The Day Before Midnight

0700

It snowed that night, and sometime after three, Beth Hummel awoke, as she always did, to the sound of small bare feet padding urgently across the hard wood of the floor.

“Mommy?”

It was the voice of her older daughter. Bean — derived somehow from Elizabeth — was seven, a careful, grave second-grader who wrote her numbers and her name with exaggerated precision and had filled out her Christmas list from the Sears catalogue as if it were a college application.

Beth rolled gently, hoping not to awaken Jack next to her, and turned to face the child in the darkness. Her daughter was very close, and Beth could smell her, warm and fresh like a loaf hot from the oven.

“Yes, honey?”

“Mommy, it’s snowing.”

“I know. They said it would on the TV.”

“The world is all white. Jesus loves the world, he made it all white.”

“I’m sure he does, honey,” said Beth.

Jack snorted in his sleep, came from unconsciousness with a loggy lurch, half rose, then whispered gruffly, “Shhhhhh, girls.”

He fell back, inert in seconds.

“Mommy, can I get in?”

“Of course, honey,” said Beth, scooting over and lifting the covers so that there was room for Bean, who climbed in and snuggled against her mother. The child was still in a second. Beth could feel her daughter’s heart pumping and the rise and fall of her fragile chest. Her little nose was full; she breathed with a vaguely ragged sound, and Beth worried that it would bother Jack, but behind her he continued to sleep heavily.

Beth drifted off herself then. She was dreaming of tropical beaches. But only an hour or two later another soft tread, slightly swifter, slightly lighter, nudged her from her shallow sleep. Poo — from Phyllis — had discovered the snow.

“Mommy!” Poo whispered in a gleeful rush of excitement, touching her mother with taut fingers. “Mommy, it’s white outside.”

“Shhh, I know,” whispered Beth. Poo was five, a kindergartner, whose blond hair had not yet begun to darken, like Bean’s. She was impossibly beautiful, and as lively as Bean was grave. She was a bossy, feisty child who tormented her older sister, and occasionally her mother. You couldn’t tell her a thing, like Jack.

“Mommy, Jesus loves us.”

“Yes, he does,” said Beth again. The connection between Jesus’s love and the snow dated from an obscure remark made by a Sunday-school teacher a few weeks back to Poo, in November, on the occasion of the season’s first snowfall. Beth had never been too sure what to make of it.

“Mommy, I’m cold. I had a bad dream. Can I come in too?”

Jack sometimes joked that all his life he’d wanted to sleep with two women at the same time and now he sometimes woke up with three of ’em in the same bed.

“Yes, but be careful,” Beth whispered. “Don’t wake Bean or Daddy.”

But Poo hadn’t waited for the answer. That wasn’t her style. She climbed aboard and scuttled like a little commando up the gully between her mother and her father, and slid in between them.

Beth felt the brush of her younger daughter’s toes, cold from the long race across the bare floor. Then Poo seemed to merge with her mother, to simply become one with her, their breaths and rhythms joined. Beth pulled the covers up to her neck, felt the embrace of the warmth, its sluggish, numbing power.

But she could not get back to sleep. She lay in the silence, feeling the ease and sighs of her daughters. Now and then something ticked in the house, or a draft of uncommonly cold air came through the door. She lay, waiting for unconsciousness, which did not come. Finally, she looked over at the clock. It was almost six. The alarm would go off at six-thirty, and Jack had to be out of the house and in his pickup by seven for a drive to a new job in Boonsboro; the girls had to be fed and dressed for the bus by eight. So finally, Beth decided to get out of bed.

Crossing the floor, she pulled her slippers on and then her robe, a red polyester thing from Monkey Ward that had seen better days. She hoped Jack would get her a new one for Christmas in a few weeks, but since he usually did his shopping at the drugstore on Christmas Eve, she knew it to be unlikely. She looked back at the three heads sunk into and embraced by the pillows. Her husband, an athletic and muscular man three years older than her twenty-nine, slept heavily. He looked like an animal in a den, lost in dreamless mammal sleep as the seasons changed. And her two daughters, facing the other direction, out toward the shaded windows, were delicate and lyrical in the dim light beginning to stream in at the margins of the shades. They were tiny and perfect, their nostrils fragile as lace, their lips like candy slices, the whisper of their breaths soft and persistent. But she was aware that it was sometimes far easier to love them when they were in repose, as now, than when they were at each other like wildcats in the backseat of the station wagon. She smiled at them — her three charges in the world — and felt something profoundly satisfactory move through her. Her family. Hers. Then she crept into the bathroom, quickly squirted some Crest on her toothbrush, and cleaned her teeth. She headed downstairs to start breakfast.

Beth walked around the house, pulling up the shades. The morning light was just beginning to show over the trees. Yes, it had snowed; a light powder, unmarked as yet by human traces, lay across everything. Maybe Jesus did love them. The world looked freshly minted. It was radiant as far as she could see. The clouds had cleared overnight. From the kitchen window, over the sink, she could see the white roofs of Burkittsville, a collection of sloping rectangles against the white netting of the snow on the trees. Beyond them was the mountain.

It wasn’t much of a mountain, almost more of a large hill in the feckless Blue Ridge chain, which had itself seen better days. But to Beth, who was born and raised in Florida, it was a real mountain, a huge hump, crusted with pines, that rose two thousand or so feet above the town. She knew it had been mined for coal back in the thirties, and some of the old people in the town talked about the great Burkittsville cave-in of thirty-four, which had ended the mining operations, and almost ended Burkittsville until Borg-Warner opened its big plant in Williamsport twenty miles away, where most of the men worked. Up top she could see the red and white towers of the phone company’s microwave processing station, or whatever it was.

The mountain was something she liked, and in the spring she and the girls would drive to the park and go for long walks along the trails at its base. You got about one thousand feet up it, and there was even an overlook, where you could sit on a little bench and look across the valley, see Burkittsville spread out like a collection of dollhouses, and beyond that the undulating farmland of Maryland. To the left, a dark blur, was Middletown, and farther out was Frederick, the big city. It was a lovely view. The girls adored it. Even Jack liked it, though he wasn’t much on views.

Beth shook her eyes from the mountain, and returned to reality. She took out the Honey Nut Cheerios, shook the box, and got the bad news. There was enough for only two bowls — this meant that the third person down the stairs would have to make do with corn flakes. Beth tried to work out the political permutations. If Bean came down last, it wouldn’t matter. Bean liked Honey Nuts, but if she couldn’t have them, she’d smile and get on with things. Jack and Poo, however, loved Honey Nut Cheerios with the frenzy of zealots. If Poo or Jack came down to see the other finishing the cereal, there’d be trouble. The Jack-Poo relationship was the volatile one in the family because Poo was such a replica of her father — stubborn, selfish, vain, charming. The whole morning could come apart.

Upstairs, Beth heard the shower come on. He was up, that meant, which was a good start to the day, because she didn’t want to have to rouse him, a task you wouldn’t want to wish on a Russian soldier.

But her heart fell.

Bean walked in.

“Honey, what are you doing up? You don’t have to get up yet.”

“Mommy,” said Bean, one small finger rubbing one sleepy eye, her hair a mess, her little body swaddled in its purple pajamas, “I heard something. It scared me.”

“Oh, honey,” said Beth, bending to her daughter, “there’s nothing to be scared of.” At that moment a man in black with a large black pistol stepped into the kitchen. She looked up at him, stunned. She heard the steps of other men moving speedily through the house.

“Mommy, I’m scared,” said Bean.

Two more black-clad men with huge black guns rushed into the kitchen. They seemed so huge and she felt powerless. It seemed the world was full of men with guns.

“Please, Mrs. Hummel,” said the first man, a blunt, suntanned fellow with shiny white teeth and blank eyes. “Don’t make any noise. Don’t make any problems.”

Beth panicked, started to scream, but a hand came over her mouth roughly, locking it in her throat.

Gregor Arbatov spoke the name “Tata,” shook a terrible dream of caves and mountains from his head, and came awake. He found himself where he should be, in the bedroom of Molly Shroyer in a high-rise apartment in Alexandria, Virginia. The time on the clock radio was approximately seven A.M., and already Gregor was late. He was always late.

Gregor still shivered from the dream — he’d been having it more and more lately, the same damn thing. In it, he’d wrestled someone; it was cold and dark, a memory of iron fingers around his throat and hot breath in his face. He had a sense of his strength ebbing. He took a deep breath, trying to clear his head, and touched his temples, contemplating the white ceiling above him. He tried to lose himself in its blankness.

Next to him, Molly Shroyer made a wet noise. He turned to study her torpid form. She was somewhat less than beautiful. With a great deal of effort, Molly was able to transform herself into a reasonably attractive woman by encasing herself in some kind of elastic device to supply to her body the kind of discipline that her own mind lacked. A muumuu also worked. Molly breathed heavily under the covers, and when she breathed, the image of mountain ranges trembling under a mantle of snow came to Gregor, which is perhaps why he’d been having his cave dream so frequently; the girl, so big on the outside, was tiny on the inside. He knew her to be a delicate, vulnerable, tragically neurotic creature, wretchedly unhappy in her loneliness underneath the excess flesh.

This was Gregor’s specialty. In his own small way he was a legend. Gregor, nominally second assistant commercial attaché in the Soviet Embassy in Washington, an old D.C. fixture who drank with Western newsmen, followed the Redskins, filled in at bridge, knew the difference between a Big Mac and a Whopper, was in actuality an illegal operative of the GRU, as Red Army Intelligence is called to distinguish it from the swankier, civilian-run and deeply loathed KGB. His undercover job consisted of agent running, and as he had worked it out, this primarily entailed wooing, then seducing, then turning lonely American women who worked in secretarial or clerical positions in the security or military establishment. Molly, for example, was a secretary to a staff assistant of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. But Gregor had a few others, all equally enslaved to him, all equally imperfect, all equally rich in self-loathing and impoverished in self-esteem. Yet Gregor’s talent and perhaps his most impressive grace was that he loved them all: he really did.

He was not, despite embassy gossip which he did not discourage, a particularly gifted sexual athlete. As a technician, he was irredeemably proletarian: He just got on and plowed until he couldn’t plow anymore. Nor was he unusually endowed in the physical sense. But he had the gift of conviction, and the patience to listen, and a slightly romantic tendency. He was kind, considerate, gentle, flirtatious, indefatigable. He remembered birthdays and anniversaries and special restaurants. He always brought little gifts. He gave flowers. He nursed his girls slowly toward friendship and then intimacy and then compromise. It was a good system, carefully wrought, the result of much experimentation.

But on this morning Gregor awoke with a nightmare and a headache, late. Molly preferred him to get up before the sun and slip out, a sensible precaution. He concurred. There were so many foolish ways you could be tripped up by the FBI, turned out and ejected, and the one place on earth this GRU agent did not care to see again was Russia.

He headed into the bathroom and caught a quick shower. A thickish man with exceedingly strong, broad hands, forty-three years old, his body was extravagantly hairy and he left a trail of fur wherever he went; Molly said he could turn a bathtub into a national emergency faster than any man she’d ever known.

You’re a whale, he told himself, and it was true. He was easily twenty-five pounds overweight. You need to exercise, be careful what you eat and drink. You’ll drop dead in bed one night, and then what?

Gregor dried off, squirted on some cologne (he always tried to smell good), brushed his teeth, pushed the hair he had left on his head into some semblance of wet order, and quickly climbed into his baggy blue suit. It would need pressing again before the end of the century or the end of the world, whichever came first. He tied his black shoes, thinking how nice it would be to shine them someday. He had owned them for seven years. A little cracked, perhaps, but extremely comfortable.

Molly snorted like a large African game animal wallowing in the mud. Without makeup she was quite appalling to look at. In the dark, when he was riding her like a buffalo, yelping and plunging, it was quite another thing. Now, in the harsh morning, she was the perfect symbol of his imperfect life.

Melancholy seeped through him.

He faced an unpleasant day. To begin with, the boy genius Klimov, Deputy Rezident, had called a meeting for the morning, and Klimov had lately been somewhat unpleasant. Then Gregor had to service his most important source, the mysterious Pork Chop, at a shopping mall out in Maryland, a tiresome, dreadful prospect, very tense, very exhausting. Then, far worse, he had communications duty that night, which meant sleeping on a cot in a basement cell that embassy tradition called the Wine Cellar, attending encryptment equipment in case a hot eyes-only zapped over from Moscow. In truth, the Americans at the National Security Agency out at Fort Meade, in Maryland, would have it unbuttoned before he could; perhaps he could simply call them and request the message. But the duty, which came about once a month, was the worst thing in his life: It would upset his entire system, which depended on a solid ten hours’ sleep, plus a little nap in the afternoon.

And then the other thing gnawing at him, not yet put into words by anyone, but clearly expressed nevertheless. For the truth was, he was now in trouble in the embassy. Of late, the gleanings had gotten thinner and thinner. Where once he’d had nine girls and his life had been a phenomenon of scheduling, an athletic extravaganza, the action was now slow. He was losing his touch. Younger men had been brought in, and they treated him with contempt. Only Pork Chop seemed to please them, and Gregor was only a cutout to Pork Chop, who worked for bigger fish.

Klimov, the awful Klimov, was twenty-eight. Twenty-eight! With shrewd, furious eyes and the energy to work like a beaver, tirelessly. A true believer. A lover of the system, and no wonder. He had a vastly important uncle who could see that things always came to him. Arbatov hated Klimov almost as much as he feared him. And he felt exposed, vulnerable, a target, since he was the only man in the section who was over forty. And because he’d lasted so much longer than the others.

My time, he thought, is almost over.

Molly’s left lid crept open, then her right.

“Are you still here, Gregor? God, you’re so late.”

“I’m sorry, darling,” Gregor said.

She laughed, but then turned petulant.

“Who’s Tata?” she demanded. “I heard you say her name. Is she a new girlfriend, Gregor?”

“No, no, my love,” said Gregor. “Tata’s a prince. Prince Tatashkin. A hero from an old story in my childhood. A great knight who saves the world. He came to me in a dream, that’s all.”

“It’s so hard to be mad at you,” she said babyishly, scrunching up her features into the mask of an infant. “You’re so cute. Mowwy wubs her Gweggy-weggy.”

She offered a mouth to kiss. He did, gently.

“I love you, too, my love,” he said, and left.

Jack Hummel had seen the movie Psycho at an impressionable age, and for that reason — Beth never could fully understand it — he had ordered her never to come in while he was showering.

“Honey,” he’d say to her, “if you saw that movie, you’d know. This guy comes in when this girl is showering. All you can see is his shape through the curtain, and then—”

“I don’t want to hear,” she’d say, covering her ears.

So when the door of the bathroom opened and he saw a black shape through the torrent of water and through the steam and through the translucent plastic of the curtain, he jumped, of course, feeling the lingering imprint of the movie. A second later his anger burst out, on the presumption that Beth had, once again, forgotten.

“Beth, honey, how many times have I got to—”

But the shower curtain suddenly exploded in a clatter of ripping plastic and popping rings. Jack’s mouth fell open dumbly. In the steam he saw that it wasn’t Beth at all, but some figure out of a terrible dream.

The man stood there in black boots, black combat fatigues, and a black face mask. He had a gun, too, and it was black. Jack, who knew a little about such things, recognized it as an Uzi with about half-a-yard of silencer hooding its short snout.

Jack felt himself pissing in the stall. The water continued to spray down on him. The man gestured with the gun.

“My children,” Jack begged, raising a feeble hand against the surrealism of the moment.

“Oh, God,” he begged again, “please don’t hurt my children. Please, please, don’t hurt my children.”

Another gunman, this one unmasked, popped into the door. He was deeply tanned with the white teeth of a toothpaste commercial and the air of command. He held a black automatic, also silenced.

“Come on, now, Mr. Hummel. You can’t stand there all day.” He leaned into the stall and with his free hand turned the water off.

“I hate waste,” he said almost conversationally. “Now, come on. Dry off and get dressed. We’ve got a job for you. Herman, if he’s slow, you might prod him a little.”

He looked at his watch, a fancy black scuba number which he wore inverted on his wrist.

“We have a schedule to keep.”

Jack dressed quickly with shaking knees and trembling fingers, while the man with the Uzi watched him. He couldn’t get the buttons on the fly to work, and it bothered him that the leader hadn’t bothered to wear a mask. Jack wondered if that meant they’d have to kill them all because they’d seen his face.

And it was the land of face you wouldn’t forget. He had a pro linebacker’s battered mug with a nose that had been broken dramatically into a crooked hawk’s bill. He had almost expressionless eyes, and his hair had been cropped close, almost into blond stubble. His cheekbones were wide and the skin had been tanned until it was almost leathery. He looked like Jack’s old football coach, who’d been one tough son of a bitch.

“Hurry,” said the man with the Uzi.

“Okay, okay,” Jack complained, pulling on his work boots.

Downstairs he found his two girls sitting stiffly in their chairs, eating Honey Nut Cheerios. For once they were quiet at breakfast. His wife stood at the stove. There was a total of five men in black, four of them with an assortment of exotic weapons vaguely familiar from the movies, and the leader with his pistol.

Jack’s problem now was shock. The image didn’t make any sense at all to him. It was as if guys out of the TV news had crawled out of the box and taken over. He stood there trying to put it together.

“You see, Mr. Hummel. No harm done. Breakfast as usual. No problems.”

“What do you want?” stammered Beth. The color had drained from her face, and her gestures were mechanical. He could see her shaking; she had wrapped her arms tightly around herself, as if the fear had made her cold. Her eyes were unfocused. Jack longed to touch her and to make the men go away.

“We don’t have a lot of money,” he said through a clog of phlegm in his throat, though he was certain it wasn’t money the men wanted. But he couldn’t begin to guess what they were after. What could he—?

“Come this way, please,” said the leader.

They went into the living room.

“Now, it’s very simple, Mr. Hummel. We have a job to be done. That is, we may have a job to be done. We can’t do it. You can. Therefore, you’ll have to come along.”

There was something remote in his voice — not an accent so much as the effort to pronounce each word perfectly. It had an odd, disconnected sound to it.

“And if — I’m just asking — if I don’t?”

“Best to come, Mr. Hummel. We’ll be leaving some people here. Best to come, Mr. Hummel, and avoid unpleasantness.”

“Oh, Jesus,” said Jack. “Please don’t hurt them. Please, I’ll do anything. Just don’t—”

“Mr. Hummel, if you do what you’re told, no harm at all will come to your wife and children. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“You may say good-bye. If all goes well, you’ll be back by noon. If not, it may be a day or so. Your children, however, and your wife, will be perfectly all right.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Jack, wishing he sounded a little less terrified. “Ill do it. No problem, I’ll do it.”

“Fine. Then we are off.”

“I suppose I’m an idiot for asking. But where are we going?”

“To meet the general, Mr. Hummel.”