Tibetan Cross

by Mike Bond

  He swung his feet out of bed, sat scratching his balls. “Glad to.”

  She crouched before him, fingers biting into his thighs. “Don't be cute! This is awful, where we are. Can't you see that?”

  He stood massaging his ribs. Body feels like it fell down an elevator shaft. God, she's ugly. Hate her. Hate them all. “Fuck you, Cunt.”

  She tousled his hair. “It's the romantic in you I can't resist. Prick and Cunt – we should do well together.”

  He limped, exasperated, to the window. “No matter what I say you turn it somehow.”

  She folded Le Monde, slapped it emphatically on the dresser. “Let's eat. And talk.”

  Lifting his jeans from the foot of the bed he slipped one leg carefully into them. Then, sitting on the bed, the other.

  “Can I ask a question?” she grinned.

  “Might not get an answer.”

  “Why do you never wear underpants?”

  “Haven't owned a pair since ‘69. They overheat the balls – kill all those little squirmy things.”

  “What need do you have of those little squirmy things right now?”

  “Question of morale on the lower forty. Keeping their pecker up. Sense of optimism, infuses the whole corpus delecti.” Wincing, he pulled up the pants. “I have the collective miseries of every halfback who ever played the game.”

  She kissed him. “I love you when you let even a little of yourself show.”

  “Ever since you've known me, ever since that day on the Kali Gandaki, I've been a wild man, a stranger, out of myself.” He shrugged into his shirt, buttoned it and stuffed it into his pants, buckled them. “Now I've got to do these god-damn shoes.” He tried to bend over. “Please come tie them, will you? My hands won't work – fumbling the laces.”

  She knelt and tied them. “Maybe it's the shock treatment – it was agony watching, pretending to be with them, knowing you were dead unless I played along till I could get you free.” She pulled him up. “But you're going to be fine, Prick, and we'll vanish somehow, once we've found Paul.”

  He turned from the door. “Who said anything about Paul?”

  “You did. You have to meet him in Colorado, in a week. I've already figured how we can fly from Madrid to Buenos Aires to Mexico City and drive from there. But we have to leave tomorrow.”

  “I'm going alone.”

  “They'll be waiting for you! I can help you slip through.”

  “Like in Crete?” He walked out the door and started his awkward, painful descent of the stairs. Why the fuck she take a room on the third floor? Shit, it's troisième étage – the fourth goddamn floor. Damn French with their rez de chaussée. Why can't they be like everyone else? I'll never make it back four floors. Not without a gun up my ass.

  She's glomming on real friendly now but it's bullshit. This's how they hope to get Paul. Crazy that she shot that Jack guy. Blew his lungs all over the attic. They must want Paul bad, to do that. Gotta pretend I trust her. What if she's straight? Can't take that chance. Should walk her into some alley and strangle her. Can't do that. Not to her.

  But I have to get rid of her soon. Don't make Paul wait – that's terror.

  AT the corner a front-room restaurant, its curtains shutting out the street. “How'd Mort track me down?” he asked her.

  “There was a real hunt for you in the hills of Crete. After several days they were sure you'd drowned – I learned all this later. But Mort kept checking every other avenue – nothing escapes him – and he finally ran down the freighter he remembered had left Sitea the morning after you escaped into the hills. Then they tracked you by plane to some place on the Algerian coast, lost you, and found you again in Oran.” She bent to clear her throat. “Then, idiot, you wrote that letter, from Marseille!”

  “And what were you doing while I was having such a good time in Algeria?”

  “After my snafu in Vye, they stationed me back in Brussels till they caught wind of you. I was on my way to Marseille when you shot Mort and disappeared. Then they found you'd called that hotel in Aix, and figured you were on your way to Neuenweg, so I was switched up there. You got there faster than they expected.” She slipped a stockinged toe up under the cuff of his jeans. “But you'll never make it as an agent clandestin.”

  “Oh?”

  “In Neuenweg you were staring right into the sun with your binoculars. Lou saw the reflection. They figured you'd want to search the house, and left me there to capture you, since I was the only one you hadn't seen out on the deck. They drove back uphill with the car lights off. I knew they didn't trust me, after Vye, that they wouldn't go far enough away for me to warn you off. I was so happy when the truck came and scared you out. When you came back I couldn't believe it.”

  “I shouldn't have been surprised to see you there.”

  “I almost killed Jack, when he beat you, but my mind was so scattered. I hadn't worked out a scheme yet. But by the end you were mentioning things I'd told you that were true, and were not in the persona I was supposed to be with you – about my husband and stuff – and I knew that soon they'd kill me. And I was afraid you'd tell them about Paul.”

  “What's Paul to you?”

  “Nothing, except your friend. But I knew once they had him you'd both be dead.”

  “Why?”

  “You're the only ones, Prick, who know what went on. Once you're dead they're safe, forever.”

  “What about you?”

  “I don't even know why they want you…that's the chance I'm taking. I've got nothing to expose but hearsay.”

  “I'll tell you.”

  “Let's just drop it, find Paul, and get away – please?”

  “And let them stay safe, forever?”

  “So what? Let's live, not dig up their sordid lives.”

  “Who'd send a nuclear bomb to Tibet?”

  “Ah, that's the story you're supposed to be spreading, that's what they said you might tell me. It was your role.”

  “Jesus. They did it, Claire, I saw it.”

  “That's idiotic! Who'd dare start that?”

  “Maybe they thought it wouldn't cause anything – or that it'd be localized. A way of putting pressure on the Chinese, chasing them out of Tibet, subtle victory against the worldwide specter of communism.”

  “Who would they blame?”

  “The Chinese? I don't know. The Russians, the Indians, us…”

  “Never in my work did I come across such a scheme. When you told me in Athens, I only half-believed you.” She tugged at her short hair. “But then, I never knew what was going on anyway. They certainly wouldn't have told me.”

  “So what's Neuenweg?”

  “A safe place, for meetings. I never knew of it before. One of the higher ups was there – Mort must have called him after they found you in Marseille.”

  “Who?”

  “Lou. He's from D.C.”

  “Mort's American?”

  “Who knows what anyone is in this business?”

  “I have to know.”

  “I can't help very much. I've been in Brussels for them for three years, supposedly as a freelance reporter, but actually prying loose whatever secrets I could on the EEC, on all the NATO members except the Americans.”

  “Secrets?”

  “Troop strength and deployments, technology transfers, missile locations, who's sleeping with whom, that sort of thing. I assumed the U.S. was just checking up on its allies.”

  “You never cared to ask who you were working for, or what they were doing with your information?”

  “After my husband's death I didn't care. I really loved him, Sam.”

  “No one said you didn't.”

  “A year after Tim died I was still heartbroken, hating the people who'd killed him. I saw an ad in the Times for a researcher on international affairs, ‘excellence in languages a must.’ I spoke French and German like a native, being French and having grown up here.”

  “You had an American passport in Athens.”

&nbs
p; “It wasn't real.”

  “Are you American?”

  “The real me?” She dimpled. “She was a French citizen.”

  “What was her name?”

  “She's dead and buried. Take me as I am.”

  “You've just grown a new head.”

  “I'm the snake eating its tail, darling.”

  “So you answered this Times ad?”

  “And they called me back a month later; I was to work in Brussels. It was soon boring, but it helped me forget. It became my world, a world of no absolutes, of forces and counterforces with no rights and no wrongs except the underlying hatred that forgave all, allowed all. It was perfect for me. But over the months I began to heal, began to see things that shocked me, that I couldn't forget. I was changing, but I didn't realize how much until I met you.”

  “'Till I met you,'” he sang in falsetto. “Crap!”

  “You're not the world's sexiest man, Sam. I hate it when you squint without your glasses, or when you're brusque, like you are now, and think it's masculine. In some ways you're so dumb…and you're going to lose your hair.” She reached across the table and pinched his side. “You're going to seed.”

  “Keep to the subject.”

  “And now I've hurt your feelings. You've got no sense of humor. Try to take yourself less seriously. Though I love you, anyway. On the flight from Teheran I was supposed to stick with you as a way of finding Paul. But in Athens, in that hotel in the Plaka, I kept seeing a person who didn't fit the description I'd been given. I had to know, you see.”

  “Had to know what?”

  “Who you really were. After you fell asleep that first day in Athens, I got to thinking it over, and decided I couldn't take their word. I'd begun to like you.” She grinned. “Don't ask me why – I can't imagine.”

  “Back to your story.”

  “After a year in Brussels, translating silly dispatches and wiretapped phone conversations, I was sent to Kenya and told to call myself a stringer for Le Figaro, which no one ever questioned, amazingly. Out of Kenya I gathered info on leftist figures – politicians, editors, military people, and sent it back to Brussels in the diplomatic pouch. In Nairobi, though, I began to have doubts.”

  “Regarding?”

  “Just exactly what I was doing. And whom I was working for. I wanted to tell you about it in Crete but you didn't listen.”

  “Try again.”

  “One of my tasks was to interview an American who was trying to stop the elephant slaughter. You know about the ivory trade, don't you, how all the elephants are being killed for their tusks? The elephant poachers have strong ties to the Kenyan government – at one point the president's sister was head of the largest smuggling group. Well, I spoke with this American. It was one of those persona assignments, I thought, that you file and forget. But he was on to something.”

  She filled his glass and he pushed the bottle away. “He was trying to force the World Bank to hold up development loans to Kenya until the government began to enforce its elephant poaching laws. In the course of the interview, I established his daily routine as well as his intentions for the coming months – he was very honest about how he planned to put pressure on the World Bank.”

  “Well?”

  “A month after the interview he died in what was described as a car accident. I think the people who sent me… that my information was used by the killers. So, in a sense I killed him. And I really liked him.”

  “You keep saying ‘really.'”

  “An affectation, in a world where nothing is more real than anything else. Pretences, facades, covers, roles, ropes, feints, doubles, faking, disguises, masks – how many words are there for lies? I'm sick of them!”

  “Since when?”

  “For months I've been learning what my job really is, and wondering who, underneath it all, wants the results of it. One night last year I got stoned, alone, and while doing the dishes and listening to music I began to think what I was doing in the world – was I making it better or worse?”

  “Why care?”

  “For such a long time I'd wanted only to kill those I imagined responsible for the deaths of my father and Tim – when my contact called I'd beg for something more crucial, impacting, and he'd chuckle and say, ‘in time, in time.’ But every chance I got I'd ask, or read, or figure out, how American intelligence was structured, what we were doing against the communists. In my three trips to Thailand I met with newspaper editors in the guise of a freelancer doing stories on the Cambodian refugees beginning to pour into Thailand. My assignment, of course, was to find which editors and publishers were hostile to the States, but as part of my persona I had to spend some time with the refugees.”

  She pushed her plate away. “I've had it.” She put both hands over her face, silent. He watched her short black hair, tarry in the mirror behind her, the mirror put there to make the room seem larger. Why do we manipulate the world? In the mirror's reflection an obese man leaned into his meal at another table, a white napkin over his belly – like spring snow on a north-facing slope. Oh, to be in Montana again, or in the Himals, far from the cities. To be in the cold October wind off the Beartooths, the scent of elk and lodgepole in the high sharp air. Christ, she's crying – tears sliding down her hands.

  “C'mon Claire, don't reduce us to this. A lovers’ quarrel. La chamaille imaginaire. Don't make me leave.”

  She laughed, wiping her cheeks with the backs of her fingers. “You're crippled, silly. You can't leave.”

  “It seems you're always dependent on my being crippled.”

  She reached out a tear-wet hand to his. “Why are you so mean to me?”

  “I don't trust you.”

  “Don't you see how I've been had? By them? Myself? Unlike you, I'm not accepting it – interviewing those Cambodian refugees, all the things I'd been avoiding began to take form in my mind. Here were survivors by the thousands: shattered, bereaved families who'd been bombed by the U.S. Air Force every day for months, in a neutral country! At first I dismissed it as lies, but the more I saw the wounds, the agony, the heartache, the burned children and starving parents, I…” She shook her head. “It wasn't just they who suffered; I did, too. And I judged myself by the rules the U.S. taught at Nuremberg.”

  She squeezed his hand. “Since then I've learned more: the CIA battle to take over opium smuggling out of South Vietnam and Laos in the ‘60's – how we – the CIA – sold heroin to pay for operations Congress wouldn't fund, assassinations Congress didn't know about – the same heroin that ended up on the street in New York and Chicago and a thousand other places, addicting young Americans. And the Vietnam War, which killed my husband, was unleashed by the CIA yelling ‘Wolf! Wolf! – Communist! Communist!’ and the gullible Americans came running to protect the enormous CIA heroin networks and profits in Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam…”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Sam, try to realize the implications: I've been working for the very people responsible for Tim's death, and the deaths of fifty-five thousand other Americans and three million Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians! All these years, I've been living a falsehood, not just in the roles, the covers, but in my deepest motivations! I was living with a stranger, lying to myself while my self was lying to me. Sex, an occasional orgasm, hunger, thirst – they were the only parts of my life I couldn't prove false.”

  “Nobody's who they seem.”

  “Maybe. But good people don't try to be false – not to anyone! CIA people, and their likes in the KGB, in British Intelligence, any undercover operative of any sort, are consciously false. It's a way of life become a habit they can't break. With so many identities they lose the real one; there becomes no person underneath, just roles on top.”

  “That may be easier.”

  “But it's not alive! It isn't good.”

  He sat back. Her face, rouged by emotion, seemed swollen, her look accusatory, hounding. What right does she have to criticize me? Again she's twisti
ng things – I'm on the defensive. Is she straight or playing me? Until I know I have to assume the latter. “Tell me about Der Kapellmeister.”

  She paused. “Where'd you hear that?”

  “Answer me!”

  “I don't know who he is – but that's the name for the MAD liaison. It means bandleader.”

  “What's MAD?”

  “Acronym for West German military intelligence.”

  “Bandleader?”

  “Kapell in German means chapel, so it's chapel master, literally. Where'd you hear it?”

  “Mort mentioned it once to Lou.” He smiled. “I've gotta tell you, I don't buy your change of heart.”

  She sat more upright. “When?”

  “In Athens, for one. When suddenly you decided not to spy on me but be my buddy. ‘I'd begun to like you – don't ask me why,’ and all that.”

  She smiled. “I did a horrible thing, but I'm glad I did it.”

  “What's new about that?”

  “You don't have to be such a bastard, Sam. I do believe you feel sorry for yourself.”

  “I certainly feel sorry, but for other people. So what did you do?”

  “With your antibiotic I gave you something to make you speak openly – that you wouldn't remember the next day.” She snatched his hand, “I had to! I had to know if their story was real! When I learned who you were – that's when I decided to help you. My mistake was I should've told you right then. But my trade makes me hungry for reliability, for sureness, makes me conservative. Most everything I face is false; when I find the true, I don't trust it.”

  “After Africa what happened?”

  “Two weeks after that American died in the World Bank incident I was pulled back to Brussels. I spent another year and a half there, traveling occasionally to Thailand, and recently serving as girl friend to a British major.”