Fidelity Page 23

  “It was once. Then it wasn’t. Perhaps it is again,” Justyna said softly. “I’m not sure.”

  “You haven’t been back? Not since . . . ?”

  “No,” Justyna said.

  “Even after the Iron Curtain fell? You never wanted to see what had become of everyone?”

  “There wasn’t anyone left,” Justyna said. “I was an only child, of course, and both my parents died when I was young.”

  “And your friends?”

  Justyna imitated a person smiling. “I had many friends,” she admitted. “The good ones are lost. The bad ones . . . The bad ones have their own sins to weigh them down and don’t need an old woman reminding them.”

  “You never talk about it,” Kay said.

  Justyna nodded, forked a bit of watercress between red lips. “No, I never do.”

  “Was it so terrible?”

  Justyna dabbed at her mouth with the corner of her napkin. “Yes,” she said, as if it hadn’t been.

  Kay could see the wound clear, raw and red, although it had been decades since it was made. She steeled herself and poured more salt inside. “Why did they take you?”

  “Why is this important to you, Kay?”

  Kay could not say—or at least she did not say, swallowing an explanation. “It just is. Please?”

  Justyna sighed and set the napkin down. For a long time it did not seem as if she was likely to speak, and when she did, it was in a flat and affectless monotone. “Because I was young, and foolish, and righteous, and thought that these alone would be enough to keep me safe from the hands of men. Alas”—she shrugged—“it was not. It never is. At the time I imagined I was fighting for something greater than myself, for my country, for the future. I think it was mostly just innocence. The young have so much energy—far more so than sense.”

  “You were a part of some sort of . . . dissident movement?”

  “Looking back, it all seems very childish, our pretensions that we might change the system, that we were on the cusp of a new utopia, if only we could reach out to grasp it. Nothing violent, of course, though I suppose after a few glasses of red wine some of our members may have grown rather . . . animated. But it wasn’t real: Luis used to call them paper tigers, and laugh at our dreams.”

  “And your friends? How did they feel about him?”

  “Everyone loved your uncle,” Justyna said, smiling at distant times. “He was charming beyond any measure; any room he walked into he walked out of to a chorus of happy voices. And for us, at the time, America was . . . something like a dream. Americans were an alien species, unmarked by war or struggle. And being in the diplomat corps, he could do small favors for us: a pack of Marlboros now and again, that sort of thing.”

  “But he couldn’t stop them from taking you?” Kay asked, forcing the words out from her throat.

  Justyna set one gloved hand on Kay’s, the hand that was missing two digits, and said, “Isn’t the answer to that obvious?”

  “I suppose it is,” Kay said. “Why did they take you?”

  “Because they could, Kay. Because they could do whatever they wanted and no one could stop them. If you mean, was there some reason, some obvious proximate cause . . . ?” She shook her head. “None that I knew. None that I ever learned. I was walking out of my apartment one day—on the way to meet your uncle, in fact—and some men came up on either side of me and walked me to a car, and from that car to a box.”

  “You don’t need to talk about it,” Kay said suddenly, her face red and miserable.

  But Justyna continued over her interruption, spewing forth like a punctured abscess. “They would ask me questions that they must have known I didn’t have answers to, my relationship to spy rings, assassination plots which were, which they knew to be, entirely fictitious. It didn’t matter. Their aim was only to break you. I think perhaps that might even be giving them too much credit: I think for most of them it was simply something that they had become, the way one begins to think of oneself as a doctor or a lawyer. Can you imagine kissing your children good-bye every morning, then going in to torture a stranger?” Justyna shrugged, shook her head.

  Kay found that she could not imagine it. “How long were you inside?”

  “A long time,” Justyna said. “A long time.”

  “How did you get out?”

  “I don’t know why I was released,” Justyna said, looking off down Fifth Avenue, at the towering edifices of American civilization and perhaps beyond that, to a past that was not as distant as she might have liked. “I do not know why I escaped those cells, that torment. At the time I was in no position to question the matter. Perhaps they knew they had frightened me enough to leave, that I would never again trouble them, that I was broken. When they took me out of my cell, I was sure it was . . . I was sure it was to kill me. That was the only reason you left: another body to be put in an unmarked grave—‘killed attempting to escape,’ they would tell your people, assuming they bothered to tell them anything at all. Anyway, I was too tired to fight then. I think . . . I think I had accepted it. They led me down a long hallway, then into a little holding area, and they removed my cuffs, and left, and the door opened . . .” Justyna smiled, for the first time since she had begun telling her story. “And he was there.”

  “Uncle Luis?”

  “He saved me,” she said with firm certainty. “He saved me,” she repeated. “We were married shortly after, and moved here, and said good-bye to the whole . . . horrible, sordid business. And I’ve lived in peace and contentment ever since,” she said with a half-mocking smile. “A happy end to an unhappy story.”

  Kay did not say anything for a long time, although Justyna could read the heavy thought in the crinkling up of her eyes. “I’m sorry to have brought this up with you, Auntie.”

  “It’s fine, Kay,” Justyna said, forcing a smile to her face, although Kay could see that it wasn’t fine at all. “It was a long time ago. It doesn’t matter anymore. It doesn’t have anything to do with our lives any longer.”

  “I’m not sure that that’s true,” Kay said quietly, underneath her breath. But after saying it she switched the topic quickly, onto more salubrious grounds: casual chatter, movies she’d seen and restaurants she had been to. But even in the midst of it, and even walking to the subway and even while kissing her good-bye, Justyna noticed that Kay’s smile did not quite reach her eyes.

  53

  TOM OPENED the door of a small side-street bar ­nosebleed-high up on the West Side, just about where million-dollar condos the size of shoe boxes gave way to the rapidly gentrifying grit of southern Harlem. It was dark and rather dismal. The bartender was making what Tom felt was a not particularly sincere effort to clean the bar with a dirty rag, or at least an effort that was not crowned with great success. A handful of patrons eyed him vaguely, went back to their own drinks, their own troubles, their own lives. All except one.

  Pyotr had given him a picture, and Tom had spent a long time staring at it before holding it over the flame of his Bic lighter and scattering it into a sewer grate. Longer than he needed to, long enough to make sure. Wasted time, as it turned out, because Tom would have known Luis even without the picture, would have picked him out as soon as he walked into the bar. Not that he did anything particularly dramatic to give himself away—it was simply that, as many years as he had dedicated to his job, Tom had developed a nose for sin, or guilt, at least, and this last rolled off the man like a bum’s stink on an August afternoon. No, he hadn’t needed the picture: Pyotr could have told him, simply, to find a man who looked as if he had come to the edge of a very high precipice, and was seriously considering continuing onward.

  Tom sat down on the bench beside him, a whiff of expensive but not overpowering cologne reaching his broad nostrils.

  “You’re late,” Luis said.

  “By a minute and a half,” Tom said. “And you sh
ould not have picked a booth by the window.”

  “Shall we move?”

  Tom shook his head, although Luis could barely see it, given their position. “It would draw more attention,” he said sternly. Pyotr had warned him that Luis would be unhappy to be meeting with him, might buck a bit, might make a little trouble. They did sometimes, Tom had found. Angry at what had brought them to this moment, although what had brought them to this moment was their own decisions, their own sin and foolishness. Impor­tant to shut that kind of thing down as quick as you could.

  The waiter came over, smiling and overfriendly, as they were in this country, trying to earn a tip as always, false good humor a faint covering for the cold, naked capitalist machine. Tom kept up his end for a few sentences, in part because rudeness gets remembered, while faint gregariousness does not, but mostly because he could see it made Luis uncomfortable.

  “Did you need to sit next to me?” the contact said unhappily. “People will think we’re lovers.”

  “This is Manhattan, my friend, in the twenty-first century. Two men sitting together will not get a second look. And this is the sort of business best discussed in hushed whispers. Or do you disagree?”

  “No,” Luis admitted. “No, I don’t.”

  Tom waited for his drink to come, sipped at it, then began to speak. Outside, the summer light was fading, pedestrians walked home in the warm weather, cabs passed by with their signs shining bright, a beat-up sedan sat aimlessly across the way. “The brother has taken the bait,” Tom said.

  “Fine,” Luis said irritably. “Then why are you talking to me?”

  “Because Christopher is not the problem. The problem is that Christopher is not of any interest to us at all, obviously. Is only of any use insofar as his sister’s sympathy is attached to him.”

  “It is.”

  “So you say.”

  “Pyotr was convinced,” Luis said.

  “And Pyotr is a very wise man,” Tom said. “But it will not be Pyotr in the room with her, not Pyotr making the pitch.”

  “Kay loves her brother.”

  “No doubt she cares for him deeply. Does she care enough to endanger her career? Does she care enough to betray her principles? Would she put blood above country, above her own future?”

  “She would.”

  “You’re sure of this?”

  Luis did not say anything for a while. He stared out the window, at the night and the darkness and the city. He stared at his hands, withered and bent with age. “I’m sure,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Family is . . . everything to Kay. After what happened to her parents . . .” Luis shrugged and fell silent. “She would not betray Christopher. She would not do anything which would endanger him. He is the chink in her armor,” Luis said unhappily. “He is all that she has left. She will do whatever it takes to save him.”

  “That is very good,” Tom said, putting a finger of gin through a crooked smile. “That is excellent. That is the best thing for everyone, absolutely,” he said. “It should be easy for you to explain the situation to her, then.”

  Luis tore his eyes from the evening, brought them back to Tom. “What are you talking about?”

  “It has been decided that the initial approach would best come from someone whom Kay is comfortable with. Someone whom she trusts.” Tom made sure not to smile while enunciating this last word.

  “I won’t do it,” Luis said firmly, or with what he thought was firmness. It was always strange to Tom, the sudden decision a man makes, too late, far too late, to grow a backbone. “There was never any discussion of that. Pyotr . . . Pyotr assured me that I would be kept out of it. That no one would ever know of my involvement.”

  “By ‘no one,’ you mean your family, your wife and adopted children? Do you imagine that your betrayal is less significant because they are unaware of it?”

  Luis began to curse then, halfhearted and miserable, bits of vileness dribbling from his mouth. Tom let him go at it for a little while; knew, from long experience, that they had come to the last bit of rebelliousness, the pointless anger, the final stage before complete submission. Outside, a pair of lovers passed, tourists, to tell by their bright smiles and fat cameras, holding hands and taking in the city. The sedan sat unmoving. A homeless man pushed an overloaded grocery cart down the sidewalk. Tom fancied he could smell the stink through the window.

  Luis fell silent finally. Tom smiled and waved to the bartender for two more drinks.

  “I will not argue with you, Luis, because this is not an argument. This is not a dialogue, not even a conversation. I am relaying orders to you, orders which were given to me by men that are more important than either of us. This is the way this works: you are a part of an organization, Luis, as am I. A cog, nothing more. It is not up to a cog to dispute the workings of the whole. The end result is not his consideration. Do you understand, Luis? Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Luis said, after a long pause.

  “Excellent. The meeting needs to happen soon, within the next couple of days.”

  A long pause, Luis fighting through the liquor and his despair to try to focus on the plan. “I could set something up for the weekend. Sunday.”

  “Sunday will be fine. Sunday will be perfect. Invite her to your house. Make her feel comfortable. Explain what has happened with Christopher, the trouble he has gotten himself in, how serious, how very serious, how terribly serious, that trouble is, and that there is only one option for saving him. If she loves her brother as much as you believe, then she should come to her own conclusions about how to help him.”

  “I know how to make an approach,” Luis said, hollow-eyed, and Tom had to admit that he probably did, having been on the receiving end of one, delivered by a master of the form.

  “Excellent. Once you have . . . made the situation clear to your niece, you will call me to deal with the particulars.”

  “And then?”

  “And then your part in this story ends. You may continue on to a happy retirement, sure that you have done nothing more than what you had to and your troubles all finished.”

  “And Kay’s just beginning,” Luis said quietly.

  “Not your concern,” Tom reminded him. “And when you begin the approach, Luis, I want you to understand something. It is important that you understand something,” he repeated, holding one thick finger in the air. “You are doing her a favor. You are not her enemy, you are not her corrupter, you are not playing devil to her Christ. You are her friend. You are her friend and you are the friend of her brother. You are doing her a favor, though she may not feel it as such at that moment. But that is only because of Kay’s own peculiar perspective; that is not the truth of the matter. Because if she is not convinced . . . If she is not convinced,” Tom said, turning his sausage-length digit and butting the end against Luis’s shoulder, “should she be unwilling to go along with the tide, the inevitable force of consequence, or should she, God forbid, decide to go to her people with what you have told her”—Tom shook his big head back and forth, sorrowfully, regretfully—“this would be a very bad thing, Luis. A very bad thing for your niece, a very bad thing for you and a terrible, terrible thing for your nephew.”

  “You don’t need to threaten me,” Luis said.

  “Threaten?” Tom cocked his massive skull, as if this were a word with which he was uncertain or unfamiliar. “Who is threatening anything? I am simply clarifying the situation that you find yourself in. Either you will convince Kay to work for us, or you will be responsible for the loss of two generations of Malloys.”

  Luis had not touched his drink, but he did so then, downing three stiff fingers of vodka in one fierce, desperate gulp. “I understand,” he said.

  And Tom thought that he did.

  “Is there anything else?” Luis said, a sliver of a man, made no larger by the liquor he had imbi
bed.

  “I think we have about covered it,” Tom said with a smile. “No, no,” Tom said, holding up a hand as Luis reached for his wallet, “do not dream of it. The drinks are on me.” He leaned in closer. “I will expense it to our organization.”

  Luis left quickly, stumbling as he got up from the chair and hurrying out, not looking back. Tom finished up his drink, not in any particular hurry. He chatted briefly with the server when he came back, about the weather and baseball, although only the former was really of any interest to him. He left a few dollars more on the bill than he needed, but not enough to get remembered.

  He walked outside with a happy buzz from the alcohol and from the sensation of a plan running smoothly.

  54

  LUIS HAD asked her to come to the apartment on Sunday morning for brunch, one of Aunt Justyna’s special meals: eggs and bacon and a pitcher of mimosas big enough to take a bath in. Luis had told her ten thirty, and ten thirty was when she arrived, with a box of donuts from one of the boutique bakeries on her side of the river. Walking inside, however, she did not smell anything frying, or baking, or grilling, and all of the lights were off, and Luis was sitting quietly in a chair at the kitchen table, and Justyna was nowhere to be found.

  Luis was dressed, as always, perfectly, in a charcoal-gray suit with the jacket unbuttoned, a pink handkerchief in his breast pocket the only dash of color. “Kay,” he said, “take a seat.”

  Kay looked at him but didn’t answer. There were a number of broad windows facing the street outside, and Kay went past each, opening the blinds one by one. When she was finished, sunlight illuminated the room, and she dropped down opposite Luis.

  “Hello, Uncle,” Kay said. “Where’s Aunt Justyna?”

  “She’s out with some friends, won’t be back for a while. I’m afraid we’re going to have to postpone brunch,” he said.

  Kay reacted to this unexpected development with her usual steady equilibrium. “All right.”

  “We need to have a talk, Kay,” Luis said, and it was in the same tone of voice in which he had once informed her she would not be receiving a pony for her twelfth birthday. Serious but not unkind.