She rolls her eyes at me—just as she used to do when we were children—and takes the nurse’s hand. I tuck Gregory like a football in the crook of my right arm and jump out ahead of her to take the other hand. Kedrov appears around the door, lugging a pair of suitcases—mine and Iris’s. Iris turns back to the open doors of the ambulance.
“My bag, Ruth. With Gregory’s things.”
I search about the back of the ambulance and discover a small, soft valise, which I hoist over my elbow. Together we make a slow procession toward the Roman arches at the entrance of Rizhsky Station, which looks something like a church, only grimier. Behind us, a tram rattles along its tracks. A bus growls past. The air is thick with exhaust and cigarettes. I concentrate all my attention on Iris to my left and Gregory on my right arm, and I hope to God I won’t let either of them drop to the pavement.
The train is short—only three carriages—and pulled by a steam engine, just like the old days. The boiler hisses and the air reeks of coal smoke. Kedrov leads us to the carriage just behind the engine and helps Iris climb the steps. We have a compartment to ourselves, a sleeper, more comfortable than I expected. The nurse takes Iris’s temperature and blood pressure and makes some notes on her chart, which she hands to Kedrov before she steps, with an air of relief, out of the compartment.
“No nurse?” I ask Kedrov.
He shakes his head and looks out the window at the busy platform below us. Gregory squirms, opens his eyes, and starts to cry.
Iris unbuttons her blouse. “Poor fellow, he’s hungry after all this.”
Kedrov flushes red and bolts for the door of the compartment so quickly his mumbled excuse hangs in the air behind him.
The whistle keens good-bye. The train jerks forward. I turn to the window just in time to see the nurse hurrying back down the platform and out of sight.
When Fox was a kid—difficult to imagine, I know, but imagine it anyway—he used to love magic shows, he said.
We were inside Orlovsky’s atelier when he told me this. It was one of those blurred, hurried days before we left for Moscow, when Fox was attempting to distill a decade’s worth of accumulated experience and tradecraft into a few simple lessons. This was one of them. He told me he would order those kits in the mail, the ones with the flimsy boxes with the sliding bottoms and that kind of thing, and he would spend hours and hours perfecting the tricks, until he could fool even his mother—who was, he told me gravely, no fool.
I said that was a nice story, so what?
Well, tradecraft is a lot like magic, he said. All those KGB watchers, you have to fool them into thinking they’re seeing one thing, when another thing is actually taking place before their eyes. Now, how do you execute this sleight of hand? You distract the viewer with some other maneuver, some elaborate display of the left hand while the right hand performs the dirty work, or else you employ some sinfully attractive assistant to lure the attention of the audience while the magician makes the rabbit disappear.
Now, I admit, I thought as you did when he explained this. I flattered myself that I was the sinfully attractive magician’s assistant, and Fox was the magician, and Digby was the rabbit. But I guess you could say that Fox was practicing a little illusion on me as well, which I began to understand during that first visit to the Digbys’ apartment. Still—because the illusion fits comfortably with all my notions of Iris and myself and the world in general—the whole truth only really dawns on me as I sit in that train compartment, rattling through all the switches as we progress out of Moscow.
I remember something else Fox told me. I turn to Iris and ask quietly, “When Sasha does his training lectures, how many of the candidates are women?”
“None,” she says.
Sure, you see women agents from time to time, Fox said. You see handlers, couriers, that kind of thing. But not case officers. Not our side and especially not theirs.
I said that was unfair, but Fox shook his head.
It’s an advantage, he said. You’re invisible to them. If we split up, they’ll run after me, not you. They’ll figure I’ve got the football, because what kind of man hands off the football to a woman?
The rabbit. The football. Whatever it is, it’s sitting right next to me. Hiding in plain sight, while the watchers watch someone else.
I settle back against the seat and close my eyes. “It figures,” I mutter.
But I don’t fall asleep. I just lie there staring at my eyelids and pray that Fox knows what he’s doing.
As the train gathers speed, out of the Moscow suburbs and onto the vast western plains, I keep an eye out for KGB watchers. We have lunch in the dining car, but among the other passengers I see nobody who takes much notice of us. Iris doesn’t eat much. She looks a little pale, but what do I know about the aftermath of childbirth? She says she feels fine, just tired as you might expect. Outside the window, the landscape rolls by, green fields and hills, speckled by lakes. The clouds break up a little, exposing a pure blue sky. Sometimes we come to some village or town, gray and spent. I don’t know much about this part of the world, but it seems to me that the land has been trampled on somehow, that that past half century has left the people exhausted.