“I don’t think so. Get the hell out of here, would you? Now.”
“An old man by the name of Owens was murdered two nights ago. He was Darby’s old boss.”
Evita was holding onto the edge of the piano bench so tightly her knuckles were turning white.
“I talked to him. He told me about Mexico City and about you. And he told me about Darby’s days afterward, in Washington and then in Moscow. He was afraid of your husband. I think Darby was sleeping with his wife.”
“Christ,” Evita swore in disgust. She jumped up. “Harry!” she shouted. “Harry!”
McGarvey glanced over his shoulder just as a huge black man, his shoulders bursting out of a white T-shirt, stepped around from behind the bar. The two women had turned and were looking over.
“Yo,” he called out in a deep baritone voice.
McGarvey tried his last card. He didn’t want a fight with Harry, who looked as if he could tear down a large house with his bare hands. “Did you know that Baranov is back in Mexico City?” he asked Evita. “I have that for a fact.” He glanced again toward the bar. The big man was clenching his fists. He looked like a small Sherman tank painted chocolate brown.
Evita was suddenly trembling as if she had just stepped out of a very cold bath directly in front of an open window.
“A lot of innocent people have already been hurt,” McGarvey said.
She looked down at him, her lips pursed. She shook her head. “There are no innocent people, don’t you know that?” She looked up. “Hold my calls, Harry,” she shouted. “I’m going to be in conference for the rest of the morning.”
“You got it,” her bouncer said. He went back behind the bar. The two women went back to their breakfast.
Evita came down from the stage. “Where did you hear this, about Baranov?”
“I have my sources. But it’s true.”
She studied his eyes for a long time, then turned away as if she were resigning herself to some very bad news. “I knew he was going back down there. I saw him. Here, in New York, you know. Maybe nine or ten months ago.”
McGarvey suppressed his excitement. He had inadvertently stumbled onto another aspect of this business; her relationship with the Russian. Yarnell was at the center of this mess, of course, and he apparently had help at high levels in Washington, but Baranov was the key; at least he was as far as concerned Evita Perez. His was more than the name of a Russian spymaster to her. He could see her involvement written all over her face, in her eyes, in the set of her shoulders, in the way she held herself as if she were reliving the pain of a very old, very deep injury.
“We’d better go upstairs,” she said at length.
McGarvey picked up his overnight bag, followed her across the cabaret floor, and went up the stairs to her apartment-salon. At the top she closed and locked the door.
“Fix yourself a drink,” she said. “I’ll take champagne.” She turned and disappeared into the back.
. McGarvey dropped his bag at the end of one of the couches, took off his overcoat, laying it aside, and went to the bar. He mixed himself a bourbon and water, and found a split of Mumms for her, which he uncorked and poured. When she came back she had changed into a thin yellow cotton dress, let her hair down, and put on a little makeup. The change was startling. She looked almost beautiful and certainly very seductive. He could clearly see the shape of her nipples through the material of the dress. She sat down on the couch in front of the fireplace, tucked her legs up beneath her, and accepted the glass of champagne. There was some expectation in her eyes, but he could see that she had girded herself for a difficult time ahead. Difficult but necessary.
“You’re out to get Hizzoner, Darby,” Evita said.
“I think your husband was and is a spy,” McGarvey said.
“Ex-husband, let’s keep that part straight right from the beginning, shall we?”
“His Soviet control officer has been and still is Valentin Baranov.”
Evita laughed disparagingly. “You think you know so fucking much. You don’t know a thing. Nothing.”
“I’ve come to you for help,” McGarvey said, quite calmly. “I’d hate like hell, you know, to see you deported back to Mexico. Baranov is there. He’d take over.”
“Who are you trying to kid?”
McGarvey measured his next words. He watched her carefully, especially her eyes and her hands as they gripped the champagne glass. He was looking for her vulnerable spot.
“You’d probably never see your daughter again if you were sent away,” he said. “I saw her in Washington a few days ago. She’s living with her father. Quite a beautiful young woman. A lot like you.”
“You sonofabitch,” Evita swore. “You bastard.”
She wanted to speak Spanish. McGarvey could hear it in the way she chopped her words. English was far too slow for her, yet she must have figured Spanish would be lost on him.
“I came here trying to avoid all of this,” McGarvey said sitting forward. “Believe me. I think Darby has used every person he’s ever come in contact with. Including you. Including your daughter.”
It was a heavy thought for her. The weight of it seemed to press down upon her, causing her shoulders to sag, her back to bend a little; even the weight of the champagne glass became too much for her and she rested it on her lap.
“Is she a pretty girl, do you think? I haven’t seen her in so long. She doesn’t know me any longer. Whatever Darby tells her is true. She has stars in her eyes.” Evita shook her head, looking inward. “Who wouldn’t? I don’t know anyone who could resist him. His charm. He’s so damned self-assured, no matter what he says you have to believe him. You know?”
“Is he still working for the Russians?” McGarvey asked gently. “For Baranov?”
Evita looked up. “Have you met my … have you met Darby? Have you come face-to-face with him? Have you spent a few minutes listening to him?”
“No.”
“I thought not. You don’t talk as if you were one of his initiates.” She drank her champagne nervously. “I don’t know what you’re doing here.”
“When is the last time you saw him?”
“A long time ago. Not long enough …”
“You mentioned that Baranov had come here. You saw him? You met with him?”
“How can you think you know Darby without meeting him?” Evita asked. “I want to know that. I don’t think you know a goddamned thing about him, see. I think you’re guessing.”
“I’m guessing, you’re right about that much. But I think he killed a very good friend of mine. Or at least I think he had my friend killed. I don’t suspect there is a lot more that I want to know about him, except for his relationship with Baranov.”
“You really think Darby is a spy?”
“Yes.”
“You think he is a murderer? You think he was working for Valentin?”
“Yes. I think he’s still working for him.”
She laughed again. “Listen to me. Darby doesn’t have, nor has he ever had, enough dedication to anything or anyone other than himself to become a spy,” she explained. “You say he worked for Valentin? It’s true, you know, in the old days. But it was also true that he turned in absolutely top-rate intelligence to his own people. To your people, you know. The agency. The Company. Our Father who art in Langley …”
“But he worked for Baranov.”
“He was in love with Valentin. We all were.”
“Still?”
“What do you want?”
“You told me downstairs that Baranov had come here nine or ten months ago. What did he want?”
“Old times …”
“What’d he want?” McGarvey insisted. “You were in love with him, too. Did he come here to …”
“Yes!” she asked defiantly, her head up.
“Did you and he make love? For old times’ sake?”
“What kind of a fucked up question is that?” Evita jumped up, flinging her champagne glass toward the
fireplace. “What did you come here for? What do you want? I don’t care what you think, you know. Darby gave himself and then he gave me. But that’s all there is to it. There’s where you don’t understand anything. He never gave a damn about anything or anyone. Not about me, not really about Baranov, not about his bosses in Langley. None of it. It was nothing more than a big game to him. He was playing chess, only it was with real people. But he didn’t care.” ..
McGarvey understood what frightened her now, and the sudden understanding did nothing for his dour mood, nor for his satisfaction.
“Get out of here,” she said, turning away from him. She went to the window, where the bar was set up on a sideboard. She looked outside, but he didn’t think she was really seeing anything. She was looking inward again. “Just … just go away,” she said.
“Baranov came here ten months ago looking for something, Ms. Perez,” McGarvey said softly. “Now you think it’s a real possibility that Darby is going to give him your daughter.”
Evita said something very fast in Spanish, but the only word McGarvey caught was amor, which means love, and she hung her head and began to weep, her back bent, her head bowed, big racking sobs shaking her narrow shoulders. There was nothing he could do for her; he supposed she was crying not only for her daughter but for her own lost youth, and for the golden days, as Owens had described them, when she and Darby Yarnell were the hottest item in Mexico City. But that was ten thousand years ago, and now she probably thought of herself as an old lady. Her daughter was apparently next on the sacrificial altar Darby had built with the blood and tears of those nearest to him. McGarvey could not leave now, though. He’d come this far, and so had Evita. They would have to share the entire story, for better or for worse.
Evita had come back to the couch. She sat erect, her knees primly together as if she were a schoolgirl prepared to recite her lessons. The room was quiet and McGarvey could hear the vagrant noises of the building: an elevator rising, someone laughing in the distance, a door slamming. Ordinary sounds that punctuated an extraordinary situation. As she talked, she watched the flames in the fireplace.
“I was just twenty, and he was the finest man I had ever seen or even imagined could exist,” she said. “My parents loved him, my friends were jealous of me—they secretly adored him—and we had dinner at the President’s Palace at least once a month. It was a dream.”
“You were much younger than he.”
She smiled in remembrance. “In Mexico in those days that did not matter.” The x in Mexico was silent. As she continued she began to revert more and more into Spanish pronunciations.
It was a traditional courtship, she said. Darby had never tried to rush it, although she got the feeling at the time that she was racing headlong down a slick but wonderful toy slide. They were the feted guests wherever they appeared; he knew more people in Mexico than did her parents: Her mother was the third daughter of the governor of the State of Hidalgo, northwest of Mexico City, and her father was the assistant secretary of finance for the federal government. After their honeymoon, though, they seldom spent a quiet evening at home together. Either they went out or there was a crowd at their palatial home outside the city. Sometimes they went to the mountains, sometimes to the seaside, but wherever they went after that there was always a crowd around them. Darby, she said, called them his mob.
“One month later Baranov came into our lives,” Evita said. “But I think he and Darby were already old friends by that time.”
If her husband was a charming man, she said, Valentin Illen Baranov was a simply bewitching human being. He was short and powerfully built, with a thick, square head and dark, bushy eyebrows. But after five minutes of conversation with the man you would forget his physical person and seem to see through to his soul. He was a power, a force, an adrenaline in even the most casual of encounters.
“When was that, exactly?” McGarvey asked. “Late ’59? Maybe 1960.”
“I don’t know, but it was in the winter, I think. Around Christmas. I came into Darby’s study and they were having drinks together. Filthy vodka. ‘A peasant’s drink,’ Valentin called it.” She raised her eyes, a small smile on her moist lips. “He always said he was a peasant, and when it was time for him to retire, if he lived that long, he would go back to the land. Somewhere in the Urals. He made it sound lovely.”
Darby was a little put out that she had barged in, she said. But Baranov was a charmer; jumping up, bowing, kissing her hand. “Oh, yes, Darby, you do have a lovely wife indeed,” he’d said. The words were sticky sweet, but Evita said she always got the impression he meant everything he said. Every single word. He insisted that she stay. It was nothing more than the conversation of two old friends getting to know each other a little better. He wouldn’t let Evita drink vodka, though, or any other hard liquor for that matter. Champagne was her drink. Sweet for in the morning, a little dryer for afternoon, and the Sahara Desert of champagnes—as only the French truly know how to make them—for the evenings.
They all went out that evening. Baranov insisted on showing them off. He’d heard a lot of good things about Evita, of course, and now that he had seen for his own eyes that what he’d heard was not an exaggeration, he wanted a little of her glitter to rub off on him.
“We always had a lot of friends in those days,” Evita said. “Mostly Mexican government officials at first. But shortly after Valentin’s first visit, we started chumming around with other couples from our own embassy.”
“Other CIA?”
“I guess so,” she said. “Though at the time I didn’t know it. I didn’t even know that Darby worked for the Company. That didn’t come until later.”
“How did you find out?”
“Valentin told me.”
“What did he tell you?”
“That Darby worked for the CIA, and that he also worked for … KGB.”
“And that they worked together?”
She nodded. “That too.”
“Did he mention anyone else? Another American working with them both?”
“Not that I can remember. But he was proud of himself. Proud of the relationship. He wasn’t any older than Darby, or at least not much, but he was more like a father to him than a friend. A father confessor, his priest.”
“And for you, Evita?” McGarvey asked gently.
She looked at him, her eyes wide, but she said nothing.
“What was Baranov to you? What did he become to you?”
“My husband’s friend.”
“That’s it?”
“What do you want?” she flared, but it wasn’t very convincing. Her emotions were by now rubbed beyond the point of simply raw. She was overloaded. The majority of the hurt might have happened more than twenty years ago, but the pain was still very fresh and very real to her.
“What was your husband’s reaction to this?” McGarvey asked.
“To what?”
“To your knowledge that he was working for the KGB as well as the CIA?”
“He said it wasn’t true … .”
“But he admitted that Baranov was KGB?”
“Of course. But he told me that not everything was as it seemed. There was more in this world than simple black and white. He kept talking about geopolitics and balances of power. We were on a teeterboard; Western democracy on the one side, and Russian Communism on the other, with nuclear weapons in the middle.”
McGarvey had heard the argument before. The Soviet Union and her satellite states were balanced by the Western European nations. It was important that the United States and Canada be balanced by Cuba and others in the Western Hemisphere. Only in this way could nuclear war be safely avoided. It was why the Russians had called the Cuban missiles “peace missiles.”
“Did you believe him?”
“What did I know? I told you I was a little girl with stars in my eyes. But already Darby was beginning to change, you know. He was busy. He was gone a lot those days. If I was at our town house, he might spend a
weekend in the mountains, leaving me behind. Business, he said. Or if I was at the mountains, he might go to the seashore for a week, sometimes even longer.”
Baranov began coming around, then. He took her out to dinner once, and afterward to the Ateneo Español, but the place frightened her. They were real revolutionaries, radicals who talked endlessly about shooting and burning and tearing down the establishments. They all had a great deal of respect for Valentin in that place, but he promised never to take her back. He was sensitive to her needs. McGarvey suspected he had been digging a deeper hole into which Evita would eventually be dropped once she realized what was and had been happening around her.
Everything else seemed to change then for Evita. She’d become an American, her parents told her. And her father died within ten months of the wedding. Darby was sent out of town at that exact moment; exactly when she needed him more than she’d ever needed anyone in her life. Her final lesson came the very evening of the funeral.
Valentin was there at the house, Evita said. It was late, her sisters had stayed with their mother, and she had gotten the feeling that they didn’t really want her there with them, that her place was at home waiting for her husband as any good wife should. Her father was dead, her husband was gone, and the rest of the family was beginning to ostracize her.
He was waiting in the conservatory, Evita’s favorite room in the house. He had dismissed the staff for the evening. He knew that she would be coming back, and he even knew in which room she would bury herself when she did return, so he had set it up for her return with champagne and flowers. She asked him what he was doing there like that, at that hour, but she was secretly glad he had come, whatever the reason. The champagne was Mumms, the very driest, he said. He poured her a glass and watched her drink, even held her hand for a time while she cried. He talked then about dying; about the old moving aside to make room for the young and how it was the responsibility of the young therefore to make a difference in the world, to make life just a little nicer, a little safer, so that when it was time to hand things over to the next generation we could be proud to do so. As her father must have been proud to do for her, in the end.
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