“But no longer. I’m sorry, my friend.”
“So am I. Maybe she is too.”
“And you never saw each other again,” Kuznetsky repeated. “Regrets?”
“At the time.”
“Now?”
“No.” She didn’t want to talk about it with him, because all he cared about was whether it would affect the operation. And it wouldn’t. The Germans would be left for the FBI to pick up as planned, and that was that. Her feelings were irrelevant. But… it was cruel. She felt as if she was being tested, tempted almost, as if some malicious fate had decided to find the one person she’d least like to sacrifice…
They drove through Scottsboro. She looked at the bunch of white flowers on the dashboard, already beginning to wither in the heat. “Are you married?” she asked Kuznetsky.
“In a way,” he said. “What’s the old word? ‘Betrothed.’” He smiled at some unspoken thought, looking for a moment almost vulnerable. What a life he must have led, she thought. Or was she just romanticizing?
“Tell me about the Soviet Union.”
He was silent for a while. “It’s a place where the present hardly exists,” he said finally. “The past and the future are both very real, but the present — you have to steal it piece by piece.”
She hadn’t expected this. “Where do you live, before the war I mean?”
“In a lot of ways we hardly noticed the war. There was no one moment when peace turned into war. There’s been no real peace since Kirov was shot, ten years ago. I’ve lived all over, wherever my work was.”
“I don’t think you can have been a propagandist.”
He smiled. “You don’t hear people saying how wonderful breathing is. It depends on what inspires you. We have crammed two hundred years of development into twenty, and most of it will have to be done all over again when the war ends. All the children have schools, there are no famines, everyone has work and purpose, sometimes too much work. You should go to Siberia. There the past is weakest, the future strongest. And it’s beautiful, beautiful beyond imagining.”
“Moscow?”
“Just another city.”
Another country boy. But she felt like a child with this man. He couldn’t be more than ten years older than she, but it was like what she’d always imagined talking with a father would be like. Stern, distant, wise, sure of himself, above all, sure of himself. The way adults were supposed to be, the way so few were.
They were coming into Bridgeport. He stopped a block down from the hotel and got out. “Take care driving back,” he said as she slipped across behind the wheel. “I’ll see you later.”
“Good luck,” she said, not sure that he’d consider luck relevant.
He was already walking away, turning into the shambling bear once more. She turned the car and headed back out of town. It was four o’clock — nine hours to go. She’d often wondered how soldiers felt waiting to make an attack and now she knew — a mixture of impatience, terror, and curiosity.
And in nine hours she’d say good-bye to Paul again. Siberia, she’d go to Siberia, where the past was weaker.
At ten o’clock Kuznetsky put a call through to a hotel in Knoxville. The telephone rang only once. “How is Rosa’s uncle?” he asked.
“Fine. She took the train this evening.”
“And her cousin?”
“I’ll be seeing him tonight.”
“Good.”
He went back up to the familiar room, studied the yard through Markham’s binoculars for the last time, and then hid them under the mattress, taking care to leave the cord visible. He left by the fire escape and followed the preplanned route through the darkened back streets and alleys to the perimeter of the freight yard. There was no sign of life. He climbed through the rail fencing, under a couple of Pullman cars, and found himself forty yards from the solitary boxcar. Still nothing. He darted across the open space and took up position underneath it. It was 10:20. If everything went well, they’d be at sea in just over twenty-four hours.
Kuznetsky felt intense relief at the thought. Was it only two weeks ago that he’d been considering espionage one of the lesser forms of endeavour? Well, he’d be glad to get back to where the enemy wore a different uniform and openly challenged you. Deception was a tiring business, and, he thought, probably as self-damaging as anything he’d ever done. He didn’t know how Amy had held herself together all those years. With people like Richard Lee, he supposed. And a capacity for self-delusion.
The noises of the town slowly died down and the lights finally went out on Main Street. It must be the war — Friday nights in St. Cloud had never been so quiet. He had a fleeting image of Nadezhda at a barn dance, smiled to himself in the gloom. America! So much energy so ill-directed. He was glad he’d come back, glad he’d seen the Minnesota plains again. It seemed like an end, a welcome end. The war would soon be over, and they could start to build again, this time with the people as one. Taming the wildernesses, the one outside and the ones within.
He heard the sound of a car approaching. He mentally ran through the sequence of events Amy had written out, as he watched the state troopers, both of them this time, walking across to the depot. He heard the rap on the door, the greetings, a laugh. The lights went on, brighter than he’d expected. Three men came out, lit cigarettes, and gazed hopefully down the track. The train was late. They sat down on the edge of a loading platform, their voices unnaturally loud in the overall silence.
Then the toot of a whistle, the distant chuffing of the engine. Kuznetsky watched it pull around the curve into the station and stop at the predicted place. Damn. He had miscalculated the length of the train: the caboose didn’t cut off his line of approach from the group of men. He would have to cross the first ten yards in clear line of sight.
The fireman stood atop the tender, holding the hose as the water glugged through. As he disappeared over the other side, the meeting began to break up. Now or never. He crawled across the rail, out from under the cover of the boxcar, and wriggled his way across the first ten yards. There were no shouts. He got to his feet and sprinted the remainder, drawing the Walther as he did so. Hauling himself up the cab steps, he found himself face-to-face with the fireman, who had just lifted a sandwich to his mouth.
“Silence or you’re dead,” he whispered harshly. The sandwich dropped as the man lifted his arms, shock giving way to indignation on his face.
The engineer was coming, shouting something back to the men he’d left. “I mean it,” Kuznetsky said, maneuvering himself into position for the driver’s appearance. At least the engine was making enough noise to half-drown a shot. But the fireman’s face relaxed; the moment of immediate danger for him had passed.
“Keep coming,” Kuznetsky said, holding the automatic a foot from the engineer’s face as he climbed into the cab. “Now let’s go,” he said, moving back to where he could cover them both.
“Hey…!”
“Do it. Your life is hanging by a thread, mister. Believe me.”
The two men stared at him, found nothing in his eyes to doubt. The engineer opened the regulator, and the engine began moving forward. “There’s easier ways to get a ride, bud,” he muttered.
“Just drive the train. Normal speed, normal everything.”
“Can we talk?”
“Just drive the train.” Kuznetsky shifted position to allow the fireman to shovel some coal while he watched the engineer’s actions. “Now slow down slightly,” he ordered. The man did so. “Okay, back to the usual speed.”
“What sort of game are you playing, bud?” He sounded curious rather than belligerent.
“No games. I wanted to know how to slow this thing down if you two happen to meet with an accident.”