‘I’m curious,’ announced Cowley. ‘About you.’
‘Me?’
‘There’s been a suggestion that you’re KGB.’
Danilov laughed, hugely. ‘Not me. The tapes were, obviously. But I’m not.’
‘I don’t suppose you’d tell me, if you were,’ said Cowley, mildly.
‘I suppose not. But I’m not.’
Cowley nodded, satisfied. ‘The ambassador is being withdrawn, because of the other recordings. And Baxter. Ann Harris was a very busy girl. It’s all pretty devastating.’
‘The Cheka will regard it as a good operation,’ guessed Danilov. He supposed during his visit to the FBI headquarters he would have been covertly photographed: there would have been fingerprints, too. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that your ex-wife married Andrews?’
Cowley pushed aside the barely touched meal. He shrugged. ‘It didn’t seem important. To affect anything.’
‘It became the most important fact there was.’
‘Hindsight,’ shrugged Cowley. ‘You sure you got everything you want?’
‘Quite sure,’ said Danilov. He’d had a far better haircut than he could ever have got in Moscow: at the moment there wasn’t any grey showing at all. He’d bought three of the shirts he liked, the ones with the pin that went behind the tie, and perfume for Olga. He’d returned to the perfumery after the first purchase to get a second bottle for Larissa. The grateful Agayans had exceeded himself, changing roubles for dollars, the reverse of how it normally worked. Danilov was still determined against accepting the television or the washing machine or the dresses Olga wanted. He finished eating and said: ‘All ready to go!’
‘I’d like to know what happens to Yezhov.’
‘You will,’ promised Danilov. He paused, recalling the distant promise about secrets on a wind-swept murder scene. ‘There are still some things belonging to Ann Harris to be returned to the family.’
‘Yes?’ said Cowley, curiously.
‘The letters were listed as correspondence on the evidence list: not itemized. I don’t think there’s any need to send back all those talking about sex, do you?’
‘None at all,’ agreed Cowley. ‘Always difficult to remain entirely detached, isn’t it?’
‘Always.’
Chapter Forty-One
There appeared to be as many packing cases lying around the Bethesda house as there had been on his previous visit. And Pauline moved around the room as if she couldn’t see where she was going, actually collided with one of the larger containers in the hallway when she went to get coffee.
‘The diagnosis is that he’s absolutely insane,’ said Cowley. ‘Beyond treatment, although of course they’ll try. They’ve got to.’
Pauline nodded, but absent-mindedly, as if she wasn’t interested.
He wanted to move across to the couch where she was sitting: to hold her, comfort her. He stayed where he was, on the single chair. ‘You’re the official next-of-kin. There’ll be some legal documents to sign. Committal authority. And a hearing, before a judge in chambers. I’ll take you, if you’d like.’
She nodded again, listlessly. ‘But no trial?’
‘He’s incapable of facing one. There wouldn’t be any point.’
Pauline stirred, forcing herself to concentrate. ‘What about the point of clearing that poor bastard in Moscow?’
Her voice was strident: cracked. Cowley supposed she deserved some near-hysteria. ‘It’s better this way. Yezhov’s being cared for. He’s not suffering.’
‘Better for whom? For the Bureau! And Burden! For the great American public, who’ll never learn an FBI man was a mass murderer!’
‘And for you,’ tried Cowley. ‘You any idea of the clamour there’d be around you, if it was all made public?’
‘Bullshit!’ rejected Pauline, viciously. ‘No one’s given a fuck about me, making this decision! It’s all political!’
‘It’s better,’ repeated Cowley, Why was he being called upon to defend it?
‘Expedient,’ she corrected.
‘OK, expedient.’
‘Jesus! Doesn’t it make you sick to your stomach?’
‘Often.’ Cowley watched her look helplessly around the disorganized living-room. He said: ‘Barry will officially be listed on permanent sick leave. His salary will continue. Pension, too. There’s nothing for you to worry about there.’
‘Stop it, William! You’re talking like they must talk.’
‘I live here, you know. Across the river, at Arlington.’
She’d retreated inside herself, merely nodding.
‘I’d like to help.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know,’ admitted Cowley, ‘I just want you to know I’m around. Will be around, if you … I’m here. OK?’
‘Did he mean it to happen?’ she demanded, going off on a tangent. ‘Did he want me to prepare food with a knife he’d killed people with?’ Horrified revulsion shuddered through her.
It was exactly what the psychiatrist had guessed and Andrews had confessed to, under the analysis that was still going on. That he’d wanted Pauline to use it making meals for the three of them, when Cowley had got back from Moscow and they’d invited him over for dinner. Dr Meadows had referred to it as vampire thinking. Cowley said: ‘No one will ever know that. I can’t conceive it.’
She shuddered again. ‘I can’t believe we shared the same bed: that he touched me, although he didn’t, not very much.’
Stop! thought Cowley. Please stop.
‘Would he have killed me?’
Cowley spread his hands towards her, in apparent helplessness. ‘I don’t know! No one can know. Ever.’ Which wasn’t true. That was exactly what Andrews had admitted planning, in his final babbled, mad confession. Cowley had heard the tape. Kill the bitch. And Cowley: kill them both. They fuck, you know? I know they fuck, behind my back. That and so much more. Hysterical ramblings of intending to kill Ann in her apartment that night, until she had surprisingly emerged, almost confronting him as he was entering from the spot where he’d watched Hughes emerge. Of intending to replace the knife he’d taken after one of his love visits the day after the murder and of finding Danilov had already sealed the apartment. About him, most of all. Of the hatred, from the time they were in London together: violent, insane jealousy, blaming him for every setback, real or imagined, ever since he’d been in the Bureau.
‘But he would have killed again?’
Cowley hesitated. ‘They think so.’ He would have been one of the record-breakers, the psychiatrists at Quantico had predicted: killed and killed and killed again.
‘With the knife he wanted me to use in the kitchen!’
‘Talking like this doesn’t make any sense.’
She snorted a laugh. ‘Isn’t that it? Isn’t it all mad?’
‘I don’t want you to forget what I said.’
She frowned, confused. ‘What about?’
‘Me being here in Washington.’
‘You and me, you mean?’
The near-hysteria was close again. ‘No! Just that I’m around, if you need somebody.’
‘No, William!’
Cowley didn’t respond immediately. ‘If you ever change your mind.’
‘I won’t.’
‘I can say it was a gift from someone here at the hotel,’ said Larissa.
Danilov hadn’t considered how she’d explain the gift to her husband. The excuse had come very easily: did she accept presents from other people, here at the hotel? He’d been clever enough to buy separate bottles though, Giorgio for Larissa, Dior for Olga. ‘I had to guess. I’m glad you like it.’
‘I’d hoped you’d come, finally.’
‘Just as a friend,’ insisted Danilov, hurriedly. She was sitting demurely on the edge of the bed, he more than a metre away on the only chair. She hadn’t come forward to kiss him or moved to start taking off her clothes, as she’d always done before.
‘Just as a friend,’ she agreed, equally quickly.
‘Good.’ For whose benefit was this performance?