The death of someone close to you affects not the future but that immediate past you realize you have been living through in the futile pettiness of daily routine. Sitting next to Shakh, I noticed on the back seat the briefcase which several weeks previously had contained the technical documentation, whose market value he had told me with a smile. I remembered the tone of our meetings, their deliberate lightheartedness, the triviality of the days that had preceded and followed them. My fruitless speeches for the defense during the course of those social gatherings, the fat man peddling his cinematic trash, the business with Shakh's suitcase, the suitcase-bait that had amused me like something from a spy novel. These snatches must now be measured against your absence, against the impossibility of finding you anywhere in the world, against the infinity of this absence.
Nor, doubtless, was it lost on Shakh that death is this infinite unit of measurement. Speaking to me of the man who had betrayed you, he mentioned a droll detail but pulled himself up at once. "He lives in Destin, Florida," he was saying. "I hope he doesn't speak French: a name like that would be enough to make you superstitious." He broke off, regretting his tone, and finished drily, "His office, by the way, is in a place called Saint Petersburg. You should feel at home there."
Your death did not affect the future, for this imagined time, I now realized, was compressed into a single, very simple moment I had carried in my mind for years: in the crowd at a station, in a passing throng of faces, I met your eyes. I had never pictured any other future for us beyond that.
From now on there was also my vision of an inert body slumped behind the bare thickets next to a country road. I could see myself like this and the comfort of such a way out was especially tempting because of its practical ease. One evening the agreeable weight of the pistol was cradled in my palm for a long time. Next morning, as I consulted my watch, it occurred to me that in these days emptied of meaning, only my meeting with Shakh at noon would mark a time, a date, and give the rest of this life a semblance of necessity.
He spoke. His voice conjured up the little town of Destin, Florida, then a man, a former Russian who called himself Val Vinner, an ordinary turned agent, whose only distinguishing feature was to have betrayed you. His profile was coming together like a jigsaw puzzle from which several pieces were still missing. Prudent, ambitious, very proud of his success. Working for American intelligence, he ran the network that dealt with the transfer of scientists from the East. He had managed to persuade his new employers that importing a scientist whose head is crammed with secrets was more profitable than sending agents to glean the same secrets on the spot. Listening to Shakh, I had the strange impression that the incomplete mosaic formed by Vinner's life was becoming my own life, that this still-blurred shape was giving me a future.
"He travels all the time as a procurer, especially in Eastern Europe," explained Shakh, "but there's a chance that during the spring break he'll spend a few days with his family. You should go the day after tomorrow at the very latest. Try to see him right away. He's very suspicious. You'll say you've come on behalf of one of his best friends. I'll give you his name. This friend is currently in China on a mission, virtually incommunicado. That gives you at least four days. If he resolutely refuses all contact, mention his mistress in Warsaw. In America that can be persuasive-"
He broke off and stared at me, screwing up his eyes slightly.
"Unless you've decided quite simply to liquidate him?"
This question dogged me during the night. I did not know what I would do when I met Val Vinner. Extort a confession from him, blackmail him and so force him to justify himself at length, pitifully. See him tremble, humiliate him-or, as Shakh put it "quite simply" kill him? A pistol with a silencer, my armed hand concealed behind a map of Florida, the appearance of a lost tourist. Vinner, who is sitting in his car, agrees to help, opens the door, leans toward the map. "Yes, you're on the right road." Then he throws his head back and freezes in his seat. I lock the door and close it-he's sure to have smoked glass windows! During the course of that sleepless night there came a time when my brooding on all these methods of vengeance suddenly laid bare a hidden motive, the one I was trying to conceal from myself. In every night there comes a moment of great lucidity, of ruthless sincerity, from which one is generally protected by sleep. This time I had no protection. My thoughts were brutally exposed. There was nothing I could do against the admission that came back time and again, more and more clearly: I was going to America in the hope of hearing Vinner say that your death was not the long torment that Shakh had spoken of. That it was… an ordinary death. And that, in any case, I could not have prevented it, even if I had been at your side. That you had not suffered. That I was not answerable for this death to… To whom?
I got up to interrupt the flood of these admissions. But their sharpness now acquired the force of a living voice: "You want to see this unfrocked spy in the hope that he'll grant you absolution. Like a good old-fashioned Orthodox priest."
As the night was ending I dozed off into a sleep that retained the extreme clarity of that forced confession. But its lucidity turned into light and the edge of my grief into ice. The cold of a snowfall on a winter's day, of snow slowly chilling my brow. I saw again the wooden house you had often told me of, with its low front steps, whence one could see, beyond the fir branches, the shores of the frozen lake. After waking, I continued for a long time to experience the coolness of that day you had told me about, white and tranquil. In the aircraft, as I mentally fitted together all I knew about Vinner, playing over like chess moves all his possible reactions, I found myself from time to time far away in a fit of forgetfulness, on the shores of that lake, surrounded by the measured slumber of the snow-clad trees. At one moment, in a brief excess of grief, I thought I had grasped something which, expressed in words, faded and only told part of the truth I had sensed. "We could have lived together in that winter's day!" No, what I had just grasped went far beyond that imagined possibility. The moment I had glimpsed was shattered by words into shards of regret, remorse, hatred. I turned my thoughts once more, and with malicious joy, to the doses of mounting fear I should contrive to inject into my visits to Vinner. Then I accused myself of seeking exoneration, of secretly hoping for the account of a gentle death from him, even of wanting to kill him so as not to hear what he knew. Finally, to put an end to this verbal torture, I went back over my chess moves one by one.