roots.'
'You mean, kill Jews?'
'Yes,' said Primakov. 'Arafat believed it and let them go, but Ellen…' He raised and shook his hands in evangelical praise. 'What a woman! She'd fooled one of the world's great liars. She wasn't interested in killing Jews-Ellen was no anti-Semite.'
After a year in a PLO training camp, daily indoctrination, and maps of Israel marked up with targets? Simmons wasn't sure she believed that. 'How do you know?'
'She told me herself. Six months later, in May 1969.'
'And you believed her.'
'Yes, I did,' he said, and his sincerity almost made her believe as well. 'By then, I'd been transferred to West Germany to look into those revolutionary student groups that were just starting to destroy banks and department stores. One day in Bonn, I heard that an American girl was looking for me. My heart leapt-really, it did. I wanted it to be her, and it was. She was alone now, on the run. She and her friends had robbed a bank and set fire to a police station. She fled to California, for help from her beloved Black Panthers. They told her she was insane. Then she remembered Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin's bombing of the Schneider department store the previous year. She thought she'd find some common sentiments in Germany.' He sighed, licking his lips. 'And that, my dear, she did. Then, within a few weeks of her arrival, she heard about a chubby Russian asking a lot of questions.'
'Chubby?'
He looked down at his thin frame. 'I didn't worry enough in those days.'
'How did the meeting go?'
Primakov rocked his head, smiling at this thought or that. 'At first, it was all business. As Ellen would say, sexual affairs that obstruct the normal processes of the revolution are nothing more than destructive bourgeois sentimentality. Maybe she was right, I don't know. All I know is that I was even more in love with her, and when she demanded an outline of West German revolutionary activity, I obliged instantly. I introduced her to some comrades who, generally, thought she was a wreck. They thought some of her more radical views showed signs of imbalance. You see, German freedom fighters worked as a family, but by then Ellen was rejecting even the notion of family as bourgeois. Anyway,' he said, 'we became lovers again, then she got pregnant. Toward the end of sixty- nine. She was on the Pill, but I suppose it slipped her mind occasionally. She was, after all, very busy planning the overthrow of all Western institutions.'
Primakov stroked his cheek again, and Simmons waited.
'She wanted an abortion. I argued against it. I was becoming increasingly bourgeois in those days, and I wanted a child to bind us together. But with that shit as a father, how could she ever view families in a positive light? So I said, If revolutionaries don't have children, how is the revolution to continue? I think that finally convinced her. The name Milo was her idea. I later learned that Milo had been her beloved dog when she was young. Strange. That was also when she changed her own name to Elsa. It was partly for security-I supplied new papers-but it was also psychological. A baby was her entree into a new revolutionary world. She felt she should be reborn as a liberated woman.'
'You stayed together?'
Again, he rocked his head. 'That's the irony, you see. I wanted Milo because I thought he would pull Ellen closer to me. But now, she was one hundred percent liberated. I was just a petit-bourgeois male. An occasional penis-that's what she called me. She had other occasional penises at her disposal. I became one of a crowd.'
'That must have hurt.'
'It did, Special Agent Simmons. It truly did. At best, I was an occasional babysitter, while she went off with her comrades to start their famous trail of destruction. I'd gained a son, but I'd lost her. Finally, in a fit of frustration, I demanded-demanded, mind you- that we get married. What was I thinking? I'd made the final bourgeois compromise, and she didn't want her son poisoned by my wicked ideas. By then it was seventy-two, and the Red Army Faction was in full swing. Moscow was breathing down my neck to get control of these kids. When I told them it was out of our hands, they recalled me.' Primakov opened his hands to show that everything was out of them. 'I was desperate by then. I even tried kidnapping Milo.' He laughed quietly. 'Really, I did. I assigned two of my best men to the task, but by then a new agent from Moscow had started sniffing around. He notified the Center, and they abruptly changed my agents' orders. My own men were now to take me, at gunpoint, back to Moscow.' He took a long breath and let it out loudly, staring across the now-busy restaurant. 'That, my dear, is how I left West Germany in disgrace.'
'What do you know about what followed?'
'A lot,' he admitted. 'I still had access to reports. I followed Ellen's career the way little girls follow their favorite pop singers. The RAF trials were headlines all over Europe. Ellen wasn't picked up, though. I heard that she had fled to East Germany with her baby, then that she had returned to join the Movement 2 June. And then, in 1974, police discovered the body of Ulrich Schmiicker in the Grunewald, outside Berlin. He'd been killed by his own Movement 2 June comrades.' He paused, frowning. 'Was Ellen there? Did she take part in Schmucker's execution? I don't know. But within three months she resurfaced in North Carolina, at her sister's house. She asked Wilma to take Milo as her own. Ellen must have known that things wouldn't end well for her, and this was the only way to protect him. She made no demands for a radical education, only insisted that he not be brought, ever, to his grandparents. And he never was.'
'She was arrested.'
Primkov nodded. 'In 1979. Later that year she hung herself with her own pants.'
Janet Simmons leaned back, overcome by the feeling that she'd just listened to an entire life. A mysterious life, full of holes, but a life nonetheless. Her desire, at that moment, was to sit down with Ellen Perkins and ask why? for each decision she'd ever made. She couldn't understand Primakov's love for such an obviously unbalanced woman, but the fascination… She shook herself free of these thoughts. 'So, Milo was in North Carolina with his aunt and uncle. Did he know who they were, who his mother was?'
'Yes, of course. Wilma and Theo were honest people, and Milo was four when he came to them-he remembered his mother. But it was a secret. Ellen believed-maybe rightly-that if the authorities knew who Milo was, they'd use him as leverage to get at her. So Wilma and Theo told everyone they'd gotten him from an adoption agency. Wilma told me that Ellen would sometimes arrive under a false name to visit Milo. Usually, they'd only learn about the visit afterward. She'd tap on Milo's window, he'd climb out, and they'd go walking through the night. It terrified Wilma. She worried that Milo would go with anyone who tapped on his window. Then, of course, the visits stopped when he was nine.”
“Did they tell him what happened?'
'After a while, yes. He already knew about me. Occasionally- maybe once a year-I visited. I didn't try to bring him back with me. He was an American. He had no need for another father-Theo was a good man. Only at their funeral did I learn that I'd inherited custody. If I had any doubts, they disappeared when I met Minnie, Milo's grandmother, who kept making excuses for why her husband, Bill, hadn't come to his own daughter's funeral. I wasn't going to let them take him.'
'So he did go to Russia.'
'Yes,' said Primakov, then narrowed his eyes. 'He didn't put that on his Company application, did he? Not on his school transcripts either. That was my idea. Back then, we still thought of the world as divided between East and West. A different East and West from now. I didn't want that working against him in the future. So we settled on a little fiction. Three years in an orphanage after his aunt and uncle's death. There was no need for anyone to know they weren't his real parents. For all purposes, they were his parents.'
'It's a bit much to ask a kid,' Simmons suggested. 'To lie about three years of his life.'
'Most kids, maybe. But not Milo. Remember, he received visits from a mother who was a wanted criminal. Each visit, Ellen reminded him that their relationship was a secret. He already had a special place in his brain for a secret life. I just added a few things to it.'
'But the cold war ended,' she insisted. 'You could have set the record straight.'
'Tell that to him,' said Primakov. 'I did. But Milo asked me how his employers would react if they knew a twenty-year-old kid had pulled the wool over their eyes? Milo knows how institutions work. Point out their flaws, and they'll bite you for the favor.'
This, Simmons had to concede, was true.
'He hated Russia, you know. I tried-I tried every day to show him the beauty of Moscow and his Russian
