Текст книги "The Prodigal Spy"

Автор книги: Joseph Kanon

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

Part II

The Red Menace

Chapter 3

April 1969

“VANESSA REDGRAVE’S SUPPOSED to show.”

“Super. Where?” The two boys, obviously students, looked over the iron railings toward the tall houses lining one side of the square.

“I don’t know, but she’s supposed to show. Check out the cameras.”

“Far out. We’ll be on TV.”

Eavesdropping, Nick smiled and looked toward the embassy steps, where the camera crews were setting up. The turnout was bigger than he’d expected. The day was raw and cold, damp morning mist still hanging from the trees, but the line snaked all around Grosvenor Square, ringing the enclosed park and spilling out down Brook Street. They couldn’t all be American. The streets were still open to traffic, and the police, polite and wary, walked along the edge of the curb, asking the crowd to stay on the pavement.

The rally, like London itself, was gentle and friendly. In front of the embassy there were microphones for the demonstration speeches and Americans Against Vietnam signs, but no one broke out of line or heckled the secretaries going into the building. A few faces stared out of the upper-story windows, more curious than besieged, but no one called out to them. The confrontations and shouting belonged somewhere else. They were here to listen to speeches and then, one by one, to read the names of the dead.

Nick looked around for his LSE group, but they’d become separated earlier and were now swallowed up in the queue. One of the organizers, megaphone dangling from his neck, was moving down the line, handing out index cards.

“When you get to the mike, just read off the name and place and say ‘dead’ and then drop the card in the coffin. Got it? Don’t yell–the mike’ll pick it up. And keep it moving, okay? No stunts.”

Nick took the card. Pvt. Richard Sczeczynski. Nu Phoc, 1968. That would have been during Tet, when the body bags flooded the airport, a hundred years ago.

The organizers looked like teenagers, but then everyone in the crowd looked young to him. Earlier he had noticed a middle-aged group in drab overcoats–academics, presumably, or English radicals old enough to have tramped from Aldermaston–but everyone else seemed to have stepped out of a dorm party, smooth-faced and eager, wrapped in capes and leather and old army greatcoats. A few had peace signs painted on their foreheads. Underneath the bushy mustaches and lumberjack beards their cheeks were pink. It was a thrift shop army – cast-off shawls and buckskin fringe and tight jeans with shiny studs planted along the seams. None of them had been there.

“Excuse me,” a girl behind him said, holding out her card. “Do you have any idea how to pronounce this?”

An American voice. He looked at her–long blond hair held away from her face by an Indian headband, shoulders draped with a patterned gaucho cape–and took the card.

“Hue,” he said automatically, wondering why she’d asked. She was pretty but slightly drawn, dressed to look younger than she was. Had she been standing there all this time?

“No, the name. I mean, he’s dead–awful if I couldn’t pronounce it. I mean—”

Nick looked again at the card. “Trochazka,” he read.

“Chaw?” she said, drawing out the flat a. “Like that? Russian?”

“No, it’s a Czech name.”

“Really? Do you know that?”

Nick shrugged. “It’s a common name. Smith. Jones. Like that.”

“Common if you’re Czech,” she said. “Are you?”

Nick shook his head. “Grandmother.”

“You take it, then. I’ll never say it right. Swap, okay? Do you mind?”

Nick smiled. “Be my guest,” he said, handing her his card. He watched her face as she read it, did a double-take, and then gave a wry smile.

“Okay, you win. I can’t even start this one. Is this like Jones too?”

“No. Che-chin-ski,” he pronounced. “Polish.”

“You can tell? Just like that?”

“Well, the ‘ski’ is Polish. The rest, I don’t know. I’m just guessing.”

She looked at him and smiled. “I’m impressed.” She reached over and took back her card, grazing his fingers. “Forget the swap, though. I think I was better off the first time. Imagine, two in a row. Maybe we’re the Slavic section. How do you say yours? In Czech. Z’s and y’s and all that?”

“Warren.”

“Oh.” She smiled. “Sorry.”

“No,” he said, studying her face, her quick brown eyes meeting his without embarrassment. “They’re funny names.”

“But not to them. I know. Mine’s Chisholm, by the way. With an l.”

“Imagine what the Poles would do with that.”

She smiled. “Yes, imagine.”

He looked at her again. Wide mouth and pale skin, a trace of freckles over the bridge of her nose.

“Where are you from?” she said, the usual American-abroad question.

“New York.”

“No, I mean where here. Are you with a group?”

“LSE,” Nick said.

“You’re a student?”

He laughed at her surprise. “Too old?”

“Well, the tie—” He followed her eyes to the senior-tutor wool jacket and plain tie he’d forgotten he had on. “Are you a teacher?”

“No, I’m finishing a dissertation,” he said, the all-purpose explanation for his time away, the drift. “Late start. What about you?”

“Oh, I’m–just here.” She looked away for a second, avoiding him, and adjusted the heavy bag hanging from her shoulder, a shapeless but good soft leadier that seemed at odds with the hippie cape. When she turned back, he was still staring at her. “What?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said, catching himself. “I was–never mind.”

“What?” she said, a laugh now in her throat.

“Well, I was going to say, Do you come here often? And I realized how dumb it sounded. What I meant was, have you been to one of these before?” But what he really meant was, why are you here? He wondered if she was like the girls in Hair, floating in a haze of smoke between protest marches and concerts, interchangeable parts of the same scene. But she was looking at him again with the same frank scrutiny, anything but mindless.

“Of course,” she said simply. “I don’t understand people who don’t.”

“Even over here?” Nick said, his own doubt.

She shrugged. “It all counts. Somehow. Why do you?”

“Same reason, I guess,” he said, letting it drop.

The line moved a little now, people drawing nearer to the steps where the speakers had appeared, and he began to move with it.

“So do you always wear a tie?” she said, trying to keep his attention.

He smiled. Was she flirting with him? “I have to meet somebody after,” he said. “That’s all. Tie people.”

She looked up at him and squinted her eyes. “Tie people?”

“Parents.”

“Parents?” she said, disconcerted.

“Am I too old for that too?”

She looked at him oddly, as if his answer had thrown her, a piece from the wrong puzzle. “They live here?” she said unexpectedly.

He shook his head. “Flying visit. One meal. One tie. Not too much to ask.” He glanced at his watch, reminded of the time. Larry and his mother were expecting him in just under an hour. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I—”

She seemed flustered again, but now there was a movement in the crowd, and before she could finish, people began to surge politely around them, looking down the street.

“It’s her!” someone shouted. “She came.”

Nick glanced toward the corner, where a black taxi idled as a tall woman leaned in to pay the fare. Two women with her greeted the organizers and collected their index cards, then steered her away from the photographers who had begun to move in their direction. “Miss Redgrave, over here!” She was dressed in a plain pea coat with a long muffler wrapped around her neck as camouflage, but in her high boots she towered over the other marchers, drawing attention like camera light. Now the rally had point.

She ignored the commotion at the steps and quietly joined the line not far from Nick, thanking the students who moved aside to make a place. They nodded shyly, pretending to be indifferent, but it was a face they had seen twenty feet high and soon they were staring openly, sprinkled with the same fairy dust that drew the press.

“Can you give us a statement?” one of the reporters shouted, Cockney and insistent.

“No, sorry,” she said, turning away and staring straight ahead, removing herself.

“And will you be speaking today?” he asked quickly.

One of the women with her waved an arm to take in the crowd. “We’re all speaking today,” she said. “Just by being here.” The students around her nodded, flattered.

Nick wondered who she was. An actress he didn’t recognize? Or a hanger-on, the willing mouthpiece?

“What about charges that demos like these are actually undermining the progress of the Paris peace talks?”

“What progress?”

“Right,” he said, smiling, finally jotting something down. “Film stars in politics?”

“Come on, Davey, not again,” the woman said, surprising Nick with the intimacy. Had they been around this dance floor before? Maybe she was famous, part of the new culture that seemed to have sprung up overnight, while he wasn’t looking, a music without history. “Everyone’s in politics,” she said, almost offhandedly. “Whether they want to be or not.”

“Even the dead, eh? These soldiers here,” he said, nodding toward the index cards. “Think they’d be pleased? Being part of this?”

There was a question, Nick thought. He wasn’t even sure how he felt, still alive.

“We honor them as victims, not soldiers,” the woman said, then stopped, aware that the reporter was writing. “That’s all now, please.”

And, surprisingly, it was. The reporter, still scribbling, nodded and started to back away, apparently satisfied with an interview that hadn’t really happened. Nick remembered the reporters in Vietnam taking the handouts from the press office, knowing they were lies, printing them anyway.

“Davey’s all right,” the woman now said busily to Redgrave, who seemed not to hear, her Valkyrie head still above the crowd.

The line continued to press from behind, drawn to limelight, and Nick felt himself pushed against the girl at his side.

“Hey, Nick!”

He turned to the yell and saw the crowd rearrange itself as Henry, from the LSE group, pushed through. He came up to them, clearly excited by the day. “Hi,” he said to the girl. “I see you found him.”

Nick looked at her, puzzled, and saw her face color with embarrassment.

“I thought he’d be over here,” Henry said to her, still unaware of her discomfort. “Description fit?”

“Perfectly,” she said quietly.

“How’d you get lost anyway?” he said to Nick. “Old Wiseman came. He was asking for you.”

But Nick was still staring at the girl. She met his eyes as frankly as before, then shrugged, found out.

“Hey, is that Vanessa Redgrave?” Henry said, looking around. “Where’s Annie? Annie loves her.” He finally made eye contact with his girlfriend and jabbed his finger in the air toward the tall woman.

“I just wanted to meet you, that’s all,” the girl said, still looking at Nick but smiling now. “Is that so terrible?”

Nick didn’t know how to respond. Was she trying to pick him up? Is that the way it worked now? He looked at her, trying to imagine what it would be like. A few light exchanges, the walk back to her flat, the awkwardness until they finally touched–just like that, as easy as the music. In spite of himself, he grinned.

“No. So what do you think?” he said finally, spreading his hands to present himself, making a joke of it.

“I’m not sure yet,” she said, matching his tone. “I like the tie, though. Look, maybe I’d better explain—” But she was drowned by the megaphones starting the demonstration and settled for another helpless shrug of the shoulders and a smile that didn’t explain anything.

The crowd grew quiet around them, alert and solemn, as the speaker welcomed them and asked them to begin the roll call of the dead. They stepped forward one at a time to read the names, the first few barely audible, unsure of the microphones. In the distance they could hear a buzz of traffic, but the square itself had become a hushed theater, and as one name followed another they took on the rhythm of a muffled drum roll.

“Corporal Ronald Stanton. Ben Hoa, 1967. Dead.”

“Private Anthony Moro. Hue, 1968. Dead.”

On and on, all the body bags. The line shuffled forward, holding index cards.

Nick listened for names he might have known, ashamed suddenly of flirting. He could feel her next to him, but she was looking straight ahead, serious, and it occurred to him that he had got it wrong somehow. Not a pickup. Why ask Henry anyway? None of it made sense, except his wanting it to be true, flattered by the attention, as eager as a teenager splashing on aftershave before a dance. “Lieutenant Charles Macomb. Mekong Delta, 1968. Dead.” Not even a town, just a stretch of swamp. At the demonstration in New York they had wanted Nick to wear his uniform. “It’s important, for moral authority,” the organizer had said, a nice kid from Columbia still spotted with acne. But he had refused. Did it make him any better to have been there? It seemed to Nick that he had spent half his life in uniform, being good–Boy Scouts, with the proud sash of merit badges; ROTC, always pressed; the tropical-weight khaki–and it had all come down to a drum roll of names. There was no moral authority in a uniform, not even this new one of beads and headbands. He wondered how many of them had come to a funeral, to read the names, and were thinking instead about getting laid.

“Corporal Leonard Bauer. Lon Sue, 1968. Dead.” Nick looked up, startled. He had been to Lon Sue, before he’d been transferred back from the field, a semicircle of huts and scratching chickens steaming in a hot clearing. But who was Bauer? There’d been a little boy, killed when the bomb he’d been hiding–for whom?–went off, taking a few soldiers with him. Maybe Bauer. Afterward they had shot the parents, who never said a word, grateful perhaps not to have to live through the grieving. The huts were torched. Maybe Bauer had been one of these, shooting flames and yelling, hit later by a sniper. Maybe they were honoring a monster. And maybe he hadn’t been there at all, just a jungle casualty, and someone in the office had looked at a map and picked a place of death for his tag. Now he was another piece of evidence, a name for the Fulbright scholars and draft evaders and movie stars to drop in a box as the line moved on. Who could sort it out? Larry was on his way to Paris to negotiate, which made him the enemy to Miss Redgrave’s friend. And maybe he was.

“You go first,” the girl said, and he saw that they were coming up to the microphones, a few steps above the young faces and careful policemen. He must have been drifting again, because she was looking at him curiously, as if she were trying to read his thoughts. Odd, the dark eyes in the blond face, unless there were hints of green that only showed in the light. He tilted his head a little to see and suddenly wished they could go for a walk in the park, away from the confusion and mixed motives of a rally that wouldn’t matter anyway. A blanket on Hampstead Heath, an afternoon of absolute nothing. Talking idly. The image was so real that he wanted to laugh, surprised to be thinking in song lyrics. Instead he nodded, back in the raw, damp morning, and felt guilty. He was here for the names. He read his card and stepped away from the microphone.

“Private Leonard Prochazka. Hue, 1968. Dead.” She read the name perfectly, so that he wondered whether she had needed his help at all. Or had that been playing up too?

The steady line of readers coming down the steps pushed him farther back into the formless crowd, and for a minute he thought he’d lost her. Then he saw her craning her head near the curb, obviously looking for him, and made his way over.

“Spoken like a native,” he said easily.

“Thanks.”

“Pani Prochazkova would be pleased,” he said, testing her, but her face was blank. “His mother,” he explained.

“Oh.” She looked around at the crowd. “Now what happens?”

“Speeches.”

“Do you want to get some coffee?”

“I can’t. Really. I’m meeting somebody.” He fingered his tie. “Remember?”

“One tie. One meal.” She nodded. “Look, it’s not what you think,” she said, suddenly hesitant.

“It’s not?”

She met his look, debating, then gave it up. “Screw it,” she said. “As if you’d believe me now anyway. Look, I didn’t do this right. I just wanted to see—” She stopped. “One of my bright ideas. Not exactly the best place, though, was it?” she said, extending her hand toward the steps, where the names were still being read. “You probably think–well, I know what you think.”

“Take it easy,” he said, smiling. “Want to start this over?”

She smiled. “I thought you had to go.”

“I do. Can I call you?”

“I don’t want you to think–oh, what’s the difference? You probably wouldn’t call otherwise. Anyway, we can’t talk here.”

He watched her, intrigued, feeling that he was eavesdropping on a conversation she was having with herself. “So can I call you?”

She looked at him again, the same appraising once-over. “Flaxman, double-oh two nine,” she said carefully. “Better write it down.”

“I’ll say it three times. Then it’s mine for life.”

But this seemed to throw her.

“Like the game,” he said. “You know, for new vocabulary words.”

“Does that really work?” she said, genuinely curious.

“Usually. Flaxman, double-oh two nine,” he repeated. “Chisholm, with an l.”

She smiled at him. “Molly. Two l’s,” she said, extending her hand to shake his, just introduced.

“And I’m Nick.” He held her hand for a moment. “I’ll call,” he said, wondering if he would.

He watched her cape as she worked her way through the crowd. When she turned to look back, he felt caught and she laughed at his expression, then wiggled her fingers in a wave and was gone.

“What was that about?” he said to Henry, still staring after her.

“I don’t know. She asked if you were around.”

“Really? By name?” Nick said, puzzled again.

Henry grinned. “Maybe you were recommended. They talk, you know.”

He looked for the cape, but it had disappeared, taking the answer with it. A girl at a rally. He grinned back. “Yeah, right,” he said, the locker-room answer Henry expected. If he really wanted to know, all he had to do was call.

“I told you. Demonstrations are the best,” Henry said.

Nick listened to a few of the speeches. Wiseman, the historian, who had served Churchill in the great days, spoke of the folly of imperial adventures. Then an expatriate writer spoke on the criminality of the bombing, the tear in the social fabric at home. Nobody talked about the Lon Sue boy’s parents, bowing their heads to the inevitable. But what was there to say to that? Nobody here had pulled the trigger. They weren’t the problem. They were the good guys, even Henry, who only pretended to be frivolous, and Annie, in her white makeup and Twiggy eye shadow, listening hard. It was easy to dismiss them and their tie-dyed politics, but what about the others, who used the dead soldiers to justify sending more? Because otherwise what had been the point? Private Bauer had to be redeemed. Nick had the same sense of futile dislocation he’d felt at the other rallies. They were here to talk to themselves, but the war had taken on a momentum of its own, killing everything. Who cared why it was crazy if it couldn’t be stopped? As if he was doing anything about it either, dropping a name in a box.

Nick slipped away to the edge of the crowd, not even bothering to say goodbye. There was nothing worth hearing, and he was already late. He headed toward the Brook Street end of the square, then turned right, down past the bright flags on the Connaught to Mount Street, past the antique shops and the smart butcher where dressed fowl hung in the window like pieces of rare furniture. The crowd had been yelling back responses to one of the speakers, but even that had disappeared by the time he got to Berkeley Square, drowned out by the traffic zipping around the auto showrooms and the old plane trees that had survived the blitz.

It was a different London here, window boxes and polished brass, gleaming with privilege. With each block he felt he was leaving his own life for the smooth deep pile of his mother’s world, where every step was cushioned and even the light was soft, filtered through trees in the park. In New York her windows looked out over the reservoir, and here, he suspected, she would be high over Green Park, exchanging one eyrie for another without bothering to come down to earth.

When he reached the Ritz he hesitated, reluctant to go in, and instead walked over to the park to have a cigarette. They’d still be groggy from a jet-lag nap, grateful for the delay. But Larry never napped. It was Nick who wanted the few minutes, to clear his head.

Aside from a few dog-walkers, he had the park to himself. He sat looking at the canvas lawn chairs scattered on the grass, hoping for sun, then glanced toward the hotel windows. Of course they’d be up. What did they talk about? After all these years, their life was still a mystery to him. He knew he should be grateful. Larry had rescued his mother from the bad time when she sleepwalked through the days and had made her happy. But she’d become someone else. There were moments still when she met Nick’s eyes and he felt they were back in their old life, but then the phone would ring or the flowers would arrive and she would turn away, literally facing forward as if, like Lot’s wife, the past would kill, turn her into a pillar of salt. Instead she seemed to spin in a circle of dinners and fittings and weekends and museum committees until, exhausted, she was too tired to think of anything else.

It was useless to pretend she didn’t enjoy it. Larry adored her and she answered him with an affectionate attention that Nick knew was more than simple gratitude, some emotional payback for security. They were a couple. Larry had given them a new life and his mother reveled in it, drawing on the blank check of Larry’s wealth. But she had paid something too. Her laugh was different. Or was it only age, a settling in? Nick knew that, finally, it wasn’t his concern, that he had no right to be uneasy. Nothing stays the same. But when she sat at her dressing table now, in her perfect clothes, her hair brushed into place, he felt that only part of her came back through the mirror and that in all that soft luxury it had become something shiny and hard, lacquered with money.

He stubbed out the cigarette and started back to the hotel.

In a way, Nick thought, he’d been luckier. Larry had offered the protection and anonymity of his name without asking anything in return. His mother had been anxious about them in the beginning, but Larry had approached him as a kind of thorny Government assignment, and with his usual tact and steady whittling away had won this negotiation too. He’d brought him back from the Priory. He did not ask to be called Dad and, except for those Sundays lugging gear to hockey practice at Lasker, hadn’t tried to be one. They got along. It came, probably, as a surprise to them both. They were careful and then they were attached, in a family neither of them had expected, and when Nick had left home they found they missed each other, the reluctant father and his accidental son. Larry always introduced him that way–“my son”–and it had been years since Nick had felt guilty hearing it. Out of deference to his mother, they never spoke of his real father, because they were conspirators in this, keeping his mother happy, while she stared out of high windows and never looked back.

The Ritz, however, had only managed a second-story room facing Piccadilly, and as he padded down the corridor, past the pink walls and faux Louis XVI chairs, he smiled to himself, imagining their arrival scene–his mother frostily put out, Larry accommodating.

Larry opened the door, still in stockinged feet and suspenders, and drew him in with the familiar broad smile and a hand on his shoulder.

“Nick, come in, come in. Good to see you. Just let me finish this,” he said, pointing to the telephone lying on the desk. The years had thickened him and the Van Johnson hair was gray, but the face was still boyish, as eager as a soldier’s on leave. “The duchess is still in her parlor,” he said, nodding toward the closed bathroom. For a second Nick wondered if it was an unkind joke, for in his worst moments he had begun to think of her like the Duchess of Windsor, idle and groomed. But Larry was incapable of that kind of crack. It was just the winking camaraderie of men waiting for their women to dress. “I’ll only be a sec,” he said, returning to the phone.

Nick looked past the flowers and the messy coffee tray toward the bedroom piled with suitcases, and went over to the window. The room was quieter than he’d expected, the traffic on Piccadilly barely audible through the double glazing. The bed was still made, so no one had napped. Coffee, a wake-up shower, the phone calls–their morning was laid out before him like a map, already on schedule.

“What time is it there? Seven? Try him at home,” Larry was saying. “Well, then get him up. I’m seeing David later and he’ll want to be briefed. Yes, I know, but it’s a courtesy. Let’s not make this into a crisis, Jimmy. They’re not going to walk away from the table. It’s probably just another goddam Buddhist holiday. They’ve got a million of them. But find out.”

Nick listened to the wheels of power while the midday traffic floated by outside.

“Fine,” Larry said, signaling to Nick that he was finishing. “And use the telex line, will you? I’ll be in and out. Right, later.” He hung up. “Nick,” he said fondly, shifting gears.

“How’s the Insider?” Nick said, a joke between them. A Newsweek cover story had labeled him Mr Insider, the old Democrat who served both parties and seemed beyond either, the surprise Nixon appointee to the negotiating team, brought back by the wrong party from his banishment to the wilderness during the Johnson years. That had been the one transition he hadn’t survived, trickier than Truman to Eisenhower, because Kennedy had liked him and that, for Johnson, had been that. Now he was in because he’d been out, his hands so clean in Asia that he’d become a statesman, not a fixer.

“Outside looking in, from the sound of it,” he said, smiling. “Seems I’m going to face an empty table in Paris tomorrow.”

“They’re objecting to you?” Nick said, surprised.

“They’ll get over it. They have to.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“This time? Old Cold Warrior, something like that. Hardline–that’s the actual phrase. Funny, back then I wasn’t supposed to be hard-line enough. Still, who was? Except Stalin.”

Nick smiled at the play of his mind. “Is it serious?”

But Larry was clearly enjoying himself. “No. Ho’s probably still away for the weekend, but nobody wants to say. The minute he gets back we’ll be bowing and drinking tea and off we go.”

“Good luck,” Nick said, looking at him seriously.

Larry looked up, not sure how to respond, but before he could say anything, Nick’s mother opened the bathroom door.

“Nick,” she said, smiling. “I didn’t hear you.” She was already dressed, a Chanel suit with a short skirt, and had clearly been putting on fresh makeup, so Nick expected an air-kiss, but she rushed across the room to hug him with the old warmth, her cheek tight against him.

“You’ll smear,” he said, laughing.

“Oh, darling, I don’t care,” she said, holding him. “Here. Let me look at you.” She pulled back, holding his upper arms, gazing at him fondly, and Nick wondered again if she saw his father. “I think you’ve grown. Is that possible? We’re supposed to stop. But Nick, the hair.” She touched the back of his neck.

“Too long?”

“Too scraggly. Just a trim? I’m sure they have a barber downstairs. It wouldn’t take ten minutes—”

“Mother.”

“Oh, I know, I know. But honestly, Nick, you can’t go to the Bruces’ like that. You really can’t.”

“We’re going to the Bruces‘?”

She sighed. “Oh, I know, darling, I’m sorry. We came to see you and now Evangeline’s carrying on about dinner. She’s been on the phone half the morning. I told her we’d said drinks but apparently she’s got half of London coming to some reception. So now it has to be dinner after, and – Anyway, it can’t be helped. You know what she’s like. You don’t mind, really, do you? Sasha will be there, I suppose. Weren’t you at school together?”

“No, she’s younger.”

“Oh. Well—”

“It’s my fault, Nick,” Larry said. “I can’t say no to David. He’s still the ambassador. Anyway, we can talk at lunch.”

Nick smiled to himself. One meal. One tie. “Fine,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. This all right?” He touched the lapel of his jacket. “For tonight?”

“Don’t tease,” his mother said lightly, enjoying herself. “A proper suit. I know you have one. Funny, isn’t it? Men used to come to London just to buy suits, and now look at everybody.”

“You’ll feel better at the Bruces‘. I’ll bet the rot hasn’t spread there yet.”

“Ho-ho,” his mother said, waving her hand. “But you do see about the hair. She’ll ask. I suppose they still have barbers here.” This to Larry, a dig at the hotel left over from an earlier conversation. “I knew we should have stayed at the Connaught,” she said, as if somehow the barbershop had already let them down.

“You wouldn’t want to be there today anyway,” Nick said, skating over it. “It’s a little noisy.” His mother raised her eyebrows. “There’s a demonstration right around the corner.”

“At the embassy, you mean,” she said, fixing the geography in her head. Then, looking at him, “You were there?”

Nick nodded.

“Oh, Nick, you didn’t. It’s not fair to Larry, it really isn’t. Think how it looks.”

“I wasn’t thinking about that,” he said, glancing at Larry.

“Darling, you have to. It’s just what the papers—”

“Nobody was looking at me,” he said. “Vanessa Redgrave was there.”

“What’s it got to do with her?” his mother said sharply.

Nick shrugged. “What’s it got to do with anybody?”

His mother sighed. “I’m not talking about politics. I’m talking about this family. Larry’s in a sensitive position right now—”

“I’m going to be a lot more sensitive if I don’t get something to eat,” Larry said. “Anybody else hungry? I’ll just go get my tie.” He ducked into the bedroom.

Nick’s mother followed him with her eyes, saying nothing, then went over to the coffee table and lit a cigarette. “It’s just–I don’t want anything to go wrong. He’s so happy being back. It might even do some good. This war,” she said, exasperated, as if she’d been given another inferior room. Then she paused, hearing herself, and lowered her voice. “You know what they’re like at the White House -they don’t trust anybody, and they hate the protests. They think it’s about them.”