“Talbot. Don’t be old-fashioned. It’s a good way for me to pass the time without you,” she’d insisted. “There are a couple of girls from Smith in the city so I won’t really be alone. We talked yesterday and they have a line on tickets to Carousel—the new musical that just opened.”

  “But we would have a ball there together, Ellie. I’d like to see Carousel. It’s supposed to be superb. And we could look up the Warrens—Hal and Molly—see how the banking business has been treating him.”

  “I’d love it, Tal. But…another time. Plus, my love, I can’t get an early start on Christmas shopping if you’re with me. I’ll just do a quick up and back while you’re out of town and we’ll plan another trip together.”

  Tal declared himself disappointed, saying at the very least, he would see if Rémy were available to see her safely onto the train. The next morning, minutes after he headed to Andrews for his flight, Rémy arrived and handed her a small valise.

  “This is for me?” Eleanor asked, unaccustomed to lugging things of that size, so unlike notes easily hidden or destroyed. “What’s in it?”

  “Schematics of buildings where Tal and his colleagues have set up offices so the Centre can rent adjacent space, tunnel inside walls, that sort of thing. The rezidentura has been working on these for months—some are hand drawn and updated just days ago. They offer an idea of how quickly the American intelligence operation is growing. So. Take these to Cossutta who will get them where they need to go.”

  Later that morning, Eleanor arrived at Penn Station where she stowed her luggage and the valise in a locker, then walked the two miles to Bloomingdale’s. She bought socks and ties and aftershave for her husband, circling the sales floor multiple times to ensure no one was following her. She went next to the matinee performance of Carousel, surprised to discover that it was a reworking of a Hungarian play she had studied as a girl—just as tragic and unsettling as she remembered it. After taxiing back to the train station to retrieve her luggage, she arrived at her hotel just after six in the evening, to wait for the man who, for good or for bad, had made her who she was.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  1947

  Washington, DC

  When newlywed Eleanor arrived in Washington, DC, she found it not exactly as described. Cossutta had prepared her for a chorus of politicians, bureaucrats, reporters, columnists, neighbors, shopkeepers, bus drivers absolutely aligned, sounding the refrain that her homeland must be subjugated and destroyed.

  But Washington, she found, was focused more on catching up from the frenzy of the war years, less about the Soviet threat. The city itself felt new, improvised—wholly different from the centuries-old seats of power she knew in Europe and Russia. This was an earnest, clumsy, work-in-progress, as war-focused enterprises returned to non-military use and soldiers swapped uniforms for civilian suits. Rows of neat little split-levels were going up outside the Potomac River in Maryland and Virginia, burgeoning suburbs swallowing up farmland, creating new communities where veterans, full of hope and optimism, could start their families and begin to heal. Talbot’s work involved countering the Soviets, but to Eleanor’s surprise, it also included vast efforts to rebuild Europe, to provide for the millions of refugees searching for home and safety.

  The young couples they befriended in their first years in Georgetown had stunned her with their diverse views of Truman, taxes, the nuclear threat, the missile gap with the Soviets. The group often lingered long after the dinner check had been settled—coffees, brandies, other aperitifs spread across the table—debating issues and testing ideas. It was an echo of the evenings she had loved on the piazza, absent the anxiety and tension: unlike pre-war Florence, no one in post-war Washington worried their opinions could be twisted into something the government would one day use against them. These conclaves were chatty and good-natured, full of sarcasm, jokes, contemporary references, and slang that Eleanor absorbed and folded into her expanding American vocabulary.

  “Korea will be Harry Truman’s undoing,” a friend announced one evening, a section head at the Department of Agriculture who lived with his wife in their building. Eleanor flinched hearing a government employee assert such a thing out loud against a country’s leader. Any frustrations her mother had with her soviet had been shared with her husband in whispers—quickly recanted if Eleanor inquired about it. In Florence, Patrizio and the others had loudly trumpeted Mussolini’s brilliance; digs were murmured with hand over mouth, communicated with gestures, raised eyebrows, scoffs.

  But in Washington, Eleanor found no single party line promoted by the State to ensure people moved in a unified direction with a shared perspective and viewpoint. Unity of belief and message, her mother had taught her, enabled leaders to create a cohesive culture and protect the people from injurious, corrupting influences. But this Washington? It was a political and cultural stew. Everybody had opinions about everything—lawmakers, of course, but also her neighbors, the mechanic who fixed Tal’s car, the proprietor of her favorite dress shop. A local TV show called Meet the Press featured influential people with wildly different viewpoints, arguing and debating. The questions the newsmen threw at the officials would have cost them their jobs and shut down their newspapers back home.

  American artists, too, expressed themselves in a way entirely new to her, celebrating a world at peace by trying daring things, causing a sensation among their patrons and drawing headlines in the Arts section of the Post. Caroline took Eleanor to a modern dance concert at American University, where they watched, rapt, as young, sinewy bodies draped across one another, grasping and twisting in a raw display of sensual freedom. It was a long way from the Kirov Ballet. Caroline had been the one to comment on how arousing the whole thing was, saying maybe if she’d been with Eleanor in Florence among Michelangelo’s naked statues for years, she’d be more used to it.

  “But in Florence,” Eleanor protested, “the statues stand still. These bodies—” she searched for words—”writhed. I’ve never seen a body do that. Except maybe Tal’s—but certainly not in public!” Caroline laughed and winked, suggesting they stop by the box office and inquire about getting season tickets.

  Freedom of expression, Eleanor began to understand, was a thread that wound through all of American culture, the subject of books and newspaper columns and lectures—even dance recitals. Americans were preoccupied with this, she saw, not destroying the Soviet Union. This was their organizing principle.

  When she and Tal began attending services at St. John’s—Eleanor faking her way through the Book of Common Prayer because her re-education in this area, too, had been lacking—she had expected something akin to a low-key rally, a celebration of all that was good about America wrapped up in hymns and recitations. When, in his homily, the rector began to extoll the high virtue of Capitalism over Communism, she felt a rush of satisfaction. Exactly as described, she thought, the greed the Americans are known for—thinking only of themselves.

  The rector continued.

  “Under Capitalism,” he declared from the gilded, elevated pulpit, “you can make a lot of money. Making a lot of money enlarges the tithe you can give to the poor to relieve their suffering. As Saint Luke’s gospel reminds us, ‘For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.’ And God has bestowed on this country, and on you, my dear people, more than our ancestors could ever have imagined. So here is your charge: make your money, fairly, ethically. Then give it away to the good of others. I trust I’ll see you all at the mission fair next week where you can explore ways to do so.”

  And so it went, each time they attended. No condemnation for godless Russia, just prayers for its people, that a religious sensitivity would arise to proffer hope. Rector Grant didn’t pound the pulpit as he made his case: he laid out his argument gently, in a way that inclined Eleanor to listen. And as she listened, not wholly believing, a door nudged open, behind which she parked the inconsistencies—ideas and concepts that didn’t quite fit with what Cossutta had taught her. The economics of it all, for one thing. Her government collected and redistributed resources according to need. It was the fairest way. But Americans were buying their own homes and cars, working two jobs if they wanted, happy in their autonomy, in their striving. Was that better, all that hustling to find opportunity? These were the questions she would sort through at some point, when she knew more and was better equipped to find the holes in the rector’s logic, spot the fallacies in the stories the news anchors shilled. Her lack of contact with Gilberto made possible her extended musings about the world she now inhabited, absent his particular filter.

  One afternoon, she took her musings to the Freer Gallery, attracted more by the familiarity of the Italian Renaissance-style building than the Oriental and Egyptian art in its galleries. As she studied an ancient tapestry, she felt a jostle, later finding a folded note in her jacket pocket. The first message from her handler—a reminder of what she had been sent here to do. The message specified a drop site outside the National Gallery where she would receive instructions and return information. The requests were fairly simply at first—Talbot’s itinerary for an overseas trip, names of people he traveled with, met with, or mentioned; new words or phrases she overheard when he spoke on the phone. She was asked to host dinner parties for Talbot’s colleagues, neighbors, friends who held government jobs, and take photos with her new Polaroid camera—her guests fascinated by the astonishing technology and envious that she’d been able to find one to buy. Each time Eleanor deposited the envelope of muddy images at the drop site, she was quite sure they would be of little use.

  Two years after she arrived, she retrieved the message that Rémy and his new wife would be moving in next door. They were not to acknowledge their shared past in Florence but instead, act out the little charade at the homeowners’ meeting. When she spotted him there, she wished she could rush over and throw her arms around him—the face so familiar, an emblem of her formative experiences in Florence. Once their contact was established—Rémy securing her the job at the library, the friendship extending to include Talbot and Caroline—Eleanor no longer needed the drop sites. She handed her notes directly to Rémy. He provided her a film camera, which she used to take photos of items in Tal’s desk drawer, briefcase, coat pockets, and wallet. Within a few days of turning in the completed roll, she would find a camera with fresh film behind a volume of The Collected Plays of Lillian Hellman in the Fiction section of the library.

  Cossutta sent a letter every so often, routed through Florence and mailed to her office. These always took her by surprise, a jolt to her life and routine. The letters—ostensibly just her old professor saying hello, hoping she was finding time to pursue her art—were reminders that he was watching, that he knew what she was doing and expected her to continue in the cause. At first, she scoured the pages for signs that he missed her, that he wished to have her back, near him. But eventually, she no longer looked for hidden meanings, reading each letter once then dropping it in pieces in a city trash can.

  As tension with the Soviets grew and CIA operations broadened, monitoring Talbot grew more sophisticated. While Tal was away on business, Eleanor and Rémy set up a wiretap on his work line and embedded two tiny cameras into the wood paneling in his office. Rémy told his wife he had been at the Bentleys helping Eleanor put a new rug in Talbot’s office. It had taken some time, he said, to position it just right.

  Despite all she was doing to undermine Talbot, Eleanor began to settle into her American life, growing comfortable as his wife, living into the fiction she had created. When she considered things through the eyes of Eleanor rather than the Soviet operative she was, she found a lot to like. She convinced herself that all she was doing was what her parents had done in Kirov: monitoring those around them, keeping an ear tuned to anything the Soviet government should know about. That’s all it was. But she was very glad she worked here, in the United States, where her time was mostly her own. She could visit and revisit museums as often as she wished. She could read what she wanted, see movies and shows that intrigued her, absent any concern a neighbor would see and take exception, or worse, that Tal would chastise or correct her as Cossutta had so often done. She lived in a home more expansive than she could have imagined for herself, finding deep pleasure in choosing drapes and furnishings, and curating her humble collection of art. Talbot accompanied her to estate sales and antique stores as she searched for new treasures, praising her discernment when she found something she simply had to have.

  Daily, when he was in town, Eleanor consulted the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook Talbot’s mother had sent her on their first wedding anniversary to produce American dishes completely foreign to her—meatloaf with ketchup glaze, chicken fried in Crisco, gelatin salads topped with whipped cream and walnuts. The bounty she found in the grocery store was unlike anything she’d seen, even in the best years in Italy. She liked her library job, buoyed by colleagues who invited her to baby showers and graduations and brought cakes on birthdays. When she and Talbot visited his parents, she reveled in the very idea they could just drive there—no nosy passersby asking about their itinerary as they loaded up the car, no checkpoints along the way to verify that itinerary. They drove unmonitored through miles of gorgeous countryside, the Blue Ridge mountains framing the highway when they headed south, stopping for gas or food that was always available to them.

  So it was to be expected, perhaps, that three years in, her double life had created an accumulating pressure inside her, the dissonance harder to manage. In growing so comfortable with her husband, her peaceful life, she feared she might forget she was playing a part, might make an observation or blurt out something that exposed her. She couldn’t very well rejoice in the abundance at the market or marvel at their freedom of movement. But she thought about it all the time. She certainly couldn’t comment how nice it was that their neighbors never informed on them to authorities. But it astonished her. Her solution was to circumscribe her conversations with Tal, be quieter, more withdrawn, disengaged. He repeatedly asked what was troubling her, where she had gone. She claimed not to understand what he was asking but believed the distance she created was vital to protecting her cover and continuing her work.

  But did she have to continue that work? Her contributions to Soviet intelligence seemed minor from her standpoint, inconsequential even. Talbot was a mid-level officer, pushing papers, overseeing budgets—not the key intelligence operative Cossutta hoped he would become. Perhaps Rémy could take over monitoring Talbot—there was so little going on. She would never disclose anything, of course. But what if she became the woman she pretended to be and could live a regular life, here, as an American, perhaps with children one day? Given what she’d sacrificed already, that seemed to her like a fair exchange.

  When Cossutta summoned her to New York that first time, she believed the timing was perfect, her opportunity to negotiate easing out of her commitment. Eleanor prepared for their reunion in hopeful anticipation, wholly unprepared for what her onetime lover would demand.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  1950

  New York, NY

  Eleanor checked her make-up, reapplying a layer of lipstick as she waited, wondering what Cossutta would think of her now, nearly four years after they’d last met. She wished to appear competent, mature in his eyes, to show his confidence in her had been properly placed, that he could trust her judgement now, in wishing to step away.

  When she heard his tap on the door, she gave a little start, taking one last glance in the mirror, exhaling to settle herself. She opened the door and there he stood, hand on his hip, a half-smile on his face. He stepped through, eyeing her as he closed the door behind him, placing a package he carried on the credenza. He reached to cup her face in his hands, to take her in, surprising her with a fierce kiss on her mouth.

  “My lovely little Starling,” he breathed, clasping her hands and drawing back to see all of her. “Here we are.” He reached to run a thumb over her lips, rubbing off the cherry red lipstick she had just applied.

  “We are, Gilberto, finally,” she managed, gesturing to the little table and chairs in the room, feeling a familiar vulnerability that had been a signature of her days in Florence.

  He continued to stand before her, hands encircling her wrists. “Look at you. So American now, Mishie, with your painted face and your silk stockings.” He swept a hand at her and chuckled. Was it disapproval she heard in his voice? Contempt? “What happened to the long hair I loved? What a shame, Mishie. Must you now go to the salon every week for the working ladies to cut and curl it?” He raked his fingers through the hair at her temples then withdrew to examine his fingertips. “Ack. Lacquer. I can only imagine what your mother would think.”

  His criticism stung and confused her.

  “I’m doing exactly as I promised, Gilberto, exactly what you prepared me to do.” She worked to hide the edge in her voice, forcing a smile. “I’m not the teenager I was when we met.”

  “You’ve done the job so well I hardly recognize you. But there is a remedy. Underneath those clothes—so haute couture, Mishie—I’m sure I’ll find the girl I remember.”

  “Gilberto,” she stalled, taking a seat at the table. “You’ve only just arrived. Please, let’s sit a moment and catch up. We haven’t been together since…well, I haven’t seen you since my wedding day. I want to know how the years have been for you—really—the direction of your sculpting and what you’re assigned to do here. I have some things to say too. Shall we order up some drinks? “

  His eyes narrowed. Then he chuckled.

  “Listen to you, Mishie, speaking as if we are peers now, as if we’re meeting to pass to the time of day. Surely you know we are not here, together, in New York City of all places to discuss sculpture. We’re here to discuss business and to renew our…friendship.” He approached, bringing his face close to hers, one hand leaning on the table, the other reaching up her skirt for her garter, unclipping it so her stocking began a slide down her leg.