RAYMOND: Hey Jeffery, I’m really pleased to be coediting this MWA anthology with you. I think we’ve got some great authors and terrific stories that explore many aspects of what we commonly refer to as the “Cold War.” The process has been great fun.

JEFFERY: Hi, Raymond. Yes, this project has been a big treat for me. And you’ve hit on one of the most compelling elements of the book—the many different takes our contributors have on that era. The stories range from classic espionage to subtle psychological drama of the decades that saw huge change in America… and the rest of the world.

RAYMOND: Seeing that we’re both around the same age—meaning we’re old farts—we can actually remember that tense period in the early 1960s when the Cold War was really causing some anxiety. I recall doing the “duck and cover” drills in elementary school and not totally understanding what they were for. I thought they were fun—you got to take time out from class to practice jumping underneath your desk a few times.

JEFFERY: And how reassuring to learn that six inches of fiberboard and metal could ward off the overhead blast and radiation from a thermonuclear bomb. Your comment brought back a very real memory of the Cuban Missile Crisis standoff. I was in middle school outside of Chicago and a teacher told my class to be particularly diligent in ducking and covering, since we were not far from Argonne National Laboratory in DuPage County—sure to be targeted by the Soviets. You’re a Chicagoan, too; do you also remember the Nike missile sites in the area?

RAYMOND: I didn’t come to Chicagoland until the early nineties; I grew up in West Texas, where everyone would have rather been dead than Red. But I’m sure my experience in the classroom was similar to yours at that time. And, yes, there is an old Nike missile site not far from my current home in Chicago’s northwest suburbs. It looks like the remains of a forgotten World’s Fair. Seriously, one of the structures resembles a broken-down amusement park ride. I think, though, my full realization and understanding of the Cold War came with my discovery of James Bond—first through the films, which really didn’t address the Cold War much, and Ian Fleming’s novels, which did.

JEFFERY: Apart from a few Twilight Zone TV series episodes, Bond was my first fiction exposure to the Cold War. I was more a fan of the books than the movies and so, yes, I had a real sense of how the Cold War could set the stage for a thriller. From Russia, With Love is the quintessential Cold War Bond novel for me. Of course, it’s a bit ironic that you and I, as the only two American authors to write James Bond continuation novels, chose not to set our 007 tales during the Cold War. That’s one of the reasons I was delighted to participate in this project, Ice Cold.

RAYMOND: I agree with you about From Russia, With Love. Actually, my directive from the Fleming people was to make my books “more like the current movies,” which, at that time, were the Pierce Brosnan action extravaganzas. But back to America’s reaction to the Cold War… You know, it seems to me that the U.S. was much more freaked out about it than other countries, even England. There were some serious overreactions to the situation. Senator Joe McCarthy’s rhetoric in the fifties, and the Hollywood blacklisting in the late forties and all through the fifties, were terribly misguided. When you look at the list of Hollywood actors, writers, and directors who were blacklisted, your jaw drops. I actually played around with the idea of writing a blacklist story for this anthology, but ultimately rejected it because I couldn’t shape it into a mystery or thriller—it was, simply, pure tragedy.

JEFFERY: Yes, that insanity ruined lives forever. I remember my disappointment at learning that some musicians and filmmakers whom I admired turned in their colleagues at Congressional hearings; I never looked at them the same—but since I wasn’t in their shoes, it’s easy to cast judgments, I suppose. It’s curious how we think of the Cold War in terms of nuclear or conventional military confrontation, which was certainly true (just ask anyone in Eastern Europe or who lived within missile-range of Cuba), but the blacklist is a reminder that there were more subtle consequences, like paranoia, anxiety, and derailed or destroyed political and social movements. I think our authors tapped into these two sides of the Cold War era very well.

RAYMOND: There were also a bunch of “Red Scare” movies made in the late forties and the fifties… Ever seen I Married a Communist or Invasion USA? Today they’re wonderful and unintentionally humorous relics of the era. But the ultimate Cold War movie—and one that puts everything in perspective today and which was amazingly ahead of its time (1964), is Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. It captures the paranoia, the insanity, and the absurdity of the Cold War long before intelligent and sensible people in this country accepted it as such. Alas, we don’t have any black comedies in our collection, but we do have some exciting mysteries and thrillers that paint varied portraits of that significant time in world history. I’d like to thank Barry Zeman for the idea of bringing the two of us together to coedit the anthology, Larry Segriff at Tekno Books for initial copyediting, Lindsey Rose at Grand Central, Margery Flax, all of the MWA members who worked hard to submit stories—and I’m sorry we couldn’t use everyone’s—and all the authors who have contributed to the collection.

JEFFERY: Dr. Strangelove is my favorite Kubrick film (yes, even over 2001!). And take a look at the YouTube of Tom Lehrer, the comic songwriter (and mathematician), performing his “We Will All Go Together When We Go.” It’s further proof that irony and wit were alive and well during that dark time… Ah, Raymond, I think we could continue this dialogue forever but I suppose we better get on to some other projects. Let me add my heartfelt thanks to all of those you mention above—especially our contributors, whose stories truly bring to life a complex and edgy time in world history.

To be summoned to the highest floor of GRU headquarters in Moscow made you immediately question your future.

Several fates might await.

One was that you had been identified as a counter-revolutionary or a lackey of the bourgeoisie imperialists. In which case your next address would likely be a gulag, which were still highly fashionable, even now, in the early 1960s, despite First Secretary and Premier Khrushchev’s enthusiastic denunciation of Comrade Stalin.

Another possibility was that you had been identified as a double agent, a mole within the GRU—not proven to be one, mind you, simply suspected of being one. Your fate in that situation was far simpler and quicker than a transcontinental train ride: a bullet in the back of the head, a means of execution the GRU had originated as a preferred form of execution, though the rival KGB had co-opted and taken credit for the technique.

With these troubling thoughts in mind and his army posture well in evidence, Major Mikhail Sergeyevich Kaverin strode toward the office to which he’d been summoned. The tall man was broad shouldered, columnar. He hulked, rather than walked. The Glavnoe Razvedyvatelnoe Upravlenie was the spy wing of the Soviet Armed Forces; nearly every senior GRU agent, including Kaverin, had fought the Nazis one meter at a time on the western front, where illness and cold and the enemy had quickly taken the weak and the indecisive. Only the most resilient had survived.

Nothing culls like war.

Kaverin walked with a slight limp, courtesy of a piece of shrapnel or a fragment of bullet in his thigh. An intentional gift from a German or an inadvertent one from a fellow soldier. He neither knew nor cared.

The trek from his present office—at the British Desk, downstairs—was taking some time. GRU headquarters was massive, as befitted the largest spy organization in Russia and, rumors were, the world.

Kaverin stepped into the ante-office of his superior, nodded at the aide-de-camp, who said the general would see him in a minute. He sat and lit a cigarette. He saw his reflection in a nearby glass-covered poster of Lenin. The Communist Party founder’s lean appearance was in marked contrast to Kaverin’s: He thought himself a bit squat of face, a bit jowly. The comrade major’s thick black hair was another difference, in sharp contrast to Lenin’s shiny pate. And while the communist revolutionary and first Premier of the Soviet Union had a goatee that gave him—with those fierce eyes—a demonic appearance, Kaverin was clean shaven, and his eyes, under drooping lids, were the essence of calm.

A deep pull on the cigarette. The taste was sour and he absently swatted away glowing flecks of cheap tobacco that catapulted from the end. He longed for better, but couldn’t spend the time to queue endlessly for the good Russian brands and he couldn’t afford the Western smokes on the black market. When the cigarette was half smoked, he stubbed it out and wrapped the remainder in a handkerchief, then slipped that into his brown uniform jacket.

He thought of the executions he’d witnessed—and participated in. Often, a last cigarette for the prisoner. He wondered if he’d just had his.

Of course, there was yet another fate that might await, having been summoned to this lofty floor of headquarters. Perhaps he was being rewarded. The Comrade General, speaking for the Chairman of the GRU or even the Presidium itself—the all-powerful Politburo—could be recognizing him for furthering the ideals of communism and the glory of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In which case he would receive not a slug from a Makarov pistol, but a medal or commendation or perhaps a new rank (though not, of course, a raise in pay).

Then, however, his busy mind, his spy’s mind, came up with another negative possibility: The KGB had orchestrated a transgression to get him demoted or even ousted.

The soviet civilian spy outfit and the GRU hated each other—the KGB referred to their military counterparts contemptuously as “Boots,” because of the uniforms they wore in their official capacity. The GRU looked at the KGB as a group of effete elitists, who trolled for turncoats among the Western intelligentsia, men who could quote Marx from their days at Harvard or Cambridge but who never lived up to their promise of delivering nuclear secrets or rocket fuel formulas.

Since neither the KGB nor the GRU had exclusive jurisdiction in foreign countries, poaching was common. On several occasions in the past year Kaverin had run operations in England and the Balkans right under the nose of the KGB and turned an agent or assassinated a traitor before the civilian spies even knew he was in country.

Had the pricks from Lubyanka Square somehow put together a scandal to disgrace him?

But then, just as he grew tired of speculation, the door before him opened and he was ushered into the office of the man who was about to bestow one of several fates.

A train trip, a bullet, a medal, or—another endearing possibility in the Soviet Union—perhaps something wholly unexpected.

The incident in the small Cape Cod town of Westbury began on an evening of dismal weather. A freakishly early snow mixed with sleet had closed most of the roads off Route 6, the Cape’s main artery, and knocked out power and telephone service throughout much of Barnstable County. By some stroke of luck, though, Westbury was spared.

So at 2:50 in the morning the phone rang in the bedroom of the house belonging to Westbury’s police chief, Henry Silva.

He rolled over and reached out in the darkness without looking and grabbed the touch-tone’s handset. “Silva,” he said.

“Chief, Melissa here at county dispatch.”

He coughed, rubbed his eyes, switched on the lamp. On the nightstand were a pad of paper and a Bic pen. He uncapped the end of the pen with his teeth. “Go, what do we got?”

“A fatal shooting. Vladimir Polowski of 14 Old King’s Highway.”

“The old guy? Christ. Where’s Jeff Crane?”

“His cruiser’s stuck in a drainage ditch off Long Pond Road. Says he should be freed up just as soon as Tucker Towing gets him out.”

“Oh, jeez,” Henry said. Jeff Crane was Silva’s only officer. “All right, who called it in?”

“Ray Richardson.”

“Don’t know him. Is he a neighbor of Polowski’s?”

“No. He’s not from around here. Says he’s been living up at the Westbury Motel for the past couple weeks or so.”

Henry scribbled a note. “Where is this Ray Richardson now?”

“Says he’s in the victim’s kitchen.”

“Huh. He say what he’s doing in there?”

A pause. “Yeah. He says he’s the one that killed him.”

They didn’t call it Asperger’s Syndrome in those days, but my younger brother Julian probably had it.

Certainly, everybody who remembers him agreed that he was not quite normal and probably had some highly functioning version of autism. When he was very young, he was silent, withdrawn, and clumsy much of the time, although excellent at almost all mental games, and blessed with a sly sense of humor that was all the more surprising for his lack of verbal skills. He is the one, for example, who put the Saran Wrap over the toilet bowl in my parents’ bathroom, although I think that to her dying day, in spite of my denials, my mother thought it was me.

I was the firstborn, a baby boomer in 1948. Julian and I were “Irish twins,” eleven months apart in age to the day. I guess big brothers can go one of two ways with awkward siblings, especially if they are close in age. I could either ignore the difficult little rat who was taking so much of my parents’ time and energy, or as a dutiful first child I could become my parents’ ally as his protector, playmate, and friend. I don’t remember actually choosing, but by the time he started school, I had fallen into and was completely committed to the latter role.

We were a good Catholic family, which meant we belonged to St. Benedict’s parish and went to Mass every Sunday, and confession at least every two weeks. I was an altar boy from second grade on, and amazingly to everyone (except me, who tutored him relentlessly), Julian followed me one year later. He couldn’t always get out what he knew in English, but he could memorize and spew Latin as well as or better than anybody.

Of course, being a good Catholic family also meant that my parents followed the rhythm method for birth control, which in turn meant that the other kids followed along on a regular schedule. Michelle arrived twenty-one months after Julian, then in short order followed Paul, Louise, Marian, and Barbara. With each new child, and my parents’ commensurate lack of time for any individual one of us, my responsibility to Julian became greater. I understood his moods, I could entertain him, translate for him, and occasionally, very occasionally, I would let him win at some physical contest—hoops, ping-pong, mini golf.

And then, when he was in sixth grade, Julian suddenly changed in a fundamental way. And perhaps more remarkably, some of the other kids stopped treating him like a freak. Astoundingly, and maybe because the director wanted to make a point that whom so many called the “retard” actually had a good brain, he was cast as Rolfe in the school musical, The Sound of Music, and it turned out that he had a beautiful singing voice. The rehearsed words in the play came out with a natural ease that somehow carried over to his day-to-day speech. Still in sixth grade, he later won the school’s Spelling Bee, and went on to place second in the entire county. Kitty Rice, the prettiest girl in his class at St. Benedict’s, got a crush on him and they actually walked around the school yard holding hands for a couple of months.

In short, Julian had become “normal”—though of course not in all ways. And not to someone who knew him as well as I did. Not to his protector and confidante and best friend.

The basic problem, and it was a paramount issue for a preadolescent young man in the late 1950s, was that in spite of his achievements and advances in apparent normalcy, he suffered from a medical condition over which he had little control. He was, in fact, different, even as he improved in his day-to-day coping with the Asperger’s.

He felt things more than other people did.

That was simply a fact.

When Kitty Rice broke up with him, for example, he went into a brooding silence that went on for over a month. Another time, our younger brother Paul had shot a really beautiful bird out in the backyard with his BB gun, and when he’d brought it inside to show it off, Julian took the little broken thing into his hands, petting it, breathing on it, trying to will it back to life. Afterward, exuding silence like a black miasma, he hid himself away in his secret place in our unfinished attic and slept up there until the next morning.

And some kids still teased him. Friendly and trusting by nature, Julian was sometimes smart enough to realize that people were having fun at his expense, but unfortunately he lacked the gene for irony. Consequently, he could be led a long way down the primrose path before he realized that he was the butt of a joke. All too often, being a year ahead of him, I wasn’t around to cut things off and shut the bullies up before he got hurt.

These not-infrequent episodes would always leave him demoralized, depressed, and silent, and they drove me to near-homicidal rage that I only rarely acted on. But I was a good Catholic, and anger was one of the deadly sins, so I generally offered my anger up to the poor souls in Purgatory, and life went on.

But sometimes, it almost didn’t.

At seven o’clock on an August morning, Fraulein Doktor Anna Klaas joined the crowds hurrying into Munich’s Central Railroad Station. In her mid-thirties, she was a pretty woman, with glossy black hair, large black eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses, and porcelain skin that was a little too pale. She was dressed in a fitted brown jacket, a matching wool skirt, and sensible brown pumps. As if it were a talisman, she held her briefcase in both hands close in front of her. She walked purposefully.

The train station was the city’s largest. Handsomely rebuilt in modern architecture by Krupp, it’d opened only two years before, in 1960. Like nearly half of Munich’s buildings, its predecessor had been destroyed by Allied bombing. She could still feel the ground shuddering under her feet, hear the thunderous explosions in those last terrifying months.

Nervous, Anna glanced around the massive station. The spicy aroma of breakfast wurst drifted across the crowds. Long lines of commuters queued up for tickets. As the wood wheels of baggage carts rumbled across the floor, she headed down a short corridor, pushed into the ladies’ washroom, and waited. When the second stall from the window was empty, she entered and locked the door behind her. Opening her briefcase, she took out a playing card sliced in half. It was the five of diamonds. She crouched, reached behind the stool, and lodged it between the pipes. She flushed the toilet, left the stall, washed her hands, and walked out of the station.

Abigail made her tour of the cages, adding water to all the drinking bowls. The food was more complicated, because not all the mice got the same meal. She was ten years old, and this was her first job; she took her responsibilities seriously. She read the labels on the cages and carefully measured out feed from the different bags. All the animals had numbers written in black ink on their backs; she checked these against the list Bob Pharris had given her with the feeding instructions.

“That’s like being a slave,” Abigail said, when Bob showed her how to match the numbers on the mice to the food directives. “It’s not fair to call them by numbers instead of by name, and it’s mean to write on their beautiful fur.”

Bob just laughed. “It’s the only way we can tell them apart, Abby.”

Abigail hated the name Abby. “That’s because you’re not looking at their faces. They’re all different. I’m going to start calling you Number Three because you’re Dr. Kiel’s third student. How would you like that?”

“Number Nineteen,” Bob corrected her. “I’m his nineteenth student, but the other sixteen have all gotten their PhDs and moved on to glory. Don’t give the mice names, Abby: you’ll get too attached to them, and they don’t live very long.”

In fact, the next week, when Abigail began feeding the animals on her own, some of the mice had disappeared. Others had been moved into the contamination room, where she wasn’t supposed to go. The mice in there had bad diseases that might kill her if she touched them. Only the graduate students or the professors went in there, wearing gloves and masks.

Abigail began naming some of the mice under her breath. Her favorite, number 139, she called “Miss Bianca,” after the white mouse in the book The Rescuers. Miss Bianca always sat next to the cage door when Abigail appeared, grooming her exquisite whiskers with her little pink paws. She would cock her head and stare at Abigail with bright black eyes.

In the book, Miss Bianca ran a prisoner’s rescue group, so Abigail felt it was only fair that she should rescue Miss Bianca in turn, or at least let her have some time outside the cage. This afternoon, she looked around to make sure no one was watching, then scooped Miss Bianca out of her cage and into the pocket of her dress.

“You can listen to me practice, Miss Bianca,” Abigail told her. She moved into the alcove behind the cages where the big sinks were.

Dr. Kiel thought Abigail’s violin added class to the lab, at least that’s what he said to Abigail’s mother, but Abigail’s mother said it was hard enough to be a single mom without getting fired in the bargain, so Abigail should practice where she wouldn’t disturb the classes in the lecture rooms or annoy the other professors.

Abigail had to come to the lab straight from school. She did her homework on a side table near her mother’s desk, and then she fed the animals and practiced her violin in the alcove in the animal room.

“Today Miss Abigail Sherwood will play Bach for you,” she announced grandly to Miss Bianca.

She tuned the violin as best she could and began a simplified version of the first sonata for violin. Miss Bianca stuck her head out of the pocket and looked inquiringly at the instrument. Abigail wondered what the mouse would do if she put her inside. Miss Bianca could probably squeeze in through the F hole, but getting her out would be difficult. The thought of Mother’s rage, not to mention Dr. Kiel or even Bob Pharris’s, made her decide against it.

She picked up her bow again, but heard voices out by the cages. When she peered out, she saw Bob talking to a stranger, a small woman with dark hair.

Bob smiled at her. “This is Abby; her mother is Dr. Kiel’s secretary. Abby helps us by feeding the animals.”

“It’s Abigail,” Abigail said primly.

“And one of the mouses, Abigail, she is living in your—your—” the woman pointed at Miss Bianca.

“Abby, put the mouse back in the cage,” Bob said. “If you play with them, we can’t let you feed them.”

Abigail scowled at the woman and at Bob, but she put Miss Bianca back in her cage. “I’m sorry, Miss Bianca. Mamelouk is watching me.”

“Mamelouk?” the woman said. “I am thinking your name ‘Bob’?”

Mamelouk the Iron-Tummed was the evil cat who worked for the jailor in The Rescuers, but Abigail didn’t say that, just stared stonily at the woman, who was too stupid to know that the plural of “mouse” was mice, not “mouses.”

“This is Elena,” Bob told Abigail. “She’s Dr. Kiel’s new dishwasher. You can give her a hand, when you’re not practicing your violin or learning geometry.”

“Is allowed for children working in the lab?” Elena asked. “In my country, government is not allowing children work.”

Abigail’s scowl deepened: Bob had been looking at her homework while she was down here with the mice. “We have slavery in America,” she announced. “The mice are slaves, too.”

“Abigail, I thought you liked feeding the animals.” Dr. Kiel had come into the animal room without the three of them noticing.

He wore crepe-soled shoes which let him move soundlessly through the lab. A short stocky man with brown eyes, he could look at you with a warmth that made you want to tell him your secrets, but just when you thought you could trust him, he would become furious over nothing that Abigail could figure out. She had heard him yelling at Bob Pharris in a way that frightened her. Besides, Dr. Kiel was her mother’s boss, which meant she must never EVER be saucy to him.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Kiel,” she said, her face red. “I only was telling Bob I don’t like the mice being branded, they’re all different, you can tell them apart by looking.”

“You can tell them apart because you like them and know them,” Dr. Kiel said. “The rest of us aren’t as perceptive as you are.”

“Dolan,” he added to a man passing in the hall. “Come and meet my new dishwasher—Elena Mirova.”

Dr. Dolan and Dr. Kiel didn’t like each other. Dr. Kiel was always loud and hearty when he talked to Dr. Dolan, trying too hard not to show his dislike. Dr. Dolan snooped around the lab looking for mistakes that Dr. Kiel’s students made. He’d report them with a phony jokiness, as if he thought leaving pipettes unwashed in the sink was funny when really it made him angry.

Dr. Dolan had a face like a giant baby’s, the nose little and squashed upward, his cheeks round and rosy; when Bob Pharris had taken two beakers out of Dr. Dolan’s lab, he’d come into Dr. Kiel’s lab, saying, “Sorry to hear you broke both your arms, Pharris, and couldn’t wash your own equipment.”

He came into the animal room now and smiled in a way that made his eyes close into slits. Just like a cat’s. He said hello to Elena, but added to Dr. Kiel, “I thought your new girl was starting last week, Nate.”

“She arrived a week ago, but she was under the weather; you would never have let me forget it if she’d contaminated your ham sandwiches—I mean your petri dishes.”

Dr. Dolan scowled, but said to Elena, “The rumors have been flying around the building all day. Is it true you’re from Eastern Europe?”

Dolan’s voice was soft, forcing everyone to lean toward him if they wanted to hear him. Abigail had trouble understanding him, and she saw Elena did, too, but Abigail knew it would be a mistake to try to ask Dr. Dolan to speak more slowly or more loudly.

Elena’s face was sad. “Is true. I am refugee, from Czechoslovakia.”

“How’d you get here?” Dolan asked.

“Just like your ancestors did, Pat,” Dr. Kiel said. “Yours came steerage in a ship. Elena flew steerage in a plane. We lift the lamp beside the golden door for Czechs just as we did for the Irish.”

“And for the Russians?” Dolan said. “Isn’t that where your people are from, Nate?”

“The Russians would like to think so,” Kiel said. “It was Poland when my father left.”

“But you speak the lingo, don’t you?” Dolan persisted.

There was a brief silence. Abigail could see the vein in Dr. Kiel’s right temple pulsing. Dolan saw it also and gave a satisfied smirk.

He turned back to Elena. “How did you end up in Kansas? It’s a long way from Prague to here.”

“I am meeting Dr. Kiel in Bratislava,” Elena said.

“I was there in ’66, you know,” Dr. Kiel said. “Elena’s husband edited the Czech Journal of Virology and Bacteriology and the Soviets didn’t like their editorial policies—the journal decided they would only take articles written in English, French, or Czech, not in Russian.”

Bob laughed. “Audacious. That took some guts.”

Abigail was memorizing words under her breath to ask her mother over dinner: perceptive, editorial policies, audacious.

“Perhaps not so good idea. When Russian tanks coming last year, they putting husband in prison,” Elena said.

“Well, welcome aboard,” Dr. Dolan said, holding out his soft white hand to Elena.

She’d been holding her hands close to her side, but when she shook hands Abigail saw a huge bruise on the inside of her arm: green, purple, yellow, spreading in a large oval up and down from the elbow.

“They beat you before you left?” Dr. Dolan asked.

Elena’s eyes opened wide; Abigail thought she was scared. “Is me, only,” she said, “me being—not know in English.”

“What’s on today’s program?” Dr. Kiel asked Abigail abruptly, pointing at her violin.

“Bach.”

“You need to drop that old stuffed shirt. Beethoven. I keep telling you, start playing those Beethoven sonatas, they’ll bring you to life.” He ruffled her hair. “I think I saw your mother putting the cover over her typewriter when I came down.”

That meant Abigail was supposed to leave. She looked at Miss Bianca, who was hiding in the shavings at the back of her cage. It’s good you’re afraid, Abigail told her silently. Don’t let them catch you, they’ll hurt you or make you sick with a bad disease.

Ho Chi Minh City, Socialist Republic of Vietnam, is home now, but my first conscious sensation was of our village in the Mekong River Delta, not far from Can Tho. The sweet stink of night soil. Mist drifting off the paddy in the morning. Utter silence but for birdsong.

The first memory that burned into my brain was me clinging to my mother’s legs, pressing with all my might. I was the second youngest of four. My baby brother was in her arms. We were standing in shade cast by an enormous American officer, an unjolly green giant. He reeked of butter and gunpowder. He had more hair on his arms than on his head.

My mother chanted over and over, “Me no VC. Me no VC. GI number one. GI number one.”

That was her only English, and she was trembling so hard I could barely hang on. My father was nowhere to be seen. Where was Father?

There were helicopters above us, hovering, bristling with guns and rockets, going whoompa whoompa whoompa. Dragonflies from hell, hovering above water buffalo that moved as slowly as the village pace.

A South Vietnamese Army interpreter spoke for the American. He said our village was a suspected Vietcong sanctuary.

“Me no VC. GI number one,” my mother replied.

The interpreter slapped her face hard. We swayed together, managing to keep our feet. Nobody moved to help her. Not the giant. Not the villagers who stood at our rear.

The American officer said that we harbored the enemy. He said we were communist sympathizers. He said we were ungrateful. He said we did not love our country. He said we were traitors. He said we were lower than snake shit. He said that he was declaring a free fire zone.

He gave us ten minutes to pack up and go. He gave us ten minutes to leave our home of ten centuries. The bones of our ancestors were in this ground. They could not leave. What would become of them? When the village was gone, they would be nowhere.

We carried what we could and watched the helicopters vaporize our village. Huts turned fiery orange and bubbled black into the sky. The smoke seared my nostrils with earth, life, and death. I saw faces in that smoke, old old faces that stretched in sooty agony as they rose and diffused in the air. The faces screamed, and so did I.

The chilling words were printed in black block letters on the large white board in four languages: English, Russian, French, and German. It should have also said, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here,” Dante’s inscription at the entrance to Hell. For Hell was on the other side of Checkpoint Charlie.

It was a gray Hell, with gray buildings and gray people, made grayer on this particular day by the gray clouds and the rain that fell steadily on everything. Gerhard Johnson had a knot in his stomach the size of a basketball as he showed his papers to the American soldier at the newly painted white guardhouse made of wood that looked out of place in this drab setting, partly because he was afraid the East German guards wouldn’t let him through—and partly because he was afraid they would. But he had to go.

He was waved through the American side as he had expected he would be. He approached two of the East German guards with their long coats and unsmiling faces in his borrowed Volkswagen Beetle. One stood in front of the car and motioned for him to stop. The other came to his window and took his passport and visa.

Gerhard tried to look casual, as if he did this every day. However, he hadn’t crossed the border for over a year. That was before the Wall was erected, when people could pass freely back and forth between East and West Berlin, before the brain drain of highly educated and skilled East German citizens fleeing to the West had become a rushing torrent, threatening to bring the economy to a standstill.

The guard stared at the visa for a long time, as if trying to find something wrong with it. It was perfectly legal. Gerhard had jumped through the proper hoops to get it. As an American citizen he carried a U.S. passport, and the visa had been issued to him by the American Embassy in West Germany.

The guard spoke to him in broken English. “Why you go to GDR?”

Gerhard phrased his answer carefully. “My aunt lives here. I’m going to visit her.” He wasn’t about to mention that he had a one-year-old daughter here. That would surely raise a red flag.

“How long you stay?”

“Two days.”

It was all the time he had. He was in West Berlin on business for the import-export firm he was employed by, and the vacation days had been reluctantly granted him by his boss to use before he had to fly back to the U.S. Business was booming in Europe, and the company needed his ability to speak German.

The guard suddenly spoke to him in German. “Do you know what we do to spies in the GDR?”

In spite of having prepared for this situation, it was all Gerhard could do not to react to the statement. If they found out he spoke perfect German they would never let him in. Young foreigners passing through Checkpoint Charlie were automatically suspected of being spies. He looked at the guard in what he hoped was a questioning and uncomprehending manner.

The guard watched him. Had an eye blink given him away? His heart pounded and the basketball in his stomach grew larger. The guard looked at the other guard, who motioned for him to pop the hood, which was the storage space for the rear-engine VW. It contained only a small suitcase with clothes and toilet articles, unlocked. Meanwhile, the first guard peered into the backseat, which was empty.

The guard with the suitcase took his time looking through it, while Gerhard hoped the sweat he was feeling on his back wouldn’t show up on his face. He had considered leaving a pile of West German marks on top of his clothes. They were valuable in the black market here. But he didn’t know how they would react. A bribe could be taken as an indication of guilt, and he wasn’t guilty of anything.

The guard closed the hood and walked up to the window. The two men spoke together in German about whether Gerhard was a spy, keeping an eye on him for a reaction.

Perhaps his German first name had spooked them. His mother had been German. He had learned to speak German before he learned English. His father had met her when he was studying in Germany, and he had asked her to marry him. She was part of an upper-class family in the city of Halle, where she grew up, and she never adjusted to life in the U.S., being married to an itinerant minister who had trouble holding a job. She took Gerhard and his sister back to Germany several times when they were young, and on one occasion his father had to come over and take them home.

She became a psychological cripple during the war, partly because her brother was in the German army. He died somewhere in the frozen expanses of Russia. She died soon after, perhaps from a broken heart.

The guards stopped talking, and one of them handed Gerhard his passport and visa. He motioned for Gerhard to go on. It happened so quickly he was unprepared, and it took him a few seconds for his shaking hand to get the car into first gear. Then he had to be careful not to drive away too fast. He looked in his rearview mirror and saw they had turned their attention to the next car.

In the New Hampshire island community of New Castle, Michael Smith spent nearly a month conducting a surveillance op at an oceanfront park called the Great Island Common. It was small, with a tennis court, gazebo, and picnic tables and benches scattered on a scraggly green lawn. There was a stone jetty sticking out into the near channel, from where ships entered and left nearby Portsmouth Harbor to the Atlantic, and across the narrow channel was the state of Maine.

Near the stone jetty was a good downstream view of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, which had been building warships for the U.S. Navy since 1800.

It was now one year after the hammer-and-sickle flag had been lowered for the last time over the Kremlin, and sitting in a rented blue Toyota Camry, Michael thought it ironic that his work and the work of so many others was still going on, despite peace supposedly breaking out everywhere.

Cold war or hot war, there was always plenty of work to be done.

Anna picked up her latest target at Tempelhof shortly after he arrived on a Pan Am flight from New York via Frankfurt. She recognized him from the photographs in the dossier tucked under her arm. Though her handlers were in charge of surveillance, she always wanted to see her men in the wild, to get a sense of what they were like when they didn’t know they were being observed. This helped her decide how to approach them. If she was too aggressive with a man who was awkward around porters and taxi drivers, she’d scare him off. If she was too timid with a blustery man who acted like he owned the world, he’d soon tire of her.

Her target was Donald Weatherly. He was fifty-nine and looked it. He wore a brown suit with the jacket unbuttoned, and no hat. He was taller than average, but only slightly. His hair, disheveled after his long journey, was receding at the front and thinning at the back. He wore black-rimmed glasses and had a small, neat mustache that was tinged with grey, as were his eyebrows. He was paunchy but not fat. All in all, not the sort of man a young woman would have typically afforded a second glance.

Older men, she had learned, were particularly susceptible to seduction because they thought their chances of ever being with a sexy young woman again were nearing an end. Not at an end, but almost. This gave them an unusual sense of optimism. They flirted with waitresses, cashiers, stewardesses, and any other pretty women with whom they came into contact. Deep down, they probably knew that their only real option was to pay for it—which many of them did—but they never stopped hoping. Eighty-year-old men flirted with her. She admired their spirit, in part because it made her job easier.

She made sure Weatherly didn’t notice her. With over three million people in Berlin, it would have been too much of a coincidence to run into a person twice in different parts of the city. It happened, of course, but she couldn’t risk making him suspicious. Weatherly wasn’t a spy, but he had a degree from Princeton, so he wasn’t stupid. Gullible, perhaps. Susceptible, she hoped. But not stupid.

She stood at a pay phone, smoking a cigarette and holding an imaginary conversation with the dial tone. A kerchief was wrapped around her dark hair, and she wore oversized sunglasses with tortoiseshell frames. She never looked directly at Weatherly after he came through the security checkpoint with his luggage—one suitcase and a briefcase—but she never let him escape her field of vision either.

A porter approached, offering to take his bags. Weatherly handed over the suitcase, but maintained his grip on the briefcase. He pointed toward the exit and let the porter take the lead. A professional exchange, she decided. The man was neither timid nor brash. Average.

As they drew near, she turned aside and crushed her cigarette out in an ashtray. Weatherly looked straight ahead, displaying little interest in his fellow travelers, the airport shops, or overhead signs. Neither did he look over his shoulder. Civil engineers weren’t typical targets of espionage.

The porter led him through the exit doors to a queue of taxis. She followed at a discreet distance. The porter signaled a taxi driver and loaded the suitcase into the trunk. When Weatherly tipped the porter, the man smiled and touched the brim of his hat, an effusive display of emotion for a German, she thought. Weatherly got into the back of the cab. A few seconds later, the car merged with traffic and headed toward the nearby city center. She returned to the terminal and made a phone call.

Berlin, August 1961

Conrad slipped his rifle off his shoulder and took aim the moment he heard the thud. Across the road from where he guarded the border, a woman had stumbled rather dramatically. He blinked away perspiration dripping into his eyes from beneath his helmet and saw that the woman appeared to be in her thirties. She was loaded down with shopping bags, and something seemed to have fallen from one of them. A knot of garlic shed its papery skin as it bounced along the cracked pavement, settling just short of the snake of barbed wire separating east from west.

The slope of the woman’s cheekbones stirred something in Conrad, and for a moment he imagined touching her skin, its softness, even its taste. He thought fleetingly of Emilie. How long since he’d seen her? Swallowing the aching regret of her loss, he consulted his watch. It was nearly quitting time, and he was getting hungry. He reshouldered his rifle. He was about to fetch the garlic and toss it back to her when Hans, a fellow guard, beat him to it.

The woman was just out of sight when the explosion ripped Hans from the ground. Conrad rushed to his side along with Axel, his oldest friend and also a guard. As the smoke cleared, it was obvious that Hans was dead. The back of his head was crushed, threads of blood spinning lacework on the arid ground. His blue eyes, frozen, stared at nothing.

A siren wailed into the cacophony of panicked voices. Fellow East Berliners watched the scene through the dusty windows of apartments whose view had been radically transformed from open street to barbed wire. Conrad scanned the length of the street for any trace of the woman. Somehow, she had vanished into the havoc.

My name is Rachel Hirsch, and here is what passes for my life: I reside at the Stone Coast Home for Seniors, along with a dozen other old souls in various stages of decline. I’m sharp-tongued and silver-haired, five-foot-two, and Jewish, even if I have not practiced my religion since childhood. At sixty-one I am still fairly spry, and have the dubious distinction of being the youngest resident, although nobody knows my true age.

Every morning for the past month I have woken at dawn, read for an hour in my room, and then pulled on a jacket to hike down the hill to my old house and Roy’s. I watch the sun rise as the lobstermen visit their traps, I hear the shriek of the gulls winging beside the boats, and I breathe deeply of the cold, spruce-scented air. Thoughts of my prior life flit in and out, and, for a few seconds anyway, I feel something akin to peace. Turning, and taking the hill with slow steps, my spirit seems serene in a way that I suppose only the very wicked can understand. Perhaps the snowfalls to come will make these morning pilgrimages impossible, but who can say when—or if—that will happen. I’ve found that winters on the coast can be capricious.

I take my breakfast with the other denizens of the Home. Seated in the stuffy salon where we consume our meals, I spoon oatmeal from a big bowl, sprinkle raisins and chopped walnuts on top, and listen to the memories of my housemates.

Each of us has a story. There’s Frank, a former surgeon from New York, tall, white-haired, and wobbly; Rita, raised up in a restaurant-owning family in a small Vermont town; and Betty, a martini-drinking, summer-stock-singing beauty. I pass the oatmeal to Willis, once the owner of a sardine packing plant Down East, who controls both the conversation and seating arrangement. He hasn’t lost the bullying demeanor of one who single-handedly ran a factory, no more than Frank has forgotten a certain air of medical arrogance, nor Betty the lyrics to songs from South Pacific. Seated beside Willis is Evelyn, dressed as if she’s headed to a disco, even though it is 1989 and the disco craze is dead.

My own story will never be told, not unless the dementia that is gradually gripping my mind loosens my tongue in a way that torture never could. Every day I look for signs that I’ve become a slack-lipped, crazy woman like Mavis, who was removed from Stone Coast Home for Seniors last week because she’d begun shrieking profanity. I wonder whether I’ll know when the time is right to take the cyanide pill I’ve so carefully concealed in an antique locket. I ought to remove it from my jewelry box tonight, pour a glass of Riesling and be done with it, and yet my spirit is such that I cannot help but hang on to this life. Perhaps my tenacity—or cowardice—springs from an inability to imagine a reality beyond the one I now know. Visions of heaven, angels, and welcoming white lights do not ring true for me. Unlike Roy, I believe that the end is The End.

I tell myself that I am curious, that I cling fast to my meager existence because, even after all these years, my story is still unfolding and I long to see where it goes. I hope and pray that is my truth. But there is a terror lurking beyond even the bleakness of death: I fear I am already lost in the fog of forgetfulness, and do not know any better, that I am closer to being like Mavis than I really know.

There are a few things I can say with certainty, and here is one: Roy Mahoney was my next-door neighbor, and a good one at that.

For close to twenty years he performed a laundry list of little acts that bespoke friendship and kindness. Each fall he’d prune the rambling rosa rugosa that bordered my land and the beach, cutting the canes nearly to the ground so that the following June’s blooms would be riotous. Every spring he rustled up a rototiller to turn over the garden, mixing in the aged manure he’d hauled from a neighboring farm. In return, I baked zucchini bread, lent him Tom Clancy novels, and helped pick out presents for his grandkids. My contributions to our friendship seemed small in comparison to his, and yet the man never once made me feel guilty.

Roy brought over a tuna noodle casserole on the day the dog died.

I’d pulled into the driveway in my Civic, and there he stood, wearing jeans and an LL Bean chamois shirt, an aluminum-foil-covered pan in hand. I’d just left the vet, the feeling of the old retriever’s coarse fur still fresh in my mind. My hands trembled as I yanked the keys from the ignition, hot tears threatened to spill from my eyes.

“Cancer?” he asked as he followed me to the door.

I nodded. “Tumor as big as a grapefruit.” I blinked back the memory of Dr. Pease and his assistant carrying Sadie’s still body out of the examining room.

“Putting down a friend is hell.” Roy said. He plunked his casserole on the counter. “Comfort food. Figured you could use a little.”

Roy stayed for supper that night, something he’d done once or twice a week since we both became widowed. I tossed a green salad and uncorked a bottle of Burgundy, while he ripped the foil from his Pyrex pan, letting the smell of tuna waft up and around us.

We talked a lot about the past when we were together. My late husband Henry met Roy while serving at the American Embassy in Vienna, and they were colleagues and friends. Roy liked to reminisce about waltzing in the fancy palaces of alt Wien—old Vienna—especially the elegant dress balls held at the State Opera House. Dressed to the nines, young, and confident, Roy and his wife, Sally, made a handsome, happy couple, a light around which Henry and I fluttered like moths.

In addition to Austria, our chats centered on Connecticut, where we lived in neighboring towns and the men rode the commuter train into New York City each morning. Back then, we met most weekends for bridge. Sally would catch me up on the growing Mahoney family, and the men would smoke cigarettes and discuss politics. This was the tumultuous time from the mid-1960s to the late ’70s, before we’d sold our homes and moved up north to Maine, before Roy went into real estate, before our spouses passed away: first Sally, from breast cancer, and then Henry, from a heart attack.

Never once did we discuss Berlin. It was as if the five years between posts in Austria and New England did not exist.

Instead, we focused on pleasant memories, or kept our conversations firmly rooted in the present. A safe topic was the never-ending list of chores that went hand-in-hand with old-house ownership, like maple syrup and pancakes.

Alone, I never could have handled the work my antique Cape required, but with Roy’s assistance even the most arduous tasks were manageable.

He was ready to help with the roof when Hurricane Gloria tore up the coast back in ’85. I remember the morning after: a sky scoured clear of clouds, an August day so blindingly beautiful it made seeing the storm’s wrath obscene. Damage and destruction were everywhere. The Mahoney’s little dory was smashed into jagged chunks, and up the street a mobile home had been flipped and gutted like a carp. An old apple tree that still bore fruit lay ripped from the ground, the tiny nubs of Northern Spies now stillborn on the branches. In the front of the house, a gaping hole the size of a man now graced my porch ceiling.

Roy patched the roof that afternoon while quizzing me about other storms.

“Doria was back in ’71, right? That one did a heck of a lot of damage.” It was later in the day, and Roy had filled his pockets with roofing nails and climbed back up the ladder. He was sixty-six at the time, agile enough to do any chore. A cool breeze blew in suddenly from the water, a reminder of fall weather to come. I’d hugged my cotton cardigan closer to my body while shaking my head.

“I wasn’t here for that storm.”

“Right.” Roy had held the hammer ready to strike, a thoughtful look on his face. “You went home to see your father.”

“Mother.”

He tacked down a shingle and reached for another. “She lived in Germany.”

“Yes.” The pinched face of the woman I knew only as Mutti flitted through my brain. She had lived in Germany, and, although I took orders from her, she was not my parent.

There was often this type of teasing element to our conversations, as if Roy was trolling for information. That day I’d met his questioning eyes and we’d regarded each other for several seconds. What had I said next? Probably something light, like, “I’m not paying you to gab, Mahoney.”

And what had he answered?

“You’re not paying me at all.”

Because Roy seemed to enjoy this banter, and was in fact the one who initiated it time and time again, I was unprepared for his comments last month. It was Thanksgiving, and we were washing dishes from dinner in his steamy kitchen.

“It was all a game,” he’d said suddenly, stopping in the act of drying a piece of china.

“The Cowboys over the Eagles?” I said, even though I sensed he wasn’t talking about football.

He shot me a look. “Three weeks ago the wall came down,” he said, carefully placing the gravy boat back in the cabinet. “Did you ever think you’d see that in your lifetime? The Berlin Wall is history. If your relatives were still alive they could go back and forth freely.”

I shrugged. The times they were a-changin’. “True.”

“The Cold War is over.” He took an oval platter from my soapy hands. “I keep asking myself why it seemed to matter so much.” He dried the platter, set it on the counter, and draped the dish towel over one arm. “Remember that Thanksgiving we were detained?”

“Yes.” I turned off the water and faced him, my hands on my hips. “How could I forget?”

It was 1960 and a cold autumn had settled on Berlin. The four of us decided to visit English friends in Salzburg for a holiday dinner. It was snowing, hard, and Henry’s car, an ancient Lancia, broke down in the middle of Berlin’s Soviet zone.

“Were you frightened?”

“Of course,” I answered. “We all were.” But not for the same reasons.

I pictured Sally and me, waiting in the military police station, flanked by the men. I saw the watchful eyes of the little Soviet private, his AK-47 aimed at us as we sat on the hard wooden benches. I suppose that Sally feared imprisonment or death, and I assume the men did as well. But I dreaded being exposed, my carefully fabricated life destroyed by one stupid blunder.

“Sally was pregnant,” he said hollowly. “I don’t know if you knew that.”

“No.”

“She lost the baby the next day.”

I thought back. Sally had shared no news of her condition. Apparently she had kept secrets as well.

“You went on to have other children.” As if on cue, the voices of Roy’s grandchildren reached us from the backyard. They were returning from a walk to the little beach.

“Yes, but that was her first. It mattered.”

I untied the faded checked apron and hung it on the back of the kitchen door. I’d seen Sally wear it, dozens of times, when baking chocolate chip cookies for the children, or stirring batches of Chex Mix for our bridge games. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well it was a long time ago.” He looked up at me. “Another Thanksgiving has come and gone. I’m grateful for your friendship, you know. Along with the kids, you’ve kept me going.”

I nodded. A shriek from the other room made us both smile.

“You and Henry—you never wanted children.” Stated like a fact, but I knew he was probing. Roy’s interrogation style was nothing if not smooth.

“There were medical issues,” I hinted, pursing my lips together as if the whole subject made me uncomfortable. Let him think Henry had been to blame, when in truth I’d swallowed pills surreptitiously to prevent conception.

“I’m sorry, Rachel—I don’t mean to pry.” He paused, changed the subject. “Sometimes I think you’ve hardly changed from our Vienna days. Those same blue eyes—just like when you came to work for us at the Embassy. What did Henry call them? Danube Blue? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man fall so hard for someone.”

I turned my blue eyes on him and fluttered my lashes. “That’s me—irresistible.”

He chuckled. “Apparently.”

Truthfully, it hadn’t taken much more than a little flirting to get hired by Henry as an errand girl. Once I’d gained his trust, I’d secured a marriage proposal and shown Mutti and my superiors that I was serious about undercover work.

Roy brought us back to the present by brandishing a folder. “Ready to sign that offer?”

I’d come to a decision in the early fall: I was tired of taking care of my old house. I reserved a spot at the Home and hired Roy to list the property in September. Two months later, we had an offer from a New Jersey nurse. A good offer.

“No time like the present.” I sat down at the kitchen table while Roy pulled papers from his file. The children flicked channels in the other room.

“As we discussed, the buyer is willing to pay cash and meet your price. You sure you can clear out of here in two weeks?”

“I can’t wait.” I took the papers from him and initialed several pages.

“Come on, you’ll miss living on the bay, won’t you?”

“I can walk to the water whenever I want. Where do I sign?”

Roy indicated the last page. “Right here.”

I scrutinized the buyer’s signature, a messy scrawl of unrecognizable letters. “Is this supposed to be her name?”

He nodded.

“But her handwriting… I can’t even read it. Is this legal?”

“Sure. You can sign your name with an X and it’s legit.”

“How insulting,” I continued. Proper penmanship had always been a thing with me, perhaps because my schools had been so strict when it came to writing. “I’ll admit it, I’m offended.”

“Come on, Rachel—who cares? So Miss Julie Lamont from Lyndhurst has a messy signature. All that matters is her bank account, and I assure you, it’s strong.”

I signed and handed him the papers. “I hope I don’t meet her,” I said. “Because if I do, I’m going to say that she ought to be ashamed.”

“Really?” He gave me an odd look.

“It’s rude and disrespectful, that’s all.” I gathered my jacket. “Is that all you need? I’m going home.”

I stomped out of Roy’s house, barely saying goodnight to his children and grandchildren.

The next day I called to apologize. “It’s a strange quirk with me,” I said. “You’re right—getting upset about a signature is ridiculous.”

He was silent for a few seconds.

“I’ll forgive you—if you make goulash with some of this leftover turkey.”

“Yes, but only if you’ll join me to have some.”

Roy brought a plateful of turkey over that afternoon and returned in the evening for supper. His company had gone back to southern Maine, and we were enjoying a glass of wine while our dinner simmered on my stove.

“I was thinking about Vienna,” Roy said, swirling the ruby red liquid in his glass. He was seated at the table, a big man who was comfortable in his skin. “I guess that’s why I craved the goulash, huh?”

I smiled. “Hungarian food always was your favorite—Henry’s too—and it certainly was plentiful there.”

He nodded. “What a fabulous city. I don’t think you’ve ever told me what brought you to Vienna in the first place?”

“Curiosity, I suppose,” I gave a little shrug to add credence to my lie. I had been sent to Vienna: there had been no choice about it. “It was such a lively spot once the war was over.”

“Yes.” He knocked back the rest of his wine. “It was a wonderful listening post, too.”

I stood, reached for the bottle, and refilled his glass. “What are you talking about?”

He chuckled. “Rachel, you know what I mean. Certainly Henry told you the real reason we were stationed in Vienna. It was fertile ground for information… for espionage.”

I moved to the stove and stirred. “Don’t tell me you and Henry were spies?” I kept my voice very light. “I can see my exposé now: I Slept with an Agent.”

“Rachel.” Roy rose from the table and walked to me. Put his hands on my shoulders. “Henry told me that you knew about our cover.”

I turned and regarded him with wide eyes. “I would have been a total dummy not to suspect something, especially once you both got transferred to Berlin. What about Sally? She must have known, too?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. Sally had a very trusting nature.”

“And you’re saying I don’t?”

I watched as he walked back to the table and picked up his wine glass and seemed to study it. “We had a mole in the Berlin office,” he said quietly. “Lost several good men because of leaks we couldn’t plug.” He paused. “I always suspected Henry.”

“That’s ridiculous! Henry would never have betrayed his country. He didn’t have the…” I stopped. “He wasn’t like that.”

“What were you going to say? That he didn’t have the nerve? The imagination?”

“No, I—”

“You’re right, you know, Henry didn’t have the guts. He was the type that followed orders to the letter. You, on the other hand—”

“Me? Now you’re making no sense at all.”

“I’ve speculated about you for years.”

“What?” I faked a lilting laugh. “Roy, I think your days of drinking burgundy are over. Of all the crazy things to say! It’s the nonstop stories about the Berlin Wall. It’s put you into some kind of fantasy land.”

“Come on,” his voice was soft, cajoling. “After all this time, after everything we’ve shared, you can’t keep pretending. Not to me, Rachel. Admit it: you were an East German spy working right under our noses.”

“I see.”

“I’m not going to do anything about it, so why not come clean? It’s not like anyone would care at this stage of the game.”

I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach. I knew people who would care very much. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

His eyes were boring into mine, his jawline taut. “Who was your contact?”

I turned, removed the lid of a pot, and slammed it down on the stove with more force than I intended. “I’m not talking about this anymore. You’re accusing me of terrible things.” I stirred the noodles for the goulash and hefted the pot to the sink. Steam rose as the water poured out and they drained, fogging the window that looked out to the bay.

I carried the noodles back to the stove and added them to the turkey mixture. “Set the table, Roy,” I instructed him in a quiet voice, “and stop talking nonsense.”

He turned to the cabinets, opened one, and pulled down plates. They clattered as he placed them on the table.

“I’ve never had any real proof,” he said, opening a drawer for silverware. He pushed it shut with his hip. “That is, until yesterday.”

I reached up to a shelf where I kept spices. “Oh really? What gave me away, the type of cranberry relish I ate for Thanksgiving?”

“Signing that contract. Your strange reaction to the buyer’s signature.”

The house was silent except for the bubbling of the goulash. “I don’t understand.”

“I didn’t either, at first, but then I remembered a man Henry and I interrogated.”

“This gets more and more complicated.” I sprinkled the contents of a jar into the goulash and stirred.

“Bear with me. This guy told us about a spy who was extremely fastidious about penmanship.”

“Nothing wrong with that.” My voice sounded flat.

“He described a young German woman whose father was a Jewish doctor. In 1933 her family fled the Nazis for Switzerland, eventually settling in Moscow.”

I swallowed, and he went on.

“She was educated at elite Party schools and trained for undercover work. After the war, she went to the Soviet-occupied zone of Berlin, becoming part of the East German foreign intelligence service. Sound familiar?”

“Yes.” I carried the pot of goulash to the table. “It sounds like a John le Carré novel.” I struggled to keep my voice light. “Sit down, Roy, and let’s eat.”

He pulled out my chair with a flourish. He was enjoying himself, demonstrating just how clever he was. “Don’t you want to hear the punch line?”

“You mean there’s more?” I gave a gay little laugh and spooned goulash onto his plate and then mine. I took my napkin, spreading it carefully onto my lap.

“Yes. The best part, you might say.” He put a forkful of the steaming noodles up to his lips and blew on them. “The agent we were questioning said that the German spy was known to be ruthless, with a strange trait: an almost sadistic hatred of poor penmanship.” He paused. “I’ll never forget what he did, Rachel. He held up his hands, like this,” Roy spread his fingers out, palms toward me, “and he was missing the middle finger from each. The agent had hacked them off to teach him a lesson.”

“Quite the story.”

“Isn’t it? Now you can see why I thought of you.”

“I see—my flair for the dramatic? My skills with a butcher knife?” I tried to smile.

“Your reaction to that signature yesterday.”

“I’m flattered that you think I could have been—could still be—a notorious spy.” I took a gulp of my wine. “Try the goulash.”

“Sure smells heavenly.” He peered down at his fork. “These mushrooms remind me of the ones we ate in Austria, the heaping basketfuls you gathered in the Vienna woods.”

“Yes,” I said. The same mushrooms I’d picked as a girl in Hechingen, and later in the forest outside Moscow. The ones often confused with deadly Amanitas, a small quantity of which I kept dried in a jar among the spices.

He took a bite, chewed, and gagged violently.

I watched him slump to the floor. Several moments later I would take his pulse, grind up the goulash in my garbage disposal, and carefully wash and dry the dishes. I would put dessert on the table, compose myself, and phone for an ambulance. But first, I bent down and kissed his cooling cheek.

“It’s over,” Roy rasped. “Can’t you see that it’s over?”

I knew he was referring to the Cold War, and I gave a sad smile. “Not for me, Roy. It will never be over for me.” A thin trickle of spittle seeped from his mouth as I sat back on my haunches. “Auf Wiedersehen.”

How often in the weeks that have followed have I wished for a different ending to Roy’s story? Wished that he had never made the connection exposing me, wished that he had not been the one to list my house, wished with all my heart that he’d anticipated my lethal nature? Even as I watched the emergency responders try to restart Roy’s heart, I pictured the way a different scenario might have played out. I saw Roy, raising a hidden gun, firing, and my world going black. Roy, realizing that my cover had to be protected at all costs because it was the only world I had ever known.

My wishes all vanished when they wheeled him away.

Now I rise at dawn to take my walks. I listen to stories, eat oatmeal. I keep my secrets and save my memories, especially those of good friends who were hell to put down.

Yes, sure, joy, celebration, jubilation, dancing in the streets, standing atop it triumphantly with upraised fists for the world’s photographers, rock music blasting from open apartment windows, spray painting the dirty grim brick and stone in exuberant neon red and orange and blue, happy vodka- and schnapps-fueled reunions and toasts and excitement and tears of gratitude, yes, sure, but now there is also the jurisdictional nightmare, the integration of Berlin city services separated for almost three decades, subway line and bus line confusion, new hospital assignments and emergency vehicle routes, new patrol zones and a new public safety management grid, and that is why I am striding, in cold November, two days after the fall of the Wall, to meet one Inspector Alexander Grimmenkauf at one of the old checkpoints, because the investigation’s thin trail of evidence so far winds a path on both sides.

Because amid the joy and jubilation and celebration, a young woman has been murdered.

And if you were to observe this meeting—say, from one of the celebratory open apartment windows—you would laugh at the cliché of it, because I am so West German—from my leather jacket and moptop black hair (an indirect legacy of the Beatles’ famed Hamburg stint), to sloppy mustache, to my jazz CD collection, to my sweet blond American girlfriend, Susie (dozing this morning at my pad on Tiergartenstrasse), and Grimmenkauf (whose reputation precedes him) is so Eastern bloc—stepping out of the past and out of one of those noir American films Susie and I have been seeing—trenchcoat, collar turned up, black fedora. Short, squat, compact, and powerful beneath it. Classic Stasi. As schooled in torture and coercion and confession as I am schooled in forensic techniques and databases. As steeped in enforcement’s murky ugly past as I am in police work’s best practices and weekly white papers. And the idea of our working together—of my selection for the case, and of his—with our methods so utterly separated by technology, culture, style, police law—is someone’s idea of a joke. A lab experiment assembled by our respective departments. Even our ages conspire in the metaphor—I am just thirty, looking forward in career and life, he is past sixty, looking back at both.

“Herr Grimmenkauf.”

“Herr Bunder.”

He shakes my hand, glances up at me merely dutifully, and allows only the briefest ironic smile—just enough to tell me that he knows too, what a joke this is. Some administrative committee’s hasty response to sudden shifting conditions. Symbolic. And ridiculous.

And then—no preliminaries, no chat from him. “We can walk to the crime scene and the morgue,” he says flatly. “In that way, a very convenient murder.” He turns, and begins leading me.

Making it clear. I’m not going to be a poster boy for détente. For Western victory and normalization. Let’s figure this out, and go our separate ways as quickly as possible.

Cops don’t walk on the Western side, we’ll take our Mercedes sedans even two blocks. But Grimmenkauf walks, I learn. And as I fall in silently behind him, I notice the limp, of course. Trenchcoat, turned-up collar, gruff monosyllables—and he’s even got the grim limp. Noir on noir. You couldn’t make this guy up.

The dress had a recklessly full skirt, nearly eight meters of hand-painted silk, and was the most capitalistically decadent garment Ludmila Blatova had ever designed. Every time she set needle or shears to it, a shock, a combination of adoration and apprehension, rippled along her spine and tightened her abdomen. She still couldn’t believe the dress was permitted. But Khrushchev himself had directed that no expense or extravagance was to be spared for the 1959 Soviet Exhibition of Science, Technology, and Culture in New York City. There, the USSR’s superiority would be demonstrated in every aspect of life, from Sputnik to rugs. They’d already beaten the Americans in the race to outer space. But they’d always lagged behind in fashion. Until now. The clothes shown in New York would epitomize the socialist aesthetic—simple, modest, and functional. Even Westerners would want them.

Ludmila was one of four designers brought to the center of Soviet fashion, the Moscow ODMO, the All-Union House of Prototypes, but she was the only one plucked from a provincial garment factory. The others came from GUM, the state-sponsored department store. For months, all of them had worked long hours on the collection of daywear and evening gowns that would represent the Soviet Union in New York. None of them complained. To handle such luxurious materials and patterns was a dream. And a nightmare. One misstep or accident—a clumsy drape or silhouette, the wrong length, crooked or puckered seams, a smear of blood from a pricked finger on a priceless textile—might mean a Siberian gulag, or so Ludmila feared.

They were to be steered clear of such disasters through the close supervision of a senior ODMO designer, Vladlena Gribkova. Not only was her father a high-ranking Party member and Deputy Commissar of the Ministry of Light Production, but also she’d had the benefit of visiting Paris, twice. Her advantages showed in the brilliance of her work. Every design in the collection showed her creative stamp. Ludmila was as jealous of her position and spotless pedigree as of her talent.

Ludmila was the only designer allowed to contribute an entirely original dress to the collection, an honor which both thrilled and terrified her. As she feverishly worked, nausea alternated with light-headedness. She could scarcely sleep and had no interest in food. The only hunger she felt was for the chance to realize more of her ideas. She hoped her cherished dress was just the beginning of a dazzling career. If she could impress Gribkova, Ludmila might gain a permanent position at ODMO, advance, and maybe, one day, become senior designer herself. She tried her best to win over Gribkova, but the senior designer rebuffed all attempts with chilly resentment and mistrust, or so it seemed to Ludmila.

“Is it finished?” Gribkova asked, standing over Ludmila.

All afternoon Ludmila had labored over the skirt’s hem, which required thousands of tiny invisible stitches. “Another minute or two.” She didn’t look up and kept sewing, hoping the anxious tremble of her fingers escaped the senior designer’s scrutiny.

The only soft thing about Gribkova was her generous curves. Everything else was cold and sharp—her voice, demeanor, and scathing criticism, her elegant spiked heels and cat-eye glasses. She was tireless and seemed to see and hear everything. No one dared pilfer fabric scraps or extra buttons, or indulge in anticommunist jokes.

Out of the corner of her eye, Ludmila saw the pointed toe of Gribkova’s black pump impatiently tapping the floor. Ludmila had been so proud of her own new flat sandals from Poland, which she’d procured after standing in line for hours. Now, compared to Gribkova, the shoes made her feel as sturdy and practical as her homemade button-down dress.

At last, Ludmila made the final stitch, cut the thread, and handed Gribkova the skirt for her inspection. “There. Done.”

Gribkova took it, her lips pursed, ready to disapprove. Holding it up to the light, she examined it centimeter by centimeter. When she’d finished, she called, “Inessa.”

Inessa was the model assigned to the dress. A twenty-two-year-old redhead. She and the other models lounged in their underwear around a scarred wooden table in a corner of the workroom, smoking, gossiping, and turning dog-eared pages of Zhurnal mod and Modelt zesona, while they waited to be fitted. At her name, Inessa stood and melodramatically threw off a blanket draped around her shoulders. “Yes, Comrade Gribkova,” she said, hiding a giggle behind her hand. She was always giggling. Tall and stick-thin, her best feature was her almond-shaped eyes and long eyelashes. From certain angles, she might have looked like a giraffe, but on the runway she walked like a goddess.

“Put it on so we can check it again,” Gribkova ordered.

Inessa bent down and held her skinny arms over her head like a child so Ludmila could slip the dress over them.

“The petticoat too,” Gribkova said to Ludmila.

She helped Inessa climb into the layers of stiff netting.

The dress became a frothy confection that took Ludmila’s breath away.

“Walk,” Gribkova ordered. She peered critically at the model as she pranced up and down the workroom.

Ludmila peered too, chewing her lower lip.

Inessa stopped and whirled, showing off, as vain as if the dress belonged to her. It was sleeveless with a form-fitting bodice that ballooned into a full skirt. The cream colored silk was tissue-paper fragile, like moth wings. From a distance the fabric appeared to be spotted with fashionably large, multicolored polka dots. Closer, the dots resolved themselves into a pattern, each dot a traditional Ukrainian motif delicately rendered in shades of azure, carmine, teal, and sunflower. The tones suited Inessa’s bronze freckles, and the fit was perfect.

The dress was to be worn at cocktail parties, which were apparently common in the West, or so Ludmila had been told. Couples and young single professionals held them at their big suburban houses in the early evening before dinner. Everyone dressed up. Martinis and other fancy mixed drinks and appetizers were served. She herself had neither attended nor heard of any Russian attending or hosting such gatherings, but her social circles were limited to a few seamstress friends.

“Stop. Don’t move,” Gribkova ordered and picked up Ludmila’s razor-sharp shears. Holding them like a weapon, the open blades glinting in the light, she walked over and cut a dangling thread. Then she stood back.

She and Ludmila studied the dress looking for more flaws. Ludmila could see none.

“All right,” Gribkova said, with a curt nod. “You can take it off.”

Ludmila helped the model wiggle out of the dress, gingerly, so very gingerly. A ripped seam and they might find themselves both convicted of sabotage and sentenced to ten years’ hard labor.

Gribkova clapped her hands and addressed them all. “Workers. That is enough for today. Tidy up and then go home. Get some rest. It’s another early day tomorrow.”

Dutifully, Ludmila began to straighten up her workstation.

“Ludmila,” Gribkova said.

“Yes, Comrade Gribkova?”

“Stay behind. I want to speak to you.”

Ludmila swallowed. Had the senior designer changed her mind? Gribkova didn’t like the dress after all. It was to be purged from the collection. She might even censure Ludmila for individualistic tendencies and send her back to Minsk. Not trusting herself to speak, Ludmila nodded.

Once the others filed out, Gribkova wearily sank onto a stool. “I congratulate you. The Deputy Commissar has seen your dress and is satisfied that it is far superior to any American party dress. It will be a centerpiece of the New York City show.” She pronounced this news in the same stark tone that she denounced something as an utter and disgusting failure. “It embodies the style and comfort Comrade Khrushchev envisions for the modern Soviet woman.”

This wasn’t what Ludmila had been expecting. Her face turned hot, which she knew resulted in unbecoming blotches. “Oh,” she said, the word squeaky with relief. “Thank you, Comrade. That is very kind of you.” She realized she was babbling but couldn’t stop herself. “And him. Comrade Khrushchev. And all of them. Too kind. Of everyone.”

Gribkova seemed unmoved by gratitude. In the same icy tone, she continued, “Furthermore, when we go to New York, we will need a hard worker who’s skilled with a needle, someone able to handle any last-minute crisis that might arise. The deputy commissar has agreed. You will come to New York City.”

Ludmila’s face became even hotter, and no doubt even more blotchy, and her vision blurred. “Oh, thank you, Comrade Gribkova.”

“Just make sure I don’t regret my decision,” Gribkova said meaningfully.

Monterey Bay, California. October 1968.

In Budapest the streetcars were painted yellow. Sometimes I believed that was all the color left in Hungary. Margaret, my foster mother, said that the cars had been painted yellow before the communists took over and would be yellow after the communists fell. To her, the color was a spark.

We jerked and swayed along with the other people crowding the line out to Little Pest. At each stop the January wind cleared the air thick with body heat and drying wool.

“See?” Margaret said, a smile on her leathery face. “The men drool over my sweet Helena. Saint Jerome is with us.”

Margaret was Roma and a closet Catholic. For her the world was as piled up with signs as the snow against her farmhouse. After knowing her eighteen years, I found that she had a way of creating the signs she credited to her saints. On a streetcar full of workers heading back to their tenements, I was the only young Budapesti wearing an Italian overcoat and with my hair styled for evening. I was the only girl in a floral dress, one Margaret had me sew tight to catch Typhon’s eye.

We pushed our way off at Üllői Avenue and into a light rain. Around us drab lines of apartment blocks rose like grave markers over Pest.

Her contact’s building looked no different from any of the gray slabs scored with balconies. The elevator was out of service. Despite her years I struggled to keep up with Margaret on the ten-story climb. She had fought the fascists and later the Russians, but how the British found her, as with any of her clients, I never dared to ask.

A tidy man introduced as Braintree ushered us into the flat. Margaret had me remove my coat and turned me toward him standing beside the window. Braintree fidgeted like someone uncomfortable with planned housing, either this one or of tenements in general.

“So this is your student,” Braintree said. “She’s pretty enough. Bit older than requested though, isn’t she?”

Margaret lifted my skirt to the thigh and turned me into a profile. “Twenty-three. Not too old. Tall like requested. Brown hair. Typhon does not miss my sweet Helena. Face of a girl, body of a woman.”

“Quite.”

A week earlier I had managed to find a copy of Beggar’s Banquet, and wearing out Margaret’s turntable with the Rolling Stones somehow left me expecting my first live Englishman to resemble a wild-haired and languid Brian Jones. There was no “Street Fighting Man” in Braintree.

I was a street fighter’s daughter. Out the window was a view west, to where the river wrapped around Csepel Island. There the Allamvedelmi Osztaly murdered my father in the last hours of the Revolution and first of the reprisals.

“Still,” Braintree said, “we rather hoped for a professional.”

Margaret lit a pipe and watched him through the smoke. “Tell me when you discover how to get a working girl into a Party social. Helena is Communist Youth, monitored for membership. Smartest girl I have.”

“I relay messages for her,” I said, speaking up to impress. I had finished top of my English class despite the Party elite’s children spending their summers in Britain. “I gather information. True, I am not one of her Mata Haris. Margaret is happy with what I bring even so.”

“Admirable accent, dear girl,” Braintree said. “They’d have you at Selfridges. But as I understand you round up café blather from drunken underlings. Typhon is somewhat up the food chain. And acting on a different set of expectations.”

“She will get Typhon alone,” Margaret said. “Sweet Helena, so pure, but gypsy in her heart. She keeps her head always. She shows you now if you like.”

“You Magyars must have taught the Russians their tricks,” Braintree said. He turned toward me, something not quite benevolent about his grin. “Very well then. Not the first large rabbit Margaret has pulled out of a small hat. Understand, dear girl, that learning Typhon’s name means you leave Hungary tonight.”

I understood that and more. I understood Hungarians smuggled records in and the West smuggled defectors out. I understood that Hungary had few men so special as to lure Braintree from London, fewer still with a weakness for university girls. For Margaret to send me, there was but one. Zsigmond Irinyi, deputy head of Central Control and the AVO’s Butcher of Csepel, packed his bags for the West.

“When you have Irinyi alone,” Braintree was saying, “absolutely alone, deliver this message: ‘Cicilia.’ He will provide a confirmation word. Return here with it straight away. We close up shop at three tomorrow morning. Mustn’t be late for your flight west, not with the great bear and her cubs nipping at your heels.”

“Then you find me a warmer new home?”

Braintree nodded. “I believe we’ve still a few of those about.”

Margaret followed me down as far as the lobby. “Sweet Helena,” she said, grasping my hand. “Tonight I lose my Helena.”

I did not cry. Margaret punished any tears, saying Hungary did not need more silly girls. “You will leave first.”

“Second if you are careless,” Margaret said. “Braintree follows protocol, moves early before the Butcher is found out. Tonight they give us the Butcher on his wrong foot. Tonight, we must be the spark.”

We’re down in the bomb shelter alphabetizing the canned foods so we can find what we’re looking for during an invasion or nuclear attack. Not bitchen on Labor Day weekend. The shelter is a long rectangular room with fluorescent lights, a bathroom at one end and a sink and small stove/oven at the other. Surplus military cots, blankets, pillows, and flashlights everywhere you look. No windows because it’s underground. The ceiling is low, and the lights flicker and hum and make you squint. Mom and Dad have a small record player set up down here for Tijuana Brass, Engelbert Humperdinck, and Andy Williams. If we get bombed I’ll take in my Cream and Doors. Amazing, the music old people would want to hear during a nuclear attack.

We’ve already reviewed the Batteries/Drinking Water/Perishables Rotation Schedule, which is written out on graph paper in Dad’s perfect handwriting and tacked to the corkboard below the Radiation Exposure Do’s and Don’ts. The whole family is here—Dad, Mom, Max, Marie, and me. I’m Mike, sixteen and the oldest. I can’t wait to finish up the work so I can get to 15th Street in Newport Beach, where there’s a south swell and waves running three to five feet, glassy conditions, water temp of seventy. Of course Dad has other ideas.

“Take your time and do a good job here, troops,” he says. “Chicken noodle before clam chowder and so forth, right on down the line. When this is done we’ve got some reloading to do in the gun room. The forty-five brass is really piling up! Then, the rest of Saturday is yours. But remember we’ve got the chapter meeting here tonight.”

Again, not bitchen. Fully not. The meeting is the South Orange County California chapter of the John Birch Society. Which means monthly atrocity films about the World Communist Conspiracy, programs on how to detect drug use in young people, plenty of cocktails and cigarettes, moms in short skirts, and dads with skinny ties and flat-tops. Dullsville. Me and Max steal almost-finished drinks when the grown-ups lose track of them. Which is easy when the living room is dark so they can see the atrocity films. Piled bodies, executions, maimed survivors. The speakers all agree that these things will happen here in America if we let them take our guns away. Or negotiate with the Russians. Or if we let the government put fluoride in our water. Fine, but I’m a member of the Newport Beach Bodysurfing Association, and Newport’s three-to-five and I’ve got the keys to the Country Squire.

It’s more like six to eight feet by the time we get to 15th Street that afternoon, a blow-out, the waves just mountains of chop. Some of the other club members are there. We wear white water polo caps to distinguish us in the water from nonbodysurfers, whom we call “goons.” We meet once a month and talk about contests, techniques, and trips to other breaks. I catch a right and stay tucked up high in the pocket as long as I can hang there, trimming along, palms and swim fins vibrating on the wave, which catches up and breaks over me. I could stand in that cylinder it’s so big. It’s loud, too—a full-on roar. I’m blinded by the spray, the brine grinding away under my eyelids for my short, sweet ride. Then the usual bodysurfer’s exit—a lip-launched freefall. Gravity tilts me downward but I try to maintain my elevation. Like a falling jet. I’d scream but I’ll need the air. Soon. The wave drives me straight to the bottom, where I flatten, rake my fingers into the sand and hold what’s left of my breath while the wave thunders by above me. Fireflies in my eyes. Finally I shove off and wriggle upward, break the surface in the oddly smooth and spreading wake to gasp in sudden red sunlight. Fully bitchen. So bitchen I swim back out and do it again. Several times. Later Max gets a great ride but comes up under a jellyfish and when we’re riding home his face looks like a stewed tomato. Marie, who has worked hard on her tan, thinks it’s hilarious.

When I turn onto our street I slow way down and casually look at the Lamm house. Adlyn is nowhere in sight, which is a bummer. Neither is her older brother, Larkin, which is fine with me. His van is in the driveway. The house is all concrete and glass, curvy and science fictional, nothing like the tract houses across from it, where we live. The Lamms moved in six months ago. On the last day of school I got brave enough to talk to Adlyn. Dr. Lamm is an important officer at the Tustin Naval Air Station, says Dad.

“Adlyn is nowhere, nowhere, nowhere to be found,” singsongs Marie from the back. “She’s too mature for you, Mike. You’re too chicken to call her so she has to call you.”

“Shut up, Marie.”

“My whole face is burning. Mom’s going to make me soak it in vinegar again.”

The summer that she was a newlywed, Judith Monaghan watched The Newlywed Game almost every day, except when it was preempted by the hearings. She watched those, too, marveling at Senator Ervin’s eyebrows and Maureen “Mo” Dean’s outfits, but she preferred The Newlywed Game, despite the fact that she had once been vitally interested in politics. Actually, maybe that was why she preferred the game show to the hearings; it seemed more real to her.

The Newlywed Game came on at 2 p.m. on Channel 13, and Judith set aside the next two hours to accomplish whatever could be done while seated in the living room—darning socks, shelling peas, whipping in hems, teaching herself to knit. She was sure that she and Patrick could answer every question correctly, as they had known each other for six years before they married. But how would they get to California from Baltimore? Would her mother be upset about the inevitable “Making Whoopee” questions? And was it possible to angle to be on the show when the top prize was a washer-dryer? Judith didn’t like the look of the furniture sets given away as prizes—too shiny new for her tastes—and the Monaghans already had a perfectly good television, a wedding gift from her second-oldest brother, who owned two electronics stores.

The Newlywed Game was followed by a show called The Girl in My Life, about women who had made a difference to others. Judith didn’t care for it as much. She usually switched to The Edge of Night, which led right into The Price Is Right, where she won almost everything. Or would have, if she had been in the studio audience. Judith was a very focused shopper, paying attention to prices, calculating the per unit cost among different brands.

Judith did have a washer, but no dryer, a problem during that clammy, damp summer, when the sun rose every day only to disappear until 4 p.m.—the time that Judith tied an immaculate apron over one of her pretty, hand-tailored dresses and began to prepare dinner for her husband, who arrived home at 5:30 p.m. and expected his food at 6. (He spent the intervening half hour with a beer and the evening paper, the Orioles pregame show on WBAL.) She liked making Patrick dinner. She liked doing things in general. Judith was as restless as a hummingbird, and the small brick duplex required so little of her. She cleaned the woodwork with a Q-tip, vacuumed the Venetian blinds, scrubbed the long-discolored grout with a toothbrush, and still she ended up with time on her hands. She even started ironing the sheets when she changed the linens on Fridays and she might have washed them more often, but they took so long to dry on these strangely overcast summer days. She tried to bake her own bread, once. The loaves were flat and dense; Patrick said he preferred store bread, anyway. He liked Wonder Bread, and Judith liked Maranto’s, the fresh, paper-wrapped Italian loaves.

“Those only taste good the day you buy them,” Patrick said. “Wonder Bread tastes good all week long.”

They had only one car, and of course Patrick took that every day; the bus stop was four blocks away and he would have been required to change buses on Route 40. Besides, he needed the car for his job, which involved driving from bar to bar, doing inspections. Judith didn’t mind. She did a big grocery shop on weekends and could do any daily marketing on foot—vegetables, last-minute items—at the High’s Dairy Store on Ingleside, or even the grocery stores on Route 40 if it came to that. She knew if she shopped efficiently, she wouldn’t have to do these daily runs to High’s, but the walk down Newfield Road was another way to fill the long days.

Married life was lonely, which seemed strange to her. Shouldn’t marriage be the end of loneliness? She tried to find a neutral way to express this thought to her mother, who called every day at 9 a.m., despite the fact that Judith told her repeatedly that was when she cleaned the kitchen.

“The days seem so long that I find myself cleaning even more than you did.”

“I,” her mother said, “had four sons. No one could clean more than I did.”

“I cook a lot, too. I’m getting pretty good.” Judith was proud of her cooking, the meals she put together for Patrick. She would never be like the woman in the Alka-Seltzer commercial, the one who made heart-shaped meatloaf. “Sometimes I wonder if I should have kept my job until I got pregnant.”

A quick laugh at her own expense, as if what she was saying was silly. But she did miss work, the intrigues of an office, being around others. She had lived at home until she married. She had wanted to take an apartment with another girl after she finished college, but her parents wouldn’t hear of it.

“Marry in haste, repent in leisure.”

Judith adjusted the phone, which she had cradled between her ear and shoulder, thinking she must have misheard. For one thing, no one could call Patrick Monaghan’s courtship hasty.

“I didn’t catch that,” she said. “I’m washing the breakfast dishes.” Patrick liked to start the day with eggs, bacon, toast, and juice. She had made the juice fresh until he told her he preferred Minute Maid concentrate. That was okay, she used the empty cartons to set her hair after he left in the mornings, the best way to get the smooth look that he liked.

“Mrs. Levitan died that way. She was washing the dishes and the phone slipped in the sink and she was electrocuted.”

“I don’t think that’s what happened,” Judith ventured.

“You’re right. Mrs. Levitan is the one who died while talking on the phone in a thunderstorm. It was Irene Sandowski who dropped the phone. Although I think it was in the bathtub.”

“Oh, Mother, how could someone drop the phone in the bathtub? The Sandowskis aren’t the type of people to have a phone in the bathroom.”

“She thought she was so clever, that one. And grand. She had her husband find an extra-long cord—I think he had to call Bell Atlantic special—and she hooked it up to a princess phone, pink, a birthday gift, and she would take it into the bathroom and prop it up on the toilet and take bubble baths like she was Doris Day or somebody, talking the whole while. Well, one day, the whole thing fell in.” A pause. “I just realized—I never did understand why she got a pink phone, when her bedroom was all gold and white, but the bathroom was pink.”

“Irene Sandowski is alive,” Judith said.

“Are you sure?”

“She was alive as of last week when I got the invitation to Betty’s wedding. Irving and Irene Sandowski request your pleasure, et cetera, et cetera.”

“I didn’t say she died. But that’s why she has that white streak in her hair and now she has to be careful when she gets her teeth cleaned because her heartbeat is irregular. So Betty is getting married? Someone nice, I hope.”

Nice meant Jewish. Nice meant rich, or at someone who might be rich, some day. It also meant: Not like your husband, the Irishman, the Mick, who took you to the far side of town, where I suspect you are eating HAM every day. Yet the Weinsteins didn’t keep kosher and ate pork when they had Chinese carry-out, while crabs were okay as long as they were eaten outside on newspaper. However, her mother had never tasted lobster, a fact of which she was strangely proud.

“It’s nice over here,” Judith said. Sometimes, saying a thing could make it true. It wasn’t not nice. It just wasn’t where she had expected to live.

“It’s tacky, sharing a wall with another house,” her mother said.

“You grew up in a rowhouse.”

“You didn’t,” her mother said. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“You don’t have to call every—” but her mother had already hung up.

Judith thought maybe she should spend less time talking to her mother and more time with her brother, Donald, the one closest to her in age. A bachelor who worked for a state senator, Donald was used to listening to people. Plus, he liked Patrick, had helped get him the job with the liquor board. Donald had lots of connections, lots of pull.

“Maybe you should get a job, Judith,” Donald said. “I can help you if that’s what you want.”

“Oh, no,” she protested. “I’m a married woman now. And the babies will start coming any day. I’d just end up quitting.”

Those wished-for babies were the reason for the house on Newfield Road, which Patrick had rented without consulting her. “With three bedrooms, a yard, and a washing machine—no dryer, but it has one of those umbrella like things to hang the clothes on and the yard gets good sunlight, I made sure to check that. And a garbage disposal, Judith. Plus an unfinished basement, which we could make into a rec room, the landlord said improvements were fine. Of course, we probably won’t be there long enough to care. I mean, it’s okay for one kid, but once we get past that—”

Patrick had never said so many words at one time in all the time Judith had known him.

“Newfield Road? I don’t even know where that is,” she had said.

“Edmondson Heights. Over by Social Security, but closer to Route 40. You know Mr. G’s, where I used to take you for soft ice cream when we started dating? And the drive-in where we saw that movie together the night we met? Sort of between those two places.”

Judith had fond memories of both Mr. G’s and the drive-in. But Judith had considered those exotic adventures, akin to going on an African safari. Observe the Baltimore Irish Catholic in his natural environment, eating soft ice cream and onion rings after a movie. The boys Judith knew congregated at diners, after dropping their dates at home. Edmondson Heights was seven exits away on the Beltway from where she grew up in Pikesville. It might as well have been seven hundred miles.

“I don’t know people who live over there.”

“You’ll meet some. I have lots of cousins in the neighborhood, if it comes to that.”

“I mean, I mean”—But she could not say: I don’t mean people, people. I mean my people. Your people are not my people. How could she point out that there wasn’t a single temple along the Route 40 corridor? Patrick thought she wasn’t going to go to synagogue any more. They had thrown in their lot together, Romeo and Juliet, vowing to disown their disapproving families and live their own lives, by their rules. Only it turned out their families would not be disowned so easily and what were supposed to be their rules, Patrick’s and Judith’s, were turning out to be Patrick’s rules. He chose where they lived. He chose how they spent their weekend hours. She suspected, come December, he would choose to have a tree in the living room. At which point, should Judith’s mother visit, she would drop dead on the spot.

But, so far, her mother had inspected the rowhouse only once. She had walked through it without comment, unless sniffs could be counted as comments. In which case, she had made roughly forty, fifty comments, five to ten per room. The thing that seemed to bother her the most was the umbrella-like drying line in the backyard that Patrick considered such an asset. She had placed a hand over her heart and shook ever head ever so slightly, the way she did when she watched the war coverage on TV.

Certainly, her mother could not be surprised that Judith didn’t have an automatic dryer, and she had to admit the washer in the duplex was a step up from the coin-operated machines in the Bonnie Brae Apartments. Louise Weinstein, as a newlywed, had pinned clothes to a line strung behind a Butchers Hill rowhouse, not that far from where the Monaghans lived in Fell’s Point. Both families had moved up and out, of course, but the Weinsteins had headed northwest, while the Monaghans marched due west. Judith and Patrick might never have met if they hadn’t ended up on a double date together, and it wasn’t even with each other. Judith’s date, Harold, asked to find a boy for her friend Thelma, had suggested Patrick Monaghan, an enthusiastic volunteer in the governor’s race. Thelma was a pretty girl, but Judith could feel Patrick’s eyes on her neck throughout the entire film, Sweet Charity. The next day, Patrick called and asked if she was really as interested in politics as she had claimed over soft ice cream at Mr. G’s because the Stonewall Democratic Club was always looking for volunteers. Oh, she was interested. She was interested in politics and interested in this stoic Irish redhead. Go figure—the man was trustworthy, but politics broke her heart. Patrick’s, too, if it came to that. They never quite got over what happened in that governor’s race. The Watergate hearings, as far as Judith was concerned, were just an opportunity for the rest of the nation to learn what they already knew. It was all a shuck, a game, business as usual. Patrick and Judith had presented their youth and idealism like a burnt offering to pagan gods, then comforted each other when it came to naught. At least they had a marriage to show for it. Lots of young couples were marrying early if only because of the lottery numbers the boys had been assigned. But Patrick had a high number. Judith knew he really loved her.

Besides, whatever the pace of their courtship, she was not repenting. She didn’t regret her marriage. The house was fine, just fine, especially for a place to pass through. The neighborhood was—

There, her resilience failed her. She hated Edmondson Heights, the blocks and blocks of brick rowhouses just like her own, thrown up in the ’50s to address the shortages after the war. She could and did walk for miles, but the scene seldom changed. Sometimes, she walked all the way to the Westview Mall, but it was a dark, jerry-rigged place, an open-air shopping center that had closed itself in to keep up with the times. Besides, she had no money to buy the things she really wanted, clothes and shoes and books, so she ended up at Silber’s Bakery, eating those abominations known as pizza rolls, hunks of white bread with tomato sauce and cheese smeared on top. She would probably weigh an extra ten pounds if it weren’t for all the walking.

Over the summer, she gradually began to see the small distinctions from block to block along Newfield Road, which had initially looked all of a piece to her. She could tell, for example, where the neighborhood changed over from renters to owners. The tiny front lawns were better-kept and often had shrubberies, the ones hung with bright red berries that Judith had always heard were poisonous, but perhaps that was just a story told to scare children. The doors and shutters were painted in glossier colors, and the houses had storm doors. Renters kept iridescent globes on pedestals in their yards. Owners nailed ceramic cats to their brick facades. Some even had those hitching posts that looked like jockeys, although the faces had all been whitewashed. There were more children, too, in these blocks. Judith’s block was almost childless. Two blocks over, the Lord Baltimore diaper truck was a daily presence. Go another five blocks and it was the Good Humor man.

Walking as she did, day in and day out, Judith felt like a spy in her own life. She looked like the other women she saw, she lived a life like theirs, and yet she was not one of them, she was sure of that. Was it merely being Jewish in a neighborhood where almost everyone else seemed to be Catholic? Her face burned with the memory of her humiliation when she served pot roast to one pair of neighbors on a Friday night, only to have Mrs. Delaney say quietly, “We go meatless on Fridays.”

“Oh, who gives a crap, Frances?” said Mr. Delaney, who took seconds. It was a good pot roast; Judith couldn’t help preening a bit. Mrs. Delaney limited herself to potatoes and the Jell-O salad, said she was considering giving up red meat anyway.

“Frances would be a hippie, if I let her,” Mr. Delaney said. “But I’m not going to be married to a hippie. And I’m not going to live on rabbit food. She’d grow her own vegetables if I let her.”

Judith’s face had burned at that, too, thinking of the plot that Patrick had planted in their backyard.

Frances Delaney was young, younger than Judith, yet Judith still thought of her as Mrs. Delaney, perhaps because Mr. Delaney was so much older, in his 40s, closer to her parents’ generation than hers. He had been career military until a year or so ago, and Judith was unclear where he had met his bride. His attitudes, too, made him seem old. Gruff, bossy. He worked at the Social Security Administration, as did many in the neighborhood. At the dinner table that night, he placed his large hand over Mrs. Delaney’s and said: “No hippies and no women’s libbers for us, right, Pat? Our wives stay home and take care of us, as it should be.”

“Judith worked at her father’s variety store before it went bust,” Patrick said, missing, as he often did, the point beneath the actual words, words not being something he used very much. “She was a secretary at Procter and Gamble when we met.”

“Before you married,” Mr. Delaney said.

“Yes.”

“That’s okay. Frances here was a nurse.”

“And you met—” Judith began.

“Oh, it’s such a boring story,” Frances Delaney said. “Don’t bore them with it, Jack. Where did you two meet?”

“The movies,” Patrick said. No one would ever accuse Patrick Monaghan of telling long stories. At night, when Judith tried to share her observations about their neighborhood, he would say: “I’m not much of one for gossip, Judith.”

But Judith didn’t mind that Patrick was the strong, silent type. She had come from a family of big talkers. Patrick was her Quiet Man. She loved his silences. Except when she didn’t and then she locked herself in the bathroom, wishing she had a phone cord that stretched all the way in there. Only whom would she call? Her mother, who would repeat the line about marrying in haste? Her girlfriends, who had married proper Jewish boys and were living proper Jewish lives in the northwest suburbs? Judith might be able to find a cord long enough to stretch into the bathroom, but she wasn’t sure that there was any phone line long enough to take her back to the life she had known. She was a spy. A spy in what her mother called the land of Mackerel Snappers and Shanty Irish.

She did not look that different from the other women. Her hair had a reddish cast and she was given to freckles, even in this sunless summer. She was often asked, in fact, what parish she had grown up in, a question she eventually realized was meant to suss out whether she preferred St. William of York or St. Lawrence. There was some confusion in the neighborhood about which parish to join, and the choice was considered a tip to one’s ambitions. Would you be moving southeast, to the larger houses in Ten Hills and Hunting Ridge, or west, closer to Social Security, where Jack Delaney worked? It was all very complex, a mathematical equation made up of the husband’s ambitions and prospects, the pace at which the children arrived. Even if Judith managed to sidestep that first question, the other questions were still lying in wait. Patrick had a good job as an inspector for the city liquor board. Safe, solid. But how high would they rise? How many children would they have? And when those children arrived, how would they be raised? All very well to say love was all when it was only the two of you, but baby makes three and some very difficult questions, as Judith was now realizing. Who was she? Who would her children be?

So while others might call what she did on her walks snooping or spying, Judith believed she was simply trying to find a way to be. Would she move toward Ten Hills or Woodlawn? Would she have an iridescent globe on a pedestal in her yard? (Probably not; they struck her as tacky.) She definitely would not have one of those whitewashed hitching posts. And she didn’t know what to make of the people who affixed those two pairs of kittens to their brick-fronts, always a white one and black one. What was that about? Who were they? Who was she?

The summer continued cool and damp. Good for sleeping and good for walking, but not for much else. Judith imagined this was like summer in London, not that she had been there, or San Francisco, not that she had been there, or—well, she really hadn’t been anywhere. She had grown up in Northwest Baltimore, the youngest of five, the only daughter. Spoiled, she saw in retrospect, but does anyone ever realize they’re spoiled until the spoiling ends? Yet spoiled as she might have been, she could put her little house shipshape by 11 a.m. and then what? She could have stayed in and watched soap operas, but she was more interested in the soap operas playing out in the neighborhood. In plain sight, once one knew where to look. The battling Donovans. The literally bursting-at-the-seams Kate O’Connell, who had just given birth to her fifth child in five years. The Horton hooligans, as they were known, a brood of terrifying brothers. Judith took to walking down the narrow lane that led to the carports behind the houses of Newfield Road. This was where real life could be glimpsed. Almost no one here had a proper garage and some didn’t even have carports, only concrete pads. She saw Betty Donovan sitting on her back steps, which could use a coat of paint, smoking a cigarette and holding a frozen package of succotash to a swollen eye. She saw the Horton boys trying to burn ants with a magnifying glass, which made her glad that the sun was weak and fitful. She saw Katie O’Connell tie one of her children to the useless umbrella drying rack in her backyard. “He tried to run away,” Katie said when she saw Judith looking. “What else can I do?”

And Judith saw the Lord Baltimore diaper service truck parked in the carport behind the Delaney house, despite the fact that the Delaneys had no children.

“They do shirts,” Frances Delaney said one July morning as Judith headed out again for a walk, thinking she might do a little marketing, or even have an ice cream cone at High’s for lunch. She always left by way of the street, then returned via the alley, her bag of groceries a cover of sorts, a legitimate reason for being in the alley. It would be natural, with a bag of groceries, to want to enter the house through the kitchen door.

“Excuse me?”

Frances Delaney was on her knees in her front yard, tending to a small flower bed. The men did the lawns, the women did the flowers. Judith did not have a green thumb, perhaps because her own mother did not, so her lawn was just lawn.

“Lord Baltimore Diaper Service,” Frances said, rising to her feet, brushing off her knees. She was wearing short shorts and a halter that left a strip of her midriff bare. A good outfit for tanning if the sun ever came out again; Judith just didn’t feel comfortable in such clothes since she married. She thought the whole point of being a wife was to look polished, grown-up. To look as if you had some place to go, even if it was only High’s Dairy Store. She was wearing Bernardo sandals and a hot-pink shift that she had made from a remnant at Jo-Ann Fabrics, a coordinating scarf over her hair, which she would wash and set later today in the loose straight style that Patrick liked. “They do shirts, too.”

“You send your husband’s shirts out?”

“Jack’s fussy in his way.”

Judith thought about Mr. Delaney. Jack. He had come to her home for Friday night supper in a Banlon shirt. He wore his hair very short, even shorter than Patrick wore his, practically a crew cut. He had picked his teeth at the table and touched his wife a lot, stroking her, patting her. He reminded Judith of the fairy tale in which a Chinese emperor kept a nightingale to sing for him.

“His work shirts,” Frances Delaney continued. “They’re particular at Social Security. Always looking for something to hold against a man, Jack says. He liked the Army better, he says. The rules were clear. He even liked Germany when we were stationed there.”

“Is that where you met? Germany?”

Frances laughed as if the idea were absurd, meeting someone in Germany. “Anyway, he likes his shirts just so, and I like Jack to be happy.”

“Isn’t that expensive? Sending out shirts?”

“Jack doesn’t know I send his shirts out. He just knows that they’re ironed and starched to his standards, which are very high.” She smiled shyly. She looked like a gypsy to Judith, but Patrick said Frances Delaney was pure black Irish—dark hair, blue eyes so pale that they were barely there. But there was something in her voice, a suggestion of an accent that had been vanquished, or was being kept in place through strict discipline.

“Where did you go to high school?” she asked Frances. It was usually the first thing Baltimoreans asked of one another.

“All over,” she said.

“Army brat?”

“Of a sort. My father’s work took us to Asia and Europe.”

That probably explained her accent, although it wasn’t so much an accent as a complete absence of accent, unusual here in Edmondson Heights, where almost everyone, except Judith, spoke with the exaggerated o’s and extra r’s that marked what people called a Baltimore accent.

Judith knew she shouldn’t ask more questions, that part of being a good neighbor was to respect all the little boundaries—the cheap white pickets that people placed down the middle of their shared lawns, the invisible lines dividing the parking pads, the shouts and sounds heard through the paper-thin walls late at night.

Yet she pressed, curious: “Don’t you get an allowance? Doesn’t he go over the checkbook?”

“I’m clever with money. I economize on the groceries—I’m a good cook, if I do say so myself. No one’s ever left my table unhappy.” Was Frances Delaney suggesting that she had left Judith’s table unhappy? That was so unfair. It wasn’t Judith’s fault that she forgot most Catholics didn’t eat meat on Fridays. “And I use what’s left over for the laundry. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt me.” She clapped a hand to her mouth. “I mean what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. I always get that wrong. Would you like to come in for a Tab?”

“Sure,” Judith said.

Over the next two weeks, she stopped at Frances Delaney’s house almost daily, enjoying Tab or Fresca and, sometimes, a white wine that was quite unlike anything Judith had ever tasted. They talked about everything and nothing. They complained, in the self-deprecating code that was allowed, about their husbands’ foibles. Silent, oblivious Patrick. Gabby, grabby Jack. They watched the Watergate hearings and made fun of Sam Ervin’s eyebrows, talked about Mo Dean’s style, which Judith admired but Frances thought drab.

“If my husband had that kind of job, I’d look better than that,” said Frances, who almost always wore cut-offs and halter tops. “She looks dowdy to me.”

“I worked in politics,” Judith confided in Frances. “I thought I was going to change the world.”

“The world never changes,” Frances said, smoking a Virginia Slim. Judith yearned to join her, but she had worked too hard to give it up.

“That’s what I found out.”

Inside the Delaney house, she saw enough evidence of money to believe that Frances Delaney did have a household budget with considerable fat in it. The appliances were new, unusual in this block of renters. The dining room set could have come straight from the grand prize package on The Newlywed Game. Mahogany, shiny. Tacky, but expensive, and Frances seemed to loathe it, too, neglecting to use coasters beneath their sweating glasses. The television set was color and huge, a Magnavox with a stereo built in.

“Do you own or rent?” Judith asked one day.

“Own.” Frances made a face. “It was his mother’s house. She died, left it to us, so we moved here. We could afford something nicer, but he says there’s no point in moving until we outgrow it.”

“So you’re going to have a family?”

“Of course.” She looked—insulted, that was it. As if Judith had given offense. “Why wouldn’t we? Jack’s only forty-two.”

“My oldest brother is forty,” Judith said, a peace offering. “I’m the youngest of five, the only girl. I grew up in Pikesville.”

“Pikesville. Isn’t that all Jews?”

“Yes,” Judith said, thinking it the most tactful way to reply. If she knew anything about her new friend, it was that she was delicate and sensitive, not at all like her coarse, belligerent husband. She would appreciate the chance to avoid hurting Judith’s feelings.

“Wow. How did you stand it?”

Judith thought very hard about what to say next.

“Hasn’t it been the worst summer?”

“Yes, but it’s a blessing in a way,” Frances said. “These houses get so hot, you have no idea. The second floor is usually unbearable during the day.” Frances stuck out her bottom lip and blew a few errant tendrils from her face. “You know, I suppose we should have you over to dinner, in return. I should have thought of that sooner.”

“Oh, please—don’t worry about that.”

A rumbling noise from the carport. From where they sat, in the dining room, Judith could see a white truck pulling to a stop. The Lord Baltimore diaper truck.

“I should go.”

Frances didn’t protest. “Friday night,” she said, not rising from her chair. She dangled a hand between her thigh absentmindedly, then across her collarbone, caressing herself. Judith left behind a half-full can of Tab, desperate to be out of the house before the Lord Baltimore Diaper Service driver crossed the threshold.

When she returned from High’s forty minutes later, the truck was still there.

The next day was Thursday. It rained all day, and Judith decided not to walk anywhere, but to stay inside and watch the hearings.

Friday night Judith and Patrick walked down their front walk, traveled perhaps fifteen yards, and went up the Delaneys’ front walk. Judith carried a loaf of zucchini bread, although the Delaneys had come to her dinner empty-handed. But proper people, truly mannerly people, did not come empty-handed in her experience.

“I wonder what they’ll serve us,” she said.

“Probably fish sticks,” Patrick said mournfully. “I thought I was leaving this behind when I married you.”

They were both surprised—Patrick happily, Judith ambivalently—to learn that Frances Delaney was an outstanding cook. Yes, dinner was fish, but poached salmon, served with little potatoes unlike anything Judith had have ever tasted, something called “fingerlings.” The salad was served after the main course, which Frances said was how the French ate.

Her husband rolled his eyes. “Judith studied cooking in France. I promised not to bitch about her pretendions as long as her grub is good.”

“Pretendions?” Judith couldn’t help asking. “France?”

“You know,” Jack said. “Putting on airs. Pretendions.”

“Oh, pretensions,” she said, then hated herself for it. She was trying to show Frances Delaney, by example, how a well-mannered person behaved, but Frances Delaney seemed to be one step ahead of her. She was even better dressed than Judith tonight, in a modest, knee-length lace shift that exposed only her arms. As she moved back and forth between the dining room and the kitchen, serving dinner with an ease that Judith had yet to master, Frances seemed not to notice Jack Delaney’s proprietary pats on her rear end. Judith did, though. She also noticed, with a sinking heart, Patrick’s approving looks at the house, the furniture. He probably thought this dining room set was classy.

“What the fuck is in my salad?” Jack Delaney held up a fork with a yellow blossom on the tines.

Judith had wondered the same thing, but would never have questioned it and would certainly never have used that word, which she did not remember ever hearing spoken aloud before, except through the walls late at night, when the Mulcahys were fighting. At least, they started out fighting. Where they ended up was more shocking still.

“Nasturtiums,” Frances said. “They’re edible.”

“They’re flowers,” her husband sputtered. Patrick looked hopeful, as if his host’s temper tantrum might get him off the hook.

“Don’t forget your promise to me, Jack,” Frances said, her tone even and polite. “To try anything once.”

“And don’t forget yours to me,” he said. “Try everything once.”

Frances seemed paler than usual, but she said nothing, not even when he patted her rear end again, leaving a grease stain on the white lace that she had managed to keep spotless while preparing and serving this meal.

“Hey, Pat, do you know what they call the alley behind our houses?” Jack Delaney did not wait for an answer. “Bonk Alley! Could there be a better place to live? Bonk Alley.”

“I don’t get it,” Judith said. She didn’t. She looked at Patrick. Patrick busied himself, making a little pile of flowers on the side of his plate. He was a polite man, but he had his limits.

“Bonk—it’s slang for screwing.” In some ways, Judith found that Jack’s use of that word even more shocking. “Something I picked up from the Brits.”

“Brits?”

“You know, when I was in London. God, that city is a shithole. They’re pre-verted, too, the Brits. Think they’re so superior to us. But they’re the preverts.”

“Perverts,” Frances said quietly. “The word is pervert.”

“Well, you would know honey. You would know.”

Jack fondled his wife’s rear end again as she collected the salad plates, making way for dessert. “Coffee?” she asked brightly. She made it in a Chemex, Judith observed. Judith and Patrick normally drank Nescafé. He said he preferred it, yet he had seconds of Frances’s coffee.

Frances did not serve Judith’s zucchini bread for dessert. Judith could not fault her for this lapse, as Frances had prepared something called tiramisu. “Could you get the recipe for this?” Patrick asked Judith.

“I’m not sure I could make something like this,” Judith said. She couldn’t even spell it.

“It’s not so hard,” Frances said, “if you use store-bought lady fingers.”

“Do you?” Judith asked.

A slight pause. “Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. I made these. But then, I like to bake. It fills the long afternoons.”

Judith felt she had lost a contest, although she wasn’t sure what it was, or who she was playing. She was almost tempted to make a crack about long afternoons, but she knew the women were in this together.

At least Judith could help clean the kitchen. She scraped the plates into the trash—the Delaney house did not have a garbage disposal, score one for her—and tried not to think about the white Silber’s bakery box she saw in the can, a box that clearly had held something nowhere in evidence. Lady fingers?

They parted, promising to do it again, knowing they never would.

The next time Judith walked to High’s, she did not return via what she now knew was Bonk Alley. She did not want to see the white Lord Baltimore truck coming and going, did not want to risk being taken into Frances Delaney’s confidences, confidences she sensed would be too heavy for her to bear. August passed. The gavel came down on the hearings and the country went on, as Judith knew it would. Everything goes on. The weather turned glorious around Labor Day, just in time to mock the children returning to school. The days were shorter, technically, although they still felt long to Judith. The vice president resigned, and while some Marylanders felt ashamed of their native son, Judith and Patrick, Stonewall Democrats, toasted the news, he with a beer, she with vermouth, which she had bought under the mistaken belief it would taste like the white wine that Frances Delaney had served. But the two couples, the Monaghans and the Delaneys, did not socialize again. Nor did the two women. Judith kept to the street, eyes straight ahead, trying not to see or hear the secrets all around her.

But it was impossible to miss, ten days before Halloween, the ambulance parked outside the Delaney house, lights twirling, Jack Delaney being carried out in a gurney, face covered. All the women of the neighborhood gathered to watch, somber yet excited in some horrible way. At least something was happening.

“Is he okay?” Judith asked Katie O’Connell, who may or may not be pregnant with number six under her shapeless coat. Probably better not to ask.

“He’s dead,” she said. “They don’t pull the sheet up over your face unless you’re dead, Judith.”

“But how?”

“Who knows? Heart attack probably. That’s what a man gets, taking up with a younger woman.”

“You mean they—in the afternoon?” The O’Connells shared a wall with the Delaneys. She shrugged.

The news would not make its way up and down the street for several days. Frances Delaney, in her quest for culinary sophistication, had harvested the yew berry bushes at a neighbor’s house a block over, asking permission before she did so. She had researched the berries carefully at the Catonsville library—or so she thought. It turned out the berries themselves were not poisonous if prepared properly. But everything else about the plant was so toxic that any preparation was risky. She had made her husband a tart. The only reason she hadn’t eaten any was because she had given up desserts, worried about her weight. He had awakened with a stomachache and called in sick to work, but Frances hadn’t thought it could be that serious. He was dead by the time the ambulance arrived.

Within a week, a for-sale sign went up in the yard. Within a month the sign was gone, and the neighbors, who had felt sympathy for the young widow, were incensed: Frances Delaney had sold to the first Negro family in Edmondson Heights. The gossip flew up and down the street. Who did she think she was? Where was she from, anyway? Not here. She hadn’t even gone to high school in Baltimore.

A week after that, Judith saw a moving truck pull into Bonk Alley. Not a regular moving truck, a Hampden Van Lines, or a Mayflower. A U-Haul. Not even a U-Haul, just a gray, no-name thing.

But it was driven by the dark-haired man who used to drive the Lord Baltimore Diaper Service truck. Frances Delaney came out with a box of things, caught Judith watching, gave her a cheery wave.

“I’m moving to San Francisco,” she said. “Isn’t it exciting?”

“Is that where you’re from?”

“I’m not really from anywhere.”

“Army brat, right?”

“Something like that.”

A week after that, the men in black suits came to Newfield Road. They walked up and down, up and down, knocking on doors. They said they were insurance investigators. They asked questions about the Delaneys. Nice people? Friendly people? Did Jack Delaney talk much about his work? Where had Frances Delaney said she was going? These conversations were reported along the back fences and the sidewalks of Newfield Road. More gossip, Patrick sighed, when Frances tried to talk to him at night, when he just wanted to watch Kojak. Katie O’Connell, who shared a wall with the Delaneys, had the most to share and tell.

Until the day the men in the black suits knocked on Judith’s door.

“Did Mr. Delaney talk about his work much?”

“Just that he worked for Social Security.”

“Doing what?” There were two men, one named Simon, the other Arthur.

“Oh, goodness, what does anyone do at Social Security? Make sure all the checks go out, I suppose.”

“But did he ever say what he did?” pressed Simon. Or Arthur.

“No. I remember his wife said he liked it better in the Army. That the rules were clearer.”

“He said he was in the Army.”

“Yes, in Germany, I think. Although he also said he spent time in London. I guess things are awfully close over there.”

“And the wife, Frances—she cooked with plants a lot?”

“I wouldn’t say a lot,” Judith said. “There were nasturtiums in the salad, the one time we ate over there. She was a good cook. Still, I would have known she wasn’t from here, once I heard about the yew berries. No one who grew up in Baltimore would ever touch a yew berry.”

“Anything else?” The two men, Simon and Art, looked at her with so much hope that she felt obliged to try.

“She said she made her own lady fingers from scratch. But she didn’t.”

They left, clearly unimpressed by this intelligence, but Judith thought it meaningful. Why had Frances lied about the lady fingers? Later, when Judith relayed the story to her brother Donald, who liked to talk in the way that women did, she asked what insurance company they represented. She went to look for the card, only to realize she didn’t have one. But she had seen one, surely. Something State? State something? Something State Something?

“Jesus, Judith, don’t you even know who you let into your house?”

“Don’t be so paranoid,” she told her brother.

“Everyone’s paranoid,” Donald said. “It’s in style, like sideburns.”

A few days later, her brother dropped by, looking serious. “That neighbor of yours. What did you say his name was?”

“Jack Delaney.”

“And he worked at Social Security? That’s what he told you? Do you know what he did there?”

Hadn’t Simon and Arthur asked the same thing? Judith gave the same answer. “What does anyone do there?”

Donald’s question turned out to be rhetorical. “He was developing computer programs, Judith. Computer programs that don’t have anything to do with senior citizens getting their checks every month. Yeah, he went to Woodlawn every day, parked his car in the lot. He worked at Social Security, but not for them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Judith, have you ever heard of a guy named Oleg Lyalin?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “KGB. Defected two years ago in England, in part because he fell in love with his secretary. The Russians don’t like that, in-house adultery. They think it makes you vulnerable. So he defected, got to be with the love of his life, in return for whatever information he had.”

“I guess it sounds familiar.” Judith used to be so up on things. What had happened to her? A summer of The Newlywed Game, walks on Newfield Road, ice cream cones from High’s Dairy store, Frances Delaney’s brief and baffling friendship.

“You don’t get it, do you, Judith?”

“Get what?”

“The Delaneys—I have an old friend working for Mac Mathias. This guy, your neighbor. He’s a computer whiz. He was married to someone else. He wanted to be with his secretary. Someone made it happen. Not officially, not like Lyalin. But Jack Delaney—or Boris Badunov, or whatever his real name was, and maybe he worked for the East Germans, not the Russians—this guy, he came in from the cold on the condition that his girlfriend could come, too.”

“The house belonged to his mother. Frances told me that.”

“Yeah, she told you that. Did she tell you where they met?”

It’s a long boring story. “No.”

“Did you tell you where she was from?”

All over. Asia. Europe. An Army brat? Something like that. “No.”

“They brought her over, thinking they were going to make him happy. Wanting their computer whiz to be happy. But I guess the KGB, having lost one agent to his secret love, had a better plan. She killed him. Killed him and took off.”

“Took off with the Lord Baltimore diaper truck driver.”

Donald laughed. “Where did you hear that? He was her handler. CIA. And he was found dead in St. Louis three weeks ago.”

“He used to be parked in her driveway. For long stretches. I thought—”

“That’s probably what they wanted all you gossipy housewives to think, Judith.”

They were sitting at the little built-in breakfast nook in Judith’s kitchen, drinking coffee from the Chemex she had bought a few weeks ago. It really did make better coffee. She looked at the clouds forming in her half-empty cup, glanced up at the kitchen clock. Almost 4 p.m., time to fix Patrick’s dinner. Then it would be time to clean up. Two hours of television after dinner. Tonight was a Wednesday, which meant Adam-12 and the NBC Mystery Movie. She hoped it was the Snoop Sisters tonight and not Banacek, although George Peppard was very cute.

“Donald, how is what you do—talking to people, finding out stuff, then telling other people—how is that different from what housewives do? Isn’t it all just gossip?”

“You have a point there, Judith. I guess it’s a thin line between gossip and espionage.”

“Do you think your boss could help me get a job, the way he did with Patrick? Given that he knows Mathias?”

“You want a job with the feds, not the city or the state? I suppose I could swing that. What are your qualifications? What type of job are you looking for?”

“I type eighty words per minute. And I see things. I want to work at the CIA.”

“You didn’t see two spies under your own nose.”

“I will,” she said. “You see what you look for. Once I start looking for spies. I’ll see them.”

She did not tell him everything else she had seen that summer, things that no one thought mattered. She saw Katie O’Connell, worn down by a baby-a-year and a husband who was never going to advance in his career. She saw Betty Donovan, smoking and weeping on her back steps. She saw the Horton boys, who had stopped trying to burn up things and moved on to suffocating cats in milk crates, cats that Judith freed. She saw ceramic cats nailed to walls, iridescent globes on pedestals, whitewashed lawn jockeys. She saw a laundry truck parked for hours behind the Delaneys’ house. Donald was wrong. Judith wasn’t just seeing what someone wanted her to see. The Lord Baltimore driver may have started out as Frances Delaney’s handler, but Frances Delaney had learned how to handle him before long. He probably knew about the yew berries, thought they would end up together.

“You know I’ll ace the civil service exam,” Judith said. “And with two salaries, we can move up and out of here.”

“Not sure you need to take a test,” her brother said. “Anyway, I’ll see what I can do.”

The CIA meant a two-hour commute to Langley, so Judith settled for NSA, just down the parkway in Fort Meade. She accepted a clerical position, but even that demanded absolute nondisclosure on her part. When her neighbors, soon to be her old neighbors, asked what she did, Judith smiled and said: “I can’t tell you. But I can assure you that we are not involved in domestic spying. NSA is forbidden by law to spy on our own citizens. So domestic spying is just my hobby.”

Then she winked, as if it were all a big joke. The women of Newfield Road—talking over back fences, drinking Tab during the soap operas, running into each other at High’s Dairy store, tying their children to the clothes line, holding frozen vegetables to their bruised eyes, pretending not to see the little boys who tortured living things—the women of Newfield Road said to each other: “Did you hear? Judith Monaghan claims she’s a spy. A spy in Edmondson Heights. Did you ever hear of anything so ridiculous?”

He felt them rubbing the cold grease onto his temples. He kept his eyes shut against what he knew was coming. They were doing it again; no one could stop them, the shock of volts would slam through his head like a railroad car—and then, oblivion. They’d got him good now, hadn’t they? Sucker punched, and down for the count. How had this happened? It was his own fault. He should have been warned, all the signs were there, he should have seen it coming: Mea maxima, maxima culpa. But whenever he said “they” were after him, they were following him, they were spying on him, it was dismissed as paranoia. Well, paranoia or none, he knew what they were after: they were after his memory. He knew what men could do, what their actions could lead to. And now they wanted to erase his memory, kill it. They could kill him too. They would kill him. They were killing him. His job, his only job now—before the next deadly lightning bolt hit—was to hold on to what he knew. Hold on to truth. He forced himself to go down into those dangerous, dark pools of his past, descending deeper and deeper and darker, moving down until all the muted light surrounding him was slowly swallowed into darkness, despairing, despairing… then suddenly he thought he glimpsed it—just a quick flash!—like that trout lurking against the pebbled bottom of a riverbed.

And then he knew what he must communicate; he just prayed it was not too late.

My name is Paloma Perez. I am twenty-three years old, I’m so-called “mestizo” (part Anglo/Spanish, part Native American), of the Catholic faith, born in New Mexico of parents who separated shortly after my birth. I am a graduate student in History of Journalism. I am currently on an exchange grant between New Mexico State and University of Idaho. The latter place has an archive containing many very important papers of the famous writer who is the subject of my dissertation. I’ve been working on this project for almost two years. Though all my professors except one think it’s a humongous waste of time to cross that tundra again.

I’m sitting in the living room of my cabin along the Big Wood River, hundreds of miles south of the campus at Moscow, Idaho. The Big Wood is a fast river that runs from the Galena summit, 9,000 feet up in the Sawtooth Mountains, down to the reservoir below my cabin, where it joins other rivers. It is a great trout-fishing stream. I decided to live in this cabin, on this river, because it is just across the river from the place where, fifty years ago, my subject took his own life.

I mention these facts about myself and my project, because two months ago I took leave from the university and moved here so I could get closer to resolving an enigma about this man that I still cannot quite understand. One way to understand it, I thought, was to try to bond with him in some way. To understand the role that his later journalism played, I believed I needed to figure out what he was thinking just before he died. But now I’m not so sure.

Because tonight, as I was sitting here with a cold plate of uneaten macaroni on the coffee table before me and my notes scattered around me on sofas and chairs, something unexpected happened: I was browsing my subject on my laptop and I somehow got pulled into the back door of a website, where I read something that frightened me. On a black screen background, these words came up: “SECURITY, CONFIDENTIAL: Apply through the Freedom of Information Act through proper channels.”

It was a scam, I thought—so I shut down for the moment.

But that was when I got my first inkling, a premonition that something in my factual research didn’t fit, that something was very wrong. And that little idea, that small piece of doubt, began to rub at me like a burr under my saddle; it was making me more than uncomfortable, more than wary. I felt like I just had to dig it out.

Still, I always take all the security precautions that Leo taught me: I’ve switched my computer onto “private browsing,” so no one can follow my path, trying to track my train of thought; I’ve glued a sticky star onto my laptop’s camera aperture so no one can see me at work; I’ve stripped off the cookies that were left there as tracers by others; I’ve checked the antivirus data… though I cannot shake the certain conviction that I’m being watched. Maybe I’m getting as paranoid as he was. I don’t really care.

I flipped open my laptop and started to write down the facts of what I actually knew. That was four hours ago. And I’m still writing. And it still irritates me, and it still doesn’t fit.

It’s midnight now, I can hear the crickets chirping along the river, a twig snaps outside and I flinch; I go to the window; my motion-detector light is on, flooding the band of guilty culprits that are nightly huddled there at the edge of my gravel drive. A small cluster of white-tailed deer: undeterred by the glaring light, they are peacefully munching my landlord’s blueberry bushes.

I take my cold macaroni plate to the kitchen and I make a pot of black coffee—just the way my subject once famously described doing it, where you boil the grounds and water together right in the pot. (Leo says I’m sick to try to bond with my subject this way, but I hope that maybe tonight, drinking this sludgy muck will clear my brain.)

I get back to the sofa and shuffle my papers into a stack—stuff that I’d earlier culled from the web and half-covered with my own scribbled notes—and I leaf through these as I look on my screen at what I’ve just written tonight:

His name, of course, was Ernest Hemingway.

Even though thousands of books and essays and dissertations have been written on Hemingway’s life and literature they mostly stress the influence that his early journalism training had on him, and how it in turn created his breathtaking impact on American fiction. These are the “facts” that everyone knows. My thesis is very different:

Though Hemingway claimed to despise journalism, he never stopped being a journalist. He wrote hundreds of thousands of words on current events for magazines that paid him very well, scribbling his observations on every conceivable topic from barbershops to boxing, from bullfights to bullshit, from picadors to pecadillos—while decade after decade, he produced less and less fiction, and even then, only under “literary duress.” In the end, if you weighed his fiction against nonfiction, on word count alone, fiction was less than that one-eighth of his total output: the “tip of the iceberg” syndrome.

There was one place that my subject—over a period of thirty years, almost half his life span—had visited, frequented, and finally lived in. Yet he never wrote much about it until late in his life. And even then, it wasn’t reportage, it was just a sketch, a short story, a simple vignette that he crashed out in a matter of weeks, and which he somehow with effort managed to stretch into a brief novel.

It sold five million copies in magazine form, and another million in books. It was made into a movie, it landed him a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize. It’s still found in libraries all over the world and taught in schools. It made him rich. Maybe it also made him dangerous. It was—oddly, for a man who hated symbolism—the only allegory he ever wrote: The Old Man and the Sea.

If that simple allegory was the tip of the iceberg, then what exactly was the vast, deep mass of “subaquatic facts” lurking beneath the surface?

It was the place where he’d set the allegory, the place that was almost a character in the story—the place where Hemingway lived from World War II to the very height of the Cold War—the place he loved so much that he refused to leave it, even when he knew he had to, even when his property was about to be seized by the local State, even when he had been warned repeatedly to leave by the U.S. State Department, even when he was being haunted by the FBI, had been threatened by the CIA.

Cuba.

Less than a year after his return to the U.S.—to his house here across this very river, near Ketchum, Idaho—the world’s most famous living writer, Ernest Hemingway, was dead.

That was precisely the burr I’d been struggling to dislodge all night. But now I thought I knew: all the signs had been there all along, hadn’t they? All the numbers now added up. I knew that if I’d figured it out, then whoever was watching me (and I was sure by now that it was not just my imagination) was not likely to hit the “pause” button any time soon. And it really terrified me.

I checked the clock: it was four o’clock in the morning. Yanking some tiny digital memory cards out of a plastic bag I always carried in my jeans pocket, I frantically jammed these, one after another, into my laptop and started downloading my data with links. I left a little jingle as my own calling-card on each. If I couldn’t reach Leo, maybe he could reach me. I would hide these each in ways that he’d be sure to find them. Then I would hit the road just before dawn, and cover my tracks—as he’d taught me, so long ago, to do.

For I’d suddenly guessed why Ernest Hemingway took so long to leave Cuba—even after the revolution was over, after the Castro takeover—why he’d never written about it, why he’d felt he had to encrypt what he knew in an allegory, why right afterward, he’d been in two plane crashes in a row that looked like accidents, why he was so depressed by the huge success of his book—the awards, the money, the spotlight of fame—that he couldn’t go to the Nobel ceremony, could barely bring himself to write his brief acceptance speech.

Less than six months after Hemingway moved back to America, he was secretly flown out of Idaho and slapped, by surprise, into the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where he was submitted to electroconvulsive shock therapy: month after excruciating month, over and over, they’d fried his brains. Whatever it was that Hemingway discovered at the height of the Cold War, was something deadly dangerous that had to be erased from his mind—a process that quickly and surely drove him to suicide. The cold, frightening thought even entered my own mind, that he may have been murdered.

This was why I had to reach Leo at once: whatever it was I’d stumbled onto involving Cuba—whatever I was being watched for, paranoia or not—was something that seemed about to raise its ugly head again. Right now.

When Paloma vanished, I was the one who was in trouble with everybody.

Our parents were livid—the only thing they’d agreed on in years was that it was my fault Palo was missing. After all, I’d encouraged her in this crazy idea about Investigative Journalism. Didn’t I know that those kinds of journalists got themselves killed? (Actually, though our dad taught History of Journalism, it involved nothing more recent nor dangerous than Carlyle’s reports on the French Revolution. While mom couldn’t figure out how her gorgeous daughter, at age twenty-three, was still in school and unmarried.)

Not to mention that The Company, my employer, was equally miffed with me. My sister had apparently stumbled in the back door of an “eyes-only” website, sending up incipient-terrorist flags. They thought I’d given her the link (I hadn’t) and they put me on temporary leave, saying I was mucking about in the wrong backyard: Who do you think you are, Leo?—you’re an analyst, not a field operative. (Well actually, I am a field operative—been one for ages—my employer just doesn’t know it!) This break in my routine, however, afforded me the opportunity to do some investigations of my own.

In this entire scenario, my beautiful and brilliant sister, Paloma, seemed to be the only one with a grain of sense in her head. At least, she had the sense to get out of town before the yapping dogs got on her trail. (Well actually, they don’t use yapping dogs in the Rocky Mountains, that’s the Deep South, I believe.)

And she had the presence of mind, just before decamping, to send me that frozen trout: the one with the teeny digital card embedded inside its head. As soon as I got it, I knew she was gone, and why. Despite her fears she’d expressed on that disk, I felt sure my sister was okay. I did not yet know what had spooked her so much that she’d taken the drastic measure of using a dead cutthroat trout as bubble wrap for her communiqué. But since I was now on leave, I didn’t feel it necessary to share that communiqué, at least not yet, with my employer.

I waited with bated (or was it baited?) breath to learn more.

Meanwhile, I dropped by New Mexico State University in Santa Fe to pay a visit to Professor Livia Madachy—“PM” as Palo called her—Palo’s advisor, the one who’d first encouraged her to branch out and study something other than (what everyone else had voted for, due to Palo’s good looks) being a weather girl or a TV anchor.

PM was a middle-aged Anglo lady with tanned skin and leathery wrinkles that outdid even Georgia O’Keeffe’s. Soon, I gathered that Professor Madachy had also received a frozen trout. But hers just had a note that said thanks for supporting an unusual thesis: seems everyone other than PM was down on Hemingway as a topic altogether, and not just here at the university.

According to PM, the Hemingway bashing was nearly universal throughout all of Academia, e.g.: the feminists said he was a machismo misogynist for having four wives he cheated on with each successor, and mistresses on the side; the gay professors called him a sexually insecure homophobe with a penis-gun fetish; the sociologists said he used the “N” word for black persons, and looked down on folks of Indian roots, like Palo and me. In psychology classes they said he suffered from depression exacerbated by alcohol and a long history of familial suicide; even in Palo’s journalism courses they played podcasts from a noted “literary” writer, harping on how boring Hemingway was, and how he’d destroyed American literature. While in literature departments, Hemingway was apparently total anathema. And why not?—after all, the guy got to be a Nobel laureate, while packing nothing by way of credentials but a midwestern public high school diploma.

I could certainly see how Palo had a problem finding a thesis advisor who had accepted her general concept. Now I just had the problem of finding Paloma herself.

Maybe a wolf always returns to its known haunts, but my sister had only one haunt that I ever knew of. And that was the late, great Ernest Hemingway. He seemed the one and only key to my next move.

It was decades ago, a bright Saturday morning in August of 1978 when my then teenaged granddaughter, Alyse, dropped the bomb that would forever change our lives.

“Nana,” she said, absently dunking the marshmallows that topped her freshly made cup of hot chocolate, “what would happen if Daddy turned out to be a spy, you know, the bad kind?”

Lloyd, my husband, was sitting in the kitchen with us, but he was mostly oblivious to the ongoing conversation between Alyse and me. Once he disappeared behind the pages of his copy of the New York Times, the world could have come to an end around him without his paying the slightest bit of attention. This time, however, Alyse’s offhand comment managed to penetrate his concentration on the day’s news. He had just taken a sip of coffee. He choked on it and had to get through a coughing fit before he could respond.

“Your father a spy?” he asked. “How utterly absurd! I can’t imagine how you came up with such a preposterous idea!” Then, dismissing the whole idea, he folded his newspaper, slapped it into the basket on his walker, and then stalked off into the living room, in search of peace and quiet.

I remember standing by the kitchen sink for a long moment, staring down into the depths of the cup of coffee I had just poured for myself. There were any number of issues at work in the kitchen that morning, not the least of which was the fact that Lloyd had answered a question that had been addressed to me. But after being married to Lloyd Anthony Creswell for more than forty years, I had learned to pick my battles. The real problem in the room that morning was that my husband had been entirely confident in dismissing Alyse’s stated concerns. Unfortunately, although Lloyd could allow himself the luxury of regarding her accusations as preposterous, I could not.

Yes, Alyse’s father, Gunnar Lloyd Creswell, was my son, my only son. And yes, as his mother, I should have been shoulder to shoulder with my husband in leaping to our son’s defense. And yet I couldn’t be, because something in Alyse’s innocently asked question spoke to me and touched a nerve I didn’t even know was there. My first instinct was to look that question in the face and say the whole idea was out of the question. The ugly truth of the matter is, not only did I not like my son, I didn’t think he was that bright either.

My husband’s people came from England, not on the Mayflower, but shortly enough afterward. Lloyd always told me that his family referred to those early female immigrants as GARs—Grandmothers of the Revolution—whose female descendants were fully entitled to membership in the DAR.

My forebears came from Denmark nearly two centuries later. My name, Isadora, comes from my great grandmother; Gunnar bears my father’s name. Lloyd’s family has always believed in the English tradition of “keeping a stiff upper lip.” Mine came with a full dose of Scandinavian-bred stoicism. Between us, neither one of us believed in being overly emotional.

So it was in keeping with family tradition that I picked up my cup and saucer from the counter and returned to the kitchen table without spilling so much as a drop of coffee along the way. Another child might have had her feelings hurt by Lloyd’s curt dismissal, but Alyse has spent enough time with us the last few years, especially during the summers, that she’s learned to shrug off her grandfather’s occasional grumpiness the same way I do.

I sat down next to her. “Calling your father a traitor is a rather serious allegation,” I said quietly. “What would cause you to come to that kind of conclusion?”

“I saw him,” she said quietly. “I saw him in the park with a woman when he was supposed to be at work. She was very beautiful, and she must have been rich. She was wearing a fur coat.”

Lloyd Creswell is true blue and always has been. When we got married in 1936, he swore to love, honor, and cherish, and I have no doubt—not a single one—that he kept those vows. Even when he was overseas during World War II or afterward, when he found his calling in the world of banking and we came back to Altoona to live, I’m sure he never strayed. Not once. I wish I could say the same for me. Or for Lloyd’s son, for that matter. Maybe that’s part of why Gunnar bugs me so much. Looking at him is too much like seeing myself in the mirror.

But the idea of Gunn having a woman on the side? That made perfect sense to me, because he always had a woman on the side. That was certainly true when he was married to his first wife, Alice—Alyse’s mother, and I saw no reason why it wouldn’t be true now with his second wife, the eminently regrettable Isabelle.

Alyse takes after her mother—in looks, brains, and temperament. Alice was a lovely girl. Why is it that nice girls always feel obliged to tie themselves to bad boys? Is it some ingrained need to fix the scalawag and make him into something better? Good luck with that. All I know is that Alice Goodwin was a beautiful bride. As she walked down the aisle on her father’s arm, she was nothing short of radiant, smiling at Gunn who was grinning back at her from his place next to the altar. And what was I thinking when I saw that shit-eating grin? Was I happy for him and for her? No, there was a part of me that was thinking, What a lovely girl. Please don’t break her heart, Gunn. Please.

Which he did, of course, in short order. Alice came to me in tears only a month or so after Alyse was born. Someone at work had sent her an anonymous note saying that Gunn been carrying on a passionate affair with someone at the office most of the time she was pregnant. What did I think she should do?

My advice would have been to throw the bum out, but Alice wasn’t one to make hasty decisions. She would want to have all the facts at hand, but the real problem was this: Alice didn’t want a divorce. She wanted her husband back. She wanted Gunn to grow up, shape up, and be a decent husband, father, and human being. That left it up to me to do the only thing that seemed reasonable to do at the time. I ran up the flag to Lloyd. I told him what Alice had told me and turned him loose to have a fatherly chat with his son. According to Lloyd, he gave Gunn a stern talking to—not that it did a bit of good.

Two months later, in the middle of an ice storm in upstate New York, a semi jackknifed in front of the vehicle Alice was driving and slammed into the driver’s side of her car, killing her instantly. Alyse, swathed in a cocoon of blankets and lying in the back seat, was left unscathed. Within months, Isabelle—the girlfriend from work, a gorgeous babe who had once been Miss Indiana, was the new Mrs. Gunnar Creswell and Alyse’s stepmother besides. I believe it’s safe to say that I hated the woman on sight, and I’m pretty sure the feeling was mutual.

I didn’t tell Alyse any of this. It wasn’t my place, but the idea of her father Tom-catting it around with someone from work made more sense to me than anything else. But my first thought was that if he was, it would serve Isabelle right.

“When was this?” I asked casually.

“Last winter,” Alyse said. “I was with one of my girlfriends. We were taking a short cut through Book Hill Park when we saw them. Since I wasn’t supposed to be there, I made sure Dad didn’t see me, but I got a good look at her. She was very beautiful.”

“Your friends saw them, too?”

“I was with Crystal. I ducked back out of sight behind a tree. She’s the one who saw the briefcases.”

“What briefcases?”

“They had matching briefcases, brown ones. Dad always carries one like it back and forth to work. Crystal said that when the woman got up to leave, she took Dad’s suitcase instead of the one she brought. You know, an old switcheroo like they do in the movies.”

“That’s not much to go on, now is it,” I said kindly. “It might have just been a mistake.”

“I guess,” Alyse said. She bit her lip and shrugged. “I was just thinking if he got in trouble or something, maybe I could come live with you and Grandpa all the time instead of just for a few weeks during the summer.”

Alyse said the words with such heartfelt earnestness and innocence that it broke my heart. Long before Alyse’s little brother, Jimmy, was born, Isabelle treated her like so much excess baggage. As soon as Isabelle appeared on the scene, baby Alyse was shuffled off into the care of a series of mostly non-English-speaking nannies. Later on, she was packed off to various daycare facilities for long hours every day even though Isabelle had by then given up all pretense of holding a paying job.

Over the years it was clear that as far as Isabelle was concerned, Alyse was tolerated rather than loved. Once Isabelle and Gunnar’s child came along, it got worse. Jimmy is an obnoxious kid, your basic spoiled brat, and Alyse is expected to spend her weekends, afternoons, and evenings serving as an unpaid babysitter for the little demon while her mother goes off to do whatever it is she does with all that spare time.

Because Lloyd and I were fairly well to do, Isabelle assumed that meant Gunnar was, too. Supposedly, Isabelle comes from an impoverished background, but once she and Gunn tied the knot, she started making up for lost time. She wanted to live in the best neighborhoods, drive the best cars, wear the best clothes. And if Gunn’s paycheck didn’t pay the freight, she figured they could come to us with their hands out to get whatever was needed to make up the difference. Isabelle was willing to be chummy with us as long as the money kept flowing. When Lloyd finally put his foot down a few years ago and turned off the money spigot, Isabelle stopped making any effort to be pals, and so did I. We’ve tried to stay in touch with the grandkids. That’s been easy to do with Alyse but not so easy with Jimmy.

I finished my coffee. “Let’s not give this another moment’s thought,” I said. “I told you we were going to go shopping for school clothes for you today, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

We were parked outside the Logan Valley Mall by the time the first stores opened at 10 a.m. I stayed on the sidelines while Alyse tried on clothing. Just because we were no longer talking about her father’s outside interest didn’t mean I was no longer thinking about it.

It was the fur coat that Alyse had mentioned, the one the woman in the park had been wearing, that piqued my interest and ate away at me. For one thing, I knew far better than Alyse that Gunn and Isabelle were still deeply mired in money troubles, enough so that only a few months earlier, Gunn had once again come crawling to Lloyd, begging for a loan to keep from losing the house. Lloyd claims to be a tough guy, but he knuckled under one more time—more out of concern for keeping a roof over the grandkids’ heads than to help Gunn or his money-grubbing wife.

And now there might be a new woman in Gunn’s life, one presumably that Isabelle knew nothing about. If that wasn’t just deserts, I didn’t know what was. And since the woman was wearing a fur coat, that made me wonder if it was possible that my two-timing son had found himself the female equivalent of a sugar daddy.

At the time I set out to find out who that woman was and what she was about, I told myself I was doing it for Alyse’s sake. If some kind of marital scandal was about to tear that poor child’s world apart, I wanted to know about it before it happened rather than after the fact. But the truth is, it was for Alyse’s mother’s sake, too. There was nothing that would make me happier than being able to rub Isabelle’s nose in the same kind of mess she had made for her predecessor.

That was why, the following week, when I drove her back to D.C. in time for school to start, I made an unscheduled stop in my present that took me back to my own, less-than-exemplary past.

Even now I won’t put the man’s real name to paper because it is one too many people would recognize. Yes, it’s more than thirty years in the past, and the brief affair I had with him—a man I’ll call Alf—happened twenty years before that, while Lloyd was off fighting for God and country. At the time, I was a young, attractive woman with a husband who was far away, a young child to care for on my own, and an aching need to have some fun in my life. Back then Alf, an aide to a longtime senator, had a wife back home in Dixie and more money than sense. From my point of view, he was perfect. That had been true in the forties, and he was still perfect for what I needed now—now that Alf was a senator in his own right with the same wife who was a mover and shaker in the city’s inner social circles. I had watched the couple’s rise to power from the sidelines without ever thinking I might want to contact Alf again, but now I did.

I played the “old family friend” card when I gave my name to the receptionist out front, and it worked. Within minutes I was ushered past a roomful of waiting lobbyists into Alf’s private office. He came around to greet me, hand outstretched, as though I were some kind of visiting constituent from back home. He leaned over and kissed me hello, but I could see he was worried about what I was doing there.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked, leading me over to a pair of comfortable leather armchairs.

“I’m here about my son,” I said.

Alf frowned. “Forgive me,” he said. “I remember he was a cute little kid, but what was his name again?”

“Gunn,” I answered. “Short for Gunnar. He’s a military analyst who works for the Pentagon.”

A shadow seemed to fall across Alf’s face. “You need to know that I have very little influence over what goes on inside those walls,” he said. “Promotions, pay-raises, that kind of thing are totally outside my realm of influence these days.”

“What if Gunn were a spy?” I asked. I didn’t really believe that at the time. The words were only a means to an end—bait meant to get Alf to bite and do what I wanted him to do.

Alf’s jaw dropped. “You’re saying you suspect your own son of being a traitor to his country?”

“It’s a possibility,” I said with a dismissive shrug. “Gunn and his second wife, Isabelle, have lived beyond their means for years. I also have reason to believe that he’s become involved with some other woman. There are children involved, of course, and I was hoping you might be able to put him under some kind of surveillance to let me know exactly what kind of scandal our family is about to be up against.”

“You want me to investigate your son?”

“Yes, if it’s just another case of skirt-chasing, so be it.”

“And if it turns out to be something worse?”

Gunn was a womanizer and had always been a womanizer. It didn’t seem possible that it might be something worse. Besides, in this battle, Isabelle was my main target. Whatever happened to Gunn as a result would be collateral damage, but it wouldn’t be undeserved.

“Then he gets what’s coming to him,” I said. “My husband didn’t put on a uniform and go to war so his son could grow up to be a traitor to his country.”

“What about Lloyd?” Alf asked. “Does he know anything about this?”

I was surprised that Alf remembered my husband’s name, but I don’t suppose I should have been. After all, Alf is the consummate politician. For politicians, knowing people’s names means money.

“No,” I said. “There’s no reason for him to, or for anyone else to know about it, either.”

I was thinking of Alf’s very pretty wife, whose surgically maintained good looks kept thirty years or so off her face. Alf must have been operating on the same wavelength. Up to that moment, he must have been worried that I had turned up at this late date intent on making trouble for him over our long-ago indiscretion. My last words caused a visible look of relief washed across his face.

“So we understand one another?” he asked.

“Completely,” I said, gathering my things and standing up. “It’s good to see you again, Alf, but I don’t expect we’ll stay in touch. Once I know who the woman is, we’re done.”

Was it blackmail? More or less. I made my way back to where I’d parked the car, thinking about how Alf was one of the most powerful men in the country and how I was now the power behind the throne. It was oddly exhilarating. On the long drive back to Altoona, I wondered how long it would take for me to hear from Alf again. I never did.

In fact, I hardly gave the matter another thought. For one thing, two weeks later, Lloyd landed in the hospital for triple bypass surgery. The surgery was followed by postsurgical complications that kept him in intensive care for the better part of three weeks and hospitalized for another two weeks after. He was released to a rehab facility for a month after that before he finally came home.

In all that time, Gunn drove up exactly twice to visit. Alyse came along. Thankfully, Isabelle and Jimmy stayed home. The first time he came, Lloyd was still so out of it, I doubt he knew they were there at all. The second time, he was in rehab. After Gunn left, Lloyd wanted to know if he’d asked for money.

“Nope,” I said. “And I wouldn’t have given it to him if he had.”

Lloyd gave me a wan smile. “That’s my girl,” he said, then he added, “So they must be doing better.”

While Lloyd was in the hospital and rehab, it took all my energy to keep the house running, the bills paid, and get back and forth to visit him each day. I thought my life would get easier once he was home, but it didn’t. After someone has been a patient for that long, after he’s been used to having nurses at his beck and call at all hours of the day and night, it was a big shock to both our systems to have him come home with only me to take care of him. Neighbors pitched in and so did people from church. That was the time I could have used Gunn to show up and help out—to rake leaves and put up storm windows or even answer the damned telephone, but true to form, he didn’t, and I was too busy to worry about what my useless son was or wasn’t doing.

What I remember most about that winter was the snow. It came in early November and it never went away. If it hadn’t been for the guy next door who used a snowblower to keep my driveway clean, I have no idea how we would have made it out to doctors’ appointments or to buy groceries.

By the time we were approaching the end of March, I was more than tired of snow and tired of being locked up in the house with an often disagreeable and impatient patient. With another snowstorm predicted, I had made a quick trip out for groceries. I was in the kitchen putting them away, while Lloyd snoozed in front of Walter Cronkite and the CBS Evening News. When the phone rang, I answered it in the kitchen.

“Grandma,” Alyse said breathlessly. “It’s true.”

“What’s true?”

“Dad’s a spy. The FBI was just here. They arrested him, put him in handcuffs, and took him away.”

I didn’t have to pretend to be surprised. I was surprised. I had a hard time catching my breath. I staggered over to the table and dropped heavily onto one of the kitchen chairs.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “Is it possible there’s some mistake?”

“There’s no mistake,” Alyse said quietly. In the background, I could hear Jimmy wailing as though his heart was broken.

“Where’s Isabelle?” I asked.

Between us Alyse and I never referred to Isabelle as Alyse’s mother because she wasn’t.

“She went out,” Alyse replied. “She said she was going to talk to a lawyer.”

“Have her call me when she gets back,” I said. “I need to go talk to your grandfather.”

As I walked into the living room, I realized what I had done. I had been aiming for Isabelle, but the person I had hit—the one who deserved it least—was my husband, Lloyd. I walked over to the TV set and switched it off.

“Wait,” Lloyd said. “It’s just a commercial. The news isn’t over yet.”

“It’s over for now,” I said, and then I told him.

Lloyd heard me out, listening stone-faced as I repeated what Alyse had told me. When I finished, he wanted details I didn’t have.

“Spying for whom?” Lloyd demanded, his face contorted with grief. “And what kind of information could Gunn possibly have that would be of use to anyone?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I have no idea. But try not to get so upset, Lloyd. It’s bad for your heart.”

“Not knowing is bad for my heart. I want to talk to Isabelle, and I want to talk to her now. Where the hell is she?”

“According to Alyse she went out to talk to an attorney.”

Lloyd leaned back in his chair. I could see he was making an effort to get himself under control, and while he fought with his emotions—looking for his stiff upper lip—I battled my own, because I knew without a doubt—without a single doubt—that I was the one who had put this train in motion.

For the next half hour, we sat there in silent misery, waiting for the phone to ring. “If it’s Isabelle,” Lloyd said when it rang, “put her on speaker.”

It was, and I did.

“It’s Gunn,” she said breathlessly. “He’s been arrested by the FBI. I don’t know what it’s about. We have a friend who’s an attorney—a criminal defense attorney. I didn’t know what to do, so I went to see him. He says he’ll take the case, but he needs a $50,000 retainer.”

“No,” Lloyd said.

“What do you mean, ‘No’?” Isabelle wailed. “This is your son. Are you saying you won’t help him?”

“I’ve helped him before,” Lloyd said, “but not this time. This time he’s on his own, and so are you.”

“Hang up the phone, Isa,” Lloyd said, shortening Isadora to the pet name he hadn’t used in a very long time. “You’ve already talked to Alyse?”

I nodded.

“Then take it off the hook. If anyone else calls tonight, we don’t want to hear from them.”

I didn’t sleep that night. Neither did Lloyd. Maybe women are more realistic than men. I had understood my son’s shortcomings all his life. Lloyd had not, and now the idea that his son had betrayed his country had broken my husband’s heart. By the next morning the story was headline news on the local television stations and on the national networks as well. When Lloyd went into the bathroom to shower, I tried calling Alyse. Naturally, Isabelle was the one who answered.

“What kind of parents are you?” she screamed at me. “You’re just going to let your son rot in jail? You’re not going to lift a hand to help him?”

Lloyd came out of the bathroom. “Who is it?” he asked.

“Isabelle.”

“Let me talk to her.”

I handed him the phone. He listened to her in silence for the better part of a minute. I could hear her voice screeching into the earpiece, but I couldn’t make out any of the words. When he was finally able to get a word in edgewise, he said in a tone I had never heard from him before, “I’m very sorry to hear that.”

Then he ended the call and handed the phone back to me.

“What did she say?”

“If we don’t help, she’ll see to it that we never see our grandchildren again. That she’ll take them back home to her folks’ place in Indiana.”

I was aghast. I didn’t care that much about Jimmy one way or the other because I didn’t know him that well. But Alyse?

“Can she do that?”

“Of course she can,” Lloyd replied. “She’s the mother.”

By the middle of the day, friends and neighbors were showing up with covered dishes, almost like it was a funeral. I’m not sure why they do that when no one can stand the thought of eating, but they do and they did, and I tried my best to be grateful. Lloyd had been one of the premier bankers in town. Gunnar had been one of the best-known graduates from the high school, one people had pointed to with a certain pride of ownership. People didn’t talk about that very much as they sat quietly in our living room, commiserating with us. They talked about the weather. They talked about our health.

And then came Sunday morning and the worst call of all, and it wasn’t Isabelle who broke the news. It was Alyse. “He’s dead,” she sobbed into the phone. “Daddy’s dead.”

We were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking our coffee. I had put the phone on speaker so we heard the news together.

“How is that possible?” Lloyd asked.

“They found him in his cell,” Alyse answered brokenly. “They say he committed suicide.”

I heard Isabelle’s voice, shouting from somewhere in the background. “Are you talking to them? Damn it! I told you not to. Get off the phone right now!” The line went dead as she disconnected.

Lloyd put down the phone. “He was guilty,” he said quietly. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have taken his own life. And someone wanted to spare the country the ordeal of taking him to trial. That’s why they left him the means to do it.”

It was amazing for me to see that in the face of this disaster, Lloyd was the one who was dead calm while I was falling apart.

“I still have some friends in high places in D.C.,” he said. “Let me see what I can find out.”

I had friends in high places, too, but I wasn’t about to call on Alf. Not now. Not ever.

While Lloyd worked the phone, I emptied the refrigerator of casseroles, dumping out the food I knew we would never eat, and arranging the clean dishes, marked on the bottoms with their owners’ names, on the dining room table to await pickup.

It was hours later when Lloyd finally put down the phone. “It was the Russians,” he told me. “Gunn was working for the Russians. He evidently provided them with plans for a new top secret spread-spectrum military communications system. The woman he was working with has already been spirited out of the country. They’re trying to establish her identity.”

“That must have been the woman Alyse saw. Remember? She told us about seeing them together. In the park.”

Lloyd gave me a long look. “If Alyse is in a position to identify a Russian spy, then we have a major problem on our hands. Does anyone else know that?”

“I certainly never told anyone.”

“Neither did I,” Lloyd said. “But if security people from both sides of the Iron Curtain are looking into this matter, then Alyse could be in real danger, especially if she can identify someone the Russians don’t want identified.”

The next few days were a nightmare that had to be lived through. The sun came out and the snow turned to mud and muck. We sat glued to the TV set, hoping for snippets of news. No one called to let us know when Gunn’s services would be. No one invited us to attend, but we heard about it from a local news reporter. The funeral would be held at their Georgetown church on Wednesday afternoon.

“Are you going?” I asked Lloyd.

“No,” he said. “I won’t go where I’m not welcome.”

“I want to see Alyse,” I said. “I want to talk to her and Jimmy at least one more time before Isabelle spirits them off to God-knows-where in Indiana.”

Early Friday morning, I set off on my own, driving Lloyd’s lumbering Lincoln. As the heartbroken widow, Isabelle was the star of the show, and she was making the most of it. I sat near the back in the crowded church and spoke to no one. When the service was over, I went back to the house and let myself into the reception where I hoped to find a chance to speak to Alyse alone.

The house was crowded with people I didn’t know. We weren’t part of Gunn and Isabelle’s circle of friends, so there was no danger of my being recognized. At least I didn’t think so. I stayed in the background, and made sure that when Isabelle moved from one room to another, I stayed one room away.

Jimmy was up to his usual tricks. I saw him sneak a sip from someone’s abandoned glass of wine. Then when his mother approached, he knocked it over and blamed Alyse, who was halfway across the room when it happened.

“You stupid girl!” Isabelle yelled at her. “Didn’t I tell you to watch him? This is all your fault!”

I’m sure Isabelle meant that the spilled wine was all her fault, but I saw the look on Alyse’s face, and I knew how she was taking this—that her father’s death was all her fault. And of all the people in the room, I was the only one who knew for sure that was true.

When Alyse fled upstairs, I followed her and found her sobbing into the pillows piled on her bed. Standing there looking at her, listening to her, I knew exactly how her life was going to turn out with an impish half-brother and a stepmother who was prepared to blame her for every little thing. And in that moment, I made up my mind. It didn’t matter if I was going to be guilty of kidnapping or custodial interference or whatever, I was going to get her out of there, no matter what.

“Alyse,” I said gently, placing a hand on her shoulder. “Tell me something. Do you want to go to Indiana?”

She stopped sobbing. She didn’t look at me, but she shook her head.

“I know you know your father was a spy,” I said softly. “You told me so last summer.”

She nodded again, into the pillows, without raising her head.

“And you know who his partner was,” I added. “The woman in the park. You can identify her.”

“I guess,” Alyse mumbled.

“That means people are going to be looking for you. Bad people.”

“Russians you mean?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, “And maybe some of our people, too. I don’t know—the CIA maybe or the FBI. But if the good guys can find you, that means the bad ones can, too.”

“Will they hurt me? Am I in danger?”

“Grandpa thinks so,” I said. “And so do I.”

“So what should I do?”

“Write your mother a note,” I said. “Tell her you’re running away. Grandpa’s car is down the street. The doors are unlocked. It’s almost dark now. No one will see you if you slip out now and hide in the back of the car.”

“Isabelle will kill me if she finds out,” Alyse said sitting up. “And if I’m gone, who’ll look after Jimmy?”

“That’s his mother’s problem,” I told her. “It’s not yours.”

“But I’m just a kid, Grandma. Where will I live? How will I find food to eat? What will happen to me?”

“First we have to find a safe place for you to stay,” I told her. “As to how you’ll live? Let Grandpa and me worry about that. We’ll take care of you, Alyse. I promise. Will you do it?”

Alyse squared her shoulders. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I will.”

I went back downstairs. I was through the dining room and halfway through the living room on my way to the front door when a voice behind me inquired, “Mrs. Creswell?”

I froze, thinking Isabelle must have realized I was there and sent someone to eject me. When I turned around, however, a man in a suit was holding up an FBI badge for my scrutiny. “I’m Agent Holloway,” he said. “I believe you’re Gunnar’s mother, correct?”

It made sense that the FBI would be a presence there. If there were a conspiracy, they would be looking at all of Gunn’s connections to see who else might be involved. Still it spooked me that a complete stranger had successfully spotted me in a crowd when I had been making such an effort to remain invisible.

I nodded as cordially as I could manage. “I’m Isadora,” I said. “And yes, I’m Gunnar’s mother.”

“I’m very sorry for your loss.” Agent Holloway said mechanically. At the same time, however, I caught him surveying the room behind me. “Is Mr. Creswell here by any chance?”

“Our family has some estrangement issues,” I said, making a show of dabbing at my eyes. “Under the circumstances, Lloyd thought it best to stay away. I only came in hopes of seeing the children. In fact, I was just looking for Alyse. You haven’t happened to see her anywhere, have you?”

“No,” he said. “I haven’t.”

“I need to find her,” I said, “because I’m going to be heading home in a few minutes. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

I bustled off and spent the next little while making an obvious effort of searching for someone while continuing to stay out of Isabelle’s way.

When it seemed reasonable to do so, I made my exit. By the time I reached the car, Alyse was already huddled invisibly on the floorboard of the backseat. We left D.C. and drove for hours. Only after I had stowed Alyse safely with a friend who ran a parochial school in upstate New York, did I go home to face the music. I thought Lloyd would be furious. He wasn’t. In fact, he was the one who came up with the idea of creating an entirely new identity for her. I never asked him how he did it. Maybe he had a friend of his own in high places, one I knew nothing about. Then again, maybe he didn’t.

Strangely enough, Isabelle never questioned the idea that Lloyd and I might have had something to do with Alyse’s disappearance. As far as she was concerned, her stepdaughter was nothing but an ungrateful teenager who had run off in her family’s hour of need and good riddance to her besides. Within weeks of Gunn’s funeral, Isabelle and Jimmy moved back to Indiana. For a while I tried to stay in touch with my grandson, but eventually I gave up on that. My letters and gifts were all sent back marked RETURN TO SENDER.

Once Alyse became Debra Highsmith and left for Albuquerque, we never saw her again. By then I suppose I had convinced myself that what I had told her in her upstairs bedroom was true—that the Russians would never stop searching for her. I was wrong about that, of course. I know that now.

Lloyd died two years later. I know the loss of Gunnar and the humiliation surrounding our son’s death contributed to and hastened my husband’s death. I’ve accepted my responsibility for that. If I hadn’t sent someone chasing after Gunnar, maybe he would have gotten away with it. Maybe he could have been more like me and never been caught. Maybe things could have been different. Maybe my life could have been different.

But I doubt it.

They call us spooks.

You know—spies, agents, operatives—whatever.

Spooks.

But I’m here to tell you that it’s not just spooks that occupy the darker regions of the intelligence field. Ghosts reside there as well. Lost souls that somehow fell through the cracks and disappeared into a black pit of secrets and lies, as if they’d vanished into thin air.

Ghosts.

I know this firsthand. It’s the only justification for what happened, for I now believe it’s a mystery that will never be deciphered. For years I wanted to think there was a reasonable and logical solution to the puzzle. For a so-called easy diplomatic mission, it has haunted me ever since that bizarre night. And because I couldn’t properly explain it at the time, my career took a hit. I was removed from the field and brought home to the States. The pay was slightly better, surprisingly, but the new job was most definitely a demotion. Instead of working in an exotic European locale, such as the glorious city of Vienna, Austria, I found myself behind a desk at CIA headquarters.

What really happened on the night of November fourth, nineteen-fifty-six?

The crazy thing about it is that somehow it involves the Ferris wheel. The same one used in that spy movie, The Third Man, the one that starred Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles. I love that picture. I was in Vienna during filming, and I saw it three times when it played in the city. It was amazingly true to what was going on then, except I never really heard much zither music playing in the streets. You might know the scene—Cotten and Welles meet in one of the gondola cars for a clandestine rendezvous in the sky. The gondolas have roofs; like little wood cabins with windows, and large enough for fifteen people. The Wiener Riesenrad, at the time the world’s largest Ferris wheel, already had a lot of mystique since it had been built before the turn of the last century. That movie gave it even more of an air of mystery, and subsequent films and stories added to it. Today the wheel is a major tourist attraction in Vienna.

I’m ninety-four years old now. I think I’ve outlived most of the guys I knew in the Agency. Hell, I can remember when our offices were spread around D.C., long before the Langley campus was built. I spent most of my life in the CIA and, before that, with military intelligence during the war. Getting into that was easy—I had an advantage. My grandmother was from Frankfurt and she lived with us in Texas when I was growing up in the thirties, so I learned to speak both English and German fluently. The Military Intelligence Service snatched me up when I was drafted and I was stationed first in France, then Belgium, and finally Germany. I didn’t see any action. I analyzed intelligence reports. When the war was over, I had the choice to become a citizen again at the age of twenty-six, or join the organization that would eventually evolve into the Central Intelligence Agency. With the state of Europe being what it was—everyone was scrambling for pieces of divided countries—I figured that at the very least the work would be interesting. So I became a political analyst for a living.

And lucky me—they sent me to Vienna. Lovely Vienna. What a fascinating, gorgeous, vibrant place. Full of spirit, history, and the arts. It was an ideal posting, and I loved it. Officially, my job title was “Ambassadorial Assistant.” I worked in Vienna’s American sector until Austria was granted sovereignty in nineteen-fifty-five. After the war, Austria, being on the losing side, was divvied up between the U.S., France, Britain, and the Soviet Union. The capital city itself was also split into four sectors. Surprisingly, the system actually worked during the years it took for Vienna to be rebuilt and repaired. Even the Russians displayed no desire to occupy Austria the way they had other Eastern European countries, like Hungary. That was admirable, given that the Iron Curtain already dissected Berlin and was laying foundation from north to south across Europe. When Austria became its own boss again and the four superpowers dissolved their pieces of that pie, I stayed in the city and worked at the U.S. Embassy.

And that brings me to the question at hand. At my age, I know I could die tomorrow. Hell, I could kick the bucket tonight during dinner. Of all the memories I possess from my long life, there are indeed many treasured ones and also some I’d prefer to forget. And then there’s the one I wish to God I could understand before I close my eyes for the last time.

What happened to the Szalay family that fateful evening of November fourth, nineteen-fifty-six?

It was a busy morning at the embassy. A lot was going on in the world that day. I was at my desk tracking the Suez crisis, because we knew the Brits were going to join the Israelis in the war with Egypt. That whole shitstorm began during the summer, when Nasser declared the Suez Canal belonged to Egypt alone and kicked out the Brits, with whom the Arabs had already fallen out over the existence of Israel. I imagine the Brits’ colonial attitudes also had something to do with the feud. France got into the act and it was shaping up to be a war between Israel, the U.K., and France on one side, and the Arabs, in particular Egypt, on the other. Everything grew tense for the next couple of months, and finally, just six days prior to November fourth, Israel attacked Egypt.

After the fact we found out the Brit operation was called “Project Telescope.” On the fifth, the Brits dropped paratroopers into the country. Royal Marines landed on the sixth. At that time, the U.S. position on it all was to discreetly favor the Arabs. It was in America’s best interests to keep peace in the region. The Suez Canal was a major artery for the efficient flow of oil to the West. We also knew that the Soviet Union was backing the Arabs in the cause, and we didn’t want to piss them off. Eisenhower didn’t want to escalate the thing into World War Three. So America would end up trying to broker peace, which we eventually did, perhaps by dangling the possible fluctuation in value of the pound sterling over Prime Minister Eden’s head.

Anyway, that was all going on in the Middle East. In Vienna, we were mostly concerned about the situation in Hungary. Although things had been quiet in that country for a week, the Soviets were going to invade the country that morning, the fourth. Needless to say, our phones were ringing nonstop. We had Hungarian refugees pouring into Austria from across the border—the first time since the war that citizens could do so. We had no idea how bad it was going to be in Hungary, but we knew it could get ugly. The Soviets were probably going to clobber the revolutionaries and punish the rest of the country for the rebellion.

Today it’s called the Hungarian Uprising of nineteen-fifty-six. The Hungarian people got fed up with being ruled by the communists. On October twenty-third, students led a protest in Budapest that became violent—and suddenly it seemed that the entire country took up arms against their overseers. In five days, all Russian troops had been pushed out and back into the USSR. The Hungarian government failed, and a coup went into effect led by the “New National Government.” Imre Nagy was appointed their first prime minister. The revolt was bloody and frightening to the rest of the world. Of course, the U.S. was on the revolutionaries’ side, but we couldn’t say so publicly.

For nearly a week, there was calm. It looked like the Soviets were going to leave Hungary alone. Hordes of Hungarians left while the borders were open.

But we knew that on November fourth the Soviets were going to strike back. In fact, we learned about it that very morning and did our best to get the intelligence where it was needed. In another week, though, the Soviets crushed the Hungarians and punished them, too. Thousands were lost. The arrests, kangaroo trials, and executions of hundreds of people went on for years. The country was under communist rule until the fall of the USSR in nineteen-eighty-nine. Today the Uprising is remembered as something akin to a Hungarian Holocaust, and the date is a national holiday.

As I was going over the latest cables from our station in Egypt, Ambassador Thompson called me into his office. As I assumed, it was about the Hungarian situation.

“The Soviets are encircling Budapest as we speak,” he said in his typically calm, soft voice. “By tonight the city will be cut off. We understand the Soviet Eighth and Thirty-eighth Armies were deployed to boost the divisions already posted in Hungary. It’s going to be a bloodbath.”

“What are we going to do, sir?” I asked.

“Nothing, of course. What can we do? Unless the rebels hold out—which I seriously doubt will happen—Hungary will once again be under Moscow’s control. I give them five days. A week, tops.”

“I’m afraid I agree.”

He shook his head and made a tsk-tsk sound. Then he took a manila folder that lay on his desk and opened it. “I have a small task for you. We received a coded cable from Dulles this morning with the request that we handle the matter.” Thompson handed me the transcribed signal, along with a photograph of a middle-aged man with eyeglasses and a mustache. To me he looked like a college professor. His name was handwritten at the bottom. I had never heard of Tamás Szalay before that moment. Apparently he was a high-level guy in the Hungarian Working People’s Party, someone with access to all the Soviet puppet big shots like Münnich and Kádár.

The instructions, which used Dulles’s own code identifiers, said that Szalay and his family were among the refugees rushing to get out of Hungary, and the man wanted to defect to the West. He possessed extremely valuable information about the Soviet Union’s plans to aid the Arabs in the Suez Crisis in the event that the U.S. entered the conflict. It was the kind of intelligence for which men were killed.

“Szalay is already in Austria,” Thompson said, “and he will be in Vienna tonight. The problem is, the Soviets were unaware he had fled the country until yesterday. They know what he knows. They want him back. Failing that, they’ll kill Szalay to prevent him from defecting.”

“You said he’s with his family?”

Thompson nodded. “A wife, a teenage daughter, and a young son.”

“Christ. That’s not conspicuous, is it?”

“Right. Now they’re in hiding, but we have to get them out as quickly as possible. Would you mind being their contact tonight?”

“Me?” I wasn’t an operations man. I should point out that my expertise in intelligence lay in strategizing and analyzing data. I wasn’t the type of field agent who got his hands dirty. I never carried a gun. Fiction has often exaggerated what we did during the Cold War, especially those of us who were stationed in foreign cities. The spy game was mostly played on paper, or by interpersonal interaction with assets, or by observation. The cloak-and-dagger stuff was strictly for the movies and the novels of John le Carré and Ian Fleming. Thus, up to that day, my years in the CIA, while filled with many tense and worrisome moments, had never brought me face-to-face with violence.

“I’m afraid there’s no one else. Really, it’s just an easy diplomatic mission. You can handle it.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Our Austrian friends will deliver the family to you tonight at the Prater. You’ll babysit them for an hour or so, and then they’ll be picked up by one of our men. That’s it.”

“Why the Prater?” The Wiener Prater was Vienna’s long-standing amusement park, where The Third Man Ferris wheel was located.

“I have no idea. Maybe somebody decided that if they were going to appear in public, then the park would be the safest place. After all, they have children. Unless the Soviets know where they’re hiding, they can’t track them to the park. At least, that’s what we’re hoping. At any rate, extreme discretion is a priority. An Austrian asset will have all the details by lunchtime. You’re to meet him at noon.”

Thompson gave me the Austrian’s info and sent me on my way. On the surface, the assignment seemed straightforward. As long as the Szalay family could get to the Prater safely, then I could get them out of Austria with no problems.

Or so I thought.

I met the asset at Trześniewski’s, one of my favorite cafés. They served small rectangular open sandwiches of fresh bread and various spreads. It was a Viennese mainstay since before the First World War. The man gave his name as “Ernst.” It probably wasn’t real. He looked about my age, had blonde hair, and was as Austrian as they come. Being in public, we spoke German.

“There has already been one attempt on Szalay’s life,” he told me. “It happened last night in District Twenty-Two. Two assassins attempted to shoot into the car they were in while it was stopped at a street light. Luckily, our man in the car behind them engaged the attackers in gunfire. Szalay and the family got away safely.”

“Jesus,” I said. “How come we didn’t hear about that?”

“I’m sure the police are trying to figure out what really happened. All they found were two dead men lying in an intersection.” Ernst shrugged. “Vienna’s a rough town these days.”

We talked about the logistics of getting the family out of the park and into an unmarked van that would take them immediately to Salzburg, and from there, into West Germany and the American Zone. Since the Riesenrad was in the southwest corner of the park, near the front entrance, I thought it best that we meet in that vicinity. Just across from the attraction, on the other side of the circular Riesenradplatz, stood a small pavilion containing restrooms, a snack bar, and an ice cream parlor. Ernst thought that was perfect. Ausstellungsstraße, a major east-west avenue, ran just north of the Prater main entrance. At the given time, the van could pull up to the curb and I could herd the family into it quickly.

“As long as you’re not seen by the opposition, that should work fine,” my Austrian colleague said.

“One last question. Why are we doing this at the Prater?” I thought it was a reasonable question.

Ernst shrugged. “It’s what I was told. Maybe the family wants to ride the carousel and eat some cotton candy.”

A former journalist, folksinger, and attorney, Jeffery Deaver is an international number-one bestselling author of thirty-two novels and two collections of short stories. His novels are sold in 150 countries and translated into 25 languages.

His The Bodies Left Behind was named Novel of the Year by the International Thriller Writers Association, and his Lincoln Rhyme thriller The Broken Window was also nominated for that prize. He is a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Readers Award for Best Short Story of the Year and has been nominated for seven Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America. He’s won both the Steel Dagger and the Short Story Dagger from the Crime Writers Association in the U.K.

His most recent novels are The Kill Room, a Lincoln Rhyme novel, and XO, a Kathryn Dance thriller, for which he wrote an album of country-western songs, available on iTunes and as a CD.

Readers can visit his website at www.jefferydeaver.com.

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Compilation copyright © 2014 by Mystery Writers of America, Inc.

Introduction copyright © 2014 by Gunner Publications, LLC and Raymond Benson

“Comrade 35” copyright © 2014 by Gunner Publications, LLC

“Police Report” copyright © 2014 by Joseph Finder

“The Last Confession” copyright © 2014 by Lescroart Corporation

“A Card for Mother” copyright © 2014 by Gayle Lynds and John C. Sheldon

“Miss Bianca” copyright © 2014 by Sara Paretsky

“The Essence of Small People” copyright © 2014 by Gary Alexander

“Checkpoint Charlie” copyright © 2014 by Alan Cook

“Crush Depth” copyright © 2014 by Brendan DuBois

“The Honey Trap” copyright © 2014 by Bev Vincent

“House of a Thousand Eyes” copyright © 2014 by Katia Spiegelman Lief

“A Neighbor’s Story” copyright © 2014 by Vicki Doudera

“East Meets West” copyright © 2014 by Jonathan Stone

“Show Stopper” copyright © 2014 by Gigi Vernon

“Deep Submergence” copyright © 2014 by Joseph Wallace

“Sparks to the Bear’s Hide” copyright © 2014 by Robert Mangeot

“Side Effects” copyright © 2014 by T. Jefferson Parker

“The Everyday Housewife” copyright © 2014 by Laura Lippman

“Cuba Libre” copyright © 2014 by Katherine Neville

“His Mother’s Son” copyright © 2014 by J. A. Jance

“Ghosts” copyright © 2014 by Raymond Benson

Cover design and illustration by Christine Foltzer

Cover copyright © 2014 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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First ebook edition: April 2014

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ISBN 978-1-4555-2072-5

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