Maman needn’t have worried. The Froelichs don’t even have a TV.
Jack follows the curve of the cul-de-sac that is Morrow Street and parks at the foot of the manicured lawn of the yellow brick lowrise. … in other developments, U.N. Secretary General U Thant sent identical letters to Mr. Khrushchev and President Kennedy—He switches off the radio.
He gets out and walks up to the front doors beneath the porte cochère. He enters the empty vestibule and sees a house phone. Through a glass wall to his right is a small lobby, likewise deserted. Couch, leather armchair, coffee table with three or four magazines fanned out. A potted benjamina gathers dust in one corner.
He scans the framed directory on the wall and finds what he’s looking for: O. F. apt. #321. As he dials the number he glances at the wall of small metal mailboxes: the discreet typed initials reappear there, O. F. Our Friend. Of course! Jack shakes his head. Simon.
The line rings a third time. There is a brief pause followed by a reedy voice. “Ja?”
“Hello, Herr Fried? This is Wing Commander McCarthy, sir. I’m here to welcome you.”
There is no reply. Instead, Jack is startled by a loud buzzer. He hangs up in time to grab the handle of the glass door. Two steps lead up to the elevator. He takes them in one stride.
After a sluggish liftoff, the elevator stops at the second floor and an elderly lady gets on. Jack nods but she seems not to register his presence. When the doors close and the elevator rises, however, she looks up at him. “Down,” she says accusingly.
He exits at the third floor. The smell of lavender follows him out and down the hall, where it’s joined by the fug of a thick gravy. Someone’s dinner will be ready long before five.
It crosses his mind that you would never in a million years walk into this apartment building, along this corridor with its carpet-muffle of orange and red paisley, through the duvet of dinner smells and geriatric perfume, and expect to find a high-level Soviet defector. Simon has selected everything for invisibility.
The door marked 321 is at the end of the hall. A corner unit. Jack removes his hat, stands in front of the peephole and knocks. He has butterflies in his stomach. Simon has been characteristically low-key about the whole thing, but the facts speak for themselves. Jack is about to meet — has been entrusted with the well-being of — a man whose life and work and presence here derive from the crucible of international relations which at this very moment are affecting the lives of everyone on earth. He takes a deep breath. Considers knocking again.
Finally, a fumbling behind the door. Slide of a deadbolt, the knob turns, the door opens a few inches. Above the safety chain, a stripe of white face, scant grey hair. Spectacles.
“Herr Fried?” he says. “I’m Jack McCarthy, sir. Willkommen in Kanada.”
The door closes. The slide of the safety chain and it opens again, a little wider. Jack extends his hand. “It’s an honour to meet you, sir.”
Oskar Fried takes his hand briefly. The man feels frail.
Jack looks into the light grey eyes. Fried’s face, delicately lined parchment, pale. He is somewhere between fifty and seventy-five. “May I come in, sir?” he asks, because Oskar Fried has made no move. He appears shell-shocked. He must have been through one hell of a trip.
Fried turns and retreats slowly, almost at a shuffle. Jack follows him into the apartment. The smell of tobacco. Familiar. The lights are off, the curtains drawn, as though he were in hiding — which he is, though presumably the Soviets haven’t the first clue where to look for him. Jack glances around. The dull greens and browns of a furnished apartment; the tobacco masks a generic air freshener designed to mask a generic loneliness — the smell of the solitary male. Wall-to-wall indoor-outdoor, respectable lampshade yellowed with years of nicotine, a cheap print of Niagara Falls over the perfectly decent couch. Jack will have to get the man out to the PMQs for a visit to a real home as soon as possible.
“How are you settling in, sir?” he asks. “Uh, brauchst du, uh, brauchsten Sie etwa?”
Fried doesn’t smile at the attempted German, but says by way of reply, “Do you bring money?” His voice is thin, his accent more raw than Henry Froelich’s. Uneroded.
Jack smiles. “I’ve got it right here, sir.”
He takes a small brown envelope from his inside breast pocket and hands it to Oskar Fried.
Fried takes it. “I thank you,” he says, with an old-world inclination of the head that puts Jack in mind of Froelich again.
“You’re most welcome, sir.”
Oskar Fried is a spare man — as though he had been drawn with a pencil. His glasses are wire-rimmed, not the robust black frames Jack had pictured. He was right about the bow tie, otherwise there is no trace of the meaty Brylcreemed physicist he had envisioned. Fried’s white dress shirt is buttoned up but still loose at the neck, revealing the narrow cords and loosening flesh of undernourished and advancing years. Jack recognizes the permanently starved look of some Europeans — no amount of good food can possibly make up for the war. Henry Froelich has that look, although, even with his stoop and lean cheeks, Henry’s face is warm and mobile. Oskar Fried looks to be etched in sandstone. Seventeen years behind the Iron Curtain will do that. His suit jacket and trousers are of indestructible brown wool manufactured sometime in the last fifty years. But even in a lab coat, he would look like … a clerk. Jack feels disappointed, then immediately guilty. The man is exhausted. Traumatized. Stranger in a strange land.
Jack walks over to the window—“May I?”—and opens the curtains, squinting at the flash of daylight.
Fried jumps to his feet. “Nein, bitte.”
Jack draws them closed once more and turns to see Fried holding an ice bucket. He blinks to readjust his eyes and sees that the bucket contains bits of bark and stone. Growing up from its midst, supported by a coat hanger, is a flower. Purple, almost black.
“Orchid,” says Fried.
Jack smiles and nods.
“Dunkel,” says Fried. “Not light.”
“It grows in the dark,” says Jack.
Fried nods, almost smiles.
Jack feels a rush of pity for the man. Is it possible to be farther from home than he is now? And has the U.S.S.R. ever really felt like his home? He may very well have found himself in the wrong part of his homeland at the end of the war, trapped in what was suddenly East Germany. Forced to make the best of it. And now, a chance at freedom. He has been brave enough to grasp it, this wisp of a man. And perhaps generous enough too. “Herr Fried, I want you to know that we appreciate what you’re doing.”
Fried listens closely, nodding.
Jack continues, slowly and clearly, “I want to thank you for coming.”
“You are welcome,” says Fried.
Poor bugger holed up here, taking the thanks of the free world from some RCAF type he doesn’t know from Adam. Answering to a name not his own. “Look, sir, when you’re settled in, you call me at work, okay?” Jack takes the money envelope from Fried and writes down his office number and below it his home number. “This number here,” says Jack, pointing to it, “is my home. But only for emergency, verstehen Sie?”
“Ja. Emergency.”
Once Jack has arranged to bring Fried out to Centralia — for brunch this Sunday, perhaps — there will be no reason for him not to use the home number. But until Jack has been able to introduce Mimi to the “visiting professor,” and to think of a plausible friend-of-a-friend scenario, it is best that Fried call him only at work.