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him to his wedding! ”
    Sally asked softly, “How did they know?”
    â€œI damn near blew the place apart trying to find out. You know something? The arrangements at that boardinghouse were made by me personally. The cash payments were made every two months by a Hungarian contact who lived in the suburbs, a guy we had worked with for years. I got out there, two days later—had to show my phony papers at two checkpoints—ready to kill the son of a bitch. I knocked on the door and demanded to see him. His wife doesn’t speak German, English, or French, but she caught on. She put on a heavy shawl and beckoned me to follow her. She grabbed her daughter from the study, a girl about ten or twelve. Then she led me wordlessly—I just followed her—six blocks away, to a cemetery, and then to two fresh graves. He had died—three weeks before the Russians came—of a heart attack, the daughter explained to me in schoolgirl English. The other grave was the girl’s brother’s. He was killed by the Russians during the Resistance, a day before Theo. I didn’t ask her anything else, I just left her, kneeling by the graves, with her little girl, reciting a rosary.”
    The silence was long.
    â€œWho did it?”
    Blackford shrugged his shoulders. “In this business, you never know. Maybe the landlady got suspicious. Who knows?”
    â€œBlacky, you’ve got to get out.”
    â€œI’m not going to get out.”
    â€œIn that case—I’m not going to marry you.”
    He looked at her, without resentment. Why should she understand? The U.S. Government understood, in a geopolitical sort of way. In the same sense that one can understand that what’s good for General Motors is good for America: What’s good for humanity in East Europe is good for America. But only a few really understood. And many of them were immobilized by a paralyzing fatalism, like decent southerners, who lived without protest, generations after witnessing a lynching. Blackford Oakes felt only this, that there wasn’t any alternative for those few who did understand, or thought they did. They had , living in the same world, to do something . He wanted very much to marry this intriguing, learned, beautiful woman—who went frequently to meetings of the Sane Nuclear Policy Committee, who talked fervently of disarmament, and the lessening of international tensions, and of the great thaw that had resulted from the death of the abnormal Stalin, and of how the U.N. was our last, best hope. There were two kinds of coexistence, he saw. One with them, two-scorpions-in-a-bottle sort of thing. And coexistence with people like Sally, who wouldn’t step on a scorpion, for fear of causing pain. His impulse, at this very moment, was to march with her to the altar and to swear before God that he would live with her as one person, and love and protect her, in sickness and in health, till death did them part. Why not? Budapest was four thousand miles away. This business of being involved in mankind was just too goddam much. If he could keep his distance from Tobacco Road, couldn’t he leave Budapest be, let alone Moscow? He took her hand and leaned up, to kiss her gently, above the eye. Suddenly his mood changed, and he felt a general elation as the parts came together; the concept of integrated coexistence. He brought her close to him and said: “Whenever you say, I’ll wait for you always. But I can’t disengage now on the other things. Do you understand?” “I do,” she said, stroking his hair. They sat there silently for a long period. The late afternoon became early evening. The apartment became dark.
    Suddenly he looked up, his boyish face bright with the ingenuity of it all: “Ah,” he said, “let’s move into the bedroom! Better light.…”
    She turned her head to one side, and he thought he had never seen such lovely hair.
    â€œNo,