Joseph Kanon - The Prodigal Spy

“Molly,” she said to Anna, shaking her hand too.

Anna placed her hand on Nick’s father’s sleeve, familiar and affectionate, and said something in Czech. Then she got in the car and started around the tank, noisily shifting gears.

“What did she say?” Nick asked.

“Not to be too long. I thought I’d show you the sights. We don’t want to travel in convoy.” He walked toward the passenger door.

“Why not? Do people follow you?”

“No.” He smiled. “Force of habit, that’s all.”

Nick started the car. “Where to?”

“Just drive around. Head for the castle.”

“Can I see where you live?”

“It’s just up here. Up Holeckova. We’ll come round the other way. We don’t want to surprise anyone.”

Nick drove along the river, then climbed the steep hill to Hradcany. His father said nothing, glancing in the rearview mirror.

“I suppose she’s my stepmother,” Nick said, and then, when his father didn’t answer, “How did you meet?”

“At the institute. In Moscow. She was an archivist.”

“When was this?”

“Well, when? Fifteen, sixteen years ago.” Nick counted backward No, not right away. A decent interval.

“Do you love her?” he said, surprised at his own prurience. But how else could he ask it?

His father looked at him, then back at the street. “I married her. We’ve had a good life. I owe her this.” He motioned his hand to take in the city. “I never would have got out of Moscow otherwise. She’s a Czech national.” He paused. “I loved your mother. It’s different.”

Nick looked straight ahead at a church with several towers, green copper domes. “How long have you been here?”

“Just a year. She retired, you see, so they let us settle here. Kind of a gold watch. Ordinarily you have to stay put. But I guess they knew I wasn’t in any shape to worry about, so why not?”

“What’s wrong with you?” Nick said quietly. “Is it cancer?”

“No, my heart. I’ve had one operation, but it doesn’t seem to have done any good. That reminds me.” He took out a plastic vial and opened it. A different pill from the one last night. “Thins the blood,” he explained. “Of course, if you cut yourself you have a hell of a time, because it won’t clot. Fix one thing and something else goes.” He swallowed the pill without water. “Anyway,” he said, steering away from the subject, “we came to Prague. My gold watch too, I guess.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“Hitler thought so too. He made it an open city. That’s why it’s still beautiful-no bombs. Imagine, having Hitler to thank for this.”

“What’s Moscow like?”

“It’s like Brooklyn. Everyone there thinks it’s special and you can’t imagine why.”

Nick smiled. The same rhythm.

“At first I couldn’t get used to the quiet,” his father said. “It’s very quiet for a big city. You never hear an ambulance or a fire truck. I don’t know why. Not much traffic. And then in the winter the snow muffles everything. Sometimes I used to open the window and just listen to the quiet. It was like being deaf. You think you want quiet, and then when you get it-” He paused. “But after a while you get used to it. Like everything else.” He took out a cigarette and rolled down the window. “The funny thing about that was in the bad old days, they used to send the cars at night, so no one would know. But it was so quiet everyone did know. You’d hear a car in the street-you couldn’t miss it-and you’d know it was an arrest. The whole block. Maybe they planned it that way. You didn’t go back to sleep after that. You’d just lie there, waiting to hear the next car. But that was before, when Stalin was alive. Turn here by the church. We’ll swing around the Strahov.”

Nick said nothing, imagining the nights, now just an anecdote. People talked about the knock on the door, but it had been something else, a car motor idling in a quiet street. No screaming, no people being dragged out, just the faint sound of a car door being shut, a deaf man’s terror.

“Were you ever arrested?”

“No. Of course, I was debriefed. That took months. I still don’t know where. But after there was a flat. In the Arbat. Two rooms-a palace, then. And a job. They gave me a medal.”

Nick heard the tone, a hint of pride, and was disconcerted. Was he supposed to congratulate him?

“What kind of job?” he said, not sure again how to ask. “Did you-work for them?”

“As an agent, you mean?” his father said, almost amused. “No. Who would I spy on? The diplomats, the journalists — they were already taken care of. There wasn’t anybody else. Just the defectors. We kept to ourselves-maybe we were kept to ourselves, I don’t know. For a while I worked with Maclean on International Affairs. The magazine,” he said to Nick’s unspoken query. “Like your Foreign Affairs. I think with the same level of accuracy. A nice man. A believer, you know. Still. But the others-” He let the phrase drift off. “Not exactly people you want to spend the weekend with. Besides, I was trying to learn Russian, not speak English. I was never very good at languages. I still can’t speak Czech, not really.”

“I thought you could.”

“You did? Oh, the committee. No, I never could. I picked up a few words from your grandparents. But they tried not to speak around me. They wanted me to be-” He paused, framing the words. “An all-American boy.” Nick said nothing, letting the thought sit there. “I was, too. I had a paper route. I still fold a paper like that, like I’m going to throw it on a porch. Sixty subscribers-a lot for then. The things you remember.”

Nick heard the fade in his voice and resisted its pull. “Too bad about the language. It would have come in handy,” he said lightly, indicating the street.

“Well, Anicka takes care of all that. That’s a little like being deaf too, when you can’t speak the language. People talk to you and you just look. You even get to like it, not hearing things. When I first got to Moscow, I would spend days not hearing anything. It was quiet. Like the streets.”

The sound, Nick thought, after a door had closed.

They had made the circle and were coming back down Holeckova. “Slow down a little if you want to see it. Where I live. Third building there on the left. The white one. Not too slow,” his father added, automatically putting his elbow on the window to cover the side of his face.

It was a multistory apartment building with simple art moderne lines in a section of the street that must have been developed before the war, when straight edges and glass were still a style. The white was tired now, but had escaped the cracks and watermarks of the newer buildings across the river, put up on the cheap. It was set back from the street, reached by a flight of concrete steps set into the hill. There was nothing remarkable about it at all, except that his father lived there.

“We were lucky to get it,” his father said. “The views are wonderful. Not the Old Town, but then the plumbing’s better. Two bathrooms.”

Nick glanced quickly at him, feeling again a peculiar sense of dislocation. He was in Prague with a ghost, discussing real estate. He noticed the hand at the side of the face.

“Does someone really watch the house?”

“Or do I just imagine it?” his father said wryly. “No, the Czechs take a look from time to time. The STB. You see, to them I’m a Russian. They want to know what I’m doing here.”

Nick took this in, toying with it. A Russian. They passed the Soviet tank again and headed across the river.

“What did they give you a medal for?”

“Services to the state. All of us got one. Mostly for going there. Once they’ve brought you in, they don’t know what to do with you, so they give you a medal. It’s cheap and it gives you something to hold on to. So you don’t wonder why you’re not doing anything anymore. They don’t trust foreigners-they can’t help it, it’s in the bone. After the magazine, I got the job at the institute, so at least they thought I wasn’t going to do any damage. Some of the others-English lessons, make-work.”