“I thought I’d killed you,” Christopher said.
He told her about the photograph the Truong toe had given him.
“Was that the picture that odd little Vietnamese took in the restaurant?” Molly asked.
“Yes. I was stupid to let him see you.”
“And you think they really would kill me in order to- what? Punish you for learning their secrets?”
“I know they would,” Christopher said.
Looking steadily into her eyes, Christopher told her what his life had been. He gave her no details, just the fact that he had always lied to her. Molly gazed back at him while he spoke, showing no flicker of surprise.
She said, “Is this what drove Cathy to do the things she did -knowing you were a spy?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Then she was a fool.”
“You may not say so when you’ve lived with it for a while, Molly. Ninety percent of the time it’s a foolish, joking sort of life. But once in a while something like this happens, and the joke stops.”
“Do these people really go about murdering strangers?”
“Not usually. This time they’re really threatened.”
Molly moved for the first time since they had begun to talk; she crossed her legs, clasped her bare knee, and put her chin on it, as if listening to a story about creatures she didn’t believe in.
“What do you have on them, for heaven’s sake?”
“Molly, it’s better that you don’t know that.”
“No,” she said, “we’re not going to have that again, Paul. If you don’t tell me I’ll go out into the streets and let them kill me. I won’t go on with you.”
“All right,” Christopher said. “I believe they assassinated Kennedy. I have some proof, and before I’m done I’ll have it all.”
“I see. And when you have the proof, what good will it be?”
“I don’t know, Molly. All my life I’ve believed that the truth is worth knowing, even if it leads to nothing. It usually leads to nothing. But what else is there?”
Molly touched herself, and with the same finger, touched Christopher.
“Yes,” he said. “But I didn’t know that always.”
“It’s funny,” Molly said, after a moment of silence. “I won’t say I’m not frightened. But it’s too unreal.”
“It’s real enough,” Christopher said. “I’m sorry you have to know.”
“Know what? I’ve always known you were dying of shame. Now I know why, and it’s not so bad as it might have been.
Whatever you’ve done, you’ve done for your country. Isn’t that supposed to justify anything?”
“That’s what we train ourselves to believe.”
“Yes,” Molly said. “I would like to know one more thing. Have you killed other men?”
Christopher closed his eyes. “Not with a gun or with my hands,” he said. “People have died because I made mistakes, or by accident. Sometimes I knew it was going to happen and did nothing to prevent it. I don’t know the difference between that and murder.”
2
Molly made them a cooked breakfast. She put a new record on the phonograph and stood with her arm around Christopher’s waist and a glass in her hand, waiting for him to laugh at the words of a new Italian love song.
After they ate, she gave him the mail and the telephone messages from the office. Christopher sorted out five of the telephone messages and pushed them across the table.
“Who’s this?” he asked.
“Herman. I don’t know whether that’s supposed to be a first or a last name. He talks Italian with an accent.”
“And this was the message?”
“Yes. It seems less mysterious now than it did then. He just kept saying he’d be standing by the Pietà in Saint Peter’s at ten o’clock in the morning and again at four in the afternoon. Then he’d say, ‘Molto urgente!’-and ring off.”
“Could you tell what sort of an accent he had?”
“Not really. A lot of tongue and lips in it.”
Christopher looked at his watch. “It’s three-thirty,” he said. “I ought to be back in less than two hours.”
Molly gave him a long look and then laughed. “Ah,” she said, “the joys of love.”
“Molly, you have to understand. This may be nothing-I may not even make the contact when I see who it is. But I have to know. It could be important.”
“It could be a killer.”
“In Saint Peter’s? Shooting a man in front of the Pietà is the sort of thing a lover or a lunatic would do-not a professional.”
“Kennedy was shot in Dallas, in the middle of a crowd of people with cameras.”
“Yes,” Christopher said, “but there’s no way to kill the President of the United States discreetly.”
“What you’re saying is that if they kill you-or me, I suppose-they’ll not simply kill us but destroy all trace of us. Isn’t that it?”
“That’s the idea, Molly.”
They sat on opposite sides of a narrow table, and Christopher could see every detail of Molly’s face. Her eyes were closed and she pressed her lips together, so that a web of lines appeared for an instant on her smooth skin. Tears ran through her lashes.
“My God, how cruel,” she whispered. “They leave a person no meaning at all.”
Christopher turned up the volume on the phonograph and told Molly what to do while he was gone. On his way out of the building, he used the stairs again, searching the hallways on each floor as he descended.
The day was as gray as slate. There was no one in the street except a shepherd, down from the Abruzzi for the Christmas season, who stood on the low wall above the river playing bagpipes. The shepherd’s wild music followed Christopher across the Ponte Sant’Angelo, but no one was behind him, and he was still alone when he reached Saint Peter’s Square. He walked through one of the colonnades of Saint Peter’s, loitering among the pillars, but still saw no one following.
Inside the basilica, he walked along the left wall, pausing to look at paintings. In an alcove near the great altar he saw the original of Luong’s picture of Christ: its meaning was being explained in German by a guide to a group of tourists. Christopher walked on, behind the main altar. Foreign priests were celebrating mass in the chapels along the sides of the basilica.
Gherman Klimenko, standing before the Pietà with a guidebook in his hand, saw Christopher coming. He leaned on the chapel rail, as if to read Michelangelo’s signature on the girdle of the Madonna, then snapped the guidebook shut and walked leisurely to the other side of the church. Christopher paused for a moment at the sculpture and watched Klimenko’s gray-tweed overcoat disappear into the group of German tourists.
He followed Klimenko past Luong’s Christ and saw the Russian get into the elevator that led to the roof of Saint Peter’s. Christopher took the stairway, and Klimenko was already on the gallery, gazing down into the Vatican gardens, when Christopher got there. He went to the opposite side of the terrace and waited until a young couple finished taking photographs and descended the stairs. Klimenko turned and looked at him, and Christopher walked across the flagstones toward him.
“This has been very dangerous for me, coming to the same place at the same hours for three days,” Klimenko said.
“I’ve been away. I only got your message today.”
Klimenko had no hair and he was always cold. Even in Africa he wore a buttoned suit. He stared morosely at Christopher and pulled his fur hat tighter on his bald head; a sharp wind filled with rain blew the skirt of his coat and he leaned over and tucked it between his knees.
“I think you know what I want,” Klimenko said.