Joseph Kanon - The Prodigal Spy

The air was still, not even a rustle of leaves. A crime story. But what if you were in it?

When Molly stirred in her chair, it felt like an interruption. “Well,” she said, pushing herself up, “I’ll let you two figure out who done it. I’m just a farm girl.” She looked toward the garden, where Anna was digging, then up at the clouds. “I’d say about an hour, if we’re lucky.”

They watched her move across the grass, waving to Anna.

“She’s a nice girl, your Molly.”

“My Molly?”

“She likes you,” his father said simply, a matchmaker’s tease that caught Nick off guard.

In spite of himself, he flushed. “Don’t complicate things.”

“A girl like that is never a complication. Your mother had it, that spirit.”

“She doesn’t have it now.” He looked down. Anna had been right. They were quarreling.

But his father sidestepped it, saving nothing. He put his hand on Nick’s shoulder, stroking it lightly, the way he used to when they sat together on the dock, waiting for fish.

“Do you still go to the cabin?” he asked idly.

“No. It was sold.”

His father nodded. “So. Every trace.” Then the hand stopped, just a weight now. “Will she see me, do you think?”

Why hadn’t he thought of this before? “Yes,” he said. They’d all see him. His mother, staring out of windows. Larry, who’d patched up their lives. All the carefully constructed years. Where would they meet, in the apartment? Nick tried to picture it, the tentative first words, but nothing came. And he realized, shocked at himself, that he didn’t want it to happen. He didn’t want him to come back, splintering things again. The old dream. And now that it might be real, like the weight of his father’s hand, he wanted to shake it off, walk away. But the hand was there, pulling him.

His father leaned back and sighed. “I’d like that,” he said dreamily. “What will I say?” A conversation with himself. “Where do you start? I don’t know how to start with you. What do you like for breakfast? What do you read? It seems silly, doesn’t it, not to know these things.”

Nick didn’t say anything. His father, too, seemed to retreat from the day, closing his eyes against the weak sunlight. Nick could hear Anna and Molly talking in the garden, a faint insect buzzing.

“Anna doesn’t know,” Nick said. “What we talked about this morning.”

“No. I told you, no one. It’s too dangerous for her.”

“Why dangerous?”

“If they thought she helped-” He let the thought hang.

“What about Molly?”

“Molly? There’s no danger to her. What does she know? That I wanted to see you, that’s all,” he said drowsily. “It’s good she likes you. It looks better.”

“You took a chance with her.”

“No. I checked.”

“What?”

“There are not so many Americans in Prague. We know who they are-the embassy staff, the journalists. We watch to see if they recruit Czechs, so there’s a list. I checked. She’s not working for them. A love affair.” He smiled, his eyes still closed. “At that age, there’s always a love affair. She was safe. You were the chance-if you would come. But you did. I knew. It doesn’t matter, you see, all the rest of it-what you like for breakfast. I knew you would come.”

Nick looked over to the garden at Molly’s face, fresh and guileless. A security check, just in case. In his father’s world, suspicion hung over everyone, like the permanent cloud cover.

Then, a new thought. “Who keeps a list?”

“Nick.” Indulgent, to a child. “We have our people too. That’s the way it works.”

But how exactly? Nick thought. Maids in the embassy? Repairmen going through desks? Somebody nursing a drink at a bar, all ears?

“Like Marty Bielak?”

His father frowned. “Who?”

“An American. He lives here. He was at the bar in the Alcron.”

“Bielak,” his father said, evidently remembering. “You talked to him?”

“No, he talked to me. Don’t worry-I didn’t say anything. Just a tourist. Is he one of yours?”

“Well, a Winchell,” his father said dismissively. “A legman. He collects items-do they still call them that, items? He worked for the radio. Then his wife left, last year, when people could go out. So now he’s a legman. To rehabilitate himself, I suppose. I met him once. He’s a believer. For him, still the workers’ paradise.”

“Then why does he need to rehabilitate himself?” Nick said, slipping into the language.

“They won’t trust him now. Unless she comes back, of course. Anyway, better avoid him-you don’t want to become an item.”

“But is it useful, what he does?”

“It gives them something to read. What else is there, Rude Pravo?”

Nick said nothing, and in the stillness that followed he could hear his father’s faint breathing. He looked over at the closed eyes, the lined face smoothing out with sleep. He had drifted off with a cigarette still in his hand, and Nick leaned over and gently slipped it from his fingers, taking a puff himself, familiar, like sharing a toothbrush. A lazy afternoon. But nothing was peaceful here, not even the torpid landscape, tense with rain.

He looked toward the garden, where Anna was planting. Why bother? Soon it would be overgrown, abandoned. But she didn’t know. If they thought she had helped- He felt the cigarette hot on his finger as the thought swept through him, stiffening him with dread. She didn’t know because she wasn’t going. His father was going to leave her, walk away from this life the way he’d walked away from theirs. Leaving everything behind. Only this time it would be Nick on the other end in the phone booth. That’s what he was being asked to do.

He let the cigarette fall, staring ahead, not trusting himself to look at his sleeping father. The same crime all over again. He saw his mother weeping on the sofa. But Anna wouldn’t be rescued by a rich man. She’d need to be rehabilitated-to denounce him, make them trust her. He watched her work, bending and straightening, unaware, and he could feel the heat in his face. We have a life here. But it would go too, the dim cottage and the jars of food, whatever peace they’d managed to scrape together. How could he do it? But how could he have done it the first time?

Nick got up and moved away from the chairs. The lawn sloped west, into the sun, and for an instant he wondered if he could keep going, all the way through the barbed wire, until he was home. In Prague they kept reminding you they were west of Vienna, Molly had told him, as if their history had violated a logic of geography. It was forty, fifty miles to the border, not far. He could simply walk through. But his father needed someone to help. A small favor. A message. And then it would never stop, one step after another until everyone was swept up in the turmoil again. Not history, just his father’s endless mistake.

As he reached the trees he could hear the sky begin to rumble, a sound effect. He followed the path down to the water, pushing past bushes until the house was hidden behind him, out of sight. He stopped. What if the message were never delivered? A small betrayal, for everyone’s sake. He started down again, with something like relief. It was that easy. Stop it finally. His father would never know. But he’d wait, expecting a call, some signal. That’s how it would end, waiting, wondering why nobody came. The way Nick had waited. Could he do that to him? I don’t want to die here, Nick.

The water was a crick, just as he had said, channeled by a low bank. Nick picked up a few small stones and began throwing them into the stream, listening for the familiar plops. He’d have to tell him, not let him waste what life was left here. Don’t excite him, Anna had said, but which was worse? You can’t expect me to do this. But his father had expected it, sure of him. So he’d sent for him, finally. That had been the point all along. Not to see him; to get an accomplice. He threw another stone, staring at the ripples.