Our Woman in Moscow(33)
Sasha said clearly, All right, I’ll be there in half an hour, and the receiver rattled into its cradle. His footsteps treaded the floorboards back toward her. She stretched her hands above her head in hopes of enticing him, but he just sat on the edge of the bed, naked and somber, and said, Well, it’s begun.
She didn’t need to ask what had begun. Nor did she need to ask why he wasn’t surprised.
Ruth
June 1952
New York City
Remarkably enough, the house telephone rings precisely eleven minutes after I hang up the line from the Empire Hotel—remarkably, because I can’t think of a method other than rocket propulsion that could have made the journey in so little time. Like many of Sumner Fox’s feats, it remains an unexplained miracle.
“Gentleman to see you, Miss Macallister,” says the doorman, perfectly neutral because I tip well at Christmas. “A Mr. Fox?”
“Send him right up, please, Mike.” I smooth my hair and tighten the sash on my dressing gown, because regardless of the gentleman’s beauty—let’s admit it, he has none—I’ve always believed in presenting an orderly face to the world, particularly when my nerves are as shredded as they are in this moment. Then I light a cigarette, pace across the room, stub out the cigarette, think better of it, and light another. You see what I mean.
At last, the doorbell. I fly from living room to foyer and fling the door open. Sumner Fox stands in his dark suit and dark tie; the hallway lighting makes his bony face look jaundiced.
“You should have checked the peephole first.”
“For God’s sake.” I step back. “Won’t you come in, Mr. Fox.”
He’s so wide, he practically turns sideways to fit his shoulders through the door. I lead him into the living room and ask if he wants a drink or something. He shakes his head no. I feel a pang of disappointment. My head’s throbbing, my arms and legs have that heavy, sick feeling that combines the worst effects of a hangover and a sleepless night. What I need is a couple of aspirin and a Bloody Mary. Or is it the other way around?
“Sit, please,” I tell him. “I want to make a few things clear.”
He waits for me to sit first before he finds the indicated armchair and lowers his body onto it. As I said, he isn’t especially tall—I would say he only just clears six feet, if he clears them at all. He’s simply big. Even his thighs have a thick, meaty diameter, especially crammed between the arms of a chair like that, a hundred years old, built for men of elegant, aristocratic frame. He rests his hands on his knees and cocks his head a few degrees, to indicate I should begin when ready.
I knot my hands in my lap. “First things first. I am not snitching on Sasha Digby. What I’m telling you, I’m telling you so you can make my sister and her children safe. You can’t take down a single thing I say and use it against her husband in a court of law, or whatever it is you mean to do with him, if you find them. If I agree to help, you leave him alone.”
“I can’t promise that, but I can promise this conversation is off the record, so far as our investigation goes.”
“I guess that’s fair.”
“Is there anything else?”
“Yes. You go first. I want to know why you’re here right now, instead of four years ago or next month. Something’s happened to my sister, hasn’t it?”
His thumb moves, rubbing the material on the side of his knee. “Yes.”
“They’re in Moscow. Four years ago, when they disappeared, they went to the Soviet Union.”
“What makes you say that?”
I don’t answer. He nods and stands to look out the window at the sunrise, which has reached a tremendous zenith. The colors illuminate his face. I wait for him to think things over, weigh the risks versus the possible return, calculate how much he has to give in order to get something worthwhile back from me.
Without turning from the window, he speaks.
“On the fifteenth of November 1948, as you know, Sasha Digby failed to turn up at his office at the American embassy in London. There was no answer at his home telephone, nor did anyone answer the door at the family home in Kensington. Diplomatic staff established that neither he nor any member of his family had been seen since the previous Friday. The FBI was then alerted, but discovered no leads at all, not the slightest confirmed trace of them.”
“I remember it well. A couple of nice gentlemen turned up at my apartment building at Thanksgiving and gave me the third degree. So tell me something I don’t already know.”
“I can’t do that,” he says. “Not unless you tell me what you do know.”
“Ah. Clever.”
He turns his head to look over his shoulder. “Miss Macallister?”
I reach for the pack of cigarettes on the sofa table. “I first met Sasha Digby in Rome, right before the Italians entered the war. As I’m sure you’re aware, he was working at the US embassy as a junior diplomat, alongside my brother, Harry. He had just rescued my sister from a traffic accident outside the Borghese gardens, that’s how I met him.”
“He was previously unknown to you or your sister?”
“We might have been introduced at some party or another, but I didn’t take any notice of him until I saw him at the hospital afterward. As I’m sure you can imagine, it was a harrowing day, and that night Harry and I took him out for dinner and drinks to thank him for what he’d done. Afterward, he came home with me and spent the night.”