Cronley gestured to him to come over.
“What are you up to, Jim?” Justice Jackson asked.
“I respectfully suggest, sir,” Cronley said, “that the question is, what is Serov up to?”
“Point taken,” Jackson said, smiling.
Serov, wearing the dress uniform of an infantry colonel, approached the table.
“Mr. Justice,” he said. “How nice to see you again, sir.”
“Colonel,” Jackson said.
“Pull up a chair, Ivan,” Cronley said, “and tell us what you expect to get for your bottles of bubbly.”
“A moment of your time,” Serov replied. “First, to welcome you back from Argentina. And, second, to as
k how the inquiry into the escape is going.”
So, Serov knows where I was?
No surprise.
“I don’t know how that Argentina rumor got started,” Cronley said. “And this is not the place to discuss the escape.”
Serov didn’t reply, instead turning to the waiter and telling him to bring his open bottle of champagne to the table.
“Someone once said, ‘There is no such thing as too much money or champagne,’” Serov said. “Are you going to introduce me to your friends?”
“Ginger, Father McGrath, when you get home you can dazzle people by reporting that you met a very senior officer of the NKGB. This is Colonel Ivan Serov, first deputy to Commissar of State Security Nikolaevich Merkulov.”
“I thought I told you, James, that is in the past. I am now back in my beloved infantry, serving as adviser to the Soviet chief prosecutor to the Tribunal. I speak English, he doesn’t.”
Serov turned to McGrath.
“Father, it is a pleasure to meet you. But James hasn’t given me the proper name of this lovely lady.”
“This is Mrs. Moriarty,” McGrath said, “a friend of the family.”
“And the widow of the late Lieutenant Bruce Moriarty,” Cronley said, an edge to his tone.
Serov turned to Ginger.
“I heard, of course, about your husband, Mrs. Moriarty. A tragedy. My condolences.”
It wasn’t a tragedy, Ivan, Cronley thought. It was an assassination.
And I’m just about convinced—not sure, but just about convinced—that you were behind it.
“I know how it is to lose someone,” Serov went on, “to lose one’s life companion . . .”
And where are you going now with this, you bastard?
“. . . I recently lost my Rozalina. On March seventeen. Not quite a month ago.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” Jackson said.
“I didn’t know about your wife, Ivan,” Cronley said. “I’m sorry.”