Chapter 7 Grace

Chapter7 Grace

It was the view out the window that made Grace March fall in love with Briarwood House. That very first day nearly four years ago, she’d looked right past the endless steep stairs to the fourth floor and the room’s hideous slanted lime-green walls, not to mention the sheer nerve of Doilies Nilsson trying to call a dollhouse-size icebox with a hot plate on top “the kitchenette”—instead, Grace had walked straight to the gabled window overlooking the square, and thought Yes . Here was a broad ledge where she could brew sun tea, a window seat where she could curl up on cold mornings with the first cigarette of the day, a place she could raise the creaky sill and lean out and watch . Observing people was Grace’s favorite occupation by a country mile—watching the world go by on that busy intersection of Briar and Wood, the endless palette of humanity laid out before her like a moving tapestry... Even after six years, Grace still found American life fascinating.

So she’d turned around with a wide smile and said, “I’ll take it,” already knowing this was the kind of landlady who would enforce pointless rules and snoop through her things, but not particularly caring. Let her snoop; there was nothing to find. Grace had been kitted out to the last tag in her clothes the first time she disappeared, and she’d done an even better job the second.

Dear Kitty , Grace had written her little sister on the back of a postcard showing the Washington Monument, sipping an ice cream soda in the booth of the Crispy Biscuit that very first day in the square, I’ve found the perfect place to hide. I can disappear here and they’ll never find me in a thousand years. I only wish you were here too.

But Kitty wasn’t ever going to join her in Washington. Kitty was a handful of bones in a hastily buried ammunition crate and had been for twelve years. Strange to think she’d be Nora’s age now—Grace still thought of her as a lanky child with chestnut-brown plaits. I never see you mailing any of those postcards you’re always scribbling , Nora had said once, and Grace had just smiled. The postcards went into a shoebox under her bed; writing them kept something of Kitty alive in this shiny new world her little sister hadn’t had the luck to see with her own eyes.

“It’s not even eight,” a man’s voice said sleepily from Grace’s bed. “Are you already up? It’s Saturday...”

“I like to watch the square wake up.” Grace had already wrapped herself in her threadbare robe with its Chinese dragons, turned on the hot plate under the kettle, and padded over to the window with her morning cup of tea. She’d have liked to stir in a spoonful of jam the way she always did growing up, but she had trained herself out of that habit long ago. Dead giveaway , her trainers had said. Americans put sugar or honey in their tea, so get used to it. Grace sipped slowly now, curled up on the window seat watching the world below.

Pete, running out the door toward Moonlight Magnolias... That boy should be in school, not working full-time; he wasn’t even seventeen. Grace had a few thoughts about that, most of them unprintable. There was Nora, clipping off toward the National Archives in one of her slim suits, working even on a weekend... Her gangster still liked to ask after her whenever Grace joined the poker table at the Amber Club on late weekend evenings (American poker was an absolute gift to the wallet for someone who had been trained how to lie for a living). There went Fliss in her blue Alice band, swinging Angela by the hand as they came down the steps after Nora... Fliss had more bounce in her step these days; she was counting the weeks until her Dan came home from Japan. And then, Grace supposed with a wistful pang, they’d be gone and she’d have a new neighbor in 2A.

Fliss and Angela turned right as they came to the sidewalk—Prospect Park, then. Grace had considered the name another good omen, moving into the neighborhood, although if she had to be honest a stroll to Prospect Park—the sandlot, the sedate playground, the pigeon-decked statue of Councilman Smoot—was not precisely a stroll down the Nevsky Prospect of her childhood. (T. Nealey Smoot wasn’t exactly Peter the Great, was he?) Grace didn’t even have to close her eyes to see the Nevsky Prospect, so vividly: not as it had looked during the war, gray and wrecked, gripped by soot-flecked snow and implacable ice, but warm and bustling, the endless butter-yellow and icing-pink facades of the vast pre-Revolution palaces rearing up overhead, eating hot chebureki stuffed with ground lamb and black pepper, the just-fried crust searing through mittened fingers. Kitty swinging from her hand, Mama behind with the shopping in a string bag, shouting Galina, don’t let go of your sister. Yekaterina, listen when I call you! Mama sometimes called Yekaterina Katya or Katechka , but only Grace had called her Kitty. After Princess Kitty Shcherbatskaya in Anna Karenina , of course!

“Jesus—” The male voice from Grace’s bed sounded much more awake, and much more panicked. “I need to get out the door. Where are my pants?”

“By the dresser.” Grace smiled and sat back as Harland Adams started frantically flying around the tiny room. An FBI agent , she could hear her trainers approving. An excellent source, see what you can get out of him. But he wasn’t a source, he was a friend. A somewhat heartbroken one, too, since he’d recently proposed to Bea (for the third time) and been turned down (for the third time) and had come stamping out of the Briarwood House parlor swearing he was done with women who wore trousers and swore like sailors and smithereened a man’s heart to pieces before just heading out like it was nothing so they could scout pitchers in Pittsburgh. Clearly a man in need of a listening ear, so Grace had taken him upstairs once Doilies Nilsson’s back was turned, poured him some sun tea, and duly listened.

“Bea went on a date with another scout last week!” Harland burst out after the second glass. “She didn’t even try to hide it. She told me I should find someone else to keep my bed warm, too; she wouldn’t mind a bit!” He was so distressed Grace reflected she could probably get the secret of nuclear fission out of him if he had it, so it was a good thing she was out of the spying business.

“Bea never said she’d be your girl and yours alone, so stop trying to clip her wings,” Grace told him briskly. “She’s got her dream job at last; you think she’s in a hurry to change things up? You really want to net that one, play the long game. Stick around, let her know you love her, but for heaven’s sake stop proposing marriage. And you really should find someone else to have a little fun with while you’re waiting for her to slow down and smell the coffee, so—” And Grace leaned forward and kissed him, because he really was a good-looking fellow, and her bed had been empty for a while. JD had joined the pitching staff for the Dodgers, Claude Cormier was playing drums at the Cotton Club in Harlem, Joe next door had a girlfriend right now, and Grace didn’t poach men who were taken.

“I shouldn’t have stayed over last night,” Harland said now, looking faintly tortured, or at least as tortured as a man could look while hopping on one foot trying to pull on a sock. “I didn’t mean to lead you on, Grace. I don’t want to make things awkward with you and Bea—I don’t want you thinking—”

“I’m thinking we had a very nice time and that’s all there is to it.” Grace rose, glided over to the hot plate where her kettle was still warm, and poured out a cup of tea for him. “Let’s leave it at that, shall we?”

He couldn’t entirely hide his relief. “You mean it?”

“You had a lot to get off your chest, G-man. Glad I could help.”

“You won’t be able to call me that much longer,” he said suddenly, almost mumbling. “I-I’m leaving the bureau. It’s not what I ever imagined...”

Darling, the things I could tell you , Grace reflected. “Can’t say I’m surprised,” she said, passing him a chipped mug. “Tapping phones so you can learn people’s secrets to use against them doesn’t seem like the kind of thing a Virginia gentleman like you is all that comfortable with.”

“Grace, if you knew the half of it...”

Grace knew considerably more than half of it. She and Kirill had rolled an FBI agent on vacation in a Los Angeles bar during their first eight months in the States: a bottle of bourbon and a little shameless flirtation had netted some absolutely startling allegations, some of which Grace sincerely wished she could wipe from her mind (the image of J. Edgar Hoover in a garter belt?!). But she wasn’t interested in extracting information from Harland. She brushed her lips across his instead, comradely rather than loverlike, and grinned privately at the irony of comrade . He wouldn’t be too amused, this soon-to-be-ex G-man, knowing he’d just rolled out of bed with Comrade Galina Stepanova of the USSR.

Former, anyway.

“Come on,” Grace said, “let me scout the way downstairs so you can sneak out without Nilsson spotting you.”

Harland looked stricken. “I’m a thoughtless bastard, Grace, I never even thought about the trouble you’d get in if I stayed over. If we get caught, will you be thrown out?”

“Honey,” said Grace with complete truth, “I never get caught.”

In her training days, everyone knew only the best would be sent over. The most dedicated, the most loyal, the true believers. ( How on earth did someone like me slip through the cracks? Grace sometimes wondered, but never aloud.) No one in their carefully vetted class of recruits would ever turn, not when they had all been so closely screened, so minutely monitored. The very idea was treason, spoken of only in whispers as they practiced their marksmanship, their ciphers, their American slang. There was no such thing as a deep-cover operative who turned traitor, oh no. Only those who were caught, and even they would never go to an American prison. You’d exercise your suicide option before that happened. And if you were less than perfectly loyal to the Motherland, someone would put a bullet in your brain long before you were ever sent overseas.

But if someone did turn... Grace remembered a young man in her class saying. He was from Vorkuta and looked like he came from Peoria, and he glanced behind him before he went on, bent over a worksheet where he was learning to count out American change. If someone turned, what would it take? What kind of torture?

None, Grace could have answered. Despite all her lip-service loyalty, she’d already been ripe to abandon the country that thought it owned her body and soul, the country she’d never entirely thought of as home. All it had taken to start the process of her defection, once she landed on these shores, was an American grocery store.

“You must never appear shocked by the abundance,” her trainers had warned her. That was why the engineered towns where the candidates drilled were equipped with American labels; Grace had spent two years wandering aisles stocked with cans blazoned Campbell’s and Niblets as she trained herself to think in Imperial rather than metric and learned a soft Iowa drawl from a linguist born and raised in Irkutsk. She was prepared for American grocery stores by the time she and Kirill were finally inserted. Only she hadn’t been: she’d taken herself out for that all-important American housewife ritual of the afternoon shop, her friendly smile ready for deployment, her introduction cued up (“Betty McDowell, Bob and I are new here!”) and... well, she’d ended up wandering around the store looking outwardly composed, but with her mind in a complete daze. It wasn’t that she didn’t know what Betty Crocker’s Softasilk Cake Flour was when she saw it on the shelf, or a bag of vibrant California oranges. But in her training days the oranges were just painted wooden balls and the flour behind the Betty Crocker label was the same half-sawdust rubbish Grace had queued for in Leningrad growing up. Here was the real thing: real oranges, real flour, stacked high in such opulent quantities—and anyone here could buy such things. There was no line of desperate people snaking out the door, no one checking ration cards, no one arbitrarily refusing to sell because they’d heard your grandfather was a kulak . There was enough here.

Later, of course, Grace realized it wasn’t quite that simple. Claire told her a little, tersely and without self-pity, about the Hoovervilles where her family had been reduced to living during the thirties; the breadlines and the shacks and the desperate people queuing up at churches for charity aid. America was not really, Grace knew now, the land of unlimited plenty open to all. But on her first afternoon in a grocery store it had looked that way, and it had rocked her back on her heels.

“Disgusting,” Kirill said under his breath. “They share nothing, they hoard it all for themselves. It’s as terrible as the trainers said it would be.” But what did Kirill know about terrible? He’d sat out the war in safety, one of the privileged deemed too important to be sent to the meat grinder fronts where Hitlerites were (regardless of what the propagandists said) mowing down Russian regiments like wheat. He’d sat in an NKVD office during the war, and Grace doubted he’d ever spent a night hungry—because hoarding wasn’t something only the capitalist Western pigs did, oh no. Grace had survived the Leningrad siege during the war, and that was probably the first mistake her recruiters had made, recommending her for the deep-cover program. The second mistake had been to think that the Ukrainian half of her heritage was somehow eclipsed by the Russian half; the third mistake was to send her over paired with Kirill. But that first mistake...

You don’t need to be smart to serve the Motherland , one of her trainers had said. Plenty of slots in the machine for dull cogs. But for our program—hiding in plain sight, among the enemy for years, undetected—to serve that way, you need a brain. Well, Grace had a brain. She also knew what it was to be hungry, so hungry you ripped the leather backing off a chair and boiled it with a handful of frozen weeds for soup, so hungry the teeth grew loose in your head and you watched your breasts shrivel and your weight drop to eighty-seven pounds at five foot six. To know hunger in your bones, in your blood, as part of your heritage.

Never recruit someone into deep cover when they know what it is to starve , Grace thought, buying a pastrami on rye at Rosenberg’s Deli next door to Briarwood House. Because if you’d ever been forced to the knife-sharp edge of that terrible cliff—living day after day knowing you were being slowly dragged over that edge toward death—it drew a stark line within your soul. On one side of that line were the things worth starving, suffering, dying for, and on the other side was everything else. Grace had willingly suffered those pangs for Kitty, for her family, for survival, and she would do it again in a heartbeat. Some things were worth it. But even as she was pulled into the deep-cover program she already knew that Joseph Stalin—the man who, long before the Leningrad siege, had starved every single one of her mother’s family in Kharkiv to death before Grace was fifteen years old—was not one of them.

If you had brains enough to know that, and you yourself also knew what it was to starve—you didn’t think Disgusting when you saw a grocer’s shop stocked with everything under the sun and no rules at all to stop anyone from buying what they wanted.

You thought, in that soft Iowa drawl that was now second nature even inside your own head, They said it would be terrible, but it’s marvelous .

You thought, I could get used to this .

And most importantly, you thought: I wonder what else about this country they lied about .

Quite a lot, it turned out. All that propaganda she’d grown up with, about how Westerners would sell their children for a loaf of bread and prostitute their daughters on street corners for a mug of beer— that certainly hadn’t turned out to be true, either. And once you went looking for the lies, you found them everywhere. You looked around at a land you’d been told your entire life was filled with enemies and evil and found it instead to be a land of plenty and peace. And then?

Well.

You’d come to realize this country had more to offer than well-stocked grocery stores.

You’d come to realize you did not have it in you to cause harm to the people here.

You’d come to a breaking point.

And when that point came—say, on the afternoon a certain manila folder came to hand, and you realized what was in it and what it meant for the country you now thought of as your own...

You’d take every skill they taught you during training, every trick you’d absorbed, every weapon they’d given you, and use it . So that a year after being inserted in your California ranch house near Edwards Air Force Base, about halfway toward the assigned goal of getting your “husband,” Bob McDowell, hired as an engineer on the flight program that was so very interesting to the higher-ups in Moscow, Bob/Kirill would wake up and find that his wife, Betty/Galina, was gone, gone, gone. Headed east with a new set of identification papers their higher-ups knew nothing about, headed east under the name Grace March , headed for a brand-new future without ciphers, without dead drops, without missions.

Headed into the land of the free.

Not that the land of the free was a perfect land.

“Thank god you’re here, Grace.” The other typists in the Department of Commerce steno pool fell on Grace the moment she walked in the door Monday. “That man Morrow called for some filing to be done!”

“Heavens, how dare he,” Grace said mildly. “I’ll go right over.”

A concerned hand on her shoulder. “Do you want one of us to go with you? It’s better to go in pairs, you know. Around them .”

“I doubt Mr.Morrow will eat me,” Grace said and took herself off to the shoebox-size office where the higher-ups had deigned to stash a man of the stature of E. Frederic Morrow, former writer for CBS, former Major of Artillery, current adviser to the Department of Commerce. “Good morning, sir.”

He glanced up, light shining off his dark face. “Mrs.March, good of you to come in.” The days she didn’t, he wasn’t likely to get any filing or typing done. The last time one of the steno pool girls volunteered (“feeling herself impelled by a sense of Christian duty” was how he put it, dryly), she’d burst into tears the first time he had to cross to her side of the room, then she ran straight out of the office. “Start with those folders over there, please,” he said now. “And if you wouldn’t mind, leave the door open.”

Why? Grace probably would have asked a few years ago. Now she knew why. He doesn’t want any talk about white women in his office behind closed doors was how her ex-lover Claude would have put it in his Louisiana drawl. You leave that door open if you don’t want to cause trouble for him, chère . D.C. ain’t Deep South but it’s South enough. Dating Claude had been a profound eye-opener for a woman who hadn’t seen a For Whites Only sign before coming from Leningrad to the land of the free. Grace missed him. I hope he’s getting nothing but standing ovations at the Cotton Club.

She transcribed her way efficiently through the pile of folders, powered through a stack of filing, reorganized some paperwork. “Anything else, Mr. Morrow?”

He’d blinked the first time she called him mister and sir but didn’t now. “That will be all, Mrs.March. Much appreciated.”

“I do believe you’re wasted here, Mr.Morrow.”

His chuckle, as she bowed herself out, was somewhat grim. “I do believe you’re wasted here yourself, Mrs.March.”

“A lady has to pay the bills.” Grace didn’t care much what she did for a living as long as she had a little money in her pocket, and there were plenty of ways to earn money in a town full of politicians. The cover for which she had been trained was simply housewife , but she could pass as an artist as well: she’d learned to sketch as a child, taught by her mother, who used to paint colorful birds and ferns and flowers around the windows of their Leningrad apartment. “Like your grandmother taught me in the house where I grew up,” she’d said, folding Grace’s chubby fingers around a brush. Grace had never dreamed of doing anything with it for a living (dreaming wasn’t exactly encouraged in the USSR) but she’d been instructed during deep-cover training to learn more, simply because artist was a good cover occupation.

Artists never attract attention coming and going at all hours, or for keeping irregular company , her trainers had explained, signing her up for painting classes once her skills were discovered. Grace didn’t have Reka’s instinctive, outlandish flair with a brush but she’d found illustration work as soon as she arrived in Washington: the odd sign here or mural there, supplemented with anything else she could find. And last year, she had found the Department of Commerce.

“Head there and ask for Mr. Morrow, if you have secretarial skills and want to make a little cash,” Claire had said last year, telling the Briar Club about her own stint subbing while Congress was out in August. “None of the girls at the office steno pool will be secretary to a Black man, and he’ll pay out of pocket for a few hours of typing and filing every week.” Grace had signed up for a course that winter and now came into Mr. Morrow’s office every few days. It backed up the library job and the sign painting nicely... at some point she’d have to think about a real position with a proper salary, but for now she was happy to drift through the months with a patchwork collection of odd jobs.

When you had spent so much of your life just surviving, it was such a pleasure to drift. Such a strange sensation to be able to thrive .

Grace took her lunch at one of the local Hot Shoppes, a thirty-five-cent cheeseburger and a delicious slush of sherbet and orange juice called an Orange Freeze. There’d been a near-identical Hot Shoppes restaurant in the replica American town where she’d trained, a fact that amused Grace no end. Two years she’d spent there, being immersed with the rest of her classmates during cultural indoctrination, and it had been like living on a movie set. The details were all correct—the cars that passed on the streets were Packards and Chevrolets; the street signs were all in English and the parking meters full of American dimes and nickels—but everything was just a little too pristine. The stools at those diners didn’t squeak as they spun, and the hamburgers still tasted like ordinary Moscow mystery meat, not American beef. None of the seats sagged at the replica American movie theater showing Life with Father and The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer . The streets where smartly suited young men called out Hi, Jim! and Nice day, Bill! in flawless American accents didn’t have a single person over the age of forty-five, only those sharp-eyed young men whose NKVD fathers and good linguistics had vaulted them into the deep-cover program. Those green parks with pristine swing sets had no children playing in them, only young women like Grace with razor nerves and white gloves, learning how to coo Did you see the article in McCall’s ? and I’ll bring over a casserole as though they’d been born and raised in the Rockies, not the Urals.

Trust Russians, Grace reflected as she took a big bite of her cheeseburger, to get the big picture right but the details so completely wrong. Living in a fake American town for several years hadn’t prepared her for living in America, not one bit. Because the biggest difference between Americans and Soviets, she’d realized her first month in this country, didn’t lie in the vowels, the clothes, or how you sweetened your tea. It was in the shoulders. When Soviets were squashed down by life, by luck, by the system, they got resigned—the shoulders drooped. Hit an American with an equal dose of the same oppression and they went stiff—either with anger or with fear, but their shoulders and chin went up, not down. Grace even saw it in Mr. Morrow, who went to work every day with a complete lack of surprise for the fact that he was expected to work in a windowless sardine can, that everyone watched him narrowly whenever he addressed a single word to a white woman, that men half his age and half his rank snapped Boy, get my coat when he went out on his lunch break. He might not be surprised at such treatment, but his shoulders still went rigid over it.

One month newly arrived in America, graduated from that bullshit city-slick movie-set town to the real thing in California, and Grace had started trying to carry her shoulders differently. Wondering if it would ever come naturally to her.

Pulling her shoulders back, finishing her cheeseburger and fries down to the very last smear of ketchup with a thoroughness only people who had been starved long and recently could muster, Grace thought that she damned well intended to find out.

The whole house came to Grace’s room on Thursday nights, but nearly every other evening she’d hear a knock from some member of the Briar Club hoping for a more private heart-to-heart. Tonight it was Pete and Lina, the darlings. “Can you help us fill out Lina’s entry form for the Pillsbury Bake-Off?” Pete asked anxiously, Lina chewing her lip at his side.

“If you don’t mind sharing my attention with CBS.” Grace opened the door, waving them in. “You know I love you, Hammerin’ Pete, but Edward R. Murrow has my heart.”

“Who’s he?”

“Good lord, do you not watch the news? Only the man taking down Senator McCarthy, and about time, too.” Grace had been absolutely glued to his program throughout this entire month of March. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason. And remember, we are not descended from fearful men. This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent... Hear, hear , thought Grace, switching on the television set now and smiling to see Murrow’s lean grave face and long widow’s peak in black and white. Someone please take McCarthy out so Americans would stop looking for Soviet moles under every rock, and this Soviet mole could settle down and live in peace.

“Sun tea?” Grace called, already filling glasses for Lina and Pete as they flopped on the floor. The recipe hadn’t come from any mother-in-law in Iowa, but from a Betty Crocker cookbook all the female deep-cover recruits had been required to memorize during cultural indoctrination. Pete and Lina sipped, already arguing about the application. “We need to include a seal from a Pillsbury flour bag, Lina-kins; if we do, the prize has the potential to be doubled...”

Edward R. Murrow had already kicked off about McCarthy, looking grave. His proposition is very simple: anyone who criticizes or opposes McCarthy’s methods must be a Communist, and if that be true, there are an awful lot of Communists in this country.

A few more than you think , Grace reflected, wondering what Kirill was up to these days. She very much doubted he’d reported her disappearance to the higher-ups—too much risk of being tainted by association, recalled by his handlers, and briskly shot. If he knew what was good for him, he’d have reported her as dead from a car accident and carried his mission on alone, not that Grace gave him much of a chance of mining information gold from the Edwards flight program without her. Kirill had been one hell of an aviation engineer, but he’d never figured out how to be charming, how to loosen people’s lips. He’d never quite mastered how Americans talked in contractions rather than in careful complete sentences like robots. That had been the reason Grace was paired with him: she’d always had the easier way about her, the ability to make people open up.

You charm the information out of those air force folks, he’ll determine what’s useful , her instructions had been when they began their false marriage. Grace had taken that to mean a partnership: that they each had something valuable to bring to this business of nosing out information and sending it back to Moscow, and that the marriage part was about as real as the fake wedding portraits they’d posed for in a studio while making a mocked-up photo album. Kirill had taken it to mean something much more like an actual marriage: he would give the orders, Grace would follow them, he would receive the credit with their higher-ups, and otherwise Grace would keep her mouth shut, open her knees whenever he felt like it, and make rassolnik exactly the way his mother from Udmurtia had made it or else get the back of his hand. Not so dissimilar from an American marriage, if you substituted green bean casserole for rassolnik ...

Pete, sounding anxious: “You sure you want to enter the competition this year, Lina? Twelve’s the cutoff age and you’re only eleven.”

“I’ll be twelve by the time the competition’s held in New York—”

Murrow’s beautiful voice was still rolling out from the television set: —mature Americans can engage in conversation and controversy, the clash of ideas, with Communists anywhere in the world without becoming contaminated and converted. I believe that our faith, our conviction, our determination are stronger than theirs, and that we can compete, and successfully, not only in the area of bombs but in the area of ideas ...

Grace supposed he was right: her own faith in the Communist ideal had been distinctly tarnished long before she’d been recruited for this work. Faith in the system, in the collective, in Marxism: those things might have been the water she swam in growing up, but a constant undertow in that water had been her Ukrainian mother’s bitterness. If I’d married a man back home and birthed you there, we’d all be dead , Grace remembered her whispering in the Ukrainian she still spoke to her children when her husband wasn’t there to hear. Whole towns dead of starvation, every cousin I grew up with... Purges aren’t just done with bullets and denunciations and black vans in the night, Galina Pavlovna. And she’d seal her mouth tight before anyone could hear, before anyone could report that the pretty wife Comrade Stepanov had picked up near Kharkiv wasn’t as grateful for Comrade Stalin’s bounty and wisdom as she should be.

Comrade Stalin... Grace shook her head to remember how drunk she’d gotten when she heard Stalin had died, so utterly smashed Bea and Claire had had to haul her up three flights of stairs. How she hated that man. Hated him and hated the fact that he was dead and she’d never have a chance to tell him the world he built had been the world that killed her mother’s family, the world that killed her sister. Rot in hell, Uncle Joe , Grace thought, and leaned over Lina’s shoulder to look at the contest form. “Breads, cakes, pies, cookies, entrees, and desserts—which category are you entering in, Lina?”

“Cakes.” Lina looked suddenly nervous, chewing on a strand of her hair. “I need to submit an original recipe, and—and Mrs.Grace, I was wondering...”

Pete gave his sister an encouraging go on gesture.

“Could I submit that cake you taught me to make last month?” Lina asked in a rush. “The eight-layer honey cake? I’ve never seen anything like that in all my cookbooks—”

Because it was invented in Russia a hundred and thirty years ago , Grace thought. A treat for the holidays, when she’d been growing up—Papa always frowned at Mama’s Ukrainian desserts like yabluchnyk , preferring good old Russian classics instead. Kitty had been the baker of the family; with Grace working at the ammunition factory and Mama putting in long hours as an interpreter, Kitty would be the one rushing into their shared kitchen, not even taking off her red Pioneers kerchief before she started rolling out the biscuitlike layers, drizzling in the honey, sandwiching them together with sour cream frosting. What on earth would Kitty think—her russet-haired, bright-eyed younger sister—to know that an American girl of the same age wanted to take the family recipe to the Pillsbury Bake-Off?

Grace could almost hear Kitty’s bossy little voice: Make sure she mixes the filling with condensed milk instead of cream for extra sweetness. And pulverizes the cake trimmings into crumbs to decorate the top! And—

“Of course you can submit it,” Grace told Lina, feeling the thickness in her voice.

Lina beamed. “Tell me the steps again, for the form?”

Grace turned down the volume on the television so she wouldn’t have to compete with Murrow’s sonorous baritone as she began dictating the recipe, but she listened to him with one ear anyway: ... I cannot contend that I have always been right or wise. But I have attempted to pursue the truth with some diligence . . . Pete looked thoughtful, listening. “He really can talk, can’t he?” Smoothing his hair as if wishing he had the newscaster’s long widow’s peak. Grace wondered if Hammerin’ Pete was about to get a new idol. The William Holden/ Stalag 17 phase had given way to the Dragnet phase, and the Briar Club ladies had endured a certain amount of Pete intoning, “Just the facts, ma’am,” but that might have just about run its course...

“What’s this cake called?” Lina wanted to know. “The winning recipes always have good names.”

Medovik , Grace almost said in Russian. “Let’s call it Eight-Layer Honey Cloud Cake,” she suggested instead. “That sounds like a prizewinner, doesn’t it? Is your mother going to let you compete if you get in?”

The girl’s face fell, and Pete answered somewhat grimly, “We’ll fight that battle when we come to it.”

Later when the television was switched off and Lina bounced down the stairs to find a stamp for her entry form, Pete told Grace, “If she gets into the Bake-Off, she’ll compete if I have to drive her to New York over Mom’s dead body . Lina needs this.”

“She does,” Grace agreed. Over the last four years she’d seen Lina Nilsson grow from a singularly charmless, graceless eight-year-old with the personality of Elmer’s Glue to a gangly spotty adolescent who still chewed her hair and talked in fits and starts... But she could bake by now, a thousand burned cookies and flat cakes later, and all the lavish encouragement from the Briar Club over the years meant that despite her mother’s carping, Lina knew she could bake. If life wasn’t kind enough to give a little girl dimples, beauty, charm, wit, or any of the other things that made for smooth sailing into adulthood, then she had to find something else to put a swing in her step. Grace reckoned that an acceptance letter to the Pillsbury Bake-Off at age twelve would give Lina bragging rights clear into high school. “She’s going to get in, Pete. I can feel it.”

“Until then”—Pete smoothed his hair back like Edward R. Murrow’s, aiming for a sonorous baritone instead of a teenage tenor, and finished up with the words Murrow used at the end of tonight’s (and every) broadcast—“good night and good luck!”

He thumped off down the stairs, and Grace smiled, wandering back inside and folding herself back up at her window seat. The lean ginger cat she’d semiadopted years ago came winding along the window ledge and through the sill, and Grace lifted him inside. “Hi there, Red.” The name, her own private joke—Kitty’d had an ancient cat called Trotsky when they were growing up, but you couldn’t exactly name a cat Trotsky in McCarthy’s America. Not that it would be McCarthy’s America for much longer, the way Murrow was taking an axe to his reputation on CBS...

Poor old Trotsky, he’d died of advanced age and decrepitude just before the war started, the meanest, most bad-tempered cat in Leningrad, and the luckiest too. If he’d lived into the first winter of the siege, he’d have ended up in a soup kettle. Grace felt a residual clutch of panic in her chest and shifted Red against one shoulder so she could rise and head back into the kitchenette. There she stared at her pyramid of canned food, the joking toll she collected from every member of the Briar Club for every Thursday night meal, only it wasn’t a joke at all. She needed the cans for her bad nights, when she woke up with that aching ghost of starvation raking her bones with phantom claws. It didn’t help to run her hands over her body and feel soft, healthy flesh there instead of jutting bone; it didn’t help to run her tongue over her teeth and feel that none of them were loose; it didn’t help to eat something and remind her stomach it was full. The only thing that helped was counting the cans. Canned corn, canned peaches, canned spam, pork and beans, fruit cocktail, tomato soup... She stood reading the labels, doing the math in her head: seventy-six cans in a colorful pyramid against her kitchenette wall, every one dusted and turned label out with fanatical precision; seventy-six cans meant how many days of survival when divided between eight people, between seven, six, five? Math Grace could do effortlessly, even raked and clawed by ghostly hunger. Survival arithmetic, the only thing you had the energy to do on 125 grams of bread from the state per day, and whatever else you could put in the soup pot once the weeds had been stripped from every crack in every street, every leather chair and spare boot had been boiled, and every stray cat in the city eaten. “You’d have ended up in a stew,” she told Red softly, stroking his back. “I could have, too.”

The nine-hundred-day siege, some called it—Hitler’s forces circling Leningrad like a lethal necklace, choking off everything. Nine hundred days, three winters, but Grace’s whole family went in the first winter. Papa was long dead by the time the siege began, leaving eight of them huddled together for survival in a two-room apartment, curled together for warmth, pooling ration cards, drinking water scavenged from shell-holes in the Nevsky Prospect after the German bombers came through. Eight people: Mamochka, Papa’s father, Papa’s two younger brothers and their wives, Grace and Yekaterina. Kitty had kept a diary, right to the end, even though by the end the entries were just a list.

Aunt Zhenya died on December12 at noon, 1941. Grandfather died January14 at three o’clock, 1942. Uncle Leonid, February3 at six in the morning, 1942. Uncle Josef, February10 at nine at night, 1942. Aunt Sofka... Mama...

And finally Grace’s own handwriting: Yekaterina Stepanova, March1, twilight, 1942. After which she’d shoveled the diary into the stove and warmed her frostbitten fingers on the blaze. A nine-hundred-day siege, but it took less than ninety days to claim her entire family.

Ironic, that. Mama had married a Russian so she could escape the tiny farming village of her birth, then wept bitter tears as her husband’s Party starved her left-behind family and neighbors to death among millions of others whittled down to skin and bone—but she’d consoled herself by hugging Grace and Kitty close: “At least being born here as good Party girls, you will never die in such a hell.” It was only blind chance she’d learned her family’s fate at all—worrying, as Grace grew, about how the letters from home tapered away and then stopped coming altogether. She’d only discovered the truth when a gaunt former neighbor made his way to Leningrad just before the borders locked down, looking for work and mumbling horrors from a toothless mouth. “All of them starved,” he had whispered, “while food piled up in depots and they weren’t allowed near it—” but never where anyone could hear, because it was ten years in the gulags for even hinting aloud at what was happening on the other side of that border. That, Grace remembered, was when Mama’s hair began to whiten... but she hadn’t lost her fierceness, holding Grace and Kitty close. “At least you girls won’t meet such a fate. None of us will.”

But they had. All except Grace.

So now Grace stood in her kitchenette, in this apartment that she would have been forced to share in Leningrad with at least two other people, and she cuddled the lean cat to her breast the way she’d once slept with her bones folded around Kitty’s smaller bones for warmth, and she counted cans of food. She counted green beans and sour cherries and black-eyed peas, counted how many days of survival they guaranteed her, until the ghosts of yesterday slipped away for now and she could remember that she lived in a land of plenty. A land she had made her own, a land she’d entered as an enemy and stayed on in as a friend, a land she was never going to harm and never, ever going to leave.

“Good night and good luck, Kitty,” Galina Stepanova said. “I wish you were here.”

Kitty’s Medovik, Lina’s Eight-Layer Honey Cloud Cake

3 / 4 cup granulated sugar

1 / 4 cup honey

2 tablespoons unsalted butter 3 large eggs, at room temperature, beaten with a fork 1 teaspoon baking soda 3 cups all-purpose flour, plus more to roll out the dough 1 cup heavy whipping cream 32 ounces sour cream 2 cups powdered sugar Whole strawberries for decoration

Preheat the oven to 350?F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. In a medium saucepan, heat the granulated sugar, honey, and butter over medium-low heat, whisking occasionally, until the sugar is melted, 5to 7minutes. Don’t use high heat or the mixture may scorch on the bottom.

As soon as the sugar is dissolved, remove the mixture from the heat, and while it’s still hot, add the beaten eggs in a slow, steady stream while whisking vigorously until all the eggs are incorporated (whisk constantly so you don’t end up with scrambled eggs). Whisk in the baking soda until no lumps remain, then fold in the flour 1 / 2 cup at a time with a spatula until the dough reaches a clay consistency and doesn’t stick to your hands.

Cut the dough into 8equal pieces. On a well-floured surface, roll each piece out into a thin 9-inch circle about 1 / 8 inch thick. Sprinkle the top with a little flour to keep the dough from sticking to the rolling pin. Place a 9-inch plate or the base from a springform pan over the rolled-out dough and trace around it with a knife to make perfect circles. Keep the scraps for later.

Transfer 2 rounds of the dough to the prepared baking sheet and bake for 4to 5minutes, until golden. Transfer the rounds to a wire rack and let cool completely. Repeat with the remaining rounds.

Once the rounds are baked, place the dough scraps on the same baking sheet and bake for 4to 5minutes, until golden. Transfer to a wire rack and let cool completely, then crush the scraps with a rolling pin until you have fine crumbs.

To make the frosting, beat the heavy cream in a medium bowl until fluffy and stiff peaks form. In a large bowl, whisk together the sour cream and the powdered sugar. Fold the whipped cream into the sour cream mixture and refrigerate the frosting until ready to use.

To assemble the cake, spread about 1 / 3 cup frosting on one cake round, then top with another round, alternating frosting and cake layers until all the cake rounds are used up. Don’t skimp on the frosting since the cake needs to absorb some of the cream to become ultra soft and press the cake layers down gently as you go to keep the layers from having air gaps. Frost the top and sides with the remaining frosting.

Dust the top and sides with the cake crumbs, then cover the cake with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight. The cake needs time to absorb some of the cream and soften, so be patient.

Decorate with whole strawberries and eat with friends of any nation, while listening to “Rags to Riches” by Tony Bennett.

American summers spun the whole year like a kaleidoscope, Grace thought. Sunshine and lengthening days tumbling every month into a new pattern, the bright jewel-like pieces that were the Briar Club women falling with every spin into fresh shapes.

May. The last petals of the famous D.C. cherry blossoms had long winnowed away over the Tidal Basin like rosy snow, tourists winnowing away with them. The Decoration Day picnic that had now become a tradition, Harland with an arm around Bea’s waist as he flipped hamburgers on the grill, telling them he’d gotten feelers from the International Organizations Division. “What on earth is that?” Bea asked, popping the top on a Coca-Cola bottle.

“Sounds like the dullest thing in the world,” Grace said, wandering up with a Schlitz in hand. She gave Harland a reassuring smile, in case he was worried about her saying anything to Bea about that one time in March.

“If it sounds dull, that means it’s CIA,” Harland said, somewhat glumly. “I don’t know if I’m a fit for the intelligence bums—they’re looser than the FBI, all Yale and Harvard types. The kind who wear loud ties and write novels in their spare time. Lefties and loonies, Mr.Hoover used to call ’em.” But his face was thoughtful, and Grace decided to break her rule about not nudging.

“You didn’t like the atmosphere with the feds. Maybe try the lefties and loonies?” She didn’t ask about the mission, but he told them anyway, waving his burger flipper. Something about the Congress for Cultural Freedom, setting up artistic and intellectual projects with Agency funding. “A different way of fighting the Communist spread, maybe. Show those Moscow types there’s a different way over here, better art and a freer exchange of ideas...”

Grace blinked. “Modern artists getting CIA funding?”

“Why not? At least it’s building something with government funds, rather than tearing something down.”

Grace supposed he had a point. Hadn’t all those artists of the Renaissance taken money from popes and princes to paint their ceilings and frescoes? Who cared now about where the money had come from, as long as you could admire the genius?

“It could be a different kind of war. A war of the arts instead of an arms race.” Harland sounded more thoughtful now, flipping burger patties from grill to plate. “Promote America over Moscow through culture instead of bombs...”

“My idea of culture is Casey at the Bat ,” Bea said with a laugh, slinging her lanky arm around Harland’s neck.

Which is better than most Soviet poetry , Grace thought, carrying the plate of burger patties in toward the hungry crowd in the kitchen. Soviet art in general; ugh . All that cement-heavy poetic verse about the glory of hard work, all those dreadful State-approved landscapes studded with heroic factory welders. If Grace had tried to paint her flowered wall vine on an apartment wall in Leningrad, her nearest neighbor would probably have reported her for anti-Soviet sentimentality. My little Petrykivka daubings aren’t hurting anyone here , Mama had shouted when Papa objected to the the wall vine she’d recreated from her Kharkiv home, but she’d still had to paint it out, her mouth bitter. Who’s going to remember how to do these things when all our artists have been starved or shot? she’d mumbled, wiping her eyes. Grace wondered what she’d think of her daughter’s wall vine half a world away... “I say jump over to the Agency, G-man,” Grace advised Harland over one shoulder. “And then we’ll find you a new nickname!”

Summer’s kaleidoscope spun again, almost before the Decoration Day picnic napkins were tossed away, or so it seemed to Grace, and it was June and she found herself glued to the Army-McCarthy hearings on television. Watching that dark-haired, half-shaven, sweaty-looking thug bluster and threaten, wondering how on earth he’d ever conceived such a bee in his bonnet about the Red Menace when he could have been kissing cousins with Joe Stalin. If there was ever a man who would have thrived in a police state, it was McCarthy. “He looks like a hairy old p?cs ,” Reka grunted, watching the trials at Grace’s side as they smoked their way through a pack of Lucky Strikes, and later she invited Grace to see the portrait she’d done: McCarthy in savage abstract strokes of black and red, more ape than man, teeth nearly bared across the table. “I’m calling it Decency ,” Reka said with her feral Hungarian grin, and Grace grinned back—that moment during the hearings when they’d both cheered, when the lawyer opposite Tail Gunner Joe lost his temper and snapped, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

McCarthy is done , Grace had thought in that shocked, televised moment. He’s done, and it was on television for the whole world to see. He was done, or soon would be—and maybe she’d be safe here.

Another kaleidoscope spin into July, summer heat and Fourth of July sparklers and Bea—victorious from signing a nineteen-year-old southpaw pitcher to the Senators—corralling them all onto the sandlot for another game as the Briarwood Belles. “We don’t have Mrs.Sutherland to play center this year,” Bea complained. “Where’d she go off to, anyway?” Claire replying with a white, set face, “Last fall her husband unexpectedly decided to move the family back to Virginia to focus on the home county in his run-up to the election. They haven’t been back since.” Grace looking at Claire’s immobile face, remembering the way she’d gone to her room for a while sometime around Halloween, and not come out for days. Maybe, Grace thought, she should break her rule about never nudging and apply another nudge here.

“Any word from the lovely Mrs.Sutherland?” she murmured to Claire, helping her do up her borrowed catcher’s chest protector. “I do hope she didn’t have any recurrence of the injuries of last fall.” She still thought about the shoe marks on that long torso... Grace hadn’t thought she could be surprised by the idea of husbands hitting their wives (Russian men tended to have heavy hands; even her good-tempered papa hadn’t been above dealing out a smack when Mama got even vaguely critical of the latest Party directive, and Kirill had certainly been free with his slaps behind the scenes) but Sydney Sutherland’s black-bruised body had shocked her profoundly.

“No,” Claire said in set tones. “She’s— She’s all right, she just can’t get away right now. Her in-laws swept in for a surprise visit on Halloween and by morning everyone was urging a trip back to Loudon County. And then they just stayed . There’s a whole clan of Sutherlands there. A Klan with a K ,” she muttered, face looking bleak, and Grace made a mental note to look for newspaper mentions of the young Mr.Sutherland who was so favorably tipped, him and his white teeth and his Bronze Star, for a House seat. He deserved to lose his wife to a redheaded con artist who cooked potato pancakes. (It hadn’t remotely surprised Grace, learning Claire had those particular inclinations. Her training had stressed that you had to be willing to flirt with anyone of any sex if it got you the answers you wanted. American women are perverts , Kirill had huffed, personally offended that a woman might respond more to Grace’s smiles than his. Grace had rolled her eyes on the inside. Kirill could turn any female off men for good.)

August, baking summer heat bringing a new addition to the house, because Fliss’s husband was finally home. “It’s been so long,” Fliss kept saying, eyes welling. Nearly a year after the end of the conflict in Korea before her Dan was finally demobbed or cut loose or whatever the army called it, one of the last doctors to be sent home from Japan to San Diego; Fliss had met him there with Angela in tow but come back alone: “He’s been retasked to Balboa to fill in for another doctor injured in a car crash.” She had sighed, passing English shortbread around Grace’s green-walled room. “ Another month or two apart, but supposedly it’s the last delay.” She dashed away tears but at least they were frustrated tears, angry tears, not those terrible leaden sobs that had torn out of her when Angela was younger. Better angry than despairing.

“Are you two moving right away, Bubble and Squeak?” Grace had asked, already dreading her loss, but Fliss looked almost shy.

“Well—I have this hope that he could stay with me here until we figure out where we’re headed next. I just don’t want to leave yet... Do you think you could help me talk Mrs.Nilsson around?” And Grace extolled the virtues of having a doctor in the house until Doilies rethought her position on no men , and it felt like no time at all before the entire Briar Club was watching Dr.Dan’s cab pull up at the curb, his lanky limbs unfolding from the back seat. He seemed slightly bemused to be embraced by so many women he’d never met before, but he rallied to grill some Japanese yakitori on Grace’s hot plate while Fliss slung Angela over one hip and talked about the future. “Once Angela’s in kindergarten I’m starting back at least part-time as a nurse—” Grace wondered idly if the English girl ever thought about that night over the border at the Chickland Club, the riot where Grace had stabbed a man under the jaw when he came at them. Had Fliss seen the gleam of the little steel spike in her fist?—a blade hardly bigger than a toothpick, which Grace kept in an innocent lipstick tube in her pocket. She was no assassin who could crush skulls with her bare hands, but she’d had training in hand-to-hand fighting; she knew how to keep weapons about you hidden and innocuous. Grace could feel the little spike in its tube in her pocket now as she took her plate of yakitori skewers from Dr.Dan—sharp enough to puncture an eye or tear open a jugular or push a drop of poison through a shirtsleeve. Not that she planned to use it for any of those things, but did it ever hurt to be prepared? She still had her old pistol, too, oiled and loaded, taped under one of her dresser drawers...

September, Lina’s shriek splitting the entire house: “I got in, I got in —” Her glasses fogging up as she got off the telephone, flinging her arms around Pete. “I’m in the Pillsbury Bake-Off, I’m invited to New York!” Pete swung her so high her saddle shoes practically scraped the ceiling, Grace got the next hug, Bea leaped around whooping, and Mrs.Nilsson came out to see what all the ruckus was about.

“The Pillsbury Bake-Off?” Crossly. “Don’t be ridiculous, Lina, you’re not going to New York , it’s completely out of the question.”

Pete went red as a fire truck, clearly about to detonate like the shells Grace had watched German Junkers drop down the center of the Nevsky Prospect like a string of exploding pearls. She touched his arm and cut in quickly: “Mrs.Nilsson, have you thought about the advantages here? Our Lina in the Bake-Off, only one hundred competitors chosen from everyone who applied all over the country! You know the first place winner among the juniors stands to win three thousand dollars?”

Mrs.Nilsson’s nose twitched, but she continued to look fretful. “Lina won’t win , she never wins anything.”

Grace could have cheerfully stuffed the bitch in her own icebox and sunk it into the Volga. Where were the secret police with their pliers and cement blocks when you needed them? “Even if she doesn’t place, Mrs.Nilsson, all the entrants win prizes just for competing. A hundred dollars cash—”

“A Hamilton Beach mixer,” Nora said.

“And a brand-new Stratoliner push-button range,” Bea finished. The whole house was expert by now in the Pillsbury Bake-Off competition rules. “Didn’t you say you wanted to update the old kitchen range here?”

That nose twitch again. “A Stratoliner?”

“You can update this entire kitchen on your daughter’s back!” Grace cooed, holding her smile steady as Doilies blinked. And later that night Lina tiptoed up to Grace’s room, jubilant.

“She says I can go!”

Grace kissed the top of her head. “Of course she did.” Kitty, you’d be proud—you never made it to New York, but your cake is going...

And then it was October again, bluster in the air and leaves starting to scamper down the street like dried flakes of gold, and half a year had gone and Grace sat in her windowsill with Red in her lap, every bit as fascinated as her first day here by what she could see out her window. She’d never intended to stay so long, not in a bilious lime-green room the size of a coat closet with a landlady who snooped. Grace had assumed she’d move on to somewhere bigger, more anonymous—Washington had just been the first and farthest train ticket available from the San Diego depot when she packed her things (including a certain manila folder) and shed Kirill and her mission and her whole espionage-constructed life.

But here she still was, and the Briar Club was coming in an hour: Reka’s turn to cook, and she was making paprikas on the hot plate and talking lately about a new set of abstract portraits she was sketching out for a series. Wasn’t she good enough for a show of her own? Reka didn’t think so, but maybe she could be encouraged just a little, to think bigger for her work. Not that Grace liked to nudge—

You do too like to nudge , she scolded herself with an inward laugh. You love to nudge! She sometimes thought of moving on, finding new horizons, but if she wasn’t here, who was going to feed and fix this lunatic grab bag of friends she’d somehow collected? Maybe that was the other side effect of having survived starvation: it left you wanting to feed people, feed everyone , feed them and fix them. She hadn’t even realized it was what she was craving, back when she walked into a houseful of people who had nothing in common but an address, but who all needed feeding and fixing.

“The way Mom’s haranguing Lina now about the Bake-Off, I could just kill her.” Pete sighed, first up the stairs as usual. “She’s got Lina practicing that dratted cake every other day now, going on and on about how she’d at least better place third and nab the thousand-dollar prize if she can’t manage first place. Lina’s worrying about it now and I want her to enjoy that dratted contest, not go to pieces over it! Mom’s going to have her in shreds by the time we’re all in New York.”

Grace beamed as she passed him a plate of sandwiches, loving the dear sweet earnest kid to bits, loving them all. “Leave everything to me.”

Poisons hadn’t been a large part of Grace’s training as a mole—she hadn’t been sent to murder anyone at Edwards Air Force Base, after all, just inveigle diagnostics and logistics out of them for the Bell X-2. But the use of certain quick compounds to gripe the guts, that was a standard tool of the trade. What better way to get access to a man’s office or a woman’s handbag than if they had to suddenly excuse themselves to the bathroom with a churning stomach?

Simplicity itself to drop a double dose into Mrs.Nilsson’s orange juice at breakfast, the morning she was supposed to take Lina to New York.

“We can’t miss that train,” the horrid woman wailed through the door of the downstairs bathroom, the one she refused to let any of the boarders use even if the line upstairs was five-deep. Grace smiled at the sound of retching, not feeling one drop of guilt. Doilies had already made Lina cry that morning, scolding her not to frown when she mixed her cake because judges wouldn’t award anything to a cross-eyed little girl who scowled. “If Lina misses registration today she won’t be allowed to compete! I won’t get that Stratoliner—”

“Sugar pie, don’t you fret a moment,” Grace cooed. “Pete and I will take Lina.”

“He doesn’t need to go to New York! He has work to do—” Words cut off by the sound of more vomiting. Claire and Bea peeked around the corner with How’s it going? expressions.

“Then Pete will stay here and take care of you,” Grace lied. “You rest up and let me handle everything in New York!”

Some more token harping from the other side of the door but really, Doilies wasn’t going anywhere when she was vomiting like this, and she knew it. Besides, as Grace pointed out, the train ticket was covered by Pillsbury so she wouldn’t lose money by staying behind.

“Quick, before she changes her mind—” And they were all piling out the door, Grace pausing to scoop Mrs.Nilsson’s address book off her bedside table and stuff it in her handbag, Pete tossing Lina’s traveling case over one shoulder and running down the steps to hail a cab. It was going to take at least three cabs to get them all to Union Station: the entire Briar Club (minus Arlene) was escorting Lina to the Bake-Off. Even Harland and Joe were coming along. “You don’t all have to come,” Pete had protested at first, even though his face flushed with pleasure. “It’s such a long way.”

“Nonsense, of course we’re coming.” All the contestants would have cheering sections of devoted family and Lina needed one, too, especially if her cheering section largely wasn’t composed of blood relatives. Blood was overrated, anyway, Grace mused, helping Reka along with a hand to the old woman’s elbow as they spilled out of the cabs onto the steps of Union Station. The only blood relative she had left after the Leningrad siege lifted and the war was over was Uncle Tolya, who was something very high up in the NKVD (the KGB now, Grace reminded herself), far too high up to have anything to do with her side of the family... Except when he realized Grace spoke near-perfect English and might possibly be useful.

“It must be from your mother,” he’d said carelessly, dropping in without warning shortly after the war was over, not bothering to offer any condolences. “She was an interpreter of some sort, wasn’t she? Useful, very useful. I’ve put your name in for screening, language skills like that are much needed.”

Grace, still struggling back from a bout of pneumonia that nearly killed her and only up to ninety-eight pounds from her siege days’ worst of eighty-seven, had thought he meant she’d end up an interpreter herself. Fine—better than working in an ammunition factory the rest of her life. She’d never thought in a thousand years that a year of screening and interviews would lead to being selected for the deep-cover program. Such an invitation had no possible answer, Uncle Tolya had made it clear, except I would be delighted to serve .

“Reflect well on me, Galina,” he’d said before Grace was shipped off, a glint of warning in his eye. “You reflect well on me, I reflect well on you. It’s the Soviet way.”

I’m half Ukrainian, you bastard , Grace thought but didn’t say, and that’s the only half worth counting . Uncle Tolya had already condescended to say she was very lucky her Ukrainian side hadn’t disqualified her from the start. Just think, he’d probably be hauled out and shot if it got back to her superiors that she’d defected... frankly, that didn’t bother Grace one bit.

“What are you thinking about?” Nora asked as they settled into their compartment, barely in time to grab their seats before the train began to rumble down the tracks.

“Family.” Grace smiled. “The acquired kind.”

“My favorite kind,” Nora agreed with feeling, and Grace sat back in her seat as the train left the station, watching America roll past.

Thank goodness Reka knew New York City like the back of her hand, or else the Briarwood contingent would have been entirely lost. “Follow me,” the old woman barked as they piled off the train into the chaos of Grand Central, laying about her with the cane she’d recently begun using (less because she needed the support, Grace thought, and more because she liked having something to jab people with). “If anyone gets in your way, use your elbows. Don’t make eye contact; New Yorkers hate eye contact. Last ditch, shout move . MOVE,” she snapped at the man in her path, whacking his shin with her stick until he skittered out of their way. None of the Briarwood ladies listened; they were all too busy gaping, Grace included. Washington was a sleepy little burg compared to this glittering metropolis stacked with skyscrapers and teeming with life.

“MissLina Nilsson?” A balding man in a smart suit held up a sign with the Pillsbury logo, and they made their way toward him. “Welcome to New York. If you will follow me, we’ll escort your party to the Waldorf...”

“Get used to the high life, sis,” Pete said, seeing his sister look petrified. “You’re living it up now!”

A couple of taxis took them all through the city, and Grace could hardly peel her nose off the glass, seeing those towers of stone glide past one after the other. Everything so new , so undamaged—it gave her a twinge of sadness to imagine how the city of her birth compared: tragic, destroyed Leningrad with its sacked palaces, its crumbling tenement blocks. A kind of grim optimism was baked into Soviet society; as long as Grace could remember she’d been told, Look at the world around you not as it is, but as it will be—as we will make it! But as she looked at New York City all she could think was how far, how goddamn far Leningrad still had to go.

It could be like this someday , she thought, staring up at the gleaming castle of the Waldorf-Astoria as they all piled out of their cabs. Leningrad could be beautiful and modern and shining. So could starved, downtrodden Kharkiv, the other half of her heritage that she’d never seen—and never would. She knew she’d never go, even if everything east of the Berlin Wall became a paradise. She’d given too much blood, shed too many tears, buried too many ghosts to ever go back east again.

A flurry of activity at the long, gleaming hotel desk as they checked in, the Briar Club ladies arguing who would share rooms with whom: Joe and Pete and Harland were bunking together, but Claire refused to bunk with Reka because she snored, and while they scrapped that out Lina stood looking utterly overwhelmed at the huge bustling lobby, the enormous vases of flowers, the Pillsbury logo prominently displayed everywhere. Grace saw a telephone and veered off to make a certain call—pulling Mrs.Nilsson’s address book out of her handbag, she flipped through until she found the number she wanted, a New Jersey number. “Mr.John Nilsson, please,” she said crisply as a woman’s voice answered.

“He’s not in at the moment—he rents my upstairs apartment. I can take a message—”

“Yes. Please inform Mr. Nilsson that both his children are just across the river, in New York City. His daughter is, in fact, competing in the Pillsbury Bake-Off. At her age, it’s a real achievement. It would be a nice gesture on Mr. Nilsson’s part if he were to turn up and show a little fatherly support.”

Grace hung up and went back to Lina, who stood looking intimidated as the man who’d met them at the station checked his way down a clipboard. “—opportunity this afternoon, MissNilsson, to begin meeting your fellow contestants. A gala dinner this evening will kick things off—”

“Gala?” Lina whispered.

“—and after breakfast tomorrow, orientation. You will be allowed to see the ballroom where the competition will take place and make any final requests as to your mise en place —”

“My what?”

“—dinner tomorrow evening as well as entertainment, though I advise an early night as the bakers are expected outside the ballroom the following morning at the stroke of eight—”

Lina was shutting down; Grace could feel it. Pete stepped in and took the clipboard. “Just give me the rest of the itinerary,” he said firmly as Grace bent down to Lina.

“What is it?” she whispered, looking around the lobby. Where had Fliss gone off to...

“A gala?” Lina whispered. “A dinner ? I don’t have anything to wear. Mom said my old dimity would be just fine, no need to buy anything new...”

“I know she did.” Of course Mrs.Nilsson had thought it just fine to send her twelve-year-old daughter to New York City for the biggest event of her life in a too-short hand-me-down frock. You cheap cow, I hope you’re still hunched over the toilet vomiting , Grace thought. “About the dress—” she began.

“The dress matter is dealt with!” Fliss wriggled past a cluster of excited bakers exclaiming over the hotel in Georgia drawls, managing not to drop the bulging garment bag she’d hauled all the way from Washington. Pete had asked her what was in it, and she and Grace had exchanged conspiratorial glances. Now she turned to Lina with a beam. “Grace got me your measurements on the sly, and I did a whip-round through all Dan’s cousins who have daughters when we visited his family in Boston two weeks ago—”

“Knew I could count on you, Bubble and Squeak,” Grace approved.

“—so I have quite the selection for you, Lina,” Fliss finished with a flash of dimples.

“Selection?” Lina whispered, a smile starting to creep back over her face.

Fliss unfolded the garment bag. “Pink satin, blue taffeta, or yellow organdy?”

“This is agony,” Bea said. “This is worse than watching a no-hitter.”

“This is worse than a stakeout,” Harland muttered. “At least on a stakeout someone might shoot someone.”

This is worse than sweating through NKVD screening , Grace thought but didn’t say. The Briar Club stood clustered at the side of the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom, utterly transformed from its usual elegance: the walls were hung with red-white-and-blue bunting, an enormous banner blared “WELCOME TO THE SIXTH ANNUAL PILLSBURY BAKE-OFF!,” and row after row of Stratoline ranges with accompanying refrigerators and countertop stations crowded the dance floor. One hundred bakers were baking away in a frenzy: the dinners and speeches and sightseeing were now behind them, and the Bake-Off had begun.

Halfway up the very last aisle of baking stations on the ballroom’s south side was Number Ninety-Two, this year’s youngest contestant: Lina Nilsson of Washington, D.C., whipping sugar, honey, and butter together like a dervish.

“I can’t watch,” Nora moaned.

“She’s out of the gate strong,” Claire said, ripping at a thumbnail. “She’s already on her second cake.” The contestants had exactly six hours to make their recipe twice: one for the judges to taste, one to be photographed.

Dr. Dan, tallest of them all and even taller with Angela perched on his shoulders, strained to see into the oven as Lina took a peek inside. “Nice height in the pans. Angie, honey, can you see those cakes? Do they look brown?”

“Brown,” Angela agreed, hanging on to two handfuls of her father’s hair.

“She’ll have a good crumb.” Joe nodded, fingers tapping out a syncopated jazz beat on his thigh.

They were all experts in Lina’s eight-layer honey cloud cake by now. “You could do this in your sleep,” Grace had said this morning, as the women all gathered in Lina’s room to help her get ready. Fliss had hooked her into a weightless confection of pale yellow organdy that made Lina look like she’d been frosted in buttercream; Claire tied her sash; Nora curled her hair; Pete sat to one side buffing her gleaming patent leather shoes. Lina herself sat in the middle looking so sick Reka sat poised at her side with a wastebasket in case she threw up what little breakfast she’d been able to choke down, and Bea paced back and forth saying things like “You just gotta control the game one inning at a time, Lina. Ingredient by ingredient, pitch by pitch—” until Claire threatened to cram the curling iron down her throat.

“You could make this cake in your sleep,” Grace kept saying, lump in her throat. Lina didn’t really look like her sister, but how could she not think of Kitty at a time like this? “You could make this cake in a coma!” and Lina managed to look only mildly petrified as they escorted her down to the ballroom and she took her place with the other contestants. They’d all cheered their heads off when she strode in, four abreast with three other junior bakers, cameras flashing, band playing “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

But now there wasn’t anything they could do except watch in agony as Lina flew around her baking station like a buttercream fairy in a Pillsbury Bake-Off apron.

“She should have gone with an easier cake,” Reka growled. “Those biscuit layers need to sit overnight if she wants the best texture—”

“Her first cake is already set and refrigerating.” Claire’s fingers drummed on the strap of her pocketbook. “She’ll give the judges that one to taste—”

They all moaned as Lina dropped one of her layers and it cracked in half, but she calmly pieced it back together with sour cream frosting as the clock ticked agonizingly into the Bake-Off’s last hour.

“She hasn’t left herself much time to decorate,” Fliss said tersely, her English voice clipped, a BBC broadcaster reporting on a wartime air raid. “That could cost her.”

“It’s not going to cost her.” Pete was pacing back and forth like a horse in a box stall. “C’mon c’mon c’mon...”

The air was a jumble of smells by now as a hundred fragrant dishes hit countertops all across the ballroom: butter and sugar, chicken and chocolate, savory and sweet. Lina’s hands flew as she decorated the top of her cake with fresh strawberries. The bell rang out—“Time is up, bakers! Please step away so your entries may be collected—” Lina pushed one last strawberry into a frosting swirl and collapsed against her Stratoliner, exhausted. They all stood watching like anxious new parents as Lina’s cakes were ushered away to the sequestered judges. They couldn’t swarm the ballroom; they had to wait for Lina to make her way to them. She looked like she’d just run a race: all the curl was falling out of her hair, flour dusted the lenses of her glasses, and that round little face so often set in sulky lines was absolutely radiant. “I did it,” she called, pulling off her egg-daubed apron and waving it over her head. “Did you see me? I did it! ”

“You didn’t even place,” Mrs.Nilsson sniffed when her daughter and entourage swanned back through the doors of Briarwood House in utter triumph. “All that work and you didn’t even place?”

“I still say she was robbed,” Grace said indignantly. “Those Caramel Cream Sandwich Cookies that took second place did not look better than Lina’s cake—”

“And that Teen Bean Bake that took third!” Nora huffed. “That girl’s mother was a prizewinner in the first Bake-Off, so you just know there was favoritism!” Indignant looks from the Briar Club, who had lambasted the judges all the way home on the train. Lina had been as serene as a water lily floating on a pond, though, clutching her bag, which now held her official Bake-Off apron, a certificate stating that her recipe would be included in the annual Bake-Off cookbook, and a brand-new tooled leather address book bought for her by Grace, in which were the names and addresses of about fifty new friends. Your cake looks scrumptious , the fifteen-year-old junior division winner from Centralia, Kansas, had gushed, coming up to Lina after the results were announced. Much more difficult than my Rosy Apple Whirls! Want to write and trade recipes?

Lina was still glowing.

“Well, at least we get the Stratoliner and the Hamilton mixer out of it.” Mrs.Nilsson sighed, looking a little wan from her bout of vomiting but clearly full of her usual vinegar. “What about that one-hundred-dollar check?”

“Turns out those were only for the top contestants,” Grace lied smoothly. She’d already handed Lina’s certified check from Pillsbury to Pete and said, Deposit that in an account for your sister and say nothing to your mother! He’d grinned like a fiend and said, Already planning on it.

“I don’t know why you didn’t mention you were all going to New York,” Arlene sniffed, swishing her skirts a little disconsolately. “I would have liked to go! Y’all even got in the paper!”

“Lina saved the clipping—” Everyone crowded around to look, and Grace took advantage of the moment to reach into her own handbag, slip Mrs.Nilsson’s address book out, and stash it under some papers on the hall table. Pete and Lina’s father hadn’t shown up at the Bake-Off, and that disappointed Grace. When she decided to meddle and nudge, she wanted it to pay off. But there was nothing on earth even a defected spy could do to make a father care about his children.

“I’m going to frame that for your room, Lina-kins,” Pete was saying. Photo coverage of the Bake-Off had mostly been of Mrs. Bernard A. Koteen, who had won the grand prize with her Open Sesame Pie, but one photographer had snapped a shot of Lina throwing her arms around Grace, both of them beaming, and run it with the caption: “Grace March of Washington, D.C., congratulates the Bake-Off’s youngest contestant: Lina Nilsson, 12.” Grace smiled, watching Pete handle the clipping with such care. She’d never even seen the photographer, who must have gotten her name from someone else.

She honestly didn’t think a thing about it—that picture. She remembered that later in utter horror, how happy she’d been. And how careless.

“Thanksgiving dinner for nine,” Grace said, making her list. Normally the Briar Club did an abbreviated celebration on the holiday—Mrs.Nilsson served a grudging late lunch of dried-out turkey breast and canned mashed potatoes and packaged rolls to Pete, Lina, and whoever among the boarders wasn’t visiting relatives, before going out for her usual Thursday evening bridge game. Grace had wondered, her first year at Briarwood House, what kind of bridge club met on Thanksgiving, and then she actually met the harridans: the meanest cluster of tightfisted crones imaginable, far more interested in making a few dollars at the card table than throwing a turkey in the oven for whatever family they hadn’t managed to alienate. Usually people like that just sat like a bump on a log making everyone else’s Thanksgiving unpleasant, Grace thought, so she made a point every year after of assuring Doilies that of course she shouldn’t stint herself of her usual Thursday game—and then as soon as she was gone, everyone trooped up to the top of the house for pumpkin pie and cider.

This year, though, Grace felt something more was called for. Hardly anyone in-house was going off to visit family for Thanksgiving of ’54, so she began planning: a full dinner for nine. What else was that new Stratoliner range in the kitchen for?

“It’s Lina’s oven, really,” Grace had pointed out when Doilies complained about the idea of the kitchen being taken over by ten, even after being told she didn’t have to do any of the shopping or cooking. “And Lina says I can use it.” That shut the woman up; she went off muttering and Grace started working out with a pencil just how big a turkey you needed to feed nine. She loved Thanksgiving. Anyone who had survived nine hundred days of starvation during a siege was going to swoon for a holiday that revolved solely around food. No need to wrap presents, no need to put up decorations, just pack in all the pie and Parker House rolls you could without exploding. “Let’s see, it’ll be me, Joe, Pete, Lina, Nora, Reka, Bea, Harland, Claire...”

“I wouldn’t mind coming,” Arlene volunteered, looking petulant and a little bit sad at the same time.

“You aren’t going back to Texas for the holidays?” Grace asked brightly. The Huppmobile was not a car anyone wanted parked at the Thanksgiving table.

“I haven’t really... ever since, you know. The town invasion at Lampasas, the war games? I told you about that.”

Grace remembered well: celebrating the end of the conflict in Korea with a bit too much gin, the ugly gleam in Arlene’s eye as she talked about American soldiers simulating a Soviet invasion in their own heartland. “I thought you found it so exciting,” she couldn’t help adding with an edge to her voice. Trust me, you wouldn’t enjoy the real thing.

“Well, yes and no. I haven’t really felt comfortable going home since.” Arlene started chewing her thumbnail, then caught herself, giving a quick hard shrug instead. “All the girls who managed to marry soldiers from that time just lord it over everyone . And you should see how much damage got left behind—soldiers chasing the turkeys on our ranch for fun, laughing when they piled up and began clawing at one another. Good American boys! I can hardly think what state actual Russkies would have left the place in.”

You don’t have to imagine it , Grace thought. Just look at Poland. “Well, I’m sure your hometown’s back to normal by now, Arlene. Won’t your parents miss you?”

A brief pause. “You don’t want me at Thanksgiving, do you?” Arlene asked flatly. “Nobody does.”

“Mmm,” Grace murmured. “Well, you haven’t made much of an effort to be liked around here, have you?”

“Claire’s a bitch and somehow everyone’s still friends with her. Reka’s old and mean, and people like her too.” Arlene’s face was tight—had been since the Bake-Off, Grace thought. Apparently that hilarious group jaunt to New York had finally hammered home to the Huppmobile that no one in the house where she had lived for nearly five years even remotely liked her. “What’s wrong with me ? Why does no one like me ?”

“Well, you were very offensive about Mr. Cormier when I invited him to dinner,” Grace pointed out somewhat acidly. “And you cost Reka her library job out of spite.”

“I never said anything to your friend’s face—”

“That hardly—”

“—and I didn’t know Reka would lose her job when I told the librarian! I apologized to Reka, years ago, and she hated that job. And she still isn’t very nice, and neither is Claire, and I don’t see why they still get to be—”

“Reka might be old and cross, but she still pitched in for Lina’s glasses and makes us all paprikas and haluski and drew sketches of Fliss to include in her letters to Dan in Tokyo. Claire may be a bitch, but she watched over me while I was”— drunk —“sick, and babysat Angela for Fliss, and helped Pete put up the greenhouse.” Grace raised her eyebrows. “When have you ever pitched in for anyone around here, Arlene?”

“I made Red Crest Salad that one time,” Arlene muttered. “And, well, I’m sure I put in a quarter for Lina’s glasses...”

You didn’t , Grace thought, but found herself adding Arlene’s name to the dinner list with a slight internal sigh. She just didn’t have it in her to leave anyone out in the cold on a holiday. “Maybe you can bring sweet potato pie...” Thanksgiving dinner for ten.

And then: “Dan and I aren’t heading to Boston for the holiday after all,” Fliss said, sounding relieved. “Apparently his parents are quarreling, and everyone’s finding an excuse not to come to their house while they burn the turkey and throw martini glasses at each other’s heads. Count us in!”

Dinner for thirteen!

And then came a telephone call a week before the holiday. “Mrs.March?” a man’s gruff voice said. “John Nilsson here. I just got back from a business trip. I missed the message you left with my landlady about the kids.”

“You’ve missed a lot more about them than a message,” Grace said coolly, looking down the corridor for Pete and Lina. One at work and the other at school, thank goodness. “They’re wonderful children. I’ve boarded in their house the past four years, and I like to think I know them very well.” Better than you , her tone said.

“What business is it of yours?” Bristling down the line, just a little.

“You should have showed up to the Bake-Off, Mr.Nilsson.” Layering her voice with that gentle hint of reproach, that pause that just invited the guilty to rush and fill it.

He was silent awhile, on the other end of the line. Grace let the silence bloom, curling the telephone cord around her finger. “They are better off without me,” he said at last, very quietly. “I’m... not a good influence.”

Normally Grace was inclined to take men at their word if they said they were bad fathers, but she thought she heard the echo of someone else’s words there. Mrs.Nilsson, maybe. And she couldn’t help but remember thirteen-year-old Pete’s face glowing as he recounted how, in the years before the war, his father taught him to make Swedish meatballs, took him out to play catch, tossed little Lina high in the air till she giggled. “Did you know your wife made your son drop out of school?”

The man’s voice shifted on a dime from uneasily apologetic to outraged. “Wait. What? ”

Grace made a decision on the spot. Maybe the man wasn’t a good influence, but exactly how much good was Doilies doing her children? “What are you doing for Thanksgiving, Mr.Nilsson?” And she hung up a few minutes later thinking, Dinner for fourteen!

Thanksgiving morning. Grace was decorating the dining room table by nine, making the dreary room with its flocked wallpaper festive with branches of autumn leaves she’d collected at Prospect Park, wondering if she could persuade Mrs.Nilsson to let her shake the place up with some sunny new curtains and fresh flowers. It had taken her four years to gradually brighten the stairwell with its four-story Petrykivka -inspired wall vine, the corridor with new colorful vases and refurbished carpet, the kitchen with its window boxes full of marigolds, and the front room with its glistening suncatchers—maybe she could talk her way into bringing some light into the dining room too, make it a place people wanted to eat rather than something that should be kept under glass. Lina began banging around the kitchen by ten, whisking pie tins like a seasoned line cook at the Crispy Biscuit. “I’ll make anything but another honey cloud cake,” she said airily when Grace finished up the dining room so it looked like an autumn glade and turned her attention to the turkey. “I’m trying a new piecrust recipe Helen gave me—”

“Who’s Helen?” Grace eyed the turkey where it rested on the counter, wondering how she was going to truss the slimy thing without getting poultry blood on her red taffeta dress. Was turkey-trussing the sort of thing you could shove off on a man, because it involved an enormous hunk of meat? Or did American men only consent to help with meals if a grill was involved? Some customs about this country she would never understand.

“Helen Beckman from Iowa, the Bake-Off second-place winner in the junior division.” Lina had been exchanging round-robin letters with a whole cluster of Bake-Off contestants for the past month, to Grace’s delight. “Helen says if you want to avoid a soggy bottom crust...”

Lina chattered, Grace trussed, Pete came in on a gust of icy autumn wind, blowing on his hands. “Mom’s off to her bridge party; she let me drive her with the weather looking so bad. It’s going to be an all-day tournament—”

Grace sent up a little Thanksgiving prayer of gratitude. The kitchen was really bustling now, Nora in a slim green dress and her reheeled Cuban pumps pulling down the good crystal punch bowl—“Are you sure we shouldn’t just carry plates up to eat on the floor in Grace’s room? It won’t be a Briar Club dinner without those green walls all around us!” Grace got the turkey in the oven and turned her attention to the stewpot; Claire was stirring up punch and spiking it liberally with rum. “Grace, what’s that you’re stirring?”

“Sort of a beef-and-leftovers soup. Barley, potatoes, beef, some chopped pickles. Trust me, it’s tasty.” Grace had decided to make Kirill’s mother’s rassolnik . The woman had produced a bastard of a son, but her thick, briny rassolnik was top-notch—excellent for curing hangovers, and there were bound to be some of those tomorrow...

Knock knock . Joe arriving with a bottle of bourbon, dropping a kiss on the back of Grace’s neck. “Thought you’d spend the holiday with your girlfriend,” Grace said, laughing.

“Eh, we broke up. You look about as mouthwatering as a piece of cherry pie,” he said, appreciating the red dress with its long tight sleeves and nipped-in waist, and Grace twirled so her full skirts flared. Stylish clothes; something else she’d never tire of. The thrill of having a closetful of dresses that had never been owned or worn by someone else first; it sated her soul nearly as much as her pyramid of canned food...

Knock knock. Harland coming in with two bottles of sherry, which promptly disappeared down everyone’s throats as Claire mashed potatoes and Pete made stuffed celery. “Someone dig Reka out of her room,” Bea called, opening Joe’s bourbon. “She’s painting again and she’s lost track of what inning it is.” Grace dashed up the stairs and hammered on Reka’s door awhile; the old woman answered looking sour as ever, with green paint under her nails. “Dinnertime already?” she growled. “Just as well, I’m stuck.” She waved at the latest canvas propped on her easel, and Grace made a May I look? gesture. “Feel free; it’s terrible.”

Grace surveyed the canvas: an abstract blur of the Briar Club on their sightseeing tour in New York. The day before the Bake-Off they’d gone to see the Statue of Liberty, even though Reka had groused about the tacky tourist predictability of it all. They’d all gaped up at the statue, serene copper-green Lady Liberty, and Grace had gotten a little choked up and also a little giggly. Give me your tired, your poor, your defected spies...

Reka’s painting showed them all in a line before the water, backs to the viewer as they looked at the bold green slash of the statue pointing at the sky. Grace and her friends drawn in abstract scribbles of paint, more implied than depicted—yet she knew every one of them at a glance. Claire’s bright hair, Bea’s arm winding up like a pitcher’s as she skipped a stone across the water, her own red skirt in the center... The painting was bright and unabashed, both abstract and specific, a portrait and a snapshot at the same time. “It’s good, Attila,” Grace said quietly.

“It’s complete szar ,” Reka retorted, but Grace could tell she was pleased. Handing the old woman her cane so she could hobble downstairs and beeline for the stuffed celery, Grace arrowed for Harland and drew him off. She was definitely not going to miss the chance for the newest member of the CIA’s International Organizations Division to take a look at Reka’s work for recommendation. “Weren’t you saying something about there being government funding for modern art, sort of as an anti-Soviet protest? Let me tell you what our Reka’s been working on...”

Knock knock . “Uh, John Nilsson,” the thickset man on the doorstep said, eyes already hunting beyond Grace for his children. All going according to plan, Grace thought as she waved him inside. Thanksgiving dinner for fourteen, Briarwood House positively preening itself with holiday goodwill now that the last guest had arrived.

And then, three more knocks in a row.

Kirill’s Rassolnik

1 pound lean beef, cut into bite-size pieces 1 / 4 cup barley, rinsed

1 / 2 tablespoon salt, plus more to taste

1 1 / 2 cups diced pickles (about 6baby pickles or 3large pickles)

4 tablespoons olive oil 3 medium potatoes, diced 2 carrots, 1thinly sliced and 1grated 1 onion, finely diced 2 celery sticks, finely sliced 1 tablespoon tomato paste or ketchup 2 bay leaves 1 / 2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

2 tablespoons dill, plus more for serving (optional) Sour cream

In a large pot, bring 12cups water and the beef, barley, and salt to a light boil and cook, partially covered, for 30minutes. Skim off any impurities that rise to the top to keep the soup clear.

In a medium skillet, sauté the pickles with 1tablespoon of the oil for a few minutes on medium-high heat. Add the pickles, potatoes, and carrot slices to the soup pot and cook for an additional 10minutes while making the mirepoix, aka zazharka.

To make the zazharka, place the remaining 3 tablespoons oil and the onion in a large skillet and sauté for 2 minutes. Add the grated carrot and the celery and continue to sauté until the carrots are soft, about 5 minutes. Stir the tomato paste or ketchup into the skillet and add this mixture to the soup pot. Add the bay leaves, pepper, and dill, if using, to the soup pot. Season with additional salt. Continue to simmer for another 2minutes, or until the potatoes are fully cooked and can be easily pieced with a fork.

Serve with sour cream and extra dill, if desired, and eat when hungover or when life is in danger of spectacularly imploding in all directions, while listening to “Wanted” by Perry Como.

The first knock came as Grace was talking to a shaky-looking Pete by the stairs. “—don’t have to get your father’s side of the story,” she was saying. “But I thought you might want to, without your mother, while the rest of us are around if you need us.”

“Uh-huh.” His eyes kept drifting over her shoulder to where stocky, square-faced Mr.Nilsson was twisting his hat between his hands and making awkward conversation with Lina, who had retreated behind her pies as if for moral support.

“I can tell you one thing: your mother is lying when she says your father never sent money for your upkeep. I did a little rifling through her desk—” Grace waited for Pete to bristle at this invasion of maternal privacy, but he looked too comprehensively shocked to do more than blink. “I found her bankbook—he’s sent checks every single month, and believe me, she’s cashed them, so—”

Knock knock. Grace broke off at the rap on the front door, giving Pete a gentle push toward where his family hovered around the pies. You hurt those two, I’ll kill you , she thought benignly toward John Nilsson, but she had a good feeling. It was Thanksgiving, the holiday that meant good things for family. She threw the door open just as the man on the other side was raising his fist to knock again.

“Mrs.March,” Xavier Byrne greeted her, expensive overcoat stirring around his knees, his eyes as watchful as she’d ever seen them over a poker table at the Amber Club. “I’m here to see Nora.”

Grace blinked. Did gangsters celebrate Thanksgiving? Cultural indoctrination hadn’t covered that. “Nora?” And Nora was there, looking wary in her slim green dress but drinking him in, and he was drinking her right back. “Cold drink?” Grace suggested, just to bring down the temperature before things ignited right here in the doorway.

“Ten minutes, Nora,” Xavier Byrne said. “If you can hear me out for ten minutes, I’m gone for good. Okay?”

But he only got three, Nora mutely leading him back toward the parlor where the two of them vanished into a whispered conversation, before another knock came at the door.

“Claire,” Sydney Sutherland gasped, beautiful and bareheaded in a raspberry linen sheath, looking like she’d run all the way here from her old Georgetown address, and in those high black heels too. “Is Claire here?” And Claire was already shoving past Grace, pulling Sydney inside and into a violent hug.

“I don’t have long,” Grace heard Sydney whisper into Claire’s red curls. “He’s playing touch football with some friends from Yale, and he took Bear along—I’ve got maybe an hour. I just had to see you, it’s been so long—”

Goodness, all kinds of drama and most of it not even because of meddling , Grace thought, discreetly herding Bea and an avid-eyed Arlene back toward the kitchen to leave the lovebirds some peace in the hallway. “Is that turkey burning?” Grace said, and she heard another knock, this one at the back door. “What is this, a clown car?” Grace joked to Reka, reversing into the dining room past the table set with all the good china. “Is someone trying to find out how many people can be stuffed into one house for one holiday?” She went through the autumn leaf–wreathed dining room toward the house’s back entrance, but Fliss had beaten her there, throwing open the door.

“Happy Thanksgiving!” Grace heard the Englishwoman sing out in her cheerful voice. “May I help you, Mr.—?”

“McDowell,” a folksy Iowa voice said. “Bob McDowell, ma’am. Looking for Mrs.Grace March.”

The hallway telescoped in front of Grace’s eyes, darkening and lengthening, suddenly as long as a football field. She began to run, she began to scream, “NO, DON’T LET HIM IN—” but the corridor just lengthened before her like in a nightmare, and Fliss was already swinging the door wide.

Then the welcoming smile on her face turned to a startled cry, and she stepped back with her hands flying to her throat as blood slipped through her fingers like rubies, and the man on the other side struck the door all the way open with the blade in his hand. A curved blade, curved like a sickle—it was a sickle, Grace saw with crystal clarity, the short-handled sickle that hung on the shed wall in the backyard, the one Pete used to cut down overgrown weeds in summertime. Only now it was in Kirill’s hand. A sickle for a Soviet, dripping red off its edge, as Fliss crumpled against the wall.

A gasp sounded behind Grace and someone—Nora? Arlene?—gave a shrill scream. Kirill ignored them, taking a step into the hall toward Grace. She had forgotten how big he was. Kirill Lensky/Bob McDowell, looking like a retired football player with his big shoulders, his blue eyes and square, all-American jaw, his red Udmurtian hair buzzed in an all-American crew cut. Until you heard the growl in his voice, the growl of a thug from the banks of the Volga.

“Galina,” he said, stepping forward.

And she bolted.

She bolted toward him, not away, and the false lipstick tube she always kept in her pocket was already in her hand. Hurt him , the thought drove through her, hurt him first and fast . She flicked the cover off to bare the little steel spike, flipping the needle-sharp length of it around in her palm between first finger and second even as her fist clenched, and then she drove the spike into Kirill’s throat, cheek, face, one-two-three. He howled, doubling over, but he didn’t collapse and she hadn’t really thought he would—he was much bigger than she was and they’d had the same training; she’d never take him down by brute force. All she could do was try to knock him off guard.

She yanked him away from the door by the shirt collar and hit him with the spike again, raking his eyes. This time he screamed, lashing out and getting hold of her other wrist. One brutal yank and agony shot up her arm. Grace caught her own shriek of pain before it escaped her teeth and turned into the motion instead of against it, getting a strangely vivid memory of hand-to-hand instruction during her training days: Go with, never against, Comrade Stepanova! She’d never been the best at hand-to-hand fighting; she’d never been the best shooter, either. She’d been the silver-tongued one, charm her weapon rather than killer’s instincts. And charm wasn’t going to save her here, not against Kirill, who had murder in his eyes.

Grace leveraged the twist of his arm, managing to yank her wrist free and slide out of his grip. He was already lunging, but this time she didn’t fly at him; she reversed and sprinted hell for leather toward the stairs, leaving her pumps behind on the floor in the first two hurtling steps. Three thoughts were pounding.

Draw him away from the rest of Briarwood House before he could hurt anyone else.

Make him chase her to the top of the house, up three flights of stairs on his two-packs-per-day habit.

Get far enough ahead so she could free the neat little pistol she kept oiled, loaded, and taped on the underside of her third dresser drawer.

She took the stairs three at a time, mind bulleting ahead of her. Kirill crashed behind, bowling over Reka, whose cane went flying. Grace heard a man shout—Xavier Byrne, Dr.Dan, who knew—and then she was up to the second-floor landing and rounding the post. She’d trudged these flights three times a day for four years and she was only flying faster; behind her, she could hear Kirill wheezing and slowing. Shouting below, screaming from the Briar Club, but she couldn’t spare even a second’s thought for them now.

How did he find me?

She couldn’t spare a thought for that, either, bursting onto the top-floor landing and through the door of her tiny apartment. She slammed the door behind her and dropped the bolt, not that it would hold—two steps across the room and she wrenched the third drawer all the way out and onto the floor. Flipped it over, clawing for the pistol—

Her door splintered, half stove in.

She raked the pistol off the drawer’s underside, thumbed the hammer back. Her hands felt clumsy; how long had it been since she’d done this in earnest? The shattered door crashed open and Kirill bulled through. Grace whipped her pistol up and fired all in one motion.

Dry click. Misfire. She wanted to howl, but instead she talked. “Don’t rush me.” Talking fast, before he could lunge. “I’ve got you dead to rights, and my next shot kills you. Don’t you move, Kirill. Think about what comes next.”

She didn’t think it would work, but he stopped at once, the sickle swinging in his big hand. In the hall downstairs he’d gone for her in unthinking rage—now he was trapped on the top floor of a house full of people, which certainly hadn’t been his plan, and Kirill had never been good at improvising when plans went south. Most Soviets weren’t. Their training stressed conformity, obedience, not ingenuity. He hadn’t meant to get caught up here, and now all he knew was that he didn’t want her to pull the trigger again and he didn’t want anyone calling the police, either. He stood there visibly thinking, his face and throat bleeding—Grace could see that her little steel spike had punctured the corner of his eye. He looked like he was weeping blood. “You bitch, Galina,” he said at last. “Why did you run?”

She wasn’t sure she could risk pulling the trigger again—another dry fire, he’d pounce on her. Keep talking, keep talking. “How did you find me?”

“A photograph, some stupid baking contest. I saw it by chance.” His Russian was clumsy, almost stilted, like Grace’s. Neither of them had spoken it in years; that had been the first thing drummed into the recruits: Never assume you’re somewhere safe and can let down your guard. From this moment on you use nothing but English, until it’s all you’re able to speak and think and dream in. “‘Grace March, Washington, D.C.’—once I had the city and the name, I had you.”

Grace found herself remembering the moment she’d picked that name out. March after the March sisters in Little Women —part of her training had been a reading list crammed with American classics. Grace because... Well, her war-haunted, spy-trained soul had been howling for it by then: a little grace.

“Is Fliss alive?” The words burst out. “If you killed my friend, Kirill—”

“ They aren’t your friends ,” he roared, moving toward her. “They’re dirty capitalist whores, moneygrubbing American bitches who—”

Grace fired. Another misfire; this time she felt the round stop in the barrel, dammit all to hell. If she tried again, it might explode in her face, and he was nearly on her, that curved blade in his hand rising. But there was someone standing in the shattered doorway behind him, tall and resolute—Bea, it was Bea, those long baserunning legs carrying her up the stairs ahead of anyone else in Briarwood House. Bea with a terrified face, blazing into the room with hands white-knuckled around her Fort Wayne Daisies baseball bat. Her swing carved a short, vicious arc downward, as a howl tore out of her throat.

The bat crashed into his ribs with a home run crack. Kirill went down as though he’d been scythed, the curved blade flying from his hand. But even as he screamed he was turning, lashing out at Bea, and Grace never hesitated. She scooped the sickle from the floor, whipped it around her former partner’s throat, and slashed with all her weight behind it.

The spray of blood painted her hands, the front of her dress, Bea. It caught Claire and Nora and Reka and Harland, who had just reached the doorway behind Bea. So much blood. The creeping tide of it reached for Grace’s stocking feet as Kirill bled out there on the floor of her green-walled room, his blood so much redder than his hair. She moved back from the liquid crimson edge at her toes, feeling like her head was made of glass. She couldn’t drop the sickle. She knew he was dead—she’d opened his throat nearly to the bone—but her fingers wouldn’t release the handle. She just stood there, gasping a little, looking at Kirill’s empty blue gaze. Better to look there than at the horrified eyes of the Briar Club, of her friends as they realized what she was. For four years she’d welcomed them all to this room, fed them from her mismatched plates, heard their secrets. Now they knew hers.

She looked up at them, blood painted across her face, across the wall vine behind her. A woman in a red dress, a sickle dripping in her hand. McCarthy would have dropped dead of a heart attack at the sight: his much-vaunted Red Menace in the flesh. Grace just felt a rush of weary, dulled shock.

“Well,” she said, dropping the blade. It clattered loudly in the thickened silence. “Now you know.”

“—calling the police—”

“—not until we know what we’re dealing with—”

“—what are we dealing with? Who do we even call? You think Sergeant Laker from down the block is equipped to handle this, him and his potbelly—”

Harland, Joe, and Xavier Byrne were arguing at the parlor door in low, fierce tones, none of them sure what to do with her. It was, Grace supposed, a real dilemma. She sat on a footstool before the fireplace, watching the blood dry on her hands, wrist throbbing where Kirill had wrenched it, so utterly exhausted she could barely move.

“You’re a Soviet spy ?” Claire burst out. “What— I don’t even know what to...”

No one did, Grace thought. The Briar Club stood around her at a wary half-room’s distance, in a semicircle like a traumatized book club. Claire and Sydney were welded together at the hands and Bea was pacing back and forth, unable to keep still, limping badly—her sprint up the stairs had torqued her bad knee all over again. Mr.Nilsson had vanished into the kitchen the moment he saw Grace, pulling Lina with him before she could get a glimpse of the blood, saying with surprising authority, “She doesn’t need to see this.” Pete had gone with them briefly but come back into the parlor, crossing and recrossing his arms, his father’s return officially no longer the most unsettling event of his evening. Reka had slumped down on the nearest couch, looking small and shaky, cursing a bruised hip from where Kirill had bowled her over in the hallway. Nora was cradling a crying, hiccupping Angela so that Dr.Dan could press a compress against the slash on Fliss’s neck.

Grace indicated it with a red-brown hand. “I’m so glad you’re all right, Bubble and Squeak.” The first thing she’d seen as everyone flooded back down the stairs, unable to stay in that blood-soaked room with a dead Russian spy: Fliss in the parlor, her frantic husband wadding clean towels against her neck. Grace’s legs had given out in relief, sinking her down on the footstool. All the harm Kirill could have wrought—at least he hadn’t murdered one of her friends.

Fliss stared at her, wondering. “The nicknames,” she said. “The friendship. The suppers, the years . Was it all an act?”

“None of it,” Grace said, but what reason on earth did they have to believe her?

“Your English is so—” Claire shook her head.

“My mother was an interpreter in Leningrad,” Grace said wearily. “She had a well-to-do uncle who sent her to a private school before she married; she had a gift for languages. She was teaching me English before I could walk.”

“Where is she now?” Bea’s right hand flexed around the bat she couldn’t seem to put down.

“Dead,” said Grace. “Murdered during the Leningrad siege. She went out to get our daily ration, which was one hundred twenty-five grams of bread per citizen per day, and someone smashed her head in with a brick. All for a few slices of bread that was half sawdust.”

The muttering among the men halted, and Harland came back into the room toward her with quick, angry strides. “What are you here for?” he demanded, color flaring high in his cheeks. “State secrets? Are you trying to infiltrate Congress or the FBI or—”

Grace laughed. She couldn’t help it. “If I was, I’d have gotten a lot more out of you, wouldn’t I?”

He flushed. Yes, you slept with a Red spy, G-man , Grace nearly said. Get over it. But she didn’t say it, because she still hoped Harland and Bea might work things out someday, and what a thing to think about at a time like this, but she couldn’t switch off caring about her friends just because she had blood drying in her hair. Shocked and angry or not, they were her family, the only family she had left.

Not that they’d believe it now.

“Were you here to assassinate someone?” Harland went on, voice rising. “Get a shot off at the president? At Hoover, or McCarthy, or—”

“I was here because I was hiding .” Grace gestured up at the ceiling, in the direction of her partner lying dead three floors above them. “Hiding from him . I didn’t want anything but to be left alone.”

“Like we’d believe that!” Arlene’s voice was shrill; her eyes glittered like shards of broken glass. “You’re a Commie spy like Ethel Rosenberg—”

And Ethel Rosenberg’s fate is probably going to be mine , Grace thought. Tried and sentenced to execution, all because of a photograph taken at a baking contest. A high price to pay for honey cloud cake.

“Do what you want with me,” she said, cutting across Arlene’s rising voice, Harland’s furious questions. “I can’t stop you. Because I’m not an assassin, I’m not a villainess out of Pete’s comic books who can... I don’t know... shoot kryptonite from my fingertips. I am just Grace March, and yes, I had another name growing up: Galina Pavlovna Stepanova. I was given a job and sent here, but I didn’t have much choice about taking that job or not. If I hadn’t, I’d have gotten a bullet in the brain or lived the rest of my life being worked to death on the Arctic Circle, so I came here. And, yes, my partner and I passed information for a while in California. It was done with an encryption cipher and an identification code, everything placed in dead drops around town so someone we never met could collect it and pass everything back to Moscow. But it was never anything more than details on flight programs and—” Grace cut herself off as she heard her voice rise. “I never hurt anyone,” she said, more quietly. “Not until today.”

Xavier Byrne spoke up, very quiet, his eyes very dark. “Why are you running from your own people?”

Grace looked at him as though he were crazy. “Because they are not my people. Not really. My father might have been Russian but my mother was Ukrainian, and she told me what the Soviets did to her home—”

“Russian, Ukrainian, what’s the difference?”

“Oh, fuck you,” Grace spat. “There’s a difference. I’ve never seen it, I was born in Leningrad but my mother’s family came from Kharkiv and they were all starved to death on Stalin’s orders, so what goddamned loyalty do you think I feel for him? I knew enough to keep my mouth shut about that, just keep my head down and parrot the party line, because I didn’t want to end up dead or in a gulag, but Leningrad wasn’t really my home. I’ve never had a home, until I came to this country.”

The silence was absolute.

Grace drew a gulping breath. “When I came here I looked around and thought I never want to leave . You wouldn’t want to, either, if you’d been living in a city where one and a half million people died in a nine-hundred-day siege, where the survivors murdered one another for ration cards and bread. A city where you drank water out of shell craters on your hands and knees, and when your one surviving uncle brought home a lump of meat and said not to ask what it was, you cooked it and ate it without asking because no one in your family had eaten in four days. A city where I had to watch my little sister starve to death before my eyes and there was nothing I could do .” Grace felt the tears begin to slide. Let them fall. Let it all fall. “And then I come here. And it isn’t a cesspit of capitalist evil the way I’d always been told my entire life, it’s a wonderland. Not a perfect place, maybe, but compared to the secret-police-infested wasteland I left behind, it is paradise . And I realized that all I want is to stay here, make a life here, get a job and pay taxes here, so I did. I made a life. I walked away from everything I was and made a home around a room with green walls, and sun tea, and Thursday night suppers on a hot plate, and friends .”

She looked at them, from face to face. “I have been your friend,” she said to Pete, the first person she’d met at Briarwood House. Hammerin’ Pete with his battered Mickey Spillane paperbacks and his thirteen-year-old blushes and stammers. “I have been your friend.” Looking at Nora, with whom she’d shared a landing bathroom for four years and given advice when she fell in love with the gangster who now had a protective arm around her waist. “I have been your friend”—to Reka, Attila the Hungarian, scowling on the couch—“and your friend”—to Fliss, who she’d hauled out of a nightclub riot full of bigots—“and yours, and yours, and yours.” To Bea and Claire and Sydney, Harland and Joe. “I have always been a friend. To all of you.”

“If you wanted to stay, why didn’t you go to the nearest embassy and defect?” That was Joe, very quiet.

“With McCarthy starting up his rants about Reds?” Grace let out a harsh bark of a laugh. “I might as well strap into the electric chair and flip the switch myself.”

“You could still turn yourself in.” Harland looked like a man groping for a lifeline. “Immunity in return for everything you know—”

“I don’t know anything useful. They make sure we don’t. I can’t tell you where any other spies are, or who collected from my dead drop. I don’t even know where my old training facility is; they took us there blindfolded in trucks—”

“You tell us you never hurt anyone here with your spying, but how do we believe that?” Harland folded his arms.

Because I love this country , Grace thought. I can speak my mind here without being arrested; I can walk these streets a free woman without worrying I’m going to be hauled away in a van; I can earn money and decide for myself what to do with it. Why wouldn’t I love this place? Why would I ever want to harm it?

But they wanted proof.

“Behind the bureau in my room,” Grace said. “Third board, the one with the crack—you’ll need to pry the nails out. Look inside. You’ll find a manila folder.”

Waiting, then. Blinking tiredly, as feet tramped upstairs and then down again. Seeing the folder in Harland’s hands, his face over it growing slowly white. “What the...” he said softly, flipping pages, and the others crowded close, reading over his shoulder .

“What’s Skunk Works?” Nora said blankly.

“A department of Lockheed Martin,” said Grace. “The kind of department that isn’t publicized.” The plan from Moscow had been to get Kirill hired there. Grace had found a back door—befriending the secretaries, the women no one noticed who had access to so much.

Harland was flipping pages more rapidly now. “This is— Jesus, this is their proposed development plan for the next ten years of supersonic aircraft. Project names, rudimentary designs, material sciences advances...”

“What’s a ramjet?” Bea asked, reading over his elbow.

“Some kind of engine for bombers or fast-strike aircraft or—”

Grace spoke up. “I got my hands on those pages spring of ’50. I knew as soon as I saw it that I wasn’t telling Kirill about it, I wasn’t taking it to the dead drop for collection, I wasn’t turning it over.”

“How do we know that?” Harland shot back. “You could have just copied this and sent the information on; how is this proof that—”

“Because the first thing the Soviets would have done with this information if I’d handed it over back in ’50 was rub the West’s nose in it, because that’s what they do . They know they’re behind in aviation and engineering; the West stole their scientists left, right, and center after the war. They’re desperate. If they got hold of that”—indicating the folder—“they’d be rushing to brag how far ahead they were for once.” She looked around the circle. “Have you seen a single headline in the newspapers over the last four years that said anything like that?”

Glances back and forth among the Briar Club.

“When I got my hands on that report, I ran.” Grace remembered her frantic clandestine scramble for a new name, new identity, new papers behind Kirill’s back. “I didn’t know what to do with it, whether I should destroy it or try to return it somehow, so I just... hid it. I guess it’s your problem now, Harland.”

“There’s not a government I can think of that wouldn’t paint the walls red to get their hands on this,” Harland said softly, closing the file. They all edged away from it as though it were radioactive.

Grace looked between her friends again, from face to shocked face. “Do what you want,” she said. “I can’t stop you. But someone turn off the oven. Because the turkey’s burning.” Grace March let her face drop, let her hopes drop, let the tears drop. “Happy Thanksgiving.”