Easy for him to say. He’s done this kind of thing before, I feel certain. Marriage, obviously, but also operating undercover. I have all kinds of questions I know he won’t answer—questions I don’t really want to hear answered, I suspect—and that ought to make me feel secure. He knows what he’s doing! All I have to worry about is the cover story. I think it’s strange, for example, that he’s using his real name. Won’t the Soviets know Sumner Fox works for the FBI?
Unlikely, he said, because he’s always worked under a code name, per standard tradecraft. And his employment records plainly indicate that he works for a corporate law firm in Washington, not the FBI.
What if they investigate? I wanted to know. What if they ask around and find out we didn’t meet at the Yale Club on the first of January, that nobody in Newport knows anything about a wedding between Mr. Sumner Fox and Miss Ruth Macallister?
He said they’d filed all the paperwork with the town hall in Newport, for one thing. Hudson’s been briefed, he’ll cover for us. Vivian’s been briefed about the beautiful wedding at dawn on Bailey’s Beach, how she cried buckets of tears, how Tiny and Pepper and Little Viv were my bridesmaids and all kinds of rubbish, and nobody lies quite so convincingly as Aunt Vivian.
“How the hell do you know so much about Aunt Vivian?” I asked.
“As I said,” he answered placidly, “we’ve been working on an extraction plan for some time, just in case.”
All right to all that, but I still feel as if I’m missing something, and I tell myself that’s the reason for the bad behavior of my nerves, which usually perform so well in moments of high excitement. The airplane comes to stop outside the terminal. I catch a glimpse of a pair of men in dark suits, watching the workers in their boiler suits wheel the stairs into place. The stewardess opens the door and a moment later, the two men duck through the hatch and scan the interior.
“Mr. and Mrs. Fox?” says the man on the right, who has light brown hair and a pointed face like a rabbit.
Fox lifts his arm. “Right here.”
He holds my hand as we make our way up the aisle—we sat in the third row—and out the hatch into the hazy sunshine of early evening. The terminal building looks right out of America, all pale beige stone and clean, rounded art deco lines. At the bottom of the stairs, the men in boiler suits have already taken our luggage from the hold. They carry the suitcases to a large, clumpy black car that sits near the door to the terminal, engine running. Fox keeps a snug hold of my damp hand. My shoes click on the asphalt. I’m wearing a dress, which is not my usual costume, and I can’t get used to the way the skirt swishes around my legs as I walk.
We reach the car. One of the men opens the back door. Fox puts his hand to the small of my back and ushers me inside, then swings around to the other side and slides in beside me.
As we hurtle into Moscow, I can’t tear my eyes from the scenes around me—the road signs with their strange letters—the building, building everywhere—gray, featureless blocks that seem to merge into each other, so you can’t tell one from another. I remember reading the desperate newspaper dispatches from the Battle of Moscow, ten years earlier—how the brutal cold and the brutal fighting nearly broke both armies, Soviet and German, and yet you wouldn’t ever imagine all this annihilation to see it now. Life goes on—the country rebuilds in ambitious, gigantic projects that rise from the ancient earth.
We don’t say much, just hold hands and look out the windows. I glimpse people in flashes—walking down sidewalks, queuing up outside shops, sitting on benches to scatter crumbs for pigeons. When the car turns a corner and scoots to a stop outside the fa?ade of an enormous fin de siècle building, I have to shake myself free of a trance.
To stand before the National Hotel in Moscow, you would never imagine you had traveled deep inside the beating heart of world communism. You would think yourself transported to maybe Paris before the calamity of war, everything that was decadent and cosmopolitan, chock-full of the aristocratic and the celebrated and the just plain rich—just picture the shining Packard limousines and the furs, the glimpses of ankles in white stockings, the black silk top hats and the swirling capes, all thronging in and out of these revolving doors, staring between the curtains of these pedimented windows. Inside the lobby, a man’s waiting for us. Like the men at the airport, he wears a dark suit. He seems about forty years old, starting to bald, medium height and stocky. His wide, Slavic face stretches to an expression of welcome.