experienced a frisson of fear when she saw Sweetie standing next to Lucy, and realized that it could, if driven by some unknowable doggy impulse, take the child's head off with a snap of its jaws. No, let's wait awhile before we spring Sweetie on old Maggs, was Marlene's thought.
Marlene started dinner and Lucy and the dog went up to Lucy's room. The animal had been quickly integrated into Lucy's fantasy play, which was rich and weird. Marlene could hear her chatting to Sweetie, as to her various dolls and toys. The dog had decided to sleep in Lucy's room, or rather in the closet thereof, the twin of the one from which Marlene had rescued it in the identical apartment next door. Marlene suspected that it had been confined there when indoors for nearly its entire life; pathetic, but there it was. Home was prison was home. Marlene had seen it often enough with criminals. Another oddity: Sweetie didn't bark, a characteristic that Marlene also attributed to its deprived puppyhood. It made a variety of yipping and groaning noises instead. Marlene's training books said that excessive barking could be 'corrected' by early discipline, which apparently Thug 'n' Dwarf (probably mostly Thug) had been excessively free with. So: the world's only wimpy hellhound, and perhaps it was for the best, all things considered. It gave her another excuse to keep Sweetie; the poor thing wouldn't last a minute in a pound pen. Dachshunds would cream it.
Marlene went into Lucy's room to announce dinner. Sweetie was lying on Lucy's bed wrapped in an old pink baby blankie, with a knitted pink doll's bonnet set absurdly on top of its massive head, and on its face there was an expression of forlorn and pathetic helplessness.
'We're playing baby,' Lucy announced.
Marlene broke up.
The phone rang during dinner, and when Marlene answered it a familiar low voice said, 'Tomorrow. I'm driving.'
'Harry,' said Marlene, 'first you say, 'Hello, how are you,' then you do a little small talk, and then you say what you're going to do. Remember? We're supposed to work on our conversational skills.'
'How's the kid?' said Harry Bello, refusing to be drawn.
'The kid's fine, Harry. Did you have any problem getting away on short notice?'
'I took a leave. Around four.'
That concluded the conversation. Marlene had left a message at Harry's office the previous day. 'Tell him I'd like to see him and that I have a situation here where I could use his help.' This was the response. Harry knew 'come' as well as Sweetie did. It still made Marlene sad, and a little guilty-her hold and Lucy's hold over Harry Bello-but not quite sad and guilty enough to make her not use it.
Maggie Dobbs was repotting a rare white frangipani she had grown from seed. Behind her in the conservatory she could hear Manuel working, mixing potting soil, mumbling to himself, singing snatches of tuneless song. She spent an hour or so out here most mornings, while Gloria was getting the children up and fed. Hank was long gone to the Hill, to start his usual twelve hours. It was the most peaceful and nearly the most satisfying part of her day. The plants, unlike most of the other organisms in her life, were content to merely be. Their demands were modest and easily satisfied with a slight displacement of position, a little more or less to drink, a few spoonfuls of this or that.
'There! Comfy now?' she said to the frangipani, and felt herself blush. Talking to plants, the first sign. She put the frangipani firmly back on its shelf. On the other hand they didn't talk back, didn't look at you as if you were not quite up to it, didn't roll their eyes to heaven at one of your remarks and make you feel like a dunce. She took her apron off and hung it up and as she walked down the aisle to the door a blood-red mass of begonia caught her eye and she shivered slightly, recalling the bloodied face of the monte man and the smear on the window and the waving knife. There was that too, the problem of Marlene.
She left the conservatory and went to the kitchen, poured a cup of coffee, and tried to relax into the reassuring chatter and clatter of breakfast time. It was all very well to complain about being bored and to joke about the wife-of blues, but joking and complaining were one thing; actually leaving the comfortable middle-class bubble in which she had spent her entire life, and entering a world in which men carried knives and waved them in your face, spraying blood, in the company of a… a-Maggie Dobbs did not exactly know what Marlene was, but what it was frightened her. And yes, she was admirable, but Maggie was starting to realize that admiration and participation were quite different things.
And, of course, she had involved Marlene in the book project. She recalled Hank's reaction when she had first told him about what Marlene was doing. His face had flushed and his eyes had opened wide and his mouth had dropped open, and she had braced herself for a scolding, but somehow it hadn't happened. That was odd; as if Hank had wanted Marlene involved for some reason, and she thought she had seen in the moment, just before he would have started yelling at her, a calculation replace the anger in his eyes.
The phone rang. It was Marlene, calling to say she wouldn't be by today and maybe the next day too. Something had come up-a visitor from out of town. Maggie hung up the phone and felt a wave of relief. She was ashamed of it, but it was relief all the same.
Harry Bello stiffened when Lucy came into the living room, followed by Sweetie.
'A dog,' he said flatly, meaning, 'Unnatural mother, how can you let my precious goddaughter in the same house as this drooling monster?'
'Relax, Harry. He's a sweetheart,' said Marlene, leaning over, grabbing the dog by its ears, and swinging the huge, jowly head from side to side. 'Aren't you a sweetheart? Aren't you? Aren't you a lily-livered candy-ass?'
The dog licked her face ecstatically and thrashed its whiplike tail.
'See, he's harmless,' said Marlene.
But Harry wasn't looking at the dog or at her; he was staring at Lucy, who was ignoring him.
'Aren't you going to say hello to Uncle Harry?' Marlene asked. 'Come on, Lucy, give him a hug and a kiss.'
Lucy endured an embrace and then scampered up the stairs to her own room, followed by Sweetie. Marlene took in the stricken expression on Harry's usually blank face and said, 'Oh, Harry, they're like that at this age. She'll come around.'
'She forgot me already,' said Harry, a faint whiff of accusation in his tone.
'No, she hasn't, Harry. You'll spend some time, she'll see you, she'll get used to you again-don't worry about it.' What Marlene did not voice was her understanding that Lucy didn't have to make nice to Harry because Harry was so obviously enslaved. She loved him in exactly the same way that she was coming to love Sweetie. Now she had two dogs.
Marlene made coffee and they sat at the kitchen table while Marlene spread out her notes and files on Reltzin and Gaiilov, and laid out the Dobbs project, what she had learned and what she wanted Harry to do.
'How long do you think?' she asked after Harry had sat silently shuffling bits of paper for a while.
He shrugged. Tapping a yellowed magazine photograph of Reltzin, he said, 'Him? A couple of days. He goes to concerts, he's a citizen, he's got a job or a pension, a phone, electric. There's ways. The other one, the spy? Who knows? We don't have a picture? No? Then it depends. The guy wants to stay lost and he's got experts to help him, then probably never, with just me working. If he don't give a damn somebody finds him? It depends on the breaks. Maybe this Reltzin sends him a birthday card every year. We find him, we'll know better.'
In fact, it took Harry Bello somewhat under forty-eight hours to find Viktor Reltzin. Marlene had made a bed for Harry on the couch, which he occupied only intermittently and for short periods. Otherwise he worked the streets and the phones. Through liberal and illegal use of his NYPD detective's shield, Harry got into the Kennedy Center's concert subscription records, and there he was. Harry then confirmed that indeed a man named Reltzin, with the right stats and face, lived in an apartment on Connecticut Avenue near Kalorama. He had an unlisted phone number, which did not prevent Harry from finding out what it was. Marlene called it.
A mild voice with a faint Slavic accent answered. Marlene had decided not to dissemble at all. If Reltzin hung up she'd figure out something else, but she thought that someone who had dwelt long in the tangled world of espionage, and who retained the grace to nod to the widow of an accused spy in public, might not be averse to some plain dealing.
And so it proved. Reltzin agreed at once to see her. Would this afternoon be convenient? It would.
Marlene dressed in a dark pink De La Renta suit and a patterned black silk shirt she had rescued from Maggie's discard pile and altered to fit. She had to run out to the mall on Route 50 to get fresh hose and a pair of black heels. Thus attired, she left Lucy with Bello and the other dog and drove into town.
Reltzin's building was one of the noble brownish piles that line the upper reaches of Connecticut Avenue
