It didn’t take long. Even with Grandmother’s box, and the photo, and the book I’d written my scrappy translations of those letters into, I didn’t have much.
When my box was closed, I pulled it into the study. What I should do soon, I knew, was to sit down and write to Mother to set her mind at rest about me and tell her about Grandmother. Not just a wire; a proper letter. But I couldn’t quite face that yet. So I was relieved when I realized I could keep busy, for now, by making a list of the pictures Grandmother had left me. I’d get a piece of paper from the desk, number them, give the list to Marie-Thérèse, and ask her to get them crated up and shipped after me.
Organizing the actual shipping of the pictures wasn’t something I needed to do myself. But I’d go out in a minute and ask Gaston to take me to the shipping office to pay for everything, and for my ticket. I could probably be on the train to Le Havre tonight.
For a moment, I stood looking round, wishing all this had ended differently.
I walked over to the big expanse of desk. It was spotless, with two chairs drawn up against it.
I tried to imagine it covered in a clutter of whirring machinery, with those two men I’d heard sitting at these chairs wearing big headphones. I could still see the socket on the wall which they must have plugged the equipment into, because the electric cable from the nearer desk lamp, which would normally be plugged in there, was still trailing uselessly along the floor. Marie-Thérèse must have forgotten to put it back.
Kneeling down myself I plugged it into the wall.
It was only when I was down on my knees, on the parquet floor, that I saw the other wire. It had been pushed along the small gap between floor and skirting board. Only the end was sticking out.
At first I just thought it was an uncharacteristic piece of mess in the otherwise immaculate room. Gingerly – what if it was still connected to something? What if it gave me an electric shock? – I pulled. Several feet of cable came out from the wall: enough, I could see, without even trying, to stretch comfortably to the desk.
At the wall end, this dark-coloured cable, which you could hardly see against the brown of the parquet, went right into the floor, a few inches below the electric socket in the skirting board.
I shuffled closer to the wall, intrigued despite myself. From here I could see that the two oblongs of parquet next to the wall were no longer properly glued down to the floor. They were just lying there, held by the other pieces around them, like loose bits in a jigsaw puzzle. Turning to reach for a paper knife from the desk, I ran the blade round one of them. It flipped up easily.
A small square had been cut in the floorboard underneath, and the dark-brown wire ran down through that square into the ceiling of the room one floor below.
I knew what that room was. I’d been in it. It was General Miller’s private office.
I hadn’t taken seriously those stories Jean had told me about the Soviet agents circling his father’s office, waiting to attack. But now I sat back on my haunches, with the piece of parquet still in one hand and the paper knife in the other, looking slowly from the end of the wire that disappeared downwards, then back to the end that would reach so easily to the desk.
Then, feeling increasingly uneasy, I got up, put down the things in my hand, picked up the other end of the wire and walked with it to the desk. When I sat down at the desk with it still in my hand, I could see that it really was a perfect length to come just to about here … the exact place where a machine might have been placed on the mahogany surface. There were even dents in the cable at the end of the desk and at the floor, indicating exactly how it had lain.
But there was no way of seeing how the wire would have plugged into anything. Not any more. The end of the cable in my hand had no fitting. It had been cut – one neat, quick knife stroke. The men who’d taken the machinery away had been in a hurry, all right.
I felt suddenly sick. Whether those young Russian men with the recording equipment had been editing a recording of Plevitskaya’s voice at all now seemed in doubt. The only thing that this wire showed for sure was that they’d definitely been doing something else, too – using Grandmother’s study to spy on the General’s office downstairs.
It made a whole different, and more sinister, kind of sense of the way the two men had just grabbed their stuff and rushed off with it so hastily as soon as Marie-Thérèse tried to shut them out of the apartment, saying Grandmother was ill. If they were spies, they would have wanted to clear their equipment out. They’d say: better safe than sorry; and make off.
Other thoughts came pounding into my mind.
Had Grandmother sat in here, on that evening, looking at this wire, and putting two and two together just as I was now doing? Was it this discovery that had brought on her crise?
And had it been the return of those two men, the next morning, which had brought on her second, fatal seizure? When she’d started trying to speak, buzzing with the sound she couldn’t quite get out, and I’d rushed out of the room to fetch the housekeeper, mustn’t she have wanted me, someone, to stay with her, and listen, and understand?
I couldn’t feel sorry for Plevitskaya any more either – not at all. She’d got this equipment in here, in the first place, playing on Grandmother’s pity and affection – so she must have been involved, mustn’t she?
And then everything became clear. I got up.
It didn’t matter what Plevitskaya’s role had been. I didn’t have time to worry about her.
The only real point was General Miller. Someone was spying on him. I didn’t have to work out who it was. But I did have to hurry.
I realized, with something like relief, that all I needed to do was to find Jean and, whether or not he wanted to speak to me, tell him what I knew – that his father was in danger.
It might also have been, I thought, remembering her urgent moan of ‘MMMM …’ (‘Miller?’), what Grandmother had wanted to tell me.