“The Indians are the native Americans. You’re as American as I am.” This mocking anti-Americanism was the one facet of her character which both annoyed and baffled him. “And, anyway, what’s wrong with having nice things?” he asked belligerently.
She smiled sweetly at him. “Nothing, if you find them nice. Americans are brought up to care about their things. I wasn’t. Come on, we’ll miss the beginning of the movie. And don’t look at me like that — if I was an ordinary American girl, you’d find me boring.”
Perhaps so, Richard thought later, as he watched Marlene Dietrich throw chairs at James Stewart. He couldn’t accuse Amy of being boring.
After the movie they had coffee in a diner, then walked through Dupont Circle, kissing each other good night under the fountain. Richard then went home to his wife, Jean, piqued at Amy’s refusal to display any jealousy, angry at himself for wanting her to. Amy walked home slowly, trying to arrange her thoughts for the task at hand.
Back in her apartment, she made herself a pot of black coffee, changed back into her dressing gown, and retrieved Faulkner’s instructions from behind the brick in the fireplace. They were clear enough: Moscow wanted a report on Wim Doesburg, everything she knew and guessed about him, and her opinion of the “relationship” between them. It should be short and comprehensive. Typical.
What relationship? she asked herself, switching on the desk lamp. And what on earth could be behind this request? She sat back in the chair, sipping coffee, wondering where to begin. The first meeting on the ferry, she supposed.
She began to write, describing the German’s rotund appearance, his manner, recounting the gist of their conversation. It had been almost a year ago now, on a cold spring day. The whole encounter had seemed quite bizarre; several times she’d almost burst out laughing. He’d suspected nothing, thinking her just another patriotic German. Had she impressed him? She rather thought she had, almost too much so. She’d been too professional, too cool, and that, she knew, had slightly disconcerted him. But he’d responded in kind, and that had been the way of it ever since. She began to understand what Moscow meant by their “relationship.”
“Our meetings,” she wrote, “have always been conducted in a thoroughly professional manner, with little or no discussion of extraneous matters. He has never made any sexual advances, though he does seem aware of” — how should she put it? — “my femininity.” Suitably neutral. “He has never asked any questions about my private life.”
Funny, she thought, he seems more impressive on paper than he does in the flesh. Perhaps she had underestimated him. “He has never seemed concerned,” she wrote, “at the possibility of exposure, and his confidence, in my judgment, is well-founded. His intelligence is hard to assess. He absorbs information quickly, but his sense of humor, on those rare occasions when it is displayed, is of a coarseness that does not suggest any depth of intellect.”
Like Richard’s, she thought unkindly, quick and shallow.
What else did they want? Doesburg had told her during one of their visits to the zoo that the giraffe was his favorite animal, but she doubted whether Moscow would be interested. They wanted an assessment of his motivation. Well, what made spies spies? Experience in her case, bolstered by conviction. She had no idea what Doesburg had experienced in his fifty or so years, and she found it impossible to believe that any man of his intelligence would work for Hitler on ideological grounds. A blind spot perhaps, but Doesburg didn’t seem the ideological type. He wasn’t even interested in the war. At their last meeting she’d mentioned some current battle and he’d not even heard of it. So for him it had to be money or excitement or both. She tried to picture his flat face, the expression in the pale blue eyes. It was probably both.
“I suspect,” she wrote, “that his allegiance to the German cause is a matter of circumstance rather than conviction. From my limited knowledge I would guess that the possibility of material gain and the enjoyment of intrigue are more important to him.”
Why did she think that? His clothes were always beautifully pressed; he seemed somehow at home in New York, at ease with its excess. Which was more than she could say for herself, particularly since that day with Fuchs. She shuddered involuntarily at the memory, forced herself back to thinking about Doesburg. “Bourgeois,” that was the word that Moscow would understand. And pride too. He was proud, not of what he was doing, but of his skill at doing it.
“His mannerisms,” she wrote, “are unmistakably bourgeois. This, given the nature of his work, is a help rather than a hindrance. He seems to take an unusual pride in his competence. On at least two occasions he has told me how pleased Berlin was with ‘his’ information. Since, as we know, the information passed on to Berlin has been consistently unhelpful to the German cause, these comments would seem to tell us more about him than Berlin’s opinion of him. He clearly places much importance on the latter.”
Was this getting too psychological? If only she knew why Moscow wanted this information. Faulkner would have told her if he’d known, she was sure. She pushed her hair back behind her ears and leaned her elbows on the desk, her hands cupped in front of her mouth. Why?
Suddenly it came to her. Moscow was planning to feed Berlin some false information through her and Doesburg, and they wanted to be sure that he would believe her and Berlin believe him. What could it be? That didn’t matter for the moment.
“There is no reason to suppose,” she continued, “that he considers me in any way unreliable. I have consistently supplied him with information that Berlin must know is scientifically valuable, albeit of no practical use to them in the current circumstances. Berlin presumably values him for the same reason. I have no reason to believe that he will question any information I pass on, or that Berlin will question any information he passes on.”
That would do. She read through what she’d written, making only a few minor changes, and then spent the next three hours laboriously translating it into the month’s prescribed code. It was past five in the morning by the time she finished, and by then both her tiredness and the sense of excitement had passed. Whatever it was that Moscow wanted passed on couldn’t be that important; the Germans were already as good as beaten. It was just a matter of time.
Time. Her thoughts turned to the subject that was beginning to haunt her — the future. What would she do when the war was over? Carry on working against the wider enemy once her personal enemy had been ground under? Probably, but… if only they’d give her something important to do. Perhaps she’d leave it all behind, go somewhere like Africa, somewhere different…
The sky outside was lightening. For the first time in many months she took out another man’s photograph and sat by the window looking at his face. Three days they’d had once, three days on a floating palace. “I loved you,” she said softly. And lost you, she thought to herself. Eleven years, a lifetime ago.
Kuznetsky shifted the antitank rocket launcher from one shoulder to the other and stretched his cramped arm up above his head. Four days had passed since their escape from the German sweep, and the group’s eight survivors were now more than thirty miles from their former home, still ten miles from their pickup point at Lukomskoye. From there he’d be Moscow bound, for whatever reason it was that they wanted him. He didn’t really care, and that surprised him a little,
Nadezhda had been more upset than he’d expected, clinging to him fiercely with the tears pouring down her cheeks when he broke the news. He’d never seen her cry before. Since then she’d ignored him, a reaction which only reinforced the original impression. But there was nothing he could do. Orders were orders, the Party knew best or the Party knew nothing. How many times had he told people that? And there was only one passenger seat in a Polikarpov.