The Diplomat's Wife(112)
“I don’t think he hit anything major.” He grimaces. “I may have broken my shoulder, though.”
“When you didn’t move, I was afraid that…”
“I think I just bumped my head when we fell.”
“Thank goodness you received my message and made it in time. Simon was a traitor, Paul. It was him all along.” Suddenly I feel very foolish.
“You couldn’t possibly have known,” he says, reading my mind. “Where is he now?”
“Dead. Dava shot him.”
“Dava, the nurse from Salzburg?” he asks. I nod. “I was wondering who the woman with him was. She was in on it, too?”
“It’s a long story. Apparently it was all a deliberate plan set up by the Russians to have me use my contacts to find Marcelitis. And there’s something else.” I take a deep breath. “The plane crash, it wasn’t an accident. Simon arranged it deliberately, to keep us apart.”
I watch his face as he processes the information, trying to grasp the full extent of the damage and pain Simon had caused. Then he shakes his head and the shadow lifts from his eyes. “He’s gone now and he can’t hurt us anymore.” He reaches out to Rachel, who is trying to crawl away. “Now, isn’t it about time that you introduced me to my daughter?”
EPILOGUE
I stand on the deck of the ocean liner, looking out at a flock of gulls that dive low to the water, searching the wake for fish. Behind me, the coast of England grows smaller. A chilly breeze blows across the deck and I draw my coat more closely around me.
“Mama!” a voice calls. Behind me I turn to see Rachel toddling unsteadily toward me, bulky in her winter coat. Paul follows, his arm still wrapped in a sling.
“Hello, darling.” I stoop to pick up Rachel, who seems to grow heavier by the day. She babbles animatedly, pointing at the gulls. I study her face for the hundredth time, wondering if she has any memory of what happened. But her eyes are bright and clear.
Rachel turns in my arms and strains toward an enclosed glass area about ten meters away where a bunch of children sit at tables, drawing and painting. “You want to go play?” She nods.
“I’ll take her,” Paul offers, taking Rachel from me with his good arm. I watch as he carries Rachel over to the play area and speaks with the governess in charge. A moment later, he returns to me. “She’ll be fine playing with the other children.”
I smile. “I know.” In the weeks since we were reunited, Paul has been as nervous as a new father, scarcely letting Rachel out of his sight. I, too, have been watching her more closely since that night at the airfield, waking in the middle of the night and tiptoeing to her in the darkness, touching her to make sure that she is still there.
I turn back to face the water, and Paul wraps his arm around me, resting his chin on the top of my head. More than a month has passed since the confrontation at the airport with Simon. We buried him in a private graveside ceremony in his family plot at a Jewish cemetery west of London on a rainy Sunday morning, just the rabbi, Rachel and myself, Paul, Delia and Charles standing a respectful distance behind. At first, I had not wanted to go. Simon was a murderer. Every single thing he had said or done since I met him had been a lie. In the end, it was Paul who convinced me to go. I looked at him in amazement. His entire unit had died because of Simon. “For closure,” he explained. “I mean, I hate him, too. But we should go for Rachel. Simon is the only father she has known until now and someday she will want to know things.”
So in the end we went. As his casket was lowered into the ground my rage burned white hot. How could he have done this? He killed so many innocent men. He played with our lives, made us nothing more than pawns in his game. The rabbi passed me a small handful of dirt, and as I threw it into the grave, my anger began to wane. You lost, Simon, I thought, feeling strangely triumphant. Then, staring down into the dark hole, my curiosity burned. There were so many things I wanted to know about what had happened and why he had done it, questions to which I would never get answers. Suddenly I realized that it did not matter. “Y’isgadal, v’yis’kadash,” the rabbi began. As I joined him in the Mourner’s Kaddish, I did not pray for Simon. I prayed for my parents and Rose, for Jacob and Alek and all those I carried with me. The years I spent with Simon would forever be part of the tapestry of my life, but I would not let it destroy the good. My voice grew stronger as I thanked God for sustaining me and bringing me to this place. When the prayer ended, Paul stepped forward and took my hand, and he, Rachel and I walked slowly away together.
Dava survived her gunshot wound and agreed to cooperate with the government in exchange for amnesty, a reduced sentence. “It’s actually better this way,” Paul told me a few days earlier as we packed up the house. “There won’t be a public trial.” In fact, somehow the whole incident had been kept out of the media, though I knew that the scandal of Simon’s death and my departure would be whispered about in diplomatic circles for years. “And hopefully we’ll learn the full extent to which the communists had infiltrated the British government,” he added.
Hopefully, I think now, shivering. We learned a great deal more about Simon in the investigation following his death, how he had been targeted by the communists for recruitment while a student at Cambridge, invited to Moscow by a college classmate for spring vacation. It was not hard to imagine Simon, alone and in need of money after his father’s death, being drawn in, warmed by the prospect of being important and needed. There he had taken on the identity Dmitri Borskin, met Dava. Later another diplomat, also secretly working for the Soviets, had helped him secure his place at the Foreign Office.