“Have a good journey,” he orders me.
“Thank you. You’ve been such a great help to her.”
The doctor shrugs and turns away, and for a moment I stand there helplessly. I wonder what’s the story of his life, and whether he has some inkling what he’s doing and how he’s helping us. Whether he will pay a price for what happens next.
I take charge of the wheelchair myself and push Iris down the corridors until we reach the entrance. Kedrov holds open the door. The black car’s still there, right behind the ambulance, inside a fog of exhaust. Fox stands next to the rear door. When he sees us emerge, he walks over briskly. First, he bends down and kisses Iris’s cheek, like an affectionate brother-in-law; then he straightens and kisses me on the lips, exactly the way a husband bids his wife farewell.
“Travel safely, darling. We’ll meet you there in a few days.”
I help Iris and the baby into the back of the ambulance, and Fox climbs into the back of the official car, and we roar off on our separate ways under the overcast sky.
From this point on, I have no way of knowing where Fox is, or what he’s doing. Trust me, he said to me, as we leaned out the window of the hotel room, eight stories above the subdued morning bustle of Mokhovaya Street.
I sucked the remains of my cigarette and pondered this question of trust, and how absolute our trust in each other must be, and on what basis? He’d deceived me from the beginning. You might argue that he’d had to deceive me—the less I knew, the safer everyone was—God knew I might sing like a canary at the first whiff of interrogation—but nonetheless, there was deceit. Even now he wouldn’t tell me the whole story. Yet he wanted me to trust him with my life, and my sister’s life, and the lives of her children and husband!
But I had no choice, did I? No other way but forward. No one else but Fox.
I withdrew my left hand from his and examined the gold band, the inside of which was actually engraved in tiny cursive letters with a dollop of biblical wisdom, Paul’s letter to the Corinthians—
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices in the truth CSF to REM May 5 1952
—because Fox is nothing if not thorough, isn’t he? I did not take the ring off and read out that verse to him. I didn’t believe I needed to. I stared at it and he stared at it, and we both knew what was written inside, and that Fox himself had chosen the line. I finished the cigarette and crushed it out on the windowsill. We ducked back inside the hotel room and I turned to look at him.
“You know, people say marriage is a leap of faith,” I told him. “But I figure it’s more like a bet. I’ve put my money on you, Sumner Fox, for no reason other than a thing in my gut telling me I should. I’m hoping it wasn’t just indigestion.”
Fox started to laugh in big, hearty whoops like he might have used to do at Yale, after he scored himself a home run, or whatever it was. When he was done amusing himself, he wiped away a tear or two from those stone eyes.
“Now that’s the girl I married,” he said.
The ambulance rumbles away down the road, turning and swaying. Kedrov sits up front, next to the driver, while Iris and I make ourselves comfortable in the back with the nurse. Outside the tiny window, Moscow passes by in drab gray flashes. I fuss with the baby so as not to think about Fox, and where he’s headed, and what he’ll do.
A black fly has found its way inside the ambulance. I’m not surprised—have I mentioned the bugs in Moscow? My God. You know how it is in these territories that freeze solid during the winter months. Our parents once had the clever idea to send us to some outdoorsy girls’ camp on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire for the month of August, and it’s a wonder I had any skin left by the time we went back to school. Anyway, the thing buzzes deliriously around Gregory’s head, simply out of its mind with the delicious scent of newborn baby. I swat and shoo and look helplessly at the nurse. She shrugs her shoulders and checks her watch. The ambulance swerves and lurches and turns some hairpin corner, and without prior warning screeches to a stop. I expect we must have reached a traffic signal or something, but no. The front doors open and slam; the rear ones swing open. We’ve arrived in Rizhskaya Square, just outside the Rizhsky railway terminal, from which our train will depart in half an hour.
The nurse clambers out first and extends her hand.
“I don’t think there’s a wheelchair for you,” I tell Iris.
“That’s all right. I can walk.”
“Are you certain?”