“A spy.”
“You wouldn’t call a football manager a spy if he went to watch the opposing team play.”
“Too glib,” she said shortly.
“Perhaps. Let me just say then that my task was the same sort of information gathering as I’m sure your husband has done a thousand times. My Minister wished to know what was discussed at the Ukrainian Conference. I was sent to find out.”
“A man was killed. Assassinated.”
“Yes.” He remained silent.
“You’re telling me you had nothing to do with that.”
“That is correct,” he said stiffly.
“But you left for Moscow that very morning. Long before the first announcement of the killing was carried on French radio. I don’t believe your leaving was a coincidence.”
“No, it was no coincidence. After I left you, I walked back toward my hotel. I was met outside by one of my colleagues carrying my bag. A car was waiting and I was rushed to the airport.”
She turned away from the embankment and stared at the dark wall rising toward the sounds of the highway above. Fresh graffiti stood out white on the dark stone. No individual message registered. She stared, wondering about the man beside her. He was different of course from the Alex she had met in Paris. She could feel the tension in him. Perhaps, even, he was fighting for his life.
“You said at the party,” she turned back toward him, “that it was important that I believed you had nothing to do with the killing.”
“Yes, it is important.”
“Why?”
“Only for the obvious reasons,” he said. “Who wants to be thought of as a murderer?”
“It’s also true that if you killed that man, I can identify you to the Western press. Even if you killed under orders your career would be ruined and the Soviet Union would finally receive the blame for an official murder.”
“All that is true.”
“For those reasons it’s important to you that I believe you.”
“Americans have been so successful in some things because they are able to ignore the complexity of others,” he said, his face hard.
She faced him. “Will you find me a taxi?”
“You want to go now?”
“Yes. Unless you’re prepared to tell me the truth.”
“I don’t know yet whether I’m ready to trust you with the truth.”
“Jesus,” she breathed a frosty mist into the air. “I’m going.”
His arm swept up from the blackness and the open palm of his hand slapped her hard across the face. “I’m not a murderer,” he said harshly.
She had fallen back against the frozen granite of the balustrade. Anger boiled within her and subsided fast as she watched his stricken face.
“I’m not a murderer,” he repeated.
She struggled toward some sort of understanding.
“Not a murderer,” she said. “But you did kill that man?”
“Yes.”
“You left my room, walked across Paris in the dawn, up to his apartment room — and shot him dead?”
“All these things.” He stood before her, his arms at his side.
“But you are not a murderer.”
“No.”
Even then she sensed the immensity of her decision. She reached out and took his gloved hand. “It is safe for us to get a drink somewhere?”
“Yes, there’s a small restaurant off the Prospekt. I’m known there.” They began to walk. “Is it true,” he said, “that Westerners always believe there’s a choice?”
“They like to believe it,” she said. “Whether or not it’s true, as a myth it’s the basis of their society.”
“Do you think it’s true?”
“Not always.”
He hesitated for a long time. “I think perhaps that’s good,” he said. “Let’s forget about the restaurant.”
“Why is that?”
“I think instead I’d like to take you somewhere else.”
In Tom Yates’ office at the Embassy Harriet Bennerman laid out the papers on the conference table. “Shouldn’t you have Howard Roberts in on this?” she said over her shoulder.
Tom Yates looked up from his desk. “He’ll have nothing to contribute, but I guess you’re right. It’ll save a lot of bitching tomorrow about being left out. Call him up, Harriet. Ask him. If he says no, so much the better.”
She dialed the number from his desk phone.
“Carole’s visiting with Nancy tonight,” Yates said. “When you’ve talked to Howard ask him to put Carole on, will you?”
When Howard Roberts answered, Harriet’s carefully couched invitation to the meeting had the required effect. He declined but appreciated the call. She asked to speak to Carole.
Tom Yates looked up from his desk to see Harriet’s frown. “She’s not there? Did she just leave, or what?”
She listened for a moment. “No, just that Tom wanted a word with her, that’s all. He thought she was over with you and Nancy for the evening.”
Harriet put down the phone.
“She change her mind?” Yates said.
“No. Nancy didn’t know anything about Carole going there for dinner.”
“Strange.” Tom Yates picked up a new stack of papers.
“Would you like me to call David Butler?” Harriet asked. “He’ll know where she is if anybody does.”
“Sure,” Tom Yates said, walking over to the conference table, “give Butler a call.”
The officers attending the meeting began to drift in. Yates took his seat at the head of the table. As Harriet placed his notepad at his left elbow she bent low over him. “No sign of her at David Butler’s, either,” she said. “I’ll call around, don’t you worry.”
They turned off the street into a courtyard lit by a single rusting wall light. Empty washing lines crisscrossed the area above their heads. The stone walls were green with damp, the wooden frame windows unpainted and split with frost; where the glass panes were broken the gaps were stuffed with rags and newspapers. At the base of a broken downpipe a patch of ice spread across the cobbles.
He held her arm tightly and guided her into a doorway. She found she could see little but a flight of stone steps and a bent iron banister leading upward. A strong smell of urine and cooking cabbage pervaded the stairwell.
“Who lives here?” she asked him.
“You’ll see,” he said as they climbed to the first stone landing and stopped at a door.
He knocked and they stood waiting. Inside she heard a man’s voice.
“It’s me, Alexei,” Letsukov said.
As the bolts scraped back, Carole was half aware of a movement at the bottom of the stairs. Letsukov too had seen it. He leaned over the rail. A man in a belted woolen peasant shirt stood in the half-light at the bottom of the stairwell. One foot poised on the bottom stair, he was looking upward at Letsukov. For a moment his lips moved as if chewing on toothless gums, then he turned and disappeared back into the courtyard.
“Who was that?” she asked alarmed.
“The concierge,” Letsukov said briefly, and turned away from the stairwell.
The door opened and a warm yellow light fell upon them. An old man in a tweed jacket and open-necked shirt propelled himself forward and hugged Letsukov.
She saw the old man’s gray stubble rub against Letsukov’s cheek, his hand patting his back. She knew, before the introductions, that it was his father.
“Come in, come in,” the old man took her by the arm and drew her inside. As Letsukov shut the door behind them she saw that they were in a one-room apartment, the floorboards a dusty gray, a bed with a worn bearskin rug thrown over it in one corner, a plastic-topped kitchen table, a few chairs, a stove, a roughly hammered bookcase and some clothes hanging from a string line across an alcove. A standard lamp with an orange shade stood against the curtained window.