After a while, the man in the outdated black suit looked in and asked, “You would like dinner?”

“Da, Georgi Pavlovich. Bolshoye spasibo,” Jerry answered. He still had no idea of the Russian’s family name. First name and patronymic were plenty for politeness.

“P’zhalista,” the embassy man said, and then, in English, “You speak good. Well? Well.” He made the right choice.

“Thanks.” Jerry knew how far from true it was. But even a little was better than nothing.

His pastrami sandwich had been brought in. Dinner plainly came from the kitchen here: salmon in a creamy dill sauce, boiled potatoes, and cabbage gussied up with tomato sauce and peppers till you almost forgot it was cabbage. It was all good. So was the California Chablis that came with it. Jerry drank a glass, then half a glass more. After that, he stopped.

Georgi Pavlovich took away his dirty dishes. Jerry wondered how you said Flunky, first class in Russian.

After the man left, there he was, alone again with Leonid Brezhnev’s literary output. He could have gone out into the hall and talked with Major Bronstein, but he didn’t. Talking with the major would have been interrogation, not conversation. Like the CIA pros on the Glomar Explorer, Bronstein struck Jerry as a man who couldn’t not do his job.

So he sat there and got bored instead. A little before nine o’clock, Bronstein came in and said, “The ambassador tells me to assure you that your safety outside the embassy has been guaranteed. Everyone who needs to know of the American secretary of state’s promise to Anatoly Fyodorovich is informed and has assented.”

“Thanks very much. I’ll go back to the hotel, I guess.” Jerry stood up and stretched. Then, not quite idly, he asked, “Nu, vus makht a Yid?”

That wasn’t Russian, but Major Bronstein understood it anyway. From his looks and name, Jerry’d thought he would. “Being a Jew is interesting, the same as it is most places,” Bronstein answered, luckily, in English. Jerry had only fragments of Yiddish. His folks had used the mamaloshen when they didn’t want him to know what they were talking about. That gave him a great incentive to learn, of course, but his father spoke the old-country lingo much less after his mother died.

Out into the cool Washington night he went. He tried to look every which way at once while walking to the Corvair. The CIA might have promised to leave him alone, but the local muggers probably weren’t in on the deal.

Unmugged, he got the car, drove back to the hotel, and went up to his room. Okay, Henry Kissinger said the CIA wouldn’t murder him. If you couldn’t believe Henry Kissinger, you … were like a large part of the world. But Jerry figured Kissinger wouldn’t waste much time or effort lying about anything as trivial as he was.