“You saved me,” he said. He was not sure it was true, but it was true enough. He breathed heavily. “Why did you come?”
“I love you.”
“You hardly know me.”
“I know.” She turned her face to the left; her right shoulder made an effort to shrug.
“Did you have a message for me?”
“Of course!” In her anger, she turned back to face him.
“What was it?”
She looked away again. “I am not really Cuban.”
“I know.”
“You do? Yes, of course. I forget things now. The doctor says that will pass. My father is Spanish. My mother is African. I grew up in Moscow. When I was sixteen, they said they wanted to send me to a special school; it would help my father, they said. He was in the camps then. For revisionism. I went to the school and became a technician in intelligence; then I was recruited for fieldwork. My father was home by then. They sent me to Havana, which Moscow does not trust very much.”
“I know.”
“I report to a man named Sandor.” She rolled her head back to look at him. “You are not KGB, are you?”
“No.”
“You lied to me. Lied and lied. For a long time I didn’t believe you. Then, in the safe house in Havana, I believed you. Now I don’t believe you.”
“I’m not KGB. I’m not anything. I’m working for the man you saw me bow to at the ballet. He is working for Andropov.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“No.”
She breathed in and out. “But I love you. I reported to a man named Sandor. He reports through channels to the Eleventh Department of the First Directorate — that is—”
“I know.”
“All right, you know. Kepel reports that way, too. That means that there are two channels reporting the same thing to Moscow, so there is a way of cross-checking. I was trying to find out about plutonium, as you asked me. Back when I believed you.” She stroked his hand with two fingers, then pulled them away. “I had sometimes a — relationship with a scientist at the academy.” She twisted her head so that she could look up at him. She searched his face for a response. “You’re a stone, aren’t you?” she said bitterly.
“What did you find out from your scientist?”
She waited, gave the one-shouldered shrug again. “A woman who ran errands for Sandor came to me and told me she knew something I ought to know. She said that she had been ordered from Moscow to help me with the plutonium investigation. I said I didn’t know what she meant. She said, ‘You know, your tall friend in the KGB.’ So I let her talk. I knew she was a fake. Or thought I did. She told me that two submarines had docked in Cuba and unloaded plutonium at the small base near Guantanamo.”
“How was she supposed to know this?”
“She didn’t say.”
“She knew you’d been with me in Havana?”
“Of course, what else? Sandor had found me out somehow. So he fed me this information, I suppose on orders from above someplace. So I talked to my scientist that night. I slept with him. See how much I love you? I love you so much I sleep with other men for you.” The right side of her mouth smiled bitterly. “There is no plutonium in Cuba. He says it categorically, and I believe him.”
“Would he know?”
“Of course.”
“He could lie to you.”
“I suppose. Anyway, that was my message: there is no plutonium in Cuba, and the line to the First Directorate is corrupt. I knew it was corrupt when the woman gave me the false information and now I know it is corrupt because they followed me to Paris so they could kill you. And me.” She touched his hand again. “That is what I carried my rose for.” Her eye was full of tears. “I was so happy when I saw you!”
He looked at her, at the bandages and the tube and the lost tooth. “You shouldn’t have come,” he said unkindly. “It was stupid. You were almost killed.”
“Wasn’t my message worth it at all?”
“No. Not at all.” He was very angry and the anger poured out. “You could have sent it through the line we set up. You brought it because you wanted to indulge yourself. You did it for yourself.” He stood up. “Now look at you.”
She wept. After a while he apologized for being cruel to her. He kissed the side of her mouth that wasn’t bruised. “I’m going away soon,” he said. “You’re to stay here and get better.”
“Are they going to interrogate me?”
“Some. Nothing deep. They’re all right.”
“When will you come back?”
“When I’m done.”
“Where are you going?”
“Never mind.”
“You’re going to Moscow. Aren’t you?”
He kissed her again. “You get better.”
Late that afternoon the helicopter came over the house and Laforet appeared a few minutes after. He visited briefly with Juana and Repin, like a schoolmaster checking on the sick ones in his infirmary, and then he came to sit with Tarp in the wallpapered room. He threw down his hat and his gloves, and sat rather heavily, showing the fatigue of overwork. “I have some bad news for you. You want to hear it first?”
“Of course.”
“Your friend Carrington lost his left arm. Just above the elbow.”
Tarp thought about Johnnie, who seemed so young and so silly and who ran at life so very seriously. “I’m sorry. Thanks, Jules.”
“He will be all right, they say. He is young; he will bounce back.”
They sat quietly, thinking about what it meant to bounce back from the loss of a limb. Therese came in with wine and a rough paté and bread and hurried out.
“I’m done in England,” Tarp said. “You might go on checking on the Homburg business.”
“I’ve been in touch with your Mr. Smith. I shall ask him, too.”
“If you can check in Germany, so much the better.”
Again, a silence fell. Laforet put a little of the paté on the bread and ate a very small bite as if suspicious of it. He nodded approvingly and ate a much bigger bite. He sat back. “Well? What now?”
“Moscow.”
“When?”
“Now.”
Laforet looked down at his pant leg. He smoothed it, straightened the crease. “If you mean it, I can have you on the way in two hours.”
“Now.”
Laforet snapped his head up and gave him a dazzling smile. “Good. Good luck.”
Chapter 28
The house on Podgornyi Street had been built late in the nineteenth century and had been intended to display the solidity of a Russian middle class that did know it was moribund. Now it was a warehouse for a primary school, perhaps scheduled for demolition the next time the city government made a lurch forward. An elderly couple lived in two rooms at the back, their windows covered with rags so that only a sliver of light spilled out over the thin and melting snow. In the rest of the house painted boards covered the windows and the rooms were filled with child-sized school desks, maps of the world that no longer showed what the world was like, and gymnasium equipment that was too clumsy-looking to interest the children of the new age.
“I am looking for a ticket to The Seagull,” he had said at the kitchen door. Repin had told him that it would not matter how he used the code word seagull. The old woman had looked at him resentfully; then, without a word but frowning terribly, she had pulled the door a few inches wider to indicate he could come in. Tarp heard her whispering fiercely while he waited in a damp entry that smelled of earth and the sour cabbage that was cooking.
The old man had put his head into the gap of the inner door and looked him over and then disappeared. More whispering, and then he had come and told Tarp to come in. The old woman had gone into their other room — too angry, Tarp thought, to face him.