“I was coming anyway,” she said, annoyed. “Don’t worry.” Then she leaned forward again, making a last effort. “What if I’m right? How could you not want to know?”

He looked at her, then signaled for the bill. “It takes practice. After a while, it works. Everything goes away and the last thing you want to do is bring it back. What do you think would happen if we went? A few awkward days with someone I don’t even know anymore? All taped by you for some magazine?”

“That’s not fair. I never said I wanted to do that. You don’t have to take it out on me.”

“Take what out?”

“Whatever it is that’s making you like this.”

“Right. Sorry.” He pulled out some money to put on the plate with the bill.

“So you won’t,” she said, gathering her purse.

“You go. Tell him you saw me and I said he owes you the interview. Ask him why he defected. Ask him why that woman jumped out the window. I’d buy a copy of that story myself.”

She looked up. “Why she— ?”

“Forget it. Come on, we’d better go.” He shook his head. “It’s been a strange day.” He looked at her. “I thought–well, never mind what I thought.”

“I didn’t do this right.”

“No, you were perfect. How else? It’s like telling someone he’s got cancer–it’s hard to warm up to it. Anyway, I got the message.”

“But you’re not going to see him.”

“Look, it isn’t just me. You’ve met my family. How do you think they’d feel about this little weekend reunion? I can’t do that to them. It’s impossible.”

“Don’t tell them. They don’t have to know. Nobody has to know.”

“Just me and every photographer in Moscow.”

“You’re not listening. That’s the last thing he wants. Nobody would know it’s you. Anyway, he’s in Prague. It’s different.”

“What makes you think he’s still there? Maybe he’s gone back.”

“No, he lives there now. His wife is Czech.”

He had been about to stand up to leave but now he stopped, amazed. “His wife?” It had the full shock of the unexpected. He had imagined his father as he was that night, back in the snow, literally stopped in time. Now suddenly he too had become someone else. Nick sat back in his chair, as if he’d been winded. “Christ. His wife.”

“Didn’t you know?”

“I don’t know anything about him,” he said, and for the first time he saw that it was true. What had his life been all these years? It hadn’t stopped at the press conference. There’d been jobs and apartments and wives, a whole unknown life.

But Molly took his surprise for disapproval. “Your mother remarried,” she said gently. “After the divorce.”

“They weren’t divorced,” he said offhandedly. “It was annulled.”

“Annulled? But how—”

“You mean because of me? Oh, that wouldn’t stop the Church. It just–never happened. They’re pros at that. My mother had connections,” he said, thinking of Father Tim and his puppet strings. “Not that there was any problem. A Communist? They don’t think there’s anything worse than that. Let’s go,” he said, standing up.

“I never met her,” she said, trying to hold him. “The wife. I saw her at the party, but I didn’t meet her.”

“I don’t want to know,” he said, holding up his hand. “Really.” He stopped. “Are there children?”

“Not that I know of.” She put the cape over her wonderful dress. “Just you.”

“Not me,” he said, and led her out of the bar.

It was late, but there was a taxi outside, unexpected luck.

“Will you drop me?” she said, an invitation.

“No. I’ll walk.”

She looked at him. “Well, at least I got to meet the ambassador.” She hesitated at the taxi’s door, listening to the motor turn over like a rickety machine, “For what it’s worth, I think you’re crazy. He’s worth ten of them, those people at dinner. I don’t care what he did.”

Nick smiled slightly. “I know. They’ve probably done worse. They just didn’t do it to me.”

“Neither did he.”

“I don’t want to see him, Molly. I can’t.”

“You don’t want to see me now either, do you?”

He leaned against the open door, waiting for her to get in. “I wish I did. No one ever wanted to meet me before.”

“No?” She smiled, then shrugged. “Well, don’t let it throw you. I just turned up at the wrong door again, that’s all.” She got into the cab, then almost immediately pulled down the window. “I hate to ask, but do you have a fiver? I’m flat. I’ll pay you back.”

He took out the note and handed it to her. “That’s okay. I’m feeling rich today,” he said, thinking of Larry.

“Thanks. You know where to find me if you change your mind.” She tilted her head slightly. “By the way, did anyone ever tell you? You look like him.”

He stared at her through the window. “Who?” She rolled her eyes, giving up, and sat back in the seat as the taxi pulled away.

He walked all the way back to his flat, cutting through Soho and its halfhearted dingy lights, then the quiet squares north of Oxford Street.

In the months after his father left, when he knew he would hear, he would listen for the phone, check the mail even after they had moved, always ready. It was only a question of when the message would come. If there were people in the room, he was prepared to cover, the way his mother had in front of the police. Code. But the message didn’t come, and after a while he forgot what he’d been waiting for. No, he always knew. Come with me. Join me. And now that it had come, delivered by this unlikely girl, he felt ambushed, standing at the phone too startled to reply. Why now? This way? A summons like an old long-distance connection, scratchy and unclear, barely audible over the thin wires. What did his father want?

He could fly there in a few hours–Vienna was farther–not the end of the world. He wouldn’t have to cross the barbed wires and guard dogs in the movies of his youth. Just show a passport, with its harmless new name, and join the line of German tourists waiting for the bus. In and out. See where Kafka lived. Wenceslas Square, which wasn’t a square but a long street. He knew because he’d seen the Soviet tanks on television last year, lined up against the students.

What would they say to each other? Where did you go that night? How was it arranged? Why didn’t— ? But what was the point? Everything he wanted to know, that drew him, was further away than Prague, back irretrievably on 2nd Street. That was where they still lived, in some dream of the past. It was what he couldn’t tell Molly, because he hadn’t known it then himself. He was afraid of ghosts. They were too fragile. If you disturbed them, they vanished. If he saw a nice old man living with a Czech wife somewhere west of Vienna, his father would be gone for good.

The house was quiet; even vigilant Mrs Caudhill in the ground-floor flat had gone to bed. It was an ugly Victorian redbrick, one of four whose bay windows stuck out like prows in a row of modest Regency terrace houses, and he’d been lucky to find it. A room at the top back, “overlooking the garden,” which turned out to be a birdbath and a clump of rhododendrons that never bloomed. When he opened his door and switched on the desk lamp, still tiptoeing from the climb up the dim stairs, he could see everything in a glance: a bookcase of boards and bricks with a record player in the middle, a daybed and a cast-off easy chair, a desk with typewriter and stacks of index cards, an electric fire in front of the bricked-up fireplace. He flicked the fire on, rubbing his hands. It was always cold in England, and they put the water pipes outside the houses, where they could freeze.

He sat down, still in his suit, then got up to make some tea on the gas ring. It was only when he went over to look out the window that he realized he was pacing, jittery and caged. He wouldn’t sleep. Anxiety had sopped up the alcohol, leaving his mind too sharp to rest. He thought of rolling a joint, but that would run the risk of an unwelcome thought floating in, and he didn’t want to think. Everyone smoked in Vietnam because it was surreal and then you couldn’t tell the difference. Now he needed to do something, crossword puzzles or solitaire, to keep his attention on the immediate.