All right, so he’s lied to this woman. But he’s only lied because he doesn’t really know the truth, and it seems stupid to muddy the waters with speculation.
Sitting in that hospital waiting room with Ruth’s husband—Ruth was married to Sumner Fox, of all people, the Sumner Fox, he just couldn’t get his head around that—he had craved a drink very badly. He hadn’t wanted to get Iris pregnant again, God no, not after Claire’s birth—but she had begged him and he was only a man, after all, and there it was, another baby, sapping the strength from his wife and possibly sapping her life as well.
The funny thing is, he’s never loved Iris more than he has since they came to Moscow. He might almost say that he never really loved her until Moscow—had never appreciated all the beautiful qualities inside his wife because he was too busy drinking, obsessed with himself and his own agony and the guilt and secrecy that tore his guts apart. Also, in Moscow there was no Nedda. No dazzling unpredictable bitch to pour his vanity into. Just her sublime creature, Iris, to whom he was actually married—who, in this newly discovered perfection, took on all the qualities he once imagined existed only in such great works of art as they had examined in their first moments together. You might say he’d gone from one extreme to another, from hardly appreciating Iris at all to idealizing her as a goddess.
Which made it all the more bewildering when, after leaving the hospital almost with relief at three o’clock in the afternoon to retrieve the children from school, he came home to discover a world he did not understand.
He knew at once that someone had searched the apartment. Among the first things you learned as a covert operative, you figured how to detect the signs of intrusion. Sometimes it was easy, as when the searchers didn’t bother to hide their intentions and just ransacked the place. Other times they covered their tracks exquisitely well, so the subject wouldn’t know he was under suspicion.
But even after four years as a private citizen, more or less, Sasha still kept these residual instincts. His eyes still traveled to the drawers, to the doors, to the rug, and examined them—not even consciously—for disturbance. He couldn’t remember what, exactly, had told him all was not as he’d left it. He just knew. He told the children to wait in the living room as he went through the house, finishing at last in his own office, which he knew to be clean—there couldn’t possibly be anything there to interest the KGB, and yet still he felt this terror as he took out his key and opened all the drawers and felt along the horizontal panel where, in another desk in another city in another lifetime, he had once cut a small hole on a false bottom to form a cavity, and in this cavity he would keep his papers and his one-time pad for coding and his Minox camera.
Of course, this was a different desk, in a different city, in a different lifetime, and the thought of carving a hole hadn’t even crossed his mind, until now. Until his hand felt along the top of the middle drawer—right where the false bottom in his old desk drawer used to be—and encountered a square opening into a cavity that contained something peculiar.
A small electronic device he recognized as a one-way radio receiver.
Despite ransacking the entire apartment in a kind of delirious tantrum, like a child, he hadn’t found anything else. He had only this device that might have come from anywhere—he told himself—might have been left by a previous owner. Did he believe himself? He couldn’t say. He didn’t want to think about what it meant and who might have used it and for how long, and there was only one way to keep himself from thinking too much. He went to the liquor cabinet in which Iris kept a bottle of hospitable vodka in case of guests and he poured himself a glass, and when that was finished he went down to the liquor store around the corner and bought another bottle of vodka, and he had not stopped drinking until that bottle was empty and so was his head.
But now he’s sober again. That’s always the trouble, isn’t it? At some point you return to sobriety and nothing’s changed, except it’s probably gotten worse because you were drunk and did drunken things. And in addition to the crashing almighty hangover he woke up with this morning, he had experienced the peculiar confusion and indignity of being urged into the trunk of a car by Sumner Fox—you couldn’t argue with Sumner Fox, he was just too strong—because Iris was in danger. In danger of what? Fox wouldn’t say. The kids just thought it was a terrific adventure, but they weren’t in the trunk of the car. Sasha vomited twice, until there was nothing left to vomit. They stopped a couple of times and Fox, with a sympathetic face under a wig and hat, gave him water. They passed through some kind of border checkpoint, during which Sasha expected any moment that a guard would open the trunk and shoot him, but for some reason the guards asked no questions and waved them right through. Afterward Fox told him it was the border to Latvia, and they were going to pick up Iris and Ruth and the baby and go somewhere safe.