Three winters ago. He had used her, made love to her, and then saved her life when no one could have helped her. She had been fascinated by him at first and then repulsed when she realized he was an agent, when she realized that he had used her as cynically as he had used anyone.
Why had she gone to that retreat he had on a mountain near Front Royal? It had been dead winter in the mountains, the roads had been slippery, the sky gray as a field of tombstones.
Three winters ago.
She closed her eyes. When he had touched her, his touch had not seemed sure at first, as though she had stepped outside the cold world he lived in to come to that place in the mountains and she might not be real to him.
“Don’t touch me like that,” she had said to him and she had pressed her body against him as they stood in the doorway of the house he had on the mountain. She had held him fiercely and he had known she was real, she was not a fragile shadow, that in or out of his own world, she had decided to love him.
They had loved but without words. He was immersed in silences in that place, in that season; it was like the time she had gone on a women’s retreat to a place in Minnesota and spent a curiously peaceful weekend in contemplation, in silence, in a world inhabited only by thoughts and prayers. She had been sixteen years old then.
When she had slept, he stroked her hair; she knew that even though she had not awakened.
Once she said, “I love you,” to tell him the truth. He had not replied; he had only stared at her, his gray eyes quiet and even a little sad, as though remembering a pleasant time past and never to be had again.
She lived with him for five days that winter in the silent, snow-deep mountains. She realized at last it was an idyll and that it was ending and that nothing would be decided at all between them.
Rita had wanted to ask if he loved her but she could not form the words. She was afraid there would only be silence as an answer or, worse, a spoken lie.
When she left him that morning, she had known she would never see him again.
“Damn you,” she had said to him as he stared at her on the path in the snow three winters ago.
He had touched her hand then, as shyly as he had touched her five mornings before. His gray features were hard and unyielding but in the touch was something like a child’s groping. He had understood and there was nothing they could do about it.
“I happened to you, Rita, that’s all,” he had said finally.
“It doesn’t have to be that way.”
“No. You know that it does.”
And she had agreed with the same silence he had rendered her when she had said she loved him. What was he but an incident in her life, an accidental lover? Devereaux. He was alone, from choice or necessity; perhaps it was only the manifestation of survival for him. There was no other way. She had known it when she had driven to him from Washington five days before but she had ignored reason because all love defies logic in the end.
She blinked now in the plane and found her eyes glazed with tears. Damn, she thought, and opened her purse and wiped at her eyes with a tissue.
“Are you upset?”
The dark man’s dark voice hissed next to her.
“Your smoke,” she said curtly.
“Oh. My pardon. I will put out the cigarette. I did ask you, didn’t I?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Are you staying in Helsinki? Or are you going on to Leningrad?”
“Yes. I’m going on.”
Antonio smiled. “Too bad. We could have such a good time, Miss Macklin.”
The sound of her name chilled her. She turned back to him.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Antonio,” he said. “I told you.”
His eyes became flat, like a cat’s. His cheeks were hollow, the ridge of bones beneath his black eyes too prominent. His head seemed a death’s head to her; the skin pressed too tautly over the skull.
“How do you know my name?”
“Did I say your name?”
She stared with hard eyes at him but she felt afraid. She wanted to jump up, run out of this place. The plane began a slow dip to the right over Germany and the clouds broke. The shimmering half-frozen waters of the Baltic were in view. She glanced out the window and felt like a child who wants an interminable journey to end.
Was she now a spy? Did he feel this way all the time? Had this driven him to silence, to isolation, to a coldness that could not accept human feelings from her?
In a day she had betrayed her ideals and even her job to help him. The betrayals burned in her now. This is what he did all the time, betrayals and little lies until, over the years, the shadows had closed around his life and left him nothing, left nothing true or good in words or deeds, only in the slim grasp he kept on his own survival. He was using her now.
Why did the dark man know her name? What would Devereaux do?
Rita turned in her seat to stare at him again. The dark man smiled lazily, unpleasantly, as though he knew exactly what he was doing to her.
23
He saw the city from the window of the old hotel where they had put him.
He had watched it from the first light of morning, when the first buses began streaking in from the Helsinki suburbs, when the first people had emerged onto the brick-covered streets, and when the first schoolchildren skipped along to their classes. He saw automobiles as though he had never seen them before. He touched the coverlet of the bed, and that amazed him as well. In a small refrigerator below the desk in the room, he found orange juice. He drank it and made a face and then found it quite wonderful. The room was warm. He took off all his clothes and went into the bath and took a long private shower until his skin was itchy and dry. A private shower. He soaped himself again and again. He rubbed his old body with the towel until it was red. He turned on the television set but there was nothing. He turned on the radio and he understood only a little of the language because he had never met many Finns in the Gulag. The Finns always seemed to want to kill themselves instead of being prisoners. He found writing paper in the desk drawer. He made designs. He wrote words in English:
Tomas Crohan.
Liverpool.
Dublin.
Tomas Crohan.
Michael Brent.
The last name he had not written for a long time.
The pen felt stiff in his hands.
He went to the window. It was a sunny morning. After a while, the streets were clotted with people. He smiled down at them as if he were God. He saw the streetcars and delighted in them as a child delights in an electric train. He saw trucks moving into the streets.
He saw a drunken man stagger, fall down, and rise again.
He saw a blue police car at a corner waiting for the traffic signal to change. A young man crossed in front of it.
He smiled at everything he saw.
Naked, he climbed back into the bed and pulled the coverlet over his clean body. He snuggled beneath the clean sheets.
He closed his eyes but a thousand images flooded his mind and he could not sleep. He awoke and touched his hair. His body smelled of the light perfume of the soap.
He climbed out of bed and stood in front of a mirror. He touched his penis and pulled at it until he felt warm.
He went to the closet and looked at the clothes hanging there. He went back to the bathroom and turned on the shower again and climbed inside and let the water fall on him. He opened his mouth and drank the water. He got out and selected a new towel and rubbed his body again with it until his skin hurt. He sat down on the toilet and made it flush. He moved his bowels and wiped himself with the soft paper. He took another shower and washed his private parts and rubbed himself with the towel again.
He opened the refrigerator and took another orange juice from the cabinet and then he saw the bottle of beer.