Mary's personality, as I saw it after leaving her suite, seemed to me now somewhat different from what I imagined before I had met her in the morning. She was now a fragile creature, notwithstanding her bulk and physique, absorbed with her love for Hewlett. But this fact shed new light on Hewlett himself. What had he done to arouse such a burst of sentiment on Mary's part?
The tragedy of ugly girls was once more live before me in all its raw essence. Frankly speaking, I had always pitied them. From the very early stages of their life they are inevitably compared to their more lucky playmates who callously chose them as friends to better set off their own attractiveness. They are often condemned to remain spinsters, and unless they chose to reach supremacy in purely male spheres of life like management or science, or to dedicate themselves to some noble cause that would make them forget about their wretched condition, like becoming nurses of the terminally ill, they are doomed to continual depression and eventual illness or madness, or even suicide. It's amazing how much does appearance count for a woman and practically means nothing for a man. An ugly dwarf, but rich or powerful, attracts women better than a tall handsome athlete, while a hugely intelligent or rich and powerful woman, being ugly or well on in years, can arouse nothing more than respect or fear in a man. In a moment of joking confession I heard from an elderly woman, president of an important company, that she would have given everything she had to become only for a day an empty-headed and long-legged young pretty blonde to make me go to bed with her. The joking tone couldn't conceal her real regret, as she squeezed meaningfully my hand to test my right mood. Regretfully for her my target was her long-legged secretary, a young curly-haired Afro-American with slightly almond-shaped large eyes and good brains to boot, who had no difficulty in taking me to bed without giving me much in exchange, or giving some phony stuff, but that's another story.
I had once committed the imprudence to have been excessively good to one of those wretched creatures. The poor girl was so exuberant in her gratitude to me that she nearly exhausted me with her stalking me and giving me all sorts of signs of her loving attention. I was rude to her at the end, of which I was so sorry after learning that she tried to commit suicide from which she was saved but never really recovered.
Now I suspected that Hewlett had committed the same kind of mistake. His wife had found a harmless – as she thought – spy for him, but didn't regard her a person capable of true love. Ridiculous, with that appearance! She gave her a handsome pay, enough to forget all personal feelings – as she thought – but life is richer than any pay, and what do we have now? A bundle of nerves under high tension.
I didn't rule out the possibility that his wife could make her appearance here, towards evening of this very day. Too many women, and that wasn't the end of it.
Pavel told me he found something on Mary on British television. She seems to have won, and more than once, the first prize in some local, or even national quiz. Naturally she wanted to excel intellectually to compensate for the lack of good looks. I figured her artfully painted, they are great masters in TV in embellishing person's face, their tricks can't be found out even in close-ups, her small eyes heavily made up glistening with cold triumph when she hits the right answer.
Now my mission was to be slightly corrected: I had to convince Hewlett to go on being nice to Mary, perhaps by blackmailing him (and the presence of his wife would be useful to this end), maybe I'd use my information on her quiz successes to express my admiration to her, and we can stage a kind of rivalry for her attention, or even love. It would be cruel, I knew, but it was life, the cruellest game every living being is engaged in since birth. I felt a sweet anguish looking forward to the further development of the drama. I knew for sure that it wouldn't be in any case a comedy.
I occurred to me for a moment that I was forgetting the ultimate goal of my whole mission, but that didn't bother me too much, since I had Mary's promise to give me a hand in getting information on Hewlett's contacts in Moscow.
In my room, two floors up, there was no remarkable luxury o superfluous thing but Pavel who sat in an armchair, reading a magazine.
"What's new?" he asked without looking up.
"Nothing relevant", I said nonchalantly. "It seems that Mary is deeply in love with Hewlett."
"That's a useless complication of our game", said Pavel. "She might be highly reluctant to reveal his secrets, being entirely devoted to him."
"His secrets are not necessarily what interests us," I remarked. "Anyhow, I'm thinking of how to use this lever. Hewlett's wife may come here, can you imagine this? And then, as I expect, Lena can come in this evening, at the latest. You might find them tomorrow morning all scratched and bleeding in Mary's suite, ah? Three women in fight for a playboy!"
But Pavel's was not amused.
"We must avoid this", he said. "Try to do something."
"How? I must accompany him and be his interpreter. Tell your men to spot the other two women, if they are here and to engage them in some cultural activity."
"They are on it."
Then he said after a pause:
"What I can't understand is why such a fuss about the man. Is it all really about his personal attractiveness? As a convinced marxist I think there's much more material motives behind this affair. We must look into it more thoroughly. There must be some inheritance or stuff like that."
I caught myself thinking that Pavel, too, was involuntarily more engaged in the game itself than in our practical mission.
"I hope we learn something from Lena's report by tomorrow", I said.
"If there's one", muttered Pavel, putting away the magazine. "There are too many uncertainties. She'll have to play by ear."