by Jan Fedarcyk
Kay gestured for him to continue.
“Your brother has gotten into some very serious trouble, Kay,” he said. “Very serious indeed.”
“That doesn’t sound like my Christopher.”
“This isn’t the time for levity,” Luis said, the slightest hint of disapproval in his voice.
“No, I suppose it isn’t.”
“He’s been selling narcotics.”
If Luis had been expecting Kay to react with surprise, or shock, or horror, he was disappointed. Kay nodded, almost absently, as if this were a matter of passing importance or, at most, casual interest, and then she gestured again for him to continue.
“Cocaine, from what I understand. First, behind the counter at that bar he works at, but he’s recently moved on to more serious infractions.”
“Has he been arrested?” Kay asked, voice even and neutral. “Because there isn’t very much I can do about that. That would be a matter for the NYPD, not the FBI, and I don’t have any sort of pull there.”
“Unfortunately, Kay, right now Christopher has more to worry about than the police.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Our Christopher . . .” Luis said, staring off suddenly at the open windows, squinting against the sunlight, then shaking his head and turning back to the conversation, “. . . is, as it turns out, no better a drug dealer than he was a college student, or a guitar player, or . . . or . . .” He waved his hands, as if at that wide panoply of activities that his errant nephew had attempted and failed.
Kay narrowed her eyes. “He’s actually not a bad guitar player,” she said quietly. “But I suppose that’s neither here nor there.”
“No, it isn’t. The point is, in his efforts to become this generation’s Al Capone, your brother has made an enemy of some very powerful people.”
“The mob?”
“Of a sort.”
“Then I suppose the police will have to be involved,” Kay said. “A terrible scandal for everyone, but better prison than a coffin.”
Luis’s heart seized up at this, but he fought his nerves back down and continued. “That would be premature,” he said. “There are other aspects to be considered.”
“I don’t understand,” Kay said. “Christopher came to you to talk about this? That doesn’t sound very much like him at all. He must really be desperate. And why would he think you would be able to help him?”
“Christopher has not . . .” Here it was: the big moment, the reveal. Beneath the table Luis had clasped his hands tightly together, afraid if he let them go they would tremble uncontrollably. “Christopher did not reach out to me.”
“Then how do you know all this?” Kay asked, confused, or seeming so.
“The people he’s gotten involved with,” Luis said. “We have . . . friends in common. Friends who would be willing to keep his criminality a secret, to forgive his debts. To keep him out of danger.”
“Friends,” Kay repeated.
“Friends,” Luis said a second time.
“I’m surprised to hear that. I hadn’t realized your social circle was so varied.”
“I’ve had a long career, Kay,” Luis said. “I’ve met a lot of people in it. Thankfully, some of them might be in a position to help us.”
Kay narrowed her eyes. “You’ll have to forgive me, Uncle, I must be a bit slow today, but I’m still having trouble following. Are you trying to tell me that you have some sort of . . . criminal contacts? That your time as an ambassador, a respectable career but one long ended, has put you in touch with the sort of people who would help my brother sell cocaine?”
“Not criminals,” Luis said after a while, but quietly, as if he weren’t quite sure. “Not criminals.”
“Then what?”
“Professionals.”
“Professional what?” Kay asked.
“Members of . . . Members of a foreign intelligence service.”
Luis had turned his gaze towards the wall, and so did not see the sudden gleam come to Kay’s eyes, then retreat again quickly. “I see,” Kay said finally. “And these professionals are friends with the people to whom Christopher is indebted?”
“Very seriously indebted,” Luis said. “Tens of thousands of dollars, the sort of loss which cannot be taken casually even by wealthy people.”
“And these friends of yours, they can get Christopher out of his trouble?”
“They can make it go away entirely. They can make your brother’s problems disappear. As if they never existed,” he said.
“And what would they want in return, exactly?”
“That would be a matter best discussed with them, I think. One of my . . . friends . . . is waiting nearby. He can explain the matter more clearly to you. What they can offer, and what will be required.”
There: it was out, Luis was thinking, and it hadn’t been as terrible as he thought it would be. It had been bad, certainly, but it hadn’t been terrible; it hadn’t been nearly as bad as . . . as some of the other things he had done. He even felt a momentary sense of freedom, as if of a great burden being eased, and better perhaps to be damned than to have this weight hanging forever over his shoulders, although of course he had been damned long, long ago.
“That was very neatly done, Uncle Luis,” Kay said quietly, turning her cool green eyes back to face him. “That was almost professional.”
Luis cleared his throat and continued. “Kay, I’m doing my best to protect you here. But we don’t have much time. There are certain things that you need to do. They may be difficult for you, but they are the only way out for your brother.”
“That’s good, Luis, that’s very good. You’re my lifeline. You’re the only thing standing between the cold hard hand of the SVR along Christopher’s throat. Along mine. Very neatly done, as I said. But then again, this isn’t your first time making this pitch, is it? Not even your first time making this pitch to a member of my family.”
Luis did not gasp, but his blue eyes went very wide, as if seeking to escape from his face.
“How did he react?” Kay asked.
“I . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Paul Malloy. You remember Paul, right? Your best friend for twenty years? Husband of Anne, father of Christopher and Kay?”
“Kay, you must listen to me. We’re on a clock, and—”
Kay checked her watch. “We’ve got a few minutes,” she said. “And it’s a little late in the day for you to play coy, don’t you think? You’ve already as much as told me you’re a spy. What is there left to hide?”
“We all have things to hide,” he said almost inaudibly.
Kay gestured to the bright light streaming in through the windows. “Today is a day for revelations. Today is a day for throwing off masks. Where were you when you made the approach to my father?”
“Central Park,” Luis said softly. “Near the reservoir.”
“What was the angle?”
“I would . . .” Luis licked his lips. “I’d rather not say.”
Kay bit back a smile: to think, after everything, after all of it, he still wanted to protect the memory of Paul Malloy. “I’m afraid we’re past the point of half truths. And there’s nothing more you can do to hurt them.”
Luis flinched, looked off towards the wall. “His work required him to be away from you for weeks, sometimes months at a time. He had committed . . . indiscretions.”
Amidst the betrayals and perfidies that Kay had discovered over the course of the last weeks and months, that her father had once been unfaithful to her mother seemed rather insignificant. “Interesting,” she said.
“Your father was a good man,” Luis said suddenly, adamantly, as if it were very important to him that Kay believed it. “He was the best man I ever knew. But no one is perfect, Kay. We all . . . We all do things
that are beneath us. We all find ourselves in situations sometimes that we would rather not be in, where our only escape is via a sewer.”
“What a neat turn of phrase, Uncle. Tell me, would you include his murder in this category of lamentable misbehavior?”
Luis closed his eyes for a long time, pursed his lips as if undergoing some pain. “I didn’t have anything to do with that.”
“No?” Kay raised her eyebrows. “Nothing? Hands are clean and unmarked?”
Luis did not answer.
“I’ll speak for you, then. My father was many things, as we all are, and perhaps some of those things weren’t perfect. But he wasn’t a spy, and he refused to become one. And you began to get very nervous that he would tell someone that you couldn’t say the same, didn’t you? Perhaps the SVR heard that he had contacted the FBI; perhaps they simply decided that they couldn’t afford to lose such an important and influential contact. And happily, conveniently, he was always sprinting out of the country on some mission of do-goodery. It would have been an easy thing to ensure an accident befell him. My mother, I can only assume, was a mistake. But then, these things happen sometimes, don’t they? Collateral damage in this great game between two mighty nations: a few lives snuffed out, no worse than the loss of a pawn.”
“I knew nothing of it,” Luis said again. “I swear. It is true that I made the approach, and it is true that your father reacted . . . angrily. But I had nothing to do with what happened to him afterward. If they did it . . .”
“If? If?”
But Luis continued over her, his voice rising with intensity. “If they did it, they did not tell me,” Luis said, again, growing animated. “I swear to you, I knew nothing of it. I swear on . . . on—”
But he did not finish. Kay cut him off, for the first time in the long conversation a spurt of rage coiling itself behind her eyes. “What would be left for you to swear on, Uncle? Country? Family? God? What haven’t you betrayed?”
“On your aunt,” he said finally.
The sudden flash of anger, uncharacteristic, eased off of Kay’s face, and what was left might have been regret or sorrow or nothing at all. “She was the start of it, wasn’t she? All those years ago in Poland. It wasn’t money or prestige. You did it for her, didn’t you?”
Luis nodded, swallowed hard.
“That was how she got free of the secret police?”
Luis did not answer for a while, and on his face Kay could see the scars left from a day long past in a country far distant. “We had a date,” he said. “We were to meet for coffee at one of the small cafés in the city center. She was late. At first I did not worry: your aunt was always making me late. She would get caught up in a conversation, or something would catch her fancy, and she would forget all about her duties and pursue it wholeheartedly. But after an hour I began to worry, and after two I was terrified and certain. That was the way they did it, you see: there was no warning; you would leave your office or your home and a man would come up to you on the street and walk you into a car and then you would never be seen again, swallowed up in the bowels of some concrete government building or settled into an unmarked grave.”
“What did you do?”
“Everything I could,” he said, the memory making him miserable. “Which, in the end, was nothing. I rang every contact that I knew, I made the loudest ruckus that I could, called in every favor I had accumulated in years as a diplomat. To no end. They could do nothing, none of them. I found out she was taken, but that was as much as I could learn.”
“And then?” Kay said, after her uncle had been long silent.
But he did not answer at first, not for a long time. “Two weeks she was gone,” he said. “The most terrible time of my life. Nothing to match it, and I have had some bad days, Kay, you had best believe I have had some bad days. But nothing like that: I was going mad. Mad, truly. I was sure she was dead, and I was thinking—I had come to think very seriously—about joining her. A razor, a drop from a tall height, and then we would be together, or at least I would no longer be alone.” Kay could read the memory of that despair on his face, even all these years later. “And then a man sat down next to me at a bar that I frequented, clean, neat-looking, very serious. And he told me that there was still time to save the woman that I loved. That her crimes had been very terrible, but that there was still a chance for her to be forgiven. That she could be released, that she could be set free. That arrangements could even be made for her to leave the country, to return with me to the U.S., if that was what we wished.”
“The carrot,” Kay said.
Luis smiled nastily. “Indeed it was. And this . . . very serious man, this polite and well-dressed man, he made it entirely clear to me what would happen to her if I did not go along. What . . . What would be done to her.”
Kay thought for a moment of the two missing fingers on her aunt’s hand, of the ghostly pallor that had dropped over her face while speaking of her time in prison. “And then?”
“I said yes, of course,” Luis said. “In a heartbeat, without consideration. And do you know what?” he announced, wide-eyed, shaking his head slowly. “I would do it again. Despite everything, I would do it again. I would sell every secret I ever learned, I would betray my country and the service, I would betray your father, and your mother, and your brother, and you, to keep your aunt alive for a single day longer. It is a terrible thing, to discover your own weakness—to be broken in that spot.”
“As you were hoping to break me, Uncle?”
He seemed to close down around himself then, head dropping down into his shoulders, shoulders weighing down into his chest, as if she had put something heavy on his back and it was bearing him down through his chair and into the floor and below it, to the very foundations themselves. “You have cause to hate me. I am worthy of your loathing. I have earned it. And I know how this must sound to you, Kay—believe me, I know. But the truth is that we, all of us, have less control over our lives than a gnat carried along in a storm. Random chance, the hand of fate or some . . . other engineer: these determine the course of our lives more than any of us would like to believe. Our pretensions of morality, the certainty we have about who and what we are, these are nothing but comforting illusions. We do what is required of us. When your aunt was captured and they offered to free her, I responded without hesitation: there was no alternative; that was what was required of me. Right now, what is required of us is that we do whatever we must to help your brother.”
“Your friends,” Kay said after a long time. “What would they want in exchange for their help?”
For a moment Luis seemed to regain his footing. “Not much,” he said. “They’re reasonable people. They’re really very reasonable people. You wouldn’t need to do anything . . . unsavory. Nothing that would jeopardize your career. Indeed, it may well prove to be the opposite: it is as much in their interests as yours to see you continue to ascend in the hierarchy.”
“Has that been your experience, Uncle?” Kay asked. “Did it help your career, becoming a spy? Did they ever ask you to do anything unsavory?”
“That’s not important right now,” he said, trying to convince someone. “What matters right now is your brother and what we can do to save him. There aren’t two options; there isn’t any other way out. Your brother is in terrible danger, and you’re the only one in a position to help him. You may feel any way you want about me—God knows I deserve it. But I’m only the middleman, the conduit; hating me or breaking me will do you no good. Kay,” Luis began again, struggling into composure. “If you know all of this, then you know what sort of people we’re dealing with. Nothing I said was false. Your brother is in terrible danger. Please,” he said, and for the first time in the conversation his voice squeaked into a higher register. “Please, for the love of God, do not make me a murderer twice over. Your father left the two of you in my charge. Perhaps he was a fool to do so. I did my b
est,” he said, dry-mouthed, sorrowful, licking his lips, eyes like some caged beast. “I did my best.”
Kay looked at her uncle for a long time. Then she got up from her seat, walked over to the kitchen cabinets and removed a glass, filled it with water and set it in front of Luis. After a moment’s pause he drank from it greedily, swallowed it in one gulp and set it back down on the table.
“That’s almost true, Uncle. Everything you told me you believed to be true.” Kay put her hands in her lap. “This is indeed a very desperate situation—not for me, however, and not for Christopher, either.”
“Now’s not the time for false courage, Kay.”
“I can’t promise you much,” Kay said sadly. “Treason, that’s what we’re looking at, and no one could pretend otherwise. I won’t lie to you: you’ll probably be dying in prison. There’s only so much that I can do for anyone, and even if I could do more, I’m not sure that I’d do it for you. I’m truly not sure.” She shook her head as if clearing away confusion. “The FBI are waiting outside,” Kay said simply. “And this conversation isn’t about you making your pitch to me: I’m making the pitch to you. Christopher is fine—well, not fine: Christopher is broken, broken by the death of his parents, broken by the lies of the man who was to raise him, perhaps also by a sister who didn’t believe in him the way she should have. But he’s in no danger from the SVR. That much, at least, I can assure you.”
“You . . . You knew?”
“For a while,” Kay said. “For longer, maybe, than I realized. This man who made the approach to you—your handler these last years. What was his name?”
“I knew him only as Pyotr,” Luis said. “But his true name I cannot say.”
Kay swallowed a deep intake of breath, tried not to show her surprise or excitement. “And you were to hand over the rest of this conversation to him? He’s to be your . . . relief, as it were?”
“No,” Luis said. “There is another man—a man I only met recently, a week or so ago. His name is Tom. He’s—”