“I had forgotten you.”
I had never forgotten you, he thought.
Three years before. She had been a reporter for a second-rate news service working for a man named Kaiser. There had been a priest named Tunney who had come out of Asia after twenty years. He had used her to find Tunney’s secret and, in the end, he had saved her life. A simple matter except that when he had used her, he had fallen in love with her. He could not remember having loved anyone in the cold, shallow life he had lived for the past two decades. Yet he had loved her and in the end, he had left her because it could not have been a good thing between them.
He had told himself that.
It didn’t matter after a time. After a little while, she only came to him in dreams or nightmares.
“Why are you here, Rita?”
“Vacation.”
He turned from the window and smiled. “It’s a nice time of year.”
“It reminds me of Wisconsin. You remember I came from Wisconsin.”
He didn’t speak.
“And you. You’re here for the game,” she said. Her voice was a little too brittle; it betrayed her feeling beneath the cold words.
“You show me yours and I’ll show you mine,” Devereaux said.
“Sure. That’s fair. Will you be fair?”
He waited.
“Fourteen hours ago, in Dublin, I was picked up by a British agent.”
“Do you have the right country? I thought Dublin agents were Irish.”
“He was British, all right. And he wanted to know about someone named Tomas Crohan.”
She watched him for the effect. Her green eyes narrowed shrewdly in the dim light of the afternoon hotel room. The bed still was not made and it bore traces, in the thrown-back sheets, of a restless night.
He did not move a muscle. He waited with seeming patience.
“So I told him what I knew. It was either that or get thrown in the clink. Or maybe something worse, though I don’t think they would have killed me over this. Is that why you’re here?”
“Why are you here?”
“I’m going into Russia as soon as I get a visa through Finnair tours. I think this guy Crohan is a prisoner in Leningrad.”
Again, a cold ghost of a smile crossed Devereaux’s face and the gray eyes flashed like winter ice in an Arctic ocean pack.
“Be sure to arrive on visiting day,” he said.
“Why would you be interested in this?” she said, ignoring the sarcasm.
“I might be here on vacation, too,” he said. He realized that, except for the interrogation by the policeman, it was the first extended conversation he had had in nearly two months. He had never forgotten the low, husky sureness of her voice; never forgotten the slight overbite that gave her mouth an aggressive, sensuous look; never forgotten the presence of her — antithesis of warmth and open life to his thesis of gray, of uncertainty, of frozen indecisions.
She had nearly been murdered twice during the Tunney business and he had saved her life. And then, when she had said she loved him, he had retreated from her openness and certainty back to his own shadow world of muted lights, of grays, of cold.
“I showed you mine,” she said and smiled. Conversation had brought back the color to her face. She leaned forward in the chair to see him better outlined against the light streaming through the window. It was always so hard to see him, she realized, even in the same room.
Devereaux decided something.
“You won’t have to go to Leningrad,” he said slowly, flatly, his voice surging like the lazy ice breaking up in spring.
Now Rita Macklin did not speak and sat perfectly still.
“I don’t know what any of this is. A British agent questioned you in Dublin? About this?”
“He kidnapped me. He was nice really.”
“Yes. He sounds nice.”
“You’ve done worse things,” she said.
He ignored her. “Why were the English interested in him?”
“He didn’t say. Your kind of people don’t usually reveal their motives easily.”
“Not to reporters, anyway.”
“He said I was a spy. For CIA.”
“Are you?”
“Not very likely.”
“There are stranger things.”
“I work for—”
“I know who you work for, Rita.” The voice was still flat, without emotion, but softness had come to his words and curled up at the edges of them.
“I never expected very much out of this story. I wasn’t even sure it was a story,” Rita said after a moment of silence in the room.
Devereaux glanced down again at the construction pit where they had found Natali. “Would you believe me if I said there were worse things than being arrested by a British agent?” he said, still staring out the window.
“Like what?”
“A couple of killings. One, a woman. One, another British agent. At least I think he was. And now something is going to happen. This afternoon. I don’t know what but I know it is going to happen now. Did this agent in Dublin, did he know about you going to Helsinki?”
“Yes. In fact, he told me. He knew a lot, and a lot of what he knew he got wrong about me.”
“Facts and lies, all mixed up,” Devereaux said, not to her but to himself. “And who is Tomas Crohan? I’m the only one who doesn’t know.”
She told him, simply, as much as she knew about the man who had been an American agent behind Nazi lines in 1944 and 1945 and been captured at last by the Soviet army sweeping into Austria. She told him about Mrs. Fitzroy and then about the priest in Dublin who had once been part of the Irish government and who had been hit and killed on a Dublin street the day Rita Macklin came to Ireland to see him.
“What do you think?” she said at the end of her narrative, but he did not speak for a moment.
She stared at him and saw the logic behind the confusing events of the past days. If Devereaux was here waiting, then he was waiting for Crohan; if Devereaux thought something was about to happen, then Crohan must be here. The thought terrified her momentarily, the way a skier feels both exhilaration and terror as the descent begins and all the mundane plodding up the slope to reach this moment is forgotten.
“Is Crohan here?” she asked at last.
“I think so.”
“Have you seen him?”
“No. I wouldn’t know what he looks like.”
“There don’t seem to be photos of him. Mrs. Fitzroy had a childhood photo and there was one in Father Cunningham’s possessions of someone I guess is Crohan. It was taken about fifty years ago.”
“Odd, isn’t it?”
“What?”
But he did not answer. He was thinking furiously for the first time in more than two months; he was shaking himself out of the lethargy of routine, of waiting, of enduring day by day without word from the East or the West. No wonder he had felt himself a prisoner; it was exactly like prison, like the nine months he had endured in the St. Charles Reformatory for Boys west of Chicago when he was thirteen, nine months that had seemed like nine years. He had grown up rough on the streets of the South Side of Chicago, had grown up with a sense of survival and brutality, and he had only been rescued, from the reformatory and from the direction of his life, by his Great Aunt Melvina, who had suddenly given him a home, and by his intellect, which had given him a new life away from the streets. Now thought would rescue him again; he felt the thoughts connecting inside him like a string of lights rescued from an old cardboard box and suddenly given light and new life.
“Dev,” she said, softly, standing up, walking across the room.
He turned and looked at her. His eyes were ice, his hair patches of white and black mingled, his face rugged and crosshatched with deep lines that did not reflect age but experience.
“There is some danger in this,” he said quietly.
“Of course,” she said.