There was a knock at their door.
He waited, poised above her, holding his breath.
“Oh, answer it,” Rena said. She smiled. The moment did not pass, it was merely suspended. “I’ll wait here for you.”
He grinned. “I’ll have to put my clothes on.”
“Not too many,” she said.
He pulled on his robe and went to the door. It was Rolf Gustafson, the equipment man from the temporary news bureau that had been set up in the Malmö city hall. He was some sort of employee of the town. He pretended to know all the secrets of Malmö and where the women could be found and what the price of dinner was in a particular place. He was annoying, but he was useful to the journalists who had attended the conference, as well as useful to people like Michael and Rena, who were translators and interpreters. Rolf stood in the doorway. He had two small equipment cases that belonged to Michael Hampton.
“I didn’t expect this,” Michael said in fluent, if not unaccented, Swedish. “I was going to pack up myself.”
“It was my pleasure, Mr. Hampton,” Rolf said. He had packed up everything for everyone from the journalist’s lockers — he had the master key. He had earned himself several tips as a result.
Michael fumbled for a tip and held out a twenty-kronor note. The equipment man said thank you and tried to look around Michael at whoever was in his bed. Michael said thank you again and closed the door.
“That saves you time,” Rena said from the bed. “We have more time.” Her eyes looked curiously at his bag.
“I wish you could come to Stockholm,” he began, untying his gray robe. He let it fall to the floor. Rena pulled her eyes from the bag and looked at Michael. The room was decorated in the permanent, old-fashioned style of so many provincial hotels. The Savoy was somber, gray, formal. From the front windows, you could see the blustery waves of the Kattegat that extended across to glittering Copenhagen on the other shore. “I wish you didn’t have to go back.”
“It’s only six weeks until the winter break,” she said. She was thinking of Brussels and the European Commission, where she worked as a translator. Like all legislative bodies, the European parliament had frequent holidays. The EC was slowly accumulating a bureaucracy with real economic and political power, and she was an apparatchik there, translating the Dutch demand for free trade into French, and the French demand for wine controls into English, and the English demand for open butter markets into German. She spoke every language well and was paid a good salary for her talents. Michael did not make as much.
After they made love again, they slept a while.
Then Michael awoke through instinct. He never set an alarm but he was never late. It was nearly one. He went into the bathroom, which was as large as some modern hotel rooms. He took a quick bath in the large tub and washed himself, remembering her scents. He was so in love with Rena that it made him helpless to think of her. If he thought of her eyes — azure and deep, innocent with all the world’s secrets behind them — it broke his heart because she was not there to be touched in that moment.
He dressed, and she still slept.
He opened the two equipment bags, just to make sure everything was in order.
He discovered the mistake almost at once.
He had five tapes from the official summaries and the official “final statements” of the conference. The tapes were routine, because it was a way to double-check the accuracy of his typed translations for the various press associations he worked for. Everything was routine. His principal client had wanted him to attend this conference; his principal client had paid for information that was so inconsequential that Michael could not believe it. His principal client was a cardinal of the Vatican who demanded information on many things from time to time. Money was money, and his principal client was generous and always paid promptly. His language skills were not as rich as Rena’s, but he had more range in some of the lesser languages used around the Mediterranean rim.
His hand trembled.
He picked up the sixth tape.
He knew he had had five tapes, but now there were six.
“The damned fool,” he said aloud.
“What is it?” Her voice was low, full of shadows. She was on her naked belly on the bed, and she raised her shoulders slightly, and those cloudless eyes held him in a sleepy embrace. Her lips pouted the question to him, and he saw her lips were wet again. He desired her again in that moment, desired to feel her breasts beneath his fingers.… He looked at her and said nothing.
The rain was beating against the tall windows now. There was some anger to the sound of wind and rain. The demonstrators in the mailed streets had gone away, and Lithuania was not free and South Africa was not censured.
“Six tapes,” he explained.
She propped herself on one elbow in the bed and stared at him with those incredible eyes. Even if she were not attractive in face or body, her eyes would have made many men fall in love with her.
“Now I have to find out where it goes,” he said, not looking at her but looking at the tape.
“What are you talking about?”
“Should I miss the train?”
“What are you talking about?” Rena seemed anxious. “You can’t miss your train.”
“I’ll take it with me,” he said, still talking to himself. He dropped the tape into the case and closed it. “Busybody Rolf packing up everyone and getting it screwed up. What if I can’t return the tape?”
“It’s only a tape, Michael. Don’t worry about it.” She sighed. “Give me a kiss good-bye, okay?”
He kissed her a long time and smelled her passion and felt her moist mouth open on him. He wanted to lie down with her again, just to hold her against him and to feel her lips on his flesh. It was ten minutes after one. The train station was just across the street.
He said, “I miss you more every time we have to split up.”
“I miss you more, Michael,” she said in that wonderful low voice. But her gaze was focused over his shoulder on the equipment case.
The countryside was flat and thick with pine trees. The train rocked along through the narrow valley formed by the right-of-way. Raindrops drizzled on the windows, forming patterns before they blew away. The cars were brightly lit and the warmth of the train made everyone feel a little sleepy. Michael closed his eyes and slept a while, leaning his head against the window frame. The conductor awoke him to take his ticket. They gossiped a while about the various soccer teams. When the conductor went on, Michael rose and stretched and went to the next car ahead to get a sandwich and a beer. He took them back to his compartment. He ate the sandwich slowly, staring out the window at the bleak, chill countryside. Winter was so long in Sweden. It began with the last breath of summer — even while the children were still at the beach — coming one morning and blowing on the leaves of the trees to begin their brief time of blushing and dying. It made the summers so much more precious to know how brief they were.
Michael fell asleep again, lulled by the warmth of the car.
He dreamed of Rena. He always dreamed of her when he left her. He knew she treated him at times like a pet, but it didn’t bother him. She was the reward. She had come to the Malmö conference from Brussels, for certain unnamed clients, funded by this or that European Commission payroll. She was so vague that Michael dropped it. He wasn’t interested anyway. Rena was always mysterious, perhaps deliberately. She would speak of Lithuania — a place she only knew through the experience of her father and mother — and she would be annoyed if Michael did not understand her deep patriotism.