She could give Subotin the “version” he wanted. She could do it now: say that the top brass of the Jewish Committee were preparing to wrest Crimea away from the Soviet Union with aid from America, and so on. Claim that Seldon Parker had been aware of all this, was in cahoots with it. It would lead to Seldon’s arrest, certainly, but it might leave her and Leon spared. Her offering would buy them their lives, would leave her family intact. Wasn’t that all she wanted? To protect them, to protect Yulik? Who was Seldon to her? Not her blood. A friend? What was a friend? A deviant was what he was, a shicker with an unsound mind.
But she could not do it. Maybe his plan was nothing but a castle in the air. Maybe this Hank Kelly did not exist. Maybe he did exist but would lose his nerve at the last moment, get them all thrown in the basement of the Lubyanka Prison. And yet. And yet Seldon had confidence. And because he did, so did she. Whatever pure or unwholesome motives had stirred him into coming to their aid, the plan he had conceived—the pact to which all three of them had bound their fates, their lives—was all she had now. It was the one hope she still safeguarded from all the broken promises of her fifteen years in Russia.
“You’ve had more than a month to ‘set the mood,’?” Subotin said.
“Please, I’m getting closer. Last time Parker dropped by for a drink I got him talking but he would only stay for a short time.”
Subotin recorded this and said, “This was when? The Thursday before last?” He seemed to be consulting something in his notes.
“Yes, I believe so.” She pretended to think. Had she told him the precise day Seldon had visited?
“And how long do you consider to be ‘a short time’?”
“Pardon me?”
“Would you say an hour is a ‘short’ time? Two hours?”
His pale-blue eyes had fixed on her. Was this a theoretical question? What was he asking her?
And then, suddenly, her mind caught the meaning of his words.
Two hours.
For a moment, it was like Russian was again a foreign tongue to her and she had grasped the essence of the question at the last possible second.
Two hours. It was not theoretical. He knew. He knew that Seldon had been in their room two Thursdays ago for two hours. That was what he was telling her, in the guise of a question.
He was watching to see how she would respond. But how did he know? Nobody in the apartment had seen Seldon walk in or out. He had hidden in the shadows for just this reason. Only Essie, when she’d brought them the napoleon torte. Essie, of whom Seldon had harbored suspicions all along. Florence had never considered the possibility that her best friend could have occupied this very room with Subotin, or someone like him. Why not? An assumption so fleeting and vain that she had not even registered it as a thought—that she, Florence, had been singled out in some way for her insight and intelligence. Yes, a part of her had taken a depraved kind of pride in this venal, repellent work they forced her to do. This violation of herself, which sullied and antagonized her every waking moment, had sustained in her some shabby illusion: that she was shrewd, that she was, in some way, special. And now she did not even have that. An idiot was what she was, to think that Essie had sought entry into their company out of desire for Seldon. The blushing-girl act had been a ruse to worm her way into all the secret talk going on in Florence’s room. Essie running her mouth off about those magazines—what was it but a provocation? To get Florence to start yapping. Did anything else even make sense? Two hours. Those two words were all it took. They were enough. And now it was no longer Subotin who sat across that polished oak table from her, staring her down across the lace runner heaped with papers—his deck of cards. The reflection in the burnished, shining surface of that samovar from which no tea was ever poured was no longer of her and Subotin. It was of her and Essie. Subotin now was only the repository for whatever Essie had told him, or had told somebody else who had told him.
But he had been informed wrong before. She knew that. His sources made mistakes, or lied.
It’s your word or mine, little girl.
“The last time Seldon Parker stopped by my room,” she said, “I did get him talking. He wanted to talk, I could sense it. But, unfortunately, we were interrupted.”
“Interrupted by what?”
“By whom. My neighbor, Esther Frank. Seldon never talks openly when she’s around.”
“Why is that?”
Florence permitted herself a shrug. “Doesn’t trust her. Finds her irritating, and also…provocative.”
If Essie’s eagerness had been her asset, it could also be her liability.
“Provocative in what way?”
“She gripes. About the rations, the shortages. That the government is ignoring ordinary people.” At last, Florence found she could meet Subotin’s gaze head-on. “She tries to draw people into discussions, arguments they don’t want to have.”
A talentless informant, was what she was telling him.
“Yet you have never reported her anti-Soviet talk before.”
“You have never been interested in Esther Frank before.”
“You’ve listened to her outbursts and said nothing.”
“What can I say to a person who is determined to be unsatisfied? I suppose she compares her life here unfavorably to the one she had before, in America.”
She flinched as Subotin brought his fist down hard on the table, causing two sheets of paper to fly off onto the floor.
“You suppose. You presume. It appears to me that most of your purported ‘information’ is just that: Supposition. Presumption. More of your womanly prattle! You have been trying to elude this investigation.”
“But I tell you everything I know!”
She could feel the tears welling in her eyes. Her nerves were worn raw. She could not stand to be in this room one minute longer. “Everything I know. I have nothing to hide.” She let the film of tears fill her eyes. Let him think she was crying because he had wounded her honor.
“You have yet to provide me with any validatable information about concrete plans or activities of anybody in your circle.”
“But I can. If you just give me more time.”
He pointed a finger at the ceiling. “I also have orders, and I need results.”
Florence swallowed. The words, when she spoke them, did not sound like they were coming out of her mouth. “You want something concrete. She keeps foreign magazines in her room.” She could not look at him, though she was aware of his looking at her, aware of the silence.
“What magazines?”
“Noosveek. Laif…I don’t remember.” She wiped her eyes. “That is why Esther Frank slanders our Soviet reality, because she compares it to gaudy tinsel she sees in capitalist propaganda.”
Let him call Florence a liar. If Essie was reporting the opposite story from her end, let Subotin now sort it out. Your word against mine, girlie.
“Where does she get those magazines?”
“She works at the Foreign Languages Publishing House of TASS. Maybe there, or maybe from her foreign contacts.”
“You’ve seen these magazines.”
“I’m afraid I have.”
“Why haven’t you reported it before?”
“It’s vulgar frippery, nothing I considered substantive compared to the treasonous activities of the JAFC.”
She could hear him tapping his pen on the paper, perhaps struggling to decide where this all fit in. “You leave it for us to decide what’s substantive,” he said. She watched the top of Subotin’s balding forehead as he moved his pen across the paper. It would be her last memory of him.