She stopped, but not long enough for him to say anything before she went on.
“If you don’t have the same… interest… in continuing this in a serious way, just tell me. I’ve been through quite a lot in the past couple of years, and I think I can handle honest answers if they’ve got honest feelings behind them. You don’t strike me as the kind of man who’d be cruel about it if you didn’t want this to go on.”
She paused again, but again she didn’t let him interrupt her train of thought.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is, well, I think I’m a romantic woman, but at this point in my life it seems to me that good common sense is just as important.
“I’ve been burned pretty badly with this marriage, Harry, despite my bravado about it. I just can’t make that kind of mistake again.” She stopped and looked down. “But we seem to have so much to offer each other. If this is a… possibility for us, well, I’d hate for us to miss an opportunity simply because we didn’t know how to talk to each other about what we’re really feeling.” Again she confronted him with her eyes. “I don’t want the rituals of… getting to know each other to confuse what we might be genuinely feeling. We can’t mistake, or misrepresent, our feelings for each other, Harry. Either way.” She paused. “I think… that would be a shame.”
He couldn’t answer her immediately. Though she had spoken haltingly, there was no misunderstanding the depth of her feelings, and Strand wanted to accord her the same considerate deliberation.
“I can’t think of anything I’d like better than to continue this… as long as we can.” He thought a moment, his arms crossed. “I don’t know how far down the road I’m thinking. I don’t know that I have ‘plans.’…”
“No”—Mara sat up in her chair, putting the sketchpad down on the floor—“I didn’t mean that you had to spell it out for me. I, it’s just that, a trip like that, it could change things.” She stopped, seemingly frustrated at her own inability to express precisely what she was thinking. “Harry, you know what I mean here. I’m so very grateful to you for our friendship… for you sharing your home, for Meret’s friendship… for you including me in your life.” She took a deep breath. “For me, it could easily go farther than this. It seems like we’re at that point where this could become something else, something more.”
“But you don’t want to do that yet. Or maybe ever.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s that I’m afraid to if… Look, I don’t want sex to complicate a friendship. If it’s only going to be a friendship.”
Strand stood, put his hands in his pockets, and leaned his shoulder against the window frame. He looked outside a moment and tried to straighten out his thoughts. When he turned back to her she was reaching up and taking the two pencils out of her hair. She tossed them onto the floor by her sketchpad, shook out her hair, and leaned back in the corner of the chair and looked at him.
“Do you think it’s possible that you could be expecting too much from this?” Strand asked.
“Expecting too much? What do you think is out of proportion in what I’ve just said?”
“It sounds to me like you’re wanting guarantees.”
She frowned at him, waiting for him to go on.
“Guarantees,” Strand said, “that you won’t get hurt. Guarantees that I’m going to be the kind of person you want me to be. Guarantees that I’m not going to disappoint you.”
For a moment neither of them said anything, and this time he had no perception whatsoever of what was going on in her mind. The silence went on longer than he imagined it would. She broke her gaze and looked away. She nodded slightly, as if to herself, her eyes finding and settling on a drawing on the wall near her chair.
“Okay, I see your point,” she said. “Maybe I’m trying to be too careful.” She shook her head, thinking. “Maybe I’m, I don’t know, trying too hard to avoid the common little disasters that destroy a relationship, the kind of things that afterward, when it doesn’t work out and it’s over, you say to yourself, I should have seen that coming.”
“I’d like to do that, too,” Strand said. “But you can’t take the risk out of being human. Especially the kind of risks that two people take when they’re trying to feel their way into each other’s lives.”
She seemed embarrassed and at the same time a little sad, a reaction that puzzled him.
“Believe me,” he said, trying to diffuse her confusion, “I didn’t mean to push this. It was only a suggestion.”
“Harry, I’d love to go to Rome with you. I would dearly love to.” She smiled apologetically. “I don’t know. I guess I thought I wanted it too much.”
“Good,” he said, smiling too.
Ariana Kiriasis sat on a large, damask-upholstered divan in the upstairs sala of her home in a quiet street in the Aventino, the southernmost of Rome’s seven hills. She was looking out to the view over her balcony, the double doors of which were thrown open to the pleasant morning air and to the sound of crows in the stone pines on the grounds of the nearby churches of Santi Bonifacio e Alessio and Santa Sabina. This single view was the reason she had bought the old house, as well as the reason it was grossly overpriced, considering its wretched plumbing and deteriorating stucco walls, which she had had to pay handsomely to have repaired.
Having an artistic and romantic eye, she had never regretted her decision. To the northwest, the view encompassed a long stretch of the Tiber and all of the district of Trastevere. On a day like today, with a slight haze in the summer air, the filtered light illuminated the dome of Saint Peter’s with exquisite effect, as though it were a colossal pearl hurled from heaven onto the muddy banks of the Tiber.
This was the view Ariana stared at now, but it was not the view she was seeing. So intensely was her mind engaged that she actually saw nothing at all. On the sofa beside her, and scattered over the floor around her small slippered feet, were the pages of the morning’s
International Herald Tribune
, which her maid brought to her every morning with her espresso and pastry.
Ariana had been through every page of it. She had been through every column… several times. She did not find, she could not find, the item that she had depended upon seeing every first week of the month for the past four years. It was usually in the form of an advertisement, and usually the smallest one the newspaper would sell. The word “art” or “drawing” always appeared in the advertisement, which might address anything having to do with art, the sale of art supplies, an art auction, an estate sale, an exhibition. Sometimes they were fanciful. Corsier was like that. He could be droll. Within the brief advertisement were two things meant for Ariana to read: first, there was the name “Claude Corsier” in a coded form and in one of five languages; and second, there was a coded date on which the next month’s advertisement would appear.
Her own advertisement, meeting similar criteria and intended for Corsier’s eyes, had appeared two days earlier in the same newspaper.
She had already gotten up and gone to the writing desk in her bedroom to check Corsier’s previous month’s advertisement and to confirm today’s date. She had already spent a lot of time staring at the crumpled newspaper, leaning forward on the sofa, her elbows on her thighs, the fingers of both hands embedded deep into her wiry hair as her mind raced over the possibilities for the advertisement’s conspicuous absence. None of the possibilities made any sense except the worst one. She felt distinctly as she imagined a woman might feel who one morning found that dreaded lump in her breast after a lifetime of knowing that her family medical history and her own habits had predisposed her to that inevitable discovery. It had finally happened. Still, it was a shock.
Suddenly she dropped her gaze from the white dome of Saint Peter’s to the newspaper on the worn and faded Persian carpet. The sudden change from bright to dark blinded her momentarily. She waited. Her sight returned from the edges inward. As the newspaper reappeared it struck her as really quite odd that she and Claude Corsier had never discussed exactly what they would do in this situation. They had created a system for mutual notification, but beyond that… Well, there was nothing beyond that, and she was dumbfounded by the shroud of isolation that had dropped over her in the last twenty minutes. Before coffee she had a place in life. Friends. Lovers. Companions. After a few bites of her
torta di mele
and a demitasse of espresso, she was suddenly an alien in that same world.
Actually, that wasn’t quite right, either. She was no longer in the same world that she had lived in before the torte and espresso. She had been dragged backward in time into a former life. When she thought about it now, it seemed so far removed from her present life that it was as though it had all happened to another person. Yet, strangely, certain events, certain moments, faces, bits of conversation, the sound of a voice, a betrayal, the touch of a lover, a death, a fragrance, all of it was as immediate to her as the events of last night.
And that was what petrified her.
Ariana picked up the telephone.
The second-floor flat was in an old apartment building in a residential street in Wieden, the fourth district. The little street was shrouded by fat chestnut trees whose broad boughs reached all the way to the window where Ariana sat watching and waiting for him, a cool Austrian breeze carrying the smoke from her cigarette out into the dappled light of late afternoon. She could hear people passing by on the sidewalk below, and she could catch glimpses of them through leaves.
Even though she had never been to these rooms before, they were already familiar to her. For the better part of two decades she had met Harry Strand and others in countless rooms like these in Prague and Rome and Athens, in Budapest, Berlin, and Trieste, all over Europe. For security reasons they moved regularly to different streets in different cities, but eventually all the safe houses in all the cities became the same. Their differences were completely obscured because they were all used in the same way for the same reasons—a place to plot, a place to escape to, a place to tryst and to share secrets, a place to wait for the inevitable encrypted message to move on. This one reeked with the stale odors of former meetings. It was an odor she would forever associate with the taut business of bringing one’s fears under control.
She heard the key working at the lock in the door, and she turned in her chair and watched as the door swung open and he walked into the room.
“Ariana,” he said.
“Hello, Bill.”
He closed the door and flipped the deadlock. When he turned around again he stood still a moment, looking at her from the denser shadows away from the windows. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew he could see hers.
She mashed out the last of her cigarette and stood up. He moved away from the door, taking off his suit coat as he came into the center of the room. After taking a pack of cigarettes from the inner breast pocket of the coat, he folded the coat and draped it over the back of a chair. He tossed the cigarettes onto the sofa.
“What’s it been?” he asked as she approached him. “Nearly five years?” He made no gesture of greeting. The intervening years were nothing.
She said, “Something like that.”
They regarded each other awkwardly, and then Bill Howard sat on the sofa and crossed his legs. He picked up the cigarettes, took one for himself and then offered one to her. She took it from him and bent down for the tiny flame he held up to her. He had a handsome, old-fashioned gold lighter, heavily engraved and much worn. It was the only elegant thing about the man, and it didn’t seem to fit him at all. She had always wondered how he came to have it. She wasn’t surprised to see he was still using it.
Howard smelled of an American shaving lotion, the same lotion she remembered from the years before. She had seen a bottle of it once in his bathroom in a hotel in Salonika. It was emerald green. Nothing exotic, a cheap aftershave that could be purchased in any pharmacy.
Bill Howard had put on weight, but other than that he had not changed. He was still wearing suits in tones of brown, the same unremarkable hue as his thinning hair. He wore a white shirt and a tie—geometric patterns in burgundy and beige—that could have been one from those earlier years. As always he looked as if he had dressed without paying attention to what he was doing, as if he had had something else on his mind.
She pulled heavily on her cigarette and crossed her arms again. None of the lamps in the room were turned on, and the only light came from the window, tinted with green reflected off the broad leaves of the chestnuts. The apartment was dowdy with forty-year-old furniture that needed reupholstering. The place made her terribly sad.
“Still beautiful,” Howard said, appraising her in the pale light. “Greek women, I remember, have a way of ignoring the passing years.”
“I thought you weren’t going to come,” she said, disregarding his remark.
“I’m sorry it took so long.” He looked around.
“I’ve been waiting in these damn rooms for five days,” she said.
“I was traveling.”
“They might have told me that.”
“You’ve forgotten how it is.”
“I haven’t forgotten a single moment,” she said.
Howard said nothing.
“Claude Corsier has disappeared,” she said.
He didn’t have much of a reaction, only a fleeting frown.
“What do you mean?”
She looked at him, tense, restless. “Which of those words don’t you understand?”
“You’ve been keeping in touch with him?”
“Yes.”
“Really. And with Strand, too?”
“No.”
“Okay,” he said, shifting his shoulders on the sofa, settling in, “go ahead and tell me what’s going on.”
Ariana nodded and took a long drag on her cigarette for support. She collected herself.
“After the FIS changed our mission to criminal intelligence, everything changed for us… who worked with Harry. Even before that we knew things were going to be different after the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union disintegrated. The cold war was over. We knew we were living through the end of an era. Harry said the FIS was being forced to… you say, downsize. Even though we had been redirected”—she shrugged—“we saw how easily we could be thrown away when we were no longer useful in a certain way.