The Parsifal Mosaic

  Havelock stood across the room watching her; he could not look away. And then he was drifting back through indeterminate time, through the rolling mists of a haunting, obsessive dream that never left him. The images were there, the moments remembered, but they had been pushed out of his life only to rise up and attack him, inflaming him whenever the memories refused to stay buried. What’s left when your memory’s gone, Mr. Smith? Nothing, of course, yet how often had he wished for oblivion, with no images or remembered moments—trading nothingness for the absence of pain. But now he had passed through the nightmare of interrupted sleep and had come to life, just as the tears had come to Jenna’s eyes and washed away the hatred. But the reality was fragile; its fragments had to be pieced together.

  “We have to find out why,” said Michael. “Broussac told me what happened to you, but there were gaps I couldn’t understand.”

  “I didn’t tell her everything,” said Jenna, gazing at the snow outside. “I didn’t lie to her, but I didn’t tell her everything. I was afraid she wouldn’t help me.”

  “What did you leave out?”

  “The name of the man who came to see me. He’s been with your government for a number of years. He was once quite controversial, but still respected, I think. At least, I’d heard of him.”

  “Who was it?”

  “A man named Bradford. Emory Bradford.”

  “Good God …” Havelock was stunned. Bradford was a name from the past, a disquieting past. He had been one of the political comets born under Kennedy and winning dubious spurs with Johnson. When the comets had faded from the Washington firmament, heading for the international banks and the foundations, the prestigious law offices and the corporate boardrooms, Bradford had remained—less celebrated, to be sure, and less influential, certainly—where the political wars had been fought. It was never understood why. A degree of personal wealth aside, he could have done a thousand other things, but he had chosen not to. Bradford, thought Havelock, the name echoing in his head. All these years, had Emory Bradford merely been marking time, waiting for another version of Camelot to carry him into another time of self-aggrandizing glory? It had to be. If he had reached Jenna in Barcelona, he was at the core of the deception at Costa Brava, a deception that went far beyond himself and Jenna, two lovers turned against each other. It linked unseen men in Moscow with powerful men in the United States government.

  “Do you know him?” asked Jenna, still staring out the window.

  “Not personally. I’ve never met him. But you’re right, he was controversial, and most everyone knows him. The last I heard he was an undersecretary of State with a low profile but a pretty high reputation—buried but valuable, you could say. He told you he was with Cons Op out of Madrid?”

  “He said he was on special assignment with Consular Operations, an emergency involving internal security.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. He showed me copies of documents found in a bank vault on the Ramblas.” Jenna turned from the window. “Do you recall telling me you had to go to the Ramblas on several occasions?”

  “It was a drop for Lisbon, I also told you that. Never mind, it was orchestrated.”

  “But you can understand. The Ramblas stayed in my mind.”

  “They made sure of it. What were the documents?”

  “Instructions from Moscow that could only have been meant for you. There were dates, itineraries; everything corresponded to where we’d been, where we were going. And there were codes; if they weren’t authentic, then I’d never seen a Russian cipher.”

  “The same materials I was given,” said Havelock, his anger surfacing.

  “Yes, I knew it when you told me what they gave you in Madrid. Not all, of course, but many of the same documents and much of the same information they showed you they showed me. Even down to the radio in the hotel room.”

  “The maritime frequency? I thought you’d been careless; we never listened to the radio.”

  “When I saw it, a great part of me died,” said Jenna.

  “When I found the key in your purse and it matched the one the evidence in Madrid said you would have—a key to an airport locker—I couldn’t stay in the same room with you.”

  “That was it, wasn’t it? The final confirmation for both of us. I had changed, I couldn’t help it. And when you came back from Madrid, you were different. It was as if you were being pulled violently in several directions, but with only one true commitment, and it was not to me, not to us. You had sold yourself to the Soviets for reasons I couldn’t understand.… I even tried to rationalize; perhaps after thirty years there was news of your father—stranger things have happened. Or you were going into deep cover without me; a defector in the process of becoming a double agent. I simply knew that the transition—whatever it was—did not include me.” Jenna turned back to the window. She continued, her voice barely audible, “Then Bradford reached me again; this time he was panicked, nearly out of control. He said the word had just been intercepted—Moscow had ordered my execution. You were to lead me into a trap, and you were going to do it that night.”

  “At the Costa Brava?”

  “No, he never mentioned the Costa Brava. He said a man would call around six o’clock while you were out, using a phrase or description I’d recognize as coming only from you. He would say that you could not get to a telephone, but I was to take the car and drive down the coast to Villanueva, that you would meet me by the fountains in the plaza. But you wouldn’t, because I’d never get there. I’d be taken on the road.”

  “I told you I was going to Villanueva,” said Michael. “It was part of the Cons Op strategy. With me supposedly twenty miles south on business, you had time to get up to the Montebello beach on the Costa Brava. It was the final proof against you. I was to witness it—I demanded that, hoping to Christ you’d never show up.”

  “It all fit, it was made to fit!” cried Jenna. “Bradford said if that call came, I was to run. Another American would be in the lobby with him, watching for the KGB. They’d take me to the consulate.”

  “But you didn’t leave with them. The woman I saw die wasn’t you.”

  “I couldn’t. I suddenly couldn’t trust anyone.… Do you remember the incident that night at the café in the Paseo Isabel just before you went to Madrid?”

  “The drunk,” said Havelock, remembering all too well. “He bumped into you—fell into you, actually—then insisted on shaking your hand and kissing it. He was all over you.”

  “We laughed about it. You more than I.”

  “I didn’t a couple of days later. I was convinced that was when you were given the key to the airport locker.”

  “Which I never knew about.”

  “And which I found in your purse because Bradford put it there while he was in the hotel room and I was in Madrid. I assume you excused yourself for a moment or two.”

  “I was in shock; I was ill. I’m sure I did.”

  “It explains the radio, the maritime frequency.… What about the drunk?”

  “He was the other American in the lobby of the hotel. Why was he there? Who was he? I went back up as fast as I could.”

  “He didn’t see you?”

  “No, I used the staircase. His face frightened me, I can’t tell you why. Perhaps because he had pretended to be someone else before, someone so different, I don’t know. I do know his eyes disturbed me; they were angry, but they did not look around. He wasn’t watching the lobby for the KGB; he only kept glancing at his watch. By then I was in a panic myself—confused, and hurt more than I’d ever been hurt in my life. You were going to let me die, and suddenly I couldn’t trust them.”

  “You went back to the room?”

  “God, no, I’d have been cornered. I went up to the floor, stayed in the stairwell, and tried to think things through. I thought perhaps I was being hysterical, too frightened to act reasonably. Why didn’t I trust the Americans? I’d about made up my mind to go back down when I heard noises from the corridor
inside. I opened the door a bit … and knew that I was right to do what I did.”

  “They came after you?”

  “The elevator. Bradford knocked on the door several times, and while he was knocking, the other man—the drunk from the café—took out a gun. When there was no answer, they waited until they were sure there was no one in the hallway. Then, with one kick, the man with the gun broke down the door and rushed inside. It was not the action of men who’d come to save someone. I ran.”

  Havelock, watching her, tried to think. There were so many ambiguities … ambiguity. Where were the outlines of the man who had used the code Ambiguity?

  “How did they get your suitcase?” he asked.

  “As you described it, it was an old one of mine. The last I recall I simply left it in the basement of the flat I leased in Prague. You may have carried it down, in fact.”

  “The KGB would find it.”

  “The KGB?”

  “Someone in the KGB.”

  “Yes, you said that, didn’t you?… There has to be someone.”

  “What was the phrase or description the man gave you over the phone? The words you were to think came from me.”

  “Again Prague. He said there was ‘a cobblestone courtyard in the center of the city.’ ”

  “Veřejná mistnost,” said Michael, nodding. “Prague’s Soviet police. They’d know about that. In a report I sent to Washington I described how you got out of that place, how great you were. And how I damn near died watching you from a window three stories above.”

  “Thank you for the commendation.”

  “We were putting all our points together, remember? We were going to break out of our movable prison.”

  “And you were going to teach.”

  “History.”

  “And we were going to have children—”

  “And send them off to school—”

  “And love them and scold them.”

  “And go to hockey—ball games.”

  “You said there were no such things—”

  “I love you …”

  “Mikhail?”

  The first steps were tentative, but the pavane was suddenly finished. They ran to each other, and held each other, pushing time away, and hurt, and a thousand moments of anguish. Her tears came, washing away the final barricades mounted by liars and men who served the liars. Their arms grew stronger around each other, the straining of their bodies an exertion each understood; their lips met, swollen, probing, searching for the release they held for each other. They were trapped as never before in their movable prison—they understood that, too—but for the moment they were also free.

  The dream had come fully to life, the reality no longer fragile. She was beside him, her face touching his shoulder, her lips parted, the breath of her deep, steady breathing warming his skin. As so often in the past, strands of her hair fell across his chest, somehow a reminder that even in sleep she was a part of him. He turned carefully, so as not to waken her, and looked down at her. The dark shadows under her eyes were still there, but they were fading as a hint of color returned to her pale flesh. It would take days, perhaps weeks, for the fear in her eyes to disappear. Yet in spite of it, her strength was there; it had carried her through unbearable tensions.

  She moved, stretching, and her face was bathed in the sunlight that streamed through the windows. As he watched her he thought of what she had been through, what resources she must have had to summon in order to survive. Where had she been? Who were the people who had helped her, hurt her? There were so many questions, so many things he wanted to know. A part of him was a callow adolescent, jealous of the images he did not wish to imagine, while another part of him was a survivor who knew only too well the prices one had to pay to remain alive in their disorderly, so frequently violent world. The answers would come with time, revealed slowly or in eruptions of memory or resentment, but they would not be provoked by him. The healing process could not be forced; it would be too easy for Jenna to sink back and relive the terrors and, by reliving them, prolong them.

  She moved again, her face returning to him, her breath warm. And then the absurdity of his thoughts struck him. Where did he think he was … they were? What did he think would be permitted them? How could he dare to think in terms of any time at all?

  Jacob Handelman was dead, his killer as good as identified—certainly known by now to the liars in Washington. The manhunt would be given respectability; he could see the story in the newspapers: a beloved scholar brutally slaughtered by a deranged former foreign service officer wanted by his government for all manner of crimes. Who would possibly believe the truth? That a kindly old Jew who had suffered the horrors of the camps was in reality a strutting man-monster who had ordered up the guns of Lidice? Insane!

  Broussac would turn; anyone he might have counted on would not touch him now, touch them now. There was no time for healing, they needed every hour; the swiftness of their strikes—his strikes—was essential. He looked at his watch; it was two-forty-five, the day three-quarters gone. There were strategies to consider—liars to reach at night.

  Yet there had to be something. For them, only themselves; to ease the ache, erase the vestiges of fragility. If there was not, there was nothing.

  He did what he had dreamt of, waking up in sweat whenever the dream had recurred, knowing it could never be. It could be now. He whispered her name, calling out to her across the chasms of sleep.

  And as if the moments away from each other had never been, her hand reached for his. She awoke, and her eyes roamed his face; then without speaking, she raised the covers and came to him. She pressed her naked body against his, her arms enveloping him, her lips against his.

  They were silent as their excitement grew; only the throated cries of need and anxiety were heard in the room. The need was each for the other, and the anxiety was not to be feared.

  They made love twice more, but the third time was more successful in the attempt than in the completion. The rays of the sun no longer streaked through the window; instead there was an orange glow that was the reflection of a country sundown. They sat up in bed, Michael lighting her cigarette, both laughing softly at their misguided energies, their temporary exhaustion.

  “You’re going to throw me out for a hot-blooded stag from Ankara.”

  “You have nothing at all to apologize for, my darling … my Mikhail. Besides, I really don’t like their coffee.”

  “I’m relieved.”

  “You’re a love,” she said, touching the bandage on his shoulder.

  “I’m in love. There’s so much to make up for.”

  “Both of us, not you alone. You must not think that way. I accepted the lies, just as you did. Incredible lies, incredibly presented. And we don’t know why.”

  “But we know the purpose, which gives us part of the why. To get me out but keep me under control, under a microscope.”

  “With my defection, my death? There are other ways of terminating a man you no longer want.”

  “Killing him?” said Havelock, nodding; then he paused and shook his head. “It’s one way, yes. But then there’s no way to control whatever damaging evidence he may have left behind. The possibility that such a man has left that information often keeps him alive.”

  “But they want to kill you now. You’re ‘beyond salvage.’ ”

  “Someone changed his mind.”

  “This person called Ambiguity,” said Jenna.

  “Yes. Whatever I know—or they think I know—has been supplanted by a larger threat much more dangerous to them. Again, me. What I found, what I learned.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You,” said Havelock. “The Costa Brava. It has to be buried.”

  “The Soviet connection?”

  “I don’t know. Who was the woman on the beach? What did she think she was doing there? Why wasn’t it you—thank Christ, it wasn’t—but why wasn’t it? Where were they taking you?”

  “To my grave
, I think.”

  “If that was the case, why weren’t you sent to that beach? Why weren’t you killed there?”

  “Perhaps they felt I wouldn’t go. I didn’t leave the hotel with them.”

  “They couldn’t have known that then. They thought they had you—frightened, in shock, wanting protection. The point is, they never mentioned the Costa Brava; they didn’t even try to prime you.”

  “I would have driven there that night—all you had to do was call me. I would have come. They could have had their execution; you would have seen what they wanted you to see.”

  “It doesn’t make sense.” Michael struck a match and lit a cigarette for himself. “And that’s the basic inconsistency, because whoever put Costa Brava together was a hell of a technician, an expart to black operations. It was brilliantly structured, down to split-second timing.… It doesn’t make sense!”

  Jenna broke the long silence. “Mikhail,” she said quietly, sitting forward, her eyes clouded, focused inward. “Two operations,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “Suppose there were two operations, not one?” She turned to him, her eyes alive now. “The first set in motion in Madrid—the evidence against me—then carried forward to Barcelona—the evidence against you.”

  “Still one blanket,” said Havelock.

  “But then it was torn,” insisted Jenna. “It became two.”

  “How?”

  “The original operation is intercepted,” she said. “By someone not part of it.”

  “Then altered,” he said, beginning to understand. “The cloth is the same but the stiches are twisted, ending up being something else. A different blanket.”

  “Still, for what purpose?” she asked.

  “Control,” he answered. “Then you got away and the control was lost. Broussac told me there’s been a coded alert out for you ever since Costa Brava.”

  “Very coded,” agreed Jenna, crushing out her cigarette. “Which could mean whoever intercepted the operation and altered it might not have known that I had gotten out of Barcelona alive.”

  “Until I saw you and let everyone know—everyone who counted. At which point we both had to die; one by the black—operations book—that was me. The other out of strategy—no one in sanction aware—a bomb blowing up a car outside of Col des Moulinets. You. Everything buried.”