Текст книги "The Prodigal Spy"

Автор книги: Joseph Kanon

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

Anna wiped her hands and started over to them, her face tentative and somehow relieved. “We started. Before the rain comes. You had a good trip?” she said to Walter, glancing at Nick.

“Yes, perfect,” his father said easily, not answering her real question. “Here, let me help you with that.”

“No, no. You sit. I’ll start lunch.”

“She treats me like an invalid.”

“You are an invalid.”

“And you always expect rain,” he said, smiling.

She looked up at the cloudy sky, unimpressed by the patches of light breaking through, then leaned against him to take off her boots, holding on to his upper arm for support. “There are left a few,” she said to Nick, handing him a hammer. “You don’t mind? Your father should rest.”

“Sure,” Nick said automatically, staring down at her feet, surprisingly small and pale.

“Is there beer?” his father said.

“For you?”

“Anička,” he drawled, a mock pout.

She giggled good-naturedly and turned to the house. It was small, ordinary stucco with wooden shutters and sills, but placed at the top of a rise so that the lawn in front looked out over the trees to a field beyond. The landscape was unremarkable, not the dramatic rolling hills of Virginia, but the trees enclosed them in privacy. A rusty gas tank at the side. A stack of firewood, like the one at the cabin where they used to hide the spare key. A tiny tool shed in the back. A spigot with a green plastic garden hose attached, curled in a pail. Beyond the muddy driveway, woods to keep out the world. They came every weekend.

“Having fun?” he said to Molly as he reached the garden.

“You can’t imagine. Gidget goes to Prague,” she said. “Careful of the beans.”

He sidestepped a row of tiny green seedlings.

“You had a good trip?” Anna’s question, with the same edge.

Nick hammered in the stake. “We went to Theresienstadt.”

“The concentration camp?”

“My father seems to think it’s a tourist attraction.”

“The Germans go,” Molly said simply. “Pretty amazing, when you think of it.” She moved to the next stake. “How was it? With your father, I mean.”

“Fine,” he said. Then, “I don’t know. One minute he’s the same, then the next –I can’t get a fix. You know when you’re adjusting binoculars? It’s fuzzy, then it’s clear, then it’s all fuzzy again. Like that.”

“Why? What did he say?” she asked, curious.

Nick moved away from it. “It’s not what he says. It’s–maybe he’s just getting old. I never thought of him as old. I don’t know why. Of course he’d be old. What’s she like?”

“Not old. She doesn’t miss much. Her English is better than you think. She’s nervous about you.”

“Why?” Nick said quickly.

“Well, why not? Here she is, cozy in her garden, and you drop in. The long-lost son. She wants you to like her–it’s natural.”

Natural, his father’s word. “Yes,” he said again.

“So smile a little,” she said, pretending to be airy. “You look like you’ve just seen a concentration camp.” She stepped back from the last tomato stake. “There, that’s done. Just in time. Looks like soup’s on.”

She nodded toward the cottage door, where Anna was waving to them. She had changed the overalls for a skirt and blouse, and Nick noticed that her hair was brushed back, all tidied up.

“I hate soup,” Nick said absently.

“You’d better like hers,” Molly said.

She sprayed her feet with the hose and stamped them dry on the ground, taking down her hair and finger-combing it while she slipped into her loafers. Involuntarily, Nick smiled. Both Kotlar women seemed determined to make a good impression.

And, in fact, lunch was pleasant. The round dining table, set near the window corner of the room, was draped with a crocheted tablecloth anchored with a porcelain jug of fresh wildflowers. Across the table Anna had spread plates of pickles and hard-boiled eggs and salami arranged in pretty concentric circles. Nick glanced at the larder shelf, just like the one in their old cabin, but filled here with glass jars of cucumbers and tomatoes and beets, a garden preserved all year in vinegar and dill. He looked for the rainy-day snacks of his youth–peanut butter and saltines and cans of tuna–but this was a serious pantry, with real food to last a season. Anna ladled some form of borscht, beet red, from a decorated tureen and poured tall glasses of beer.

“Did you do all this yourself?” Nick said to her, indicating the shelves.

She nodded. “In the winter it’s difficult for vegetables. We are fortunate to have the garden.”

“Difficult. Nonexistent,” his father said. “Carrots–that’s it. Of course, the Americans have lettuce. Once a week the car goes to Germany. The lettuce run. Sometimes they share with their friends–the British, the Czech staff. Everyone in Prague knows someone who can get a German cabbage from the Americans. But Anička doesn’t like to do that. She thinks it’s disloyal,” he said playfully.

“Not disloyal. Illegal. Ruzyně for a salad? No.”

“Ruzyně,” Nick said. “The airport?”

“A prison,” his father explained. “Nearby. Same name.” Then, smiling at Anna, “Where they put you for groceries.”

“In the summer it’s different,” Anna said, ignoring the tease. “We have cherries down below. Plums. For jam.”

“Jam,” Nick said to his father. “Remember the time Mom tried with the blackberries?” It had slipped out before he could catch it and now it hung there, an embarrassment, but Anna smiled.

“Your mother was a gardener too?” A figure of the past.

“No. She said it would ruin her nails.” A half-truth, making her seem frivolous. Why had he said it? To make one feel comfortable at the expense of the other? But Molly was right–Anna didn’t miss much, and sensing his discomfort, she examined her hands and sighed.

“It’s a price, yes. She was right, I think.”

“But look how we eat,” his father said, pointing to the array of pickles. “Anna can make anything grow. A magician.”

“Oh, a magician. With peasant hands. That’s the price. For the planting thumb.”

“Green,” Molly said. “Green thumb.”

“Yes?” Anna giggled. “Green thumb. English–why do you make it so difficult?”

“You should try Czech,” Molly said.

Anna found this funny, or chose to, and laughed, and Nick suddenly saw her as she must have been, bright and attractive, before weight and time had drawn her face closed. When had they met? Did they have jokes together? Nick thought of his parents, laughing downstairs after the guests had gone. He had been looking at Anna as a kind of nurse, dispensing pills and telling his father to rest. Now he sensed a different intimacy. Not a nurse, a wife. Who broke her nails pulling weeds.

So, improbably, they talked about gardens, about temperamental peas and what to do when the squash came in, as if the morning with his father had never happened at all. Anna passed plates. Molly asked the names of things in Czech. Small talk, a conspiracy of cheerfulness. He found himself slipping into the easy familiarity of a family lunch, where nothing important was said because everything was already known. He sat back, listening to his father’s voice telling stories about the neighbors, feeling oddly at home. It was the last thing he’d expected here. Maybe things really were the same everywhere, fresh produce aside.

The room had been dim when they’d first come in, but now he could see it clearly, and his eyes moved lazily from the pantry shelf to the sitting area, the usual heap of books next to the couch. The side table with the Order of Lenin in its velvet box. The shelves on either side of the fireplace–no, not a fireplace, a wood stove, but framed by the same kind of shelves. He glanced toward the record player in the corner, then back to the couch, facing the easy chairs, each glance like a snapshot. He stopped. It felt the same because it was the same. The desk under the window with its portable typewriter, the table behind the couch for lamps and messy piles of books, even the radio on the windowsill–all the same. For a moment the slipcovers and crocheted doilies, Anna’s touches, disappeared. Arranged exactly the same, all of it. His father had recreated the cabin.

Nick stared at the room, half hoping to see the fishing poles near the door, and sank back into the old photograph. Did his father know? Or was it a longing so unconscious that even furniture fell into place, just part of the natural order of things? He’d never left. And what about Anna? Did she fall into place too, curled up on the sofa with a book in his mother’s spot? Maybe she liked it. Maybe she didn’t know she was living in someone else’s house.

“Did you have a place in Russia?” Nick said, clearly a question out of the blue, because they all looked at him, surprised he hadn’t been following their conversation.

“In the country?” Anna said. “Yes, a dacha. Small, like this. We had to bring everything with us. You can see the condition. So old. But new furniture–who can get it? Of course, your father didn’t mind. Men,” she said to Molly. “They like everything the same.”

“Hmm,” Molly said. “Like dogs.”

Anna laughed again, covering her mouth with her hand, a girl.

Afterward, Nick helped with the dishes while Molly and his father sat out in the sun in fading canvas chairs like the ones in Green Park. His father had taken another beer from the tiny fridge, hiding it from Anna and winking at him.

They worked at an old pedestal sink, Anna slipping wet plates into the drying rack, Nick wiping and stacking. She seemed preoccupied, uneasy now that they were alone, as if the others had taken the high spirits of the lunch table with them.

“How did you meet?” Nick asked to break the silence.

“Meet?” she said, surprised. “At work.” She brushed it away like a fly. She took a second, then turned to him, her hands still in the water. “He’s very ill. Did you know?”

“Yes. He told me.”

“It’s not good for him, to be excited.”

“He doesn’t look very excited.” Nick nodded toward the lawn chairs, trying to be light.

“He is,” she said flatly. “To see you—” She hesitated. “When he told me, I was afraid. That you would quarrel. So many years. But it’s all right, isn’t it?” She looked at him, more than a question.

“Yes. It’s all right.” He smiled. “No quarrels.”

“You think I’m foolish to worry like the mother hen. But I know him. All this month he’s waiting. What if he doesn’t come?”

“But I did.”

“Yes.” She turned back to the sink. “Your mother–she didn’t object?”

He glanced at her. “I didn’t tell her,” he said cautiously, not offering any more.

“Ah,” Anna said. “You thought it would upset her? Still?”

“I don’t know. She never talks about it.”

She nodded to herself. “Like Valter,” she said, translating his father’s name, making him foreign, hers. “Never of her. Only you.” Then, unexpectedly, “She’s a woman of fashion.”

It was another trick of language, the archaic phrase wrapping his mother in gowns and powdered wigs, a figure in a Fragonard swing. Nick smiled.

“I suppose. She thinks so, anyway.” There it was again, the easy disloyalty.

“Yes. I saw photographs. Beautiful. I was maybe a little jealous,” she said shyly.

“Jealous?”

Anna laughed. “When we get old, we become invisible to our children. But we still see. He was in love with her, I think.”

“That was a long time ago,” Nick said, embarrassed. Did she want to be reassured, this thick-waisted woman with her hands in the sink?

“Sometimes it’s easier to love a memory. In life, things change. What would Zdenek be like now, I wonder sometimes.”

“Who?”

“Excuse me. My first husband. It was a long time ago.” She smiled, echoing Nick’s words. “He was killed.”

“In the war?”

“No, when the Germans first came. They arrested him. They arrested all the Communists.”

Another life, closed to him. More than his father’s wife. Why had he thought she had no history?

“So to me he’s always young, like then. Now what would he be? An old man at the Café Slavia, arguing politics. Well, who knows? We change.” She turned and dried her hands on the towel, her eyes soft and concerned. “Even your father. Sometimes, you know, when a memory comes to life, it’s not what we expect.”

“You don’t have to worry,” Nick said. “I don’t expect him to be the same.”

She shook her head. “No. Him. What does he expect? All these years, he sees you as you were–not a man, not different. And then—” She reached over and touched his arm. “You’ll be careful. You won’t–excite him.”

Nick looked down at her hand. “You didn’t want me to come,” he said simply.

She sighed. “The wicked stepmother? No. It’s good for you to see each other. But perhaps Valter’s right, I am always looking for the rain. Why now? What does he want?” Nick moved his arm away, afraid of the question, but she had her own answer. “I think he’s getting ready to die. So, this meeting. But I’m not ready for that. We have a life here. Not rich. Not–fashion,” she said, almost spitting the word. “Quiet. But you don’t know what it means to have this. What it was like before.”

She shopped, turned back to the draining board, picked up a kettle, and held it under the faucet. For a minute the only sound was running water.

“I’m not trying to upset anything,” Nick said lamely.

“No,” she said quickly. “Excuse me. Such foolishness. How happy he is–you can see it in his eyes. So maybe it’s good.” There was a popping sound as she lit the gas ring.

“Two days. That’s all,” Nick said, as if they were bargaining for time.

She nodded. “Go talk to him. I’ll bring the tea.” She glanced out the window, a caretaker again. “It’s too much beer–he’ll fall asleep.”

But he was animated, talking with Molly in a patch of sunlight. In the low-slung canvas chairs they looked like a Bloomsbury photograph, droopy sun hats and cigarettes, waiting for tea.

“Nick. KP finished?” he said. “You’ll make someone a good husband. What do you think, Molly?”

She looked up at Nick. “Hmm. A catch.”

“I was telling Molly about when they took down Stalin’s statue here, in Petrin Park. Crowds kept coming–cheering, you know?–so they had to do it at night. But you could hear the dynamite way over Holečkova. All those years, and he still wouldn’t go quietly.”

“Chair?” Molly offered, but Nick sat down next to them on the grass.

“What’s down there?” He pointed to the clump of trees below. “Where the mist is.”

“Water. What we used to call a crick,” his father said, smiling at the word. “There’s always mist here, all over this part of Europe. It’s the cloud cover, I think. No wind, unless the föhn comes up from Vienna. Then everybody gets headaches. Maybe it explains the politics.”

Molly giggled. “And Freud.”

His father shot her an appreciative glance. “Yes, and Freud. Maybe it was the weather all along.” He lit a cigarette. “So, Nick, what will you do now?” A father’s question, innocent. “After LSE.”

Molly turned to him, frankly curious.

“Larry wants me to go back to law school.”

“Well, he would. And you?”

Nick shrugged. “We’ll see.”

“All the time in the world,” his father said. “Well, why not? Of course, someday you’ll have to earn a living.”

The tone, so unexpectedly paternal, annoyed Nick. Maybe Anna was right–he’d always be as he had been, a child.

“Larry settled some money on me,” he said bluntly.

His father was quiet for a second. “Did he? That was generous.”

“I told you he was a catch,” Molly said.

But this time his father ignored her. “What do you want to do, work with Wiseman?” He leaned back, smoking. “Of course, it’s the great subject. To know what happened. You know, when I was your age I thought history was–what? Sweeping forces,” he said, his voice ironic. “We were all swept along. Playthings.”

“A dialectic.”

“Yes, like that. The clash of forces. Something almost abstract.”

“And then?”

“Then, I suppose, biography. I saw the effect of one man. What if there hadn’t been a Stalin? Would things have been the same? No, utterly different. What if he’d never existed?”

“Who?” Anna said, coming out to them with a tray.

“Stalin.”

She hesitated, then handed his father a mug and two pills. “Here,” she said, as if nothing had been said.

“The great man theory,” Nick said.

“Great man,” Anna said. She passed out the mugs. “Such talk,” she said to his father, the words a kind of clicking of the tongue. Then she put the empty beer bottle on the tray, looked at them worriedly, and turned back to the house.

“She’s offended?” Nick said.

“No,” his father said. “She thinks the trees have ears, like all good Czechs. Someone’s always listening.” He sipped the tea. “At Stalin’s funeral, several thousand people died. Trampled. In the crowd, to say goodbye. To the man who tried to murder them.”

“There’s no one like that now,” Molly said quietly.

“Now? No. Petty crooks. Bureaucrats. So much for the theory. I was wrong. They were aberrations, the Stalins. Great forces, great men–such melodrama. And all along, what was it? A crime story.”

Nick looked up at him.

“Of course, it’s interesting,” his father said, gazing back to Nick. “To solve the crime.”

“That’s what Wiseman says.”

“Yes, well, he should know.” He smiled slightly. “Maybe it’s a hazard of the profession. He worked for the British, you know. SIS.” He caught Nick’s look. “No, not now, during the war. Everybody did. He must have seen plenty of crimes. All in a good cause, of course. They’re always in a good cause. Even Stalin’s, who knows? People thought that. Sometimes even the victims thought that–it gave them a reason why it was happening to them.” –He shrugged. “History.”

The air was still, not even a rustle of leaves. A crime story. But what if you were in it?

When Molly stirred in her chair, it felt like an interruption. “Well,” she said, pushing herself up, “I’ll let you two figure out who done it. I’m just a farm girl.” She looked toward the garden, where Anna was digging, then up at the clouds. “I’d say about an hour, if we’re lucky.”

They watched her move across the grass, waving to Anna.

“She’s a nice girl, your Molly.”

“My Molly?”

“She likes you,” his father said simply, a matchmaker’s tease that caught Nick off guard.

In spite of himself, he flushed. “Don’t complicate things.”

“A girl like that is never a complication. Your mother had it, that spirit.”

“She doesn’t have it now.” He looked down. Anna had been right. They were quarreling.

But his father sidestepped it, saving nothing. He put his hand on Nick’s shoulder, stroking it lightly, the way he used to when they sat together on the dock, waiting for fish.

“Do you still go to the cabin?” he asked idly.

“No. It was sold.”

His father nodded. “So. Every trace.” Then the hand stopped, just a weight now. “Will she see me, do you think?”

Why hadn’t he thought of this before? “Yes,” he said. They’d all see him. His mother, staring out of windows. Larry, who’d patched up their lives. All the carefully constructed years. Where would they meet, in the apartment? Nick tried to picture it, the tentative first words, but nothing came. And he realized, shocked at himself, that he didn’t want it to happen. He didn’t want him to come back, splintering things again. The old dream. And now that it might be real, like the weight of his father’s hand, he wanted to shake it off, walk away. But the hand was there, pulling him.

His father leaned back and sighed. “I’d like that,” he said dreamily. “What will I say?” A conversation with himself. “Where do you start? I don’t know how to start with you. What do you like for breakfast? What do you read? It seems silly, doesn’t it, not to know these things.”

Nick didn’t say anything. His father, too, seemed to retreat from the day, closing his eyes against the weak sunlight. Nick could hear Anna and Molly talking in the garden, a faint insect buzzing.

“Anna doesn’t know,” Nick said. “What we talked about this morning.”

“No. I told you, no one. It’s too dangerous for her.”

“Why dangerous?”

“If they thought she helped—” He let the thought hang.

“What about Molly?”

“Molly? There’s no danger to her. What does she know? That I wanted to see you, that’s all,” he said drowsily. “It’s good she likes you. It looks better.”

“You took a chance with her.”

“No. I checked.”

“What?”

“There are not so many Americans in Prague. We know who they are–the embassy staff, the journalists. We watch to see if they recruit Czechs, so there’s a list. I checked. She’s not working for them. A love affair.” He smiled, his eyes still closed. “At that age, there’s always a love affair. She was safe. You were the chance–if you would come. But you did. I knew. It doesn’t matter, you see, all the rest of it–what you like for breakfast. I knew you would come.”

Nick looked over to the garden at Molly’s face, fresh and guileless. A security check, just in case. In his father’s world, suspicion hung over everyone, like the permanent cloud cover.

Then, a new thought. “Who keeps a list?”

“Nick.” Indulgent, to a child. “We have our people too. That’s the way it works.”

But how exactly? Nick thought. Maids in the embassy? Repairmen going through desks? Somebody nursing a drink at a bar, all ears?

“Like Marty Bielak?”

His father frowned. “Who?”

“An American. He lives here. He was at the bar in the Alcron.”

“Bielak,” his father said, evidently remembering. “You talked to him?”

“No, he talked to me. Don’t worry–I didn’t say anything. Just a tourist. Is he one of yours?”

“Well, a Winchell,” his father said dismissively. “A legman. He collects items–do they still call them that, items? He worked for the radio. Then his wife left, last year, when people could go out. So now he’s a legman. To rehabilitate himself, I suppose. I met him once. He’s a believer. For him, still the workers’ paradise.”

“Then why does he need to rehabilitate himself?” Nick said, slipping into the language.

“They won’t trust him now. Unless she comes back, of course. Anyway, better avoid him–you don’t want to become an item.”

“But is it useful, what he does?”

“It gives them something to read. What else is there, Rudé Právo?”

Nick said nothing, and in the stillness that followed he could hear his father’s faint breathing. He looked over at the closed eyes, the lined face smoothing out with sleep. He had drifted off with a cigarette still in his hand, and Nick leaned over and gently slipped it from his fingers, taking a puff himself, familiar, like sharing a toothbrush. A lazy afternoon. But nothing was peaceful here, not even the torpid landscape, tense with rain.

He looked toward the garden, where Anna was planting. Why bother? Soon it would be overgrown, abandoned. But she didn’t know. If they thought she had helped– He felt the cigarette hot on his finger as the thought swept through him, stiffening him with dread. She didn’t know because she wasn’t going. His father was going to leave her, walk away from this life the way he’d walked away from theirs. Leaving everything behind. Only this time it would be Nick on the other end in the phone booth. That’s what he was being asked to do.

He let the cigarette fall, staring ahead, not trusting himself to look at his sleeping father. The same crime all over again. He saw his mother weeping on the sofa. But Anna wouldn’t be rescued by a rich man. She’d need to be rehabilitated–to denounce him, make them trust her. He watched her work, bending and straightening, unaware, and he could feel the heat in his face. We have a life here. But it would go too, the dim cottage and the jars of food, whatever peace they’d managed to scrape together. How could he do it? But how could he have done it the first time?

Nick got up and moved away from the chairs. The lawn sloped west, into the sun, and for an instant he wondered if he could keep going, all the way through the barbed wire, until he was home. In Prague they kept reminding you they were west of Vienna, Molly had told him, as if their history had violated a logic of geography. It was forty, fifty miles to the border, not far. He could simply walk through. But his father needed someone to help. A small favor. A message. And then it would never stop, one step after another until everyone was swept up in the turmoil again. Not history, just his father’s endless mistake.

As he reached the trees he could hear the sky begin to rumble, a sound effect. He followed the path down to the water, pushing past bushes until the house was hidden behind him, out of sight. He stopped. What if the message were never delivered? A small betrayal, for everyone’s sake. He started down again, with something like relief. It was that easy. Stop it finally. His father would never know. But he’d wait, expecting a call, some signal. That’s how it would end, waiting, wondering why nobody came. The way Nick had waited. Could he do that to him? I don’t want to die here, Nick.

The water was a crick, just as he had said, channeled by a low bank. Nick picked up a few small stones and began throwing them into the stream, listening for the familiar plops. He’d have to tell him, not let him waste what life was left here. Don’t excite him, Anna had said, but which was worse? You can’t expect me to do this. But his father had expected it, sure of him. So he’d sent for him, finally. That had been the point all along. Not to see him; to get an accomplice. He threw another stone, staring at the ripples.

“Just a boy at heart,” Molly said, behind him. He turned, surprised, her voice bringing him back. “You never see little girls throwing rocks, but boys can do it for hours. Now why is that?”

He smiled. “I don’t know. We used to pretend they were grenades. Here, try it.”

She took a stone from his hand and pitched it, then shrugged. “Nothing. It must be one of those throwback things. You know, from the caves. When you were out there hunting and we were home stitching hides.” She paused. “Anything wrong?”

He shook his head. “My father fell asleep. Pretty exciting, isn’t it, life behind the iron curtain?”

“I don’t know. My father used to spend the weekend watching golf on TV. Compared to that, it’s a hoot.”

He threw another stone. “How’s the garden?”

“She’s starting dinner. It takes hours, apparently, whatever it is. I suppose I should help. Boil nettles or something. God knows what little treat she’s cooking up this time.” She stopped. “Now why am I being like this? She’s nice. It’s just–I don’t know, a little strange. Different, anyway. I feel like I’m meeting the in-laws and I haven’t even been asked out yet.”

He smiled at her. “Will you go out with me?”

“Oh.” She glanced up at him. “Soon,” she said, light again. Then she turned to the water, and in the silence that followed he felt her mood shift, like a faint stirring in the heavy air. “Want to tell me what’s going on? The two of you were thick as thieves.”

“He wants me to do something for him. I don’t think I can.”

“Then don’t,” she said quickly, trying to be casual. “What is it? Smuggle something out? It’s usually that. Letters and things. They call it the tourist post.”

“No. He—”

But she swung around suddenly, holding up her hand. “No, don’t tell me. Really. I don’t want to know. It’s better. Just don’t do it.” The urgency in her voice caught him by surprise. “Don’t do anything.”

He nodded, still surprised, waiting for her to go on, but she turned away.

“God, I wish we could go,” she said.

“Go?” His own idea, thrown back at him, a lifeline. Drive through the fence.

“Before anything happens.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Nothing’s going to happen.”

“We could, you know,” she said. “Just leave. Tomorrow. We could do that stupid Danube boat if you want. Anything.” She turned. “We could start over.”

The words made him look at her, an unexpected twirl of the binoculars. He saw her freckles, suddenly clear. Not complicated.

She raised her head and held his eyes for a moment. “Couldn’t we?”

He touched her arm, an almost involuntary movement, and nodded.

“Would you like that?” she said, her eyes still on him.

There was a streak of dirt on her forehead, left over from the garden.

He nodded again. “But not on the Danube.”

“No.” She leaned closer. “Where?” she said, her voice low.

They stood for an instant, not moving, and then it was too late. The rain came all at once; no first drops, just the sudden burst of a punctured water balloon shocking them into place. They looked at each other, startled at being wet, then Molly, catching the water on her face, started to laugh. Nick took her hand and pulled her under a large tree. They stamped their feet, shaking themselves.

“Christ,” Nick said. He picked at his shirt, sticking coldly to his back. Molly shook her hair, then leaned against the tree, her breasts showing through her blouse.

She smiled. “Not here, I guess.”

They were both gulping air, as if they’d been running, and he stared at her for a second, watching the rise and fall of her chest, then moved nearer to the tree.

“Isn’t that what they do in the army?” she said. “Cold showers?”

He leaned down, rubbing his hand along her face, slick with rain.

“It’s what they advise,” he said, his mouth almost touching hers.

But the rain had broken the mood. She pulled back. “Well, what’s got into you?” she said, but pleased, still holding him. “We don’t have to start over before dinner.”

“The ground’s dry.” He bent forward again.

She reached up, putting her hand to his face. “We’re a little old for this. Rolling around in the mud.” She moved aside, shaking her blouse.

“Is that what you used to do?” he said, watching her.

“What? In my hippie days?” she said airily. “No. I like it better in a room.”

“What’s so special about a room?”

“You will, too.”

“Promise?”

She grinned. “I guarantee it.” Then she looked up at him, serious. “There’s plenty of time. Now that you’ve asked me out.”

“Okay, I’ll get us a room,” he said.

She rubbed her hair between her hands. “Mm, with hidden microphones.” Her eyes widened, a glint of mischief. “I hadn’t thought of that. What’s that like? Do they listen? You know.”

“If we make noise.”

She stepped over to the edge of the dry area, facing the rain. “Should we make a run for it? They’ll be worried.”

Beyond the first few feet, the woods had become a blur. A few drops were coming through the leaves overhead now, but the leaky tent held, shutting everything else out.

“Not yet. Stay a little.”

She glanced at him. “A little time out?” she said softly. She walked over to him. “Got a cigarette?”