Helen awoke at the house in Zehlendorf to the smell of brewing coffee. Baucom stood by the window in his boxers, raising the blinds onto a gray Berlin morning. She felt as wrung out as if she’d endured hours of nightmares, and then she remembered why. A gust of rain pelted the windowpane, and she wondered if Frieda was still out in the elements, too scared to take shelter in any of her familiar places.
Baucom climbed into bed and handed her a steaming mug. Frothed milk on top, the way she liked it.
“Thank you.”
“The way you were last night, I figured you needed it.”
“What do you mean?”
“You were in quite a state when you got back.”
“How would you know? You were fast asleep.”
“Later. Tossing and turning. Shouting in your dreams.”
“What did I say?”
“Incoherent. But your face?” He shook his head. “You looked scared. Hunted. I shook you once, to wake you, but that only made it worse. I was afraid to try again.”
“Clark Baucom, master spy, afraid to wake a sleeping harpy.”
“I take it that everything didn’t go as planned?”
“What makes you say that?” She wasn’t ready to tell him what she’d witnessed, not yet.
“Well, for starters, your handbag seemed a little full this morning.”
“Those tapes are none of your business!”
“I seem to recall you making them my business. Or one of them, anyway. But if you don’t want me to interfere, fine.”
“All right, then. If you’re going to poke around in my things, the least you can do is help. What can you tell me about Kevin Gilley?”
“He was there?”
“Who says this is about last night?”
“Then why do you ask?”
“Just curious.”
He smiled, not fooled a bit, but answered, anyway.
“One thing I know is that for security reasons you’re supposed to call him Robert.”
“Isn’t he supposed to be out of favor? I heard he was up for a transfer.”
“That’s the cover story, anyway. It must be working if you’ve heard it.”
“What’s the real story?”
Baucom shook his head, frowning.
“He plays in another part of the sandbox from me. Sorcery and black bags. Deals with things I wouldn’t want to know, and would shut my ears if someone started to tell me.”
“Supposed to be quite the Casanova, isn’t he?”
“That would cover half our field men, present company excluded.”
“Does this rep extend to his treatment of female agents?”
Baucom frowned and shook his head.
“What are you saying, exactly, that you caught him with his pants down?”
“Something like that.”
“Last person I saw drop trou in a safe house was a prim little Bohemian who used to bring me telexes from the Czech Foreign Ministry. He’d smuggle them out of the office by taping them to his ass in the washroom. Always made me turn around when he took his pants down. He’d offer a proper little ‘Excuse me,’ and then all I’d hear was the rattle of his belt buckle, a quick zip, and a bunch of ripping sounds while he tore the tape off with little grunts and shrieks.”
“I believe we were talking about Kevin Gilley.”
“I believe we were. And I told you all I know about the man, and even that was too much.”
He went silent, and for a while she thought the subject was closed. Then he moved closer, slid his thigh against hers, and slipped his arm beneath her head like a pillow. She sat up, took a swallow of coffee, and set the mug on the bedside table before easing back down. His body felt like a bulwark, a firewall. His next words emerged in a whisper, directly into her ear.
“Every now and then I do wonder who Robert’s really working for.”
She was careful not to move.
“You think it’s them?”
“Oh, no. Robert would never work for them. But there are times I suspect he’s mostly working for himself.”
“How so?”
She felt him shrug, and waited for more. He said nothing, and a few moments later he asked where she’d like to go for breakfast. Perhaps that new Bäckerei around the corner on Teltower Damm? The one that dusted everything with confectioner’s sugar and made the strongest coffee for blocks? She said that sounded fine, and then she tried one more time, sidling up to the subject carefully, as if it might reach out at any moment and grab her by the arm.
“You think Robert is just selfish, then? Looking out for number one?”
“Why do you ask?”
His new favorite question, which irritated her, and made her wonder if Gilley’s predatory nature was common knowledge, even a subject of Agency banter among the select, and therefore not a topic for discussion among those at lower clearances, like her.
“Well, let’s say, just as a hypothetical, that Gilley was at the house last night. As a customer, but not exactly playing by the rules.”
“Like us, you mean? Intimate acts in an Agency facility?”
She blushed, and was grateful he was staring at the ceiling.
“I wouldn’t call his behavior intimate by anyone’s definition. Besides, this house is decommissioned, and I’m authorized to be here. To keep the place looking occupied, show my face to the neighbors until we’ve had time to remove the equipment, close up shop.”
“True enough.”
“So, then.”
“What?”
“The hypothetical. What do you make of it?”
“I don’t engage in hypotheticals. Not for people like Kevin Gilley.”
He again let the topic drift away, off into the smoke from the Gitane he’d just lit.
“So, then,” he said at last. “Breakfast?”
“I think I’ll sleep a while longer.”
“Wise decision.”
He climbed out of bed and began to dress.
“The only problem,” she said, “is that I’m not sure I can sleep.”
“Well, it all depends on your approach.”
“What do you mean?”
“How you approach sleep. How you prepare yourself to enter it.”
“You act like it’s a place, a destination.”
“Don’t you think of it that way?”
“Usually I’m so tired that I just fall right in.”
“I enter it willfully, with gratitude. It’s the only way I was able to sleep at all sometimes during the war, or later, during some of those scrapes I got myself into. I’d think of sleep as a warm shelter on a cold night. I’d be lying there in a tent, maybe, or in one of those huts full of soldiers, everybody snoring, their breath clouding the air, and I’d picture sleep as this realm where you must prepare yourself in order to be admitted, like a sanctuary.”
“A sanctuary. I like that.”
“It’s kind of like the feeling I get when I arrive at a safe house in hostile territory, that moment when you lock the door behind you and realize you’re going to be fine. You stop and listen to the quiet, to the familiar little noises a place always makes. The hum of the refrigerator, maybe, or a car outside crossing a loose manhole cover. The drip of a downspout. Things you’ve noticed before, so that when you hear them again it’s a reassurance and all the tension drains right out of you. The way the dirty oil comes pouring out of a car when you unscrew the oil pan.”
“An oil pan. How poetic.”
Helen was about to smile when she was reminded of poor Frieda, who had also put her trust in a safe house, despite being warned about Gilley. And if a safe house wasn’t really safe, then maybe sleep wasn’t, either. But it was an appealing notion.
“A destination,” she said. “That’s good.”
Helen curled up in the bed. Baucom tugged the covers into place and lightly stroked her hair.
“I don’t know what happened last night, and I won’t press for details,” he said. “Whatever it was, I’d say you’ve earned some peace. Sleep as late as you want. I’ll cover for you with Herrington.”
“Thank you,” she said lazily, already easing through the gates toward a necessary oblivion. She sensed her troubles and anxieties remaining behind, refused entry. Even the haunting image of Frieda, pale and wet and frightened, floated off into the shadows like an untethered soul.
And from that day onward, no matter how tired or shaken or upset, Helen held fast to the idea of sleep as a secure destination, a welcoming refuge, up to and even including the night thirty-five years later when she was murdered in her bed.