Kraft put his magazine down. ‘And go where?’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Just go somewhere very fast I suppose it’s the idea of movement that excites me; I’ve been sitting still so long.’
‘Um,’ said Kraft.
‘Moscow, maybe,’ I said.
‘What?’ said Kraft incredulously.
‘Moscow,’ I said. ‘I’d like very much to see Moscow.’
‘That’s a novel idea,’ said Kraft
‘You don’t like it?’ I said.
‘I ĄX I’ll have to think about it,’ he said.
Resi started to move away from me, but I held her tight. ‘You think about it, too,’ I said to her.
‘If you want me to,’ she said faintly.
‘Heaven!’ I said, and I jiggled her to make her bubble. ‘The more I think about it, the more attractive it becomes,’ I said. ‘If we only stayed in Mexico City for two minutes between planes, that would be long enough for me.’
Kraft stood up, exercising his fingers elaborately. ‘This is a joke?’ he said.
‘Is it?’ I said. ‘An old friend like you should be able to tell if I’m joking or not.’
‘You must be joking,’ he said. ‘What is there in Moscow that could interest you?’
‘I’d try to locate an old friend of mine,’ I said.
‘I didn’t know you had a friend in Moscow,’ he said.
‘I don’t know that he’s in Moscow ĄX just somewhere in Russia,’ I said. ‘I’d have to make inquiries.’
‘What’s his name?’ said Kraft.
‘Stepan Bodovskov ĄX ‘ I said, ‘the writer.’
‘Oh,’ said Kraft. He sat down again, picked up the magazine again.
‘You’ve heard of him?’ I said.
‘No,’ he said.
‘What about Colonel Iona Potapov?’ I said. Resi twisted away from me, stood with her back to the farthest wall.
‘You know Potapov?’ I asked her.
‘No,’ she said.
‘You?’ I asked Kraft
‘No,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you tell me about him?’
‘He’s a communist agent,’ I said. ‘He’s trying to get me to Mexico City so I can be kidnaped and flown to Moscow for trial.’
‘No!’ said Resi.
‘Shut up!’ Kraft said to her. He stood, threw the magazine aside. He went for a small pistol he had in his pocket, but I got the drop on him with the Luger.
I made him throw the pistol on the floor.
‘Look at us ĄX ‘ he said wonderingly, as though he were an innocent bystander, ‘cowboys and Indians.’
‘Howard ĄX ‘ said Resi.
‘Don’t say a word,’ Kraft warned her.
‘Darling ĄX ‘ said Resi tearfully, ‘the dream about Mexico ĄX I thought it was really coming true! We were all going to escape!’ She opened her arms. ‘Tomorrow ĄX ‘ she said weakly.
‘Tomorrow ĄX ‘ she whispered again.
And then she went to Kraft, as though she wanted to claw him. But there was no strength in her hands. The hold they took on Kraft was feeble.
‘We were all going to be born anew,’ she said to him brokenly. ‘You, too ĄX you, too. Didn’t ĄX didn’t you want that for yourself? How could you speak so warmly about the new lives we would have, and still not want them?’
Kraft did not reply.
Resi turned to me. ‘I am a communist agent ĄX yes. And so is he. He is Colonel Iona Potapov. And our mission was to get you to Moscow. But I wasn’t going to go through with it ĄX because I love you, because the love you gave me was the only love I’ve ever had, the only love I ever will have.
‘I told you I wasn’t going through with it, didn’t I?’ she said to Kraft.
‘She told me,’ said Kraft.
‘And he agreed with me,’ said Resi ‘And he came up with this dream of Mexico, where we would all get out of the trap ĄX live happily ever after.’
‘How did you find out?’ Kraft asked me.
‘American agents followed the scheme all the way,’ I said. ‘This place is surrounded now. You’re cooked.’
38: Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life …
About the raid ĄX
About Resi Noth ĄX
About how she died ĄX
About how she died in my arms, there in the basement of the Reverend Lionel J. D. Jones, DJD.S., D.D. ĄX
It was wholly unexpected.
Resi seemed so in favor of life, so right for life, that the possibility of her preferring death did not occur to me.
I was sufficiently a man of the world, or sufficiently unimaginative ĄX take your choice ĄX to think that a girl that young and pretty and clever would have an entertaining time of it, no matter where fate and politics shoved her next. And, as I pointed out to her, nothing worse than deportation was in store for her.
‘Nothing worse than that?’ she said.
‘That’s all,’ I said. ‘I doubt that you’ll even have to pay for your passage back.’
‘You’re not sorry to see me go?’ she said.
‘Certainly, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But there’s nothing I can do to keep you with me. Any minute now people are going to come in here and arrest you. You don’t expect me to fight them, do you?’
‘You won’t fight them?’ she said.
‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘What chance would I have?’
‘That matters?’ she said.
‘You mean ĄX ‘ I said, ‘why don’t I die for love, like a knight in a Howard W. Campbell, Jr., play?’
‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we die together, right here and now?’
I laughed. ‘Resi, darling’ I said, ‘you have a full life ahead of you.’
‘I have a full life behind me ĄX ‘ she said, ‘all in those few sweet hours with you.’
‘That sounds like a line I might have written as a young man,’ I said.
‘It is a line you wrote as a young man,’ she said.
‘Foolish young man,’ I said.
‘I adore that young man,’ she said.
‘When was it you fell in love with him?’ I said. ‘As a child?’
‘As a child ĄX and then as a woman,’ she said. ‘When they gave me all the things you’d written, told me to study them, that’s when I fell in love as a woman.’
‘I’m sorry ĄX I can’t congratulate you on your literary tastes,’ I said.
‘You no longer believe that love is the only thing to live for?’ she said.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Then tell me what to live for ĄX anything at all,’ she said beseechingly. ‘It doesn’t have to be love. Anything at all’ She gestured at objects around the shabby room, dramatizing exquisitely my own sense of the world’s being a junk shop. ‘I’ll live for that chair, that picture, that furnace pipe, that couch, that crack in the wall! Tell me to live for it, and I will’ she cried.
It was now me that her strengthless hands laid hold of. She closed her eyes, wept. ‘It doesn’t have to be love,’ she whispered. ‘Just tell me what it should be.’
‘Resi ĄX ‘ I said gently.
‘Tell me!’ she said, and strength came into her bands, did tender violence to my clothes.’
‘I’m an old man ĄX ‘ I said helplessly. It was a coward’s lie. I am not an old man.
‘All right, old man ĄX tell me what to live for,’ she said. ‘Tell me what you live for, so I can live for it too ĄX here or ten thousand kilometres from here, Tell me why you want to go on being alive, so I can go on wanting to be alive, too!’
And then the raiders broke in.
The forces of law and order plunged in through every door, waving guns, blowing whistles, shining dazzling lights where there was plenty of light already.
There was a small army of them, and they exclaimed over all the melodramatically evil goodies in the cellar. They exclaimed like children around a Christmas tree.
A dozen of them, all young, apple-cheeked and virtuous, surrounded Resi, Kraft-Potapov and me, took my Luger away from me, turned us into rag dolls as they ransacked us for other weapons.
More raiders came down the stairs prodding the Reverend Dr. Lionel J. D. Jones, the Black Fuehrer, and Father Keeley before them.
Dr. Jones stopped halfway down the stairs, confronted his tormentors. ‘All I’ve done,’ he said majestically, ‘is do what you people should be doing.’
‘What should we be doing?’ said a G-man. He was obviously in command of the raid.
‘Protecting the Republic,’ said Jones. ‘Why bother us? Everything we do is to make the country stronger! Join with us, and let’s go after the people who are trying to make it weaker!’
‘Who’s that?’ said the G-man.
‘I have to tell you?’ said Jones. ‘Haven’t you even found that out in the course of your work? The Jews! The Catholics! The Negroes! The Orientals! The Unitarians! The foreign-born, who don’t have any understanding of democracy, who play right into the hands of the socialists, the communists, the anarchists, the anti-Christ and the Jews!’