“How do you know?”
“I saw his file on a desk at Kepel’s.”
General Kepel was the KGB chief in Cuba. “Kepel is not your immediate officer.” That was a guess, but it was an informed one.
“No.” She picked at one fingernail, destroying the cuticle. She held it up. “I love you. Look what love makes me do.”
“I hope it helps you to tell the truth.”
“It doesn’t help me do anything. It is more like being sick.”
“What were you doing at General Kepel’s?”
“He has me report to him once a week.”
“Why?”
She glanced at him bitterly. “Because he wants to screw me, what else?”
“That would be a way to greater responsibility,” Tarp said equably.
“I do not mean to get ahead on my back, thank you.”
“Well, so you were at Kepel’s, and you saw a file there and connected it with the man at the ballet. What has that to do with what I have been saying?”
“Kepel handed the file to an assistant and said, ‘Take all this Moscow woe from wit away.’ That is all.” She bit her cuticle. “Woe From Wit is a play, you know.”
“I had heard of it.”
“You are making fun of me again.”
“So from that one remark you immediately concluded that Moscow was sending a man to cause trouble for Kepel, and then he showed up at the ballet and you saw me bow to him, and everything fit together?”
“Yes.”
“You’re lying.”
“I am not.”
“You are! You lie constantly. Have you not lied to me since that first time? Lies, all lies—”
“I have not — I swear!”
“This excrement about love, this nonsense, these lies—”
“The truth, this is truth!”
They both began to shout. She was weeping, but he had the feeling that the tears were at least partly a device, like the word love; she could use tears as a kind of armor, he thought, as some people use an appearance of weakness as a strength. Oddly, he found himself admiring her. She was very tough.
He went on at her for another forty-five minutes. It was more than enough time for the sanitation team to switch guns and clean her apartment of his traces, but he kept on because he hoped that she would tell him something useful. He even hoped — laughing inwardly at himself for the hope — that she would prove to be innocent of any connection with “Maxudov,” the submarine, or the plutonium.
She sat limp in her chair. Her hair was lank; there were patches of sweat under her eyes and a sheen, like the result of fever, on her cheeks.
“Have a cigarette,” Tarp said. He had said nothing for several minutes and they had both sat there very quietly. Now he could see she was cold, for goose bumps were forming on her arms.
“I don’t really smoke,” she said, but she reached for the pack and took one. Her hands were shaking so violently that he had to light the match for her. He didn’t think she was frightened so much as she was reacting to her own exercise of will for the past two hours. She had been consistent. He wished they had not been to bed together, because his objectivity was affected, although whether for or against her he was not sure.
“You would do better not to smoke at all,” he said.
“May I walk around?”
“Of course.”
She got up. She held her right forearm across her belly and her left forearm vertically from her hip, the cigarette in that hand. She looked thinner, less full-breasted. There was a cot against the far wall and she stood looking at it. “What do you do now,” she said, “rape me?”
He hesitated. “I suppose that has been done in this room.” He sounded like a pedant.
“It would be such a good way to show what you think of love.” She had insisted throughout that she loved him. He believed that she believed she did, if only because such a belief was convenient to her. She blew out cigarette smoke and turned partly toward him. She was wearing a sleeveless top that was a little loose and that was far from new. She shivered.
“You use the word love too easily,” he said. “I do not love you, Juana, no.” He thought of saying not yet but knew it would be insincere.
She looked at him, shrugged, shivered. She dropped the cigarette on the floor and ground it with the ball of her flat shoe. “Say that I am infatuated with you, then.”
“You are under great stress. It is understandable that you would think yourself infatuated.”
“I know many men. None of them infatuate me.”
“But you think I do.”
“I know it.”
“That is the result of stress.”
“Why do you keep turning me off? I would think it would be a great sign of success, to have your victim infatuated with you.”
“You are not my victim.”
“Oh, yes! From the very first. I thought you were my victim. And all the time you were waiting to bring me here! I’m quite a fool, hey? Well, so what do you do? Turn me over to the DGI? Inform on me? Send me back to Moscow?”
“Sit down, Juana.” He closed the notebook and laid the pen on top of it as if that part of the interrogation were over. She sat in the chair rather primly. Her shoulders were rounded forward. One brassiere strap showed beyond the edge of the sleeveless blouse.
“When you first met me on the beach, you were suspicious of me. You thought I might be an American spy. Only a small suspicion, you say, so you arranged to meet me again. We went to the ballet, we danced, we went back to your apartment. You found my gun and my green card; then you thought I just might be a DGI agent who was trying to penetrate the anti-Castro cell of which you are a member for the KGB. So you checked the card and found it was not really mine, and then you thought again that I might be an American — except you had seen me bow to the troublemaker from Moscow. So here we are now, and now you know that I, too, am a troublemaker from Moscow who is trying to solve a problem inside the KGB. So you ask me what I am going to do with you. Why should I do anything with you? You have not betrayed the service. You have not behaved badly. In fact, I think you have done very well.”
“Should I be grateful to you for that?”
He stood up. “There is a traitor in the upper echelon of the service. We think he has corrupted part of the service here in Cuba. Now, if you found out that one of the people you work with had been corrupted, what would you do?”
“I would need proof.”
“If you had the proof.”
“Have you got proof?”
“That is not the point. This is hypothetical.”
She managed to make herself look ugly. “Oh, well, hypothetically — if it were proven, I would go to Kepel, I suppose.”
“Suppose Kepel could not be trusted.”
“I would go over Kepel’s head.”
“To whom?”
“To…” She bit her lip. She dragged her teeth over her lower lip as if she were pulling fruit from a tough rind. “My God.”
“An expression that has survived despite socialism. Yes, my God. You are far down in the levels of the service; you are insulated from Moscow by a bureaucracy that may be corrupt. You may yourself have been used by the corrupt ones without knowing it.”
“Have I?”
“This is only hypothetical.”
“Well, what is real? I don’t like hypothetical; I like reality! What is real?”
He stood with his hands on the back of his own chair, looking down at her. “What is real is that atomic materials have been stolen in the Soviet Union and sent to Cuba by submarine. Stolen — not sent because of any authorized plan. Stolen.”
“Why?”
“I wish I knew.”