“I think so. What happened next?”
“I know only from thirdhand sources. We had a routine in such circumstances. The passengers would get out one by one, so as to split the pursuit, and I was the first to leave the car that night. What I heard, months later, was that Amy and Effi got out together, managed to shake off the followers, only to find the Gestapo waiting for them in Amy’s hotel room. It seems likely that they’d been following her all day, ever since she started making inquiries about Anna Kaltz.
“They were taken down to Gestapo headquarters on Prinz Albrechtstrasse, put in adjacent cells. They could talk to each other but not see each other. At some time in the night some men came down and crushed Effi’s drawing hand in the hinges of the cell door. Then they all raped her. Amy they left alone, probably because she had an American passport. She tried to comfort Effi through the rest of the night and in the morning they took her out and told her she was being deported. They put her on a train for Bremerhaven and must have held her there until the ship sailed. Effi died in Oranienburg a month later, killed by some pig of a guard for speaking out of turn. It was from one of her fellow inmates that we found all this out.”
The two men sat in silence for a moment.
“I’m giving you facts, but it doesn’t seem enough,” Luerhsen said at last. “It’s hard to imagine what it was like in those days, even for those of us who were there. We were Communists, disciplined Communists, but it was still an adventure. Does that sound crazy? But that’s what I saw in her eyes that moment in the car — adventure. Is that what you’re offering her?”
It wasn’t a word Sheslakov used, but with this man it didn’t seem out of place.
“You could say that,” he said, getting to his feet. “Thank you, Comrade.” He hesitated. “I’m very sorry there’s nothing I can do for you.”
Luerhsen shrugged. “There’s nothing I want. When you’ve been at war for thirty years there’s a lot to be said for the peace of a six-by-four cell. No,” he said, refusing Sheslakov’s package of cigarettes, “I shall only miss them more when they’re all gone.” He smiled his serene smile once more. “We never lose the discipline, do we?”
After finding his way out through the labyrinth of corridors, Sheslakov dismissed his driver and walked back to Frunze Street. Evening was coming on, the office workers pouring into the Metro at the bottom of Gorky Street. He felt profoundly depressed, as much by Luerhsen’s tranquility as by Kaptiza’s cheerful submission to the roller coaster. Anatoly Grigorovich, you’re getting old. Car chases in Berlin seemed like echoes of another age, the romantic underground fighters of the Comintern dancing around the feet of the beast like… an appropriate metaphor failed him.
“There’s nothing I want,” Luerhsen had said. Well, there was something Sheslakov wanted — a problem to solve. The cogs were fitting too smoothly into place.
Fyedorova was still on the cot, glass in hand, staring at Rosa’s photograph. Amy’s photograph. He started to recount his conversation with Luerhsen, then realized that the bottle by the bed was empty. It could wait until morning. He sent her home.
Alone in the office, almost alone in the building to judge by the lack of noise, Sheslakov found a fresh bottle and put his feet up on the desk. He needed a name for the operation, something romantic he decided, something for Luerhsen and the past. Three glasses later he suddenly remembered a favorite book of his childhood, a tale of bandits in the mountains of the Caucasus. Their leader had been a woman called “Armenian Rose.”
Three
The moment he came through the door and breezed by her, she knew something was wrong. No hello, no smile, no kiss. He had that expression on his face that she hated, the righteous-child expression.
“What’s the matter?” Amy asked, more sharply than she’d intended.
“Nothing,” Richard said, in that tone of his that shouted “Something.”
“All right,” Amy said. She’d been through this game before.
He sat in the armchair and stared at the ceiling. She waited.
“Amy, I saw you with a man today,” Richard finally blurted out. “Down by the river. Who was he?”
“Have you been spying on me?” she asked angrily, one part of her mind noting the irony of the question.
“Of course not. I was in the park—”
“He was a foreigner, a Czech, and he asked me for directions. His English wasn’t very good so we started talking in German. He was a nice man…”
“What did you talk about?”
“Oh, this and that. Living in America. The jealousy of the American male.”
He turned back to the ceiling. She could tell that he believed her and was wondering how to climb down gracefully. She would have to be more careful from now on. This might have been serious. What if he’d come up to her and Faulkner and started demanding explanations?
He was still sunk in thought. She and Faulkner had exceeded the usual meeting time, but there’d been more than usual to discuss. This sudden flood of requests from Moscow…
“What are you thinking about?” Richard asked.
“Nothing.”
“Amy, I’m sorry. I do love you, you know.” He held out his arms.
She couldn’t lie to him this time, not with words anyway. She undid her dressing-gown cord, let it slip open. He pulled it off her shoulders and kissed her breasts. She didn’t want to be kissed, not this time.
“Quickly,” she whispered, and in moments they were on the carpet, he pushing inside her, his arms tight around her neck.
He came almost immediately. He hadn’t done that for ages, she thought. Did something inside him know that she was feeling absolutely nothing? She kissed his cheek, put a finger across his lips to still the apology that she knew was forming. He really was a nice man in some ways.
My own hill of beans, she thought.
“I still can’t decide whether your eyes are blue or gray,” he said, gazing into them from a distance of about four inches.
Feeling suddenly irritated, she rolled over and sat against the sofa. “Richard, you’re the only man in my life. If you see me talking to a man, it’s not because I’m asking to go to bed with him.”
“Amy, I’ve said I’m sorry. I know it’s hard for you, but I can’t leave my wife yet. I just can’t do that to her.”
“I know. I’m not pushing you.” She wrapped her dressing gown around her, crossed the room, and turned on the radio. “Coffee?”
The newscaster announced the beginning of the Russian attack on Sevastopol between sales pitches for new vitamin pills. Richard sat back on the sofa and looked around the room. Nothing had changed since the previous Friday; it still looked like no other woman’s room he’d ever known. There were no pictures, no trinkets other than those he’d bought, no obvious keepsakes. It irritated him. Amy was so… so full of life, and her apartment was as exciting as a dentist’s waiting room.
She came in with the coffee, now dressed in a green skirt and cream blouse. “Still redecorating my apartment?” she asked with a grin.
“You could make it look more lived in,” he said reluctantly. They’d had this conversation before.
“It is lived in. I live in it, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“It’s not you.”
“It is. How many times do I have to tell you? I like things unadorned. You native Americans can’t understand that.”