False Flag

By Boris Ilyin

Ben Ingram, a CIA officer on R&R leave in Paris, who joined the CIA out of pure patriotism at about the start of the Cold War, is now beginning to think of his painting hobby as a career, but so far is too loyal to his cause to switch. He falls hopelessly in love with an American newspaper reporter named Marian Crowley who, unfortunately for Ben, happens to distrust the CIA and even blames the whole Cold War on her own country attitudes Ben cannot accept.
Andrei Chernov, KGB illegal, sent to Paris on a political-action mission, is well qualified to pose as an American citizen. Later, he is to reveal his membership in the CIA to a target person. At stake is a small African countrys adherence to one or the other side in the Cold War.
The three characters find themselves in what seems to be a completely ill-fated tangle of romance and political intrigue.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491835005

Boris Ilyin

Boris Ilyin is a first generation White Russian who has grown up in the USA. He was born in 1918 in a besieged town which his father’s cavalry unit was defending from the Reds. Nine days after his birth he and his mother joined the thousands of refugees who fled across Siberia. Miraculously reunited 4 years later, Boris and his parents were finally able to immigrate to San Francisco. He spoke Russian at home but attended public schools. Boris graduated in International Relations from the University of California at Berkeley. He served for five years in the Army of the United States, in the US and in the European Theater during World War II. Upon returning to the US, he received a Masters in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University while teaching at the Stegner Creative Writing Center and publishing his first novel, Green Boundary. Recalled to Washington, D.C. in 1950, he participated in the first nineteen years of the Cold War. Upon retirement he settled in the San Francisco Bay Area and turned his attentions to painting and writing.

Book preview

Chapter I

B en still had a few friends—really his parents’ friends—in Paris, but when he first got there he avoided going out. He had an excuse. He had just recovered from an unknown bug which (so the story went) he had picked up during extensive travel on behalf of his father’s firm. In actuality, he simply wanted to paint and think things over and be by himself. It was already five years since his divorce; only a few months since the Bernie case. He’d wanted for some time now to stop and regroup, stop and re-think everything, but there hadn’t been time.

Now there was time; he was alone. He fought the depression that still made him want to retreat forever into a corner, making him jumpy over nothing. During that extensive business trip he had actually been in the jungles, and now tiny relays in his body still seemed to expect him to look for snipers or booby traps, triggered minute false alarms here and there within his muscles. He was conscious, too, of other, longer-established relays that kept sending impulses not about booby traps but about people. He caught himself at the habit of taking the political measure of almost every person he met, when right now it manifestly did not matter much what that political measure was. After the jungle and a preceding several years of being careful about people, the complex burglar alarms in his system kept shorting out while he was learning to relax. He was learning, though. He was not really the retreating or jumpy kind. In three months’ time he had found a live-in studio not far from the St. Lazare railroad station, started painting, was already planning his first small exhibit. He accepted two or three invitations to dinner. He was beginning already to get back his regular weight and the old Ben Ingram air of trimness and reined-in courtesy, beginning to regain a zest for life.

And right then, of course, something happened that he did not want to happen, and that his subconscious mind probably did want. But in any event it happened all wrong.

It was at an afternoon party in the Rue de Varenne, in one of those Proustian hôtels particuliers most of which have long been subdivided into apartments but which are still the retreat of the titled. The hosts were some comte and comtesse whom Ben did not know. He had been invited to applaud his old friend, Paul Milet-Blanchard, who was going to receive the Legion of Honor. Ben dreaded going because facing a lot of people was still a burden. He was very good at parties, and knew it, but he nevertheless groaned to himself that he was not made for such things. There was (was there not?) a strain in him that might conceivably have led him to locusts and wild honey, or at least to some experimental asceticism of the New England variety. Walking down the Rue de Varenne past the formidable gates of old courtyards, he was sure that except for the Milet-Blanchards there would be no one at this gathering with whom he could find anything in common.

Champagne flowed, chandeliers stirred and tinkled. The very first person Ben met was an elderly lady whom he immediately liked. Forever afterwards he thought of her as the Telephone Princess. Paul Milet-Blanchard, bald-headed and more than usually full of energy and elegance, unfurled an arm, presenting him.

"J’ai l’honneur. Princesse . . ."

He delivered an oration to the Princess about his old friend, Monsieur Benjamin Ingram, who had had the good sense to interrupt a successful career in the American business world in order to pursue his real talent here in Paris.

Well, actually, said Ben, it’s only for about a year.

Pah! said Paul Milet-Blanchard. You shall remain! Your work will grace our most distinguished galleries!

Milet, about to receive the Legion, was in high spirits. He kissed the Princess’s hand and moved on through the crowd. And the Princess, gray-haired and straight-backed and gracefully at ease, chatted with Ben, switching from perfect English to French and back again, as though both these languages were merely decorative alternatives to her native Russian. Here she was, in collar and cuffs of Brussels lace which perhaps she had brought with her from Russia fifty years before, ready to discuss, with that air of Heaven-blessed calm, any topic in the world. When Ben marveled at the range of her information, she smiled with comic condescension. After all, she was in the newspaper business. Then she laughed. No, my dear. She was merely the telephone operator and receptionist at the Paris office of the N.J.—the Washington News-Journal’s European Edition. By no means the most exalted position there, she confided. But she had worked there for years. You could see that her gray hair had once been black, and that she had once had the kind of rich, dark beauty that makes you think of heavy red wine. Her eyes still had the deep, beautiful-woman look, turned over the years into a softly didactic Christian calm. Ben found, anyhow, that talking to her was extremely pleasant. She approached every idea as though it were something entirely new and fresh, but something on which she was bound to receive immediate telepathic guidance. Her comments, uttered with the amiable certitude of a practiced oracle, were unfailingly original. She would say something and then pause, turning her head slightly to assess the truth some higher power had just chosen to deliver through her lips.

But Ben remained dedicated to the cover-ups and partial truths of real life. Yes, he was painting. He had taken a year’s leave of absence. He worked in his father’s firm in Washington D.C. Shipping. Export-Import. As to painting, he had always painted, wanted to try his hand at it more seriously. Just for a while.

There was a stir. People began to flow in one direction. Someone pinged a champagne bucket with a spoon, and everyone gathered in the huge library. A little old French general in mufti, who at first looked as stiff and gray as a dry mop, came suddenly to life. Turning now and then to look at Milet-Blanchard who loomed beside him, he mentioned the exploits in the French Resistance of this Paul Milet, this Belgian citizen who had dedicated himself to the cause of freedom, who had afterwards added his Resistance pseudonym, Blanchard, to his real name. Twenty-five years had gone by; the mills of the gods here in France had ground slowly; high time to recognize and honor a man’s personal dedication which, instead of ceasing with the victory of France and Belgium over their enemy, had found expression in the many imaginative humanitarian projects…

And it was during this speech that Ben saw Marian Crowley for the first time. It was she—the Marian Crowley whose face had been on the back flap of a successful book in 1967 and then of a real best seller a year or so later. Ben had read her books. Often enough, since he’d come to Paris, he had read her by-lined stories in the Washington News-Journal. She stood there with her head thrown back, arms crossed. Then she moved, cocked her head to the side, one hand going to her hip with a kind of elfin impatience. There was a clarity about her face, a delicacy of line in her arms, in her whole figure, that contradicted the brevity of her movements. Marian Crowley. How interesting.

But even more interesting was the very degree of his own sudden interest. More than once in his life Ben had turned at some crowded gathering to discover that a person two feet away was a celebrity, and a celebrity considerably greater than Marian Crowley. It gives one a mild thrill to realize that the person whom you have just side-swiped with your elbow at a Washington party is Vice President Johnson, or to find that the old gentleman next to you in the elevator of a Riviera hotel—the old gentleman who looks like Sir Winston Churchill—is Sir Winston. When he saw Marian Crowley, at first moment he had almost arched his back, recognizing in her the author of that famous book; and at the next moment his prejudices were being uprooted by the elemental phenomenon of her startling good looks.

Her hair was all one thick, short, lively wave that shot diagonally downwards over her forehead, a great impasto brushstroke of Naples yellow. Her skin was so transparently blond in the light of the electric chandeliers that it too should be rendered as though in one stroke of oil, or one even, continuous wash of lightest cream. In sunlight such a skin would catch faint reflections of a light cerulean at the neck and temples. Marian Crowley stood there, and her fame as a creator of books and lately of news columns—no matter the opinions she expressed—set off and increased her beauty.

The little general finished his speech, touched Milet on each shoulder with a sword; he stretched upward to put the red ribbon around the neck of the towering recipient, then gave him the accolade. Paul Milet, his bald head glistening nobly, bent to meet the old man’s stiff little embrace. The long lines of his distinguished face proclaimed his genuine gratitude to France, his respect for tradition; and only the corners of his eyes said, "Quelle blague!" For he had to bend down and down to reach the general’s face,

They carried it off. They touched cheeks, right and left. The guests applauded loudly, smiling and looking about at one another; and it was at this moment that Marian Crowley’s eyes met Ben’s. She was smiling like everyone else, and clapping energetically, so that accidentally it turned out that she and Ben were smiling at each other. I’ll paint her, he said to himself. For what can you do with something that strikes you so hard but try to reproduce its image? But it was unfair, he thought, retreating. It was unfair of her to be so good-looking, to smile so openly. It couldn’t be. That manner of hers must be camouflage. Or else how could she cope daily with the fresh lacerations and broken surfaces of life of which news is made? But she looked away at Milet-Blanchard, who stood with his red ribboned decoration, like a long bald eagle, waiting to make his reply.

The bright spill of blond hair hid her face. In an effort to hear better she pressed forward so that she herself was hidden behind somebody’s shoulder; and it was not until Milet’s speech was over that Ben was able to see her once more. Applause. People moved in to render congratulations.

Marian Crowley saw the Princess and waved, and came straight over, including Ben in her smile. Her eyes and lips glistened, as though she had just taken a breath of very fresh air. Honestly… she was saying, shaking her head. But he never learned what the honestly was about.

Dear Marian, said the blessed Princess, like a headmistress to a star pupil, dear Marian, here is a countryman of yours, a fellow American, whom you must rescue from the dreary monopoly of an old lady.

Ben thought again of how wary he should be. He was about to put up his usual defenses, to come smartly into the wind, trimmed and balanced. But Marian said, Well, hi, Fellow American! stretching out her hand, stepping towards him with such all-out friendliness and welcome that instead of freezing he acted, that is, he put on an act, one of his little impromptu charades, playing it down, making it scarcely perceptible so he could back out if he needed to. He bent forward, just as Milet had done a few minutes before, even imitating Milet’s expression, half-presenting his cheek, as though he expected to receive the Legion-of-Honor accolade from her. He glanced at her with awkward solemnity, as though scarcely believing his good fortune, then hesitated and drew back in embarrassed disappointment.

To his delight, she caught on instantly to the attenuated pantomime, and burst into laughter, shaking his hand up and down in congratulations.

Oh, excellent! Oh, great! You’ll go far!

Her eyes made two mirthful arcs. And now the Princess looked at them in turn. You already know each other?

You could not blame the Princess. For although Marian had let go Ben’s hand, she rested her fingertips on his sleeve while she laughed, as though the two of them had known each other for years, indeed.

You do remember, said Ben, looking at Marian tenderly.

She did her best not to laugh. The lights on the water, she said, still touching his arm.

The soughing of the birches, he said softly.

Birches! Marian said, spilling into laughter again. Sorry, I can’t keep it up, you’re too good!

Yes, it’s all a mistake, Ben said soberly, turning to the Princess. Actually, we have never met.

But her wine-dark eyes had been studying them both with amused patience. I am an expert on birches, she said, allowing each corner of her mouth to come to a fine point, And also on young Americans. Therefore you shall not cheat me of the pleasure of presenting you to one another.

She presented them and withdrew, leaving them to sip their champagne under the chandeliers. But Ben’s inspiration for play-acting, even for his peculiar brand of off-hand, hardly noticeable play-acting, had suddenly disappeared. For what was he doing, flirting even distantly with Marian Crowley, of all people?

In any event, Miss Crowley seemed to know everybody, and everybody seemed bent on interrupting them. Ben did not try to fight people off; he let her be taken away, wanting above all just now to stop and think it all over.

All right, he was smitten. It was by that bright openness of hers, that delicacy and clarity of her features, that tomboy directness and by something else behind all this. For she was like Peter Pan convincingly played by a brilliant woman. He found himself wanting to believe in Peter Pan, and even more to know the real-life actress.

Chapter II

Y et Ben already knew too well who Marian Crowley was. He had simply shut off all the buzzing alarms at the Milet party. Now he had to swallow everything he felt until it all went away.

For three days he had everything swallowed.

He told himself that his infatuation was worthy of a sixteen-year-old kid, not a seasoned cold-warrior like Ben Ingram. But the flesh is sometimes weak, and on the fourth day after the party he called the News Journal office. It was the Princess who answered.

I presume you wish to speak to Marian? I think she is at her desk.

This was stupid. His pulse went galloping when he heard Marian’s voice. But he pulled himself together and asked her to have lunch the next day.

And again that all-out friendliness: she’d love to come! Only could it be somewhere near her office? And could they make it not too very long?

When he came for her at the News Journal office the next day, he had decided to let himself go, to forget everything for a while and indulge his state of euphoria.

They walked just a block or so to a bistro on the Boulevard des Capucines. She ordered mussels. He didn’t even glance at the menu, looked up at the waiter, momentarily wondering what he wanted, then came to and blurted out that he’d have a croque Monsieur.

What’s wrong? Marian asked.

Just a bit groggy, I guess, and he added, as a sort of cover, . . . after staring all morning at a canvas. A lie, because that morning he hadn’t been able to sit down to anything.

What kind of paintings do you do?

I’m experimenting with Abstract Expressionism at the moment. But actually I’ve done all kinds of stuff. Haven’t yet settled into a style of my own.

Well, Marian said, looking rather business-like, tell me about yourself. She sounded as though they had come here for just this definite purpose.

For some reason he had a sudden urge to send everything to hell and tell her all. Crazy notion. He was living on borrowed time, knowing that his Euridice would vanish if he so much as touched upon the truth. He had to come forth with the story about the firm in D.C. of which his father was the chief executive. He said, in as few words as possible, that his job was to travel around a lot to bring in new business. He mentioned the debilitating bug he had caught in South East Asia. (All lies, all lies!)

I’m on a kind of R and R just now, he said. But I’m taking the opportunity to find out whether I can paint or not. (This at least was the truth!)

For her part, Marian got it in very early, as if in passing, that she had gone back to her maiden name, Crowley, and even used Miss instead of Mrs. but that she’d been married once. Very brief marriage. Didn’t work out at all, she told him, giving one vigorous shake of her head, her naturally high voice going as deep as she could get it—to indicate matter-of-factness, Ben supposed. No details, no accusations. And she managed to present this pre-packaged item lightly enough, but obviously in order to get her cards on the table at once. No secrets. In fact (as she said later, apropos of something else) she hated secrets, she hated mysteries. One good thing about newspaper work: you could get the facts and lay them out for all the world to see.

The Telephone Princess, with whom he chatted whenever he called Marian at the News-Journal, was apparently charmed by this nascent romance, and at once fell into the role of Ben’s conspirator. You could say, in the tiresome jargon with which Ben was so familiar, that he had recruited the Princess as a witting source—witting, at least, of the immediate operational objective, of his interest in Marian. She was a source, you might say, who was witting on a need-to-know basis. At any rate it was through the Princess that he learned, a couple of days after he had taken Marian to lunch, that Marian had left town. Out on a two-week assignment in Africa. Some unforeseen crisis? Oh, no, said the Princess. Just a series of feature articles on a typical West African country.

Ben was just a tiny bit chagrinned. Marian had written him a thank-you note for the lunch and dinner, but hadn’t bothered to mention that she would be travelling. He didn’t like being held quite this lightly.

The articles, datelined Bawala, capital of the little dictatorship known as the Republic of Sigirim, began to appear in the European Edition of the N.J. They ranged from human-interest stuff at the grass-hut level to analyses of the country’s struggle for economic survival.

Soviet aid was putting Sigirim on its feet. Soviet engineers, teachers, military-assistance people, were everywhere. American assistance had been badly bungled in the past, and only now (no doubt too late) was showing some improvement. But the Soviets had really helped.

Ben would read one of the articles, always halting on the street a few paces from the kiosk at the Gare St. Lazare where he bought his newspapers, conscious of people and cars going by, of a cloud shadow passing; conscious of his own tendency when challenged to assume an attentive, balanced stance. He would read, realizing that Marian’s taking him lightly was a very good thing.

Yes, a very good thing. That was how their relationship should be kept. He too should keep it light, very light.

Then one day he got a call from the Princess. Monsieur Ingram, she said, in a voice full of cozy promise, as though she were about to tell a bed-time story. I have a little surprise.

She was obviously calling from her switchboard because Ben heard the buzzing of a drop, and the Princess exclaimed, "Ah, mon Dieu! Please hold on!" He held on, the telephone receiver squeezed between jaw and shoulder while he wiped his hands on a turpentine rag, aware that his heart had begun to pound again in that stupid way.

"Enfin, mon ami . . ." the Princess came on the line again, but speaking now in a tone of kindly firmness, as though, yes, she would finish the tale she had begun, but then she would have to hurry off and wanted no pleading or misbehavior. "Enfin, you’ve guessed already, haven’t you? Your lovely Marian is on her way back. There was a telegram. Wait, I have written it down for you. Le Bourget Airport, five-fifteen."

Today? But it’s already six o’clock!

Five-fifteen in the morning, said the Princess authoritatively, and then, in a whispered double-take, Dear Lord, at five-fifteen in the morning? Could that be right?

Perhaps some delay along the way.

I shall believe anything of these African airlines, said the Princess. Very well. Shall I tell them to cancel our company car?

I’ll meet her, Ben said in his conspiratorial voice, If our secret collaboration in this matter will not thereby be revealed.

The Princess laughed. "Don’t worry. How can I afford to forfeit my centre-loge seat to such a brilliant romance?"

Ben’s alarm buzzed hoarsely at three-thirty. He went bumbling among the paint pots and canvases to the bathroom, shaved and dressed, descended into the blackness of the apartment courtyard and groped his way to his Peugeot. At this hour the streets that led toward the Autoroute du Nord were interminably long and empty. The stillness of night poses questions in all their nakedness. Why had he come, when he should be keeping it light? Because, just because. He was intrigued by that freshness and openness of Marian’s which must in some degree be a mannerism and a protective covering but which, like a work of true art, he thought, was also the reality itself. It seemed to him that he approached everything in life with a kind of philosophical suspicion, always consciously separating façade from reality. He did that when he painted; he did it all the time. And what if façade and reality seem to coincide? Something remarkable, something doubly mysterious happens.

At the airport he found a small buffet open, right near the gate where the plane from Sigirim was due to arrive, and got some coffee. Several Africans sat at tables near the coffee bar, saying nothing. Two had on spectacular yellow tribal robes. The others were in conservative Western street clothes. They were obviously meeting the same plane. A couple of young Frenchmen in airline uniform fired short bursts of hip argot at each other. Ben closed his eyes to hear the separated clashes of sound in the near-empty airport: laughter; silence; a clink of china; silence; cough; silence. And various humming noises: machinery, heat registers, perhaps airplanes far out on the runways.

Yes, what was he doing here? It was well enough to meet her plane at a normal hour, perhaps; to pay her this compliment lightly and casually. Another thing to come out here in the dead of night. Well, he’d come, but he wouldn’t make a big thing of it. He could indulge himself in solving the paradox of her candor, but meanwhile he had no need to be candid about himself. It was, after all, just a nice, normal gesture on his part, seeing that she got home safely at this abnormal hour. She would be treated to the Normal Ben Ingram as he usually saw himself, as he imagined Ben Ingram must look to others: the tall, eastern-school type, turning thirty-two. Something (he rather hoped) of the lanky elegance of a Paul Milet-Blanchard, translated into the blond American. Good suits and shirts; a habit of putting heels together, of tugging downward a little on the front button of his jacket to trim himself, to face any situation, any emergency. Unflappable. Quiet but penetrating sense of humor. Sardonic charm. My dear Miss Crowley, I have been delegated by your grateful reading public to welcome you to your home base…

A baggage-tender wheezed by outside the gate. The Africans got up and stood about expectantly. One of the young uniformed Frenchmen picked up a microphone and his giant voice resounded, quite unnecessarily, through the whole airport in French and then in English; and before he was through, the passengers had begun to come in, crowding up in line at the passport control.

And there came Marian, he noted calmly: the bold, brief wave of her light hair, the light tan suit. But she was staring straight ahead of her at somebody’s back, as though she were resigned to walking forever through airports. She looked pale and tired and sad, and because he had never seen her look this way, he wanted terribly to come up and comfort her. For a minute at least she did not see Ben. She waited, coat over one arm, nudging a little valise along the floor with her toe. Finally her eyes wandered listlessly over the hall and came to rest on Ben. She paused for a moment, unsure, and suddenly lighted up, and waved to him with open surprise and delight.

He waved back, finding it suddenly necessary to draw a great breath. There he stood, playing the role of the Normal Ben Ingram, while she asked him in pantomime whether he’d come just for her, and gestured at her watch what an unearthly hour it was, and what a surprise to see him, and what a plane ride it had been! And then she had to turn to an elderly couple to say goodbye. Ben realized that the couple were not Americans by the special attentive way that Marian had in addressing foreigners, bowing a little to them as she promised something. The couple (the wife in one of those long-tunic suits, and meaningless felt hats that were comme il faut for Central European ladies of advanced middle age) got through the line and went on by him, smiling at him with well-bred restraint, to signify that any friend of Marian’s was a friend of theirs.

And Marian followed a moment later, swinging the little valise, coat thrown over a shoulder, holding out her hand with that hundred-percent American manner, that radiant directness of hers.

Ben, you’re wonderful! Do you mean you came out here just for me? At this hour? She swayed right and left in recognition of his self-sacrifice. Oh, what a flight! We were late taking off from Bawala, we were delayed in Rabat, we had trouble with one of the engines. You’re an absolute hero.

She blinked at the bright lights that had been turned on as they waited to receive her baggage. Ben wished she would go to sleep on his shoulder on the way in. And he would stay awake, sitting up and driving, alert and skillful at the wheel. Once in childhood he had dreamed that everyone was asleep in the darkened house, and he, age eight, was sitting in the lonely hallway on guard through the night. It must have been because he’d just been given a new b-b gun. The Protector.

You must be exhausted, he said.

I’m simply dead. Thank heavens you’re here. Who told you when I was coming?

I’m having you watched, he said.

She laughed her high, fragile, feminine laugh, blinking at him, her eyes a little red from loss of sleep. When she pointed out her bag, the customs man looked at her, at the unmistakably honest American, and raised his hand idly in blessing and dismissal. They went out to the car. The sky was already lightening; ultramarine washing down to a yellow-pink at the horizon. She stopped to put on her coat with a brisk, decisive movement before Ben could put down her bag to help, and he watched her long and slender fingers buttoning the buttons.

It’s chilly here, after that oven I’ve been living in.

She’d been there two whole weeks, in Sigirim. What a country! Ben had no idea. Tribal disputes, religious cleavages, plain hunger in a lot of places. She admired them a lot, the young government people who had to deal with it all. But they were improving, she said, nodding seriously, forgetting to let him open the car door for her. Had Ben read her series of articles from there?

What else would I read?

Really, what do you think?

You write beautifully.

"I know what that means. You’re just an old reactionary, I suspect."

You’ve been there, I haven’t, he said. But I’m not much taken with your friend Nswada. On the other hand, he probably wouldn’t be taken with me, either.

He’s suspicious of Americans, naturally. But I’ve met him. An intelligent man and a good president, doing what he thinks is right, completely open about everything.

For a moment he forgot the Marian who charmed him and saw only Marian Crowley, the author and reporter. He had a little question for her. How tolerant would she be of the intelligent Nswada if his tyranny depended on American dollars rather than on rubles? But there was no point in starting that kind of thing. On the way in, her crisp chatter slowed to a halt and she did go to sleep, not on his shoulder but leaning back against the window on her side of the car, arms crossed a bit sternly.

The traffic was already beginning, trucks and cars and green buses piling up on both sides of the Rue Lafayette long before the Boulevard Haussmann. While he was deciding how best to navigate around the clogged center of town, she suddenly resumed the conversation, as if she wanted to show that she hadn’t dosed off for a moment.

Ambassador Love is doing a good job, she said.

Who?

Our ambassador, Freddie Love. In Sigirim. He’s making good changes in our AID program. We’re not very important down there any more, compared to the other aid they’re getting, but it’s a good program. Calls it ‘farm to farm.’

I’m all for Love, he said. Then, perhaps just to cover the bad pun with some other line, he asked her to dinner that same evening, after she’d had some sleep.

Sleep! I’ll be lucky if I get in a couple of hours. I’ve got to be at work by eleven at the latest!

She consented to come to dinner the next day, after she’d caught up on her sleep. She could have put him off, but she did not. And Ben, who should have let well enough alone instead of giving her the rush, felt so pleased at her consenting that it seemed worth it, even when the evening conversation started off with more about Sigirim. Anyway, whatever she said, what did it matter? She had on a long-skirted, gypsy-like brocade, her eyes and her earrings sparkled in the light of the candle between them, and her hands, slender and strong, illustrated to him what she said. That little country of Sigirim was finding its way. All right, the Soviets were in there solidly. Why not? Let the Soviets spend some money and help out too, in some of these places.

He peered at her, half-closing one eye, seeing how the candle-lighted tones of her skin might appear on canvas against the busy, moving chiaroscuro of the restaurant. For right behind her a couple of tail-coated waiters were serving something flambé, the meat enveloped in a crown of blue fire; and other waiters hovered and departed and returned; and new parties of people were being seated; and behind this movement were big windows that gave on a sparkling sea of night-time Paris, with the towers of the Notre Dame bathed in white floodlights, right there across the channel of the Seine. She startled him a little when she said:

You don’t really get terribly hepped up about politics, do you? I mean you seem to know what’s going on, but you can sort of take it or leave it.

You know us artists, he said. We’re above all that. We abstract human experience. We do not sit in judgment.

Seriously.

If I get serious, he said, propping his chin on his fist and gazing at her, it won’t be about politics.

I can tell you don’t really agree with some things I say. But you won’t come out and fight.

Too much of a gentleman, he admitted.

I resent that. Just because I’m a woman!

"Not just any woman," he said, looking at her with such earnestness, such limpid honesty, that for a second she obviously wasn’t sure whether or not he was clowning. Then she strove to mimic an amused annoyance, under which there was no doubt some of the real thing.

He made a normal, non-clowning Ben-Ingram face. You insist on an argument? You’d like that better?

"I’m having a fine time, Marian said, smiling at him. It’s just that I’m curious about you."

What could be better?

The mystery man, huh?

But playing mystery man is a poor policy when you own a real mystery. He backed off toward abstraction. Truth is unperceivable without its wrappings, he said. He knew he had achieved a rather interesting, restrainedly poetic expression, complete with distant gaze in the direction of the Notre Dame. Come to the truth too quickly and singe the eyebrows, he added in a neutral tone.

We reporters have to go straight for it. Life’s too short.

I know.

To me, she said, "the mature mind is one that goes directly for the answer. The idea is to get past all the wrappings, not play peekaboo."

The mature mind, maybe. The creative mind, no.

Why?

The mature mind that I think you’re talking about is incapable of accepting the unbelievable, he said. It’s too serious, too honest. See? Whereas the creative mind…

Is dishonest?

No, but wily enough, suspicious enough to suspend disbelief, to follow up the unbelievable. At considerable risk, of course.

Unbelievable like what?

Oh, I don’t know. Like you, let’s say.

He must have said this in some special way, because suddenly she looked at him seriously, almost guiltily. No, she said. I’m very believable.

Meaning what?

Meaning that maybe the unbelievable is merely in the eye of the creative beholder.

There’s really nothing to you?

But she smiled. Just don’t want you to be disappointed. Then she looked away and there was a silence between them. I mean, she said, trying to be her usual bright self, I think you’re a person who looks for enigmas. Aren’t you? And what if there isn’t any enigma?

She looked a little red around the eyes again, he thought, as she had the previous morning. They exchanged a long, gently searching look which was half serious and half comic. Who are you? Who am I? As if one could either cry at these questions or burst into laughter.

Don’t mind me, she said, taking a sip of wine and shaking her head. Still groggy from my plane.

Somehow it had not occurred to Ben that Marian could be self-conscious about anything, and the discovery made him want to be reassuring and tender to her.

When will I see you again?

Presently, she said.

You are forever evasive.

"I’m evasive? How about you?"

I wasn’t aware of it, he said, not quite candidly.

Ben, you know that I like being with you. But I really don’t know much about you.

We’ll discuss my early childhood at lunch tomorrow.

Why not now? Tell about your parents. What’s your dad like?

He’s all business, realistic about everything. He’s a happy, wonderful man, with only one regret: he was only thirteen when the U.S. entered World War I, and he didn’t get a chance to serve his country in those nice, snug trenches. But he made up for it in World War II.

Marian was nodding with some exaggeration, possibly to show that she had nothing against patriotic parents.

And my mother loves French literature and has the worst handwriting in the town of Washington.

I suppose you got your artistic talent from her?

She does water-colors now and then. But her real talent is poetry. Maybe you’ve run across her stuff. She started publishing early and still uses her maiden name for that: Louise Beauregard.

I don’t get much chance to read poetry, said Marian. Why did you mention her handwriting?

"She explained that to me once. She said that when a poem comes at her—that’s how she expressed it—she runs for pencil and paper and writes down the ‘dictation,’ as she called it, as fast as she can. Result, scrawls decipherable only by her. She hasn’t always been able to get all of it down, and would have to ‘improvise’ a few lines afterwards. But ‘her own’ efforts, as she put it, have never been quite as good as the original dictation.

"You mean she actually hears this dictation?"

No, that way lies madness. No, it’s simply that her poems have always seemed to her to have existed somewhere already in complete form. It’s as if they’d been hanging in the sky, eager to come down—but I emphasize the ‘as if.’

I mean does she believe that it all comes from something… well, spiritual?

She didn’t say. Maybe she believes that a little bit.

Fascinating concept.

"Yes. That art—perhaps all human art—is already stored somewhere up there already, like Plato’s Ideals or Universals, and radiates down on us to help produce our inferior reality."

"I’ll have you know my reality is not inferior. But Marian had already lifted her handbag to her lap. Thanks for baring your inmost soul, she added. So I’ll come to lunch, but not tomorrow. After all, I just got back. I’m piled up."

As he took her home they went back to laughing over everything and anything. Marian’s apartment was on the fourth floor of a venerable house in Auteuil, across from the southern edge of the Bois de Boulogne. As they ascended in the tiny two-person elevator, they got so hilarious over something or other that both were in tears. Ben took the handkerchief out of his breast pocket and dabbed at the corners of Marian’s eyes. She borrowed it from him and dabbed at his eyes in return.

Well, she said. Goodbye. Go away now. I’ve had enough.

And by this time everything seemed so funny that they both went into suppressed hysterics again.

Hush, for goodness’ sake! she whispered. All my neighbors will be up in a moment. Go, I say!

He himself had created this mood, as if on purpose, he now realized, to break his own momentum. Now at her door he knew that he could still stop all the clowning, pause for a moment looking at her, and take her in his arms. Could he? What would happen?

For a moment he almost let himself do it.

All right, he said, holding his chin up in profile. All right, I’ll go. I… I hope you’ll be happy, Rosalie Williams…

Go, go, go!

She had given him this graceful out, this perfect opportunity to keep things safely in check. But he said with moronic stubbornness, That lunch. Name the day.

She drew a deep breath, almost as though she too were speaking against her better judgment. You can take me to a cocktail party Tuesday. Those Austrians who were on the plane with me invited me. I know they’ll be glad if I bring someone.

He felt a strange mixture of elation and sobriety, and to cover it all over he adjusted an imaginary monocle and bowed. "Küss die Hand."

Ben, she said, recovering her bright elan, You’re an absolute hero for coming to the airport. Thanks for this evening. Thanks for everything. And looking him straight in the eye she shook his hand, arm straight out before her.

So Ben had met her plane, had taken her to dinner, had insisted on seeing her again. Was that so very forward of him? With many another girl he would have found it appropriate to proceed much faster and farther. With Marian it was different. There was a constant alternating current running between him and Marian, a subtle pulling together and pushing away. It was plain enough why. Whenever he applied the brakes on himself she sensed it, and then by the time he released them she would be reacting,