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The worst time of all occurred with Tom, who had at first tried to comfort her over the trauma she had suffered in Bulgaria, but her refusal to discuss the details finally put him off. They quarreled. Tom said he knew that it was something to do with Bobby. Margo insisted that this was untrue, but Tom refused to let it go. From the wounded and occasionally angry hints he dropped, Margo finally realized that he thought she had slept with Bobby during the Olympiad, even though, for reasons of either pride or propriety, he refused to come out and ask. In all the scenarios she had imagined for their reunion, it had never occurred to her that her boyfriend might be jealous. The reproach in his voice even as they held each other began to weigh on her. On the second night, as they stood together outside her dormitory after pizza, Tom made the mistake of forgiving her for, as he put it, whatever she had done.

Margo stiffened, and Tom hastily tried to make amends. “I’m just worried about you, sweetheart. You’re not yourself.”

“I’m fine,” she said, but couldn’t meet his injured gaze. She glanced at the building. “I have to get inside. Parietals.”

Now she stood in the hallway outside Niemeyer’s classroom—coincidentally, beneath the yellow-and-black triangles of the fallout-shelter sign—and tried to slow her whirling and disobedient mind. She might never have gone to Varna at all had not Niemeyer manipulated her with that mention of her father. She had yet to confront him
about that, and she told herself that her reluctance was because she didn’t want to invite him to lie to her any further. But another part of her knew that she didn’t want him to burst her bubble. Harrington had sown doubt about Fomin’s tale, and the last thing Margo wanted was for Niemeyer to say: Yes, sure, I knew your father because he drove for me when I was in Tunisia to see Eisenhower. Sorry about the way he died, Miss Jensen, but of course history doesn’t give all of us the opportunity to be heroic. Still, you can take pride in—

“Margie. Hey.”

Phil Littlejohn had a hand on her shoulder. She realized that she had been standing with her head tipped against the chipped hardwood paneling of the corridor.

“I saw you run out. You okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said, shaking off his touch and turning around.

“It’s just, you’ve been acting spooked since you got back from Bulgaria.”

Margo studied his patrician face, searching for any hint of the cruel mockery of which she knew he was capable. She remembered their confrontation under the stands at the stadium, and his teasing invitation to inspect the mattresses of the shelter back at his frat. But this time she saw a genuine concern, and, in his eyes, a twinkle that seemed to her to mark some sort of secret knowledge.

“I’m fine, Phil,” she repeated, more gently than she intended.

“Look. I wanted to apologize for the way I behaved last month. Too much beer. I’m sorry, Margo. See? I got your name right.”

“I have to be somewhere—”

He leaned closer. “It’s okay, Margo. I know all about what happened over there.”

The doors burst open. The crowd was filing out. Now somebody would tell Tom that she’d been whispering with Phil Littlejohn in the hallway, and there would be yet another fire to put out. But she had to hear the rest. She took Phil by the sleeve and drew him away from the main entrance.

“What are you talking about, Phil? What do you think happened?”

“That the scholarship was just a cover. The way I heard it, you went to Bulgaria on official business. I think something went wrong and you got arrested.” He grinned. “But you’re back. So they let you go. You’re safe. You should relax and put it behind you.”

She tightened her grip on his arm. “Where did you hear that story?”

“My family knows people who know people. That’s all I’m going to say.”

“Phil, you can’t tell anybody. I’m not saying if you’re right or wrong, but you can’t—”

“Ah, Miss Jensen,” an all-too-familiar voice boomed. “Is this your young man, then? Or do you require rescue from his clutches?”

Niemeyer had come up behind them, trailed by a brace of graduate students.

“No, no,” she began. “We just—”

But the great man as usual spoke right over her. “The way you went racing out of class, I was worried. For no reason, I see. You seem to be in good hands.”

This was too much for her. She made her awkward excuses and hurried from the building, nearly colliding with a man she took to be another professor, because of his pipe, tweeds, and flannels. She scarcely noticed his gold-rimmed glasses.

After dinner, from a phone booth in the dorm lobby, she made a collect call to her brother, Corbin, in Ohio. They passed a few pleasantries, but the truth was they were nearly strangers by now. Corbin had attended a small college in the Midwest, met a young woman, and settled down. He taught history at an Episcopal academy near Cleveland. He seemed happy, but he never came home to Garrison. A part of her longed to share her experiences in Bulgaria, and another part of her wanted to warn him about Cuba, but she remembered about telephones and didn’t dare. Finally, she asked him straight out whether he had ever heard any stories about Daddy doing more in the war than drive a truck. He was four years older, after all, and might have knowledge she lacked.

“What are you talking about?” His voice was warm with sympathy. “What’s the matter, sis?”

“I just wondered.”

He laughed softly. “I know. I used to want it to be true, too. But he did what he did. There’s no changing that.”

“I see.”

A pause: they really had little to say to each other. She decided to
make her excuses and promise to consider his insincere invitation to visit, and then she would hang up and—

“Although, now that you mention it, there was one funny thing,” said Corbin. “After the war ended—I think about 1946—I remember because I’d just turned seven, so you would have been, I guess, three—this man came to the house to see Mom. Caucasian. He said he knew Dad in the war, and that he wanted her to know how brave he’d been, and how he’d done important work, even though he wasn’t at liberty to tell her why.” The gentle laugh again. “I remember those words—‘not at liberty’—because I’d never heard that phrase before, and I had to ask Nana what it meant.”

“Do you remember anything else about him? What he looked like?”

“Just that he was a pudgy little fellow. Oh, and there was something wrong with his hand.”

“Something like what?”

“Come on, sis. It’s been a long time.”

“Please. Whatever you can remember.”

“Mmmm. Let me see. I think maybe it was his fingers. They were all bent, like they’d been broken or something.”

That night, she went with Jerri and Annalise to hear a speaker on the subject of the Freedom Rides that had begun last year. Jerri went in the hope of hearing evidence that the revolution was near. Margo went because Annalise dragged her: Niemeyer had hinted in class that he might ask them on next week’s midterm exam to use the tools of conflict theory to analyze the civil-rights demonstrations. There weren’t many black students at Cornell, but nearly all were in attendance tonight, and some few had gone South as Riders. Margo had talked about joining, but Nana forbade her:
Nothing’s more important than your studies, child. You didn’t see the white kids skipping class to ride those buses down South. Let the cops beat on some other fool.
Actually, a lot of white kids had gone, but arguing with Nana was like arguing with the weather. Sitting in the auditorium now, listening as the young Negro man in white shirt and dark tie described being beaten savagely for sitting in the wrong section of an interstate bus, and then spending a night in jail, Margo experienced none of the guilt she had
anticipated. Instead, she sat serenely. She saw up on the stage not an individual who had made sacrifices she hadn’t, but a fellow sufferer. She was proud of him; but of herself, too.

Then she looked across the auditorium and spotted Phil Littlejohn looking back, and her mood faded.

“What’s he doing here?” she asked her friends as they left.

“Maybe he’s interested in race relations,” said Jerri, fumbling for a smoke.

“Or some kind of relations,” said Annalise. She smiled at Margo’s surprise. “He’s got a little crush on you.”

“He has a creepy way of showing it.”

“He’s accustomed to getting what he wants. He doesn’t know how to deal with a girl who says no.”

“How about taking her at her word?”

After the lecture, Margo split off from the others and headed for the library, where she was supposed to meet Tom to study together. She wasn’t sure whether she wanted to, because she was tired of fighting and also tired of his treating her as if she had betrayed his trust. But she had never quite been able to shed the dependability her grandmother had drilled into her.

She was passing the statue of Andrew Dickson White when a tall man materialized from the shadows and fell into step beside her. When Margo heard the voice, she wondered if she might be asleep.

“Don’t look at me, Miss Jensen,” said Aleksandr Fomin. “There’s someone following you. Don’t turn around. It is important that we talk. Don’t go into the library. Just keep walking as if you’re headed into town. I will pick you up on the street. Look for a brown Chevy.”

She was about to rebuke him, but he had already melted into the night.

They drove in silence through downtown Ithaca. Fomin seemed to know the area well. He turned right, and they crossed the Cayuga Street bridge as Fall Creek raged noisily beneath. Margo wasn’t sure why she had gotten into the car; she wasn’t sure why she was so calm. She particularly wasn’t sure why she hadn’t run into the library and grabbed Tom, stopping off first only to call the emergency number Harrington had given her before she left for Bulgaria. She only knew that nobody on campus could understand what she had gone through, and seeing Fomin, the KGB colonel who had interrogated her and threatened her in Varna, was like running into a long-lost friend. Oddly, she did not feel in the least unsafe.

Although a part of her still wasn’t sure she wasn’t dreaming.

“It was not easy for me to get here,” Fomin finally said, his voice as flat and heavy as she remembered. “The movements of Soviet nationals in your country are severely restricted by the war clique in Washington.”

Margo wasn’t sure whether she was supposed to express sympathy for his plight or admiration for his courage. She chose to take the comment as rhetorical. A strange calm descended upon her. Harrington had warned her about this, too: the way the body and mind, once the weeks of fear were past, could come to miss the adrenaline rush of danger, so that in the end the only way to gain any peace was to put oneself back in harm’s way.

Maybe. Maybe not. All she knew for sure was that the sound of his voice had come as a relief.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

But the answer was obvious. They had turned in at the entrance to Stewart Park, bordering the southern shore of Cayuga Lake. Shadows yawned everywhere. Ithaca was a middle-class town; Stewart was very much a middle-class park. By day, it hosted ice-cream socials and small-boat races and Boy Scout events in warm weather; ice carnivals and snowmen and caroling in the cold. Margo had never seen the park so dark or so empty, and it had never occurred to her that the broad lawns and bold trees and lapping waves might take on this sinister mien. A gate stood open. There were very few lights. They wound along the pavement past a parking lot. In the night shadows, a somber edifice loomed menacingly, but it was only the former army-reserve training building, known locally as the Tin Can because of its corrugated construction. Nowadays, the structure was used for public-service activities. Margo had visited the Tin Can many times in connection with her volunteer work with the city’s kids. But she had never been here at this hour, least of all in the company of a Soviet intelligence officer.

“We must talk,” Fomin repeated. “This is a quiet place.”

“It’s a public park.”

“The park is closed at this hour.”

“The gate is open,” Margo began, because argument was how she identified her reality, but when she turned to look, she could tell even through the gloom that it was shut again. “You’re not here alone,” she said.

Fomin said nothing. They drove past the Tin Can. Fifty yards on the other side was a children’s playground. He stopped the car. They climbed out. Fomin led the way. He was smoking one of the foul cigarettes she remembered from Varna, although she did not remember seeing him light this one. The playground swings were as still as sentinels.

“I apologize for the drama,” he finally said. “Unfortunately, there is very little time. We have much to discuss, you and I.”

“About what?”

“About how we are going to prevent a thermonuclear war.”

They walked, along a path leading past the shuttered ice-cream stand, through the young trees, toward Cayuga Lake. Margo expected whoever else was out there to follow like a faithful guard dog, in the manner of Niemeyer’s teaching assistants, but when she looked over her shoulder there was only darkness.

“I have sought you out because I trust you,” Fomin said. “There is no other reason. I am here because there are very few who can be trusted, on either side. It was difficult to get here,” he repeated.

She glanced at him. The calm was still with her. Class reunion. Old friends’ day. “Because you’re not allowed this far north,” she said, remembering the fact from some book Niemeyer had assigned. “You’re a Soviet diplomat. You’re only allowed in certain cities, or to travel between them, or within ninety miles of them.”

“This is correct.” His tone was rueful. “But I am ignoring the restrictions. I came here to find you, Miss Jensen. Our two countries are about to go to war, and you and I have to stop it.”

Margo stared. Her aplomb never faded. So. The dream at last. Her grandmother’s roof, the perfect blue sky, the bombs falling invisibly, the world an incinerated ruin.

“I’m not a spy,” she pointed out, the same line she had repeated ad nauseam in Bulgaria.