The Prodigal Spy (9 page)

“VANESSA REDGRAVE’S SUPPOSED to show.”

“Super. Where?” The two boys, obviously students, looked over the iron railings toward the tall houses lining one side of the square.

“I don’t know, but she’s supposed to show. Check out the cameras.”

“Far out. We’ll be on TV.”

Eavesdropping, Nick smiled and looked toward the embassy steps, where the camera crews were setting up. The turnout was bigger than he’d expected. The day was raw and cold, damp morning mist still hanging from the trees, but the line snaked all around Grosvenor Square, ringing the enclosed park and spilling out down Brook Street. They couldn’t all be American. The streets were still open to traffic, and the police, polite and wary, walked along the edge of the curb, asking the crowd to stay on the pavement.

The rally, like London itself, was gentle and friendly. In front of the embassy there were microphones for the demonstration speeches and Americans Against Vietnam signs, but no one broke out of line or heckled the secretaries going into the building. A few faces stared out of the upper-story windows, more curious than besieged, but no one called out to them. The confrontations and shouting belonged somewhere else. They were here to listen to speeches and then, one by one, to read the names of the dead.

Nick looked around for his LSE group, but they’d become separated earlier and were now swallowed up in the queue. One of the organizers, megaphone dangling from his neck, was moving down the line, handing out index cards.

“When you get to the mike, just read off the name and place and say ‘dead’ and then drop the card in the coffin. Got it? Don’t yell–the mike’ll pick it up. And keep it moving, okay? No stunts.”

Nick took the card.
Pvt. Richard Sczeczynski. Nu Phoc, 1968
. That would have been during Tet, when the body bags flooded the airport, a hundred years ago.

The organizers looked like teenagers, but then everyone in the crowd looked young to him. Earlier he had noticed a middle-aged group in drab overcoats–academics, presumably, or English radicals old enough to have tramped from Aldermaston–but everyone else seemed to have stepped out of a dorm party, smooth-faced and eager, wrapped in capes and leather and old army greatcoats. A few had peace signs painted on their foreheads. Underneath the bushy mustaches and lumberjack beards their cheeks were pink. It was a thrift shop army – cast-off shawls and buckskin fringe and tight jeans with shiny studs planted along the seams. None of them had been there.

“Excuse me,” a girl behind him said, holding out her card. “Do you have any idea how to pronounce this?”

An American voice. He looked at her–long blond hair held away from her face by an Indian headband, shoulders draped with a patterned gaucho cape–and took the card.

“Hue,” he said automatically, wondering why she’d asked. She was pretty but slightly drawn, dressed to look younger than she was. Had she been standing there all this time?

“No, the name. I mean, he’s dead–awful if I couldn’t pronounce it. I mean—”

Nick looked again at the card. “Trochazka,” he read.

“Chaw?” she said, drawing out the flat
a
. “Like that? Russian?”

“No, it’s a Czech name.”

“Really? Do you know that?”

Nick shrugged. “It’s a common name. Smith. Jones. Like that.”

“Common if you’re Czech,” she said. “Are you?”

Nick shook his head. “Grandmother.”

“You take it, then. I’ll never say it right. Swap, okay? Do you mind?”

Nick smiled. “Be my guest,” he said, handing her his card. He watched her face as she read it, did a double-take, and then gave a wry smile.

“Okay, you win. I can’t even start this one. Is this like Jones too?”

“No. Che-chin-ski,” he pronounced. “Polish.”

“You can tell? Just like that?”

“Well, the ‘ski’ is Polish. The rest, I don’t know. I’m just guessing.”

She looked at him and smiled. “I’m impressed.” She reached over and took back her card, grazing his fingers. “Forget the swap, though. I think I was better off the first time. Imagine, two in a row. Maybe we’re the Slavic section. How do you say yours? In Czech. Z’s and
y’s
and all that?”

“Warren.”

“Oh.” She smiled. “Sorry.”

“No,” he said, studying her face, her quick brown eyes meeting his without embarrassment. “They’re funny names.”

“But not to them. I know. Mine’s Chisholm, by the way. With an
l
.”

“Imagine what the Poles would do with that.”

She smiled. “Yes, imagine.”

He looked at her again. Wide mouth and pale skin, a trace of freckles over the bridge of her nose.

“Where are you from?” she said, the usual American-abroad question.

“New York.”

“No, I mean where here. Are you with a group?”

“LSE,” Nick said.

“You’re a student?”

He laughed at her surprise. “Too old?”

“Well, the tie—” He followed her eyes to the senior-tutor wool jacket and plain tie he’d forgotten he had on. “Are you a teacher?”

“No, I’m finishing a dissertation,” he said, the all-purpose explanation for his time away, the drift. “Late start. What about you?”

“Oh, I’m–just here.” She looked away for a second, avoiding him, and adjusted the heavy bag hanging from her shoulder, a shapeless but good soft leadier that seemed at odds with the hippie cape. When she turned back, he was still staring at her. “What?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said, catching himself. “I was–never mind.”

“What?” she said, a laugh now in her throat.

“Well, I was going to say, Do you come here often? And I realized how dumb it sounded. What I meant was, have you been to one of these before?” But what he really meant was, why are you here? He wondered if she was like the girls in
Hair
, floating in a haze of smoke between protest marches and concerts, interchangeable parts of the same scene. But she was looking at him again with the same frank scrutiny, anything but mindless.

“Of course,” she said simply. “I don’t understand people who don’t.”

“Even over here?” Nick said, his own doubt.

She shrugged. “It all counts. Somehow. Why do you?”

“Same reason, I guess,” he said, letting it drop.

The line moved a little now, people drawing nearer to the steps where the speakers had appeared, and he began to move with it.

“So do you always wear a tie?” she said, trying to keep his attention.

He smiled. Was she flirting with him? “I have to meet somebody after,” he said. “That’s all. Tie people.”

She looked up at him and squinted her eyes. “Tie people?”

“Parents.”

“Parents?” she said, disconcerted.

“Am I too old for that too?”

She looked at him oddly, as if his answer had thrown her, a piece from the wrong puzzle. “They live here?” she said unexpectedly.

He shook his head. “Flying visit. One meal. One tie. Not too much to ask.” He glanced at his watch, reminded of the time. Larry and his mother were expecting him in just under an hour. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I—”

She seemed flustered again, but now there was a movement in the crowd, and before she could finish, people began to surge politely around them, looking down the street.

“It’s her!” someone shouted. “She came.”

Nick glanced toward the corner, where a black taxi idled as a tall woman leaned in to pay the fare. Two women with her greeted the organizers and collected their index cards, then steered her away from the photographers who had begun to move in their direction. “Miss Redgrave, over here!” She was dressed in a plain pea coat with a long muffler wrapped around her neck as camouflage, but in her high boots she towered over the other marchers, drawing attention like camera light. Now the rally had point.

She ignored the commotion at the steps and quietly joined the line not far from Nick, thanking the students who moved aside to make a place. They nodded shyly, pretending to be indifferent, but it was a face they had seen twenty feet high and soon they were staring openly, sprinkled with the same fairy dust that drew the press.

“Can you give us a statement?” one of the reporters shouted, Cockney and insistent.

“No, sorry,” she said, turning away and staring straight ahead, removing herself.

“And will you be speaking today?” he asked quickly.

One of the women with her waved an arm to take in the crowd. “We’re all speaking today,” she said. “Just by being here.” The students around her nodded, flattered.

Nick wondered who she was. An actress he didn’t recognize? Or a hanger-on, the willing mouthpiece?

“What about charges that demos like these are actually undermining the progress of the Paris peace talks?”

“What progress?”

“Right,” he said, smiling, finally jotting something down. “Film stars in politics?”

“Come on, Davey, not again,” the woman said, surprising Nick with the intimacy. Had they been around this dance floor before? Maybe she
was
famous, part of the new culture that seemed to have sprung up overnight, while he wasn’t looking, a music without history. “Everyone’s in politics,” she said, almost offhandedly. “Whether they want to be or not.”

“Even the dead, eh? These soldiers here,” he said, nodding toward the index cards. “Think they’d be pleased? Being part of this?”

There was a question, Nick thought. He wasn’t even sure how he felt, still alive.

“We honor them as victims, not soldiers,” the woman said, then stopped, aware that the reporter was writing. “That’s all now, please.”

And, surprisingly, it was. The reporter, still scribbling, nodded and started to back away, apparently satisfied with an interview that hadn’t really happened. Nick remembered the reporters in Vietnam taking the handouts from the press office, knowing they were lies, printing them anyway.

“Davey’s all right,” the woman now said busily to Redgrave, who seemed not to hear, her Valkyrie head still above the crowd.

The line continued to press from behind, drawn to limelight, and Nick felt himself pushed against the girl at his side.

“Hey, Nick!”

He turned to the yell and saw the crowd rearrange itself as Henry, from the LSE group, pushed through. He came up to them, clearly excited by the day. “Hi,” he said to the girl. “I see you found him.”

Nick looked at her, puzzled, and saw her face color with embarrassment.

“I thought he’d be over here,” Henry said to her, still unaware of her discomfort. “Description fit?”

“Perfectly,” she said quietly.

“How’d you get lost anyway?” he said to Nick. “Old Wiseman came. He was asking for you.”

But Nick was still staring at the girl. She met his eyes as frankly as before, then shrugged, found out.

“Hey, is that Vanessa Redgrave?” Henry said, looking around. “Where’s Annie? Annie
loves
her.” He finally made eye contact with his girlfriend and jabbed his finger in the air toward the tall woman.

“I just wanted to meet you, that’s all,” the girl said, still looking at Nick but smiling now. “Is that so terrible?”

Nick didn’t know how to respond. Was she trying to pick him up? Is that the way it worked now? He looked at her, trying to imagine what it would be like. A few light exchanges, the walk back to her flat, the awkwardness until they finally touched–just like that, as easy as the music. In spite of himself, he grinned.

“No. So what do you think?” he said finally, spreading his hands to present himself, making a joke of it.

“I’m not sure yet,” she said, matching his tone. “I like the tie, though. Look, maybe I’d better explain—” But she was drowned by the megaphones starting the demonstration and settled for another helpless shrug of the shoulders and a smile that didn’t explain anything.

The crowd grew quiet around them, alert and solemn, as the speaker welcomed them and asked them to begin the roll call of the dead. They stepped forward one at a time to read the names, the first few barely audible, unsure of the microphones. In the distance they could hear a buzz of traffic, but the square itself had become a hushed theater, and as one name followed another they took on the rhythm of a muffled drum roll.

“Corporal Ronald Stanton. Ben Hoa, 1967. Dead.”

“Private Anthony Moro. Hue, 1968. Dead.”

On and on, all the body bags. The line shuffled forward, holding index cards.

Nick listened for names he might have known, ashamed suddenly of flirting. He could feel her next to him, but she was looking straight ahead, serious, and it occurred to him that he had got it wrong somehow. Not a pickup. Why ask Henry anyway? None of it made sense, except his wanting it to be true, flattered by the attention, as eager as a teenager splashing on aftershave before a dance. “Lieutenant Charles Macomb. Mekong Delta, 1968. Dead.” Not even a town, just a stretch of swamp. At the demonstration in New York they had wanted Nick to wear his uniform. “It’s important, for moral authority,” the organizer had said, a nice kid from Columbia still spotted with acne. But he had refused. Did it make him any better to have been there? It seemed to Nick that he had spent half his life in uniform, being good–Boy Scouts, with the proud sash of merit badges; ROTC, always pressed; the tropical-weight khaki–and it had all come down to a drum roll of names. There was no moral authority in a uniform, not even this new one of beads and headbands. He wondered how many of them had come to a funeral, to read the names, and were thinking instead about getting laid.

“Corporal Leonard Bauer. Lon Sue, 1968. Dead.” Nick looked up, startled. He had been to Lon Sue, before he’d been transferred back from the field, a semicircle of huts and scratching chickens steaming in a hot clearing. But who was Bauer? There’d been a little boy, killed when the bomb he’d been hiding–for whom?–went off, taking a few soldiers with him. Maybe Bauer. Afterward they had shot the parents, who never said a word, grateful perhaps not to have to live through the grieving. The huts were torched. Maybe Bauer had been one of these, shooting flames and yelling, hit later by a sniper. Maybe they were honoring a monster. And maybe he hadn’t been there at all, just a jungle casualty, and someone in the office had looked at a map and picked a place of death for his tag. Now he was another piece of evidence, a name for the Fulbright scholars and draft evaders and movie stars to drop in a box as the line moved on. Who could sort it out? Larry was on his way to Paris to negotiate, which made him the enemy to Miss Redgrave’s friend. And maybe he was.