“Please. I know for certain you’ve got contacts in the Soviet embassy.” (This is a bluff—it’s not impossible he might have a friend on the inside, but who can know for certain?) “I need a tourist visa and maybe a name or two, people who might be able to help me.”

“You are nuts. Who is going to risk his life for strange American woman and her sister?”

“Then forget the names. I just need a visa. You can do that much for me, I know you can. You hate the Soviet system. And you owe it to me, Orlovsky. You know you do.”

He gives me a tormented look and rises from the couch. I think about how he used to pace naked across that floor, raging at the Soviet Union and its barbarous occupation of the human spirit, and then make love to me over the arm of the sofa or the drafting table or the rug, or downstairs in the courtyard against the lemon tree, and it occurs to me that the one place we never had intercourse was a bed. Orlovsky walks to the table without speaking and lifts the wine decanter. Even in his torment, he’s a gentleman. He returns to me and refills my wineglass first, and then his own. Instead of resuming his seat, he continues to the window overlooking the courtyard, and I don’t know, maybe he’s thinking of the past, too. Maybe he’s thinking of all the places he loved me, and how brutally he stopped.

“I might know somebody,” he says softly.

Iris

JULY 1948

London

At first, Iris thought the man had mistaken her for someone else. He was bloated and untidy, with handsome features tucked in a pasty face and a shock of waving dark hair. He stared at her from the corner of the room, where he leaned heavily against a bookshelf in the company of two other men and sipped at a glass of clear liquid.

The party was like every other party. Whenever they moved to a new posting—Zurich, then Ankara, and now London—Iris somehow expected, against all experience, some change of pace and company and mood, to go along with the change of climate and national culture, but diplomats were all the same, and diplomatic parties all followed the same unspoken pattern. Protocol, you might call it, but Iris secretly hated words like protocol. Pattern she understood; pattern occurred in nature. Rhythm, rhyme, repeat—those were all appealing, but protocol? Just an ugly, artificial human invention. Like this party.