When Iris nodded, Sasha’s head moved too.
He let out a noise of exultation and crushed out his cigarette on the bricks and kissed her—unbuttoned her dress—kissed her neck and breasts—all the familiar rituals. He untucked his shirt and Iris fumbled with the fastening on his trousers. On this wall nobody could see them or hear them—the ancient Sabine Hills rose up behind them—the sun set in unspeakable splendor behind Sasha’s head. The bricks left angry marks on the backs of her thighs. She discovered them the next day, when Sasha bathed her in the stream at the corner of the garden, before they returned to Rome.
By then she’d forgotten how his hands shook when he returned from meeting his Soviet contact in Tivoli, how full of nerves he was.
Early in the morning of Friday, the tenth of May, a ringing telephone woke Iris. Sasha stirred next to her and stumbled out of bed. The air was warm and dusky; she couldn’t see any sunlight through the cracks of the blinds. She flopped on her back and listened to Sasha’s low voice in the other room. Once he left for the embassy, she was supposed to return home to the apartment she shared with Ruth, cheerful and rested from her sketching holiday, and she didn’t know how she was going to do that. She wasn’t that Iris anymore. Her life was here, next to Sasha.
Sasha said clearly, All right, I’ll be there in half an hour, and the receiver rattled into its cradle. His footsteps treaded the floorboards back toward her. She stretched her hands above her head in hopes of enticing him, but he just sat on the edge of the bed, naked and somber, and said, Well, it’s begun.
She didn’t need to ask what had begun. Nor did she need to ask why he wasn’t surprised.
Ruth
June 1952
New York City
Remarkably enough, the house telephone rings precisely eleven minutes after I hang up the line from the Empire Hotel—remarkably, because I can’t think of a method other than rocket propulsion that could have made the journey in so little time. Like many of Sumner Fox’s feats, it remains an unexplained miracle.
“Gentleman to see you, Miss Macallister,” says the doorman, perfectly neutral because I tip well at Christmas. “A Mr. Fox?”
“Send him right up, please, Mike.” I smooth my hair and tighten the sash on my dressing gown, because regardless of the gentleman’s beauty—let’s admit it, he has none—I’ve always believed in presenting an orderly face to the world, particularly when my nerves are as shredded as they are in this moment. Then I light a cigarette, pace across the room, stub out the cigarette, think better of it, and light another. You see what I mean.
At last, the doorbell. I fly from living room to foyer and fling the door open. Sumner Fox stands in his dark suit and dark tie; the hallway lighting makes his bony face look jaundiced.
“You should have checked the peephole first.”
“For God’s sake.” I step back. “Won’t you come in, Mr. Fox.”
He’s so wide, he practically turns sideways to fit his shoulders through the door. I lead him into the living room and ask if he wants a drink or something. He shakes his head no. I feel a pang of disappointment. My head’s throbbing, my arms and legs have that heavy, sick feeling that combines the worst effects of a hangover and a sleepless night. What I need is a couple of aspirin and a Bloody Mary. Or is it the other way around?
“Sit, please,” I tell him. “I want to make a few things clear.”
He waits for me to sit first before he finds the indicated armchair and lowers his body onto it. As I said, he isn’t especially tall—I would say he only just clears six feet, if he clears them at all. He’s simply big. Even his thighs have a thick, meaty diameter, especially crammed between the arms of a chair like that, a hundred years old, built for men of elegant, aristocratic frame. He rests his hands on his knees and cocks his head a few degrees, to indicate I should begin when ready.
I knot my hands in my lap. “First things first. I am not snitching on Sasha Digby. What I’m telling you, I’m telling you so you can make my sister and her children safe. You can’t take down a single thing I say and use it against her husband in a court of law, or whatever it is you mean to do with him, if you find them. If I agree to help, you leave him alone.”
“I can’t promise that, but I can promise this conversation is off the record, so far as our investigation goes.”
“I guess that’s fair.”
“Is there anything else?”
“Yes. You go first. I want to know why you’re here right now, instead of four years ago or next month. Something’s happened to my sister, hasn’t it?”