“Don’t you know what’s going on there?”
Beth’s smile remained fixed, but her husband leaned over her lap and whispered, “We did see on the TV about Sarospatak.” (Gavra was impressed that Harold had said the city’s name properly- because it was a Hungarian name, each s was pronounced sh.) “But we’ve had this vacation planned and paid off the last four months.” He shook his head. “I’m not letting a little disturbance get in the way. We’ll just stay around the capital.”
Gavra tried not to sound irritated. “It could spread, you know.”
“From what we’re able to see,” said Beth, “it looks like your president, Mr. Pankov, he’s got a tight grip on things.”
“How long are you staying?”
“A week,” she said, then went on to explain that they’d originally planned for just three days, so they’d have time to go on to Prague, but Berta Raskovic, their travel agent back in Philly-she’d been a proud American citizen only three years-convinced them that her home country deserved more than just three days. Get to know the people, she’d told them. They’re a wonderful people.
Harold said, “You should’ve heard her. Wow! Czechs? she said. They’re the rudest people on Earth, after Yugoslavs. Can you believe it? And she sold us koronas at 2,950 to the dollar. I checked on it afterward; it’s a good deal.”
“You know the real reason we’re going?” whispered Beth.
Gavra bowed his head close. “Tell me.”
“Harold’s in love with our travel agent. She could sell him Florida swampland.”
“Not so!” Harold said with vague indignation.
In addition to everything else, Gavra found himself worrying about this idiotic couple. They were staying at the Metropol, at least, which meant that they could barricade themselves in if things became violent. But still…
Luckily, a couple of hours into the flight, they started to doze, and he could work over what had happened in the last twenty-four hours.
After escaping the Chesterfield Towne Center, he’d driven nonstop back to the Richmond airport, where he dropped his P-83 and Frank Jones’s Bren Ten into a wastebasket and bought a ticket on the next flight to JFK. He again wished he’d had an American visa in his own passport, because it was possible that by now Lebed Putonski had been discovered and an arrest warrant issued for Viktor Lukacs. So when he bought a ticket home, via New York and Frankfurt, he noticed the way the JFK Delta clerk stared at him. “Something wrong?” he said, giving a stiff smile.
The woman blushed and apologized. “Sorry, sir. You just look very tired.”
“I am,” he said, because by then it was four in the morning, and he’d been awake two full days.
He washed in the airport bathroom to make himself presentable, and despite more stares from the guards he was allowed through passport control to the international terminal without hassle. Only once he’d reached his gate did he allow himself a couple of hours’sleep on the uncomfortable chairs.
It was during his erratic nap that it occurred to him that Frank Jones and his Virginia driver’s license weren’t a lie. He was American. No one from Gavra’s country could master the accent and idiomatic phrases as well as he had.
Before dying, Kolev had told him two things. One, that Lebed Putonski’s life was in danger. Two, that he got his information from a contact in the CIA. Were those two facts linked? Had Central Intelligence ordered Putonski’s murder?
Hours later, with Beth Atkins’s head sliding dangerously close to his shoulder, Gavra went back to this slow line of reasoning.
Lebed Putonski was a defector, brought into the United States by Central Intelligence, protected for eight years, and then killed by his protectors. Why? Why now?
Beth Atkins’s head touched down on Gavra’s shoulder, but he didn’t move.
Back up. Lebed Putonski and Yuri Kolev knew each other after the war, when they shared duties on a public tribunal, sentencing prisoners to work camps and executions. Afterward, Putonski had become a Ministry bureaucrat, working his way up to Stockholm resident, passing on information from their local agents and relaying orders from home.
He unconsciously rubbed his eyes, and that movement woke Beth Atkins. She smiled and apologized for falling on him. “Can’t you sleep, dear?”
He shook his head. “I have a lot on my mind.”
She gave him a self-consciously sad expression. “You worried about your country?”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s exactly what I’m worried about.”
Beth patted his arm, whispering, “Me too,” as if it were a secret.
Then she closed her eyes and returned, magically, to sleep.
EIGHT
In the car, Katja said, “Where’re we going?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Oh no,” she said, because she did know.
“I need to try. It’ll be quick.”
“That may not be up to us.”
I turned off of Lenin Avenue and took a side street to Victory Square. “Does Aron think you’re being overcautious sending him away?”
She grunted loudly. “That’s a funny one.”
“Oh?”
She gazed out at the vacant streets. “Aron’s… well, he’s been weird over the last half year. If you know what I mean.”
“I don’t.”
She was silent a moment, but when she spoke it came out as if she’d been wanting to say this for a long time. “He’s paranoid, Emil. Or he’s seemed so for the last six months since his dad died. He thinks the world’s about to end. He’s gotten obsessed with the news, and every time something happens, it’s just more evidence that God’s hand is upon us.”
“What? He’s religious?”
She shook her head. “No. It’s just like a… a premonition. I’ve had to listen to it every damned night.” She went into an imitation of Aron’s rants, citing a wide range of events: the collision on the River Thames of a pleasure boat and a barge, which killed fifty-one, the Tiananmen Square massacre that resulted in at least four hundred dead, the Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco that killed sixty-three, and even a report in the Soviet media that an alien spacecraft had landed in Voronezh. Last November’s explosion in a Krosno fertilizer plant, which The Spark blamed on “Polish counterrevolutionary terrorists,” disturbed him, as did the murder of Colombian presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan in August. “He was shocked by it, as if the man were a close friend.” And of course there were the changes occurring everywhere around us in our corner of the world. Each event became evidence for his unfocused paranoid thesis: The world’s collapsing from every corner.
“You should’ve seen him in October, when the bulldozers were tearing down that old Calvinist church in our district. We could see it from the bedroom window. First he screamed about how he was going to kill Tomiak Pankov, then he just sat there for hours, watching the machines. I said to him,‘But you’re not even religious, Aron.’And he gave me that look. It’s a look I know. The one that says, You callous bitch.”
That’s how, her face as red as the hammer-and-sickle crest on our flag, the story ended. I didn’t know what to say. What can you say when your friend’s husband is in the midst of a personal apocalypse?
“But now,” she said quietly, “now I don’t know. Maybe he’s been right all along.”
We stopped in front of Yalta Boulevard 36. I took my hands from the wheel and turned so I could look directly at her. “Everything might change, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to end.”
