Nick said he had to go to the bathroom and raced into the house, leaving them standing at the car. He walked through the empty rooms, trying to fix them in his memory too, but it felt like someone else’s house. Maybe Father Tim was right. Things passed, whether you wanted them to or not.

He went up to his father’s study and stood at the door. His mother hadn’t taken the desk and it still sat there, just the desk and the blank walls. The window was closed, and in the stale air he thought he could still smell tobacco. His chest hurt again. Why did it have to happen? He stared at the desk. He wouldn’t cry and he wouldn’t do what Father Tim had said. He wouldn’t forget anything. His father was somewhere. But not in the empty room. There was nothing left but a trace of smoke.

He heard his mother calling and went down the stairs to the car. Nora cried, but he got into the back seat, determined not to crack. He wouldn’t even look back. But when the car turned the corner, he couldn’t help himself and swiveled in his seat toward the back window. It was then he realized, trying to remember details, that something was missing. There were no reporters. It was over. There were just the boxes being loaded into a van.

Three years later, in the summer of 1953, after the death of Stalin and the murder of Beria, Walter Kotlar at last gave a press conference in Moscow. In the chess game of the Cold War, the move was meant to dismay the West, and it did, another blow after the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean. Like them, Kotlar denounced Western aggression as a threat to world peace. But his remarks were limited, and he made no reference to the circumstance of his defection. His presence was the story.

Nick had waited so long for his answer that when it came, a grainy newsclip, he felt a numb surprise that it didn’t explain anything after all. It solved a puzzle, but not the one he wanted to solve. His father looked well. There was the expected storm in the papers, the events of 1950 retold as news, and for a day Nick and his mother wondered if their lives would be exploded again. But no one called. The country had moved on. And by that time Nick had a new father and a new name, and their troubles, everything that happened to them, had become just a part of history.

Part II

The Red Menace

Chapter 3

April 1969

“VANESSA REDGRAVE’S SUPPOSED to show.”

“Super. Where?” The two boys, obviously students, looked over the iron railings toward the tall houses lining one side of the square.

“I don’t know, but she’s supposed to show. Check out the cameras.”

“Far out. We’ll be on TV.”

Eavesdropping, Nick smiled and looked toward the embassy steps, where the camera crews were setting up. The turnout was bigger than he’d expected. The day was raw and cold, damp morning mist still hanging from the trees, but the line snaked all around Grosvenor Square, ringing the enclosed park and spilling out down Brook Street. They couldn’t all be American. The streets were still open to traffic, and the police, polite and wary, walked along the edge of the curb, asking the crowd to stay on the pavement.

The rally, like London itself, was gentle and friendly. In front of the embassy there were microphones for the demonstration speeches and Americans Against Vietnam signs, but no one broke out of line or heckled the secretaries going into the building. A few faces stared out of the upper-story windows, more curious than besieged, but no one called out to them. The confrontations and shouting belonged somewhere else. They were here to listen to speeches and then, one by one, to read the names of the dead.

Nick looked around for his LSE group, but they’d become separated earlier and were now swallowed up in the queue. One of the organizers, megaphone dangling from his neck, was moving down the line, handing out index cards.

“When you get to the mike, just read off the name and place and say ‘dead’ and then drop the card in the coffin. Got it? Don’t yell–the mike’ll pick it up. And keep it moving, okay? No stunts.”

Nick took the card. Pvt. Richard Sczeczynski. Nu Phoc, 1968. That would have been during Tet, when the body bags flooded the airport, a hundred years ago.

The organizers looked like teenagers, but then everyone in the crowd looked young to him. Earlier he had noticed a middle-aged group in drab overcoats–academics, presumably, or English radicals old enough to have tramped from Aldermaston–but everyone else seemed to have stepped out of a dorm party, smooth-faced and eager, wrapped in capes and leather and old army greatcoats. A few had peace signs painted on their foreheads. Underneath the bushy mustaches and lumberjack beards their cheeks were pink. It was a thrift shop army – cast-off shawls and buckskin fringe and tight jeans with shiny studs planted along the seams. None of them had been there.

“Excuse me,” a girl behind him said, holding out her card. “Do you have any idea how to pronounce this?”

An American voice. He looked at her–long blond hair held away from her face by an Indian headband, shoulders draped with a patterned gaucho cape–and took the card.

“Hue,” he said automatically, wondering why she’d asked. She was pretty but slightly drawn, dressed to look younger than she was. Had she been standing there all this time?

“No, the name. I mean, he’s dead–awful if I couldn’t pronounce it. I mean—”

Nick looked again at the card. “Trochazka,” he read.

“Chaw?” she said, drawing out the flat a. “Like that? Russian?”

“No, it’s a Czech name.”

“Really? Do you know that?”

Nick shrugged. “It’s a common name. Smith. Jones. Like that.”

“Common if you’re Czech,” she said. “Are you?”

Nick shook his head. “Grandmother.”

“You take it, then. I’ll never say it right. Swap, okay? Do you mind?”

Nick smiled. “Be my guest,” he said, handing her his card. He watched her face as she read it, did a double-take, and then gave a wry smile.

“Okay, you win. I can’t even start this one. Is this like Jones too?”

“No. Che-chin-ski,” he pronounced. “Polish.”

“You can tell? Just like that?”

“Well, the ‘ski’ is Polish. The rest, I don’t know. I’m just guessing.”

She looked at him and smiled. “I’m impressed.” She reached over and took back her card, grazing his fingers. “Forget the swap, though. I think I was better off the first time. Imagine, two in a row. Maybe we’re the Slavic section. How do you say yours? In Czech. Z’s and y’s and all that?”

“Warren.”

“Oh.” She smiled. “Sorry.”

“No,” he said, studying her face, her quick brown eyes meeting his without embarrassment. “They’re funny names.”

“But not to them. I know. Mine’s Chisholm, by the way. With an l.”

“Imagine what the Poles would do with that.”

She smiled. “Yes, imagine.”

He looked at her again. Wide mouth and pale skin, a trace of freckles over the bridge of her nose.

“Where are you from?” she said, the usual American-abroad question.

“New York.”

“No, I mean where here. Are you with a group?”

“LSE,” Nick said.

“You’re a student?”

He laughed at her surprise. “Too old?”

“Well, the tie—” He followed her eyes to the senior-tutor wool jacket and plain tie he’d forgotten he had on. “Are you a teacher?”

“No, I’m finishing a dissertation,” he said, the all-purpose explanation for his time away, the drift. “Late start. What about you?”