She had told Emmett the truth: For a week she had thought she might love Stan Bertolli, but that feeling had gone away. Yet she was fond of him, and he was the only thing left to her.
She used his old cell phone to call him. “What have you got?”
“Not much. How about you?”
“I …” she began, then changed tack. “I’ve been dozing in front of the television.”
“Give me another hour, and we’ll talk when I get home.”
When he returned that evening with a takeout bag of grilled chicken, she thought of Zora’s other girl, the one with the long legs who could convince Russian thugs and kleptocrats to give up secrets, but seduction had never been Sophie’s forte. She tried, though, for now she was thinking in terms of practicality, of balances of power, of what Zora had called the push and the pull of seduction. Yet when she focused on Stan, using her eyes, stroking her hair, trying to look dreamy and enthralled, she felt ridiculous, knowing that it wasn’t working.
As he prepared the food, she said, “Did you find out about Jibril Aziz?”
“Not much. Just his position in the Office of Collection Strategies. I sent him an e-mail—maybe he’ll get back to me.”
“No phone number?”
“None.”
That made no sense. “Why not?”
“Sometimes they don’t list numbers. Either they’re changing offices or the section head wants them undisturbed because of a project.”
“How about a wife?” she asked, thinking of what Kiraly had said. “A family?”
“None.”
So not even her gloomy Hungarian spy knew what he was talking about.
As they ate, he told her about Zora—Zora and Emmett and the ways in which Stan had gotten everything so wrong last year, hounding poor Emmett until he had to flee to Budapest. She wanted to cry, knowing it was her fault, but instead she turned it around. Misdirection, Zora called it. “You pretended you’d never heard of her. You lied to me.” Put them on the defensive, always the defensive. It worked, but as he made excuses, she felt the distance between them growing, and another part of her grew frightened: He’s the only one you have, and you’re scaring him away. So she moved to the sofa, knowing he would follow, and he did.
“Where is Zora?” she asked.
“Serbia. She went back home in September.”
Where else?
Then he told her the thing that she would not be able to shake for a very long time. “She told Emmett she was working for the Serbs. That was a lie.”
“What? Are you sure?”
“My Serb contact says that by then she was working for the Egyptians.”
A year, a full year, believing that, if nothing else, she was helping Zora’s people. She hadn’t even been doing that. She’d been feeding everything that Emmett brought home into Hosni’s grand machine. God, she hated Zora. Briefly, she also hated Stan for holding up this cracked mirror.
He went on, though, explaining how he’d put together his fantasy of Emmett’s guilt, then telling her why he hadn’t sent Emmett home. “The disaster is that you would have left, too.”
She didn’t have to do this, she realized. She didn’t have give herself to him tonight. But she had to give herself to someone, and with Zora gone who else was there?
He said, “What did Balašević have on Emmett?”
Misdirection. Now.
She leaned close and placed her head on the side of his chest; he wrapped an arm around her. In her head, she saw a flash of dirty leg, spastic, kicking at the damp earth of a musty basement floor. All desire fled her body; the only thing left was survival. When he kissed her neck, she knew it was accomplished.
The first orgasm surprised her. Entirely mechanical, but strong. She’d almost forgotten how good it could be, and the little, shattering explosions transported her elsewhere, to a hard bed in the Hotel Putnik, and a much younger Emmett praying between her legs.
4
1991
On September 20, Sophie and Emmett arrived in Novi Sad desperate for sex, for their rough, seven-hour train ride from Budapest had felt like their first true plunge into authenticity. They’d shared a filthy cabin with a pair of fat old women who ate cheese sandwiches and eyeballed them, and as they waited at the border wailing Gypsies swelled outside their window, reaching up to sell them T-shirts, cassettes, bottled water, and toys. The Hungarian border guards seemed to be waiting for bribes, shooting them looks of scorn as they rifled through their papers, so by the time they crossed into Yugoslavia they were expecting trouble. Yet they received none: The Yugoslav soldiers gathered around to hear their American voices, one telling of a cousin in Chicago, another sternly advising them to mix bad wine with Coca-Cola for a perfect evening drink. Toothy grins surrounded them as the young conscripts pushed in to get a glimpse of the West.
This was when the arousal flickered in them both, and by the time they reached the high marble-and-concrete lobby of the Novi Sad train station, bought dinars at official rates from a surly clerk, and haggled for a noisy taxi ride to the center of town, they were famished for it. They didn’t notice the haughtiness of the desk clerk or the mustached secret policeman watching them from behind a copy of Politika or even the scratches on the inside of their door that, had they been in the mood to notice, would have made them think that someone had been imprisoned in the room for a very long time. They weren’t in the mood to look around at anything in Milošević’s Yugoslavia, not even checking the nighttime view from their window until afterward, when Emmett, naked and satisfied, pulled back the heavy, dusty curtains to look down on a tree-lined street full of sleepy taxis under the tungsten glare.
It was late when they finally dressed and walked around the corner to Trg Slobode—Liberty Square—to mix with dour-looking dark-headed couples peering into sparse shop windows. The city hall was lit up like a cathedral, and the pedestrian avenue was choked with sidewalk cafés. They sat at one and ordered strong Turkish coffees. “Turska kafa,” Emmett read from the menu, and the waitress, a pretty yet bedraggled girl, giggled at his pronunciation. Heads turned to look at them. In that postcoital glow, neither was concerned. They had crossed into the Balkans. Anything could happen, and they were ready to welcome the unknown with open arms.
A tall man, one of a table of three, turned a leg toward them and leaned against his thigh. “American?” Dark eyes, a cigarette gushing smoke around his face.
“That’s right,” said Emmett, chin out, defiant.
“MC Hammer,” the man said, smiling now. “Madonna. Michael Jackson. J. R. Ewing.”
“Yes,” Emmett said, trying to hold back a grin. “All American.”
The man leaned back and waved at the waitress and ordered Lav beers for his new American friends. Soon they had joined the three dark-haired men who turned out to be great fans of America. Voislav had relatives in New York, while Steva had spent a university semester in Pennsylvania. They asked questions, often returning to the most important one: How do you like Yugoslavia? After ten hours, what could they say? So far, so good.
“Come,” said the third, Borko. “We go to disco.”
Sophie hesitated. It was one thing to chat with friendly strangers in an open-air café around the corner from your hotel, but a disco required taxis; it required giving yourself over to the care of strangers. Then she saw the glow in Emmett’s face. This was it; this was what he’d meant when he’d said, To go. To see. To experience.