back in the chair.
"He might have faked the first two, but not the last."
"What do you mean?"
"The shampoo. It can only be ordered by prescription; it's a preventative remedy for seborrheic dermatitis, a condition she episodically suffers from. She's never wanted anyone to know, so I have to buy it under my own name -as did Mr. Schneider."
"Are you convinced?"
"I wish I could yell foul and go back to Paris with a clean slate, but that's not possible, is it?"
"No, it's not."
"It's all so crazy. Before Janine, I had a terrific marriage, I thought. Great wife, wonderful kids, but State kept bouncing me around. South Africa, Kuala Lumpur, Morocco, Geneva, all as a chief attache, then came Finland, a real ambassadorship."
"You'd been tested. Good Lord, man, they plucked you out of the chief-attach pool and made you the ambassador to France, a post usually reserved for the high rollers in political contributions."
"Only because I could put out the brush fires said Courtland.
"The d'Orsay was becoming more and more anti-American, and I could paste over the anti-French stereotypes coming out of Washington. I guess I'm good at that."
"Obviously, you are."
"And it cost me my family."
"How did Janine Clunes come into your life?"
"You know, that's a hell of an interesting question. I'm not really sure. I had the normal postpartums after the divorce, the living alone in an apartment, not a house, the wife and the kids back in Iowa, sort of on my own, scratching around for diversions. It was a kind of limbo. But State kept calling me, saying I should put in an appearance at this party or that reception. And then one evening, at the British Embassy, this lovely lady, so alive and so intelligent, seemed attracted to me. She held my arm as we went from group to group, where very nice things were said about me, but they were diplomats I knew, and I didn't take them seriously. She did, however, and she fed what ego I had left.. .. I'm sure you can figure out the rest."
"It's not difficult."
"No, it's not. What's difficult is now. What am I going to do? I suppose I should be filled with anger, furious at her betrayal, ready to behave like a howling animal lunging for the kill, but I don't feel any of those things. I just feel empty, burned out. I'll resign of course, it would be asinine to continue. If a ranking reign service officer can be duped this way, he should run, not walk, to the nearest plumbing school."
"I think you can serve yourself and your country in a better way," said Sorenson.
"How? Come back and fix the pipes?"
"No, by doing the most difficult thing of all. Return to Paris as if we'd never met, never had this conversation."
Stunned, Courtland stared in silence at the director of
Consular Operations.
"Besides being impossible," he said finally, "that's inhuman. I could never do it."
"You're a consummate diplomat, Mr. Ambassador. You never would have landed in Paris if you weren't."
"But what you're asking me to do is beyond diplomacy, it goes to the core of subjectivity, hardly a diplomat's ally. There's no way I could conceal my contempt. Those feelings I claim not to have now would come rushing to the surface the instant I saw her. What you ask is simply unreasonable."
"Let me tell you what's unreasonable, Mr. Ambassador," Sorenson interrupted, his tone harsher than before.
"It's exactly what you said. That a man of your intelligence and vast experience, a foreign service officer who knows his way around embassies all over the world and is on constant alert to the danger of internal and external espionage, could be deceived into marrying a confirmed Sonnenkind, a Nazi. And let me tell you what's even more unreasonable. These people have been in hiding for anywhere from thirty to fifty years. Their time has come and they're crawling out of the cracks in the walls, but we don't know who they are or where they are, only that they're there. They've sent out a list of hundreds of men and women in high places who may or may not be part of their global movement. I don't have to tell you the climate of fear and confusion that's spreading across this country and the countries of our closest allies, you can see for yourself. Pretty damn soon there'll be hysteria-who is and who isn't?"
"I'm not disputing anything you say, but how will my going back to Paris as an innocent husband change