Requiem for a Lost Empire (26 page)

   "It'll be easier to talk about her over there."

   I already knew what he was going to say. I had sensed it from his voice on the telephone. Then from his face. From his silence in the car. At moments the pain of what I was going to learn still seemed remediable-as if all it needed was for us to do a U-turn, dash to an airport, land in a city where your presence, even if under threat, even if improbable, could be divined at one of those addresses I could completely reconstitute from memory: the street, the house, the traces left by our presence there several years before. A second later I realized that Shakh was going to tell me about a death (for me your name and your face were not yet associated with this death) that had happened some time ago.

   He talked about it as we walked along a country road between two rows of bare trees, their trunks blue with lichen, engulfed in brambles. Someone who did not know him would have thought he was weeping. From time to time he wiped from his cheeks the melted flakes of the snow that had surprised us on our journey. But he spoke little and in a toneless voice. When his words broke off I again began to notice the whistling of the wind and the tramp of our feet on the sodden path. The pain made the world less and less recognizable. I saw myself walking beside an old man miles from anywhere, among lackluster fields, a man I knew to be on the run, at the end of his tether, who was at home nowhere, a man who was telling me, as he mopped the trickles of water from his face, that he now knew almost the exact date of your execution. But this precision only served to make more improbable the death he was announcing and the need to connect this death with you, still so intensely alive the previous day and now separated from us, separated from this cold spring morning by a year and a half of nonexistence. The path itself, which ran beside an old stone wall, was marked by unreality, for, according to what Shakh had just said, we must picture you passing this way more than twenty years before, at the start of your life in the West. What was also unreal was the notion that this very spot could have helped him to break the news.

   He told me the date of your death and now it was no longer possible to avoid linking you with this loss. The world became empty, thunderous, hollow. A place where your name rang out repeatedly, like the echo of a vain incantation. By a hasty reflex in the face of death, in deference to the proprieties, the image of a coffin surrounded by wreaths and weeping faces flashed into my mind. Shakh's voice began again, as if to sweep away the vision of this funereal pomp. He spoke of a death preceded by interrogations, tortures, violations. And of burial in a mass grave, among anonymous bodies.

   At that moment we emerged into a vast courtyard in front of an old farmhouse converted into a restaurant. I walked behind Shakh like an automaton, crossed the yard from one end to the other, passed very close by the crowd gathered around a bridal pair. I saw the guests with a clarity that hurt my eyes: a woman's hand, with veined fingers clutching a little patent leather purse; the bride's bare forearms, her skin rosy and covered in goose pimples; the closed eye, as if in sleep, of the young man filming the ceremony with a little camera. Everything about this gathering seemed so necessary and so absurd, as it moved slowly toward the restaurant's open door. Everything had a point, both the old fingers gripping the black leather, and the youthful arms shivering beneath the icy drops. And nothing could have been stranger. Just for a moment, in a notion that verged on madness, I thought it might be possible to join them, very simply to tell them of my grief. A man emerged from the crowd and seemed to be urging us to go in more quickly, then realized his mistake and adopted an air of offended surprise. The path continued around the farm building and led back into the avenue where Shakh had left the car. As we passed, a large gray bird stirred among the branches and launched out obliquely in a low, irregular flight over the emptiness of the fields studded with raindrops. I suddenly thought that to plunge into this springtime void, to vanish into its indifference, would be a salutary step so easy to take. A body crumpled up behind the bushes, the temple brown with blood, the arm flung out by the recoil from the gun. Shakh stopped, looked in the same direction as myself and seemed to guess my thought. His voice had the firmness you adopt when addressing a man who has drunk too much and needs to be reprimanded. "If she had talked we would not be here. Neither you nor I." Still drowning in the torpor of the void, I felt I was closer to that body than to this man speaking harsh words to me, closer to that imagined suicide than to myself. He swung round, started walking again and said in a muted voice, "I have the name and address of the man who turned her in."

   The death of someone close to you affects not the future but that immediate past you realize you have been living through in the futile pettiness of daily routine. Sitting next to Shakh, I noticed on the back seat the briefcase which several weeks previously had contained the technical documentation, whose market value he had told me with a smile. I remembered the tone of our meetings, their deliberate lightheartedness, the triviality of the days that had preceded and followed them. My fruitless speeches for the defense during the course of those social gatherings, the fat man peddling his cinematic trash, the business with Shakh's suitcase, the suitcase-bait that had amused me like something from a spy novel. These snatches must now be measured against your absence, against the impossibility of finding you anywhere in the world, against the infinity of this absence.

   Nor, doubtless, was it lost on Shakh that death is this infinite unit of measurement. Speaking to me of the man who had betrayed you, he mentioned a droll detail but pulled himself up at once. "He lives in Destin, Florida," he was saying. "I hope he doesn't speak French: a name like that would be enough to make you superstitious." He broke off, regretting his tone, and finished drily, "His office, by the way, is in a place called Saint Petersburg. You should feel at home there."

   Your death did not affect the future, for this imagined time, I now realized, was compressed into a single, very simple moment I had carried in my mind for years: in the crowd at a station, in a passing throng of faces, I met your eyes. I had never pictured any other future for us beyond that.

   From now on there was also my vision of an inert body slumped behind the bare thickets next to a country road. I could see myself like this and the comfort of such a way out was especially tempting because of its practical ease. One evening the agreeable weight of the pistol was cradled in my palm for a long time. Next morning, as I consulted my watch, it occurred to me that in these days emptied of meaning, only my meeting with Shakh at noon would mark a time, a date, and give the rest of this life a semblance of necessity.

   He spoke. His voice conjured up the little town of Destin, Florida, then a man, a former Russian who called himself Val Vinner, an ordinary turned agent, whose only distinguishing feature was to have betrayed you. His profile was coming together like a jigsaw puzzle from which several pieces were still missing. Prudent, ambitious, very proud of his success. Working for American intelligence, he ran the network that dealt with the transfer of scientists from the East. He had managed to persuade his new employers that importing a scientist whose head is crammed with secrets was more profitable than sending agents to glean the same secrets on the spot. Listening to Shakh, I had the strange impression that the incomplete mosaic formed by Vinner's life was becoming my own life, that this still-blurred shape was giving me a future.

   "He travels all the time as a procurer, especially in Eastern Europe," explained Shakh, "but there's a chance that during the spring break he'll spend a few days with his family. You should go the day after tomorrow at the very latest. Try to see him right away. He's very suspicious. You'll say you've come on behalf of one of his best friends. I'll give you his name. This friend is currently in China on a mission, virtually incommunicado. That gives you at least four days. If he resolutely refuses all contact, mention his mistress in Warsaw. In America that can be persuasive-"

   He broke off and stared at me, screwing up his eyes slightly.

   "Unless you've decided quite simply to liquidate him?"

   This question dogged me during the night. I did not know what I would do when I met Val Vinner. Extort a confession from him, blackmail him and so force him to justify himself at length, pitifully. See him tremble, humiliate him-or, as Shakh put it "quite simply" kill him? A pistol with a silencer, my armed hand concealed behind a map of Florida, the appearance of a lost tourist. Vinner, who is sitting in his car, agrees to help, opens the door, leans toward the map. "Yes, you're on the right road." Then he throws his head back and freezes in his seat. I lock the door and close it-he's sure to have smoked glass windows! During the course of that sleepless night there came a time when my brooding on all these methods of vengeance suddenly laid bare a hidden motive, the one I was trying to conceal from myself. In every night there comes a moment of great lucidity, of ruthless sincerity, from which one is generally protected by sleep. This time I had no protection. My thoughts were brutally exposed. There was nothing I could do against the admission that came back time and again, more and more clearly: I was going to America in the hope of hearing Vinner say that your death was not the long torment that Shakh had spoken of. That it was… an ordinary death. And that, in any case, I could not have prevented it, even if I had been at your side. That you had not suffered. That I was not answerable for this death to… To whom?

   I got up to interrupt the flood of these admissions. But their sharpness now acquired the force of a living voice: "You want to see this unfrocked spy in the hope that he'll grant you absolution. Like a good old-fashioned Orthodox priest."

   As the night was ending I dozed off into a sleep that retained the extreme clarity of that forced confession. But its lucidity turned into light and the edge of my grief into ice. The cold of a snowfall on a winter's day, of snow slowly chilling my brow. I saw again the wooden house you had often told me of, with its low front steps, whence one could see, beyond the fir branches, the shores of the frozen lake. After waking, I continued for a long time to experience the coolness of that day you had told me about, white and tranquil. In the aircraft, as I mentally fitted together all I knew about Vinner, playing over like chess moves all his possible reactions, I found myself from time to time far away in a fit of forgetfulness, on the shores of that lake, surrounded by the measured slumber of the snow-clad trees. At one moment, in a brief excess of grief, I thought I had grasped something which, expressed in words, faded and only told part of the truth I had sensed. "We could have lived together in that winter's day!" No, what I had just grasped went far beyond that imagined possibility. The moment I had glimpsed was shattered by words into shards of regret, remorse, hatred. I turned my thoughts once more, and with malicious joy, to the doses of mounting fear I should contrive to inject into my visits to Vinner. Then I accused myself of seeking exoneration, of secretly hoping for the account of a gentle death from him, even of wanting to kill him so as not to hear what he knew. Finally, to put an end to this verbal torture, I went back over my chess moves one by one.

   I recalled that, before leaving me, Shakh had uttered this sentence, of which only the first part had seemed helpful at the time: "If you don't get a grip on him instantly, during the first ten minutes, you've lost. From what I've been told, he's an eel." The rest of his words now came back to me and seemed even more important: "But whatever happens, don't forget that for… for her, it's all the same. The die is cast." Calling these words to mind, I told myself that, ever since that walk with Shakh along a path winding around an old farm, I had had the impression of living in some obscure afterlife.

6

   In my mind I had fashioned the town where Vinner lived out of the dark and humid stuff of the Parisian spring. I pictured the man himself dressed in an overcoat, his face clouded by rain and suspicion. Exhausted by sleepless nights, by my anticipation of our first meeting, I had not given a thought to the sun over the Gulf of Mexico. As we touched down, the light and the warm wind came surging into my imagined town, and the man in the somber overcoat was me. Traveling to Destin along the coast, I sensed the very particular atmosphere, at once carefree and nervous, of southern towns preparing for the holiday season. It could be detected in the noise made by a workman taking beach chairs out of a shed, in the smell of paint from the fresh lettering that promised a fantastic reduction for those dining early. At the hotel I rid myself of my Parisian clothes, like shameful and ridiculous witnesses beneath this clear sky.

   I went out at once, not so much from fear of missing Vinner (I did not even know if he was at home) as in order to forestall a new wave of doubts. I followed Shakh's advice to go directly, without telephoning, without wasting time on normal reconnaissance in the area. Certainly the atmosphere of beach resorts, where everything is designed to lighten the load of things, contributed to the ease with which, half an hour later, I found Vinner's house on the corner of a street. Not a grayish structure, the impregnable fortress my imagination had constructed from the damp stone of Parisian apartment buildings, but a small one-story villa, set back in a garden dominated by several clumps of young palm trees. Behind the metal gate, to the left of the narrow path that led to the house, there was a parked car with an open trunk, which a man, who had his back to me, was cleaning with a small vacuum cleaner, reminiscent of a watering can. I pressed the bell. The man turned, unplugged the machine, left it in the trunk and, instead of coming toward me, which would have seemed natural, walked over to a little sentry box made of pale bricks, which stood beside the gate and was almost entirely hidden beneath the leaves of a creeper. I heard his voice very close to my ear on the intercom and at the same moment noticed the dark, flat eye of the surveillance camera. The voice was slow, thickly American. As I explained who I was, I was hardly aware of what I was saying, dazed by the comical vision I had just seen: a fifty-year-old with close-cut hair, a corpulent man rendered almost square by a white short-sleeved shirt open to his chest, this man who had been running his vacuum cleaner over the carpet in the trunk and who was now greeting my explanations with long drawn-out "Okays," this man was Val Vinner! An almost mythical being, given the evil he had wrought and the scale of what he had, negligently, destroyed, and here he was parading himself in all the banality of this little paradise beneath the palm trees, in the domestic peace of a holiday morning.