“What’ve you done with it?” I said.
“That’s confidential, of course.”
“But it’s the real thing?”
“There’s no doubt about it,” he said.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Can you get him out of the country?”
“Maybe.”
“I can’t be involved, of course.”
“Of course.”
“But I did more or less promise him.”
“In exchange for the information?” I said.
“That’s right.”
“Well, I can try,” I said and started to rise. He used his right hand to pull me back down. “There’s one other thing.”
“What?”
“I’ve had a lot of time to think during the past week.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We’ve known each other for a long time.”
“A half hour ago you couldn’t remember my name.”
“A man sometimes does foolish things.”
“Such as?”
“This girl, Gordana Panić. We were, well, close and I made some promises, some foolish ones, I’m afraid, but now that I’ve had a chance to think it all through it would be far better if this entire affair didn’t involve her. Am I making myself clear?”
“Perfectly,” I said. “You want to give her the brush.”
Killingsworth frowned. “There’s my family to think of.”
“What about her?”
He ignored the question. “And as ambassador I should avoid any hint of scandal that could damage our relations with Belgrade.”
“You want me to fix things, right?”
“Could you?”
“Why should I?”
Maybe I wanted him to crawl a little. Or maybe it was because I thought I’d owed him something for thirteen years and now was my chance to pay it all back with compound interest. His face fell. Crumpled would be better. He was no longer Ambassador Amfred Killingsworth, millionaire publisher. He was only a fifty-year-old man who’d just about wrecked things because of a twenty-two-year-old girl and now he was trying to scramble back, trying to salvage it all, trying to make it as it had been before he fell in love too late in life. And that was probably what hurt most of all, that he couldn’t fall in love at fifty with someone who was twenty-two because he didn’t have the stomach for the sacrifices that it called for.
“Oh, hell, Killingsworth. I’ll see what I can do.”
His face brightened. It not only brightened, it shone. “You mean it?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll remember it, Phil. We’ve had a few differences, but that’s all water under the bridge. Wait till you see my report on how you’ve handled this. I’ll see that you get full credit.” He was babbling now, not saying anything really and I only half listened. Then he said, “Who brought you in?”
“Hamilton Coors,” I said. “You know him?”
“Of course I know him. Damned fine man. He’s a personal friend of mine, the best I’ve got in the Department.”
I nodded. It was all that I felt like doing. “Coors speaks well of you, too,” I said.
I was dozing by the fireplace about an hour later when I got my first night visitor. It was Tavro. I glanced about and the rest of them were sprawled out or huddled up near the warmth of the flames.
“I must speak with you,” Tavro said in his whispering rasp.
“Go ahead.”
He looked around, his sad fish face covered with a black and white stubble that made him look mean all the way through. “When will Killingsworth get back to Belgrade?”
“Tomorrow, I think.”
“He has information, papers, documents that are mine.”
“I thought you gave them to him.”
Tavro frowned. “It was a foolish mistake. I must have them back.”
“I don’t think there’s much chance.”
“Then I must leave immediately.” He started to rise. I caught his arm and pulled him back down.
“You don’t have a chance,” I said. “We’ll try it tomorrow with the girl. You can be her grandfather.”
He shook his head. “Mr. St. Ives, if the information that is contained in those documents that I gave your ambassador is revealed to anyone else, I will be dead before night.” I looked at him. His face was still grumpy and mean, but it was also serious.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Your ambassador, Mr. Killingsworth, does not have the background to assess their true significance.”
“He told me that it was hot stuff.”
“He was speaking as a newspaperman, not as a diplomat. The information that he possesses could destroy this government.”
“Isn’t that what you want?”
Tavro looked away and then returned his gaze to me. It contained as much sincerity as he was capable of displaying, perhaps more. “Not if it would take Russian tanks, Mr. St. Ives.”
“Like Czechoslovakia, huh?”
“You do not believe me?”
“No.”
Tavro shook his head and then smiled as if he felt sorry for my stupidity — which he may have. “Think about this, Mr. St. Ives. If I were not telling the truth, I certainly would not be here.”
I nodded as he rose. “Okay,” I said. “We’ll go first tomorrow. The others can come out later.”
“Tomorrow,” he said, as if he were not at all sure that there would be such a thing. Then he rose and walked to the far end of the fireplace where he stood and looked into the flames for a long time. I watched him for a while and then I tried to go to sleep, and almost succeeded until something warm and wet started licking my ear.
“What’re you doing?” It was Arrie, of course.
“Trying to sleep,” I said. “Doesn’t the sandman stop by your place anymore?”
“I was cold.”
I put my arm around her. She snuggled against my chest. “I bet they have rooms upstairs,” she said.
“We’d freeze before we got there.”
“What did Tavro want?”
“Out.”
“You still going to help him?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“You’re making a mistake.”
“Probably.”
“None of it’s gone right, has it?”
I looked down at her, but she had turned her face away from me. “None of what?” I said.
“None of what you thought you were supposed to do.”
“No, it’s all gone wrong.”
“It could get worse,” she said.
“I don’t see how.”
She sighed and snuggled closer. “You will if you try to get him out.”
26
The cold awakened me. Thin gray light was coming through the tall windows. The fire had died down. I gently lifted Arrie’s head from my chest and made her a pillow of my topcoat. She curled into it without waking. I rose and went over to the fireplace, put three large logs on, and waited until they caught. I squatted down and warmed my hands before the flames. And then I thought for a long time, until the thinking threatened to become the end itself rather than the method by which the end is reached.
I rose and walked over to the windows. Before me stretched a broad, snow-covered meadow that was lined by thick forests of fir and pine. Beyond the meadow was more forest that rose until it thinned out into snow and rocks and became the peak of a mountain whose name I would like to have known.
Below the castle near the edge of the forest, two deer, a buck and a doe, took small, delicate, tentative steps into the deep snow. They stopped, looked around suspiciously, and then bounded across the meadow, hurrying into the safety of the forest on the other side.
I turned from the window and went back to the fireplace. Tavro was propped up against the stone wall, his overcoat drawn up to his chin. I bent down and shook his arm. He opened his eyes and then opened and closed his mouth several times as if he tasted something bad.