He shakes his head and looks out the window at the busy platform below us. Gregory squirms, opens his eyes, and starts to cry.

Iris unbuttons her blouse. “Poor fellow, he’s hungry after all this.”

Kedrov flushes red and bolts for the door of the compartment so quickly his mumbled excuse hangs in the air behind him.

The whistle keens good-bye. The train jerks forward. I turn to the window just in time to see the nurse hurrying back down the platform and out of sight.

WHEN FOX WAS A kid—difficult to imagine, I know, but imagine it anyway—he used to love magic shows, he said.

We were inside Orlovsky’s atelier when he told me this. It was one of those blurred, hurried days before we left for Moscow, when Fox was attempting to distill a decade’s worth of accumulated experience and tradecraft into a few simple lessons. This was one of them. He told me he would order those kits in the mail, the ones with the flimsy boxes with the sliding bottoms and that kind of thing, and he would spend hours and hours perfecting the tricks, until he could fool even his mother—who was, he told me gravely, no fool.

I said that was a nice story, so what?

Well, tradecraft is a lot like magic, he said. All those KGB watchers, you have to fool them into thinking they’re seeing one thing, when another thing is actually taking place before their eyes. Now, how do you execute this sleight of hand? You distract the viewer with some other maneuver, some elaborate display of the left hand while the right hand performs the dirty work, or else you employ some sinfully attractive assistant to lure the attention of the audience while the magician makes the rabbit disappear.

Now, I admit, I thought as you did when he explained this. I flattered myself that I was the sinfully attractive magician’s assistant, and Fox was the magician, and Digby was the rabbit. But I guess you could say that Fox was practicing a little illusion on me as well, which I began to understand during that first visit to the Digbys’ apartment. Still—because the illusion fits comfortably with all my notions of Iris and myself and the world in general—the whole truth only really dawns on me as I sit in that train compartment, rattling through all the switches as we progress out of Moscow.

I remember something else Fox told me. I turn to Iris and ask quietly, “When Sasha does his training lectures, how many of the candidates are women?”

“None,” she says.

Sure, you see women agents from time to time, Fox said. You see handlers, couriers, that kind of thing. But not case officers. Not our side and especially not theirs.

I said that was unfair, but Fox shook his head.