The Prodigal Spy

by Joseph Kanon

  He stopped, waiting for her reply, but she said nothing.

  “You know what I did the day he gave his press conference? That was the first time he came back from the dead. I played baseball. There was a game that afternoon and I saw him on television and I thought, Oh God, it’s starting all over again, everybody will know, they’ll throw me out of the game or look embarrassed or something. They’ll know. But they didn’t. I went to the park and nobody said a thing-the kids, the coaches, nobody. We just played ball, as if nothing had happened. Because it hadn’t. That’s when I realized it was over. I wasn’t his son anymore. I was somebody else.” He looked at her. “I’m still somebody else.”

  “If you say so.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means I don’t believe you.”

  He felt the lurch again, found out, back at the table with Doris Kemper.

  “Have it your way. You delivered your message. Why did you, anyway? I mean, why bother? What’s in it for you?”

  “I told you. He promised to talk to me.”

  “And you believed him? He’s been known not to tell the truth, you know. In fact, he’s famous for it.”

  “He’s not like that.”

  “Really. What is he like?”

  “He’s-” She searched for a word. “Sad.”

  Nick looked at her, not quite sure how to take this. “Am I supposed to feel sorry for him? Forget it.”

  “Old-sad,” she said thoughtfully. “He’s old. Don’t be angry. He just wants to see you.”

  “So why not pick up the phone? They have phones there, don’t they? Why you? I don’t get it.”

  “He wants me to bring you.”

  Nick stared at her, dumbfounded. “Come again?”

  “He said you’d need a cover. I guess that’s me. You’d be with me. He told me you had a different name. I didn’t realize it was that Warren.”

  “Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. He walks up to you at a party and says go get my son and I’ll give you an interview. But don’t tell anybody, because I’m being watched. And you agree to do it? This doesn’t strike you as a little crazy? If you’re that hard up for a story, why not interview Barbara Hutton? Nobody remembers her either.”

  “I’m just telling you what he said.”

  “But why go through this? He’s not a prisoner, you know. He’s allowed visitors.”

  “I know. I kept wondering about that too. What I think is, he doesn’t want them to know who you are. I don’t know why. He wants them to think you’re somebody else.”

  “Your fiance.”

  “Look, I thought it was crazy too. All the cloak-and-dagger stuff. Why do you think it took me so long? But I kept thinking about it. First of all, it’s like that there. They’re all a little spooky. Jiri thought everybody’s phone was tapped. So maybe it’s crazy, but they ought to know. They live there. They’re always arranging to meet in parks, things like that. So I thought, well, maybe he thinks that way. He’s used to it. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought there was something else. Not just being careful. Like he had it all worked out. The problem was, I couldn’t figure out what. Then it occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t supposed to know, but you would. That you’d know what he meant.” She had been leaning forward, her voice eager, but now she sat back, opening her hands. “So I thought I’d better tell you. Just in case.”

  Nick shook his head, staring at the glass. “What exactly did he say to you?”

  “Exactly? He wants to see you. Don’t tell anybody. He said you’d understand.”

  “No, about the shirt.”

  “Oh.” She frowned, concentrating. “Tell him I always remembered how he helped with the shirt. He’ll know.” Like that, anyway. I don’t know exactly. At the time, I didn’t think-is it some kind of code?“

  The word made Nick smile. “No. And this isn’t Nancy Drew either. No codes. No invisible ink. There was a shirt, so yes, I know it’s him. That’s it.”

  “But what do you think it means?”

  Nick looked at the table for a minute so she would think he was trying to sort out his thoughts, not push them away. It was starting again. Secrets. Listening at doors. But it didn’t have to start. All he had to do was push it away.

  “I think it means you met an old man at a party. Maybe he’s sorry about what happened. So am I. But that doesn’t mean I want to see him. It’s a little late for apologies.”

  “You’re wrong. There’s something else-it’s not that simple.”

  “Look, I’m sorry you came all this way-”

  “I was coming anyway,” she said, annoyed. “Don’t worry.” Then she leaned forward again, making a last effort. “What if I’m right? How could you not want to know?”

  He looked at her, then signaled for the bill. “It takes practice. After a while, it works. Everything goes away and the last thing you want to do is bring it back. What do you think would happen if we went? A few awkward days with someone I don’t even know anymore? All taped by you for some magazine?”

  “That’s not fair. I never said I wanted to do that. You don’t have to take it out on me.”

  “Take what out?”

  “Whatever it is that’s making you like this.”

  “Right. Sorry.” He pulled out some money to put on the plate with the bill.

  “So you won’t,” she said, gathering her purse.

  “You go. Tell him you saw me and I said he owes you the interview. Ask him why he defected. Ask him why that woman jumped out the window. I’d buy a copy of that story myself.”

  She looked up. “Why she-?”

  “Forget it. Come on, we’d better go.” He shook his head. “It’s been a strange day.” He looked at her. “I thought-well, never mind what I thought.”

  “I didn’t do this right.”

  “No, you were perfect. How else? It’s like telling someone he’s got cancer-it’s hard to warm up to it. Anyway, I got the message.”

  “But you’re not going to see him.”

  “Look, it isn’t just me. You’ve met my family. How do you think they’d feel about this little weekend reunion? I can’t do that to them. It’s impossible.”

  “Don’t tell them. They don’t have to know. Nobody has to know.”

  “Just me and every photographer in Moscow.”

  “You’re not listening. That’s the last thing he wants. Nobody would know it’s you. Anyway, he’s in Prague. It’s different.”

  “What makes you think he’s still there? Maybe he’s gone back.”

  “No, he lives there now. His wife is Czech.”

  He had been about to stand up to leave but now he stopped, amazed. “His wife?” It had the full shock of the unexpected. He had imagined his father as he was that night, back in the snow, literally stopped in time. Now suddenly he too had become someone else. Nick sat back in his chair, as if he’d been winded. “Christ. His wife.”

  “Didn’t you know?”

  “I don’t know anything about him,” he said, and for the first time he saw that it was true. What had his life been all these years? It hadn’t stopped at the press conference. There’d been jobs and apartments and wives, a whole unknown life.

  But Molly took his surprise for disapproval. “Your mother remarried,” she said gently. “After the divorce.”

  “They weren’t divorced,” he said offhandedly. “It was annulled.”

  “Annulled? But how-”

  “You mean because of me? Oh, that wouldn’t stop the Church. It just-never happened. They’re pros at that. My mother had connections,” he said, thinking of Father Tim and his puppet strings. “Not that there was any problem. A Communist? They don’t think there’s anything worse than that. Let’s go,” he said, standing up.

  “I never met her,” she said, trying to hold him. “The wife. I saw her at the party, but I didn’t meet her.”

  “I don’t want to know,” he said, holding up his hand. “Really.” He stopped. “Are there
children?”

  “Not that I know of.” She put the cape over her wonderful dress. “Just you.”

  “Not me,” he said, and led her out of the bar.

  It was late, but there was a taxi outside, unexpected luck.

  “Will you drop me?” she said, an invitation.

  “No. I’ll walk.”

  She looked at him. “Well, at least I got to meet the ambassador.” She hesitated at the taxi’s door, listening to the motor turn over like a rickety machine, “For what it’s worth, I think you’re crazy. He’s worth ten of them, those people at dinner. I don’t care what he did.”

  Nick smiled slightly. “I know. They’ve probably done worse. They just didn’t do it to me.”

  “Neither did he.”

  “I don’t want to see him, Molly. I can’t.”

  “You don’t want to see me now either, do you?”

  He leaned against the open door, waiting for her to get in. “I wish I did. No one ever wanted to meet me before.”

  “No?” She smiled, then shrugged. “Well, don’t let it throw you. I just turned up at the wrong door again, that’s all.” She got into the cab, then almost immediately pulled down the window. “I hate to ask, but do you have a fiver? I’m flat. I’ll pay you back.”

  He took out the note and handed it to her. “That’s okay. I’m feeling rich today,” he said, thinking of Larry.

  “Thanks. You know where to find me if you change your mind.” She tilted her head slightly. “By the way, did anyone ever tell you? You look like him.”

  He stared at her through the window. “Who?” She rolled her eyes, giving up, and sat back in the seat as the taxi pulled away.

  He walked all the way back to his flat, cutting through Soho and its halfhearted dingy lights, then the quiet squares north of Oxford Street.

  In the months after his father left, when he knew he would hear, he would listen for the phone, check the mail even after they had moved, always ready. It was only a question of when the message would come. If there were people in the room, he was prepared to cover, the way his mother had in front of the police. Code. But the message didn’t come, and after a while he forgot what he’d been waiting for. No, he always knew. Come with me. Join me. And now that it had come, delivered by this unlikely girl, he felt ambushed, standing at the phone too startled to reply. Why now? This way? A summons like an old long-distance connection, scratchy and unclear, barely audible over the thin wires. What did his father want?

  He could fly there in a few hours-Vienna was farther-not the end of the world. He wouldn’t have to cross the barbed wires and guard dogs in the movies of his youth. Just show a passport, with its harmless new name, and join the line of German tourists waiting for the bus. In and out. See where Kafka lived. Wenceslas Square, which wasn’t a square but a long street. He knew because he’d seen the Soviet tanks on television last year, lined up against the students.

  What would they say to each other? Where did you go that night? How was it arranged? Why didn’t-? But what was the point? Everything he wanted to know, that drew him, was further away than Prague, back irretrievably on 2nd Street. That was where they still lived, in some dream of the past. It was what he couldn’t tell Molly, because he hadn’t known it then himself. He was afraid of ghosts. They were too fragile. If you disturbed them, they vanished. If he saw a nice old man living with a Czech wife somewhere west of Vienna, his father would be gone for good.

  The house was quiet; even vigilant Mrs Caudhill in the ground-floor flat had gone to bed. It was an ugly Victorian redbrick, one of four whose bay windows stuck out like prows in a row of modest Regency terrace houses, and he’d been lucky to find it. A room at the top back, “overlooking the garden,” which turned out to be a birdbath and a clump of rhododendrons that never bloomed. When he opened his door and switched on the desk lamp, still tiptoeing from the climb up the dim stairs, he could see everything in a glance: a bookcase of boards and bricks with a record player in the middle, a daybed and a cast-off easy chair, a desk with typewriter and stacks of index cards, an electric fire in front of the bricked-up fireplace. He flicked the fire on, rubbing his hands. It was always cold in England, and they put the water pipes outside the houses, where they could freeze.

  He sat down, still in his suit, then got up to make some tea on the gas ring. It was only when he went over to look out the window that he realized he was pacing, jittery and caged. He wouldn’t sleep. Anxiety had sopped up the alcohol, leaving his mind too sharp to rest. He thought of rolling a joint, but that would run the risk of an unwelcome thought floating in, and he didn’t want to think. Everyone smoked in Vietnam because it was surreal and then you couldn’t tell the difference. Now he needed to do something, crossword puzzles or solitaire, to keep his attention on the immediate.

  The kettle whistle startled him and he hurried to make the tea. Why now? He sat back down in front of the electric fire, counted the orange bars, and sipped from the mug. He could will himself to be calm. Read something. As long as he didn’t think. Then he glanced out the window and saw the top branches of the leafless tree and 2nd Street came flooding back, racing through his body until he actually felt memory, a tingle in his fingers on the cup. Everything he’d pushed away at Jules. Scene after scene. Had she thought he was indifferent? That it wasn’t still there, just waiting? Welles and his stupid gavel, rattling ashtrays for the cameras. The swarm of hats outside the window, drinking coffee. His mother all dressed up for the charities benefit. The pearls flung backward on the dented car roof.

  He stopped. That was the other thing. She’d left her apartment, checked into the Mayflower, and jumped. That was all. A girl at Garfinkel’s. But before that, what? Discussion groups about capitalism? Saving the world from fascism? What had made her come forward, unraveling her lethal thread? What did the committee know, anyway? His father’s judges. One of them, it turned out, had been a member of the Klan, convinced the Communists were organizing Negroes. It was there in the index cards. He glanced over at the desk. Indifferent? Then why the stacks of cards for Wiseman, the trail back? Larry had known instinctively that the research was a pose. He was studying the mechanics of history to find out something else. Had his father gone there that night, a last stop at the hotel? And now the one person who could tell him had sent a message and he sat with a mug of tea, too afraid to ask.

  The room was warm enough for him to change now, and he went over to the closet to put his jacket away. He could read something until he fell asleep. Trollope, maybe, who’d probably seen houses like this going up and thought they were handsome. But his hand fell on an omnibus Stevenson, and there was memory again, Kidnapped in the club chair. He took it out anyway, a gesture of refusing to be intimidated, and threw it on the bed. He’d never read Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, just seen the movie, and that seemed safe enough. Then he realized, with a sighing irony, that he wasn’t going to escape it. Who was that, after all, but his father, one person, then another? Except that Dr. Jekyll couldn’t help himself, once he’d taken the medicine.

  He folded his pants and put them on a hanger and started unbuttoning his shirt, staring down at the pile of laundry on the closet floor. He’d have to go to the Chinese tomorrow. When it hit him, he held on to the open front of his shirt, literally dizzy.

  The shirt. His father hadn’t been able to help himself then; Nick had helped him. It was something only they knew, that Nick had tried to help. In his child’s mind, he had even been willing to break the law, anything. He was asking for help. That was the code.

  Nick stood for a minute, arguing with himself, but he knew beyond reason that he was right. There had never been any point in making the message cryptic-why not just ‘Come see me’? “He’ll know.” And he did know. I need your help again. Don’t tell anybody. Between us, like before. It couldn’t mean anything else. His father might have used a hundred references from Nick’s childhood, but he used the shirt, their secret. Molly could have thought it was an old family joke, nothi
ng more. Was that what his life was like now, so cautious he didn’t even trust his own messenger?

  But he trusted Nick. Nobody else had ever tried to help him. And now there was another shirt.

  Nick walked over to the desk, pulled by strings that stretched so far back he was afraid mere movement would make them snap. What if he were wrong, standing there in his socks and underwear in the middle of the night, reading things into an innocuous hello? Or maybe just telling himself a story that would make him do what he wanted to do anyway. What if?

  He picked up the phone and started to dial, surprised at the clunking sound in the quiet room. Flaxman nine. A Fulham number. Maybe he was still stoned. But he had never felt more alert in his life.

  “Hullo?” The phone was picked up on the first ring, as if she didn’t want anyone else to hear.

  “It’s Nick.”

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  Why hadn’t he waited until morning? But it had already been a month. “I know. I’m sorry. It couldn’t wait.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve changed my mind. You still willing to make the trip?”

  “Maybe we’d better talk about this in the morning.”

  “Are you?”

  She paused. “What made you change your mind?”

  “It doesn’t matter. You were right. I have to go. Can you leave right away? Tomorrow?”

  “Are you crazy? We have to get visas. It takes a few days. You can’t just walk-”

  “Okay, where do we go for the visas?”

  “Czech consulate,” she said, suddenly practical. “It’s in Notting Hill Gate.”

  “Will you meet me there? First thing in the morning?”

  “Try noon. They don’t open till late. And you just have to wait in line anyway. But go early if you want.”

  “No. We have to go together. You’re my fiancee, remember?”

  She laughed. “Do I get a ring?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “I was kidding, for God’s sake. Are you all right?”

  “Okay, noon. Where in Notting Hill?”