Damn him.
Rita had been very sure about leaving Devereaux at the time. The doubts came a moment later. She held them off for a while, for a long while, and then she could not end her addiction to him at all. She had to call him, wherever he was. She had to at least hear the sound of his voice again, a potent placebo against the doubts and melancholy of life apart from him.
He never answered her calls.
There was only a single number and she knew it was one of the twenty-four-hour answering rooms kept by R Section. She said his name and told them her code name. Her code name — though she wasn’t part of Section at all, she had a code name, as he did. They would patch her through to wherever he was in time — they wouldn’t tell her where he was.
There was a phone recording machine hooked up in a safe house in New York and it wasn’t even his voice but a computer-generated one: “Leave a message at the tone.” And then a tone, and she would tell the emptiness: “Call me.”
He had not called her.
He had not come back to her. She felt relieved sometimes at that because it wasn’t any good between them, not in the long run. Not as long as he was the reluctant spy for R Section, kept in harness because they needed him and they knew how to control him. He had tried once to break free with her and it had nearly cost both of them their lives. In the real world, you’re on one side or the other; those are the rules.
She said those things to console herself because it was truly broken between them. He would not call her.
“Call me,” she would say in the darkest moment to the sound of a beep on a recording machine. She wouldn’t say more than that.
It should have been enough for him.
2
She stepped out into the bright October light. The sunlight was fragmented against the golden maples behind the apartment complex. It was dazzlingly beautiful in that moment.
Rita Macklin stepped onto the new gravel on the lot, stopped, smiled at the sky and trees. The bad thoughts about Devereaux had left her; she would be all right for the rest of the day. Now she was herself, an attractive woman with merry eyes and an eager manner that pleased all men and not a few women. She could not be given to melancholy on a perfect autumn morning.
She fumbled for her car keys in her purse and pulled them out. The car was a five-year-old Ford Escort, a minimal sort of car that fitted her life and style. She hadn’t wanted a car at all but her bosses insisted she have one. There are stories outside the District, Mac would say; you have to fly out of Dulles, another would say, and it would be more economical. Inside the District, she still used the clean, swift Metro underground and the poke-along buses. Sometimes she would just walk all the way home, up Massachusetts to Wisconsin Avenue and out to the Old Georgetown Road, marveling at all that was new in the city, comforted by all the things that had not changed. But today she had to go to Dulles, so she would use the car.
She had her keys in hand as she reached the car. In the next moment, she was on the ground.
She had fallen, she thought.
She felt a dull sickness in her stomach and wondered if she had broken the heel of her right shoe. The shoes cost $125, which was obscene, but she had loved them when she saw them in the store on L Street.
She thought her skirt would be soiled by the gravel and dirt in the parking lot. A stupid fall and she had ruined her clothes and would have to change and miss the next flight… The thoughts came jumbled and fast as she lay on the gravel and tried to decide why she felt sick. She tried to turn on her hip and push herself up but her right arm didn’t work. She thought she had sprained it in falling. And why had she fallen?
Then she felt the pain from her belly up across the right side of her chest to her shoulder and from her shoulder down to her right elbow. The pain was centered in her right side but she couldn’t understand why she wanted to retch.
Instead, Rita moaned. And blood filled her mouth and her nose, although she did not know this yet.
She blinked to be able to see better. She saw a man coming between the rows of parked cars. The sun was behind him and he was merely a shadow until he came near. He carried a briefcase. She noticed the initials on the briefcase and thought it was pretentious to have initials on your case. She wouldn’t have thought of doing that. She counted herself a simple person. She wouldn’t have owned a car but she had to go to Dulles, where the plane would have left already —
Oh my God, she thought, I’m going to scream in a moment.
It was the lawyer who lived in the apartment at the other end of the hall. Tom. Tom something, they had met at a party of a mutual friend in the same apartment building. He had wanted to put the hit on her but he really wasn’t her type at all. Now she was lying here, embarrassing herself, embarrassing him. What an awful way to start a —
She moaned again and saw that frightened look in his eyes, as though he were looking at something quite horrible. His look frightened her more than being on the ground.
“Please,” she said.
“My God, Rita, your blouse, your face—”
She wasn’t seeing him very well.
What about her blouse?
“You’re bleeding, you’ve been shot,” Tom said. “My God, Rita, I’ll call emergency… I heard the shot.”
What about her blouse? There was nothing wrong with her blouse. She looked down at her blouse and saw that the green satin was wet on the right side and that the green had turned a much darker color. What about her blouse?
He was leaving her and the world spun around so that the rows of cars narrowed around her. Were they going to crush her? What did she care? She didn’t want to close her eyes because she thought she might fall asleep right there, between the parked cars in the parking lot. That would make her look foolish. Tom what’s-his-name certainly shouldn’t have left her to look foolish. Was she drunk? She had gone running five miles this morning, all the way out to the Beltway and back, and she had eaten an English muffin, lite cream cheese, and a tomato slice for breakfast…
She closed her eyes despite herself.
3
Devereaux picked up the telephone in the living room of the three-room safe “house” on West Fifty-eighth Street in Manhattan.
He was just over six feet tall, with graying hair and absolutely pewter eyes. For a moment, he only listened to the complex whine of the scrambler becoming activated.
“November,” Hanley said.
“Control,” Devereaux responded.
“There’s been… a rather bad thing,” Hanley said. His voice was so unusually delicate, almost hesitant. It was the voice of someone trying to be a friend while conveying both sympathy and bad news.
What a peculiar tone of voice. Hanley was only control and not his friend by any means.
“Rita Macklin was shot this morning in the parking lot of her apartment building,” Hanley said. “We were only notified a little while ago, through the editor of that magazine she worked for. She had left her building at the usual time, according to him; she was catching a flight to Phoenix.”
Devereaux waited. If he spoke now, he would betray himself to Hanley. He thought of the voice on the answering machine and how he had been tempted to call her and catch the shuttle back to her. But he had not because it would have been no good again. They had loved each other too much to put up with hurts and disappointments in his work for Section. He understood how much he hurt her, and there was no way not to go on hurting her. So he had cut it off, finally, even if she could not. He always dreaded returning to this apartment, dreaded the blinking red light on the answering machine that meant someone had called. Would it be her voice? “Call me.” But he loved her too much to do that.