Dave shut up.

“I’ve done a lot of selfish bad things in my life. Some you know about, but there are more.”

Dave could believe that. But he wanted to tell her that she had also brought joy and laughter into many people’s lives, including his own. However, she had asked him just to listen, so he did.

“I hold Walli’s life in my hands.”

Dave bit back a retort, but Beep said what had been on the tip of his tongue. “Okay, it’s not my fault he’s a junkie, I’m not his mother, I don’t have to save him.”

Dave thought Walli might be tougher than Beep reckoned. On the other hand Jimi Hendrix had died, Janis Joplin had died, Jim Morrison had died . . .

“I want to change,” Beep said. “More, I want to make up for my mistakes. It’s time for me to do something that isn’t just what grabs me at the moment. It’s time for me to do something good. So I’m going to stay with Walli.”

“Is that your last word?”

“Yes.”

“Good-bye, then,” said Dave, and he hurried out of the room so that she would not see him cry.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

The Kremlin is in a panic about Nixon’s visit to China,” said Dimka to Tanya.

They were in Dimka’s apartment. His three-year-old daughter, Katya, was on Tanya’s knee, and they were looking through a book with pictures of farm animals.

Dimka and Natalya had moved back into Government House. The Peshkov-Dvorkin clan now occupied three apartments in the same building. Grandfather Grigori was still in his original place, living now with his daughter, Anya, and granddaughter, Tanya. Dimka’s ex-wife, Nina, lived there with Grisha, eight years old and a little schoolboy. And now Dimka and Natalya and little Katya had moved in. Tanya adored her nephew and niece and was always happy to babysit. Government House was almost like a peasant village, Tanya sometimes thought, with the extended family minding the children.

People often asked Tanya whether she did not want children of her own. “There’s plenty of time,” she always answered. She was still only thirty-two. But she did not feel she was free to marry. Vasili was not her lover, but she had dedicated her life to the undercover work they did together, first in publishing Dissidence, then in smuggling Vasili’s books to the West. Occasionally she was courted by one of the diminishing number of eligible bachelors her age, and sometimes she would go on a few dates and even go to bed with one of them. But she could not let them into her clandestine life.

And Vasili’s life was now more important than her own. With the publication of A Free Man he had become one of the world’s leading writers. He interpreted the Soviet Union to the rest of the planet. After his third book, The Age of Stagnation, there was talk of a Nobel Prize, except that apparently they could not award it to a pseudonym. Tanya was the conduit by which his work reached the West, and it would be impossible to keep such a big, terrible secret from a husband.