Well, there wasn’t anything else to do so I did it. I kissed her. She knew how to do it. Her tongue darted into my mouth, seeking, caressing, a warm, wet determined explorer. I soon found that she wore nothing under her dress and that her skin was as smooth and delightful to touch as it was to look at. Her hands got busy too and then we were naked on the floor and all over each other, feverishly probing, tasting, and demanding from each other. Nobody gave very much; it was all take, and at that particular time and place it was the way we both wanted it and so that’s what we did. And then she gave a half scream, cutting it off by sinking her teeth into my shoulder as her hips arched high and hard into mine and her nails raked my back. She shuddered violently, once, twice, and then she was pounding her body against mine again and gasping, shuddering once again, but less violently, and then subsiding slowly, quietly.
We lay there on the Oriental rugs, thinking our own thoughts. I memorized a pattern in one of the rugs. She ran her fingers down the side of my neck. I propped myself up on my elbows and studied her. There was a warm, sexual glow about Gordana that made her indescribably beautiful, but that’s all. Earlier that day, I had looked at another girl who had that same glow, but who was not nearly so beautiful, not half, who had hair that flopped around over a pert, saucy face and I had felt something, tenderness, affection, care. Something. I found myself feeling only admiration for Gordana, which isn’t a hell of a lot of emotion.
“I am not in love with you,” she said.
“I know.”
“And you are not in love with me.”
“That’s good. That makes it simpler.”
“How?”
“Do you think I am a little girl?”
“No.”
“Amfred did until I taught him otherwise.”
“Are you in love with him?” I said.
“With Amfred? With Ambassador Killingsworth?” She smiled mockingly. “He is married.”
“That’s no answer.”
“He is old.”
“He’s fifty and he’s rich.”
“I like him. He is a foolish man, but I like him.”
“Better than Arso Stepinac who’s not so foolish and not so old and not nearly so rich?”
“Arso,” she said. “He wanted to be engaged, but how could I be engaged to the Church and to him, too? But I agreed. It was to be a secret. He promised.”
“Tell me about Killingsworth.”
“Poor Amfred. He is so clumsy. But nice — like a big, clumsy, friendly dog.”
“I assume that your grandfather doesn’t know anything about either Killingsworth or Stepinac.”
“Or St. Ives?” she said.
“Or St. Ives.”
“Or a number of others,” she said and stretched, thrusting herself against me. “You are very good.” She giggled. “I cannot say in the bed so I will say on the floor. You are very good on the floor, Gospodin St. Ives.”
“Why gospodin?” I said. “Why not comrade?”
“I am not a Communist,” she said, “but, should the necessity arise—” She shrugged prettily. She did everything prettily and so far she was the prettiest liar I’d ever met.
“What happened to your engagement to Stepinac?”
“He became jealous. So I tore it off. Tore is not right, is it?”
“Broke,” I said, suffering a bad case of déjà vu.
“Yes, I broke it off. He wrote me many letters. Passionate ones.” She rolled her eyes naughtily. “One could not believe that a man who says he is of the police could be so passionate. There were so many letters that even Grandfather grew suspicious.”
“Where is your grandfather?” I said. “Or have I asked that before?”
“He is detained,” she said and closed her eyes and drew me down to her again, snuggling up against me.
“Where?” I said, propping myself back up on an elbow.
“Do you think I’m attractive?” she said.
“You know what I think.”
“Would I be attractive in New York? Or Washington?”
“Anywhere.”
She sighed deeply and snuggled some more. “It would have been so nice in New York, I think. Yes, I would prefer New York. I am tired of living in a capital. Or perhaps I shall become a nun after all,” she said.
“Isn’t that the plan?”
She smiled, more to herself than to me. “That is the plan. My engagement to the Church. Such a long engagement. I could not wait.” She pushed me away gently. “But now it doesn’t matter.”
“What doesn’t?” I said.
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing matters because it’s all over.”
“What?” I could never recall asking so many questing and getting such nonsense answers.
“Come,” she said, rising with a smooth grace and reaching for my hand, “let us go see Grandfather. He is waiting.”
“Like this?”
“Come,” she said, tugging me through a door and down a hall. “Grandfather is waiting.” She was smiling now, but sadly, and some tears were rolling down her cheeks. I could only stare at her. “In here,” she said. “He is in here.”
She opened a door and Anton Pernik, Nobel laureate, lay quietly on a bed, his eyes closed, his hands clasped around a rosary. He was dead. She walked over to him, leaned down, and kissed him on the forehead. She turned to me, naked and lovely, and said, “He is dead.”
“So I see. When?”
She looked around the room. All the religious artifacts and pictures that were missing from the sitting room had been hung on the walls of the bedroom. “He found comfort in such symbols,” she said, making a vague gesture.
“When did he die?” I said, feeling more naked than I’d ever felt in my life.
“This morning. Early this morning. In his sleep. I don’t think he minded. I don’t think he really wanted to go to America, but he thought I did. He thought I wanted to become a nun.”
“Do you?”
I stood in the doorway without a stitch on, looking at the lovely nude girl and her dead grandfather and, as if from a distance, I watched my mind function. I wasn’t proud of what it did, but I was glad to see that it could still work. It did it protestingly, sending out signals of distress and disgust, but it kept on working and when it was done, it spewed out the end product. It wasn’t pretty.
“Do I what?” Gordana said.
“Do you really want to go to New York?”
She shook her head. “It is impossible now. I have no money. My grandfather is dead. I cannot go.”
“Do you want to?” I said. “Do you want to go badly?”
“Yes,” she said softly. “Very badly. I’ll do anything to go.
I stared at her, not liking her much just then, but not liking myself at all.
“You may have to,” I said.
16
When I got back to the Metropol at seven o’clock I wasn’t surprised to find Slobodan Bartak of the Ministry of Interior waiting for me in the lobby and looking as if he might spit acid.
He approached almost at a lope, his short torso thrust forward, his face screwed up into a twisted advertisement of anger and disapproval. I stopped and waited for him. He halted before me, locked his hands behind his back, teetered up on his toes, and when he spoke his voice was a bitter, petulant charge. “I have been waiting for more than an hour.”
“Did we have an appointment?”
“You have heard from the kidnappers.”
“Ah,” I said.
“Well?”
“Let’s make a deal.”
“Deal?”
“A trade, a transaction.”
“What kind of transaction?”
“I’m sure that there’s some old Yugoslav tradition that calls for a drink during negotiations.”
“I know of no such tradition,” Bartak said. “If one drinks, one drinks after negotiations, not during.”
I took his elbow and turned him toward the bar and toward a drink I did not want. “Let’s fly in the face of tradition,” I said.