“I see you’re with the boss. Another promotion?”
Markus cocked his head. “It’s good that I know you from before. Your true feelings. Someone else might misinterpret.” He held his glance for a second, then moved on. “You’re here with her?”
“Isn’t that what you want?”
“I want you to be careful. A woman like that—”
“You don’t have to worry about that. She’s already making new friends.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. You know how friendly the Russians can be.”
“Alex—”
“And not a sign of Markovsky. I don’t think she has any idea where he is. We’re just chasing our tails with this.”
“An American idiom?”
“Going in circles, getting nowhere. She’s hurt, that’s all.”
“Hurt?”
“You spend time with somebody and he leaves without even saying good-bye? It makes her feel like—” He stopped.
“Yes,” Markus said, amused. “She’d be convincing at that. Just keep your ears open.”
“But does that sound like the kind of thing he would do?”
Markus looked up.
“I don’t think so either. That’s not the way it makes sense. He didn’t say good-bye because he wasn’t going anywhere. Something happened to him. You’ve checked with the police?”
“Of course we’ve checked,” Markus said quickly, annoyed. “Everything. It’s not so easy to hide a body. Even in Berlin. Karlshorst doesn’t think he’s dead—they’re still looking. So we keep looking too.”
“What do they say, Karlshorst?” Alex said, curious, testing the ice.
“Well, Karlshorst,” Markus said, unexpectedly sharp, an exposed nerve. “They don’t always share things. It’s for security reasons,” he said, looking up, correcting himself. “In sensitive cases.”
Alex nodded. The defection was still a Russian secret.
“Have you heard anything more about Aaron?”
Markus glanced up. “Don’t ask about this. I was able to intervene in the case of your friend Kleinbard, but the other—”
“You mean you got him out?”
“A bureaucratic procedure only. A Party review.”
“Thank you.”
“Thank the Party.”
Alex said nothing, letting this pass.
“And there she is,” Markus said, talking half to himself, staring past Alex’s shoulders. People were beginning to move in to their seats, the whole lobby in motion, Irene standing fixed in her own island near the doors, a rock in a stream. “As you say. New friends.”
Alex stood still, a prickling at the back of his neck. The Russian who’d been in her room. Now smiling, making small talk. Irene’s world. Something Alex thought he knew, had accepted, until it was in front of him and his blood jumped. What he really felt, the same wrench in his stomach, seeing Kurt’s head in her lap.
“Everything is so easy for them,” Markus was saying.
“Who?”
“That family. The von Bernuths. If you dropped something, someone was always there to pick it up. So why not do whatever you wanted? With so many servants. And we were the servants. We were glad to pick up, just to be part of that house. Remember at Christmas, the big tree? The parties. Even Kurt, a good Communist, but for her? A servant. Sometimes I think it was that house he loved, not her. That life. You fall down, always a soft carpet. I used to think, what is it like to be them? Everything so easy.”
Alex looked at him, oddly touched. A boy with his face pressed against the glass.
“They don’t feel that way now,” he said.
“No?” Markus said, coming back. “Well, a child’s memory only. What does a child see?”
“It’s gone. The money, everything.”
“Yes, I know. You wrote about this. And then the war. But look how she stands. The shoulders. That’s not money, something else.”
“That’s Fritz,” Alex said. “Well, I’d better go rescue her.”
Markus smiled. “Still the servant. But servants hear things, so it’s good. Maybe you could bring her one day, to see my mother. Someone from the old days,” he said, trying to sound casual.
Alex stopped. “I forgot to ask. How is she?”
“Not so well. Still at the Central Secretariat guest house. She prefers it there.” He hesitated, weighing, then looked up. “Can I tell you something? You’re the only one now from those days. The others—”
Alex waited, his silence a kind of assent.
“We’re strangers to each other,” Markus said finally. “I know,” he said before Alex could answer. “She’s my mother. But it’s too many years maybe. Maybe that.”
“Give it some time.”
“She says things. I think, who is this woman? Does she know what it was like for me, to suffer for her crimes?”
“For you?” Alex said.
“Yes. All the children. After the parents were taken away. We were—orphans. Imagine what terrible things might have happened. Only the Party saved us.”
Alex stood still, unable to speak, people brushing past on their way into the theater. He thought of her bony hand on the railing, too afraid to risk the elevator, a punishment box. He’s one of them.
Finally, at a loss, he just nodded and said, “I’ll bring Irene.” But of course she’d be gone, another ghost after tonight.
He went over to her, still talking to the Russian. “We should go up.”
“Yes,” she said, relieved to get away.
“We meet again,” the Russian said to Alex.
Alex acknowledged this with a look, taking Irene’s elbow.
“But a minute,” the Russian said, blocking them. “The general wanted to meet you.” This to Irene.
“General?”
“Saratov. The one who replaces Markovsky. He had to use the toilet, but I know he wanted—ah, here. General, Frau Gerhardt.”
“I have heard of you, of course,” he said, a curt nod to Irene, but taking them both in.
Saratov was barrel-chested and dark, a short man with none of Markovsky’s blond good looks—Georgian, perhaps, or Armenian, a permanent stubble on his face that suggested hair everywhere else, and an almost feral alertness in his eyes.