“Great man,” Anna said. She passed out the mugs. “Such talk,” she said to his father, the words a kind of clicking of the tongue. Then she put the empty beer bottle on the tray, looked at them worriedly, and turned back to the house.
“She’s offended?” Nick said.
“No,” his father said. “She thinks the trees have ears, like all good Czechs. Someone’s always listening.” He sipped the tea. “At Stalin’s funeral, several thousand people died. Trampled. In the crowd, to say goodbye. To the man who tried to murder them.”
“There’s no one like that now,” Molly said quietly.
“Now? No. Petty crooks. Bureaucrats. So much for the theory. I was wrong. They were aberrations, the Stalins. Great forces, great men-such melodrama. And all along, what was it? A crime story.”
Nick looked up at him.
“Of course, it’s interesting,” his father said, gazing back to Nick. “To solve the crime.”
“That’s what Wiseman says.”
“Yes, well, he should know.” He smiled slightly. “Maybe it’s a hazard of the profession. He worked for the British, you know. SIS.” He caught Nick’s look. “No, not now, during the war. Everybody did. He must have seen plenty of crimes. All in a good cause, of course. They’re always in a good cause. Even Stalin’s, who knows? People thought that. Sometimes even the victims thought that-it gave them a reason why it was happening to them.” — He shrugged. “History.”
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.”
