Troy checked out at five—he’d have fun getting Angus to rack up a night at the Ritz as a legitimate expense—and was home in less than fifteen minutes.
It was clean, Jordan was right about that. He’d never seen the place so free from dust. But they’d thrown out the Kelim rug that his mother had given him when he moved in, the back wall was stained and streaked where Jordan’s cleaners had scrubbed the wallpaper bald, and the room smelled—mostly chemical bleach, a bit lavatorial with a hint of town gas—Jordan must have turned the gas stove on unlit to back up his invention—but a distinct, at least distinct to Troy, underscent of blood. And fainter still, almost beyond the nose’s imagining . . . a hint of cordite.
He was glad he’d moved the Constables. Adhering to the sea, just below the cello case on Skolnik’s masterpiece was a piece of brain the cleaners had missed. A wee speck of Jan or Jiri. Troy tore the corner off a page of newsprint and wiped him away. They’d missed nothing else. Even the corkscrew had been stripped of Danko’s sticky mortal remains and placed neatly on the draining board. Troy didn’t much feel like touching it again, but self-knowledge told him he’d change his mind the next time he wanted to open a bottle. The moment came sooner than he had thought.
On the dot of six, Jordan was knocking on his door.
“I said too much over the phone . . . and there were things I simply could not say.”
He paused.
Troy sensed a difficult subject. Resisted the temptation to fill the silence and say, “spit it out.”
Jordan almost whispered, as though he feared being overheard in an empty house.
“Did you have to kill them all?”
Troy said nothing.
“Well, did you?”
“Jordan, let me ask you this. What were you going to do with four live rogue Soviet agents? Four live rogue Soviet agents in all probability denied by both the Russians and the Czechs? Put them on trial and listen to protestations of innocence, put up with tit for tat measures? Try and swap them for one of ours, even after the Russians disown them? Because you know as well as I they will disown them. Jordan, four live Czechs were nothing but an embarrassment for you. Better, by far, that they simply vanish.”
“It was you or them, right?”
“Of course, it was me or them.”
Troy lowered his voice, took out the anger he didn’t much feel in the first place. Whispered the near-whisper Jordan had used.
“Besides, it’s not as if they were real, is it?”
Now Jordan said nothing.
The concept—one that had struck root, grown, curled, and convoluted in Troy’s mind like bindweed since the day Onions had first uttered it—could hardly be new to Jordan, but it seemed it was. Troy could hear that same sad silence once more. Jordan looked stunned at the remark, and then passed over it without comment. An almost visible stiffening of the lip.
“I think you may be right about ‘rogue’ agents. We’ve been able to follow their trail. They came in from Dunkirk on fake Belgian passports. They probably had no contact with the Russians from the moment they assumed new identities. They certainly had no contact with anyone at the embassy here or in Paris or in Brussels. Danko’s always been a maverick. I’m pretty certain he set out to solve this one on his own. If he did, there’s a very good chance the Russians have no idea who he intended to see while he was here. Which means there’s a very good chance they don’t know a damn thing about you.”
“And if your hunch is wrong?”
“Then they’ll come looking for you, won’t they?”
Jordan accepted a glass of wine. It was how men of their class and upbringing coped with deprivation. They uncorked a piece of history, hoping austerity would spend itself before history did. Saying it would be just the one, he was looking oddly at Troy over it. Troy did not ask. He knew the look. He’d seen it a thousand times in the job—it was saying, “I thought I knew you”—a presumption given the brevity of their acquaintance—and adding, “But I didn’t.” It was something akin to shock in Jordan. In its odd way—odd since it was Troy with whom or at whom he was shocked—in its odd way it was pleasing, it made Troy faintly hopeful that there was more to human insignificance than the hill of beans. He liked Jordan. Jordan was not “one of us.” Onions was, Jack wasn’t, Rod most certainly wasn’t. Onions would not blanch at what Troy had done. He might arrest him for it, but he would not blanch, flinch, or doubt. Rod would weep, Anna would weep in torrents. Kolankiewicz would debate life’s fatal necessities with him. Méret Voytek would understand. Méret Voytek was “one of us” as surely as Troy himself. And suddenly Troy knew what it was Kolankiewicz would debate with him. He had half an idea why Voytek was as she was. He had no idea why he was.
Jordan left without any word that this had been simpatico. They might never be simpatico again. Troy took down the Skolnik and rehung the Constables. The Skolnik he consigned to the cupboard under the stairs. It was too awful, and too revealing to anyone who could put two and two together and realize it was the square root of sixteen. He could give it back, but thought better of it. One day he might own a lawnmower and have to buy a shed to house the lawnmower, and one day in the unimagined future, the sunny uplands of the 1950s and beyond, he might have to patch the roof on that shed.
About half an hour later the telephone rang. Kolankiewicz.
“I can’t be sure but I think my office might have been burgled. A day or two back. I cannot be certain. If so, a neat job, and the file on Skolnik is missing.”
“I know,” Troy said. “I found it. Nothing to worry about.”
“Found it? How?”
“As I was saying . . . it’s nothing to worry about.”