Chapter 3: The Arrangement

I spent the two days she had given me the way a man spends money he has been told not to touch — carefully, and badly, and with one eye always on the door.

Wednesday I filed four hundred honest words on the wolfram situation, which is to say I did the one piece of real journalism I had done in a month as a kind of penance, and cabled it to Chicago, where an editor I had never met would cut it to two hundred and run it next to an advertisement for cigarettes. Thursday I went to the British party in the Lapa and let Sir Edmund Carruthers show me the gun in the drawer — the ones who arrive on the arm of men like our Romanian friend — and I lied to Eldridge on a dark terrace and discovered that I could, which frightened me more than the gun had. Then I came back to the Avenida Palace and did not sleep, and toward dawn I gave up pretending to, and Friday arrived the way Fridays do, indifferent to whether you have slept.

I should say that I had spent those two days telling myself I was waiting for an asset. This is the language we used, Donovan’s people and I, and it is good language, clean and cold, built to keep a man from noticing what he is actually doing. An asset was a thing you ran. You did not wait for an asset the way I was waiting — the way you wait at a window in the last hour of light, listening to the building for a particular tread on a particular stair, ashamed of yourself and unable to stop.

She did not use the stair.

She knocked on my door at a quarter past nine, which was the second wrong note she had played for me — the first had been my name, at the casino, on a Tuesday that felt now like something that had happened to a younger man — because the arrangement, the careful arrangement, was that she would find me, in a public room, in a manner that could be explained to the watchers, and instead she had come up to the fourth floor of the hotel where I lived and knocked on the door of my room as though we were two people with nothing to hide, which we were not, which we were the precise opposite of.

I opened the door. She came in past me without a word and waited until I had shut it.

“You should not have come here,” I said.

“No.” She set down her bag. “I should not have done a great many things. I am behind on all of them. I thought I would do this one first.”

She had changed since Tuesday. I do not mean the dress, though the dress was different — a dark blue thing, almost black, the color of the sea off Carcavelos at the hour I had watched it go by from the train. I mean that something in her had been moved closer to the surface, the way a stone you have walked past a hundred times will one morning have been turned over by the rain, showing you the pale wet underside it had been hiding all along.

On Tuesday she had been a woman deciding whether to let go of an inch of herself. Tonight she had already let go of something larger, and was not telling me what, and the not-telling came off her like heat off a road.

“What’s happened,” I said.

“Nothing has happened.” She crossed to the window and looked down at the Avenida, at the lights coming on along it, at the slow Lisbon evening that this country had perfected as a form of national defense. “A photograph happened. On Tuesday afternoon, before the casino. I did not tell you because it was not yours to be told, and because I needed you to choose me without it, and you did, so.” She turned. “Now you may have it. He sends them when my work thins. A reminder. My sister, in a coat too thin for the season. I burned it, which is the only thing I am permitted to do with it that he does not expect.”

“Vera.”

“Do not.” She said it without heat. “Do not be gentle yet. I came up four flights of a hotel where you live, in a building full of men who are paid to notice exactly this, because tonight I did not want to be found in a public room and managed and worked toward. I wanted to knock on a door. I have not knocked on a door, on my own account, for a man I chose, in — “ she stopped, and did the small arithmetic she was always doing, and I watched her decide not to say the number. “In a long time. Let me have the door. The gentleness can come after.”

So I let her have the door, and I did not move toward her, and after a moment she crossed the room to me, and this time she did not put her hand flat against my chest the way you check a horse. This time she took a fistful of my shirt and pulled.

It was not like Tuesday, and she meant it not to be.

On Tuesday I had taken my time with her because she had told me she had not chosen a man in eighteen months and I had wanted her to remember the choosing, and she had cried, silently, with the tears running sideways into her hair, and at the end she had thanked me for the slowness. I had carried that thanks around for three days like a stone in a coat pocket. I had thought, in the foolish way a man thinks, that I knew now what she needed from me.

I knew nothing. Tonight she did not want to be remembered to herself slowly. Tonight she wanted to be somewhere that was not the inside of her own head, and she wanted to get there fast, and she used me to do it — not unkindly, never unkindly, but with a directness that turned the whole architecture of Tuesday on its head. On Tuesday I had led. Tonight she led, and I understood, somewhere under the wanting, that the leading was itself the thing she had come for: that for one hour in a borrowed room she wanted to be the one who decided, who set the pace, who said here and now and like this, because everywhere else in her life the deciding was done for her, by Cantacuzino and by Stahl and by a war that took a new small thing from her every week.

She undressed herself before I could do it for her, which on Tuesday she had not, and there was nothing of performance in it; it was the briskness of a woman who has no more time for ceremony and a great deal of need. The blue dress went where it fell. The small pale scar was still at the base of her throat beside the silver leaf, and she let me kiss it because she remembered I had wanted to, and then she did not let me linger anywhere, because lingering was Tuesday and Tuesday was a kindness she could not survive twice in one week.

She pushed me back onto the bed and came over me and put her hands flat on my chest, and this time it was not the checking of a horse. This time it was a woman holding herself up over the thing she had decided to take, looking down at me with the gray-green eyes that the file in Bern did not have a photograph of, and she said, “Do not be slow tonight.”