While we were finishing our appetizers (as a matter of principle, no one ordered focaccia), Molly arrived, profusely apologetic.
“How was your day?” she asked as she kissed me. She gave me a look that was a second or two too long, which meant she was asking about Truslow.
“Fine,” I said.
She kissed Ike and Linda, sat down, and said, “I don’t think I can take this much longer.”
“Medicine?” Linda asked.
“The preemies,” Molly replied, medical jargon for premature babies. “Today I admitted twins and another baby, and the three patients together weighed less than ten pounds. I spend all my time taking care of these critically ill little things, trying to put in umbilical artery catheters, dealing with stressed-out families.”
Ike and Linda shook their heads sympathetically.
“Kids with AIDS,” she continued, “or bacterial infections around the brain, and being on call every third night-”
I interrupted her. “Let’s leave all that behind for now, huh?”
She turned to me, her eyes widening. “Leave it behind?”
“All right, Mol,” I said quietly. Ike and Linda, looking uncomfortable, concentrated on their Caesar salads.
“I’m sorry,” she said. I took her hand under the table. Work sometimes strung her out in this way, but I knew she still hadn’t recovered from the shock of seeing that photograph.
Throughout dinner she was distant; she nodded and smiled politely, but her thoughts were obviously elsewhere. Ike and Linda no doubt attributed her behavior to her father’s recent death, which was largely accurate.
In the cab on the way home we had a quarrel, in fiercely whispered tones, about Truslow and the Corporation and the CIA, everything she had once made me promise I would give up forever. “Dammit,” she whispered, “once you start dealing with Truslow, you’re back in that awful game.”
“Molly-” I began, but she was not interruptable.
“Lie down with dogs and you get fleas. Dammit, you made a promise to me you’d never go back to that stuff.”
“I’m not going back to that stuff, Mol,” I said.
She was silent for a moment. “You talked to him about Father’s murder, didn’t you?” she asked.
“No, I didn’t.” A minor falsehood; but I didn’t want to tell her about the alleged embezzlement or the Senate hearings.
“But whatever he wants you for, it has something to do with that, doesn’t it?”
“In a sense, yes.”
The cabbie swerved to avoid a pothole, slammed on the horn, and cut into the left lane.
We were both silent for a moment. After a minute or so-as if she’d been deliberately trying for some kind of dramatic effect-she said, too casually, even airily: “You know, I called the Fairfax County medical examiner’s office.”
Momentarily I was confused. “Fairfax-?”
“Where Dad was killed. To get a copy of his autopsy report. The law states that immediate family members can get copies if they want.”
“And?”
“It’s sealed.”
“Meaning what?”
“It’s not a public record any longer. The only parties allowed to see his autopsy report are the district attorney and the attorney general of the Commonwealth of Virginia.”
“Why? Because he’s-was-CIA?”
“No. Because someone involved in the case decided something we already know. It was a homicide.”
We rode the rest of the way home in silence, and for some lunatic reason had another fight after we got back, and ended up going to bed furious at each other.
It’s funny, but now I look back on that evening with fondness, because it was one of the last normal nights we’d ever spend together, just two nights before it happened.
EIGHT
That night, the last normal night in my life, I had the dream.
I dreamed about Paris, a dream as lifelike as any waking nightmare, a dream I have suffered through perhaps thousands of times.
The dream always goes like this:
I am in a clothing store on the rue du Faubourg-St. Honoré, a men’s clothing store that is a rabbit’s warren of small, bright rooms, and I have lost my way, moving from room to room, looking for the rendezvous point I have laboriously arranged with the field agent, and at last I find a dressing room. It is the rendezvous spot, and there, hanging on a peg, is a sweater, a navy blue cardigan, which I take, as we have arranged, and in the pocket I find, as we have also arranged, a scrap of paper containing the coded message.
I spend too long poring over the message, and now I am late for the phone call I am supposed to make, and frantically, I go from room to room in this wretched store, looking for a telephone, asking for one, unable to locate one, until at last, in the basement of the building, I find a phone. It is a bulky, old-fashioned French phone, two-tone, tan and brown, and for some reason it will not work, try after try after try, and then-thank God!-it rings.
Someone answers the phone; it is Laura, my wife.
She is crying, pleading with me to come home, to our apartment on the rue Jacob, something horrible has happened. I am gripped with fear, and I begin to run, and in a few seconds (this is a dream, after all) I have arrived at the rue Jacob, at the entrance to my apartment building, knowing what I am about to see. This is the worst part of the dream: thinking that if I don’t go home, it won’t have happened; but some horrified fascination impels me onward. I swim through the air, feeling nauseated.
A man is coming out of my building, wearing a thick woolen plaid hunter’s shirt, Nike running shoes. An American, I am convinced, in his thirties. Although I can see him only from behind, I can see that he has a thick, unruly shock of black hair and-it is always the same detail-a long red ugly scar running along his jawline, from his ear to his chin. It is a terrible scar, and I can see it quite clearly. He is limping as if in great pain.
I don’t stop the man-why should I?-but instead, as he limps away, I enter the building, smelling the odor of blood, which grows stronger as I climb the stairs to our apartment, and now the stench is unbearable, and I find myself retching, and then I am at the landing, and I can see the three bodies, splayed grotesquely in pools of blood, and one of them-it can’t be, I tell myself-is Laura.
And at this point I usually awake.
But that is not quite the way it happened, of course. My dream, and it is always the same, has created a grotesque semiparable out of it.
As a case officer in Paris, I was charged with running several valuable deep-cover field agents, and a host of minor ones. I’d had one major success in Paris: I’d succeeded in rolling up a ring of Soviet military-intelligence spies operating out of a turbine plant outside the city. My cover was as an architect at an American firm. The apartment I had been given on the rue Jacob was small but sun-drenched, located in the sixth arrondissement, the best neighborhood in Paris, to my mind. I was fortunate; most of my fellow spooks were housed in the drab eighth. Laura and I had recently married, and she had no objection whatsoever to being moved to Paris: she was a painter, and there were few places she preferred to paint than Paris. She was small, irresistibly cute, with long blond hair that she wore up. We were pretty much intoxicated with love.
We had talked about having kids, and we both wanted them. But what I didn’t know was that she was pregnant, a fact that would have thrilled me. She never had a chance to tell me. I’ve always believed she wanted to tell me in her own way, at her own pace, after she’d had a chance to digest the news. All I knew was that she’d been feeling sick for several days-some sort of minor virus, I thought.
Around this time I was contacted by a low-level KGB officer, a filing clerk in the KGB’s Paris station, who wanted to strike a deal. He had some information to sell, he said, which he’d run across in the archives in Moscow. In exchange, he wanted to defect, wanted financial security, protection, the works.