The Infant of Prague

British Airways was nearly forty-five minutes late arriving at Kennedy because of traffic, and the helicopter across Long Island to LaGuardia was late, and the United flight to Chicago was late taking off because of traffic at O’Hare.

Devereaux felt the ache of travel and the ache in his stiff left leg and all the pains of spending nearly eleven hours in the air or trying to get in the air. The shuffle through customs at Kennedy was routine; the Swiss passport was Devereaux’s own, given to Cernan by Colonel Ready. The passport number would show up in twelve hours on the computer at Section because it was a creation of Section; it would be the signal that Devereaux — or someone using Devereaux’s passport — had entered the United States.

O’Hare was bright on this November afternoon and there were souvenirs celebrating Christmas or the Chicago Bears in the newsstands. Devereaux walked the long corridor from gate F12 to the main concourse at Terminal Two and then pushed through the people to the street. Traffic was standing still. A black cab driver in a yellow car was screaming insults at a white man in a black limousine and a paunchy Chicago policeman was yelling at both of them. The street was narrowed by construction barriers and filled with private cars, cabs, limousines, police cars, rental vans, suburban buses, and airport service trucks. Devereaux stared at it all for a moment, his head filling with the noises of his native land and native city. Each time he came back to the States now, the brutal vitality of it — the colors, the openness, the obscene grace — startled him. He was a stranger now. His exile had no roots.

He reentered the terminal and found the entrance to the subway by asking directions from three different policemen. The car was waiting in the station and he fell into a seat and closed his eyes. His single bag — packed by one of Cernan’s men — was between his legs.

The doors clicked closed and the train picked up speed, emerging suddenly into the light and climbing to an elevated trestle at River Road. The day was bright with bright gray clouds and there was the smell of snow in the air. The train screamed along the tracks heading south and east toward the Loop. Devereaux stared at the pitched roofs of the bungalows and the dense traffic clogging the Kennedy Expressway. He was tired and drained and it was more than the two airplane trips. It was the thought of Rita held hostage mixed with the thought of coming home.

He detested nostalgia and the memories of a past life.

What had he been all his life but the outsider? First on city streets, outside the law and protection of home, then inside a secret agency so buried in the government that its very name was snatched from deep within the funding bill that created it. Subparagraph R became Section R. And Devereaux became a pawn named November and lost his right to ever come inside.

He accepted that. He could stand the silence, the cold, the aloneness, and being apart. And then, by accident, he would suddenly be thrust into a reminder of all the past he had lost and the waste of it. Now he was on a Chicago El train, screeching along above the low bungalows down to the heart of the high-rise city, and he might have been ten years old again, starting out on the streets with his knife and his guts and his savage sense of self.

There was too much pain in nostalgia. Yet the past kept thrusting itself at him. It hurt him more now to be in Chicago than to have endured all the real pains of the past week.

He closed his eyes to shut out the city.

But when he closed his eyes, Rita was near. He could smell her and touch her.