What did Hanley drink?
She would shrug and say she did not remember.
He would come back to it again, circling back, edging the conversation: What did Hanley drink?
Scotch, she thought. He didn’t seem to like to drink.
Elizabeth had been given the codes and tested on them. She had studied at one of the four schools in the East in which R had set up special sections for their agents in training. Her instructor had been a Sixth Man named Petersen.
Devereaux didn’t know him.
She had been to R Section once, walked through the offices. Agents rarely appeared at the Section — it was a rule established by Stapleton when he had been the chief of R. He did not want clerks to know agents or the other way around.
Devereaux was convinced finally that Elizabeth told him the truth. Or her part of the truth.
But he could not believe that Hanley had set up a ghost organization in R Section to spy on the spies. It was too bizarre; there had been only one serious defection from R in nearly fifteen years — when Dobson had defected while serving as field agent in Cambodia. That had been nearly seven years before.
Still… the facts: An agent named Blatchford had attempted to kill him; Blatchford had identification that seemed authentic; now Elizabeth confessed she worked for Hanley as well. But Denisov had said Blatchford was a CIA agent. Did the CIA, then, have a ghost R Section? Perfect down to the details of Hanley’s drinking habits? And why?
Finally, he could not shake Elizabeth’s story, so he left her; Devereaux was confused and tired and felt disoriented by the knowledge that there existed a ghost Section, even a “ghost Devereaux”—whom Denisov had killed.
Devereaux walked slowly back to the hotel, along the wet pavement, dimly aware of shapes of buildings and hills through the mists swirling down upon the city. He was surprised to discover he felt a sliver of pain because of Elizabeth’s betrayal — betrayal of his bed and his little bit of love and their common pasts. When he identified the reason for his pain, he dismissed it; it was no more than another of the inexplicable aches he carried.
For a long while after Devereaux left, Elizabeth sat still on the single wooden chair in her room and looked at the photograph on the desk; he had left it in her purse and she had removed it. She stared at the picture of the child and at her younger self; she tried to catalogue her feelings but could not.
She could have told Devereaux about why she joined R Section — or what she had believed to be R Section. But she did not; she understood that Devereaux was not interested in her emotions or in her vague feelings of needing some sort of occupation to fill up the empty corners of her life and sweep out all that had been in the past.
Including the little boy and the happier time.
She was not so pale then, she noticed; her face was fuller and smiling. She would have judged her younger self even unfashionably plump, as though her contentment then had settled itself in her body and made it ripe and blooming. Like a flower.
The little boy stared at her from the photograph; she might be a stranger. Would he have known her now? Would he have said “Mother”? Of course not. It was maudlin to think about death and after death. There was no little boy anymore; he was a memory imperfectly captured by an old photograph, a photograph kept by a lonely young woman to provide wounds when needed. Was she so masochistic, then? Of course not. But she needed the pain of remembering all that had happened.
After a long time, Elizabeth rose and began to take her clothes off. She let the wet clothes fall in a pile at her feet. Then she trudged like a sleepwalker into the bathroom and took all the things he had torn apart and dumped them in the waste can under the sink. Turning on the shower, she waited until the steam of the hot water filled the room and then she stepped into the tub, hoping the water would restore her.
When she got out, she did not feel better or worse.
She wrapped the towel around her.
She had wrapped the towel around her body in that anonymous room in London and gone to him, lying on the bed, had stood by him and let him caress her until it was time for them to make love to each other; he had opened her legs and touched the lips of her sex and she had closed her eyes at the touch, gentle touch; she had waited and let him touch her until they knew they must hold each other.
She opened her eyes now and shook her head and went into the bedroom; nothing of the nightmare present had changed, not even its reminders. There was the pile of dirty clothes on the floor where she had dropped them and the photograph of the little boy and her opened dresser drawers, all her clothes and possessions violated and abandoned. She went to the bed and wanted to lay down and sleep; but she could not sleep, she knew, and the room was closing in on her, forcing the past and present together, and the jumble of thoughts pushed against her as physically painful as a wound.
She cleaned the room suddenly and compulsively, whirling through the work, making the bed, putting clothes away, like a housewife suddenly caught unawares by unexpected company. When she finished, she began to cry.
On the other side of the city, in the blackness, there was an explosion.
It wasn’t any good; she was going to drive herself mad.
Elizabeth got up finally and pulled on a dress and her coat and left the room. She made sure all the lights were on.
She rode down to the lobby in an empty elevator.
When the doors opened to the lobby, she heard distant noises in the streets beyond the hoteclass="underline" The cry of ambulances and the curious relentless ringing of the police cars. Someone had died, someone had been hurt, there had been another bomb; it was the usual symphony of Belfast at night.
Elizabeth went into the hotel bar and ordered a double whisky with ice and drank it while the bartender watched her, disapproving.
She finished it and ordered a second; she wanted to feel the whisky inside her.
At first, Elizabeth did not even notice the man next to her until he spoke. He was an American with a flat voice.
He was pretty, she decided as she sipped her whisky. He had blond hair and small, almost delicate hands. He was the sort of man some strong women keep as pets, the sort who would be weak and wasteful but too charming to get rid of.
The second whisky had no warmth; it only eased the pains. She ordered a third and realized she was going to be drunk and that was what she had wanted.
The man next to her was speaking to her and the Irish bartender stared at her.
It didn’t matter. She finished the third double and, feeling unsteady, signed her room number on the tab and left a careful tip. She realized she always left a tip, even when they didn’t like her or were rude to her or gave poor service; she was afraid not to tip.
The American beside her spoke again.
What was he saying? The voice was plastic, smooth, without seams. When Devereaux spoke, it was flat and harsh, like winter.
He suggested they make love?
She looked at him; no, she wanted to be warm and there was no warmth in the young, blue eyes, so sure of themselves. She felt old with him.
“Go ’way,” Elizabeth said, surprised by the slur in her voice: Though the thoughts still raced through her mind like a speeded-up film, they were becoming dimmer. It didn’t hurt now.
She climbed off the stool awkwardly and went back to the lobby. She fumbled for her key and then walked slowly across the lobby — slowly and carefully, pretending not to be drunk — and waited at the elevator door.
She did not notice the American had left the bar as well.
She did not see him go to the stairs.
When the elevator came at last, she entered the cubicle and pushed her floor number; the doors closed uncertainly and the elevator began its slow ascent. It creaked as it moved, cables and wheels straining as though the elevator had not been used for a long time.