Our Woman in Moscow(62)

“You mean me? I’m the solution?”

“If you’d stayed put in New York, as I asked, I would have had the opportunity to discuss this with you there. Thank God our man was keeping a close eye on you. You might have compromised the whole operation if you’d managed to get any further along.”

“What operation?”

“This one,” he says. “In which Iris Digby’s sister applies for special permission to travel to Moscow in order to care for Mrs. Digby during the weeks surrounding the delivery of her expected baby, an ordeal with which Mrs. Digby has a history of serious complications. Mrs. Digby will then be transported out of Moscow to receive medical treatment at a clinic in Riga, Latvia, in the company of her family. On their way to this clinic, the family will rendezvous with a ship off the coast of Latvia, in the Baltic Sea. That’s just the bare bones, naturally.”

“Naturally,” I say faintly.

“We’ll go over every aspect of the operation. I want you familiar with all the details, the contingencies. Once we get to Moscow—”

“We?”

He clears his throat. For the first time, he looks away from me—at my ear, possibly, or else some point beyond my ear.

“We recognized immediately,” he says, “that the complexity and potential danger of the operation—the knowledge of tactics and procedure—required an experienced agent to accompany and . . . well . . . and direct you.”

“I see. And where on earth could they find such an agent? I can’t imagine.”

Fox turns back to look on me straight. “Can you live with that?”

I look down at the passport in my hand, which has my picture in it. “But how exactly are you supposed to get permission to travel to the Soviet Union? And how . . . how are we supposed to . . .”

My voice trails off, because I’ve just realized that the name printed inside the passport is not my own. Not altogether, at any rate.

“I’ll be undercover,” he says. “As your spouse.”





Iris





August 1948

Dorset, England



At noon on the first day of August, a horse and cart ambled up the long drive to Honeysuckle Cottage under a blazing sun.

“Welcome to the land of petrol rationing!” Iris called out to Aunt Vivian, who sat in front next to Philip Beauchamp holding the reins. The three small girls waved frantically from among the suitcases piled in the box.

“Absolutely charming!” Aunt Vivian called back. In the next instant she reached back for one of her offspring, a towheaded monster attempting to climb over the edge. “Pepper! Bad girl!”

Iris hadn’t met either of the two younger girls, and Tiny—the oldest—was only a year old when Ruth and Iris left for Rome, just starting to toddle about and speak with an elegant lisp. Aunt Vivian, on the other hand. Aunt Vivian was her mother’s younger sister, who’d parlayed her wit and her long-limbed, blond beauty into a marriage with none other than Charles Schuyler III, scion of one of New York’s most prestigious families, an eligible bachelor if there ever was one. Everyone had whispered about what a fine match Aunt Vivian had made, as if this were the previous century and Aunt Vivian was some pert, pretty miss from the country, marrying above her station. Well, maybe she was. But Iris would always be loyal to Aunt Vivian. Say what you would—and people said plenty—Aunt Vivian had always stood in like another mother to Ruth and Iris, or maybe more like a worldly older sister.

Now she hauled the wriggling Pepper into her lap and gathered her pocketbook and hatbox while Philip set the brake and leapt off the box to help her down.

“Thank you,” Aunt Vivian said in that impeccable voice, more lockjaw than the toniest Long Island heiress. She dropped Pepper on the grass like a sack of unwanted potatoes and turned to lift Little Viv out of the cart. Iris ran forward to help Tiny. From inside the house, the boys came thundering onto the drive and stopped dead at the sight of the three blond girls in their neat matching dresses and Mary Jane shoes. Kip scratched his head. Jack scuffed his bare feet on the gravel.

“Boys! Come say hello to your cousins!” Iris called out.

“My God,” said Aunt Vivian, by way of greeting, “it’s like the OK Corral. How are you, darling? You look wonderful, all pink and plump. You’re not with child again, are you?”

“Of course not!” Iris gasped. She glanced at Philip as she returned Aunt Vivian’s embrace.

“Good. Nothing spoils your summer like a bun in the oven. This must be Cornelius.”

“Kip!” said Kip stoutly, holding his ground.

“Is that so? Kip it is, then.” She shook his hand and turned to Jack. “And this is little John.”

“It’s Jack, you old biddy!” Jack shouted. “Ma’am.”

“Jack! For shame!”

“No, he’s absolutely right. I am an old biddy, as far as a three-year-old boy’s concerned, anyway. Thank God the older fellows take a more liberal view. So this is Honeysuckle Cottage, is it? Very attractive.”

Aunt Vivian shaded her eyes with her hand and took in every detail of the rambling stone house, the overgrown garden, the distant view of the sea. In her mind, she was probably calculating its worth—a habit the Schuylers would have considered unspeakably gauche, if they knew. Maybe they did. They hadn’t exactly welcomed the courtship, after all. The Walkers might have done well in the postwar boom, but they’d lost most of their fortune in the Crash and Aunt Vivian shouldn’t have stood any chance with one of the original Knickerbocker families, the very definition of old New York society. Lucky for her, though, Uncle Charlie was apparently afflicted with the romantic streak that was the downfall of many a Schuyler man, and he had fallen in love with Aunt Vivian at some party during the winter season of 1935. By June, he was absconding regularly from the Schuyler compound in East Hampton—The Dunes, they called it—to the Walker family home in Glen Cove, in order to improve their acquaintance away from disapproving eyes.