Yes, she decided as she lay beside him afterward. Some things were still important. Politics were not. Fidelity was.
Laura was deeply within this line of thought when she realized what she was watching through the dormer windows. Across the street was a man. She couldn't recognize him, and would never have noticed him at all because he was moving carefully within the shadows of trees. But she had happened to be staring at his precise location and she had picked up the movement.
He walked toward the church. Laura looked across the room at the clock. It was past 2 A.M. Every tenet of surveillance that Peter Whiteside had impressed upon her came back.
Details. Details. The man was tall and lean and wore a dark coat. She could not tell age and she could not see the color of his hair. She squinted. She watched the man walk and a hunch was upon her.
For some reason-and she couldn't place the genesis of the reason-the man struck her as foreign. He was neither English nor American. Something about his movement told her that. Or was that part of a 2 A.M. fantasy?
For that matter, was the man a fantasy? She stared again. No, he was real. He entered the church.
Laura held her position for ten minutes, barely blinking. Her heart beat so loudly that she thought Stephen could hear it clear across the room. But he did not budge. No lights changed in the church. Nothing went on or off.
She thought back. A light remained on in the vestry and a very dim light in the pews. The altar was dim and visible at night; so was the cross. The man emerged. He went quickly on his way. Nothing indicated that he was anyone she knew.
Several unhappy visions were upon her all at once: the man was from the American government. They were after Stephen-he was a Communist spy. Or, the man she had seen was part of Stephen's network. A fellow traveler along the red road of Bolshevism. Or, she shuddered, had she seen one of her own countrymen? Had Peter Whiteside dispatched someone to watch her?
Or was it none of these? Was she lost in a wilderness of deceptions that, like the smile of the Cheshire cat, receded as she approached them? Was it all too grand for her to even conceptualize?
She felt the wetness of her palms. She drew a long breath. Then a final thought was upon her. The man who had entered the church was a member of the church. He sought solace with God in the lonely, early dark hours of the morning. Somewhere there was illness. Somewhere there was despair. Somewhere there was a need for spiritual strength and a prayer and that need did not observe the conventional rules of time.
Yes, that was it, she decided: a man had simply felt the need for a prayer at an unorthodox hour. Was that not, in fact, why her husband left the church open?
Now the memory of Peter Whiteside was before her, burning with the intensity of a flare. Peter's account of her husband rang shrilly in her ears.
Turned his eyes eastward… offered his services to the Soviet Union and his offer was accepted… Made the pilgrimage to the Kremlin, itself…
Suddenly she had to know. She tiptoed from the bedroom and to the stairs. Then she went down to the library, where she turned on the light on her husband's desk. She began to open drawers, riffling through his papers and belongings and shuffling purposefully through his official licenses and documents.
"So this is spying, Peter," she mumbled to herself. She felt disgraced. "I hope you're proud of yourself."
Then she found what she wanted: his United States passport. Her hands trembled slightly as she opened it. She studied his picture and the date and stamp of issue at New York. Then she flipped to the pages that bore travel stamps.
Entry into the United Kingdom via Southampton: April 20, 1935. Departure to France via Calais. Probably the ferry, she thought on May 3 of the same year. Arrival in New York on board the SS America on the thirtieth of May.
Some Communist agent, she thought. Some pilgrimage to Moscow! She flicked through each page of the passport. No other stamps save their Canadian stamps from their honeymoon in 1937. Where, oh where, Peter Whiteside, Laura asked within her soul, is the vaunted pilgrimage to Red Square?
Stephen's own words returned to her: "I was sick from the water in England and the cheese in France, so I came home early." What emerged from his passport was the documentation of a Princeton graduate student seeing the cathedral cities of England and France. Nothing more. His passport was the physical refutation of all that Peter Whiteside had claimed.
Where had Peter come upon such a tale? Who had fabricated it for him?
Laura returned the passport to its drawer. She piled the other papers and documents upon it so it looked undisturbed. She turned off the light in his study. She climbed the stairs and walked through the dark hall to the bedroom.
In her mind, Peter Whiteside was still talking to her: "Facts, Laura, facts! My office deals in facts!"
In her mind, she answered him.
Facts: the man who had entered and left St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Liberty Circle several minutes earlier was tall, angular, had a hint of a foreigner about him, and moved in and out of shadows with considerable ease. Like Marley's ghost, she reckoned, he was not an undigested clot of mustard. He had been there.
More facts, as she entered her bedroom: she loved her husband. She had personally inspected his passport. He had never been to the Soviet Union and it was preposterous that he was a Communist agent.
Laura walked quietly back to the bay window. It was 2:35 A.M. She sat down for a moment and loosened the cotton robe. She looked out the window and all was still.
Sleepily, Stephen spoke. "What are you watching?" he asked.
She looked back to him. "I thought you were asleep," she answered.
"Half asleep. I heard you coming up the stairs. Are you all right?"
She rose and returned to the bed. She untied her sash and slipped out of the robe.
Naked, she stood near the light from the window intentionally so that he could see and admire her. She took care of her body and kept her figure. She wanted Stephen to know it was for him.
She saw his eyes open appreciatively. "What were you watching?" he asked again.
"Someone went into your church," she said. "To say a prayer, I imagine."
There was a slight pause, then he answered, "Happens all the time," he said. "Funny little town. People can't sleep. Get up, take a walk. Church is the only thing open."
Sleep hung heavily in his voice. "They say a prayer, go home, go to bed. St. Paul's is a public service." Another slight pause and: "I love to look at you without your clothes."
He reached to her and slipped his hand between her legs, cupping it behind one trim thigh. He gently pulled her back to him, caressing her from the top of her leg to the buttock.
"As long as we're both awake," he said, "and as long as we're together again.."
She sat on his side of the bed and then was beside him, her flesh to his, as he kissed her.
"You don't have to talk me into anything," she giggled. “I’m your wife, remember? Saying 'no' isn't allowed."
TWENTY-TWO
Cochrane turned predatory upon tiny Mr. Adam Hay, the archivist in the Bureau's musty attic. It began on Wednesday, shortly after nine when Mr. Hay found Cochrane lounging in the small chair near the east file cabinets. Mr. Hay froze when he saw Cochrane, then turned a sour expression upon him and closed the door.
"Morning, Adam." Cochrane had a knee up, folded into his hands, and was rocking slightly in the only chair in the room.
"What do you want?" Mr. Hay answered.