Mrs. Vincent had been cremated a week ago, but now she was back. She was thinner than I remembered. Her hair was longer. Her skin was chalky white. She was surrounded with a pale, glowing mist. And she was smashing holes in my living room wall.
“What kind of ghost uses a hammer?” I turned on the light and flapped my arms in a vain attempt to dispel the plaster dust that was already starting to cling to my clothes. “I thought you guys could walk through walls.”
Mrs. Vincent suppressed a sneeze, lowered her hammer, and turned to look at me. A hint of a smile played across her face. We stood in silence for a moment, comfortably sharing space at close quarters as we’d done a million times before, then she leaned down to switch off her camping lantern. When she straightened up again she had a small pistol in her right hand. “Hello, Paul. You’re home early.”
I’d seen that kind of pistol before. In a glass case. It’s known as a PSM, because Pistolet Samozaryadny Malogabaritny is such a mouthful. Although the name isn’t as exotic as it first seems. It translates as compact self-loading pistol. It was designed for officers of the Red Army high command but quickly became popular with other branches of the Soviet military. It was admired for its compact dimensions. And for its ability to propel one of its special bullets through fifty-five layers of Kevlar.
One branch of the military had adopted the gun with particular enthusiasm. The KGB.
“Do I need to call the Cold War Museum?” I gestured to her pistol. “Tell them one of their exhibits is missing? Or did you get that thing someplace else?”
“Have you found it?” Mrs. Vincent gestured toward the wall. “Do you have it?”
“If you go all Marathon Man on me, this is going to take ages. So stop with the pronouns and tell me what you’re looking for.”
“The recording device.”
“Why would there be a recording device in my wall?”
“Your mother put one there.”
“She couldn’t have. She never set foot in this house. My father didn’t buy it until after she was dead.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about your mother. She designed a listening system that the FBI used in this house.” Mrs. Vincent reached around and tugged at a mesh of copper wires that was visible through one of the holes she’d broken in the wall. “She helped them install it here. And she died here.”
“She died at the house in Westchester.”
Mrs. Vincent shook her head. “In this house.” She walked to the doorway and pointed to a spot on the floor with her foot. “Right here. She was shot in the neck. She bled to death.”
“Did you shoot her?”
“No. But I was here when it happened. I saw.”
“How on earth did you come to be here?”
“That’s a long story.”
Very slowly, and with an eye on her gun, I moved across and lowered myself into one of the chairs. The one Robson normally uses, because it was farther away from her. “I’m not going anywhere. Are you?”
Mrs. Vincent hesitated, and shifted her weight between her feet. “I just want the device. Then I’ll go.”
“Do you know what it looks like?”
“No.”
“Where it is? There are lots of walls in this house.”
Mrs. Vincent didn’t answer.
“Do you really think you’ll find it?”
Mrs. Vincent stayed silent.
“What’s so important about this thing, anyway? Whatever’s on it, whatever it reveals about you, no one would come looking. You’re officially dead. Why wouldn’t you stay that way?”
“And go where, Paul? And do what? I’m sixty-seven years old. I don’t want to start my life all over again. I’ve done that too many times already. And how would I find a place to live? Where would I get the money for food? I realized I just want to be back in Westchester, doing what I was doing.”
“So why run in the first place?”
“Protocol. A little bird told me you’d hired a security company. As soon as they started work they’d discover the monitoring system. They’d find the recorder. You’d listen. I couldn’t be around when that happened. So I pulled the rip cord. That’s what I’m trained to do.”
“Then why come back?”
“I got to California, where my fictitious friends are supposed to be. I had the pre-prepped documents dated and sent to Ferguson. And that’s when everything started to unravel. I’m a relic, Paul. My motherland’s gone. My handler’s gone. The rest of my escape route was gone.”
“So you thought you’d resurrect yourself?”
Mrs. Vincent nodded. “I figured I’d claim there’d been an admin screwup. Mistaken identity. It would be easy to prove I was alive, after all. But first, I needed the recorder.”
“What’s so important about it?”
Mrs. Vincent didn’t respond.
“If you’re worried about admitting you were a KGB agent, I have news for you. That rabbit’s out of the hat. And I knew my mother was an electronics engineer. I just didn’t know who she was working for. So what happened? This place was a Soviet safe house, and the FBI bugged it with her system?”
“It was still experimental. Your mother shouldn’t have been here. The whole thing was—how do you say it?—a cluster fuck. There was shooting. A grenade. You lost two. Us, one. Plus I was injured.” She rolled up her sleeve and revealed her scar. “Here. And I almost lost the sight in one eye. I couldn’t work in the field after that.”
“I understand cluster fucks. I’ve been on the wrong end of a few myself. But why were you here? Was your cover blown? Were you running?”
Mrs. Vincent shook her head. “I was called here for a briefing. New equipment.”
“Why would you care about that being recorded? Everything from the eighties has been obsolete for years.”
“I don’t care about the briefing. It’s my voice. It’s on that tape. Speaking English, to the other agent before the technician arrived. That was the rule. We were never allowed to talk in Russian. If anyone else heard that—Joe Public, the authorities—who cares? But you? You were in Military Intelligence. You were trained how to listen. You’d recognize my voice. Know it was me.”
“And now I’ve found out, anyway.”
Mrs. Vincent nodded. “Which is a problem. And there’s only one solution, as far as I can see.”
She raised her PSM. Looked me in the eye for ten hour-long seconds. Then reversed the gun and handed it to me. “I’m throwing myself on your mercy, Paul. One professional to another. I’ve said enough. Do what you think’s right. I won’t fight you.”
The gun nestled comfortably in my hand, reassuringly solid and heavy.
“After my mother was dead and you couldn’t return to the field, how did you end up at our house? The KGB wasn’t known for its child-raising program.”
“I wasn’t sent there because of you. Your father was the target. Close surveillance.”
“My father was a businessman. He had nothing to do with counterintelligence.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about your father. A lot I could tell you, if I have the chance.”
“My father was a pacifist and—” I was interrupted by another voice in my head. Pardew’s. He’d said my father wanted to clear the place out…“Wait. My father knew about my mother’s monitoring system being here?”
“Of course.”
“He knew she died here?”
Mrs. Vincent nodded.
“That’s why he bought the place?”
She nodded again.
“OK. Some pieces are falling into place, but I need to think for a moment. Make sure I’m seeing the full picture. So, come. Sit.”
Mrs. Vincent took the seat I normally used, but within a couple of minutes she was fidgeting like a two-year-old. “I need to do something. How about a cup of tea?”
“No, thanks.”
“Your father always liked tea at times like this, when he needed clarity.”
I thought about my father for a moment, and the predictability of his habits.
“Actually, that’s a good idea. We should have some tea. I’ll make a pot.”
“No, I’ll do it.” She reached across and touched my arm. “You have a lot to process. And I looked after you for lots of years. I’ve missed it.”
“I don’t know. There’s a door leading out of the kitchen. What’s to stop you from running?”
“What would be the point?” She stood up, stretched her arms out wide, and turned a full circle. “I don’t have the recorder. That’s the time bomb I came to defuse, and it’s still ticking. Unless you decide to stop it.”
“OK. Fair point. Let me help you, then. It’s my buddy’s kettle, and it’s really weird.”
“I can manage! I think it’s fair to say I’ve used more kettles and made more cups of tea in my life than you ever will.”
“All right. But one other thing. There’s only one real cup, and it isn’t clean, so you’ll have to use disposable ones. And me, I don’t take milk.”
Mrs. Vincent returned ten minutes later. She was using the glass turntable from the microwave as a tray to carry three paper cups. Two were full of tea. The other, some milk.
“You choose.” She set the tray on the table between us and sat back down.
I started to reach for the cup that was closer to me, then changed my mind and stretched across to take the other. “I’ll leave you the one with room for milk.”
“Thank you, Paul. Always the gentleman.” She topped up her cup, and as she was about to replace the makeshift pitcher I nudged the table over an inch. That shifted the rim of the turntable just enough to end up under the pitcher and cause it to overbalance, tipping the last of the milk all over the floor. Mrs. Vincent yelped and hurried to her purse to grab a pack of Kleenex and mop up the mess.
We sat in silence for the next ten minutes while we drank our tea. I was the first to finish. I set my cup down on the table and saw Mrs. Vincent glance inside, checking it was empty.
“You were right,” I said. “The tea did help me think. It clarified something about your problem. There are two dimensions to it. The recorder. And me.”
Mrs. Vincent didn’t answer.
“You only need to neutralize one.”
The ghost of a smile played across her face.
“The recorder’s hard to find. I’m not.”
“You should have thought faster.”
“Did you put the same thing in my tea as in my father’s? It stands to reason, if you couldn’t risk me recognizing your voice on that tape, you certainly couldn’t risk him listening to it. And you’d just overheard him telling his partner he was going to have this place cleared out.”
Mrs.Vincent nodded. “I used K-2.”
“Good choice. Old school. Effective. If the victim was a diplomat in Moscow or some such place, the navy would have known to screen for it. But with a civilian and a suburban doctor, you figured an old KGB favorite would slip through unnoticed.”
“I did. And I was right.”
“But you disposed of the tainted cup, anyway.”
“Of course. I was trained to be thorough.”
“And when it was my turn you couldn’t shoot me, because then the police would investigate. Instead you’d make it look like I was doing some vigorous DIY and collapsed just like my father had done. Weak hearts must run in our family.”
“That was the neatest solution. I like neat.”
“Let me ask you one other thing about your thorough training. You studied the culture of the nation you were assigned to?”
“Of course.”
“That was smart. Helps you anticipate people’s moves.”
“The battle won is won in the mind.”
“You learned that men in America tend to be chivalrous.”
“Or as we call it, sexist.”
“Before you came to the United States you knew that would be true of people in general. You found from experience that it was true of my father in particular. I showed signs of it myself, just now. So it was a reasonable assumption that I’d leave you the cup with the space for milk.”
“It was less suspicious to let you pick your own cup, but I needed you to choose the right one.”
“Did I choose the right one, though? Have a closer look.”
Mrs. Vincent glanced down, her face suddenly creased with doubt.
“I saw you check just now when I put the cup down.” I pointed to it. “You were focused on whether it was empty. But what you should have been looking at is the color of the dregs.”
She picked up the cup and stared inside it.
“That one was left by the guy who shares the house with me. It’s one of dozens he leaves strewn around. He takes milk.” I reached down to the side of my chair and produced a full cup. “Here’s the one you brought for me.”
Mrs. Vincent’s expression hardened and she scowled at the empty cup as if it had personally betrayed her. Then she crushed it and dropped it on the floor. “So.” Her voice was soft and barely audible. “Where do we go from here, Paul? After everything? All the years? We’re like family, you and me, now.”
“You’ve done a lot for my family. That’s true. You murdered my father. You watched my mother die. You just tried to kill me. History aside, that limits our options.”
“I was only doing my job.” She grabbed my arm. “We’re both professionals. You of all people should understand.”
“About my mother, maybe. If you’re telling the truth. You didn’t know us then. But my father? You lived under his roof all those years. And then killed him to save your own skin.”
“No. Everything I did was an act of war. I was doing my duty. Your mom and dad were hurt. I regret that. But they chose their paths, the same way I did. The same way you did. How many people have you hurt over the years? How many have you killed?”
I pulled my arm free and crossed to the window.
“What are you going to do, Paul?”
I looked at the houses on the other side of the street and wondered which neighbor had told Mrs. Vincent about seeing Rooney’s van. Whoever it was, something needed to be done about them.
“Can you forgive me, Paul? If not as one professional to another, then for all the meals I made you. The clothes I washed and ironed. The times I didn’t tell your father when I heard you sneaking into the house after curfew.”
I could feel the weight of my phone in one pocket. Her gun in the other. I knew which tool I wanted to use to end this.
“Whatever you decide, Paul, please, let’s settle things between us. Whether I walk out of this room or not, I don’t want to get locked up. I don’t want to be disgraced. I don’t want to be deported to a country that doesn’t want me back.”
Triggering a police investigation wouldn’t be a problem for me, if I put a bullet in her head. She was an enemy agent, and she’d just tried to kill me.
“Please, Paul. Let me go.”
I closed my fingers around the grip of her gun and felt the textured aluminum warm up under my skin.
“If you can’t do that, then shoot me. Please. Just don’t turn me in.”
I pulled my hands out of my pockets, turned to face her, and held up my phone. “I can’t do that. It’s not my decision. I have to make a call.”
“I knew you’d say that, Paul.” Mrs. Vincent put the cup back on the table. The one she’d intended for me. It was empty. “I don’t know how you can drink tea without milk, though. It’s disgusting.”
“No!” I reached her chair in two strides. “You shouldn’t have—”
“I told you, Paul. I couldn’t go to jail here. I couldn’t get sent back there. You couldn’t turn a blind eye. So this was the only option.”
I held up the phone. “Shall I call 911? There’s still time, if I tell them what they’re dealing with.”
She shook her head. “No. I’ve made my choice. This is the way I want to go. But you can sit with me. So I’m not alone when…you know. It won’t be long.”
I sat and took her hand. “Remember when I was little, and I couldn’t sleep? You’d sit with me for hours.”
She shrugged. “I didn’t want to go back downstairs. The mask didn’t feel so tight in the dark, with just a kid to fool.”
“You used to sing to me. You said they were songs your father taught you, back home in Mississippi. I guess you were fooling me then, too.”
“I learned those stupid songs from cassette tapes. In a classroom. In Leningrad. I’ve never been to Mississippi. And I never knew my father.”
“I’m beginning to think I never knew mine. You said you could tell me things about him.”
“There’s no time.” Her voice was tightening. “I can feel it. It’s close. Later, go to the house. My bedroom. Inside the drapes. At the bottom, where they’re hemmed. I kept copies. All my notes. I wasn’t supposed to, but the radios. Couldn’t rely on them.”
“I’ll do that.”
We sat in silence for a minute—or it could have been an hour—then she turned to look at me. “It was my mother who liked to sing.” Her voice was barely above a whisper. “I wanted to sing her songs. I couldn’t sing them here. Too dangerous. I should have stayed home. Sung to her. My sisters. Their kids.”
“You can sing those songs now, if you want. There’s no danger.”
“There’s no time.” She gripped my hand tighter. “It’s coming. I can feel it. Goodbye, Paul.”
“Прощай, Mrs. Vincent.”
“No. Call me by my real name. Just once, after all these years.”
“I don’t know it.”
“My name—oh. It’s strange to say out loud, after so long. I thought I never would again. It’s Anna Alekseyevna Vasiliev.”
“Then farewell, Anna Alekseyevna Vasiliev. I wish we’d met under different circumstances.”
“Really? I wish we’d never met at all.”