Charlie Stone struggled to cross the cobblestones toward Charlotte, and then he saw the answer, her smile, the yes, and he began to see concentric circles around everything, doubles and triples, everything getting lighter and brighter, everything becoming wonderfully, comfortingly, white.
EPILOGUE
New York: Six Months Later
Only afterward did things come full circle.
The first thing Stone became aware of, as he slowly awakened, was the warmth and velvety softness of Charlotte’s naked back, nestled tightly against him. Then: the morning light from the strong May sun, flooding the bedroom.
Her nearness aroused him, and he slowly reached a hand around to the warmth between her legs. With spread fingers he massaged her downy pubic hair gently and slowly, then closed his fingers and increased the pressure. She was, though not awake, moist. His other hand stroked her breasts; the nipples were erect now. He kissed her neck, nuzzled her shoulder. She stirred and gave a throaty moan.
Even months later, the mysteries remained.
They knew that Sonya had died on Revolution Day, and that Yakov and his sons had been permitted – by direct order from the Politburo – to emigrate to the United States.
Avram Kramer’s mental health remained tenuous; for him, things would never be normal again.
They knew that the U.S.–Soviet summit had ended with more promise than substance, as is often the case with summits, and that neither the American leaders nor the Russian leaders, with one great exception, were harmed. The vast majority of American press reports called the summit “bland and uneventful” – the sole exception being the unfortunately timed death, by stroke, of the chairman of the KGB. But the reports, of course, were decidedly wrong.
Frank Paradiso had been reassigned to the U.S. Embassy in Lisbon. The Director of Central Intelligence, Ted Templeton, and his deputy, Ronald Sanders, both announced their resignations shortly after the summit, each for various family reasons, each announcing that he had wanted to wait until the Moscow summit was over.
Each of them also found lucrative employment in the private sector. Of course, the two officials had little choice but to resign, faced with the possibility that their role in the illegal covert operation might someday be revealed, the most damaging evidence being contained in a package that was found in Andrei Pavlichenko’s office safe after his death.
Unbeknownst to Stone, the extraordinarily secret group that called itself the Sanctum disbanded itself, a mere memory in the minds of its prominent members, who of course said not a word when they ran into one another at parties in Georgetown or panel discussions at the Council on Foreign Relations.
He was unaware, too, that at this very moment a nurse in a psychiatric hospital in Moscow was, as she’d been ordered, injecting one of her latest patients with a solution of haloperidol and a colloidal suspension of sublimed sulfur, which she’d done for several weeks’ running. This solution, the nurse knew, causes the patient to run an extremely high fever and to suffer unbearable discomfort in whatever position he assumes. The nurse knew only that the patient was afflicted with criminal schizophrenia, having been arrested, by Politburo order, in the Soviet Embassy in Washington on November 7 and flown at once to Moscow.
The patient, a former high-ranking diplomat named Aleksandr Malarek, once an aide to the late chairman of the KGB, was being administered a little lesson designed to impress anyone so foolish as to attempt what Malarek had done. Malarek now suffered a side effect of the medication: he had little more intellectual capacity than a parsnip.
Charlie refilled their coffee cups and sat down next to Charlotte at the breakfast table.
Both of them were enjoying the energizing glow of having just made love. Charlotte, who was rapt in the Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times, looked up after a few moments. “Charlie, we need to talk.”
He groaned. No one ever “needed to talk” about happy, pleasant things.
“How committed are you to teaching at Columbia?” she asked.
Immediately after Stone returned to New York, Columbia University had offered him a tenured professorship in Soviet studies, at a respectable academic salary – which wasn’t much. But Stone had plenty sacked away from his days at Parnassus and from the money his father had left in his safe-deposit box, and besides, the apartment and his mountain-climbing equipment were already paid for. And then there would be the Lehman inheritance …
He was about to publish another book, on the future of the Soviet empire, and was teaching a class on the Soviet empire, or what little was left of it.
“Committed?” Stone asked, getting up to retrieve the toast, which had just popped up. “Now what are you talking about?”
“I mean, do you like it? Would you ever consider leaving?”
“Do I like it?” Quite a bit, he thought. He’d turned away requests from several intelligence agencies, the NSA, and the DIA for his expertise. Intelligence, he’d come to believe, was a little like a snake: slimy, though deceptively dry and inoffensive, even agreeable, to the touch. He said: “Teaching in a university would be wonderful – without the backbiting colleagues and the undermotivated students. And the academic politics – which are so fierce because the stakes are so small, as someone once said. Charlotte, what are you after?”
“The network’s offered me a job in Washington I can’t pass up.”
“Really?”
“Covering the White House.”
“Seriously?” Stone stepped forward to throw his arms around her, and then stopped. “Oh, no. Washington.”
“I knew you wouldn’t be thrilled about going back there.”
He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “The land of the white sky in the summer. The land of pedestrian malls. The city that teems with lawyers and congressional interns.”
“Charlie–”
“But, then, I suppose I could manage to get a job at Georgetown.”
“Charlie, they’d hire you in a second.”
He turned to face her. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess I could do it. Why not?”
There was a sadness in both of them, but especially in Stone. In some sense, he had found two parents and lost them both. He had learned to kill and knew that he had within him the ability to take a human life, just as so many had been taken from him.
On the anniversary of his father’s death, he made a pilgrimage to Boston and placed flowers on the grave, in Mount Auburn Cemetery. The epitaph was the verse from Boris Pasternak, bleak and yet at the same time hopeful, that Alfred Stone had liked so much:
YOU ARE ETERNITY’S HOSTAGE A CAPTIVE OF TIME.
And it had always meant little to Stone, until things came full circle. It was the key to the final mystery, the astonishing revelation that Winthrop Lehman had made in the last ten minutes of his life.
Keep your machine on, Winthrop Lehman had said, gesturing weakly at the tape recorder. I have one more thing to tell you. And then Stone had known.
“You saw the gravestone I had put up in Père Lachaise to conceal the fact that Sonya was alive,” Lehman said. “She was allowed to come to Paris twice, in 1956 and in 1953. You see, your father was always grateful to me for selecting him to serve in the White House. He looked upon me as a surrogate father of sorts, and so he went to Moscow for me uncomplainingly. And when he was photographed by FBI agents in Moscow, he knew he had to go to prison rather than reveal the truth.”
Stone, watching Lehman struggle to keep his eyes open, nodded. His head whirled; he could barely speak. “I know,” he said. “I think on some level I’ve always known, although Dad never said anything. My father wanted to protect my childhood. He didn’t want to take from me the one immutable thing. I could never understand why he felt so close to you, so loyal, against all reason. But I think I always had an inkling.”