Luckily, Marina was like any eleven-year-old girl when it came to discussing these matters with her mother.
“Mama, I don’t care about him. He’s just a boy at my school. But—”
“Never mind,” Lyudmila says hastily. “We’ll speak of it tonight, when you’re home from school.”
“I’ve already left school, and I’m not going back. I’m not doing anything until you tell me what’s going on.”
Lyudmila attempts a laugh. “Darling, so dramatic! Nothing’s going on. I’m sure there’s a perfectly logical explanation. Didn’t his mother have a new baby? Maybe they’ve gone to the hospital today.”
“Mama—”
“In any case, I’m at the office now, as you know. I can’t speak about any personal matters.”
Marina makes a tiny noise that might be disgust or understanding—who can tell with a girl that age? And why in the name of reason has her daughter developed a fascination with this particular boy? What contrary fate placed the two of them together at the same school to begin with? Lyudmila feels a headache coming on. Her fingers flex to grasp one of the cigarettes she gave up during the war, when cigarettes were needed for the soldiers at the front. She stares at the bare gray-white walls, the speckled linoleum that covers the floor.
“All right,” Marina says quietly. “I guess I’ll see you at home, then.”
“Go back to school, darling. Everything will be all right.”
“Yes,” says her daughter.
Yes to what? Lyudmila thinks frantically. “Probably they started the summer holidays a few days early.”
“That’s not allowed,” Marina says flatly. “Good-bye, Mama.”
“Good-bye, Marina.”
The line clicks and goes dead. Lyudmila replaces the receiver and stares at the smooth black handle. The world, which seemed so orderly and so satisfactory a moment ago, has now gone haywire. All because of some impudent scrap of an eleven-year-old girl.
All right, Dmitri, she thinks. Have your revenge. Just remember she’s your daughter, too.
After that, the telephone goes quiet. Lyudmila resists the urge to pick up the receiver and ask Dubrovskaya if a message has come in, a cable. Of course, Dubrovskaya would bring down any message or cable instantly—she’s perfectly well trained, she’s as loyal as it’s possible to be loyal within these walls.
Trust nobody, Lyudmila reminds herself.
She stands and sits again. She flips through the papers on the desk before her—the cables, the transcripts, her own notes, all arranged in chronological order to tell the story of this operation. She rearranges the position of a stack or two. She sips her tea, which has gone cold.
The telephone rings, jarring her. She snatches up the receiver. “Ivanova!” she snaps.
Dubrovskaya’s voice, carefully neutral—“The head of your daughter’s school is on the telephone for you. Shall I take a message?”
It is invidious—invidious!—to sit in this low chair before Comrade Grievskaya’s desk as if one were a recalcitrant schoolchild. It’s invidious even to be here at all, in such a moment, when she’s supposed to be directing this operation that will possibly bring down the careers of several traitors to the Soviet people, if Lyudmila’s suspicions are accurate—and they always are, in these matters. Lyudmila wants to scream at this woman—Do you know I am a KGB officer in the middle of a major operation? Do you know I can bring down so much trouble upon your head, you’ll wish I would just execute you instead?
But she doesn’t. There’s something in the authority of a head of school that transcends even the authority of the KGB—the authority of the Kremlin itself.
Still. Her male colleagues would never find themselves in such a position, on such a day, in a chair specifically designed to make a person feel several inches shorter than the person behind the desk. They’ve never known these ritual humiliations. They have wives to deal with them.
Lyudmila starts with an offensive move, as she’s been trained. “I’m well aware that Marina has been absent from school today—”
“Yes, Comrade Ivanova,” says Grievskaya, “and we will address this infraction shortly. At the moment, however, I must bring a more serious matter to your attention.”
She pauses to examine Lyudmila over the rim of her spectacles. Lyudmila swallows and glances at the clock. Half past three.
“Yes?” she says.
Grievskaya steeples her hands above the blotter on her exemplary desk. “For some months—since the winter holidays, in fact—we have heard reports of a group of students meeting in secret to exchange subversive materials and discuss their contents.”