After that things got back to normal, or as close to normal as they generally get. Minna and I flew to some airport in Staten Island, still not knowing in what part of the country the meeting with the Chief had taken place. We went to my apartment, bought some fresh clothes for Minna, and I got to work tying up loose ends.
In among the sacks of mail that had come while I was gone was my passport. It had been mailed from London, and so it was in perfect order except for the lack of an English exit visa stamp. This didn’t bother me very much. Passports get stamped all over the place, and no one pays too much attention to the chronological order of things. Besides, the passport was a fake anyway; I’d bought it in Greece some months ago to replace one the Czechs had confiscated from me. It had the right number and photograph, so it couldn’t have been any better for me if it had been the original.
Along with the passport was an effusive note from Pindaris. He was enjoying himself in London, he had a good job at a restaurant, and he would love me forever for the great sacrifices I had undertaken on his behalf, as would the entire membership of the Pan-Hellenic Friendship Society, united as we were toward the restoration of Greece to its legitimate historic boundaries, and so on ad nauseam.
The Lettish girls went to Providence in a body as soon as the State Department decided to leave them alone. A theatrical booking agent had signed them up, and they were scheduled to embark soon on a tour of the United States with a program entitled Gymnastics and Free Enterprise. They were not quite sure what this meant but did know that their salaries were quite generous. I went up to Providence myself to be best man at the wedding of Sofija Lazdinja and Karlis Mielovicius, a three-day bonanza during which time a great deal of alcoholic beverages were consumed, and of which I have only an imperfect recollection at best. Afterward Zenta came back to New York with me and stayed around for a while before the group went off to play its first engagement in Cleveland.
Igor Radek turned up briefly, unrecognizable in tapered slacks, polka-dot shirt, short double-breasted blazer, and mirror sunglasses. He had auditioned successfully for the trombonist slot with a small jazz-rock band that had since landed an engagement at a small club in the Village. An original composition of his was being recorded on the band’s first LP; the title, he told me, was Russian To and Fro.
Milan Butec is living under an assumed name at a large residential hotel on West 23rd Street and taking a Berlitz course in English and doing fairly well at it. The translation went well, and a friend of mine has a publisher interested. Milan plans to use the advance to buy a small and unproductive farm somewhere in Virginia or North Carolina. He has learned that he will not have to grow anything on the farm, but will be able to live quite comfortably on the book’s future royalties plus the soil bank subsidies he will receive for not growing either tobacco or hogs, depending upon the location of the farm. He already understands the entire farm subsidy program far better than I do and feels that it is marvelous. “A Balkan mind is better equipped to appreciate this sort of program,” he has told me more than once. “A Balkan mind must have formulated it originally. Masterful.”
The Polish microfilm went to its specified destination, Polish exile leaders in New York and Chicago. They were glad to receive it and happy to have word that Tadeusz was alive and well; they had heard he had been executed by the Polish secret police. I reassured them on that point, and they went off with their microfilm to plot the overthrow of the Gomulka regime.
The Chinese garbage turned out to be almost entirely garbage, old interoffice memoranda and other such trivia. A friend of mine who teaches Far Eastern History at Columbia (the university, not the erstwhile dictatorship) went through the lot and translated enough for me to tell whether various documents were worth keeping. Most were not and went into the garbage can. But among the chaff there was one nice grain of wheat, a dossier of plans for the subversion of one of the little neutralist states in Africa. It had extensive analyses of various groups and factions in the government, names of Chinese agents, names of U.S. and Russian and French and British agents, and all sorts of vital bits of information and theory.
I had the feeling the Chinese had no real intention of putting the plan into effect, certainly not for the time being, with China too much in the grip of internal problems. The dossier had the tone of something drawn up by some bureaucrats who never expected to see it put into play. Still, it was worth more than consignment to the incinerator.
I thought of turning it over to the Chief, then changed my mind. The program was the sort of thing that anyone could put to use, and I rather like that little neutralist nation; I’d hate to see the Chinese overthrow it, but I wouldn’t be much happier to see the CIA turn the same trick. And, after all, they do seem to have internal leaks.
I thought it over some more and wound up taking it to Washington and hiring a messenger to deliver it anonymously to the African nation’s tiny embassy. Forewarned, I felt, was forearmed; now they would be better equipped to stave off attacks from Peking. Or, for that matter, from Washington.
A letter from Colombia (the country, not the college this time) was delivered to me by hand just the other morning. In careful language I was thanked at great length for my services and assured I would always be welcome. Should I care to come for a visit, I could expect the finest treatment.
If I can find the time, I’d like to go.
So that wraps it up, doesn’t it? The Chinese documents, Milan and his book, Igor and his plane, Sofija and her gymnasts, Tadeusz and his microfilm, the passport, everything.
Oh, yes.
Minna.
When I got home from the Armenian meeting last night she was sitting in a chair reading Alice in Wonderland. She reads English almost as well as she speaks it, and she can get through almost anything now that I’ve taught her to use a dictionary. She would miss most of Lewis Carroll’s puns, of course, but so do all children.
“Hi,” she said. “Cómo está?”
“Bien, gracias,” I said. “Who’s teaching you Spanish?”
“Paulie.” Paulie, né Pablo, was the janitor’s little boy. “And also Estrella.” Estrella was the prostitute who lives on the second floor.
“Oh. Shouldn’t you be asleep by now?”
“I will make you some coffee,” she said. “And I will have a glass of milk.”
She went into my little kitchen and made a cup of coffee for me. She brought it out along with a large glass of milk for herself. We sat together, and I sipped my coffee, and she drank her milk.
I said, “It was very nice of you to make the coffee, but it is still very late. Later than before you made the coffee. Don’t you think you ought to go to sleep?”
“I will go to sleep when you go to sleep.”
“I don’t sleep. You know that.”
“Sometimes you sleep, Evan.”
“Never.”
“When Zenta was living here-”
“That wasn’t sleeping exactly.” Zenta had spent a few days and nights with us, and it had not been sleeping, not at all. “That was different.”
“I thought so.”
“You don’t miss a trick, do you?”
“Miss a trick?”
“You notice things, I mean.”
“Some things I notice,” she said.
“And on top of that you changed the subject. I don’t go to sleep, you know that. But you have to sleep regularly or you’ll be sick. You know that, too.”
“Yes, Evan.”
“So go put on your pajamas.”
“Put them on what?”
“Put them on you.” She was unsuccessfully repressing a giggle. “You knew precisely what I meant. You knew miss a trick, too.”
She quoted Humpty Dumpty: “‘When I use a word, it means precisely what I wish it to mean, neither more nor less.’”
“Maybe I shouldn’t let you read Alice. It’s making you far too clever.”
“I like it. Don’t you like it, Evan?”
“Yes, very much. Go put on your pajamas. Now.”
“Yes, Evan.”
When she returned, properly pajama-clad, hands and face washed and teeth brushed, I asked her if she was ready to go to sleep now. She said that she was.
“We’re going to have to find a home for you,” I said.
“This is my home, Evan.”
“A real home, I mean. You need a Mommy and a Daddy and-”
“Why? I like to live here. With you.”
“A regular house,” I said. “With a lawn out in front and a big back yard and grass and trees and flowers-”
“I love to go to Central Park,” she said. “Grass and trees and flowers.”
“And children to play with, and dogs and cats-”
“There are so many children here in this building for me to play with,” she said. “Paulie and Rafael and Willie and Susan and so many others. And Eduardo lets me play with Ginger in the cellar, and Susan has a big dog named Baron, he is a German shepherd, but they speak to him in English. And there are all the animals in the zoo. I had a wonderful time when you took me to the zoo.”
I went into the kitchen and made myself more coffee. I had the uncomfortable feeling that I wasn’t getting my point across. I came back and couldn’t find her. Then I went to the bedroom. She was sitting up in bed with the covers pulled up to her neck.
“You will have to start going to school,” I said. “How will you learn anything?”
“But I learn so many things. English, Spanish, reading, writing, numbers, everything.”
“Still, in a good school-”
“Paulie says school stinks. What does that mean?”
“That it smells bad. But-”
“I would not want to go to a place that smells bad.”
“Well, what it means, really, is that Paulie doesn’t like school, I suppose. But you would like it.”
“Why?”
“Well-”
“I like it very much right here,” she said. “I teach myself things out of your books, and other people teach me things, and you teach me the most of all, Evan. Why do I have to go to school so that I can learn things?”
“If you don’t go to school, you can’t go to college.”
“What is college?”
“It’s like school.”
“Did you go to college?”
“No.” This wasn’t working out well at all. “There are laws,” I said finally, “that say children must go to school. It is the law.”
She looked at me.
“Well, it’s the law.”
“Will they put us in prison?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Besides, how will they find out? Who will tell them?”
“They might find out.”
“Then, when they come to look for me, you will tell me, and I will quickly hide in the closet or under the bed.”
“Minna-”
“And I will live here forever with Evan,” she said. “And I will play with all my friends and I will learn many different languages and I will go to the zoo to see the animals and I will read all the books and study many things.”
“Minna-”
“But now I must go to sleep,” she said smoothly. “So that I will not become sick. And I will stay here forever, and when I am Queen of Lithuania, you will be my Prime Minister.”
“Do you want to be Queen of Lithuania?”
“No. I want to live forever right here on 107th Street. May I stay here, Evan?”
“Well, for the time being.”
“Forever?”
“We’ll see how it works out.”
She didn’t say anything, and then her eyes slipped quietly shut, and she slept. I eased her down onto the bed, settled the pillow under her golden hair, tucked in the covers. When I bent over to kiss her good night she stirred.
“I will live here forever,” she whispered. “Forever.” And then she slid away to sleep again.
I turned out the light, left the room, closed the door. I will live here forever, Evan.
Well, why not? She’s fun to have around.