“Maybe it was something like that. But I had no idea I would fall in love with you. I’ve never been false to you.”
“When I walked away from you that morning in Germany, you followed me out into the countryside. You convinced me to come to Paris. I’m not saying you lied. I’m saying things got out of hand. You brought me out of Germany for your uncle and the French secret service, and when you discovered you liked me, you asked if you could keep me. Your uncle managed it all for you as a going-away gift before he left for America.”
“So what are you accusing me of? Loving you too much?”
“I’m not accusing you of anything. You did what you believed was right. I’m doing the same thing.”
“But it’s not right to choose death. Think how miserable I’ll be as your widow. The Reds will kill you. Yes they will, don’t deny it, and it would be better for me to die rather than to lose you. Your absence will be a wound that never heals. Take pity on me and don’t make me a widow.”
“I can’t shrink away from this now. I could never live with myself. I’d die of shame.”
“Shame before whom?”
“Both the living and the dead. My heart tells me to go back.”
“Then your heart has no place for me.”
“It does have a place for you, but not the way things are now. We could make a life here. People have left their homes since the beginning of time, and some have made better lives for themselves. But I can’t stand the thought of being torn away from my country to be some kind of vagabond in the West. I feel worthless here. I don’t care how rich these countries are—they’ll never be mine. And I’ll never be respected here. I’ll be some kind of foreigner, a migrant, a hobo picking his way through the rich scrap heap of Western Europe or America. My dignity doesn’t allow it.”
She said nothing. Lukas stood and went to her, but she turned away from him. He nevertheless crouched beside her chair and caressed her hair and tried to wipe her cheeks.
“I won’t let anyone kill me so easily,” said Lukas. “I’ll be careful. But we live in certain times and the times shape us in certain ways. I have to be what my time tells me to be.”
“Why are you invoking fate? Think of all those people who did their duty during the war and died for their trouble. Nobody believes in duty anymore. People matter now.”
“There are many things people don’t believe in anymore, but that doesn’t make them any less true. No one escapes his time, whether he’s brave or a coward. No woman either.”
She refused to look at him. He knew he couldn’t console her, so he stood and walked to the window to watch the children playing in the courtyard.
“Zoly promised to stay in touch with you and to help you with money. If you can, wait for me, but only for a while. If you hear nothing for too long, make another life for yourself.”
She didn’t answer.
PART THREE
TWENTY
OFF PALANGA, LITHUANIAN SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLIC
NOVEMBER 29, 1949
THE WIPERS on the window at the bridge irritably slapped at the constant spray off the Baltic Sea. As the E-boat dipped and then rode up on the swell, Lukas made out on the right the glow from the Lithuanian resort of Palanga. A lighthouse blinked on the left, from the Latvian side.
“Is this the departure point?” Lukas asked.
The German captain pulled the pipe from between his teeth where he had held it for the last hour, long after it had gone out. “Still too far offshore. I’ll come in closer, but you’d better go out to the raft now. And don’t slip off the deck—we haven’t got the time to go looking for you. Check to make sure the raft’s inflated all right. You’ll be on your own as soon as you touch the water.”
Lukas nodded to his two men, but neither one seemed all that enthusiastic now that they were so close. Rudis took a couple more puffs on his cigarette before dropping it at his feet without bothering to butt it. He adjusted his black cap so that each curl of blond hair was tucked beneath the cloth. He did not like to show loose strands. It was the sort of casual insolence that no partisan leader would stand for, but Lukas did not have much choice.
He didn’t like either of his two recruits, but it had been important to get out before the winter in order to make the crossing of the Baltic, and there had been no time for a proper personnel search or training. Lukas had found Rudis waiting on tables in a restaurant. He had deserted from the Wehrmacht in Norway during the war and walked into Sweden. It was not much of a job history, but it did show he knew how to survive. He had been in Stockholm for five years and was still waiting on tables—no ambition to do anything but pick up women with his beautiful hair. To his credit, Rudis was good with a radio and could tap out Morse code at record speed once he had practised for a few days.
The other man, Shimkus, had been a sailor who could not see past his next shore leave. He was lean and agile, happy with a beer and a smoke, and might have been in it for the money—it was hard to tell. Shimkus smiled easily, though it was unclear if he did it from a sunny disposition or a mind free of excess thought.
Everything would be all right if the letter Lukas had sent through an old drop box in Poland made it to its destination.
The Americans were involved in the mission now, along with the Swedes and the British, and as a result Lukas, Rudis and Shimkus were carrying too much materieclass="underline" a radio each, MP-44 assault rifles, Walther pistols, ammunition, twenty thousand rubles, a thousand dollars, sleeping pills, cyanide, amphetamines, grenades, penicillin, morphine, aspirin, topographical maps, long folding knives almost as big as bayonets when opened, compasses and secret pencils that wrote in invisible graphite.
Dunlop had needed Lukas to run the mission, but having been spurned by him once, he was not entirely happy to have him back. “The only reason you returned is because of your Lithuanian wife,” he said, as if accusing Lukas of a crime.
They had trained out of a summer house on a fjord south of Stockholm, empty now that the summer was over. Dunlop still drank heavily, but his enthusiasm for it had evaporated. He had lost maybe thirty pounds, not so much that he was thin but enough that his skin looked slack.
“I disapprove of personal motivation,” he continued.
Lukas was practising with the secret pencil, drawing it flat against the sheet one way and then another, and then laying a sheet on top to write the invisible letters. “You’re the one who passed on the message from Lozorius to me. If you didn’t want me, why did you tell me Elena was alive?”
Dunlop had no answer to this. He was very drunk. “Personal motivation is fickle, like love.”
Lukas looked at him closely to see if Dunlop was making a disparaging remark about his two wives. “In the end, personal motivation is all there is. The best causes are the small, personal ones.”
“I wouldn’t call those causes. I’d call them grudges. If everyone thought like you, we never would have defeated the Nazis. If everyone thinks like you, we’ll never defeat the Reds.”
“If everyone thought like me, we wouldn’t have either of those two to begin with.”
By midnight, the E-boat was fifteen-hundred metres from the beach, and the captain gave the order to launch the rubber dinghy. The offshore wind slowed them, but at least it would muffle the noise from the E-boat. Lukas worked the paddle hard, and when he first thought to look back for the E-boat, fifteen minutes had passed and it was already gone. It took two more hours to cover the distance.