Lie Down with Lions (1985)

She sensed further movements in her abdomen. She obeyed an urge to push, and then felt the placenta come out, a slippery small birth. Rabia wrapped it carefully in a rag.

The baby stopped sucking and seemed to fall asleep.

Zahara handed Jane a cup of water. She drank it in one gulp. It tasted wonderful. She asked for more.

She was sore, exhausted and blissfully happy. She looked down at the little girl sleeping peacefully at her breast. She felt ready to sleep herself.

Rabia said: “We should wrap the little one.”

Jane lifted the baby—she was as light as a doll—and handed her to the old woman. “Chantal,” she said as Rabia took her. “Her name is Chantal.” Then she closed her eyes.

CHAPTER FIVE

Ellis Thaler took the Eastern Airlines shuttle from Washington to New York. At La Guardia Airport he got a cab to the Plaza Hotel in New York City. The cab dropped him at the Fifth Avenue entrance to the hotel. Ellis went inside. In the lobby he turned left and went to the 58th Street elevators. A man in a business suit and a woman carrying a Saks shopping bag got in with him. The man got out on the seventh floor. Ellis got out at the eighth. The woman went on up. Ellis walked along the cavernous hotel corridor, all alone, until he came to the 59th Street elevators. He went down to the ground floor and left the hotel by the 59th Street entrance.

Satisfied that no one was following him, he hailed a cab on Central Park South, went to Penn Station and took the train to Douglaston, Queens.

Some lines from Auden’s “Lullaby” were repeating in his head as he rode the train:

Time and fevers burn away

Individual beauty from

Thoughtful children, and the grave

Proves the child ephemeral.

It was more than a year since he had posed as an aspiring American poet in Paris, but he had not lost the taste for verse.

He continued to check for a tail, for this was one assignation his enemies must never learn about. He got off the train at Flushing and waited on the platform for the next train. No one waited with him.

Because of his elaborate precautions it was five o’clock when he reached Douglaston. From the station he walked briskly for half an hour, running over in his mind the approach he was about to make, the words he would use, the various possible reactions he might expect.

He reached a suburban street within sight of Long Island Sound and stopped outside a small, neat house with mock-Tudor gables and a stained-glass window in one wall. There was a small Japanese car in the driveway. As he walked up the path, the front door was opened by a blond girl of thirteen.

Ellis said: “Hello, Petal.”

“Hi, Daddy,” she replied.

He bent down to kiss her, feeling as always a glow of pride simultaneously with a stab of guilt.

He looked her up and down. Underneath her Michael Jackson T-shirt she was wearing a bra. He was pretty sure that was new. She’s turning into a woman, he thought. I’ll be damned.

“Would you like to come inside for a moment?” she said politely.

“Sure.”

He followed her into the house. From behind she looked even more womanly. He was reminded of his first girlfriend. He had been fifteen and she had been not much older than Petal. . . . No, wait, he thought; she was younger, she was twelve. And I used to put my hand up her sweater. Lord protect my daughter from fifteen-year-old boys.

They went into a small, neat living room. “Won’t you sit down?” said Petal.

Ellis sat down.

“Can I get you something?” she asked.

“Relax,” Ellis told her. “You don’t have to be so polite. I’m your daddy.”

She looked puzzled and uncertain, as if she had been rebuked for something she did not know to be wrong. After a moment she said: “I have to brush my hair. Then we can go. Excuse me.”

“Sure,” said Ellis. She went out. He found her courtesy painful. It was a sign that he was still a stranger. He had not yet succeeded in becoming a normal member of her family.

He had been seeing her at least once a month for the past year, ever since he came back from Paris. Sometimes they would spend a day together, but more often he would just take her out to dinner, as he was going to today. To be with her for that hour, he had to make a five-hour trip with maximum security, but of course she did not know that. His aim was a modest one: without any fuss or drama he wanted to take a small but permanent place in his daughter’s life.

It had meant changing the type of work he did. He had given up fieldwork. His superiors had been highly displeased: there were too few good undercover agents (and hundreds of bad ones). He, too, had been reluctant, feeling that he had a duty to use his talent. But he could not win his daughter’s affection if he had to disappear every year or so to some remote corner of the world, unable to tell her where he was going or why or even for how long. And he could not risk getting himself killed just when she was learning to love him.

He missed the excitement, the danger, the thrill of the chase, and the feeling that he was doing an important job that nobody else could do quite as well. But for too long his only emotional attachments had been fleeting ones, and after he lost Jane he felt the need of at least one person whose love was permanent.

While he was waiting, Gill came into the room. Ellis stood up. His ex-wife was cool and composed in a white summer dress. He kissed her proferred cheek. “How are you?” she said.

“The same as ever. You?”

“I’m incredibly busy.” She started to tell him, in some detail, how much she had to do, and, as always, Ellis tuned out. He was fond of her, although she bored him to death. It was odd to think he had once been married to her. But she had been the prettiest girl in the English Department, and he had been the cleverest boy, and it was 1967, when everyone was stoned and anything could happen, especially in California. They were married in white robes, at the end of their first year, and someone played the “Wedding March” on a sitar. Then Ellis flunked his exams and got thrown out of college and therefore was drafted, and instead of going to Canada or Sweden he went to the draft office, like a lamb to the slaughter, surprising the hell out of everyone except Gill, who knew by then that the marriage was not going to work and was just waiting to see how Ellis would make his escape.

He was in the hospital in Saigon with a bullet wound in his calf—the helicopter pilot’s commonest injury, because his seat is armored but the floor is not—when the divorce became final. Someone dumped the notification on his bed while he was in the john, and he found it when he got back, along with another oak-leaf cluster, his twenty-fifth (they were passing out medals kind of fast in those days). I just got divorced, he had said, and the soldier in the next bed had replied No shit. Want to play a little cards?

She had not told him about the baby. He found out, a few years later, when he became a spy and tracked Gill down as an exercise, and learned that she had a child with the unmistakably late-sixties name of Petal, and a husband called Bernard who was seeing a fertility specialist. Not telling him about Petal was the only truly mean thing Gill had ever done to him, he thought, although she still maintained it had been for his own good.

He had insisted on seeing Petal from time to time, and he had stopped her calling Bernard “Daddy.” But he had not sought to become part of their family life, not until last year.

“Do you want to take my car?” Gill was saying.

“If it’s all right.”

“Sure it is.”

“Thanks.” It was embarrassing having to borrow Gill’s car, but the drive from Washington was too long, and