"For May," I said, "from all her fathers, real and imagined."
He took it from me, opened it. And then his eyes seemed to beseech me. "Do you know?" he asked. "Have you found out?"
"Whatever I've found, Mr. Brightman, you knew it already."
"Then I beg you — don't look any further."
And even as I formed the words to ask what he meant, I knew I'd waited too long. Letting go of my hand, he backed the truck around. And finally, two headlights running over a hill — a last image of golden eyes — Harry Brightman passed out of my life. But not quite.
24
A year passed.
As years go, I've known better.
But I survived; I suppose you always do. There was my work, the blessed necessity of earning a living, even a lady… Life went on and, despite what I felt, refused to leave me behind. It's even possible that Brightman's little speech played its part. What I'd learned about my parents — the tale my father's headstone had finally told — changed a great deal, but not everything, and perhaps the most important things stayed just the same.
In any event, by the spring, I was halfway back to myself, and with the mystery of my father's death finally resolved, and accepted, all those other mysteries began to come back into my mind. There were enough of them, God knows. Would Subo-tin's body ever be found? Did Loginov know he was dead? Who was Travin? What role had he played? And what had happened to Grainger? — though, in fact, a couple of discreet phone calls to Halifax answered that one: it seemed that the old man had survived, and was soldiering on at his clinic.
Indeed, as I worried away at these questions, I was able to come up with quite a few answers, for, in a general way, I was now reasonably certain about what had happened.
Subotin — it seemed obvious — had wanted money to finance the activities of his group, and through his contacts in Soviet intelligence had learned about Brightman; a unique find, to say the least. Immensely wealthy and immensely vulnerable, he would have been well worth pursuing even without the remains of his "gold for furs" fortune. And Subotin had pursued him — but then, I speculated, had pushed too hard. I was thinking of May. So far as I knew, Subotin had left her alone, and indeed she would have been too obvious a person for Brightman to pass the gold to. But this wouldn't have precluded Subotin from threatening her in order to put pressure on Brightman; in fact, it was the most powerful threat he could have possibly used. Too powerful, however: as soon as he made it, Brightman had bolted. For Brightman, May's safety had been everything, and the only time he'd exposed her to danger — in France, when she'd gone alone to the barge — had been unavoidable; for he had to make sure that Hamilton did as he'd promised while, at the same time, not revealing that he was still alive. Yes, Brightman, quite literally, had been prepared to die for his daughter, and as far as Subotin was concerned, that's just what he'd done. But this hadn't stopped Subotin at all — for, with Brightman's KGB file in his hand, he'd simply gone from one member of Brightman's old group to another: Grainger, Berri, Hamilton… Brightman would have had to leave the gold somewhere and these were the best candidates. Once you understood this, it even suggested another explanation to the hoary old riddle of why Subotin had broken into my house. Most likely, as I'd originally guessed, he'd been trying to keep me away from May by taking the telegram — but since he knew about Brightman's group, he must also have known about my parents, and so I might have been one of the names on his list.
Even if this was true, however, I wouldn't have had much importance, not at that stage: only later, after my abortive contact with Travin, had my role become potentially dangerous — hence their surveillance of my mother's old place in Georgetown.
But that brought back another question: who was Travin? There was no way to be sure. It was always possible, of course, that he was KGB, but, the more I thought about him, the more he seemed to be a man with his own, independent agenda. He'd had the photograph of Dimitrov, all those shots of May, and he'd attempted to set up a contact with me all on his own. Had he wanted the money for himself? Did he have other political goals to rival Subotin's? Even if I couldn't answer these questions with certainty, I began to put together a theory, based on what he'd said on the phone and on that paper I'd discovered in the Berlin dump. Travin was an emigre, part of that wave of Russian immigration that has swept into the United States since the early 1970s; since that time, tens of thousands of former Soviet citizens have settled in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other large cities — thirty thousand in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn alone. Most of these people are Jews; few have any sympathy with the political goals Subotin was working for. But the extreme Russian nationalism that Loginov had talked about also has its adherents within this community, and Subotin and his group might have used such people for assistance and cover. Travin — if my theory was right — might have been someone like this; someone who'd been used by Subotin but then had broken away. His attempt to contact me would have doomed him, though he knew far too much in any event; he'd known about Dimitrov, somehow he'd known about my father {something personal you wouldn't want a policeman to hear), and he'd suspected something of the truth about May: why else had he taken all those photographs of her?
But, again, there it was, the real mystery — May herself. Who was she? Why, indeed, had Travin taken those photographs? And why, if he so wished to protect her, hadn't Brightman just given Subotin the gold right away? I knew the answer, or thought I did: in the end, the gold had counted for nothing, and Brightman had protected it only to prevent a far deeper secret from being revealed. But what was that secret? After all I'd found out, and all of my theories, I was back where I started, faced with the very first question of alclass="underline" who was May Bright-man, and why had she been so important?
It was a question I never expected to answer; in fact, I never expected to hear from her again. Through mutual friends, I tried to find out where she'd gone, but no one knew; and a letter to Cadogan — the lawyer in Toronto — only revealed that he didn't know either. Yet I couldn't let it alone. At a certain point, I remembered, I'd felt that her secret was becoming my secret, and mine was merging with hers; and I still felt that way. What I'd learned about my father was half of the truth, but I wanted it all. So, as the summer went on, I kept worrying at it.
And now, at least, I knew one or two things.
Shastov — not Brightman, not Georgi Dimitrov — was her natural father; I was certain of that. And the mother, of course, was not Florence Raines — she was a Russian woman who, in 1940, had tried to save her child from the desolation around her and the carnage she could see ahead. That was something to think about. Indeed, she must have been a remarkable woman (would Yuri Shastov have married anything less?), for even if many women had wished to do what she had done, few would have been able to: she possessed some sort of influence, some power which — ultimately — had enabled her to summon Harry Brightman all the way from Canada to the Soviet Union. What was that power? Why had he responded? In frustration, I remember, I got out Travin's photographs, the ones I'd found in New Hampshire, and stared at them for hours, hoping to discover the answer. Who are you? I asked. And who was your mother, and why did they all care so desperately?