Pravda (28 page)

He pushed open the familiar door and mouthed his hello to Wayne, the lone producer, assistant, researcher, screener of callers, or whatever it was that he titled himself. In the studio, behind the glass, cans on her head, eyes on her computer screen, Connie was absorbed in the technical business of her job. She did not see him arrive. He watched her a moment, thirsty as a hermit for her beauty and her being.

There was a song playing. Something by Tom Waits. Wayne motioned for him to wait. So he helped himself to some of the vending machine coffee (which always tasted of acorns and cinnamon) and stood sipping it—the spy about to board the plane that would drop him deep behind the iron curtain. Then the red "on air" light went out as they cut to some ads and Wayne waved him in.

Connie looked up as he opened the heavy padded door and greeted him with that smile that women reserve for men they love but cannot love, which of course makes men love them even more. He took his seat opposite hers.

"Hi, you. We have three minutes five," she said. Then, a little softer, "Hmmm—you look tired, Gabriel Glover. Have you been sorting your life out?"

This was her perennial question—faux-comic Connie code for
Have you either proposed to or left Lina? Can we therefore end the misery-exhilaration cycle of our relationship and either never see each other again or live happily ever after somewhere in the countryside?

"Of course not."

"Well ... no rush." She was mocking him but not with her eyes.

"Are we still playing it cool?" he asked.

"Yes. We're learning to become friends." She nodded slowly, as if ticking off a wayward pupil. "As we should have done in the first place."

"I think I am addicted to you. I've been missing you like ... like ... like something I am addicted to."

She smiled. "Well, sort your life out and you won't bloody have to."

"I am doing."

"Feels like it."

"Connie."

She raised her eyebrows. "Don't try to be cute. You know how much I hate all this mess. I really hate it."

There was nothing he could say. There was never, ever anything he could say.

She relented. "Are you okay?"

And she meant it. She felt for him.

"Yes. I'm fine." And her generosity and understanding and inexhaustible patience made it worse. "I brought the stuff—I've read it through and made some suggestions." She was writing a script for some radio and awards thing she was hosting. He'd taken unbelievable pains to imagine her voice and edit accordingly.

She beamed her thanks. "Good job Wayne is watching or I'd have to kiss you. A lot."

"Does Wayne ever fall asleep?"

"Gabriel."

"Sorry. You started it."

"Never. Wayne never sleeps."

"That's a shame." He smoothed the piece of paper on which he would write the callers' names. "I mean, that's a shame,
mate
"

"One minute, thirty seconds. No,
mate,
you started it—if you remember."

"Mate, I remember everything."

She said, "I keep thinking about when we went to Rome. I think about you all the time."

He said, "I get scared when I am thinking about you that it's getting in the way of thinking about you."

"Soulmates."

"Soulmates."

Even though the red light was off, they were talking in hushed voices—partly because they were in a radio studio, partly because the excitement of being in each other's presence again demanded it, and partly because they were lovers and here they were, somewhere half secret, and it was the dead of night and it felt like they were the last people awake in the middle of a great city and only hushed voices would do. The song played on.

"Fifty seconds."

He said, "We could try breaking up completely—after this."

"We're not together, so how can we break up?"

"We've done it before."

"Yeah ... about a hundred times, and it's never worked."

"We could try extra-hard this time. No calls. No texts. Nothing." He took out his favorite pen. "No sudden collapses. Not even any action."

She made a suspicious face, then lightened. "Okay ... Okay. Good. It's a deal. We leave each other alone. You take some proper time to work out what it is you want and what it is you're doing."

"But I can't stop wanting you, Connie, and I can't imagine my life without you."

"Nor mine without you. So."

"So?"

"So
sort your life out,
Gabriel—for the love of Jesus, sort your life out." She gave him an expression that mixed exasperation with desire. "I'm going to introduce you in the usual way, okay?"

"Sure."

"Signal me if it gets too heavy and we'll move on to someone else."

"Okay."

The song ended in applause. The red light came on. And her voice spoke softly to the hearts of three thousand sleepless Londoners: "You are listening to Radio Rabbit with me, Connie Carmichael, and that was 'Strange Weather,' by Tom Waits. Who I still haven't met, despite the celebrity-stuffed life I lead. Well, it's midweek and it's midnight and that means it's time for our self-help phone-in. With me in the studio is our regular guest, your friend and mine, the editor of the Randy K. Norris
Self-Help!
magazine, Gabriel Glover. How's the week shaping up for you, Gabriel?"

"Terrific, so far."

The river slunk and the city slept. Parisians dreamed in three million darkened rooms. But Nicholas was still awake, sitting alone in his high-backed leather chair.

The pipes groaned, and the wood seemed to creak in the beam. He had the window open a fraction for the night air, though the flames of the false fire were turned up as high as they would go. He set down his malt, took out the letter from its cheap Russian envelope again, and held it to the angled light. His eyesight was as good as it had ever been. And yet, although he was alone, it suited some indefinite part of him to act as if it were fading.

The English, he thought, was surprisingly lucid—though lucid in the old-fashioned elegant manner rather than merely plain in the modern way. The handwriting, however, was quite unable to stay within the confines of its institutional origins. He read the letter through again. The opening sentence began with the specific use of his name: "Dear Nicholas Glover..."

The writer was intelligent enough not to commit any specific threat to paper. He merely asked for a meeting. But it was there, Nicholas was sure, betrayed perhaps by the square hook of those gallows-shaped
r
's—the grim Cyrillic
Γ
in thin disguise.

He allowed the letter to dangle between finger and thumb and played the whisky through his crooked teeth.

My God, Masha, your bloody son is alive after all. You knew this all along, of course ... Christ, why am I always so slow-witted compared to you? Only now do I begin to see what has been under my vain nose all along. You went back to find him. Didn't you? This was
the reason. Only now do I begin to see. It was not the call of your country at all, was it? It was the call of your blood. Alive all along. Known about. And yet ... you did not tell me. Even when I came to you at the end. Even as we sat together. Your quid pro quo for all the things I did not tell you—was that it? Ah, but what a shame that we played chess with our secrets like this. A shame, dear Masha. A shame on our lives.

Somewhere down on the embankment a drunk had started sobbing like a child bereft. Nicholas rose to pull the window shut, the flames wavering a moment in his draft as he passed. He eased the frame up a millimeter or two on its old hinges so that it would close more easily and turned the handle through ninety careful degrees. Then he fetched his bottle and returned Bach's harpsichord to its beginning so that he would not have to move again.

I was very close to your wife here in Petersburg and I wondered whether or not it might be possible to meet up as there are a number of important things that I wish to discuss.

And what exactly am I supposed to do now that the bastard—sorry, but we
are
all bastards, Masha, except you—now that the bastard has tracked me down? What is he to me? Or I to him? And what kind of man are we dealing with? Is he our everyday comrade—brutal, avaricious, mercenary, desperate to get out? Or is there some of your nobility in his character—is it just a meeting he wants, friendship, a lifelong correspondence about Turgenev?

Or will it be money?

Wait, though. Wait ... is this what you were doing in Petersburg, Masha, giving him money? After everything was said and resaid and asserted and defied, did it come down to money for you too? Oh no. Wait. I know you, my Mashenka!

He leaned forward in his chair, childishly enlivened by the rare excitement of a thought he had not had before.

My father's money was stolen from Russia. It came to me. I gave it to you. You gave it back to Russia. That's how you will have seen it! That's exactly how you will have seen it! Oh Masha, did this become your life's project? This son of yours and his birthright...

A young woman rising in the Party, you see this Englishman gallivanting through your cities: Maximilian Glover, whoremonger, embezzler, art thief, traitor ... Or, my god, perhaps you were sent to him ... Perhaps you were sent to my father.

Nicholas sat back, let the letter dangle again, and swallowed
slowly, concentrating on the burn of the Talisker down his throat and into the pit of his stomach.

But you ... you ... you marry the son instead. You can serve your masters better that way. My God. Surely you weren't spying after all? How many times did we talk about this? Laugh. Fantasize. Pretend. You loved to make things up, of course, and this I celebrate. But was the final joke on me? Was I distracted? Was I double-fooled? Oh, Masha, is this your little secret?

He drank again and this time held the spirit in the cradle of his tongue. (The chain of thought was long familiar to him. But he fingered the links now with a new concentration.) You study your ruffian English so very, very carefully. You take your terrible job as a lowly copy editor—a miserable checker of grammar and facts on the newspaper of record, as you liked to call it. You work the night shift. You work weekends. You work whenever you are told. And there are whispers, of course, in the canteen, up and down the editorial floor, there are whispers everywhere; more than this—there are tales and conversations and rows, all the hundred truths that cannot be printed are heard out loud, bandied back and forth across the desks every day; and then there is all that copy they cannot run; and you see it; you sift the in box while you're waiting for the idiots to file their illiteracy; and you hear the political correspondents boasting in the lifts and the diplomatic editor confiding on his way to conference; foreign desk, crime, health, and defense—you hear them all; and there are politicians and there are artists and there are captains of industry, stars of this and experts in that, and they are all in and out of the editor's office, day and night, like Japanese businessmen through a brothel. And you are there all the while, as decades pass, listening, reading, sitting quietly at your workstation, Maria Glover, the efficient copy editor.

And I wager you never took a penny There would be no trace of it. No money. Just love. You passed without being asked to do so. And I wager you never asked if any of it was useful, or appreciated, or even relevant. You simply passed information. Dutifully. Loyally. Even when they stopped acknowledging your drops. Because, yes, one day, just as you are sitting there, the Wall comes down. And it seems as though it has all been for nothing.

What then? Do you go on regardless? Or do you turn slowly from the great struggle to the personal? Is there one last thing, a private thing—though the bourgeois scum are teeming gleefully through—is there one last thing that you can still accomplish? You can return
the money to your son. You can return what is owed to Russia. You would enjoy that last bitter little irony, wouldn't you, my clever, clever Masha?

He weighed this new idea, pleased to have hauled it from the mirrored lake of his life, pleased that there was hidden treasure at the end of the chain after all.

If this is the way we must play, then play this way we will, you think. If it's all about the money, then let it be so: let's start again, but let's start fair. Yes, let's start again: oil, labor, and technology—the East will rise once more in a monstrous aping of the slobbering West. Harder, careless, and more ruthless yet. And this time the West will beg for mercy.

Or am I wrong? Am I wrong about all of this?

His eyes reflected the flames. The ice had melted in his glass.

Work was easy.

She asked for a sabbatical.

They refused.

She said that she was sorry but she was going back to the U.K. to deal with some family issues anyway. And that she would therefore be tendering her resignation.

They said, oh, they hoped it was nothing serious, they would be sad to lose her, but she should definitely drop in when she got back and they would see where they were then.

She said that, yes, it was serious, her mother had died.

They looked at her with faces of sudden concern and expressed their sympathy. They asked her when her mother passed away.

She took a private moment to dislike their choice of euphemism and then, as planned, said that her mother's death had been yesterday rather than almost four weeks ago. This so that they could not stop her from leaving immediately, now, this very lunchtime.

They did not know whether to comfort her or become even more professional.

She could tell they were alarmed at her calmness. She wanted to say, Don't worry, so was I; it passes.

They shook their heads and meant their platitudes.

She was sorry for them for having to deal with this. Death gave them focusing issues to address in the short term and mortality issues going forward.

They asked her if there was anything at all they could do to help.

She told them no, thanks, and that seeing as she would be dropping by in six months, and given the circumstances, she wouldn't be working her notice and she had to go pretty much straightaway. They said, oh, and then, of course.