“It’s insane,” she’d said quietly, “but it makes perfect sense.”
Back in her cabin, its walls seeming to mock the dreadful openness of her mind, Amy sat on the floor, her back against the bunk, her legs splayed and straight like a little girl’s.
It did make sense: that was what seemed so terrifying. It made sense that Paul should die, should be killed, if not by her then at least with her active connivance. It made perfect sense. Richard had died for the same reason, and Joe, and the guards, and the boy who had appeared from nowhere. And Paul would die. To make it all work. If he didn’t, it wouldn’t work. Her feelings had no power to change the logic of it.
She wanted Paul, but only for herself. She wanted it all to work, for herself perhaps, but for others, too, and that was the difference. At times during the days at sea the distinction had escaped her, her motivation had been impossible to pin down in words, and she’d wondered whether she’d spent ten years trapped in an illusion. But she hadn’t.
The distinction was real, the struggle was real, existing outside as well as inside herself. She couldn’t release herself from it even if she wanted to. If Paul’s death was the price demanded, then she would pay. It wasn’t what you felt that counted, it was what you did.
She could remember the very day Aunt Rosa had said that to her mother. The two women had been arguing, as they often did, but this time with more anger than usual, and at the end of the argument they’d hugged each other. She had watched from the stairs, had rushed to join the hugging, not knowing what it was for but knowing that it was important.
Aunt Rosa. She had a picture of herself and Effi sitting in that same kitchen listening to one of Aunt Rosa’s “history lessons” as they prepared the evening meal. The man in the factory working all day and getting next to no money, the owner in his big house sitting around doing nothing, getting richer and richer. And how they should even feel sorry for the rich man, because all his riches were things, cold and empty things.
It must have been in the month following Aunt Rosa’s release from prison; she’d been weak, thinner than before, but her face at that time had seemed almost luminescent, like the pictures of the Virgin Mary in stained-glass windows. And she and Effi had sat there, sometimes not understanding what this wonderful woman was saying, but captivated by the face and the kindness and the simple intensity of belief. The world could be better, fairer, more human.
Fables for children perhaps. But they’d carried a truth she’d never been able to deny, because all the people she’d ever loved — all except Paul — had lived it, had worked and struggled and died for something beyond themselves. And their deaths had not been an illusion.
The Soviet Union might be; she didn’t know. But the alternative was not: an American world in which no one cared for anything but themselves and Aunt Rosa’s cold and empty things. If the material in the crates could prevent that, they were worth any cost.
Only a few more days. Kuznetsky would kill Paul and then he and she would die. It was fair and just.
There was no other way.
Kuznetsky looked at his watch as he inhaled the cigarette. It was almost two in the morning. He checked the Walther once more and sat for another ten minutes adjusting his eyes to the darkness.
“Thy kingdom come, the Party’s will be done,” he murmured to himself as he stood up. “On earth as it is at sea.”
The two Germans had taken separate cabins. Perhaps Paul had hoped to resume his affair with Amy, perhaps they were fed up with each other’s snoring. Either way, it simplified matters.
He stepped out onto the deck, found the light brighter than he’d anticipated. The sky was overcast, but every now and then the moon would find a thinner layer of cloud to shine through, bathing the freighter and the sea in a silvery glow. A few miles to the south, the dark bumpy line of the Shetland Islands divided the ocean from the sky.
The sea was choppy rather than rough, and not as noisy as he’d hoped. Still, Sjoberg had arranged for the helmsman that night to be a Party sympathizer, and he himself took the stern watch. No one would hear anything. He took the strangling cord from his pocket, stood outside Gerd’s door, and listened. Nothing. He eased the door open and slipped noiselessly inside, closing it behind him. There was no one in the bunk.
He went to the cabin next door, but it was empty too. A white square shone in the gloom, a note pinned to the mirror. He struck a match and read it: “Amy, Bremerhaven Bahnhof, 14 July.” For an instant Kuznetsky saw the expression of surprise on his own face in the mirror, an expression he’d forgotten he had.
He went back on deck, walked purposefully back toward the stern. Above the sound of the ship’s passage he heard a scraping noise, recognized it from the loading in Havana. They were moving the crates. He peered out around the corner of the ship’s superstructure, saw the silhouettes of the two Germans pushing a crate toward the starboard rail, and as the sky momentarily lightened, he caught a glimpse of a body, Sjoberg’s, lying motionless on the stern deck.
Somehow they’d found him out, and had decided to take the uranium to Germany on their own. He felt almost proud of them.
He worked his way nearer, dodging silently through the crates of general merchandise stacked amidships until he was no more than ten yards away. Raising the Walther with both arms extended, his feet splayed to compensate for the ship’s motion, he took aim at the back of Gerd’s head.
He couldn’t do it. Didn’t want to do it. They deserved to see his face as he pulled the trigger. Private executions were bad enough, and even then the victim could see his executioner.
As he stepped forward the moonlight suddenly brightened, giving his entrance an almost theatrical quality. The two Germans stiffened, then relaxed as they saw the gun, relaxed in the way he had once seen a Siberian tiger relax, with a casualness that obscured the alertness of their poise. They didn’t expect a chance, but were ready for one if it came.
“Where are you planning to go, gentlemen?” he asked softly.
“We’re sleepwalking,” Paul said, edging away from Gerd. Kuznetsky stopped him with a flick of his wrist.
“We decided the Führer’s genius didn’t require any assistance,” Gerd said sarcastically.
Kuznetsky smiled at his own misjudgment and admired them even more. “They’re not intended for your Führer,” he said. “Or Nazi Germany.”
A tiny voice inside him said, “Let them go,” but was instantly silenced by the familiar voice of duty.
“Somehow,” Gerd said, “that doesn’t seem as surprising as it should.”
Amy lay awake on the bunk watching the play of light on her cabin walls. Another twenty-four hours. What could be wrong in spending the last night with Paul? It would change nothing. In the dark there would be no deception, in the dark their love would be real. And the thought of it, of one more meeting, one last immersion in that other world, had held her together through the weeks at sea.
She climbed out of the bunk, wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, and left her cabin. The iron plate felt cold beneath her feet. She went to tap on Paul’s door but it was ajar, the cabin empty, the note shining on the mirror.
“Why?” Gerd asked, almost disinterestedly. His gun lay on the crate, hidden from Kuznetsky by a bag of food they’d brought for the journey. If only it wasn’t lying with the butt farthest away from him.
“Why?” Kuznetsky seemed to find the question ridiculous. “I serve a cause I believe in. Could you say the same?”