The Inspector from the Brigade Criminelle was polite but distant. “When I was a young man patrolling the rich suburb of Le Vesinet,” he said in answer to her question, “it’s what my chief used to call a delicate matter.”
“It’s to do with my husband?”
“That’s not for me to say, Mrs. Yates,” the Inspector shrugged. “Not when I’ve come to talk to you about the man you had up here in your room last night.”
Involuntarily she glanced down at the crumpled bed sheets.
“This man, I believe.” He handed her a photograph. Taken at an airport it showed a tall, fair-haired man carrying a canvas airline bag across the concourse. Even from the twenty-or thirty-yard distance it was taken from, there was no doubt that it was he.
Later in his office at the prefecture the inspector had been more sympathetic.
“The American authorities will have to be told, you know that?”
She shrugged bitterly.
“This Russian, Alex, you say was the name he gave you?”
“Just Alex.”
“No patronymic? No surname?”
“Just Alex.”
“He picked you up at the Bar St Louis?”
“He didn’t pick me up, we met.”
“You went there by chance?”
“Not entirely. I knew it was a Russian restaurant. My mother used to go there when she first came to Paris after the war.”
“A Russian restaurant?”
“Yes.”
“Not completely accurate, Mrs. Yates. There are many old Russian restaurants in Paris. This one, however, is Ukrainian.”
“So?”
“Did you hear Ukrainian spoken in the restaurant?”
“The little I can understand, yes. A few men in the corner greeting each other with ‘Dobri Dyer.’… saying ne instead of nyet, tuk rather than da. Yes, I knew they were Ukrainian.”
“And your friend, Alex?”
“Of course he knew.”
“I’m sorry,” the Inspector said. “I myself am not a Slavonic linguist.” He paused. “So Alex was there before you?”
“He was sitting at the bar trying to get a table for lunch.”
“He entered into conversation with you?”
“No. I with him. He was having some difficulty understanding the barman.”
“This agronomist studying French viticulture could not speak French?”
“I assume for this work the Soviet embassy supplied an interpreter.”
“Possibly.”
“Inspector,” Carole Yates said deliberately, “unless you’re prepared to tell me what this is about, I’m going to get up and walk out of here.”
“Just one more question. What time did this man leave your room last night?”
He had left while she was still asleep. He had told her he would.
“He left when it got light,” she said.
“You mean you don’t know exactly?”
“Five. Five-thirty perhaps.”
The Inspector’s eyes wandered around the office. It was newly decorated in a pale gray. The furnishings, also new, might have been chosen by an interior designer. It was like no precinct office she had ever been in in the United States.
Completing their leisurely tour of the room the Inspector’s eyes came back to rest on her.
“Were you still asleep, Mrs. Yates, when Alex left?”
Resenting it, she said firmly. “Five, five-thirty.”
The Inspector nodded slowly.
“No more questions,” she said. “Unless you’re prepared to tell me what this is about.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m prepared to tell you that. When you see this morning’s papers you’ll know anyway. Are you familiar with the Ukrainian Nationalist movement, Mrs. Yates?”
“I know that there are many Ukrainians living in the West who are opposed to the Soviet Union.”
“That’s all?”
“Their leader — Bandera was it? — was assassinated in Munich ten or so years ago.”
“Assassinated by the KGB.”
“The Russians claimed it was some sort of Ukrainian internecine struggle.”
“They would, of course. Did you know, Mrs. Yates, that the Ukrainian émigrés were meeting in Paris this week?”
“No.”
“Did your friend Alex mention such a meeting?”
“No.”
“Émigrés from England, France, Denmark, Holland, Australia, the United States?”
“I knew nothing about it.”
“They have problems, these Ukrainians, differing views on how the Ukraine might become independent of the Soviets.”
“I told you I know nothing about it.”
“This week at the conference a leader emerged. Stepan X. We don’t yet know his name. There was a chance that he would be able to unite all the various Ukrainian ambitions.”
“There was a chance?”
“Until he was assassinated.”
“Assassinated?”
The Inspector nodded, his eyes never leaving her face.
“When?”
“I think you have guessed, Mrs. Yates. Here in Paris. Between five and five-thirty this morning. We think your friend Alex left your bed, walked three blocks to the Ukrainian’s hotel — and shot Stepan X in the back of the head.”
Her husband arrived from Dublin later that morning. His instructions were to take her back to Dublin to be interviewed by the Embassy security staff. It had already been made clear to him that his promising future with the State Department depended on her cooperation.
Tom Foster Yates had tried to behave with cold dignity, but every attempt to speak was prefaced by a faint trembling of the lower lip. As they drove across Paris to Charles de Gaulle Airport the question he had been trying to ask exploded from him. “Why, for Christ’s sake? Why just pick up a stranger and sleep with him?”
How could she explain yesterday? How could she explain a day that was already half a lifetime distant? Paris in the spring? A cliché, but significant. The three French boys in the rue de Rivoli with their outrageous compliments and explicit invitations? That was important, too. And it was her thirtieth birthday. But most of all, perhaps, it was Alex himself, and the excitement she had felt in their night of lovemaking.
“Was this some kind of experiment, then?” her husband said.
“Something like that.”
“I appreciate the effort to help me understand.”
“I don’t understand it myself, Tom.”
A fine rain patterned the windscreen. Northeast of the city the car swooped through underpasses and over concrete ramps. She knew he was driving too fast. As they came up behind a slow-moving truck Tom Yates braked overhard, jerking her forward, then released the brakes and gunned the accelerator, throwing her back against the headrest. She glanced at him but his set face proclaimed clearly that she had forfeited all rights to complain. “I’ve got to ask you…” he said…
“You’ve got to ask me, was it the first time?”
“I think I have the right to know if there have been others.”
Quite unreasonably she had hoped he would not ask.
“No,” she said truthfully, “it was the first time, Tom.”
But she knew as she said it that it would not be the last.
The shock wave from the assassination of Stepan X did not take long to reach the Ukraine. A dozen underground newspapers condemned Semyon Kuba’s KGB.
In a bitterly argued Politburo meeting Natalya Roginova accused Kuba of doing more for the recruitment of the clandestine Ukrainian National Army than Stepan X could have done himself. Discipline and loyalty to Moscow were already under attack in other parts of the Soviet Union, Kuba responded. In Minsk there had been food riots; in most of the southern republics student movements promoted breakaway nationalist ideas in the guise of rediscovering the national past. In Leningrad itself unwise concessions had been made to the workers on Roginova’s insistence. Perhaps none of this was a danger yet. But unless such opposition were rooted out now, the Soviet Union would suffer. In short, he stood by his decision to order the assassination of Stepan X.