Claire wriggles onto the floor of the car and finds it for him. It’s funny how the kids just trust him, this stranger who killed a man and then kidnapped them in a KGB car. I hope they didn’t see him do the deed. No doubt Fox did his best to conceal it from them.

“Thank you,” he says gravely to Claire. He opens the door and lights the flashlight, covering the bulb with his palm so it’s not so bright. Before he leaves, he ducks his head back in and says to me, “There’s a gun in the glove compartment if you need it.”

DO I NEED TO mention that—among other things—Fox showed me how to fire a gun? It was the day before we left for Moscow. We borrowed Orlovsky’s car and drove in bizarre zigzags through the city for an hour to throw off any possible tail. (Who’s going to tail us? I asked, and Fox just shrugged and said you never know, you should always assume somebody is watching you.) At last, just as I was about to ask him to pull over so I could throw up my breakfast in the gutter, we zoomed out of the city and wound our way into the hills somewhere, until Fox decided we were far enough from any living thing and pulled over.

We used a tree for a target. I didn’t know a thing about guns, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t have a good eye and a steady hand. Fox showed me how to aim it and fire it, how to load more bullets if I needed to. I said I hoped I wouldn’t need to fire the thing at all, and Fox sat me down and opened up a couple of bottles of lemonade and delivered me this lecture on how guns were a last resort—they were like an admission you had failed at the finer arts of espionage. But if he failed, and I failed, then he sure as the devil didn’t want me to die for it. He said this sincerely, and I believed him. Then we packed up our little picnic and went back to Rome.

Now we sat in the gloaming on a sand dune on the Baltic coast somewhere—and yes, I could find the Baltic Sea on a map, but only because I’d spent four years poring over those charts of Europe that appeared daily in the newspapers throughout the war. I pondered whether I should reach over the seat and retrieve that gun from the glove compartment, just in case, even though I hated the cold, lethal feel of a gun in my hand, the terrible foreboding that something might go wrong and I’d end up killing somebody, possibly myself.