The Diplomat's Wife

by Pam Jenoff

  “So you found a way to bring me to England and meet me,” I say slowly, thinking aloud. “But I didn’t plan on coming to England. I didn’t even have a visa until Rose…” I stop, the awful truth dawning on me slowly. I turn to Dava. “You killed Rose.”

  She looks down. “It was the only way.”

  “Dava,” Simon says, his voice cautioning. “That’s enough.”

  I remember meeting Simon on the ship, his job offer. “But I was engaged to Paul, so I could not have possibly…” A rock seems to hit me in the stomach, knocking me backward. “The crash wasn’t an accident, was it?” Dava turns away. Neither of them answers. I lean against the stairway railing for support. The newspaper headline, announcing the plane crash, appears suddenly in my mind. “All of those men, gone.” Murdered. “You knew that once Paul was gone I would have no choice but to come to work for you,” I say.

  He nods. “The fact that you were pregnant and I could marry you to keep a closer eye on things was a bonus.”

  I stare at him in disbelief. “You knew about Rachel?”

  “That she wasn’t mine, you mean? Yes. I can add. I didn’t care, though. Having a wife and daughter added to my cover, gave me an air of respectability at the Foreign Office I would not otherwise have had as that odd bachelor chap everyone suspected might be homosexual. And Rachel will continue to give me that same credibility in Moscow.”

  “No!” I cry. Breaking free of his grip, I run up the steps of the plane and push past Dava.

  Inside, the plane is a smaller version of the one I took to Munich, a single column of seats, three deep, along each side. Rachel sits on the floor of the aisle. I run to her, touching her head, making sure she is all right. Seeing me, she smiles. “Ma…”

  “Yes, darling, it’s Mama.” Hurriedly, I pick her up. I turn toward the doorway, but Simon and Dava are blocking my way. “Sit down, Marta,” Simon orders.

  “But…”

  “You’re coming with us. I hadn’t planned it this way. But you’ve interfered, complicated things like you always do. You know too much. And I can’t leave a body behind on the tarmac.” The chocolates, I remember. He wasn’t just trying to drug me but to kill me. Thank goodness I had only taken a bite.

  “But, Dmitri,” Dava interjects. “You don’t mean…?” I can hear the surprise and conflict in her voice. After all that she has done, can she really be concerned about killing me?

  “He already tried to kill me once,” I inform her. I turn to Simon, whose eyes have gone wide. “I know the chocolates were poisoned.”

  “You never said anything about killing Marta,” Dava says.

  He turns to her angrily. “It’s none of your business.”

  “But I didn’t think…”

  The plane is going to take off soon, I think, while the two of them continue to argue. For a second I consider racing into the cockpit, pleading with the pilot for help. But he is surely working with the communists, too. I have to get out. There is a small gap between Simon’s back and the door frame. Clutching Rachel, I charge at it. “Oh, no you don’t,” Simon says, grabbing me and pulling us back.

  Suddenly there is a noise at the door of the plane and Simon jerks backward. Standing behind Simon, grasping him in a chokehold, is Paul.

  Paul! Relief floods through me. So he received my message after all. But then I see Simon reach for his waistband. “Watch out!” I yell as he yanks a knife from his belt. Rachel, hearing my distress, begins to cry. Paul pulls Simon backward out the door of the plane, away from the baby and me. Struggling violently for control of the knife, they tumble down the stairs of the airplane, landing in a heap at the bottom, Simon on top of Paul. Paul tries to get up, but Simon punches him, knocking him back to the ground. Paul is still weak from surgery. He cannot possibly overpower Simon now. Holding Rachel close to me, I start down the stairs.

  Behind me there is a clicking sound. “Not so fast,” Dava says. I turn to see her pointing a gun at me. “Sit down.”

  “Dava,” I say slowly. But her face is a stony mask now, her loyalties clear. As I stare at the gun, panic rises in me. I have to get Rachel out of the line of fire. “Don’t do this, Dava,” I say slowly, raising my hand. “We’re friends. You saved my life.”

  “I know,” Dava replies. “And I don’t want to kill you. But he told me that in Moscow we can be together as a family, and you’re getting in the way of that.”

  Suddenly I understand. “You love Simon, don’t you?” I ask, trying to make my voice gentle. Rachel, her sobs subsiding, watches Dava and me with interest. Out of the corner of my eye, I look through the door of the plane. Simon and Paul are still fighting on the ground, but I know that Paul cannot last much longer. I have to get out of here before Simon comes back. But Dava’s gun is still trained on Rachel and me. “How long have you felt this way?”

  “Forever,” she replies sadly. “Years. Well before I met you. I knew Dmitri in Moscow before the war. I was going to have his baby once, too. But he made me get rid of it, said it would interfere with our work.” Her face hardens. “And I can’t have any more children now because of that.” I remember speculating with Rose about Dava’s past, how she had seemed so sad and resolute when I talked about starting a new life.

  “Now sit.”

  I drop to the first seat on the right, still holding Rachel, who has grabbed a fistful of my hair. Dava comes toward me, picks up the seat belt to tie me up. As she leans over me, her head turns slightly away for a second. Taking a deep breath, I knee her in the stomach. She flies backward to the floor of the plane with a grunt, still clutching the gun. Quickly, I stand up. Then, looking at Rachel, I hesitate. I do not want to let go of her, even for a second, but I have no choice. Reluctantly, I pull my hair from her fingers and set her down in the seat. I lunge toward Dava as she tries to sit up, landing on top of her, trying to pry her fingers from the gun. But she clings tightly to it, struggling to raise it above her head. Keep it close, I think, wrapping my hand tightly around hers, forcing her arm down. If the gun is between us, she cannot shoot Rachel. Suddenly a shot rings out. We both freeze. Then Dava rolls back away from me, her arm limp. Blood appears on her chest. “Dava…” I pull back, staring at her. Even though she betrayed me, I cannot help but feel her pain. But there is no time to linger. I race back to Rachel and pick her up. If she was upset by the gunshot, she gives no indication. I carry her to the door of the plane. Paul lies motionless on the ground below. Dread rises in me. Simon turns from Paul and starts back up the stairs of the plane.

  “Is she dead?” he asks, his voice devoid of emotion.

  “She loved you,” I say.

  “I know.” His voice is cold, matter-of-fact. “Which made it easier to get her to do what I needed. Because she really never wanted to do this to you, Marta. But she wanted a family more.” He looks over my shoulder into the plane. “I guess that’s all over now. So you’ll get to take care of Rachel for a little while longer, after all. At least until we get to Moscow.”

  “Simon, please listen. No one has to know what happened. We can go home.”

  “Moscow is my home,” he replies, his voice sincere. It occurs to me again that I have spent two years married to a stranger. “Now, get back in the plane,” he orders. He raises the knife again and now I notice that it is wet with blood. Paul’s blood. “You killed Paul….”

  “Paul?” A stunned look crosses Simon’s face. “I thought that was—”

  “Michael?” I finish for him, taking pleasure in for once knowing something that he does not. “Michael and Paul are the same person, Simon. The soldier you thought you killed in the plane crash two years ago. He survived and he found me while I was looking for Marcelitis. Paul is Rachel’s real father,” I add.

  A stunned expression crosses Simon’s face. He turns to look at Paul’s motionless body on the ground behind him. As he does, I reach out and kick him hard. He tumbles backward down the stairs, landing close to where Paul lies. I run down the stairs, desperately wanting to
stop and check on Paul. But I know that it is only a matter of seconds before Simon gets up again. Carrying Rachel, I start to run away from the plane in the direction of the airport. Taking this to be a game, she laughs giddily. I look ahead desperately for somewhere to hide, but the airfield is open, exposed. Behind me, I hear Simon getting up. Desperately, I start to run toward the airport in the distance. Let the maintenance man still be there, I pray. Let someone be there. But carrying Rachel slows my gait. Simon’s footsteps grow louder and I know that it is only a matter of seconds until he catches us.

  Suddenly I hear a shot, then another. I drop to the ground, falling on top of Rachel to protect her. I will give up, I decide, stop running and let Simon take us to Moscow rather than risk her being shot. I stare at the ground, waiting for Simon to pounce upon us. But there is silence. At last I look up. Simon has fallen to the ground and lies motionless. Behind him, holding the gun, stands Dava.

  Looking from Dava’s outstretched arm to Simon lying prone on the ground, I am overcome with a strange sense of déjà vu. Have I been here before? No, that was me shooting the Kommandant to save Emma’s life, long ago. This time it is I who has been saved.

  “Dava!” Setting down Rachel, I race to Dava’s side. Blood seeps from the front of her dress and she is breathing hard. But she is still alive.

  She leans on me for support and I help her to the ground. “I thought he loved me, too,” she says weakly. She must have overheard our conversation on the stairs of the plane. “I’m so sorry.”

  I hesitate, staring down at her. Hatred rises in me. She killed Rose. I fight the urge to take the gun and finish her off myself. But she might have information that is valuable to the government. I help her to a sitting position on the ground. Suddenly the maintenance man appears at the door of the airport. “Call an ambulance!” I yell as loudly as I can. I stand up and walk to where Simon lies, eyes staring blankly at the sky. I reach in his jacket pocket and pull out the cipher. Tucking it in my own pocket, I pick up Rachel, then start running back across the airfield toward the plane. Paul still lies on the ground, not moving. “Paul!” I cry, dropping to the ground beside him. He does not respond. I lower my face to his. Is he dead? Rachel reaches over, pats his cheek with her tiny palm.

  “Mmm,” he mumbles.

  “Paul, wake up,” I plead.

  He opens his eyes. “Marta? Are you and the baby okay?” he asks weakly.

  My body sags with relief. “We’re fine. But you’ve been stabbed.” I set Rachel down. There is a gash between his chest and shoulder that is bleeding heavily.

  “I don’t think he hit anything major.” He grimaces. “I may have broken my shoulder, though.”

  “When you didn’t move, I was afraid that…”

  “I think I just bumped my head when we fell.”

  “Thank goodness you received my message and made it in time. Simon was a traitor, Paul. It was him all along.” Suddenly I feel very foolish.

  “You couldn’t possibly have known,” he says, reading my mind. “Where is he now?”

  “Dead. Dava shot him.”

  “Dava, the nurse from Salzburg?” he asks. I nod. “I was wondering who the woman with him was. She was in on it, too?”

  “It’s a long story. Apparently it was all a deliberate plan set up by the Russians to have me use my contacts to find Marcelitis. And there’s something else.” I take a deep breath. “The plane crash, it wasn’t an accident. Simon arranged it deliberately, to keep us apart.”

  I watch his face as he processes the information, trying to grasp the full extent of the damage and pain Simon had caused. Then he shakes his head and the shadow lifts from his eyes. “He’s gone now and he can’t hurt us anymore.” He reaches out to Rachel, who is trying to crawl away. “Now, isn’t it about time that you introduced me to my daughter?”

  EPILOGUE

  I stand on the deck of the ocean liner, looking out at a flock of gulls that dive low to the water, searching the wake for fish. Behind me, the coast of England grows smaller. A chilly breeze blows across the deck and I draw my coat more closely around me.

  “Mama!” a voice calls. Behind me I turn to see Rachel toddling unsteadily toward me, bulky in her winter coat. Paul follows, his arm still wrapped in a sling.

  “Hello, darling.” I stoop to pick up Rachel, who seems to grow heavier by the day. She babbles animatedly, pointing at the gulls. I study her face for the hundredth time, wondering if she has any memory of what happened. But her eyes are bright and clear.

  Rachel turns in my arms and strains toward an enclosed glass area about ten meters away where a bunch of children sit at tables, drawing and painting. “You want to go play?” She nods.

  “I’ll take her,” Paul offers, taking Rachel from me with his good arm. I watch as he carries Rachel over to the play area and speaks with the governess in charge. A moment later, he returns to me. “She’ll be fine playing with the other children.”

  I smile. “I know.” In the weeks since we were reunited, Paul has been as nervous as a new father, scarcely letting Rachel out of his sight. I, too, have been watching her more closely since that night at the airfield, waking in the middle of the night and tiptoeing to her in the darkness, touching her to make sure that she is still there.

  I turn back to face the water, and Paul wraps his arm around me, resting his chin on the top of my head. More than a month has passed since the confrontation at the airport with Simon. We buried him in a private graveside ceremony in his family plot at a Jewish cemetery west of London on a rainy Sunday morning, just the rabbi, Rachel and myself, Paul, Delia and Charles standing a respectful distance behind. At first, I had not wanted to go. Simon was a murderer. Every single thing he had said or done since I met him had been a lie. In the end, it was Paul who convinced me to go. I looked at him in amazement. His entire unit had died because of Simon. “For closure,” he explained. “I mean, I hate him, too. But we should go for Rachel. Simon is the only father she has known until now and someday she will want to know things.”

  So in the end we went. As his casket was lowered into the ground my rage burned white hot. How could he have done this? He killed so many innocent men. He played with our lives, made us nothing more than pawns in his game. The rabbi passed me a small handful of dirt, and as I threw it into the grave, my anger began to wane. You lost, Simon, I thought, feeling strangely triumphant. Then, staring down into the dark hole, my curiosity burned. There were so many things I wanted to know about what had happened and why he had done it, questions to which I would never get answers. Suddenly I realized that it did not matter. “Y’isgadal, v’yis’kadash,” the rabbi began. As I joined him in the Mourner’s Kaddish, I did not pray for Simon. I prayed for my parents and Rose, for Jacob and Alek and all those I carried with me. The years I spent with Simon would forever be part of the tapestry of my life, but I would not let it destroy the good. My voice grew stronger as I thanked God for sustaining me and bringing me to this place. When the prayer ended, Paul stepped forward and took my hand, and he, Rachel and I walked slowly away together.

  Dava survived her gunshot wound and agreed to cooperate with the government in exchange for amnesty, a reduced sentence. “It’s actually better this way,” Paul told me a few days earlier as we packed up the house. “There won’t be a public trial.” In fact, somehow the whole incident had been kept out of the media, though I knew that the scandal of Simon’s death and my departure would be whispered about in diplomatic circles for years. “And hopefully we’ll learn the full extent to which the communists had infiltrated the British government,” he added.

  Hopefully, I think now, shivering. We learned a great deal more about Simon in the investigation following his death, how he had been targeted by the communists for recruitment while a student at Cambridge, invited to Moscow by a college classmate for spring vacation. It was not hard to imagine Simon, alone and in need of money after his father’s death, being drawn in, warmed by the prospect of being important and
needed. There he had taken on the identity Dmitri Borskin, met Dava. Later another diplomat, also secretly working for the Soviets, had helped him secure his place at the Foreign Office.

  Hearing this, I pictured the faces of the other men in the department—Ebertson, Fitzwilliam, even the D.M.—how many of them were really communist spies? I worried that someone might come after me and Paul, seek revenge for what we had done. But the investigators assured me that they would all be arrested. Paul said, too, that the Soviets would no longer be interested in me. But I was still glad to be putting an ocean between us.

  Dava’s face appears in my mind once more. Her betrayal is the hardest to believe. I remember her as she had been in Salzburg, caring and kind. It had all been a lie. I hate her for what she did to Rose, and I want her to go to prison, to suffer. I will never forgive her, but in a strange way, I can almost understand. She was blinded by her love for Simon. And she did not let him kill me in the end. If it was not for Dava, I wouldn’t be standing here today.

  I look up at Paul, wanting to pinch myself to make certain that it is real. We have been so lucky. Though the cut Simon gave him had not touched any major organs, the struggle had caused internal bleeding at the site of his gunshot wound. I clung to his hand as they loaded him into the ambulance that night, fearful that if I let go, he would disappear again. “Come back to the States with me,” he suggested before they closed the ambulance doors and took him away. He repeated the invitation as his first words when he woke up in the hospital following surgery the next day.

  I hesitated. Going to America with Paul was a long-forgotten dream, something that had died years ago. But what did I have left here? I could hardly go back to the Foreign Office after all that happened. And our house, Simon’s house, held nothing but painful memories. Delia was here, of course. But even she was talking about moving on, getting married at long last to Charles and retiring to the south of France. “Life’s too short,” she explained. Too short indeed. That night I told Paul I would come with him to America. We stayed in London just long enough to finalize affairs: I arranged for the sale of the house through an agency Delia recommended and Paul secured visas to America for Rachel and me. A few weeks later, we were ready to go.