The Diplomat's Wife Part 26

"I know." His voice is cold, matter-of-fact. "Which made it easier to get her to do what I needed. Because she really never wanted to do this to you, Marta. But she wanted a family more." He looks over my shoulder into the plane. "I guess that's all over now. So you'll get to take care of Rachel for a little while longer, after all. At least until we get to Moscow."

"Simon, please listen. No one has to know what happened. We can go home."

"Moscow is my home," he replies, his voice sincere. It occurs to me again that I have spent two years married to a stranger. "Now, get back in the plane," he orders. He raises the knife again and now I notice that it is wet with blood. Paul's blood. "You killed Paul...."

"Paul?" A stunned look crosses Simon's face. "I thought that was-"

"Michael?" I finish for him, taking pleasure in for once knowing something that he does not. "Michael and Paul are the same person, Simon. The soldier you thought you killed in the plane crash two years ago. He survived and he found me while I was looking for Marcelitis. Paul is Rachel's real father," I add.

A stunned expression crosses Simon's face. He turns to look at Paul's motionless body on the ground behind him. As he does, I reach out and kick him hard. He tumbles backward down the stairs, landing close to where Paul lies. I run down the stairs, desperately wanting to stop and check on Paul. But I know that it is only a matter of seconds before Simon gets up again. Carrying Rachel, I start to run away from the plane in the direction of the airport. Taking this to be a game, she laughs giddily. I look ahead desperately for somewhere to hide, but the airfield is open, exposed. Behind me, I hear Simon getting up. Desperately, I start to run toward the airport in the distance. Let the maintenance man still be there, I pray. Let someone be there. But carrying Rachel slows my gait. Simon's footsteps grow louder and I know that it is only a matter of seconds until he catches us.

Suddenly I hear a shot, then another. I drop to the ground, falling on top of Rachel to protect her. I will give up, I decide, stop running and let Simon take us to Moscow rather than risk her being shot. I stare at the ground, waiting for Simon to pounce upon us. But there is silence. At last I look up. Simon has fallen to the ground and lies motionless. Behind him, holding the gun, stands Dava.

Looking from Dava's outstretched arm to Simon lying p.r.o.ne on the ground, I am overcome with a strange sense of deja vu. Have I been here before? No, that was me shooting the Kommandant to save Emma's life, long ago. This time it is I who has been saved.

"Dava!" Setting down Rachel, I race to Dava's side. Blood seeps from the front of her dress and she is breathing hard. But she is still alive.

She leans on me for support and I help her to the ground. "I thought he loved me, too," she says weakly. She must have overheard our conversation on the stairs of the plane. "I'm so sorry."

I hesitate, staring down at her. Hatred rises in me. She killed Rose. I fight the urge to take the gun and finish her off myself. But she might have information that is valuable to the government. I help her to a sitting position on the ground. Suddenly the maintenance man appears at the door of the airport. "Call an ambulance!" I yell as loudly as I can. I stand up and walk to where Simon lies, eyes staring blankly at the sky. I reach in his jacket pocket and pull out the cipher. Tucking it in my own pocket, I pick up Rachel, then start running back across the airfield toward the plane. Paul still lies on the ground, not moving. "Paul!" I cry, dropping to the ground beside him. He does not respond. I lower my face to his. Is he dead? Rachel reaches over, pats his cheek with her tiny palm.

"Mmm," he mumbles.

"Paul, wake up," I plead.

He opens his eyes. "Marta? Are you and the baby okay?" he asks weakly.

My body sags with relief. "We're fine. But you've been stabbed." I set Rachel down. There is a gash between his chest and shoulder that is bleeding heavily.

"I don't think he hit anything major." He grimaces. "I may have broken my shoulder, though."

"When you didn't move, I was afraid that..."

"I think I just b.u.mped my head when we fell."

"Thank goodness you received my message and made it in time. Simon was a traitor, Paul. It was him all along." Suddenly I feel very foolish.

"You couldn't possibly have known," he says, reading my mind. "Where is he now?"

"Dead. Dava shot him."

"Dava, the nurse from Salzburg?" he asks. I nod. "I was wondering who the woman with him was. She was in on it, too?"

"It's a long story. Apparently it was all a deliberate plan set up by the Russians to have me use my contacts to find Marcelitis. And there's something else." I take a deep breath. "The plane crash, it wasn't an accident. Simon arranged it deliberately, to keep us apart."

I watch his face as he processes the information, trying to grasp the full extent of the damage and pain Simon had caused. Then he shakes his head and the shadow lifts from his eyes. "He's gone now and he can't hurt us anymore." He reaches out to Rachel, who is trying to crawl away. "Now, isn't it about time that you introduced me to my daughter?"

EPILOGUE.

I stand on the deck of the ocean liner, looking out at a flock of gulls that dive low to the water, searching the wake for fish. Behind me, the coast of England grows smaller. A chilly breeze blows across the deck and I draw my coat more closely around me.

"Mama!" a voice calls. Behind me I turn to see Rachel toddling unsteadily toward me, bulky in her winter coat. Paul follows, his arm still wrapped in a sling.

"h.e.l.lo, darling." I stoop to pick up Rachel, who seems to grow heavier by the day. She babbles animatedly, pointing at the gulls. I study her face for the hundredth time, wondering if she has any memory of what happened. But her eyes are bright and clear.

Rachel turns in my arms and strains toward an enclosed gla.s.s area about ten meters away where a bunch of children sit at tables, drawing and painting. "You want to go play?" She nods.

"I'll take her," Paul offers, taking Rachel from me with his good arm. I watch as he carries Rachel over to the play area and speaks with the governess in charge. A moment later, he returns to me. "She'll be fine playing with the other children."

I smile. "I know." In the weeks since we were reunited, Paul has been as nervous as a new father, scarcely letting Rachel out of his sight. I, too, have been watching her more closely since that night at the airfield, waking in the middle of the night and tiptoeing to her in the darkness, touching her to make sure that she is still there.

I turn back to face the water, and Paul wraps his arm around me, resting his chin on the top of my head. More than a month has pa.s.sed since the confrontation at the airport with Simon. We buried him in a private graveside ceremony in his family plot at a Jewish cemetery west of London on a rainy Sunday morning, just the rabbi, Rachel and myself, Paul, Delia and Charles standing a respectful distance behind. At first, I had not wanted to go. Simon was a murderer. Every single thing he had said or done since I met him had been a lie. In the end, it was Paul who convinced me to go. I looked at him in amazement. His entire unit had died because of Simon. "For closure," he explained. "I mean, I hate him, too. But we should go for Rachel. Simon is the only father she has known until now and someday she will want to know things."

So in the end we went. As his casket was lowered into the ground my rage burned white hot. How could he have done this? He killed so many innocent men. He played with our lives, made us nothing more than p.a.w.ns in his game. The rabbi pa.s.sed me a small handful of dirt, and as I threw it into the grave, my anger began to wane. You lost, Simon, I thought, feeling strangely triumphant. Then, staring down into the dark hole, my curiosity burned. There were so many things I wanted to know about what had happened and why he had done it, questions to which I would never get answers. Suddenly I realized that it did not matter. "Y'isgadal, v'yis'kadash," the rabbi began. As I joined him in the Mourner's Kaddish, I did not pray for Simon. I prayed for my parents and Rose, for Jacob and Alek and all those I carried with me. The years I spent with Simon would forever be part of the tapestry of my life, but I would not let it destroy the good. My voice grew stronger as I thanked G.o.d for sustaining me and bringing me to this place. When the prayer ended, Paul stepped forward and took my hand, and he, Rachel and I walked slowly away together.

Dava survived her gunshot wound and agreed to cooperate with the government in exchange for amnesty, a reduced sentence. "It's actually better this way," Paul told me a few days earlier as we packed up the house. "There won't be a public trial." In fact, somehow the whole incident had been kept out of the media, though I knew that the scandal of Simon's death and my departure would be whispered about in diplomatic circles for years. "And hopefully we'll learn the full extent to which the communists had infiltrated the British government," he added.

Hopefully, I think now, shivering. We learned a great deal more about Simon in the investigation following his death, how he had been targeted by the communists for recruitment while a student at Cambridge, invited to Moscow by a college cla.s.smate for spring vacation. It was not hard to imagine Simon, alone and in need of money after his father's death, being drawn in, warmed by the prospect of being important and needed. There he had taken on the ident.i.ty Dmitri Borskin, met Dava. Later another diplomat, also secretly working for the Soviets, had helped him secure his place at the Foreign Office.

Hearing this, I pictured the faces of the other men in the department-Ebertson, Fitzwilliam, even the D.M.-how many of them were really communist spies? I worried that someone might come after me and Paul, seek revenge for what we had done. But the investigators a.s.sured me that they would all be arrested. Paul said, too, that the Soviets would no longer be interested in me. But I was still glad to be putting an ocean between us.

Dava's face appears in my mind once more. Her betrayal is the hardest to believe. I remember her as she had been in Salzburg, caring and kind. It had all been a lie. I hate her for what she did to Rose, and I want her to go to prison, to suffer. I will never forgive her, but in a strange way, I can almost understand. She was blinded by her love for Simon. And she did not let him kill me in the end. If it was not for Dava, I wouldn't be standing here today.

I look up at Paul, wanting to pinch myself to make certain that it is real. We have been so lucky. Though the cut Simon gave him had not touched any major organs, the struggle had caused internal bleeding at the site of his gunshot wound. I clung to his hand as they loaded him into the ambulance that night, fearful that if I let go, he would disappear again. "Come back to the States with me," he suggested before they closed the ambulance doors and took him away. He repeated the invitation as his first words when he woke up in the hospital following surgery the next day.

I hesitated. Going to America with Paul was a long-forgotten dream, something that had died years ago. But what did I have left here? I could hardly go back to the Foreign Office after all that happened. And our house, Simon's house, held nothing but painful memories. Delia was here, of course. But even she was talking about moving on, getting married at long last to Charles and retiring to the south of France. "Life's too short," she explained. Too short indeed. That night I told Paul I would come with him to America. We stayed in London just long enough to finalize affairs: I arranged for the sale of the house through an agency Delia recommended and Paul secured visas to America for Rachel and me. A few weeks later, we were ready to go.

Before we left, I sent Emma a letter, too, telling her what had happened and giving her Paul's address in America. I wrote that if she wanted to come to America, I would try to arrange papers for her and the children. I wonder if I will get a response.

"Happy?" Paul asks now, jarring me from my thoughts. Still staring out at the sea, I hesitate. I am still getting used to all that has happened, trying to convince myself that it will not fall apart. I am too scared to be happy. But I nod, anyway. "I have something for you," Paul says.

I turn around to face him, the wind whipping my hair across my face. "What is it?" Paul reaches into his pocket and pulls out a box, then starts to lower himself to one knee. My breath catches. "You're asking me to marry you?"

He nods. "Again." Then he opens the box to reveal a white-gold band with a solitaire diamond on top.

"It's beautiful." I lift the dog tags that hang around my neck. "But I kind of like these."

He smiles. "You should have had a ring then, too. I was such a dumb kid."

"We were both kids."

"So is that a yes?"

I laugh. "I feel like we're already married."

"Me, too. But I think we should make it official as soon as we get settled. I want everyone to know that I'm your husband and Rachel's father."

I do not answer. That is how the whole mess started in the first place. If I had not been worried about appearances, I wouldn't have married Simon just because I was pregnant with Rachel. Enough, I think. That is all in the past now. Everything that happened, for better or worse, contributed to where we are right now. Happy. Together.

I look down at Paul, who is staring up at me, the ring box still held in his palm. "I'd love to," I say. "Yes."

He takes the ring from the box and slips it on my finger. Then he stands up, drawing me into an embrace. Suddenly, I laugh aloud. "What is it?" he demands. "Don't you like the ring?"

"The ring is perfect," I reply quickly. "It's just that this all seems so ordinary. So wonderfully, perfectly ordinary."

Paul shakes his head. "That," he replies, brushing my hair back and kissing my forehead, "is the one thing I doubt we'll ever be."

"True," I say, suddenly exhausted. "I think I'll go upstairs to the cabin for a nap."

He looks down at me, his expression worried. "Are you all right?"

"Fine, just a bit tired. Want to come with me?"

"I don't think you'll get much rest if I do."

"Agreed. Want to come with me?" He hesitates, looking over at the nursery. "Rachel is fine with the other children," I add.

"Let's go." As he takes my arm and leads me across the deck, it finally seems as though our journey together has just begun.

ISBN: 978-1-4268-1612-3.

end.