“Yes, it’s a funny coincidence, isn’t it? I understand you and your family stayed in a house with the same name, the summer before your defection. It was owned by a man named Philip Beauchamp, whom we know to have been employed by the British intelligence service during the war.”

“Philip Beauchamp is dead. I killed him myself. It was an accident, of course—”

“Of course. These things happen. Still, it’s a peculiar coincidence.”

The woman stares at him without blinking. He stares back. He knows his gaze has some power—something to do with the particular shade of his eyes, which others find mesmerizing. It’s a power he never realized until Nedda pointed it out to him, the first time she took him to bed. He wasn’t a virgin, but he’d only slept with a couple of prostitutes, so it was a new and exquisite experience to lie among clean sheets afterward and talk and touch and kiss. She covered his eyes with her hands and said, That’s better. He asked her what she meant, and she said that he could make her do anything with those eyes of his, that ultramarine color like the purest lake in the world. She murmured in her gravelly voice that she only had to look at those beautiful eyes and she came off, like that—she snapped her fingers. Of course, she was just speaking hyperbole, bed talk, but still. The idea of his magnetic gaze gave him confidence. He would never have dared to approach Iris without it.

Now he trains those eyes on this KGB woman—my God, he doesn’t even know her name!—as if he’s casting a spell, the old razzle-dazzle, except it doesn’t seem to have any effect on her.

She looks, in fact, a little bored.

“Let us cut to the chase, Dubinin. As you Americans say.”

“I’m not an American. I’m a Soviet citizen now, remember?”

She shrugs this away. “You have something I require—a full confession of your crimes, and a certain piece of information which we know you to be carrying to your Western handlers. I, on the other hand, have in my possession something terribly important to you—your wife, who is very sick, it seems, and your children.”

“Is that a threat? You’re threatening me with the lives of my family?”

“Of course not. The decision is yours. The power of life and death is in your hands.” The woman spreads her own large palms before him. “I merely offer you the chance for redemption from your crimes, like a good Communist.”

“I can’t confess to a crime I haven’t committed. I can’t give you information I don’t possess. You can torture me, you can do whatever you like with me, but I have nothing to say.”