I sat in my favorite easy chair. She sat on the rug at my feet. That, too, in my suddenly prosaic mood, struck me as somewhat overintentional: a patent construct, a cynical tableau of a woman modest in her youth doting on a somewhat older man in his authority.
All the same, I held my glass down to hers and she lifted hers to mine and we clinked them together. I sipped and sighed.
“I was raised,” I said, “in a town called Centerville.” I don’t know why I felt I had to tell her this, but I did. It was the last act of the play, I guess. The only way I could think to keep it going just a little longer.
She did her part as well. She put her head on my knee and gazed up at me dreamily as I stroked her hair. “Yes,” she said. “You’ve mentioned it. In Indiana, you said.”
“Yes. Yes. It was supposed to be in Indiana, a small town in Indiana. But, in fact, of course, it was in the Ukraine somewhere. Surrounded by these vast wheat fields. Quite beautiful really. Quite typically American. They wanted us to grow up as typical Americans. That’s what the place was made for. Even as they trained us for what we were going to do, they wanted us to develop American habits of manner and mind so we could be slipped into the places they prepared for us, so we wouldn’t stand out, you know, wouldn’t give ourselves away.”
She was very good. Quiet and attentive, her expression unreadable. She could’ve been thinking anything. She could’ve simply been waiting for the sense of it to be made clear.
“The problem was, of course, that our intelligence services…well, let’s say they never had much of a sense of nuance. Or a sense of humor, for that matter.” I laughed. “No, never a lot in the way of humor, that’s for sure. They constructed the place out of self-serious field reports and magazine articles they accepted without question and programs they saw on TV. Especially the programs they saw on TV, those half-hour situation comedies that were so popular in the fifties, you know, about small-town family life. They developed the whole program around them. Trained our guardians and teachers with them. Reproduced them wholesale in their plodding, literal Russian way, as the setting for our upbringing. As a result, I would say now, we grew up in an America no actual American ever did. We grew up in the America America wanted to be or thought of itself as or…I don’t know how you would express it exactly. It was a strange dichotomy, that’s for sure. Brutal psychologically, in some ways. We were planted as children in the middle of the American Dream and then taught that it was evil and had to be destroyed….”
I sipped my wine. I stroked her hair. I gazed into the middle distance, talking to myself more than anything now, musing out loud, summing up, if you will. “But it was…my childhood. You know? I was a boy there. There were, you know, friends and summer days and snowfalls. Happy memories. It was my childhood.”
“You sound as though you miss it,” she said.
“Oh, terribly. Almost as if it had been real.” I looked down at her again. Her sweet, gentle, young and old-fashioned face. “As I love you. As if you were real.”
She sat up. She took my hand. “But I am real.” I was surprised. It was the first lie she’d ever told me—aside from everything, I mean. “You see me, don’t you? Of course I’m real.”
“I’m not going to do it,” I told her. “You can tell whoever sent you. I’ve already deleted the code.” Now, again, she simply waited, simply watched me. I stroked her cheek fondly with the back of my hand. “I’ve given it a lot of thought. It was difficult to know how to approach it actually. Should I try to outguess you, determine what would activate your protocol? Or try to figure out the right and wrong of the matter—though I suppose it’s a little late for that. In the end, though…in the end, you know what it was? It was a matter of authenticity. Of all things. But really, I mean it. When I was younger, I tried to figure out: Who am I? Who was I meant to be? Who would I have been if none of this had ever happened? But what good is any of that? Thinking that way? We all have histories. We all have childhoods. Accidents, betrayals, cruelties that leave their scars. We’re none of us how we were made. So I thought, well, if I can’t be who I am, let me at least be what I seem. Let me be loyal to my longings, at least. Let me be loyal to the things I love. Even if they are just daydreams, they’re mine, aren’t they? Let me be loyal to my dreams.”
She didn’t answer. Of course. And the look on her face remained impossible to decipher. I found myself appreciating that at this point. I was grateful for it, though her beauty broke my heart.
I took a final sip of wine and set the glass down on a table and stood. I touched her face a final time, my fingers lingering, then trailing across the softness of her cheek as I moved away.
I didn’t turn to her again until I reached the bedroom doorway. And then I did stop and turn and I looked back at her. She made a nice picture, sitting on the rug, her feet tucked under her and her skirt spread out around her like a blue pool. She had followed me with her eyes and was watching me, and now she smiled tentatively.
“Look at you,” I said, full of feeling. “Look at you. You were never more beautiful.”
And as I turned again to leave the room, I added tenderly, “Come to bed.”
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Eric Ambler. “The Army of the Shadows” by Eric Ambler, copyright © 1939; copyright renewed. Originally published in The Queen’s Book of the Red Cross (Hodder & Stoughton, 1939). Reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop (www.petersfraserdunlop.com) on behalf of the Estate of Eric Ambler.
* * *
H. Bedford-Jones. “Free-Lance Spy” by H. Bedford-Jones, copyright © 1935 by The Frank A. Munsey Company; copyright renewed 1962 and assigned to Steeger Properties, LLC. Originally published in Argosy, March 30, 1935. All rights reserved.
* * *
John Buchan. “The Loathly Opposite” by John Buchan, copyright © 1927; copyright renewed. Originally published in London Pall Mall Magazine, October 1927. Reprinted by permission of David Lane, House of Stratus.
* * *
Ken Crossen. “The Red, Red Flowers” by Ken Crossen is taken from The Twisted Trap by Ken Crossen writing as M. E. Chaber, copyright © 1961, 2019 by Kendra Crossen Burroughs. All rights reserved.
* * *
Jeffery Deaver. “Comrade 35” by Jeffery Deaver, copyright © 2014 by Jeffery Deaver. Originally published in Ice Cold (Grand Central Publishing, 2014). Reprinted by permission of the author.
* * *
C. P. Donnel Jr. “Fraulein Judas” by C. P. Donnel Jr., copyright © 1941 by Popular Publications, Inc.; copyright renewed 1968 and assigned to Steeger Properties, LLC. Originally published in Dime Detective, August 1941. All rights reserved.
* * *
Brendan DuBois. “Old Soldiers” by Brendan DuBois, copyright © 2000 by Brendan DuBois. Originally published in Playboy, May 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.
* * *
Dan Fesperman. “The Courier” by Dan Fesperman, copyright © 2010 by Dan Fesperman. Originally published in Agents of Treachery (Vintage, 2010). Reprinted by permission of the author.
* * *
Joseph Finder. “Neighbors” by Joseph Finder, copyright © 2010 by Joseph Finder. Originally published in Agents of Treachery (Vintage, 2010). Reprinted by permission of the author.
* * *
Ian Fleming. “For Your Eyes Only” by Ian Fleming, copyright © 1960 by Ian Fleming Publications Ltd. Originally published in the short story collection For Your Eyes Only (Cape, 1960). Reproduced with the permission of Ian Fleming Publications Ltd., London. www.ianfleming.com.
* * *
T. T. Flynn. “The Black Doctor” by T. T. Flynn, copyright © 1932 by Popular Publications, Inc.; copyright renewed 1959 and assigned to Steeger Properties, LLC. Originally published in Dime Detective, December 1932. All rights reserved.
* * *
Paul Gallico. “Thief Is an Ugly Word” by Paul Gallico, copyright ©
1944; copyright renewed. Originally published in Cosmopolitan, May 1944. Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates.
* * *
Erle Stanley Gardner. “Flight into Disaster” by Erle Stanley Gardner, copyright © 1952 by Erle Stanley Gardner. Originally published in This Week Magazine, May 11, 1952. Reprinted by permission of Lisa Queen Literary Agency.
* * *
Brian Garfield. “Charlie’s Shell Game” by Brian Garfield, copyright © 1978. Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, February 1978. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Brian Garfield and MysteriousPress.com.
* * *
James Grady. “Condor in the Stacks” by James Grady, copyright © 2015. Originally published by The Mysterious Bookshop. Reprinted by permission of the author.
* * *
Edward D. Hoch. “The Spy Who Clutched a Playing Card” by Edward D. Hoch, copyright © 1968. Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, February 1968. Reprinted by permission of Patricia Hoch.
* * *
Stephen Hunter. “Citadel” by Stephen Hunter, copyright © 2015 by Stephen Hunter. Originally published by The Mysterious Bookshop. Reprinted by permission of the author.
* * *
Andrew Klavan. “Sleeping with My Assassin” by Andrew Klavan, copyright © 2010 by Andrew Klavan. Originally published in Agents of Treachery (Vintage, 2010). Reprinted by permission of the author.
* * *
Charles McCarry. “The Hand of Carlos” by Charles McCarry, copyright © 1992. Originally published in The Armchair Detective, Fall 1992. “The End of the String” by Charles McCarry, copyright © 2010 by Charles McCarry. Originally published in Agents of Treachery (Vintage, 2010). Both stories reprinted by permission of Nathan N. McCarry, Trustee of the Nancy Neill McCarry Revocable Trust.
* * *
John P. Marquand. “High Tide” by John P. Marquand, copyright © 1932 by John P. Marquand; copyright renewed. Originally published in The Saturday Evening Post, October 8, 1932. Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Welch.
* * *
W. Somerset Maugham. “The Hairless Mexican” by W. Somerset Maugham, copyright © 1927 by W. Somerset Maugham; copyright renewed. Originally published in Cosmopolitan, December 1927. Reprinted by permission of United Agents.
* * *
Sara Paretsky. “Miss Bianca” by Sara Paretsky, copyright © 2014. Originally published in Ice Cold (Grand Central Publishing, 2014). Reprinted by permission of the author.
* * *
Robert Rogers. “Affair in Warsaw” by Robert Rogers, copyright © 1962 by Robert Rogers; copyright 2019 by Steeger Properties, LLC. Originally published in Argosy, May 1962. All rights reserved.
* * *
Ronald G. Sercombe. “Betrayed” by Ronald G. Sercombe, copyright © 1964 by Ronald G. Sercombe; copyright 2019 by Steeger Properties, LLC. Originally published in Argosy, April 1964. All rights reserved.
* * *
Olen Steinhauer. “You Know What’s Going On” by Olen Steinhauer, copyright © 2014 by Olen Steinhauer. Originally published in Agents of Treachery (Vintage, 2010). Reprinted by permission of the author.
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The Big Book of Espionage Page 158