“You were much younger than he.”
She smiled in remembrance. “In Mexico in those days that did not matter.” The x in Mexico was silent. As she continued she began to revert more and more into Spanish pronunciations.
It was a traditional courtship, she said. Darby had never tried to rush it, although she got the feeling at the time that she was racing headlong down a slick but wonderful toy slide. They were the feted guests wherever they appeared; he knew more people in Mexico than did her parents: Her mother was the third daughter of the governor of the State of Hidalgo, northwest of Mexico City, and her father was the assistant secretary of finance for the federal government. After their honeymoon, though, they seldom spent a quiet evening at home together. Either they went out or there was a crowd at their palatial home outside the city. Sometimes they went to the mountains, sometimes to the seaside, but wherever they went after that there was always a crowd around them. Darby, she said, called them his mob.
“One month later Baranov came into our lives,” Evita said. “But I think he and Darby were already old friends by that time.”
If her husband was a charming man, she said, Valentin Illen Baranov was a simply bewitching human being. He was short and powerfully built, with a thick, square head and dark, bushy eyebrows. But after five minutes of conversation with the man you would forget his physical person and seem to see through to his soul. He was a power, a force, an adrenaline in even the most casual of encounters.
“When was that, exactly?” McGarvey asked. “Late ’59? Maybe 1960.”
“I don’t know, but it was in the winter, I think. Around Christmas. I came into Darby’s study and they were having drinks together. Filthy vodka. ‘A peasant’s drink,’ Valentin called it.” She raised her eyes, a small smile on her moist lips. “He always said he was a peasant, and when it was time for him to retire, if he lived that long, he would go back to the land. Somewhere in the Urals. He made it sound lovely.”
Darby was a little put out that she had barged in, she said. But Baranov was a charmer; jumping up, bowing, kissing her hand. “Oh, yes, Darby, you do have a lovely wife indeed,” he’d said. The words were sticky sweet, but Evita said she always got the impression he meant everything he said. Every single word. He insisted that she stay. It was nothing more than the conversation of two old friends getting to know each other a little better. He wouldn’t let Evita drink vodka, though, or any other hard liquor for that matter. Champagne was her drink. Sweet for in the morning, a little dryer for afternoon, and the Sahara Desert of champagnes — as only the French truly know how to make them — for the evenings.
They all went out that evening. Baranov insisted on showing them off. He’d heard a lot of good things about Evita, of course, and now that he had seen for his own eyes that what he’d heard was not an exaggeration, he wanted a little of her glitter to rub off on him.
“We always had a lot of friends in those days,” Evita said. “Mostly Mexican government officials at first. But shortly after Valentin’s first visit, we started chumming around with other couples from our own embassy.”
“Other CIA?”
“I guess so,” she said. “Though at the time I didn’t know it. I didn’t even know that Darby worked for the Company. That didn’t come until later.”
“How did you find out?”
“Valentin told me.”
“What did he tell you?”
“That Darby worked for the CIA, and that he also worked for … KGB.”
“And that they worked together?”
She nodded. “That too.”
“Did he mention anyone else? Another American working with them both?”
“Not that I can remember. But he was proud of himself. Proud of the relationship. He wasn’t any older than Darby, or at least not much, but he was more like a father to him than a friend. A father confessor, his priest.”
“And for you, Evita?” McGarvey asked gently.
She looked at him, her eyes wide, but she said nothing.
“What was Baranov to you? What did he become to you?”
“My husband’s friend.”
“That’s it?”
“What do you want?” she flared, but it wasn’t very convincing. Her emotions were by now rubbed beyond the point of simply raw. She was overloaded. The majority of the hurt might have happened more than twenty years ago, but the pain was still very fresh and very real to her.
“What was your husband’s reaction to this?” McGarvey asked.
“To what?”
“To your knowledge that he was working for the KGB as well as the CIA?”
“He said it wasn’t true ….”
“But he admitted that Baranov was KGB?”
“Of course. But he told me that not everything was as it seemed. There was more in this world than simple black and white. He kept talking about geopolitics and balances of power. We were on a teeterboard; Western democracy on the one side, and Russian Communism on the other, with nuclear weapons in the middle.”
McGarvey had heard the argument before. The Soviet Union and her satellite states were balanced by the Western European nations. It was important that the United States and Canada be balanced by Cuba and others in the Western Hemisphere. Only in this way could nuclear war be safely avoided. It was why the Russians had called the Cuban missiles “peace missiles.”
“Did you believe him?”
“What did I know? I told you I was a little girl with stars in my eyes. But already Darby was beginning to change, you know. He was busy. He was gone a lot those days. If I was at our town house, he might spend a weekend in the mountains, leaving me behind. Business, he said. Or if I was at the mountains, he might go to the seashore for a week, sometimes even longer.”
Baranov began coming around, then. He took her out to dinner once, and afterward to the Ateneo Español, but the place frightened her. They were real revolutionaries, radicals who talked endlessly about shooting and burning and tearing down the establishments. They all had a great deal of respect for Valentin in that place, but he promised never to take her back. He was sensitive to her needs. McGarvey suspected he had been digging a deeper hole into which Evita would eventually be dropped once she realized what was and had been happening around her.
Everything else seemed to change then for Evita. She’d become an American, her parents told her. And her father died within ten months of the wedding. Darby was sent out of town at that exact moment; exactly when she needed him more than she’d ever needed anyone in her life. Her final lesson came the very evening of the funeral.
Valentin was there at the house, Evita said. It was late, her sisters had stayed with their mother, and she had gotten the feeling that they didn’t really want her there with them, that her place was at home waiting for her husband as any good wife should. Her father was dead, her husband was gone, and the rest of the family was beginning to ostracize her.
He was waiting in the conservatory, Evita’s favorite room in the house. He had dismissed the staff for the evening. He knew that she would be coming back, and he even knew in which room she would bury herself when she did return, so he had set it up for her return with champagne and flowers. She asked him what he was doing there like that, at that hour, but she was secretly glad he had come, whatever the reason. The champagne was Mumms, the very driest, he said. He poured her a glass and watched her drink, even held her hand for a time while she cried. He talked then about dying; about the old moving aside to make room for the young and how it was the responsibility of the young therefore to make a difference in the world, to make life just a little nicer, a little safer, so that when it was time to hand things over to the next generation we could be proud to do so. As her father must have been proud to do for her, in the end.