He shrugs back.
The doctor turns to stare at me through the doorway. His ferocity barrels through the air to land in the middle of my forehead. His body follows in short, quick strides.
“There is excellent clinic near Riga, on Baltic Sea. You leave tomorrow by special train.”
I shoot an astonished glance to Fox, who smiles back.
The doctor frowns down at me. From the look of him, I can’t tell if he’s onto us. Whether this is an act of subversion or plain coincidence. Does it matter? I throw my arms around his neck and kiss his bristly cheek.
“Thank you,” I say in Russian.
And I pray to God to protect him when the truth comes out.
We spend our last night in Moscow like the first, in a suite at the National Hotel. Dinner’s brought up at eight o’clock by a waiter in a white uniform. Is it unspeakably bourgeois to tip? I’m not sure, but I feel certain I see something pass from Fox’s hand into that of the waiter—a man about forty years old, wiry and stone-eyed—and he doesn’t refuse it.
I’m too nervy to eat much, or even to speak. What’s there to say? We can’t discuss our plans. I try to make conversation about the baby, to muster the kind of relief and excitement I imagine I would feel about this upcoming stay in a clinic on the Baltic Sea, but every word seems so forced and unnatural that I give up.
“You must be exhausted,” Fox says at last. “You should get some sleep.”
“You, too.”
“Going to be a big day tomorrow.”
“Yes, it is.”
We stare at each other helplessly.
“Some vodka, maybe?” Fox suggests.
“God, yes.”
He finds the bottle and a pair of glasses and pours us each a shot. To my surprise, he swallows his drink as swiftly and expertly as I do, and I’m even more surprised when he refills us both and repeats the exercise. I slump back against the sofa cushion and so does he.
“Everything’s going to be all right, isn’t it?”
Fox touches my cheek with his thumb. “Yes, darling. Everything’s going to be all right.”
At some point in the night, I wake with a jerk. From the window comes the murky greenish charcoal of a midsummer’s dusk in the far north—no such thing as true night—so it couldn’t be later than three in the morning.
“Fox,” I breathe, but he’s already awake. His tension prickles me from the other side of the bed.
He knows, as I do, that someone else shares the room with us.
We stumbled to bed just before eleven. He wore his silk pajamas and I wore my silk negligee, but it wasn’t the same as two nights ago, though I wanted him just as badly. For one thing, we were too sober—literally sober, despite two shots each of excellent Russian vodka, but also in spirit—and for another, our journey together had just rounded its final turn. We could not risk further attachment. We could not allow our magnetic poles to lock together, no matter how great the pull of attraction.
Still, it wasn’t the same as our first night in Moscow, either. I wanted him near, even if I couldn’t touch him, and I felt he wanted the same from me. He lifted the covers for me. I scooted over to give him room. He leaned in to kiss me and said clearly Good night, sweetheart, and I like to think he said it to me, and not to the microphone tucked into the frame of the landscape that hung above the headboard.
I then slipped into a profound and dreamless sleep, so that my present jarred wakefulness makes me feel as if I’ve been propelled into a new universe. At first, I’m conscious only of the faint electricity of the intruder, the way you sense the presence of a living creature even if you can’t see or hear or smell it. I called out to Fox out of instinct, just now, not because I remembered he was there.
I regret it instantly.
Now the spook knows we’re awake.
A few feet away, Fox moves his arm, inch by inch. The mattress stirs delicately. I wonder what the hell he means to do. Launch himself into the dark? I can’t see anything but shadows and the faint light of the streetlamps outside the window through the crack between the curtains.
The room is so quiet, I hear the sheets move as I breathe. Fox feels fluid next to me, sliding too smoothly for sound, muscles coiling, cat ready to pounce. Don’t do it, I think. He’ll go away in a while.
Unless he won’t.
The blood rushes in my ears. My eyes ache from not blinking. I’m afraid to blink—I’m afraid to move—to distract Fox—to attract attention—
A shadow streaks across the room. I shoot up in time to hear an oomph, a crash, a cry—the cry’s mine—I jump out of bed and grab the lamp, yank it from the socket—a horrifying crunch of flesh and bone—thump thump thump as somebody bolts into the living room, thump thump thump as somebody chases him.