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“Let's go,” Dilbeck said. “While the iron, as it were, is hot.”

“Why aren't we going inside?” she asked.

He looked up and down the rainy street; then he grabbed her by the hand and, pulling her after him, walked away from the movie house.

“What's wrong?” she asked. “What's going on?”

He drew her into the doorway of a small crafts store. Raffia baskets, planters woven out of bamboo, Mohave rugs, hung in the window behind her head. He had seen a car pull up in front of the cinema, the door open, a man in a felt hat get out and go up to the cashier's desk. It might have been nothing, it might have been perfectly innocent, but the car was a certain green Catalina he had last seen driven by the fat man. He was sure of it. He was sure. He looked back down the street. A light from the window fell across his eyes. He blinked. Rain was falling from his hair, across his cheeks, his nose, a taste of chemical on his tongue. A green Catalina, a nightmare.

“We better get out of here,” he said. “Fast.”

He gripped her hand, then moved out of the shop doorway and down the street away from the theater. They came to a corner, turned, stopped beneath a dripping awning that hung above a bookstore.

She was rubbing rain from her eyes.

“What now?” she said. “What now?”

He tried to get his brain to work; but beyond, on the dark edges of his awareness, he was haunted by tiredness. He wanted all at once to sleep and wondered where he could find a further shot of energy. He put his arms around her.

“Let's get out of here,” he said.

“I wish we would.” She put her hand up to her hair, which, soaked now, hung like thick black strands of a fine metal.

They hurried along the street. And then it came to him, it came to him in a flash. Why not? he thought. It was nearby. It was only a few blocks away. The irony of it wasn't lost on him either. And besides, would anybody think of looking for them there?

He laughed in the rain.

“Don't flip out on me, John,” she said.

“I don't intend to,” he replied.

They continued to hurry.

A strong, violent wind was beginning to blow behind the rain, bringing cold, a touch of ice, a sense of winter at the heart of a sodden spring.

Dilbeck looked at the advertising neon hanging above the cinema. Trash, he thought. He was far from being puritanical, at least in his own eyes, but it seemed to him that the world was armpit-deep in garbage these days. The glossy mouth of a nude young woman beckoned to him from a photograph; she had her tongue upturned against her teeth. He glanced at Sharpe, who looked like a drowned ferret in this downpour. The third man, whose name Dilbeck didn't know, whose name Dilbeck didn't want to know right then, was holding a wet photograph of John Thorne.

“They didn't come in here,” he was saying.

“But you saw them?” Sharpe asked.

“I saw them go down the block that way,” the man said.

“Are you positive?” Dilbeck asked. He suspected that he was hearing, once more, the tune of a wild goose. A rude, atonal honk that, in his imagination, he thought resembled John Thorne's laughter at having slipped away once more.

“Okay,” Sharpe said. He gave the man some instructions to put through on his radio concerning a search of the immediate area, then he looked at Dilbeck. “What now?”

“We follow in their footsteps, what else?” Dilbeck said.

Sharpe shrugged. He trailed behind Dilbeck as they walked quickly down the block. He was breathing heavily, occasionally pausing to spit out mouthfuls of dirty rain.

5

With the revolver in his jacket, Brinkerhoff went into the room where Ted Hollander lay. He closed the door quietly behind him, trying not to disturb the American; but Hollander was awake, alert, sipping milk through a straw. Hollander put his glass down on the bedside table and smiled. He thought that there was a curiously opaque expression in the Russian's eyes, as if something were badly out of place, something distressingly disjointed. Brinkerhoff sat on the chair by the bed.

“Okay,” Hollander said.

Brinkerhoff looked at him strangely.

“What's bugging you?” Hollander asked.

“It's a small matter,” Brinkerhoff said after a pause.

Hollander saw the misshapen lump in the jacket. It was unmistakable.
To Die in Havana
, he thought. It would have been a good drugstore title. He watched Brinkerhoff, wondering now why he felt no panic, no great desire to know what, if anything, had gone awry.

Brinkerhoff took the revolver out. He held it in the palm of his hand and looked at Hollander rather sadly.

“You're going to use that on me?” Hollander asked.

Brinkerhoff contrived a pale smile. “My undersecretary called. He is badly disturbed.”

“By what?”

“By you. By this whole thing.”

“You want to explain?”

“It's the total lack of response, Hollander. It makes him uneasy. In his experience, you see, people who choose to make the trip oneway from the U.S. to the Soviet Republic are usually the subject of considerable intelligence activity after the event. You know the kind of thing? It's an operation in undermining the credentials of the defector. The wires usually hum with all kinds of data. It's all perfectly standard in cases of defection.”

“Yeah,” Hollander said. He looked at the gun. He turned his face to the side, feeling the sunlight come through the window, warm on his flesh.

“In your case—” Brinkerhoff broke off.

“In my case you've heard nothing? Is that it?”

Brinkerhoff nodded. “It's odd.”

“They're trying to throw you, isn't that obvious?”

Brinkerhoff got out of the chair and shrugged.

“That may be,” he said. “But the risk is strong. You understand that?”

Hollander felt his hands become tight and, looking down, saw the upraised white bones of his bloodless knuckles. Go on, he thought. Use the gun, use it if you're going to.

“Our arrangement was for you to live in the Soviet Union,” Brinkerhoff said. “In return for the information you provided. Customary in such situations as these. You provided the material. We were ready to keep our part of the bargain—”

“But now?”

“It's too much of a risk, Hollander. How can I explain the silence from the Americans? Why aren't they singing about you? Why?”

“To confuse you. To make it seem like I'm not on the level—”

“We have the file. We can assess the information. But what do we do with you? What do we do if we find out that you are indeed a plant? My head would come rather swiftly under the ax. And the poor undersecretary, well, wouldn't he look bad? After all, he is my immediate superior—”

Hollander closed his eyes. “You want to save your own goddamn neck. And I'm just too much of a risk. Is that it? You don't trust me.”

“Look, whatever my own feelings, they don't matter. They don't mean a damn thing. I do trust you, as a matter of fact. But the undersecretary has left this matter to my own discretion, a situation that doesn't mean anything very much. He is telling me that I need to protect myself. Do you see?”

Hollander stared at the Russian. Shit, he thought. Oh, shit, to come this far, to come this far and to get no further, to be slain like some bewildered animal in a hospital room miles from anywhere—He wondered what it would be like. To die. He wondered if there might be a moment when, in that last sharp echo of pain, there would be the outraged panic of knowing that you are slipping away toward a point where there is no return … He turned his face away from Brinkerhoff.

He had a misted image of his kids in the rainy park, Anna trying to feed chewing gum to a duck, Mark staring at him with an expression of hurt, Jimmy with his hands in his pockets. He was suddenly overwhelmed with love. He was abruptly pained by the depth of the love. It was as if he saw all the mistakes, all the losses of his life create a jet stream behind him, and he couldn't stand it. He couldn't take it. He had made it one huge, unholy mess and, in his book, you didn't get a second chance at things. He felt he wanted to weep. But his eyes were dry, his throat tight, his life—in any real sense—already over and dead.

He looked at Brinkerhoff.

He raised one eyebrow. He thought: It's going to make the surgeon's work redundant.

Brinkerhoff fired the revolver. Once, twice.

He watched Hollander slump down the pillow, his body turning to one side. There were enormous bloodstains seeping through the fresh bandages. Brinkerhoff put the pistol back into his jacket. He went to the door, opened it, stepped into the corridor.

He felt a touch of sadness.

It was waste, necessary waste.

Still, he had the file and what it all came down to in the long run was that documents were more important than people. He had the file; he had erased the risk.

6

Inside the apartment building Thorne remembered how he had last felt when he had walked down past the white walls, the sharp fluorescent lights; afraid, afraid, it all seemed such a long time ago now. He paused at a right-angled turn in the corridor and looked at Marcia. When he spoke he did so quietly. “That door over there,” he said. “Number eighty-six.”

She looked in the direction of the door. It was painted a dull gray, exactly like all its neighbors. There was a cloying smell of disinfectant in the air.

“I want you to go over. Knock. Okay? When he opens the door I'll be right behind you.”

She moved toward the door.

Thorne, following, pressed his back against the wall and nodded his head. When the door was opened, he wouldn't be seen immediately. The virtue of surprise. He watched Marcia, noticing how small she appeared, tiny and fragile and anemic beneath the silent fluorescence. He shut his eyes. Fatigue, out on the edge of his awareness, was like some relentless tide that came and kept coming, harrying him. He looked at Marcia again. She raised her hand, knocked on the door.

Nothing.

She glanced at him, then she knocked again.

There was a sound from within. A shuffle, something was dropped, there was silence. And then another shuffling sound. The lock was drawn back, the door opened.

“Good to see you again.” Thorne stepped away from the wall.

The congressman swayed slightly, his stick fell from his fist, clattered on the floor. Thorne stepped into the hallway and, when Marcia followed him, he slammed the door. He pushed Leach softly against the wall. Then he picked up the stick and saw the congressman cringe, his shoulders stooping, some desperate fear in his eyes. Old, Thorne thought. Old and wasted.

“John,” and his voice was barely a whisper.

They went into the living room. The congressman slumped into a chair, his head inclined forward: if you had wanted a picture that epitomized defeat, Thorne thought, this was it.

“I didn't …” Leach said, his sentence fading.

“You didn't expect to see me again?”

The congressman shook his head. “Nobody told me you'd come back. Nobody told me.”

Thorne looked into the narrow kitchen. Then he glanced at Marcia, who had gone to the window. She reached up and pulled the drapes across. She turned on a lamp. The light in the room was pale. Like death, Thorne thought, watching the congressman. Like he was already dead.

“Nobody told me,” the congressman said.

“When I walked out of here you thought that was the end for me,” Thorne said. “Right? You said you wouldn't lift a fucking finger to help.”

Despite the fatigue, the growing sense of numbness at the center of his brain, Thorne felt an impulse to violence:
I want to hurt this wretched, sick old man. God help me
.

Marcia went into the kitchen, saying she would make coffee. Thorne heard the sound of a percolator being filled.

Leach raised his face and looked at Thorne wearily.

“What do you want? What the hell do you want?”

“To pass a little time, Congressman. Nothing more. Then I'll be on my way.”

Leach took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead with it. Thorne sat down on the arm of the sofa. He struggled out of his wet overcoat and threw it across a chair. The soles of his feet were damp, his shirt stuck to his chest, his hair was waterlogged now; a moment of dizziness passed over him, a moment in which his eyesight became blurred, his perception dim. Then it passed. It passed, but he felt weak.

He looked at the congressman, realizing his anger had undergone a change; the man was pitiful now, nothing more. Pitiful, beaten, standing at the very end of his life.

“I saw it,” Thorne said. “I saw what you tried to prevent me from seeing. I got to it.”

Leach looked at him. “I don't need to ask you what you're talking about, do I?”

Thorne shook his head. “I saw it, Congressman.”

Leach stuffed his handkerchief into his jacket. He undid the top button of his shirt, frowned, reached for his cane.

“Where are you going?” Thorne asked.

“I need a drink,” Leach said.

“Stay where you are,” Thorne got up from the sofa and went to the entrance to the kitchen. Marcia was pouring coffee. “Somewhere you'll find a bottle of Laphroaig. Pour a little, would you?”

“Don't forget the ice,” Leach said.

“The ice, right,” Thorne said. “The sacrilegious ice.”

He turned to the sofa. Leach, his head tilted slightly, watched him.

“So you saw it, Thorne. You saw it.”

“Yes—”

“And?”

“What do you think?”

The congressman smiled; his eyelids flickered.

“I think it must have astonished you, yes?”

“To put it mildly,” Thorne said.

“Suddenly you realize you know something that hardly anybody else in the whole goddamn world knows, something so far-reaching and so profound in all its implications that you didn't believe what you were seeing, right?”