“You okay?” Rémy asked, his hand clutching Talbot’s shoulder, eyes intense and searching.

  “I’m okay today. Okay because you two are here.”

  “Well, then. I will man the grill tonight,” he announced, withdrawing the pepper, cognac and cream he planned to use to prepare steak au poivre. Caroline cheered in anticipation and he laughed, reaching to pat her cheek.

  “I know, my sweet, you can already taste it, eh?”

  After setting the steaks in the marinade, Rémy said he was going to scoot next door for a moment to check on the townhouse they still owned. The tenants—a revolving cast of single college students and interns—had reported a trail of water on the ground floor that needed investigation. He didn’t think it would take long—not as long as the steaks would need to marinate.

  “Prepare my drink, Talbot. I’ll be right back.” He headed back out the door.

  En route to the bar cart, Talbot detoured by the Hi-Fi cabinet and put on a Perry Como record. The needle dropped and after the merest scratch, music filled the house, restoring a bit of normalcy to the proceedings. Talbot stood listening, snapping along to the opening bars of “Route 66.”

  “Wish I could head out on Route 66 right about now,” he called to Caroline.

  She gave a sympathetic nod as she assembled the salad. “I bet you do.”

  He embarked, then, on his bartending duties, preparing a bourbon and Coke for Rémy and delivering a gin and tonic to Caroline, leaning against the counter to watch her tear the lettuce and chop the carrots. When the record transitioned into “Mood Indigo,” he pulled her into his arms and swept her slowly across the kitchen floor. She acquiesced to the moment, heartened to see this Talbot, her old friend, moving in his smooth, self-assured way. She relaxed into his arms, her cheek on his. When she pulled back at the song’s final notes, Talbot’s eyes were closed, fat tears threading down his face.

  “Takes me back to the war,” he said, shrugging. “Simpler times. We knew exactly who the enemy was.” He released her and said he would set the table.

  . . .

  Rémy’s visit next door took longer than he’d forecast, his brow creased when he returned.

  “Might be a bigger problem than I thought,” he said.

  “An expensive problem?” Caroline asked.

  “Hope not. We’ll see. I’ll need to spend a little time over there in the next few days.”

  “Rémy, my friend,” Talbot began, “wish I could help, but the only place I’m allowed to go is to my lawyer’s office.”

  “Not your problem, old man, and nothing we need to worry about tonight. Let’s just enjoy one another and our little feast. Bring my drink to the patio and I’ll get started.”

  Within the hour, they were seated and inhaling their dinners, the steaks so tender, Talbot said, he hardly had to chew. They pushed their chairs back from the patio table as dusk descended, the air still and warm, at the cusp of summer.

  “Grilled to perfection, Rémy. Thank you,” said Talbot. “Feels like I’ve eaten at a five-star restaurant.” Caroline nodded in agreement, rising to refill their glasses and retrieve the dessert.

  Rémy placed a hand on his chest and gave a small, appreciative nod. “Avec plaisir,” he said. When Caroline returned with the profiteroles, he reached out and pulled her into his lap, wrapping an arm around her. “I wish Eleanor could have been here—like the old days—before kids, before…”

  “Before complications,” Talbot offered.

  “Indeed. Yes. Before complications.” Rémy lifted his glass. “Here’s to our friendship,” he began, taking a long pause before he continued. “And here’s to things becoming uncomplicated in the months ahead—to the facts emerging and getting past all of this.”

  “Yes,” agreed Talbot. “Here’s to the truth in all things.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Friday, June 24, 1960

  Arlington, VA

  None of his tenants had been home when Rémy went to inspect his townhouse. There was no leak, but there was unquestionably something that needed immediate attention. Unlocking the townhouse door, he moved down the hall to the bedroom that shared the longest wall with the Bentleys’ home. Making his way to the closet, he pushed aside the blouses and skirts that belonged to the inhabitant of the room, exposing a cabinet door embedded in the wall. His tenants understood this was a fire safe that held documents the Auclairs once kept in a safe deposit box but could now keep here, to save from having to pay the bank month after month. Given the tenant turnover, he doubted any of the current residents even knew it was here.

  But it was a recording device, not a safe, tucked inside that cabinet. With the briefcase now miles away, the machine no longer served a purpose. There was no transmitter to trigger a recording and given the intensity of the investigation of Talbot, Rémy had been ordered to remove and destroy the tape. Dismantling the taping system would require a more complicated intervention he would undertake in the coming days.

  After nearly fifteen years in the United States, marriage to the quintessentially American Caroline, three happy children, a job that enabled him to own a home and a rental property—something that never would have been possible in Europe—Rémy remained a communist of unwavering belief. Did he have an interest in living under that system? Did he believe Stalin’s assertion that gaiety was the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union? Not in the least. But with de Gaulle stumbling around France, insisting French communists present a danger because they take their orders from Moscow, Rémy believed it would be some time yet before his own country would be hospitable to his viewpoint. So here he remained.

  Even so, he held a simmering contempt for Americans that had built steadily since the closing days of the war. The simmer grew to a rolling boil when Joe McCarthy’s half-truths rallied the anti-communists and sabotaged the careers of countless entrepreneurs, artists, and scholars. Americans had cheered him—Eisenhower hardly had a negative thing to say—until McCarthy started offending the wrong people.

  Rémy found the average U.S. citizen ignorant of the toll the war had taken on the world, and once the Traités de Paris were signed, these self-interested Americans gave little thought to restoring a world blighted by war. The vitriol against Stalin had been immediate and unwarranted, as American military advisors and troops wormed their way across Germany and into Berlin, blanketing Europe with personnel to implement the Marshall Plan. Talbot himself had been a part of that—his assertive, get-out-of-my-way-because-I’m-right attitude so typical of the Americans stationed across the continent in the post-war years. The Red Army had sacrificed profoundly, but Americans talked like the entire war was fought in Normandy, the Ardennes, and the Pacific. What of Stalingrad, Leningrad, the Ukraine, his blighted France? While the rest of the world staggered toward recovery, American industry hummed on the strength of the expanded economy the war had created, advertisements convincing citizens they needed console televisions, clothes dryers, air conditioning, electric garage doors, of all things. Even Caroline had made a point just a few weeks earlier of showing him a magazine ad for the 1960 Ford Galaxie Sunliner that came with a removable roof.

  “A convertible car, Caroline?” he’d asked. “Who needs such a thing?”

  “Nobody needs it, Rémy, but wouldn’t it be fun? Taking the roof off and driving into the Blue Ridge mountains? The kids would love it. They’d probably want to take their friends.”

  He had simply smiled, hoping she’d been seized by a fleeting notion she would just as quickly forget. While American automobile engineers spent their time dreaming up new, obscene and unneeded luxuries, engineers elsewhere still struggled with the logistics of getting food to starving people in Eastern Europe, Russia, Asia, and Africa.

  Rémy knew what it was like to be hungry, his years with the Maquisard having taught him that he could subsist on very little. The stories of those days that had so captivated his college classmates were mostly true and led people to wrongly conclude certain things about him, as Talbot had. Camouflaging his politics, he had secured a visa to the United States then admission into American University, situated a little over a mile from the Soviet Embassy in DC. He studied urban planning, more useful than the Renaissance sculpture he’d studied in Florence. Twelve years after their first meeting, Rémy laid eyes on a woman who bore little resemblance to the small-town Russian girl who’d sat next to him in their introductory sculpting class in Florence. Marisha’s transformation—the assertive way she dressed and carried herself, the very western way she conversed over dinner, the blood red fingernails curved around her cigarette—was utterly convincing. In fact, Rémy thought, the two of them were so embedded in these post-war identities they’d created, he sometimes forgot who they really were, the mission that had brought them here in the first place.

  Their activities grew out of orders Rémy received and later, instructions given to Eleanor on her trips to New York. Caroline was invited on Eleanor’s “girls weekends” as an antidote to Talbot’s persistent requests to join his wife in New York, and with that, the enterprise grew more elaborate, as operatives were brought in to act as friends Eleanor knew at Smith, Caroline’s unwitting presence providing additional cover. While he had married her to gain a foothold in the United States, over time he had grown to love and appreciate her, so reliable and open-faced in a way French women were not. He saw their marriage as something genuine, completely separate from the work he was sent to the United States to do. The only time he’d wavered was when Talbot had drawn Caroline into his bed, the taping system picking up their sometimes raw conversations in Talbot’s home office, while he and Eleanor conversed on the patio. Rémy had seethed, quietly furious, contemplating whether he should confront her, sweep up the children she so adored and return to France, leave her and the whole mess behind. His handler had chided him for his immaturity—for talking about it with Eleanor—and demanded he keep his mouth shut and be grateful Caroline had unwittingly provided such useful blackmail material should they need it. The handler worked out of the Soviet Embassy, a purported defense attaché whom Rémy believed ran a number of agents in Washington. When Rémy needed to get a message to him, or had tapes or documents that needed to be processed before Eleanor’s next trip to New York, he used dead drops in Rock Creek Park, near the Lincoln Memorial, or sometimes in Arlington National Cemetery, where a cutout would collect them and courier them across the city.

  As a young man, his continent under siege, Rémy came to believe the Soviet system was the fairest path. In the years since, he had dedicated his creativity, his intelligence, and his skills to ensure that system would spread. But he hadn’t truly understood how complicated living out this mission with a partially invented identity would become. His children were no longer vague, ill-formed ideas; they were flesh and blood Americans he helped with homework and tucked into bed at night. But with Eleanor positioned to gather information from the highest realms of American intelligence, Rémy could not see abandoning this work even if he’d been permitted to. He was confident he would do it well enough so that his wife and children would never discover where his loyalty truly lay. Talbot’s arrest had made things more interesting, more urgent, perhaps. And if they had to end their friendship—if Tal went to prison and Eleanor relocated to get away from the heat—it was a small price to pay for important work. Caroline would adjust, he believed. She loved her friend. But that hadn’t stopped her from climbing into her friend’s husband’s bed. Perhaps she’d feel relieved if the Bentleys were forced to move out of the Auclairs’ circle. It would tidy up a few things for all of them.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SIX

  Friday, June 24, 1960

  The Bronx, NY

  “Tone, Eleanor,” Cossutta said, his flashing eyes a warning. “Do not direct your irritation at me.”

  “Who else, then?” Eleanor sat, giving the dining room a once-over. Those seated around her were familiar to her, most of them Italians whose identities were known to Cossutta and Mario, the owner. On their meeting nights, these were the only people who could secure reservations.

  “I’m being scrutinized,” she hissed. “I’ve been interviewed—twice. My house has been searched and if Talbot goes to jail, I may be out on the street. Pardon me if I seem irritated.”

  Cossutta lifted the bottle of Chianti from the table and languidly poured her a glass, a gesture he had relied on for as long as she had known him, his antidote to difficult questions.

  “All is well, my little Starling,” his use of her code name the subtlest reminder that she reported to him. He was in charge. “So stop it. We are in this position because of your excellent work over many, many years. Release this—whatever it is—that is making you so disagreeable and be proud of what you’ve accomplished, even landing your erstwhile husband in jail.”

  “I can hardly take credit for a coincidence, Gilberto.”

  He shrugged. “I disagree. The goal was to derail the summit, diminish Eisenhower in the eyes of the world, and it’s done. The stain extends to the vice president who now has no chance of becoming president. Given his contempt of the schemer Nixon, the Premier is extremely pleased. And you played an essential part in our getting to this point. You mined information and sent it where it needed to go, helping our friends improve their capabilities. They were prepared when that odd bird flew by.”

  “How did they down it? Do you know?”

  “I have been told little. Your information aided improvements in the missile battery near Sverdlovsk and gave them an idea of the flight path. Perhaps a surface missile took it out. Or a MIG—which can’t fly as high as the U-2—got under it and shot upwards. Or maybe the MIG was hit by the missile, came apart, and debris flew into the American plane. That might explain why it was missing a wing and floated to earth mostly intact. But your fingerprints are not on this anywhere, my child, so you needn’t behave so peevishly. And we have the happy accident of Talbot himself in the crosshairs, due entirely to his own appetites. So,” he lifted his glass and smiled, “saluti.”

  From the time they met, Cossutta had impressed on Eleanor the value of certain attributes, chief among them discipline to manage herself, to modulate her emotions. The only place he welcomed her expressiveness was in bed. Outside of that, he was quick to compare her to a child if she questioned a decision, betrayed anger or disappointment. But his nonchalance—his dismissiveness—fed a growing ire inside her. She swirled the Chianti in her glass, searching for a way to make herself understood. She lit a cigarette and leaned in.

  “I’m in the crosshairs, too, Gilberto,” she said quietly, reasonably. “We’re lucky they didn’t find the briefcase and begin to figure out who the hell I am.”

  He leaned back in his chair—physically discounting her viewpoint—and sighed, looking impatient and somewhat baffled at her refusal to drop this line of conversation. He took a labored breath, as if to communicate how taxing he found her, having to make a further attempt to correct her thinking.

  “I’m sorry you’re feeling set upon, Mishie, but can you step outside your current discomfort to see the bigger picture? We’ll be rid of Talbot! Might that restore the spring in your step? It does mine. And should it appear the government is closing in, we’ll pull you out. Send you home. Return you to your family as you’ve often wished, while we circulate the story that Mrs. Bentley, cheated on so publicly, so brutally, by her husband, has fled to Europe where she lived during the war, in search of peace and privacy and equilibrium. Once we get you into Eastern Europe, you’ll disappear. I could even join you if that suits. Or we could stay here, together—I do love New York—renewing an old friendship that began during the war.”

  She stared hard at her old professor, the ease with which he proposed options for her future. She considered for a moment the wife he’d parked in Moscow then abandoned for a more vibrant life in New York—for freedom, essentially, to teach his art, enjoy the rich culture of the city—and have contact when he wished with Eleanor and other women, certainly. Did his wife share his dedication to his mission or, like Eleanor, had she been dedicated mostly to pleasing him? His black hair was shot through with gray now and the brown eyes that had once been so vibrant were rimmed in red. With the stoop of his shoulders and his softer middle, it was harder to conjure the man who had once proved so alluring, who had so easily convinced her to turn her life over to him and join the Soviet cause. Eleanor doubted the female undergraduates he now taught at Fordham were lining up for private interludes in the studio with him. But years ago, he had been a force, casting a spell on her, stoking her need for his approval, withholding it when he wanted her to do something especially difficult. First in small things, like who she socialized with at university and later, in directing her to marry Talbot. She had agreed because seeing Gilberto happy, receiving his praise, had been paramount to her—her anchor—offering her a sense of hope, of security, when the world was reeling and her parents were thousands of miles away. To keep him happy, she agreed to leave him, to live her life as the American Eleanor—hoping that one day it would pay off for her, that somehow they would reunite.

  And so they had, in 1950. As Talbot readied for a trip to Europe, part of a team assessing the effectiveness of the Marshall Plan its third year, her old professor arrived in the United States to reassert himself in her life. Newly hired into the Fordham Fine Arts Department, his curriculum vitae indicated he had spent the years after Florence in Greece, sculpting and teaching workshops to tourists. Soon after he got to New York, he sent a message through Rémy that Eleanor should report to him immediately. As Talbot had packed to fly to Europe, Eleanor mentioned, as casually as she could, that she planned to make a shopping excursion to New York while he was gone.

  Talbot had paused, his brow furrowed. “Alone?” he had asked. “That’s not something you ought to do alone, Eleanor.”