The prodigal spy

He stood for a minute, imagining how it might have been. The sudden impulse in bed, knocking against the night table as he got up, staggering (drunk?), bumping against the desk, yanking the chair out of the way, the rush to the balcony, and over. Soiling himself in the terror of the plunge. None of that happened. It would have been deliberate, planned out like everything else. A note. Nick looked on the desk, moving some of the papers aside, and then stopped. You weren’t supposed to disturb the scene of the crime. The phrase struck him, another adrenalin surge. That’s what it was, wasn’t it? He looked at the room again. Another phrase: signs of struggle. Someone pulling him off the bed, dragging him, knocking against the furniture. Had he screamed? Nick leaned against the desk, lightheaded. Had he begged them to stop, fought back, one final swing, knowing his luck had run out? But no one had heard. The body was still lying there, unreported. Nick imagined instead a hand clamped over his mouth, muffling him, his arms thrashing as they forced him out, an old man, so terrified that he went in his pants.

No note. The papers were bills, scattered now from what must have been a neat pile, making sure everything was paid before he got on the train. Nick opened a drawer. Was there really a list? There seemed to have been no effort to find it, no search. The inside of the desk was untouched, folders of letters and bills and what seemed to be official documents with his name, the paper trail of socialist life.

Nick heard a noise in the hall, the whirring of the elevator. One of the neighbors would see the body now, glance across the lawn as he went out, curious, then cry out and run back for the telephone. Should he do it first? But the idea of calling the police in Czech defeated him. Let someone else do it. Maybe instead he should slip down the stairs, go back to the hotel and his own life. Call Anna later. What more could he do here? All this paper, receipts and letters, some in Russian, the desk of a foreigner. Only on the grass, strangely young again, had he been his father.

In the top drawer he brushed aside pens and paper clips. A passport, Russian, his father’s. He drew out a manila envelope dark with age. Newspaper clippings, in English. His disappearance, his press conference, a loose scrapbook of disinformation. Why had he saved them? Then Nick saw that each of the clippings had family photographs-the three of them in front of the house on 2nd Street; the old wedding picture, blurred on newsprint; his parents shaking Truman’s hand at a reception. Their tabloid life. At the bottom of the pile were two real photographs, worn at the edges. His mother, young, maybe during the war, shoulder pads and short skirt, a vivid lipstick smile, her mouth open with the beginning of a laugh. The other was a boy in hockey gear at Lasker Rink, a wintry Central Park in the background, the boy unaware that he was being photographed by a spy. Nick looked at himself. He wished now that he had been smiling, that every time his father had looked at it he’d seen what he wanted to see, his happy boy, not somebody caught from behind a tree. Too late. His eyes filled, and he wanted to make a noise again. The photographs were like the stillness of death. If you gave in to them, you drifted away to another place. Nothing ever came back.

He was still looking at the pictures when he heard the sound in the next room. He raised his head. Two policemen faced him, guns drawn, the small machine guns they held with two hands, more menacing than revolvers. One of them shouted in Czech, looking at the blood on his pants.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t hear-”

Another shout. He pointed Nick toward the wall with the gun and said something in Czech, brisk. Now the gun was being jerked up, a signal to raise his hands. When he did, staring at the gun, the other frisked him, patting up and down his sides.

“I was going to call-”

Then a storm of Czech, perhaps to each other, their voices rising in frustration when he didn’t answer.

“I don’t understand.” But then he did. When they snapped on the handcuffs and pushed him out of the room, the gun poking at his back, he understood, dazed, that he was being arrested.

Chapter 12