“You’ve got that right, at least.”

“As the sister of a woman married to a Soviet intelligence agent, you must have known you’d be subject to investigation.”

“To be honest, the thought never occurred to me.”

“If you want me to walk right out of this building, I’ll do that. You’ll never hear from me again.”

I stare at his pale, narrowed eyes. He stares back at mine. The room is summer-warm, and the perspiration trickles down my back. I think of Iris in Moscow. How warm is Moscow in summer? I remember the two of us lying on the sand, Ruth and Iris, side by side, nine years old, while the sun scorched our skin and the thick hot nebulous summer air surrounded us like the womb we had once shared, and that was our bond. That was the love in which we existed together, the air we breathed in order to live.

“Or I can stay,” Fox says quietly, “and explain how you and I can get your sister out of Russia alive.”

I WAS THE ONE who discovered our father’s body. Have I mentioned that? Leave it to Ruth to go nosing around where she doesn’t belong.

They say the mind is supposed to block off terrible memories, in order to protect a person from having to experience them over and over. Well, I wish my mind knew that trick. I remember every detail, from the angle of sunlight through the window to the design on the bathroom tiles to the expression on my father’s face, mouth open in a shocked oval, eyes open to stare in amazement at the ceiling, as if death wasn’t quite what he expected. How his lips were the same color as his skin, because his blood had all poured out into the bathwater in which he lay. The nakedness of his body beneath the translucent red water, his delicate limbs, his bloated stomach, his penis floating above his dark pubic hair, all those human parts of him I had never before seen and now saw lifeless. Most of all, the smell of blood, as coppery as they say.