The Prodigal Spy (13 page)

“Can you always tell?”

“Agricultural development, for sure. Otherwise you have to look for signs. Journalist is usually pretty good.”

“Oh, really,” she said, playing. “You think I’m one?”

“Are you?”

She took the joint back. “We’re not supposed to tell. What made you suspect?”

“You keep popping up in unlikely places,” he said, spreading his hand toward the house.

“You know, I really didn’t expect to see you here. I don’t believe it now. I never thought–it’s funny, isn’t it?”

“What? You being here or my being here?”

“You. Maybe you’re the spook.” She glanced up at him quickly. “No.”

“You sure?”

“I’d recognize you, wouldn’t I? Here,” she said, handing him the joint, “finish it. I’m on duty.” She laughed to herself. “I interviewed a Hell’s Angel once. I asked him how they picked an Angel and he said, ”We don’t pick ‘em, we recognize ’em.“ So I guess I’d know.”

Nick smiled, feeling a buzz. “Where was this?”

“California. A while ago.”

“The summer of love,” Nick said idly.

“Well, it was for the guys.”

Nick flicked the roach out into the night and lit a cigarette, leaning against the building. The tall shrubs had taken on some definition in the misty air. In a few months it would be light all evening, England wide awake in the late northern light.

“What brought you over here?” he said.

“I don’t know. Last year, after the assassinations, I just thought, enough, you know? I mean, all you could do was watch the news. So I thought, well, Europe. I had a friend in Paris, and of course just as I get there they start tearing up the streets, so it was all the same anyway.
Les evenements
,” she said wryly, her accent deliberately broad. “So I just kept going.”

She turned so that her face came into the light from the windows. Nick watched her, unaware that he was staring until she raised her eyebrows. Then she reached over and took his cigarette. “Let me have one of these,” she said, putting it in her mouth with a casual intimacy. “What?”

“You’re a quicksilver girl,” Nick said, still watching her.

“Steve Miller Band,” she said, placing the phrase. “I actually met a guy in that band.” She handed back the cigarette, touching his fingers. “Like a chameleon, you mean.”

“No, like quicksilver. Whenever I look, you go somewhere else.”

She met his gaze and then, as if to demonstrate his point, looked away and leaned back against a potted plant. “Well, I’m here now. Where is here, anyway? I thought this would be at the embassy. Like this morning.”

“It’s the residence. Used to belong to Barbara Mutton.”

“Who?”

Nick smiled. Maybe Larry was right–nobody remembered anything. “Woolworth heiress. She was married to Gary Grant. This used to be her house.”

She looked up and down the terrace, then back through the windows at the party, a realtor’s gaze. “Do you think he used to come out here to smoke too?”

“I don’t think they were here together. Later. Maybe she bought it to get over him.”

“Instead of a good cry,” she said, looking at the house again. “What’s it like to be that rich?” Then she glanced back at him. “Are you rich? I mean, Warren—”

“No. It’s his money, not mine.” He nodded at the house. “Nobody’s this rich anymore.”

“Who owns it now?”

“You do. Taxpayers.”

“So that’s where it goes.” She giggled. “Makes me feel better about crashing.”

“Come to dinner. You paid for that too.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.”

She looked at him, not saying anything, reading his face.

“Who’s the friend?” Nick said.

“It’s not that. I just can’t.” She paused. “Maybe I can join you later,” she said, a polite dodge. “Where is it?”

“Here.”

“Here?”

“Hmm. As soon as the taxpayers clear out.”

She laughed. “You’re crazy. I can’t do that. What would they think?”

“The Braces? They’re used to it. All she has to do is rearrange the plates. It’s her idea of a good time.”

“Just like that.”

Nick nodded. “If I ask her. I thought you wanted to see the other half.”

“Not that close up. Look, it’s nice of you—”

“Stay,” Nick said, putting his hand on her arm. “I’d like you to.”

She looked down at the hand, then smiled. “Don’t you think it’s a little soon for a family dinner?”

“I may not keep running into you. Maybe I won’t get another chance.”

“You could call.”

“And then what?”

She grinned. “I guess you’d ask me to dinner.”

He spread his hands, palms up, resting a case.

“God, what am I going to tell Brian?”

“Tell him you have an interview with the ambassador.”

“Why am I doing this?” she said, laughing to herself. Then she looked up at him. “You’re not what I expected,” she said.

“What did you expect?”

But she let it go, making a joke of it. “I don’t know. Somebody in agricultural development, I guess. I better find Brian.” She held herself by the arms. “It’s cold. No wonder Barbara what’s-her-name sold it. You’re sure?” She said, looking up again.

Nick nodded. “Go find Brian.” She took a step toward the French window. “Hey,” he said, stopping her, because in the new light from the window her pale skin did suddenly begin to gleam, shifting like mercury. “Don’t disappear, okay?”

“Promise,” she said, and because the day had been lucky, he took her at her word.

The intimate dinner sat twenty-four and she disappeared after all, behind the floral centerpiece, so that like Davey, he had to tilt his head to see her. At this angle her hair bounced on top of the stems, another flower, and he watched her turn back and forth between her dinner partners, two gray-haired diplomats who preened for her attention like rival suitors. When she caught his look, her eyes laughed in a private joke. The dope had worn down to a familiar lull of well-being, but his senses still seemed sharp, catching the light off the crystal and the glow, refracted, in the soft red wine. With Larry near one end and his mother near the other, he was marooned in the middle, surrounded by people talking to each other, free to watch her. It was easier without words, he thought. This is what animals did–looks and body movements and smiles, tapping a sexual Morse code across the table.

“It’s not polite to stare, you know.” A woman’s voice, next to him.

“Sorry. Was I?” he said, turning to her, embarrassed.

But she was smiling. “I wish someone looked at me that way. She’s very pretty. Are you together?”

“Sort of,” he said, taking her in. She was still an attractive woman, but her face was loose and round, padded, Nick guessed, by years of too many extra glasses of wine. She seemed slightly drunk, shiny and amused, but not fuzzy.

“Sort of.” She laughed. “Well, you will be, if you keep that up. Youth,” she said, suggesting she’d enjoyed hers. “I tell you what. You just look and pretend to talk to me. I don’t mind a bit. I’m Doris Kemper, by the way. Jack Kemper’s wife.” She spoke the name, unknown to Nick, as if it guaranteed instant recognition.

“Nick Warren.”

“Ah. Larry’s son?”

Nick nodded.

“Well, that explains it. Your father always had an eye for the girls.”

“Really? Did you know him?”

“Not
that
way, if that’s what you mean. But I must say, I always wondered a little,” she said, oddly flirtatious. “He was quite the man about town. Do they use that expression anymore? Of course, this was all about a million years ago. Thank you,” she said to the waiter refilling her glass. “You can’t imagine how different Washington was then. People had
fun
.”

Nick watched her take another drink, trying to imagine her slim and eager for a night out. It occurred to him that if he just smiled encouragingly he wouldn’t have to talk at all.

“Well, they did,” she said, misinterpreting his look. “Of course, children don’t believe their parents were ever young. I know mine can’t. Then I heard he got married. We were overseas and I thought, well, that’s that. They’ll be hanging crepe all over town. If it lasts. But here you are, so I guess it did.”

“Where overseas?” Nick said, making conversation.

“Oh, everywhere. Athens. Rabat. Everywhere you had to boil the water.” She laughed to herself. “We were in Delhi for four years–that was the longest stretch.”

“Did you like it?”

“Well, Jack did. I had the children to raise. You know the tropics–one little scratch, and before you know it, it’s infected. You had to watch all the time. And the snakes.” She waved her hand, dismissing India, and when he followed it he found himself looking across the table again. Molly was listening to one of her suitors, fork poised in the air, her bare arms pale in the candlelight. He wondered if they would sleep together tonight. She’d stayed for dinner.

“You do have an eye,” Doris Kemper said. “I suppose he passed it
on
.” She picked up her glass. “Now tell me about yourself. What are you doing in London? Are you a lawyer too?”

“No, I’m finishing a degree at LSE.”

“That sounds interesting,” she said, clearly not believing it. “What in?”

“At the moment I’m doing research on the McCarthy period. You know, the witch-hunts.”

“People study that? Now I do feel old.”

“My professor’s writing a book about it.”

“But it’s such an exaggeration. Witch-hunts. I suppose to young people–but really, you know, the whole thing has been blown all out of proportion. I remember the loyalty oaths. We all had to do that. The army hearings. But to hear people talk, you’d think that’s all that was going on. Not any of the good things. Most people didn’t even notice.”

“HUAC held over two hundred hearings then,” Nick said calmly, a statistician. “Three thousand witnesses. And that was just HUAC. Not McCarthy.”

“Really?” she said, too surprised to be offended. But she was already moving away, the lesson of a hundred dinner parties. “Of course, we were overseas most of the time.”

She leaned back to let the waiter remove her plate and looked at Nick as if the new angle had suddenly brought him into focus. “Now I remember,” she said. “Larry’s wife.
She
had a child. That’s right. There was a boy—” She stopped. “Oh.” Nick could see in her slack face the rest of it coming back to her. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t—” She floundered, in such obvious distress that Nick, almost as a reflex, helped her.

“That’s all right,” he said quietly.

But it wasn’t. It happened so rarely now that he was unprepared for it, that moment when someone knew. He felt the sinking in his stomach, always the same, found out by the giant pointing finger. He wished he weren’t still high, unguarded, because now it would all come back. He knew the sequence, the pictures that would flash through his mind and always end with the woman lying twisted on the roof of the car. Instead he turned to the bright table, willing himself to be distracted by the opulent silver and the spray of flowers, an imperial banquet. Doris Kemper, who misinterpreted the gesture and thought he was angry, put her hand on his arm.

“I didn’t mean—” she said, and because she was silly but still kind, Nick smiled back, letting her off the hook.

“I know,” he said. How quickly it could happen, he thought, when you weren’t expecting it. But that was his problem, not hers. She never meant a thing. She’d had a life of amahs and swimming pool parties and only remembered the snakes, dreaming of Maryland. And now, of course, she’d be curious. He could already see the irresistible questions forming in her eyes.

They were both rescued by the tinkling of a knife against a glass as the ambassador rose to propose a toast. Not a speech, he said genially, just a word of welcome, because it was always good to see old friends and particularly good when those friends were about to render a service to their country. They were all aware of the importance of Larry’s mission, and they were all grateful, he was sure, that the mission had been placed in such competent hands. If there was progress to be made, he would make it, and he carried with him, at the very least, the hopes and good wishes of everyone at this table and countless other tables back home. There was a little more, and a few ‘hear, hear’s, and they raised their glasses. Nick raised his too, feeling more than ever the anomaly of his position, the son of a traitor invited to sit at the high table. But Larry, smiling modestly at the group, seemed entirely at ease, and his mother, on the ambassador’s right, looked radiant. No one, in fact, saw anything but a happy family, not even Doris Kemper, who thought he had an eye.

The table was breaking up now, heading into the sitting room for coffee, and when he looked over at Molly towering over her diplomats, who turned out to be short, his mood changed. The hell with them all, tangled up in their money and pious hopes for Paris. Their world, not his. He was going to spend an evening with a girl who’d actually met someone in the Steve Miller Band. But when she returned his look she seemed nervous, flustered by the toast, as if the evening had been a high and they were coming down, back where they started, and he wondered if they would sleep together after all.

“Good luck with your project,” Doris Kemper said, shaking hands.

“I’ll try to look for the good things,” he said pleasantly.

“You
do
that.” She smiled, almost winking. “It’s still the greatest country in the world.”

The informality of the coffee hour made it easier to slip out early, and after paying his respects to the Bruces, he collected Molly and headed for the door. A hug and faint protest from his mother, but no one else seemed to mind, absorbed on their side of the generation gap.

“She’s a nice girl,” Larry said when Molly went to get her coat. “I thought you said you weren’t seeing anybody.”

“I’m not seeing her yet,” Nick said. “First date.”

“Quite a restaurant,” Larry said, nodding at the room. Men smoked near the fireplace, ignoring the women, who perched on the edges of the deep couches, busy with each other. A waiter was passing brandy. It looked to be a long night.

“Quite an invitation,” Nick said. “Thanks. Good luck tomorrow.”