The Day Before Midnight

romantic tendency. He was kind, considerate, gentle, flirtatious, indefatigable. He remembered birthdays and anniversaries and special restaurants. He always brought little gifts. He gave flowers. He nursed his girls slowly toward friendship and then intimacy and then compromise. It was a good system, carefully wrought, the result of much experimentation.

But on this morning Gregor awoke with a nightmare and a headache, late. Molly preferred him to get up before the sun and slip out, a sensible precaution. He concurred. There were so many foolish ways you could be tripped up by the FBI, turned out and ejected, and the one place on earth this GRU agent did not care to see again was Russia.

He headed into the bathroom and caught a quick shower. A thickish man with exceedingly strong, broad hands, forty-three years old, his body was extravagantly hairy and he left a trail of fur wherever he went; Molly said he could turn a bathtub into a national emergency faster than any man she’d ever known.

You’re a whale, he told himself, and it was true. He was easily twenty-five pounds overweight. You need to exercise, be careful what you eat and drink. You’ll drop dead in bed one night, and then what?

Gregor dried off, squirted on some cologne (he always tried to smell good), brushed his teeth, pushed the hair he had left on his head into some semblance of wet order, and quickly climbed into his baggy blue suit. It would need pressing again before the end of the century or the end of the world, whichever came first. He tied his black shoes, thinking how nice it would be to shine them someday. He had owned them for seven years. A little cracked, perhaps, but extremely comfortable.

Molly snorted like a large African game animal wallowing in the mud. Without makeup she was quite appalling to look at. In the dark, when he was riding her like a buffalo, yelping and plunging, it was quite another thing. Now, in the harsh morning, she was the perfect symbol of his imperfect life.

Melancholy seeped through him.

He faced an unpleasant day. To begin with, the boy genius Klimov, Deputy Rezident, had called a meeting for the morning, and Klimov had lately been somewhat unpleasant. Then Gregor had to service his most important source, the mysterious Pork Chop, at a shopping mall out in Maryland, a tiresome, dreadful prospect, very tense, very exhausting. Then, far worse, he had communications duty that night, which meant sleeping on a cot in a basement cell that embassy tradition called the Wine Cellar, attending encryptment equipment in case a hot eyes-only zapped over from Moscow. In truth, the Americans at the National Security Agency out at Fort Meade, in Maryland, would have it unbuttoned before he could; perhaps he could simply call them and request the message. But the duty, which came about once a month, was the worst thing in his life: It would upset his entire system, which depended on a solid ten hours’ sleep, plus a little nap in the afternoon.

And then the other thing gnawing at him, not yet put into words by anyone, but clearly expressed nevertheless. For the truth was, he was now in trouble in the embassy. Of late, the gleanings had gotten thinner and thinner. Where once he’d had nine girls and his life had been a phenomenon of scheduling, an athletic extravaganza, the action was now slow. He was losing his touch. Younger men had been brought in, and they treated him with contempt. Only Pork Chop seemed to please them, and Gregor was only a cutout to Pork Chop, who worked for bigger fish.

Klimov, the awful Klimov, was twenty-eight. Twenty-eight! With shrewd, furious eyes and the energy to work like a beaver, tirelessly. A true believer. A lover of the system, and no wonder. He had a vastly important uncle who could see that things always came to him. Arbatov hated Klimov almost as much as he feared him. And he felt exposed, vulnerable, a target, since he was the only man in the section who was over forty. And because he’d lasted so much longer than the others.

My time, he thought, is almost over.

Molly’s left lid crept open, then her right.

“Are you still here, Gregor? God, you’re so late.”

“I’m sorry, darling,” Gregor said.

She laughed, but then turned petulant.

“Who’s Tata?” she demanded. “I heard you say her name. Is she a new girlfriend, Gregor?”

“No, no, my love,” said Gregor. “Tata’s a prince. Prince Tatashkin. A hero from an old story in my childhood. A great knight who saves the world. He came to me in a dream, that’s all.”

“It’s so hard to be mad at you,” she said babyishly, scrunching up her features into the mask of an infant. “You’re so cute. Mowwy wubs her Gweggy-weggy.”

She offered a mouth to kiss. He did, gently.

“I love you, too, my love,” he said, and left.

Jack Hummel had seen the movie Psycho at an impressionable age, and for that reason — Beth never could fully understand it — he had ordered her never to come in while he was showering.

“Honey,” he’d say to her, “if you saw that movie, you’d know. This guy comes in when this girl is showering. All you can see is his shape through the curtain, and then—”

“I don’t want to hear,” she’d say, covering her ears.

So when the door of the bathroom opened and he saw a black shape through the torrent of water and through the steam and through the translucent plastic of the curtain, he jumped, of course, feeling the lingering imprint of the movie. A second later his anger burst out, on the presumption that Beth had, once again, forgotten.

“Beth, honey, how many times have I got to—”

But the shower curtain suddenly exploded in a clatter of ripping plastic and popping rings. Jack’s mouth fell open dumbly. In the steam he saw that it wasn’t Beth at all, but some figure out of a terrible dream.

The man stood there in black boots, black combat fatigues, and a black face mask. He had a gun, too, and it was black. Jack, who knew a little about such things, recognized it as an Uzi with about half-a-yard of silencer hooding its short snout.

Jack felt himself pissing in the stall. The water continued to spray down on him. The man gestured with the gun.

“My children,” Jack begged, raising a feeble hand against the surrealism of the moment.

“Oh, God,” he begged again, “please don’t hurt my children. Please, please, don’t hurt my children.”

Another gunman, this one unmasked, popped into the door. He was deeply tanned with the white teeth of a toothpaste commercial and the air of command. He held a black automatic, also silenced.

“Come on, now, Mr. Hummel. You can’t stand there all day.” He leaned into the stall and with his free hand turned the water off.

“I hate waste,” he said almost conversationally. “Now, come on. Dry off and get dressed. We’ve got a job for you. Herman, if he’s slow, you might prod him a little.”

He looked at his watch, a fancy black scuba number which he wore inverted on his wrist.

“We have a schedule to keep.”

Jack dressed quickly with shaking knees and trembling fingers, while the man with the Uzi watched him. He couldn’t get the buttons on the fly to work, and it bothered him that the leader hadn’t bothered to wear a mask. Jack wondered if that meant they’d have to kill them all because they’d seen his face.

And it was the land of face you wouldn’t forget. He had a pro linebacker’s battered mug with a nose that had been broken dramatically into a crooked hawk’s bill. He had almost expressionless eyes, and his hair had been cropped close, almost into blond stubble. His cheekbones were wide and the skin had been tanned until it was almost leathery. He looked like Jack’s old football coach, who’d been one tough son of a bitch.

“Hurry,” said the man with the Uzi.

“Okay, okay,” Jack complained, pulling on his work boots.

Downstairs he found his two girls sitting stiffly in their chairs, eating Honey Nut Cheerios. For once they were quiet at breakfast. His wife stood at the stove. There was a total of five men in black, four of them with an assortment of exotic weapons vaguely familiar from the movies, and the leader with his pistol.

Jack’s problem now was shock. The image didn’t make any sense at all to him. It was as if guys out of the TV news had crawled out of the box and taken over. He stood there trying to put it together.

“You see, Mr. Hummel. No harm done. Breakfast as usual. No problems.”

“What do you want?” stammered Beth. The color had drained from her face, and her gestures were