by Pam Jenoff
“We know,” I reply. “You’re the reason we’re here.”
“We were a little surprised, though,” Paul adds. “We thought that Jan Marcelitis…”
“Was a man?” Jan finishes for him, then smiles. “It’s a common mistake. The confusion started long ago. You see, Jan is principally a masculine name in many countries, so people who haven’t met me often assume that I am a man. I never corrected the assumption because it helps me to keep a low profile in my work. Now why are you here? Who sent you?” Jan’s expression turns businesslike once more.
“Sent Marta, actually,” Paul replies. “I’m just along for the ride.”
“I work on Eastern European affairs for the British Foreign Office,” I say quickly.
Her head snaps in my direction. “Are you an intelligence agent, too?”
“I’m a secretary, actually.”
“I don’t understand…”
“My government sent me to Prague to try to find you because I know your associate, Marek Andek. We used to work together for the resistance in Poland during the war.”
“Andek is a good man,” Jan says. “Or was. I heard about his arrest.”
“Have you learned anything further?”
“Unfortunately, no. But things aren’t looking too good for any of our men who were arrested in Prague before the coup. Andek is either dead or on his way to a Soviet prison.” My stomach twists as I think of Emma. How will she survive on her own with the children? “What is it your government wants from me?”
I swallow, forcing myself to concentrate. “Our intelligence work has been compromised of late by a major leak somewhere in the British government. Recently, we came into possession of a list that may identify those individuals who are secretly working for the Soviets. But we can’t break the code.”
“So you’ve come for the cipher?” she says. I nod. “Even assuming that I have it, what makes you think I will give it to you?”
“We’re prepared to pay you half a million dollars. The money is already in a Swiss bank account.”
Jan tosses her ponytail. “There are a dozen countries willing to pay twice that for the cipher. It’s not about the money.”
“The British government, and the Americans, too, want to offer support to you and your organization in fighting the communists,” Paul says. “They have promised—”
Jan cuts him off. “Respectfully, we have very little faith in anything the Western governments promise. Their promises didn’t keep the Germans out of the Sudetenland, or out of Prague or even Poland,” she adds.
“I know,” I reply quietly. “I was there, too. I remember what happened. But this is different.”
She narrows her eyes. “Really? How?”
“They sent me to give you this.” I pull the papers out of my bag and slide them across the table. Jan takes the papers and holds them close to the candlelight. “That letter is actually a list of some of our key contacts in this region, contacts who can—”
“I know what it is.” Her eyes widen as she scans the first page. “How do I get the code?”
“You are supposed to contact a man called Lindt at our embassy in Prague. He’ll provide you with the code once I’ve sent word that you’ve given us the cipher. Of course, if Prague is too difficult with everything that has happened, I can try to get a contact elsewhere.”
“I can manage Prague,” Jan replies quickly, folding the letter and tucking it into her blouse.
“Does that mean we have a deal?” Paul asks.
I hold my breath as Jan looks from the papers to Paul, then back again. “Yes, but I have to go get the cipher,” she replies slowly. “That’s going to take a few hours.”
“Do you want us to go with you?” I ask.
Jan shakes her head. “I can move faster on my own, attract less attention.” She stands up. “Wait here.” Before either of us can respond, she walks to the cellar ladder, then climbs up it and disappears.
Paul and I look at each other nervously. “Do you think we can trust her?” I ask.
“I think we don’t have a choice. Anyway, she still needs the information from the embassy to decode the list and she can’t get that until we green-light it.”
I nod, remembering the passion in Jan’s eyes as she talked about fighting the communists. “We can trust her.”
Paul nods. “I agree. I think she’s amazing.” Hearing the admiration in his voice, I cannot help but feel a small stab of jealousy. I wish that I was amazing, too, instead of some girl Paul always has to rescue.
There is a noise at the top of the ladder and a second later Jan reappears. “All set. You can wait here while I go for the cipher. You’ll be safe, and I’ve asked Herr Meierhof to send down some food.”
“Okay,” Paul replies, but his tone is uneasy. “We need to think about getting out of Berlin, though, before anyone discovers what happened at the police station.”
“We all need to be out of the country by daybreak,” Jan agrees. “If I can get some new papers for both of you, there’s a possibility you can take the early-morning flight to Vienna. Meanwhile, both of you need to stay here, out of sight.” She takes the candle and walks to one of the wine racks and pushes it aside easily, revealing a door. I notice for the first time that the bottles on that rack are empty. Jan opens the door and I follow her through into another, smaller brick room. It is bare, except for a narrow mattress on the floor. “I’m sorry the accommodations aren’t more hospitable,” she says to me in a low voice. “But at least you can stay together.”
“But we aren’t together,” I protest quickly. “I mean, I’m married.”
“To someone else?” Jan sounds surprised. “Oh, I’m sorry. It’s just that the way the two of you are together, I mean, the way you look at each other…well, never mind, then. My mistake.”
Paul comes into the room. “Everything okay?”
“Fine,” I reply, feeling my cheeks redden.
“Then I’m off,” Jan says, handing me the candle. “I’ll be back before dawn to take you to the airport. Help yourself to a bottle of wine if you feel like it. Anything except the 1922 Château Rothschild. It’s worth a fortune. Herr Meierhof would kill me. Have a good night, you two.” Her tone makes me wonder if she still thinks there is something between Paul and me.
She walks out of the room, and a few second later I hear the cellar door close. Paul turns to me. “You did it. Congratulations.”
“We did it,” I correct him, setting the candle on the ground beside the mattress.
“Okay,” he agrees. “But let’s hold off on the celebration until we’re out of Berlin.”
Before I can answer, there is a banging noise from the front room. I wonder if something is wrong and Jan has returned. “Wait here,” Paul says. A minute later he reappears, carrying two steaming plates heaped with meat and noodles. “These came down in the dumbwaiter. Hungry?”
“No, but you go ahead.” Paul shrugs, then sets the plates down on the floor and drops to the mattress. I sit down beside him, watching him eat.
“You should try this,” he says between bites. “It’s really good. World-famous cuisine from the Meierhof. When are you going to have the chance to try this again?”
“Fine,” I relent. He stabs a piece of meat and covers it in sauce. Then he brings the fork to my mouth, cupping his other hand beneath it to catch any drips of sauce. As I take the meat from the fork, our eyes lock. Then I pull away, swallowing. “Delicious,” I say, my voice cracking.
“Do you want more?” I shake my head. He finishes eating, then carries the two plates, his empty and mine untouched, to the table in the front room. “It’s hard, isn’t it?” Paul asks abruptly as he reenters the room.
My heart skips a beat. “What is?”
He sits down on the mattress beside me once more. “Being back in Germany, after all that you went through here. It must be difficult.”
“Lots of things are,” I reply evenly. Paul looks away. Neither of us speak for se
veral seconds.
“Do you want to play?” Paul asks finally, drawing a deck of cards from his bag. “We might as well kill some time.”
I hesitate. “I don’t know too many games. Gin is my best. I used to play it with my grandmother, Feige, when I was a child.” I see her stout fingers shuffling the deck of cards, her brown eyes glinting with anticipation as she arranged her hand.
“That’s funny, so did I.” Paul shuffles the cards. “Play gin with my grandmother, I mean. She would always let me win.”
“Not mine. She was really good and she always played for real. But every time she beat me, she would say, ‘Someone will love you very much.’”
“Really?” Paul begins to deal the cards. “What did she mean?”
“There’s some old saying, ‘lucky in cards, unlucky in love.’ Or maybe I have it backward. But the point is that if you are a bad card player, you are supposed to be lucky in love.” Lucky in love. Someone will love you very much. Bubbe Feige’s words echo in my head as I arrange my hand of cards. Had she been right? Simon loves me in his own way, I know. But “lucky” would have been finding Paul years ago, before it was too late.
I look up from my cards to see Paul staring at me. “Your turn,” he says. I pick up the top card from the stack, a queen of clubs, and put it in between the two other queens I am holding, then discard the ten of diamonds.
“So tell me about your life,” I say. “Not the classified parts, I mean. But where do you live when you’re not working?”
“Nowhere, really.” Paul takes a card from the top of the deck and discards it right away, revealing a five of diamonds. “There’s an apartment in Zurich and another in Brussels where myself and a few of the other guys can catch some sleep, get cleaned up, change clothes. But those aren’t home to me any more than this room. Mostly I keep moving, take as much work as they can give me. It’s not hard, there’s lots to be done right now.”
I pick up the five of diamonds, rearranging my hand to start a run of the suit. “Do you ever get back to England?”
He shakes his head. “Not since I got out of the hospital. I haven’t been back to Paris, either.” Or Salzburg, I guess silently as he takes his turn. And if there had been an assignment at the prison in Munich he probably would have turned that one down, too. He is avoiding the places that remind him of me, I realize. Trying to outrun his memories. “The work’s not just in Europe, though,” he adds. “I’ve been to Africa twice and I’m supposed to make my first trip to Asia next. When we’re done here, I mean.”
When we’re done here. The reality slams into my chest like a rock: this is going to end. As soon as we get out of Germany, I am going to get on a plane back to England and Paul will be off on his next mission. We will never see each other again. I stare at my cards, not seeing them. “You’re up,” he says gently. I did not realize he had taken his turn. My hand trembles as I blindly pick up a card, then throw it down again. It was the seven of diamonds, I realize too late; a card I needed. Paul picks it up and shuffles his cards. “Gin!” he declares, laying down all of his cards in neat succession.
I set down my cards. “Congratulations.”
“You know what they say, lucky in cards…” His voice trails off.
“Unlucky in love,” I finish for him. “Do you really believe that?”
He shrugs. “Look at me. I was on the way to meet the one girl I ever loved when—”
I cut him off. “I’m sure there must have been others since. I mean, Brussels? Zurich? You probably have a girl in every port, as they say.” I try to sound light, chiding. But the mention of Paul with other women makes my stomach hurt. Suddenly I understand how he must feel, knowing about me and Simon.
Paul shakes his head. “Not at all. I wish I could say otherwise. The truth is, there’s been no one. A few dates here and there over the years. Once I had what we had…” He looks away. “I mean, what’s the point?”
“Paul…”
He turns back to me. “I still love you, Marta.” My breath catches at the words. “I’ve always known it, and, well, seeing you again…I know that’s wrong to say, but it’s the truth.”
I take a deep breath. I can hold back the question no longer. “Then why?”
“Why what?”
“Why didn’t you come for me?” My words, pent up since our reunion, tumble out on top of one another. “When you recovered, I mean. If I meant so much to you, why didn’t you come find me?”
He pauses. “I did.” Suddenly I cannot breathe. “Marta, the truth is that as soon as I could get out of bed, I left the hospital. The doctors said it was too soon, that I was going to relapse. But I knew that I had to find you.”
“But you never came…”
“I did,” he repeats, his voice rising insistently. “For God’s sake, Marta, of course I came for you. How could I not? I went to that address in Kensington you gave me back when we were in Paris, your friend’s aunt.”
“Delia’s house?”
He nods. “She wasn’t there. But her butler told me you had gotten married.” He pauses, swallowing as if the words hurt his throat. “He said that you moved out, gave me your married name. I looked you up. Even then I knew I had to see you. I went to find you, Marta.”
“You came to our house?”
“Yes. I saw you. You were working in the garden.” His eyes grow hollow and faraway in the candlelight, as though reliving the moment once more. “I wanted you to know that I was all right, even if we couldn’t be together. But then you stood up and I could see that you were pregnant.” His voice cracks. “You looked so beautiful. You were already married and expecting a child. There was no way I could interfere with that. So I turned around and left without saying anything.”
I do not answer. In my mind, I see the day he is talking about, an early-spring morning. I can almost feel the cool, moist dirt on the backs of my hands as I planted bulbs. I remember thinking that someone was there, behind me in the garden. It was a thought I often had in the months after Paul died, on the street and in the shops, too. I turned around but as always no one was there. Or so I thought. Oh, God. If only I had known. If only he had known. I see the moment again in my mind, only this time when I stand and turn, Paul is there. I drop the gardening basket in surprise and, heedless of the neighbors or anyone else, run across the yard and throw myself into his arms.
“Marta?” My vision clears and I am in the wine cellar once more. Paul searches my face, concerned. “Are you okay?” He really had come for me. Suddenly I can stand it no longer. I reach across the mattress and grab Paul by the shoulders, drawing him close and bringing his full lips to mine. For a second he is too stunned to respond. Then he begins kissing me back hungrily. We cling to each other desperately, as if to go back to that moment in the garden and rewrite history. “Are you sure?” he whispers between kisses, as he had that night in Paris. I do not answer, but rip his jacket open, hear the buttons as they break and scatter across the floor. He presses me back too hard, banging my shoulder against the wall. Playing cards crush beneath me. Clutching fistfuls of his hair, I bury my head in his neck to muffle my groans. Then he touches me and it is as if we are in Paris again, two young people in a time and place where shoulds and shouldn’ts do not exist. It is our first time, our reunion and our honeymoon, all of the nights that fate took from us.
When it is over we lie breathless beside each other on the mattress. “Are you okay?” he asks, his fingers still entwined in my hair.
“Yes,” I reply. “I’m glad it happened.” My body aches as it did after we made love years ago.
“Really?” he asks. I nod. “Well, that’s a relief. I wouldn’t have wanted to add this to our list of considerable regrets.”
I smile. “Me, neither.”
He touches my cheek. “I meant what I said before. I still love you.” His face is relaxed now, boyish, all of the hardness and pain gone.
“I love you, too.” The words feel warm and natural on my tongue. “I never kn
ew you came looking for me. I mean, when I first saw you again, I wondered why you hadn’t.”
“I did. I was surprised you had met someone else so quickly,” he added.
I hesitate. Tell him the truth about Rachel, right now, a voice inside me says. But I am uncertain how he will react, and I do not want to ruin the moment. “You were gone,” I reply uneasily. “Forever, I thought.”
“I understand. I was glad that you were happy.” The sincerity of his voice shatters my heart. Happiness would have been being with him. He rolls onto his side, facing me. “So what now?”
“Now we try to get out of Berlin alive.”
“You know what I mean, Marta. What about us?”
I take a deep breath, swallow. “I’m married, Paul.”
“Do you love him?”
I look away, unable to lie. “I took vows…” I hear the echo of Emma’s words in mine.
Paul rolls away, slamming his hand against the stone wall so hard I am afraid he might have broken a bone. “Dammit, Marta. Why did things have to turn out this way?”
“I don’t know.”
“You could leave your husband, you know. Get a divorce. Women do it sometimes.” Divorce. My mind whirls. I have heard about divorce, read about it in books, but I never thought of it as something people actually did. Paul continues. “I would care for your daughter. Love her as if she were my own.”
She is yours. My eyes fill with tears and in that moment, I know I have to tell him. “Paul, there’s something that I—” My words are cut off by a banging sound coming from the front room.
Paul leaps up, pulling on his pants. “Someone’s here.” Our eyes meet uneasily. Jan is not supposed to be back so soon. Has someone else found us? Paul reaches for his gun. I pull the top of my dress closed as the door flies open and Jan rushes into the room. I cringe, knowing how ridiculous we must look, half dressed, playing cards scattered across the floor.
“Jan, we were just…” Paul begins.
But if Jan notices anything strange, she gives no indication. “Get dressed quickly,” she instructs, crossing the room toward us. “We have to leave.”