Our Woman in Moscow(107)

It will be all right, I tell myself. In a matter of hours, we’ll be safe on that boat, and Iris will have all the doctors and medicines and rest she needs.

Fox will take care of us. Fox takes care of everybody. There he is now, driving this car confidently along the highway, as if he knows every road in Latvia like the pattern of lines on the palm of his hand. And I expect he does. I expect he memorized that map before he even left New York.



At last, the sun starts to set. The golden light takes on a salmon hue, and the streaking clouds seem to be holding their breath. I think Fox is traveling on secondary roads, which are pitted with holes and bumps and the scars of war. Claire is a dead weight in my lap, and now Jack leans against my shoulder, mouth open and drooling a little on my crisp navy jacket. I turn my head just in time to catch Fox looking at me in the rearview mirror, before his gaze turns back to the road before him.

“How much farther?” I ask softly.

“Not long. We’re getting near the coast.”

“But how many minutes?”

“About twenty.”

Some words come to my lips, but I bite them back.

“How’s Iris?” I say instead.

He glances at her. “Holding strong.”

Which means she’s alive, I guess. Her head leans back against the top of the seat—her eyes are closed. Is her skin flushed, or do the colors of sunset melt on her beautiful skin, that creamy wonder I always admired and often envied? Nobody has a skin like Iris, as flawless as alabaster, not a line or a crease, each emotion ebbing and flowing along its surface. Now it’s perfectly still. The baby lies secure in his swaddle on the seat between them. He doesn’t make a sound. The only noise in the car—apart from the faint rasp of respiration, from my soft questions and Fox’s low replies—comes from the trunk, where Digby rustles and thumps like a man in a fever dream.

Well, let him thrash.

I look back at the rearview mirror, just in time to catch Fox watching me again. This time he holds my gaze for a beat or two, because we’re the only ones left awake inside this peculiar world—even Kip dozes off against the window glass—and because it seems we might be in love.



At last Fox presses the brakes and turns off onto an unpaved road. The car lurches and wallows, waking everybody up. Grunts and groans float through the back of the seat from the trunk. Gregory starts to cry and Iris finds the strength to gather him up in her arms.

“Poah Thathdy,” Claire says solemnly around her thumb, which she’s stuck into her mouth.

“Poor Daddy,” I agree.

“We’re driving on sand!” Jack announces, and sure enough, when I look through the window at the blue-tinted world, that sliver of time between sunset and twilight, I see nothing but pale dunes and tall seagrass.

“You’re sure this is the place?” I ask.

“Yes,” Fox replies.

He stops the car and tells us to wait.

“Wait for what? I want to get out of here. I need some air.”

“I’m just going to scout ahead for a moment. Could you pass me the flashlight under the seat?”

Claire wriggles onto the floor of the car and finds it for him. It’s funny how the kids just trust him, this stranger who killed a man and then kidnapped them in a KGB car. I hope they didn’t see him do the deed. No doubt Fox did his best to conceal it from them.

“Thank you,” he says gravely to Claire. He opens the door and lights the flashlight, covering the bulb with his palm so it’s not so bright. Before he leaves, he ducks his head back in and says to me, “There’s a gun in the glove compartment if you need it.”



Do I need to mention that—among other things—Fox showed me how to fire a gun? It was the day before we left for Moscow. We borrowed Orlovsky’s car and drove in bizarre zigzags through the city for an hour to throw off any possible tail. (Who’s going to tail us? I asked, and Fox just shrugged and said you never know, you should always assume somebody is watching you.) At last, just as I was about to ask him to pull over so I could throw up my breakfast in the gutter, we zoomed out of the city and wound our way into the hills somewhere, until Fox decided we were far enough from any living thing and pulled over.

We used a tree for a target. I didn’t know a thing about guns, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t have a good eye and a steady hand. Fox showed me how to aim it and fire it, how to load more bullets if I needed to. I said I hoped I wouldn’t need to fire the thing at all, and Fox sat me down and opened up a couple of bottles of lemonade and delivered me this lecture on how guns were a last resort—they were like an admission you had failed at the finer arts of espionage. But if he failed, and I failed, then he sure as the devil didn’t want me to die for it. He said this sincerely, and I believed him. Then we packed up our little picnic and went back to Rome.

Now we sat in the gloaming on a sand dune on the Baltic coast somewhere—and yes, I could find the Baltic Sea on a map, but only because I’d spent four years poring over those charts of Europe that appeared daily in the newspapers throughout the war. I pondered whether I should reach over the seat and retrieve that gun from the glove compartment, just in case, even though I hated the cold, lethal feel of a gun in my hand, the terrible foreboding that something might go wrong and I’d end up killing somebody, possibly myself.