Always the pain, the chaos of composition. He could not find order in the field of little symbols. They were in the hazy distance. He could not clearly see the picture that is called a word. A word is also a picture of a word. He saw spaces, incomplete features, and tried to guess at the rest.

He made wild tries at phonetic spelling. But the language tricked him with its inconsistencies. He watched sentences deteriorate, powerless to make them right. The nature of things was to be elusive. Things slipped through his perceptions. He could not get a grip on the runaway world.

Limits everywhere. In every direction he came up against his own incompleteness. Cramped, fumbling, deficient. He knew things. It wasn't that he didn't know.

He stood on the balcony with his coffee. The breeze made his wet pajamas stick to his body. An N on its side becomes a Z.

Even in the rush of filling these pages, he was careful to leave out certain things that could be used in legal argument against his return to the U.S. Yes, the diary was self-serving to a degree but still the basic truth, he believed. The panic was real, the voice of disappointment and loss.

He knew there were discrepancies, messed-up dates. No one could expect him to get the dates right after all this time, no one cared about the dates, no one is reading this for names and dates and spellings.

Let them see the struggle.

He believed religiously that his life would turn in such a way that people would one day study the Historic Diary for clues to the heart and mind of the man who wrote it.

"It will be terrible, Alek, breathing the air of Russia for the last time."

"Your friends already envy you."

"I'll be unbearably sad at the train station. Our good friends standing on the platform. No one will believe I'm actually going. My uncle and aunt will be so unhappy. 'Marinochka, it's like a trip into space.' I can't bear to think about it."

"They'll weep with envy, I bet."

"I want them to throw flowers when our train pulls out. White narcissus petals floating down. The air must be full of flowers."

She imagined ahead. The train station, the border, the ship. But that was as far as she could go. There was nothing collecting in her mind that looked like a picture of a home.

Her husband sat at the kitchen table, writing.

He wrote "The Kollective," a painstaking essay of more than forty handwritten pages on life in Russia, life in Minsk, the hard-fisted discipline of the radio plant. He compiled statistics and asked Marina a hundred questions about food prices, customs, etc. He wanted to examine the subject of control, the Communist Party's domination of every aspect of Soviet life.

He wrote "The New Era," a brief account of the destruction of the Stalin monument in Minsk.

He made notes for an essay on "the murder of history"-the terrible march of Soviet communism. Deportations, mass exterminations, the prostitution of art and culture, "the purposeful curtailment of diet in the consumer slighted population of Russia."

Marina cried, leaving Minsk. A man at the train station stood watching, half hidden in the crowd. She saw him briefly through the window. Was it her former boyfriend Anatoly, with the unruly blond hair, who'd once proposed to her, whose kisses made her reel, or was it the KGB?

When their train approached the Polish border, Lee took his diary pages, his essay pages, all his notes, and began stuffing them in his pants and shirt. He had pages nestled ridiculously in his crotch. Two Soviet customs men came aboard and Marina drew their attention to the baby. The agents gave their luggage a quick look and wished them good fortune.

Aboard the SS Maasdam he kept on writing. Rotterdam to New York. He wrote speeches he might one day deliver as a man who'd lived for extended periods under the capitalist and communist systems.

He wrote a forward to "The Kollective."

He wrote a sketch titled "About the Author." The author is the son of an insurance man whose early death "left a far mean streak of indepence brought on by negleck."

The women on the ship were American and European, up-to-date, carefully tailored. Marina seemed a girl in their company, small, shabby-looking, lugging a baby swaddled Russian-style in bands of linen. She sat in their third-class stateroom. Except for mealtimes she was almost always there.

"Should I learn English now?" she said.

Early morning, June 13-June, his daughter's name-he stood on deck and watched the south rim of Manhattan appear at the edge of the sea, an arc of broad buildings crowded in the mist. He was seeing what Leon Trotsky saw near the end of his second foreign exile, 1917, the skyline of the New World. All the time he was in Russia he'd barely thought of Trotsky. But now he could feel the man's spirit. Trotsky was the seeker of asylum. Thrown out of Europe. Hounded by secret police. Crossing the ocean to Wall Street on a rusty Spanish steamer.

Lee was worried that the police would be waiting for him on the Hoboken docks. Here comes the defector with his beggar wife and beggar child. He had answers ready for them, two sets of answers he'd drafted and memorized in the ship's library. If he sensed he could get by as an innocent traveler, those were the answers he'd give, friendly and nonpolitical. But if the authorities were hostile, if they tried to put him on the defensive, if they had information about his activities in Moscow, he was prepared to be defiant and scornful. He would make an issue of his right to certain beliefs. Stand up to them, mock them, look right in their squeezed policemen's eyes and tell them who you are.

A tugboat moved through the harbor dawn, and bridges emerged, piers, highway lights along the Hudson.

If they could only make it to Texas, things would be all right.

PART TWO

15 July

The woman knew some ways to disappear. You could be alone in a room with her and forget she was there. She fell into stillness, faded into things around her. T-Jay liked to imagine this was a skill she'd been refining for years.

He stood at the window eating grapes from a paper bag torn open down the side. Norfolk was a foreign city. It was where trainees from the Farm came to practice the dark arts. Break-ins, dead drops, surveillance exercises, audio penetrations. Newport News and Richmond were also designated foreign. Baltimore was foreign off and on. But T-Jay wasn't here to supervise a break-in and grade the fellows on technique.

She sat on the bed dealing two hands of five-card draw and playing both hands. She was Formosan, she said, and looked young enough to be a war orphan in a public service ad. This was his third visit to the narrow room. She wore a T-shirt stenciled USS Dickson, which he hadn't noticed her putting on. Her nakedness was un-striking, so natural it seemed involuntary. He could easily believe she lived that way.

He watched her crash a magazine against the wall, trying to bat a horsefly. Seconds later he forgot her again.

The thing that hovers over every secret is betrayal. Sooner or later someone reaches the point where he wants to tell what he knows. Mackey didn't trust Parmenter. There were a thousand career officers like Parmenter. Their strongest conviction is lunch. He didn't trust Frank Vasquez. Frank had spied on fellow exiles at Mackey's direction in the months before the invasion. Frank was hard to figure. He had the heart of a chivato, a bleating little goat-face spy, but he was also quietly determined once he had an object in mind. Mackey didn't trust David Ferrie. Ferrie knew that weapons for the operation were being supplied by Guy Banister. He probably also knew that Banister had offered to channel cash from the New Orleans rackets to maintain the team of shooters. The larger the secret, the less safe it was with someone like Ferrie. There were others who would have to be recruited. Eventually one of them would reach the point. He knew how they thought, these men who float through plots devised by others. They want to give themselves away, in whispers, to someone standing in the shadows.