Our Woman in Moscow

by Beatriz Williams

  A few more beats, and Sasha shuddered and arched his back and let out a soft howl. The crisis died woozily away and Iris’s bones went slack. She heard the stream again, giggling at them. She wanted to giggle, too. Sasha swore and rolled off, panting.

  “What’s wrong? I thought that was wonderful.”

  “I meant to pull out, that’s all. I don’t have a rubber on.”

  “I don’t care. I don’t care if it happens. Do you?”

  “It would be inconvenient.”

  “Well, it didn’t happen the first time, did it? I think it would be wonderful.”

  Sasha stuffed himself back inside his trousers and buttoned them. “You do realize there’s a war going on out there, don’t you?”

  She rolled on her side and ran her finger along the bridge of his nose. “But do you care, or not?”

  “I don’t want to put you in any kind of position, that’s all.”

  “I’d say you’ve already put me in all kinds of positions, and I’ve enjoyed them very much.”

  Sasha tried and failed to suppress a laugh. “Fair enough.”

  “What about your position, though? That’s what I’m getting at. What would you think, if it happens? Would you want me to get rid of it?”

  Finally he turned his head and looked at her. His face radiated that gleaming flush she knew so well. True, he wore a rubber most of the time, but not every single time, and sometimes when he wasn’t wearing a rubber he didn’t—or couldn’t—pull out. So Iris wanted to pin him down. She wanted to hear this from his own mouth, in case it did happen. Maybe today, who knew. Maybe it already had happened. What about last week, in the cloakroom of the British ambassador’s residence? What a messy occasion that was, but these mistakes would occur when you didn’t plan ahead. Just now, for example.

  Iris patted his cheek, not quite a slap. A few blades of grass fell away from her fingers. “Well? What do you say to that?”

  He trapped her hand against his skin and leaned over the inches of grass to kiss her.

  “I say we cross that bridge if we come to it.”

  The rest of Saturday passed in a haze, and most of Sunday, too. Sunday afternoon, as planned, Sasha drove into town to find a telephone box, from which he would call Harry to say that he’d had car trouble and would have to stay the night while the engine was being repaired, so he wouldn’t return to Rome until Monday. Foolproof!

  Iris asked to go along, too. She was curious about the town—she loved old buildings and the art inside them. But Sasha said no, he’d run his errands faster if he knew she was waiting for him.

  “Errands? What errands?”

  “You’ll see,” he said, kissing her good-bye.

  So Iris just wandered drowsily around the garden, listening to the stream and to the songbirds, until she remembered her sketchbook. Of course, she’d had to pack it after all, under Ruth’s knowing eye, and her charcoals, too. She headed into the house and the small, hot bedroom. Neither Iris nor Sasha ever took the time to unpack, and the sketchbook lay at the bottom of her valise, under all her crumpled clothes, forgotten. She dug it out and turned to leave.

  But some instinct forced her to stop at the door. The shutters were closed and the room was dark, and the air still smelled of human sleep. Iris felt as if she’d lived an entire lifetime since they’d arrived here Saturday morning, had burst into this room and made ravenous love, and afterward she’d brushed her hair in the scrap of mirror above the dresser. She’d almost forgotten about that envelope in Sasha’s suitcase, and what it contained.

  But not quite.

  Iris rested her hand on the doorframe and stared at her short, round fingernails. A little dirty, perhaps, even though she and Sasha had bathed in the stream together that morning, and Sasha had soaped and washed her thoroughly. But that’s what you got when you spent the day outdoors. When you spent the day laughing and playing, walking and talking, drinking and kissing, rolling stark naked on the grass and the floor and the bed, away on your first holiday with the man you loved—the man who loved you.

  Who trusted you.

  Iris tapped her fingers against the wood and turned around. She bent over Sasha’s valise, still on the floor, and opened the lid to rummage around.

  She looked in the main compartment and the small one, the zippered pocket next to the lining.

  The envelope was gone.

  When Sasha returned, an hour later, Iris sat on the garden wall and stared into the fallen sun. The sketchbook lay open on the bricks beside her, along with a bottle of wine. Sasha had done most of the drinking since they arrived, as usual—a bottle of wine at lunch and another at dinner, gin and tonic to quench the thirst in between—but this time Iris retrieved the bottle from the cellar, a red wine from Tuscany, easy on the palate, and drank it solemnly atop the garden wall.

  Iris’s first thought, when he walked through the doorway onto the grass, was how beautiful he looked. Did she think he was plain when she first saw him, at the Villa Borghese? You could argue that his features were not beautiful, sure, that his big ears and long nose and bony cheeks and especially that sharp brow were maybe coarse and not in perfect balance, as in a work of art. But the overall effect just dazzled her. His height, and his hair, and the ultramarine eyes. He walked straight up to her and put his hands on either side of her hips and kissed her. He smelled of sweet liquor, limoncello maybe, the kind that Italians drink as digestivo.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  He pulled his cigarettes from his jacket pocket. “Something wrong?”

  “No, not at all. Did you get hold of Harry?”

  “He bought it. Swallowed it whole actually. Swore at me a little.”

  “And your errands?”

  “What about them?”

  “Did you get them all done?”

  He was having trouble lighting his cigarette, which was odd because there was no breeze at all. At last the end flared orange. He closed his eyes as he inhaled.

  “Because I was wondering, you know. Isn’t everything closed on a Sunday?”

  “Oh, yes. Of course it was.”

  “But you were gone so long.”

  “I had trouble finding a working telephone.”

  Sasha squinted at some point past Iris’s ear, the hillside or something, while the smoke curled in extravagant ribbons around his face and hair. There was some difference to him, but she couldn’t pin it down. Was he paler? Maybe. His face was so rigid. His mouth and his cheeks made small adjustments as he smoked the cigarette, but his eyes, his forehead, his brow were cast in wax. He lifted the cigarette back to his lips, and Iris noticed that his hand was trembling.

  “What’s the matter? Didn’t the photographs please her?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The photographs in the envelope. In your suitcase. I assume you were passing those along to that woman? The one I saw you with in the Borghese gardens?”

  What was surprising was that he wasn’t surprised. If his eyebrows rose a millimeter or two, they only expressed amazement at her tone, which—she’d freely admit—smacked more of jealousy than outrage. If he channeled all the pyrotechnics of his blue eyes into hers, he was only trying to figure out whether she really cared. Sitting high on the brick wall, Iris exactly matched his height. She didn’t realize how unequal they were until now—older, taller, stronger, better educated, worldly-wise—why, Sasha had had every advantage, until this moment when she knew his secret.

  “So you looked through my suitcase, did you?” he said, without rancor, and revelation arrived on Iris’s head like the dawn.

  “You wanted me to see it, didn’t you? You left it there yesterday for me to find. Right there in plain sight, an open suitcase. That’s why you told me to stay behind today. You wanted me to see it was gone.”

  He put his hand over her mouth.

  “Before you say another word, I want you to know that I’ve never done a single thing—never passed along a single iot
a of information that would harm the United States.”

  Iris nodded. He dropped his hand and pulled on the cigarette.

  “The Soviets are being left in the cold, that’s all, because of ideological prejudice. Because the success of the Soviet system threatens the way we’ve always done things. The way that killed your father, Iris, the same way that corrupted mine. You know I’m right. I couldn’t just sit back and do nothing.”

  Iris slung her arms around his neck. “I don’t care about any of that. I don’t care about politics. I care about you. I want you to trust me. I don’t want you to keep any secrets from me. Whatever you’re doing, I know you’re doing it because you believe in it, and you’re trying to make the world a better place, and I love you for it. But I can’t stand it if you don’t trust me.”

  “That’s why I left my suitcase open.”

  “And that woman. She’s your—your—”

  “Don’t worry about her.”

  “But she’s Russian, isn’t she? She’s the one who—”

  “I said, don’t worry about her. Anything personal between us—her and me—that’s finished. It’s just business now.”

  “But you won’t tell me anything else about it.”

  “I’ve told you all you need to know, all right? Because I thought I should be square with you, what I’m doing.”

  She leaned her forehead against his. “Why?”

  “It’s only fair. I could get into trouble or something. It’s only fair you know you’re jumping into hot water.”

  “I already knew that.”

  He breathed into her mouth and she breathed back into his.

  “So we’re all right?” he said. “You’re still with me?”

  The sun was dropping into the sea. Iris’s heart pounded so hard, her chest might explode—not because she was scared but because she understood that everything depended upon this moment, this conversation, this decision. The entire course of her life pivoted around this point of vital contact, his forehead against hers.

  When Iris nodded, Sasha’s head moved too.

  He let out a noise of exultation and crushed out his cigarette on the bricks and kissed her—unbuttoned her dress—kissed her neck and breasts—all the familiar rituals. He untucked his shirt and Iris fumbled with the fastening on his trousers. On this wall nobody could see them or hear them—the ancient Sabine Hills rose up behind them—the sun set in unspeakable splendor behind Sasha’s head. The bricks left angry marks on the backs of her thighs. She discovered them the next day, when Sasha bathed her in the stream at the corner of the garden, before they returned to Rome.

  By then she’d forgotten how his hands shook when he returned from meeting his Soviet contact in Tivoli, how full of nerves he was.

  Early in the morning of Friday, the tenth of May, a ringing telephone woke Iris. Sasha stirred next to her and stumbled out of bed. The air was warm and dusky; she couldn’t see any sunlight through the cracks of the blinds. She flopped on her back and listened to Sasha’s low voice in the other room. Once he left for the embassy, she was supposed to return home to the apartment she shared with Ruth, cheerful and rested from her sketching holiday, and she didn’t know how she was going to do that. She wasn’t that Iris anymore. Her life was here, next to Sasha.

  Sasha said clearly, All right, I’ll be there in half an hour, and the receiver rattled into its cradle. His footsteps treaded the floorboards back toward her. She stretched her hands above her head in hopes of enticing him, but he just sat on the edge of the bed, naked and somber, and said, Well, it’s begun.

  She didn’t need to ask what had begun. Nor did she need to ask why he wasn’t surprised.

  Ruth

  June 1952

  New York City

  Remarkably enough, the house telephone rings precisely eleven minutes after I hang up the line from the Empire Hotel—remarkably, because I can’t think of a method other than rocket propulsion that could have made the journey in so little time. Like many of Sumner Fox’s feats, it remains an unexplained miracle.

  “Gentleman to see you, Miss Macallister,” says the doorman, perfectly neutral because I tip well at Christmas. “A Mr. Fox?”

  “Send him right up, please, Mike.” I smooth my hair and tighten the sash on my dressing gown, because regardless of the gentleman’s beauty—let’s admit it, he has none—I’ve always believed in presenting an orderly face to the world, particularly when my nerves are as shredded as they are in this moment. Then I light a cigarette, pace across the room, stub out the cigarette, think better of it, and light another. You see what I mean.

  At last, the doorbell. I fly from living room to foyer and fling the door open. Sumner Fox stands in his dark suit and dark tie; the hallway lighting makes his bony face look jaundiced.

  “You should have checked the peephole first.”

  “For God’s sake.” I step back. “Won’t you come in, Mr. Fox.”

  He’s so wide, he practically turns sideways to fit his shoulders through the door. I lead him into the living room and ask if he wants a drink or something. He shakes his head no. I feel a pang of disappointment. My head’s throbbing, my arms and legs have that heavy, sick feeling that combines the worst effects of a hangover and a sleepless night. What I need is a couple of aspirin and a Bloody Mary. Or is it the other way around?

  “Sit, please,” I tell him. “I want to make a few things clear.”

  He waits for me to sit first before he finds the indicated armchair and lowers his body onto it. As I said, he isn’t especially tall—I would say he only just clears six feet, if he clears them at all. He’s simply big. Even his thighs have a thick, meaty diameter, especially crammed between the arms of a chair like that, a hundred years old, built for men of elegant, aristocratic frame. He rests his hands on his knees and cocks his head a few degrees, to indicate I should begin when ready.

  I knot my hands in my lap. “First things first. I am not snitching on Sasha Digby. What I’m telling you, I’m telling you so you can make my sister and her children safe. You can’t take down a single thing I say and use it against her husband in a court of law, or whatever it is you mean to do with him, if you find them. If I agree to help, you leave him alone.”

  “I can’t promise that, but I can promise this conversation is off the record, so far as our investigation goes.”

  “I guess that’s fair.”

  “Is there anything else?”

  “Yes. You go first. I want to know why you’re here right now, instead of four years ago or next month. Something’s happened to my sister, hasn’t it?”

  His thumb moves, rubbing the material on the side of his knee. “Yes.”

  “They’re in Moscow. Four years ago, when they disappeared, they went to the Soviet Union.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  I don’t answer. He nods and stands to look out the window at the sunrise, which has reached a tremendous zenith. The colors illuminate his face. I wait for him to think things over, weigh the risks versus the possible return, calculate how much he has to give in order to get something worthwhile back from me.

  Without turning from the window, he speaks.

  “On the fifteenth of November 1948, as you know, Sasha Digby failed to turn up at his office at the American embassy in London. There was no answer at his home telephone, nor did anyone answer the door at the family home in Kensington. Diplomatic staff established that neither he nor any member of his family had been seen since the previous Friday. The FBI was then alerted, but discovered no leads at all, not the slightest confirmed trace of them.”

  “I remember it well. A couple of nice gentlemen turned up at my apartment building at Thanksgiving and gave me the third degree. So tell me something I don’t already know.”

  “I can’t do that,” he says. “Not unless you tell me what you do know.”

  “Ah. Clever.”

  He turns his head to look over his shoulder. “Miss Macallister?”

  I reach for t
he pack of cigarettes on the sofa table. “I first met Sasha Digby in Rome, right before the Italians entered the war. As I’m sure you’re aware, he was working at the US embassy as a junior diplomat, alongside my brother, Harry. He had just rescued my sister from a traffic accident outside the Borghese gardens, that’s how I met him.”

  “He was previously unknown to you or your sister?”

  “We might have been introduced at some party or another, but I didn’t take any notice of him until I saw him at the hospital afterward. As I’m sure you can imagine, it was a harrowing day, and that night Harry and I took him out for dinner and drinks to thank him for what he’d done. Afterward, he came home with me and spent the night.”

  Sumner Fox doesn’t show the slightest reaction to this information, not so much as an eyebrow raised in faint disapproval. “Go on.”

  “We were both a little off our heads, after what happened, and needed to let off steam. Never occurred to me that Iris had any kind of crush on him, nor he on her. He came by the next night, and the next, and that’s when he told me he was spying for the Soviets.”

  “He told you that?”

  “Just like that.” I snap my fingers. “I think he was trying to impress me. You know, to show off that he wasn’t just some stuffy diplomat. Also, he was drunk. He spent a lot of time drunk. I think that’s how he dealt with everything, you know? Because men of his class, loyalty’s just bred into them. I’ve always thought that in his head, he was able to justify spying on his own country because it would bring forward the revolution and make the world just and peaceful under worldwide communism, et cetera, but down below he was all torn apart because he’s betraying not just the United States of America, but his own friends. The people he works with and drinks with.”