She, Finn, and Willy had lived through a lot together. She didn’t need Finn’s opinion of Willy to know she could rely on him. He was the last thing left standing after the hurricane of Finn’s death; a man rooted into her life, into the earth itself. In his seventy-two years, more than fifty of them in the West, he had developed a tanned leanness, with a fierce sparkle in his eyes that looked directly at her out of a face lined like a woodcut. He had supported her in the past two years, and before that too, before Finn died even. He had been an undemanding friend and father figure, always there for her if she called. Just as he’d always been there for Finn.
She tried to imagine him as the handsome youth of more than fifty years before, when he’d fled from Hungary after Russian tanks entered Budapest in ’56. Back then, his country’s brief leap for freedom was crushed. He had fought on the barricades, retreated, fought again until it was almost too late, survived, and escaped intact.
In the West, the British had eventually recruited him. He’d made more than twenty trips across the Iron Curtain, Finn had told her, but he swiftly became disillusioned. Willy had thought the West was fighting for Hungary’s freedom, but, like other refugees from the East, he was to be disappointed. Hungary was just a walk-on part in the geopolitical game of the Cold War.
Willy was important to her, she realised, not for the first time. He wasn’t just her last link to Finn; he was a mirror for her own survival as an exile.
“How’s my godson?” Willy asked.
“He’s loving life, Willy. Every minute of it. Maybe he’s a little self-absorbed sometimes, but I consider that to be a good thing. He finds out things for himself.”
“He needs a man in his life, Anna. He’s surrounded by women. You, the school…”
She laughed. Willy was always trying to get her fixed up with various “safe” men under the guise of it being right for Little Finn. He had a straightforward view of the relationship between men and women, but without the arrogance she knew in many men from the East.
She and Willy had married shortly after Finn had died, but it was only for her security. He was more than thirty years older than her, after all. But she’d easily agreed that their friendship justified this arrangement. She was able to have a new name, a new identity, until she’d been able to broker the deal with the French and do it properly.
“I mean it. He needs a man,” Willy repeated adamantly.
“But not any man,” she stated.
His eyes narrowed. She knew the look. It preceded something artful.
“What about you, then? Get yourself a new man, why not?” Willy changed tack, his easy smile not quite concealing the old-fashioned attitude behind it. “You’re young, you’re beautiful, you shouldn’t be alone all the time,” he pressed her.
“Like… get a new sofa, you mean?” she said. “Or get a new car?”
“Well…” Willy wasn’t sure this wasn’t such a bad comparison.
“Look, Willy, I’m happy as things are. And if I weren’t, why would a man be the antidote?”
“Are you angry with Finn? Is that it? Do you feel he betrayed you?”
“Finn never betrayed anyone but himself.”
“And you and the boy were collateral damage.”
She smiled at the aggressive chess game of his thoughts, always pushing the pieces out at her.
“Not necessarily, Willy,” she replied. “It’s all a matter of how you perceive it. Do I look damaged?”
“No. But you’re tough, Anna. Maybe you’re too tough sometimes for your own good. You can sit there and tell me, ‘It’s just a matter of how you perceive it.’ What kind of thinking is that? It’s not reality.”
“Reality is exactly what it is. It’s that kind of thinking, Willy.”
“But romance… !” Willy protested. He was off again, a new tack, new methods of persuasion. “What about a little physical comfort? What’s wrong with some fun? Eh?”
She laughed. “You’re the old devil, Willy, not me.”
“Romance never let me down,” Willy insisted. “It’s been like water in the desert.”
“So it’s some unalloyed good then, is it?” she replied. “No, Willy. There’s good romance and bad romance, same as anything else. Read the poets. Anyway, maybe you should ask some of your exes how great their romances were. Or would it take too long?”
“You’re cheeky and you are tough, édesem. Thank God I only have to be married to you.”
She laughed. She liked it when he called her “sweetheart” in his own language.
“You’ll frighten men away with that kind of talk,” he insisted. “You want to be the Virgin Queen?”
“If the alternative is frightened men, yes. Finn was never frightened of anything.”
“Ah, Finn.” Willy shook his head, suddenly quiet, and made no attempt to hide his deep sadness from her. She liked that about him too, that he was honest with his feelings and didn’t try to protect her from them. “Finn was a beautiful man,” he said.
“And a fool in almost equal amounts,” she added.
“I understand. You’re not over him. I apologise.”
She smiled and held his hand.
“You have nothing to apologise for, Willy. You’ve loved us both.”
A waitress brought them a pissaladière and some salad and filled their glasses.
It was true. She wasn’t over Finn; he was never far from her thoughts. How could she be over him? Finn was the reason she had left everything—Russia her home, her past, her roots, her people. Her Year Zero was 1999—the year she’d met Finn. She’d made the most of the men in her life up to then, but Finn was the only one she’d ever truly loved.
And Finn was never far away, even two years after his death. He had been a part of her life for just seven years, until they’d finally got to him. She and Finn had seven years of almost permanent tension, some of it bad, but most of it was good, the beautiful tension of being in constant awareness of each other.
They’d met in a setup, an arrangement between the KGB on her side and MI6 on his.
In 1999, he had been encouraged by his station head in Moscow to strike up an affair with her, while she in turn had been instructed by her SVR boss to do the same. Up to then, the KGB had failed at all their attempts to entrap Finn, and so she, the youngest female KGB colonel—a beauty in her own right, she was accustomed to hearing—had, much against her will, taken the job. She was no honey-trap, but a senior officer at the heart of the KGB’s foreign operations. She had worked inside the SVR, and right at the heart of the SVR itself, in the highly secret Department S.
But after 2000, when Putin became president, she had been told why Finn had remained in Moscow for so long. There was a mole, a double agent—a traitor—close to power in Putin’s circle, and Finn was believed to have sole access to him. Find the traitor—that was her patriotic assignment.
She recalled Finn’s last conversation with Adrian, his recruiter in London; how Adrian had threatened and cajoled and finally issued an ultimatum to Finn to stop his investigations. But Finn had pursued his own line, and met with his death in Paris, after he was betrayed.
She looked across the table at Willy. It was Willy who had saved them, before Finn chose to take his final step. She and Finn had hidden out in a beach hut at Willy’s driftwood restaurant on the most unwanted, unattractive stretch of sand near Marseille. Only the hippies and drifters went to Willy’s beach, and even they had to be vetted by him.
Those were the happy days, hot in summer, cold in winter, in a windswept hut hidden behind the dunes, which themselves were hidden across miles of unwelcoming salt flats. Willy had kept them successfully away from prying eyes.