Our Woman in Moscow

by Beatriz Williams

  Fox says nothing to all that. Just stands there at the window until I can’t bear it any longer. I stub out my cigarette and announce that since the sun’s officially up, I’m going to mix myself a Bloody Mary.

  When I return, he’s still standing where I left him, hands shoved into his pockets. He says he’s underestimated me.

  I plop myself back down on the sofa and light another cigarette. “Of course you did. You’re a man.”

  “It won’t happen again,” he says grimly.

  “Oh, don’t kick yourself. It’s perfectly natural.” My pocketbook lies on the sofa table, next to the cigarettes. I reach for it—open it wide—draw out the postcard and the letter. “Perhaps I should have given these to you sooner, but I needed to know you were a man I could trust.”

  Fox looks greedily at my hand. I hold it out, and he plucks the papers free and frames his fingers delicately around the edges while he examines each one, first the postcard and then the letter in its envelope. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say the expression on his face—such as it is—suggests something like relief.

  “It’s been opened already.”

  “No kidding, Sherlock.”

  He ignores me, of course—just lifts the flap of the envelope with so delicate a touch, you simply can’t imagine those fingers gripping an object so vulgar as a pigskin. Holding the extreme corner of one side of the letter, he eases it from its wrapper like a whisper and spreads it out on the sofa table. He bends over the paper and reads Iris’s words. Then he picks up the envelope and examines that, too, every letter and especially the postmark, before at last he looks up at me.

  “Do you mind if I take this with me?”

  “I certainly do mind.”

  “We’ll return it once we’ve had a chance to examine it in the lab.”

  “In the lab? What kind of lab? Where is it?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t say.”

  “Now just wait a moment. I think you owe me a little more than that. I did as you asked—I gave you the postcard and the letter. I’ve got a right to know what this is all about. She’s my sister!”

  “With whom you share so close and affectionate a relationship you haven’t communicated with her in a dozen years.”

  “That’s neither here nor there.” The cigarette’s nearly burned out against my fingertips; I stab it into the ashtray on the lamp table. “She’s written to me now, hasn’t she? Which means I have a moral responsibility to help.”

  “Which does you credit, Miss Macallister, but I’m afraid I must ask you to be patient.” He turns back to the letter and replaces the paper inside the envelope—all with the exact featherweight delicacy of touch with which he took them out in the first place. From his briefcase he extracts a rectangular sleeve. He puts the envelope and the postcard in the sleeve and the sleeve in the briefcase and snaps the case shut. When he’s finished, he turns back to my amazed face.

  “That’s it?” I ask.

  “That’s all for now. Of course we’ll return your sister’s letter when we’re done examining it.”

  “And then what? My sister says she needs my help. She’s living in Moscow, for God’s sake, in the heart of the Soviet Union, and something’s gone terribly wrong. I know it has, and you know it has, or she wouldn’t have sent me those messages.”

  “I suspect you’re right, but before we can take any action, we’ve got to determine the nature of the trouble. Whether these are genuine.” Fox lifts the briefcase. “We may need to call you in for further questions, Miss Macallister.”

  “Questions? I want answers!”

  “In the meantime, if you receive any additional letters or other communication—telephone calls, parcels, messages delivered in person—I urge you to reach me.”

  His face, as he says all this, hardly moves at all. You would think his nerves have been somehow disconnected from the muscles of his cheeks and forehead. I become fascinated with his mouth, the only thing that moves.

  “Of course,” I say meekly.

  “Thank you. I’ll walk myself out.”

  “Oh, no you don’t.”

  I scurry in front and lead him back down the hall to the foyer. As he passes one of the framed photographs, he stops and squints. “Is that the two of you?”

  I follow his stare, although I don’t need to remind myself what the photograph depicts. A pair of laughing, carefree women, one tall and blond and the other petite and brunette. Bright dresses, scarves tied in triangles over shining young hair. The blonde slings a protective arm around the brunette’s shoulders. Behind them, the Colosseum.

  “Yes. That was in Rome, right before she met Sasha.”

  “You were close.”

  “We were different, Mr. Fox. But we were sisters. We looked out for each other.”

  Fox straightens away from the photograph and continues down the hall. By now it’s drawing close to seven in the morning and the fizz of discovery has died away. I’m unsettled and exhausted. I can’t think. I sense a puzzle of a thousand pieces lying before me, and I can’t lift one, let alone connect it to another. We reach the door. Fox opens it and turns to say good-bye.

  “How worried should I be?” I ask.

  For the first time, his face softens. His pale eyes ease around the corners.

  “Miss Macallister, I can only promise I’ll do my damnedest to see no harm comes to Mrs. Digby, so long as I’m on the case.”

  After he leaves, I finish my Bloody Mary and make some dry toast. There’s no point in trying to sleep, but I return to my bedroom anyway and pick up the photograph on the nightstand.

  You have to remember that my sister is an artist. Since we were children she would stare at a painting or a drawing, a statue or a photograph, and take in every detail, however small. She would remember things about people and places. She would pick up her charcoals or her watercolors or her oil paints, and what I noticed—when I was bothered to notice—was that every stroke mattered, every speck that appeared on the paper or the canvas had some purpose, like a novelist writing a book—every word matters—or a musician composing a symphony—every note matters.

  So I study that photograph with the same attention to detail from which I imagine she created it. I squint at the children’s faces and their clothing. Though the photograph is black and white, I can tell they’re standing in front of some Arctic habitat, like the one in the Bronx Zoo. An animal stands behind the little girl. It has white fur, and it’s preparing to slide into the water. A polar bear.

  I set the photograph back down on the nightstand and walk to the hallway closet, where I pull down the suitcase from the uppermost shelf.

  Iris

  June 1940

  Rome, Italy

  Since the day Iris had returned from her week with Sasha, the tenth of May, the radio remained switched on almost permanently—except when Ruth and Iris were asleep—blaring out tinny news bulletins from the BBC that turned worse and worse as the days went by.

  Ruth was so depressed by the news, she spent the first few days in bed, reading newspaper after newspaper, calling for endless cups of tea, and when she finally rose, she said enough was enough, it was time to book passage home while they still could. Iris said she wasn’t going home until the government ordered her to, but Ruth had bought her a ticket anyway, second class, for the SS Antigone leaving Civitavecchia on the twelfth of June. The tickets sat in the desk drawer. Iris refused to open it.

  To make matters worse, she’d hardly seen Sasha at all. He worked all day at the embassy, sometimes sleeping there overnight, and Iris missed him the way you would miss breakfast, lunch, and dinner if they were all taken away from you at once, as if she’d stuffed herself at a banquet and been told the next day she couldn’t eat again, ever. In the beginning, he wrote her a couple of tender notes, but since then he hadn’t sent her so much as a postcard, let alone telephoned her.

  To be fair, she did warn him that Ruth’s work had dried up and he shouldn’t try to telephone, because Rut
h rarely left the apartment except to buy food and newspapers. Iris had never held a job, anyway, which she now regretted because she hated all this spare time, and all the war talk had turned Ruth into a bundle of nerves, snapping at whatever Iris said or didn’t say. The tension grew worse by the day. Iris felt this inarticulate scream in the air between them. To escape, she’d taken to wandering around Rome with her sketchbook, filling page after page with shadowed, moody drawings of policemen and beggars and soldiers, or else the ruins of civilizations past, the Colosseum or the Forum. She would sit on some ancient stone and contemplate arches and columns that once teemed with civic life, and the idea calmed her. What did Gertrude say to Hamlet?—Thou knowst tis common, all that lives must die, passing through nature into eternity. Why rail against the tragedy of the human condition? Wars came and went, they destroyed and then created anew. What difference did her small, inconsequential life make among all these dozens of generations, all of them living and loving and fighting and grieving?

  One day in early June, she sat in a café near the Palazzo Venezia, drinking listless coffee, while a pair of Fascists argued at the table next to her. Iris took out her sketchbook. Until now, she hadn’t paid much attention to those men in their angry black shirts. She would have liked to pretend they didn’t exist, and anyway she felt no connection to them at all, like foreigners from a country she’d never heard of. Today she studied them from the corner of her gaze. She’d learned some Italian over the past several months, and she could pick out certain words, but the truth was, she didn’t really care what they were saying. She didn’t understand the Fascist creed to begin with; politics had never interested her. Still, they were people, weren’t they? They were men who, for reasons of their own, believed certain things so passionately they were willing to fight for them. In that respect, were they so different from Sasha? Each believed with his whole heart that he was doing the right thing, making the world a better place. Iris took out her sketchbook. She filled in the two men with quick, bold strokes of her charcoal. She tried not to glance at them too often; she stamped the images on her mind and drew from that memory as long as it lasted, and then she dipped for more.

  She was nearly done with the drawing when one of them caught sight of her catching sight of him and nudged his friend. They turned to stare at her, at the sketchbook in her lap, the charcoal poised above the page.

  Iris flipped the sketchbook shut and looked around for the waiter. Before she could find him, a shadow fell over the table. She glanced up just as one of the Blackshirts snatched the sketchbook from her lap.

  “Hey!” She lunged after the book and fell right out of the chair. In an instant she was up again, but the man was already ripping the pages from the book, two at a time, flinging them into the air. The white leaves fluttered and scattered and littered the sidewalk. Iris yelled, Stop, you can’t do that, somebody help, but the other people in the café glanced over their shoulders and turned swiftly away, and the passersby pretended not to notice anything at all, although they took care not to step on any of the drawings.

  A door clicked open somewhere above her, and the noise echoed down the stairs.

  “Iris? Is that you?”

  Iris stuffed the handkerchief back in her pocketbook and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “Yes. Yes, I’m fine.”

  Ruth’s footsteps clattered down the stairs. Iris couldn’t find the strength to rise. Ruth whipped around the second-floor landing and paused.

  “Oh, pumpkin! What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  Ruth hurried down the rest of the stairs and sat down next to Iris. “That bastard. I oughta knock his lights out.”

  “It’s not—it’s not— It’s my sketchbook!”

  “What happened? Did you leave it on a bus somewhere?”

  Iris told her sister about the Blackshirts and the café, about all the charcoal drawings fluttering in the air to land on the dirty floor and the sidewalk, about all the people who pretended not to notice, who wouldn’t help, even the waiter. How the two men had left, jeering at her, and disappeared down the street.

  Ruth took a handkerchief from her pocket. “Here.”

  “And I’m pretty sure they didn’t pay, either!” Iris said, blowing her nose.

  “Fascist pigs.”

  “I g-gathered up the pages, but they’re all d-dirty and torn and just ruined.”

  Ruth gathered Iris in her arms and spoke soothingly into her hair. “Another week and we’ll be gone from here. No more goddamn wars and Blackshirts. I’ll take you home and everything will be all right again.”

  Iris leaned her face into Ruth’s shoulder, which smelled of cigarettes and some kind of perfume. Her throat hurt, not because of crying but because of everything she couldn’t say to her own twin sister—the whole story—how she didn’t want to leave, she couldn’t leave, she could not possibly leave one-half of her entire heart in Rome and continue to exist—it was a medical impossibility. The incalculably precious moments of Tivoli laid against her present despair. All those pages torn from her sketchbook, containing everything that was beautiful inside her.

  The next evening, the eighth of June, Harry arrived at their apartment for dinner. He was exhausted. Feed me, Harry begged, and Ruth poured out the drinks while Iris dressed a chicken and scraped together vegetables for a salad. Harry sucked every particle of meat from the bones and sat back on the sofa with a bottle of gin. Ruth asked what was up, was it really as bad as people were saying?

  “Worse,” said Harry. “They’ll be in Paris in a week.”

  “What about Dunkirk?” Iris asked. “The poor English soldiers.”

  “They got as many out as they could. It’s a miracle, really. Paris is next. There’s nothing to keep the Nazis out.”

  “Poor Paris.”

  Harry looked destroyed. His shirt hung from his bones. His cheeks were hollow, his skin pale and impoverished. Even his hair looked tarnished. Iris couldn’t believe her eyes. Harry, the stalwart older brother, their protector from the vicissitudes of life, the man of the house! She wanted to cook him another chicken and watch him eat it. She wanted to comfort him, to hold him in her arms like a child. She wanted to ask him about Sasha. Was Sasha as ruined as Harry? As overworked and underfed and underloved?

  “What about Italy?” Ruth asked.

  “Any day now.” Harry straightened and reached for the bottle to refill his glass. They’d been drinking it neat, not even bothering with tonic water. “Maybe before you leave. Say, that’s lucky you bought your tickets already. Order’s going out to evacuate.”

  “Evacuate?” Iris cried.

  “That’s right. Soon as Mussolini declares war, the order goes out from the embassy. All Americans out, no exceptions, except embassy staff.”

  “Can’t we stay and volunteer or something?” said Iris.

  Harry gaped at her. “Volunteer for what? The Italian Red Cross? Help out the Fascists?”

  “Maybe you’ve got a position available at the embassy for me.”

  “Iris, don’t be stupid,” said Ruth. “We’re leaving next week. It’s all settled.”

  “It’s not settled. I never agreed to go. You went out and bought that ticket without even asking me.”

  “I don’t need to ask. We’re going home, that’s all. Christ. What don’t you understand about evacuate?”

  “They can’t make us go if we don’t want to. There’s no law. Is there?” Iris looked at Harry.

  Harry lit a cigarette and shrugged. “No law against being an idiot that I heard of.”

  “Anyway, Italy’s not going to war against us. America’s still neutral, last I checked.”

  Ruth shot from her chair and marched to the kitchen.

  “What’s all this about?” Harry said.

  “Oh, it’s just Ruth. She’s in a big fat hurry to go home, for some reason. I don’t get it.”

  Harry spoke slowly. “Well, she’s not wrong, is she? I mean, why the hell are you so determined to stay?”r />
  “I just like Italy, that’s all.”

  “But Italy’s going to war, pumpkin. You don’t understand what that means. A country at war, it’s not a place for tourists.”

  “Don’t speak to me like I’m a child, Harry.”

  Ruth marched back out of the kitchen and planted her hands on her hips. Her face was all lit up. “You’re acting like a child! Like an idiot child! What, you just like Italy? What about how I picked you up off the stairs yesterday, blubbering like a baby because some crummy Blackshirts ripped up a few of your goddamn drawings?”

  “Hold on,” said Harry. “What happened?”

  “It’s nothing! I shouldn’t’ve been drawing the two of them like that.”

  “It wasn’t nothing. You were scared as a wee rabbit, Iris, and if a couple of Blackshirts can scare you like that, you won’t last a week once the soldiers start with the rape and plunder.”

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous—”

  “For God’s sake, Iris,” Harry said, topping up his drink, “just go home with Ruth! Rome’s not going anywhere. What’s keeping you here?”

  “I’ll tell you what’s keeping her. Some fellow.”

  Harry almost dropped the gin bottle. “Are you kidding me?”

  “Ask her, if you don’t believe me.”

  “Iris? What the hell’s going on?”

  Iris set her glass on the floor, walked across the room, picked up her pocketbook from the coat stand, and walked out the door. As she left, she heard Harry’s plaintive voice posing some question to Ruth.

  The streets were warm and wet with rain, so recently departed that the eaves dripped on Iris’s hair and shoulders and speckled her dress. As if she cared! She dodged around pedestrians and raindrops, hurried down streets and around corners, crossed the Tiber as twilight settled over the domes and rooftops of Rome. She reached Sasha’s apartment in record time, not quite half an hour, shivering a little from the evening breeze on her wet skin.