I and My True Love (34 page)

“But didn’t he invite you for a drink?”

“Oh, you know Bill. Always vague. No, there he is, all right.” The door had unlocked, and as they slipped through into the hall, the polite little man stepped forward. Bob closed the door quickly, locking it definitely, leaving the stranger still outside.

“Well?” Kate asked, as they climbed the staircase quickly.

“Thank you for Bill,” he answered.

“If we must play games, we might as well be inventive.”

“I couldn’t think of anything but Wilfred. And that’s not the kind of name to invite you for a drink on a dry Sunday afternoon. Good old Bill Hirschfeld. Hospitable kind of guy.”

“In his vague way.” Then she glanced up the last flight of stairs.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s get this over with.” His face was serious, too.

* * *

In answer to Kate’s light knock, there was a movement from behind the door as though Jan Brovic had been standing there, listening to their approaching footsteps. “It’s Kate Jerold,” she said softly, “with a friend.”

The door opened then. Not fully. Brovic looked at Bob Turner. He gestured to them to come in, waited for a moment to reassure himself that the staircase and hall were completely silent, and then closed the door quietly, chaining it. Kate glanced at Bob, but now he seemed to accept all these precautions: there was no hint of amusement in his eyes.

“Thank you,” Brovic said to Kate, and offered her the chair. He was watching Bob Turner carefully, trying to place him.

“Leave me out of this,” Bob said curtly and he walked over to the window. He stood well to the side of the meagre curtains, looking down obliquely into the street. “I rang to make sure that Miss Jerold got safely here.” And away, he thought grimly.

“I’ve seen you before,” Brovic said, searching his memory. “At the Union Station, wasn’t it? The day Miss Jerold arrived in Washington. You got into an Army car parked—”

“Yes,” Bob said, “the day all this started.” He turned to face Brovic.

“Yes.” Brovic sensed the young man’s animosity. He hesitated. “You’re quite right,” he added quietly, now watching Kate’s anxious face.

“Why did you want to see me?” Kate asked. She noticed the quick glance he gave in Bob’s direction. “Bob knows as much as I do,” she said.

“How much is that?”

“Very little. I only know what Sylvia believes about you.”

He stared at the ground in front of his feet, at a thin rag of carpet curling back from the dusty floorboards. There was a sudden tightening at his lips. He sat down on the edge of the bed. “All right,” he said, forcing his voice to be crisp and matter-of-fact. “First things first. Tell me about Sylvia. How is she? When did she leave? How? Where has she gone?”

As he spoke the quick sentences, Kate watched his face. Yes, she thought, he is in love with Sylvia; and her greatest fear melted away. “Didn’t Amy tell you?”

“I didn’t want to talk about anything important over the ’phone. Tell me now.”

So Kate told him.

Still something seemed not to satisfy him. “Sylvia left Georgetown early in the morning. And then you left. Why?”

“She had a—a quarrel with Payton Pleydell.” She glanced over at Bob. “I was out late on Friday night. In the morning, I found Sylvia had gone. So I left. There was nothing to keep me there.”

His eyes were troubled. “A quarrel? Did Sylvia tell you about it?”

I explained too much, she thought. I would have done better to say only that Sylvia had left. “No,” she said slowly. She could feel Bob’s eyes on her, too. “I found Sylvia’s room upset.” She felt her spine stiffen, but she kept her face relaxed. Her calm voice surprised herself. This is the way Martin Clark would handle his answer, she told herself.

“And Sylvia?” came the question she feared.

“She went to the Clarks’ apartment. I found her there. She was all right.” She watched the fear and suspicion leave Brovic’s face. Why should she be trying so hard to spare him the ugly truth? And she had to...somehow.

“Sylvia was all right?” he insisted, his eyes watchful.

She nodded. “I think she had been able to cut herself off completely from the past, as if the quarrel had ended it, made the final break easy, cancelled all her debts.” Kate paused. She was talking too much out of nervousness.

“At least, she seemed happy when she left for the train,” Kate said and paused again.

“She
was
happy,” Kate added, “eager to leave, confident.”

A shadow crossed Brovic’s face. “Where will she be now?”

“She would reach Chicago this morning. We don’t know what train she’ll take out of there—it depends on the space she can find. But with luck, she should leave Chicago this afternoon, or this evening at the latest. So she ought to be in Denver by tomorrow morning. Monday, she will travel through the Rockies. She’ll be in Nevada by early Tuesday. Then she’ll go down through the Sierras and reach Oakland in the late afternoon?”

“That’s the end of the journey?”

“Yes. The train stops there. You can’t go any farther than that, unless you take a ferry across the Bay to San Francisco itself.” This was easier: this was the kind of questioning she could handle.

“And then she’ll telephone your ranch?”

“Yes. Father will come to meet her. She’ll be in Santa Rosita by Tuesday night. It’s less than three hours by car, south-east from Oakland.”

“What will she find there?”

Kate looked at him uncertainly, and then glanced over at Bob, who was watching Jan Brovic with a puzzled expression in his eyes. Bob’s face was still guarded, still hard, but the angry resentful look had gone.

“Tell me,” Brovic said gently.

“About Santa Rosita?”

He nodded.

“There’s the ranch house,” she began hesitatingly, “sitting on the slope of a small hill, with the other buildings down on the road that drives straight west through the valley and the orchards. The house is a simple, sprawling kind of place, not large, but well spread out so that it seems bigger than it is. Behind it, to the east, are more hills, folding into each other, rising away from the valley. They’re rounded, golden-green in colour, with clusters of trees, dark green trees all the darker because of the pale gold grass. And behind them are the high hills, more pointed, tree-covered entirely. And then come the mountains, the Sierras, stretching north and south for a thousand miles and so deep that, you take a day to travel through them. That’s where you find the jagged peaks, bared right down to their skeletons, still capped with snow, and the mountain lakes and water falls.” She stopped, looking at him. “I’m not exaggerating,” she said.

“Go on,” he said. “That’s the background. What lies in front?”

“The orchards. They stretch along the flat valley, without walls or fences. Apricot trees spaced with fig trees in neat rows between little veins of irrigation ditches. There are peach trees too. And vines on the lower slopes of the small rounded hills that edge the valley. In spring, when the blossom is out, you stand on our front porch and look at this sea of pink and white stretching for thirty miles and more.” She smiled. “Our ranch is only a small part of it, of course. But somehow it all belongs together. We just happen to share in it; that’s how it feels.”

“Will she be lonely there?” he asked.

Kate shook her head. “There’s too much to share. It is only people who have nothing to give who would feel lonely.”

“What kind of people will she meet?”

“There are the other ranches in the valley, and the workers who live there all year round, and the forestry people and the National Park rangers and the fire wardens in the mountains and the cattle ranchers back in the hills. It may sound lonely, but it isn’t. Perhaps when there aren’t so many people around, they are friendlier.”

She thought over that. “They’ve got to be,” she added. “We don’t only share a view. Last year, the valley had a bad frost—” She fell silent. “And two summers ago, there was a drought and a forest fire that swept out of the Sierras... Yes, we share a lot of things.”

Brovic didn’t speak.

She said, “Mountains have a way of putting you into proper proportion.”

She said, “They give a kind of perspective.”

She said, “Either you can face that, and you stay. Or you can’t and you run away from it. That has happened, too.”

She said, still waiting, “Was that what you wanted to hear?” She looked at Bob Turner, and she realised then she had been speaking to him in those last ten minutes as much as to Jan Brovic.

Brovic nodded. That’s where Sylvia will live, he thought. Santa Rosita. It could shield her, help her. That was what he wanted to be sure of. And now, too, he had a picture to carry with him in his mind. “Yes,” he said quietly, “that is what I wanted to hear. Now, I can see her—” He broke off.

He rose to his feet. He began to pace about the room, and its peace was gone. “There are some things Sylvia must know,” he said, and his voice was suddenly harsh. “I didn’t tell her the whole truth about my mission here. For her own sake, I thought the less she knew, the safer she would be. I thought I was protecting her from useless worry, unnecessary strain.” He paused. And I only learned gradually what my full mission was, he thought: step by step, I had to learn it. “But these are excuses,” he said bitterly. “Excuses never alter the facts. When the complete charges against me are made public, as they will be, they won’t make a pretty picture—not even to Sylvia.” He looked at Kate, his grey eyes dark with unhappiness.

“I think I can see the shape of the picture,” Kate said. “Sylvia won’t believe it.”

“And yet the picture, on the surface, is true,” he said. The lines at the side of his mouth deepened with distaste. “Through my stupidity,” he added. He turned abruptly away.

Kate shook her head. “Now, I don’t see what you mean,” she said slowly. Did Bob, standing so silent by the side of the window?

“Let me give you all the facts,” Brovic said. “Some of them, Sylvia knows. But not all of them. If she did know, I wouldn’t have this worry... Listen carefully, because you must tell Sylvia.”

There it was, the full admission that he would never see Sylvia again.

He raised his head, straightening his shoulders, and he turned round to face them once more. Turner was no longer pretending to look down into the street. He and the girl were waiting, silent.

Brovic began speaking, hurriedly and yet calmly, as if he had to make everything clear as quickly as possible... In Czechoslovakia, he had been offered the job of coming to Washington, where he was to try to renew his old contacts and friendships. He had taken the offer, seeing in it a chance for eventual freedom. He had made arrangements for his father and the rest of the family to escape as soon as he had reached America. Word was to be sent to him when they were all safe. And then he would be free to act.

“I took this room,” he said, “and this was where I was going to come as soon as I got the letter from the family. I was going to ask your government for sanctuary. I was going to make a statement to the Press.” And now? Even if I could be free, I could do neither of these things. No one could believe me, now. He shrugged his shoulders helplessly, brushing off that emotional aside, and he heard his quiet voice going on, giving the exact facts.

When he had arrived in Washington, he made contact with certain of his old friends as he had been ordered to do. It was then he found out that the Communists knew a great deal about his past life in Washington, even the fact that he and Sylvia had once been in love. And at the same time, it became evident that the list of people who interested the Communists were all connected somehow with Payton Pleydell. They knew a good deal, too, about Pleydell. They knew he was on his way up to a still more important position in the government. They knew his strength and his weaknesses: his pride in his tolerance, his insistence on his liberalism; they knew that he had been influenced before in his political judgments. They had marked Pleydell down as a long-term project. They were trying to reach him through several contacts. But the one they thought was most hopeful for real results was his wife, Sylvia.

“Communists, you see,” Brovic said with almost a smile, “can be stupid, too.” Then he was grimly serious again as he added, “But I was as stupid as they were. By the time I realised I was drawing Sylvia into danger, it was too late. I had already met Sylvia, and there was no turning back. Yet I still thought I could win. It was”—and now he looked at Turner, facing him frankly—“it was my stupidity, to imagine I could somehow compromise with the Communists just long enough to suit my own purposes.”

He began to pace across the room again, his slight limp now more pronounced, his hands plunged deep in his pockets to hide his clenched knuckles. “Two major blunders in my life. First, I helped to sell out my country, through ignorance and blindness. And now—” He fell silent.

“But did you ever talk about Pleydell and his work to Sylvia?” Kate asked.

“No.” The word came out contemptuously.

“Then who did question Pleydell?”

“He wasn’t questioned directly. But his statements and evasions were all passed on to Czernik and Vlatov. They added up. That is how a lot of information is found out: the little pieces all add up.”

“Who passed them on?”

“Minlow.”

“Did he know what he was doing?”

“He knew they were Communists.”

“But did he know what he was doing?”

“He sat there, in front of Czernik and Vlatov, a drink in his hand, a smile on his lips, talking about things he had no possible right to discuss. Did he know what he was doing? Why was he there, in the first place?”

“Oh,
why
did he do it?” Kate asked helplessly.

“Americans always ask that. Why did this man behave in this way?” Brovic shook his head unbelievably. “Does that matter compared with
what
the man has done? That’s the question that should be asked: what has this man done? For that’s a fact you can measure. But why he has done it, is a secret he’ll try to keep. If ever he answers you, he will only give reasons that try to make him look as noble as possible. We’ve a modern weakness for that kind of apology. The minute a man says he’s done what he has done from idealism, we begin to excuse him.” His voice became bitter. “Especially if he has an honest face and good manners. But so have confidence men, so have poisoners. Do we find excuses for them? Of course, they haven’t yet offered idealism as their motives.” He stopped short.