Plevitskaya sat very still in the taxi until, after it had crossed the pont de l’Alma and turned along the Left Bank, down the tree-dappled quai d’Orsay, she bent down and put on her painful shoes.
She wasn’t watching the traffic, or the glitter on the Seine, or the fishermen on the banks, or the bateaux-mouches.
If it all goes wrong, go to the Soviet embassy and ask for the crab salesman, she was repeating to herself, inside her head.
Well, now that the American girl’s interference had prevented her from establishing her husband’s alibi, it had all gone wrong.
But still, this taxi journey was the last one in the world she wanted to be making.
She shut her eyes, feeling sick, when she thought of the crab salesman. No, it was unbearable to think of his reaction …
She could hardly bear to think of her husband, either, who wasn’t even aware yet of how wrong it had all gone, so would be turning up at the gare du Nord in an hour, as planned, as part of the group waving General Kutyopov’s daughter off on a train ride. She winced as she imagined how he’d be expecting her to join him there, so they could go on making a show in front of the others of having been enjoying a jolly day out together all the while, and talking loudly about their purchases from Monsieur Epstein.
It would only be when everyone started asking, ‘But where is your wife, Nikolasha?’ that he’d begin to guess. Then he’d have to get in his own taxi, and head with all haste towards embassy-land and, later, she supposed, the hold of the freight ship Maria Ulyanova. But even this was in doubt, because what if someone had already had the wit to get the police out to the gare du Nord to arrest him?
She felt sicker still when pictures of the inside of the Maria Ulyanova, chugging through grey waters to Leningrad, started crowding into her mind. Would they have to see Miller again, in there? Would he look at them, from above his gag and bound hands, with eyes full of hurt and hate? Or, and now she began to feel really sick, might they all end up gagged and bound, she and her husband just as tightly as Miller, and all being delivered, at the other end, in the same van marked ‘bread’ or ‘milk’ to the Lubyanka? When she called to mind the crab salesman’s quiet eyes, anything seemed possible.
That she could ever have hoped for today’s project to fail now seemed unimaginable. That she could ever have wanted to be sent back to Moscow felt insane.
She laced the fingers of her hands together, and squeezed them tight to stave off panic.
She’d thought she might search for her son if she got home to Russia, hadn’t she? But what if he’d been gone for years, just as she had? What if he’d emigrated?
It had never occurred to her, until today, that he might have left too. Never, until that damn girl had started talking about Miller, and about his son – whom she was so clearly in love with – and Plevitskaya had remembered Zyzyrovka, where she’d lost her son …
‘What’s that you say, madame?’ the taxi driver asked.
It was only then that Plevitskaya realized she must, without intending to, have muttered the place name out loud.
‘Nothing,’ she said. And then, ‘No! I meant, I was saying, let me out here. I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going on.’
A moment later, she was standing alone on the pont Alexandre III, with its exuberant art nouveau lamps, cherubs, nymphs and winged horses, with its foundation stone somewhere far below the waters which had been laid by the last Tsar, long before he’d known he’d be murdered. She watched the taxi she’d just been sitting in dwindle and disappear, too, into the distant heat haze beyond the shining glass of the Grand Palais, and wondered what to do with the freedom she was taking, and which tomorrow to choose.