His thumb moves, rubbing the material on the side of his knee. “Yes.”
“They’re in Moscow. Four years ago, when they disappeared, they went to the Soviet Union.”
“What makes you say that?”
I don’t answer. He nods and stands to look out the window at the sunrise, which has reached a tremendous zenith. The colors illuminate his face. I wait for him to think things over, weigh the risks versus the possible return, calculate how much he has to give in order to get something worthwhile back from me.
Without turning from the window, he speaks.
“On the fifteenth of November 1948, as you know, Sasha Digby failed to turn up at his office at the American embassy in London. There was no answer at his home telephone, nor did anyone answer the door at the family home in Kensington. Diplomatic staff established that neither he nor any member of his family had been seen since the previous Friday. The FBI was then alerted, but discovered no leads at all, not the slightest confirmed trace of them.”
“I remember it well. A couple of nice gentlemen turned up at my apartment building at Thanksgiving and gave me the third degree. So tell me something I don’t already know.”
“I can’t do that,” he says. “Not unless you tell me what you do know.”
“Ah. Clever.”
He turns his head to look over his shoulder. “Miss Macallister?”
I reach for the pack of cigarettes on the sofa table. “I first met Sasha Digby in Rome, right before the Italians entered the war. As I’m sure you’re aware, he was working at the US embassy as a junior diplomat, alongside my brother, Harry. He had just rescued my sister from a traffic accident outside the Borghese gardens, that’s how I met him.”
“He was previously unknown to you or your sister?”
“We might have been introduced at some party or another, but I didn’t take any notice of him until I saw him at the hospital afterward. As I’m sure you can imagine, it was a harrowing day, and that night Harry and I took him out for dinner and drinks to thank him for what he’d done. Afterward, he came home with me and spent the night.”
Sumner Fox doesn’t show the slightest reaction to this information, not so much as an eyebrow raised in faint disapproval. “Go on.”
“We were both a little off our heads, after what happened, and needed to let off steam. Never occurred to me that Iris had any kind of crush on him, nor he on her. He came by the next night, and the next, and that’s when he told me he was spying for the Soviets.”
“He told you that?”
“Just like that.” I snap my fingers. “I think he was trying to impress me. You know, to show off that he wasn’t just some stuffy diplomat. Also, he was drunk. He spent a lot of time drunk. I think that’s how he dealt with everything, you know? Because men of his class, loyalty’s just bred into them. I’ve always thought that in his head, he was able to justify spying on his own country because it would bring forward the revolution and make the world just and peaceful under worldwide communism, et cetera, but down below he was all torn apart because he’s betraying not just the United States of America, but his own friends. The people he works with and drinks with.”
Fox says nothing to all that. Just stands there at the window until I can’t bear it any longer. I stub out my cigarette and announce that since the sun’s officially up, I’m going to mix myself a Bloody Mary.
When I return, he’s still standing where I left him, hands shoved into his pockets. He says he’s underestimated me.
I plop myself back down on the sofa and light another cigarette. “Of course you did. You’re a man.”
“It won’t happen again,” he says grimly.
“Oh, don’t kick yourself. It’s perfectly natural.” My pocketbook lies on the sofa table, next to the cigarettes. I reach for it—open it wide—draw out the postcard and the letter. “Perhaps I should have given these to you sooner, but I needed to know you were a man I could trust.”
Fox looks greedily at my hand. I hold it out, and he plucks the papers free and frames his fingers delicately around the edges while he examines each one, first the postcard and then the letter in its envelope. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say the expression on his face—such as it is—suggests something like relief.
“It’s been opened already.”
“No kidding, Sherlock.”
He ignores me, of course—just lifts the flap of the envelope with so delicate a touch, you simply can’t imagine those fingers gripping an object so vulgar as a pigskin. Holding the extreme corner of one side of the letter, he eases it from its wrapper like a whisper and spreads it out on the sofa table. He bends over the paper and reads Iris’s words. Then he picks up the envelope and examines that, too, every letter and especially the postmark, before at last he looks up at me.