American Spy

by Lauren Wilkinson

  After I dropped the kid near a second roundabout, one closer to downtown, we continued south to the farm. The second I saw my mother’s home in the distance, the tension in my jaw started to recede—I hadn’t even been aware of the grip it had on me until I felt it diminish. We were almost to safety.

  The property was split in two by the main road and enclosed on both sides by barbed wire. White cows dotted the pasture, which was brown and a little dry looking but still lovely. The farmhouse was at the top of a crest—one of my many reasons for going there. The sweeping vantage point would give me a strategic advantage if anyone came looking for me. I made the sharp turn and climbed up the driveway lined with large green aloe plants, the Peugeot’s toy motor whining pitifully even in first gear. I parked beside my mother’s same old truck, we got out and crossed toward the house. I let us inside.

  Comfortingly, the living room was just as I remembered it: overrun by tropical plants and rattan. On the far wall were a pair of brown floor-to-ceiling plantation shutters, and a doorway that led to the kitchen. Your grandmother was in there, humming along to the radio. I could smell bacon. A pan clattered against the burner.

  “Agathe,” I called. She strode into the living room, rubbing her hands on her apron, and after I’d hugged her tightly she examined my bruises and lightly touched my cheek, her face knotted with worry.

  “I know it looks bad,” I said in French. “I tried to tell you.”

  She nodded. “You’re my child. It hurts to see you all bruised up. Even with a warning.”

  It felt like I was being cruel by confronting her with the reality of what had happened. I wished I could’ve gone off somewhere to hide, to bear the burden of it alone. I wanted to protect her, as I wanted to protect you, and hated that I couldn’t.

  “Say hello,” I said to you boys.

  “I’m your grandma,” she said, using the word mémé. She bent down, and you both gave her a perfunctory kiss on the cheek. Tommy, you seemed shy, as you always were with strangers. I didn’t think either of you remembered her.

  “They still speak French, right?” She stood. “They understood me?”

  I nodded. “They’re just exhausted. Especially William. His ears were hurting him on the plane. He couldn’t sleep.”

  “No, I’m not,” you said in French, William. “I’m not tired.”

  “How about you?” Agathe asked.

  “I’m fine. I think.” I was still feeling nothing at all.

  She asked if you two were hungry and led you to the kitchen for breakfast. I sat on the sofa. Inhaled and exhaled slowly. At my mother’s house, two thousand miles away from Connecticut, I finally felt like I was out of danger. I was suddenly exhausted. Unable to keep my eyes open, I lay down on the sofa.

  When I woke up it was dark. I leaped to my feet, alarmed at having let my guard down, then followed your voices out to the back patio. Your grandmother was telling you a bedtime story. Poochini’s tail thumped against the concrete as I stepped outside. You two were already in your pajamas, squeezed in together on the wicker sofa with Agathe.

  “Maman!” Tommy called.

  Looking at my watch, I was astonished to learn I’d slept for twelve hours. “Why didn’t you wake me?”

  “I’m surprised they didn’t. They tore up the living room this afternoon. And you slept through a huge argument over absolutely nothing. I mean tears, screaming. The works.”

  I sat on the ground next to Poochini. “Sounds like you had fun today.”

  “You were dead to the world. You must’ve needed the rest.” My mother sounded pleased as she added: “Their French is good!”

  “We are French at home,” you said, William.

  “I try to get them to speak it with me so they retain it,” I said.

  “Does that work?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Maman, what are stars?” Tommy, you asked this.

  I looked up at the sky. I don’t think you’d ever seen so many before. At night here, we could see more of them than I even knew to imagine when I was growing up in New York, and it made me feel good to think you had just a little more knowledge, a little more access to the world than I did when I was your age.

  I started to explain, muddling something about them being big balls of gas and heat and light, that the sun was also a star, that the stars were like our sun but they looked small to us because they were so far away. By the time I’d finished, you were thoroughly confused.

  “Mémé said—she says Daddy’s a star. Now he is ’cause he died.” Tommy, you said this in that matter-of-fact way of yours. You added, “What star is he?”

  I’d been anticipating questions about your father since you first learned to talk, but not that one. Annoyed, I looked at my mother. It had only taken her half a day to start filling your heads with her particular brand of spiritual hokum. She read my expression and gave me a small, apologetic smile. “They were asking what happens after you die. For obvious reasons.”

  “Is that bad man a star?” Tommy asked, apparently finding the logic in this more appealing than what I’d just told you.

  “I don’t know,” I said pointedly to Agathe. “Mémé, is he?”

  “No,” she said. “If you’re bad, you don’t become one. You come back to Earth to try again to be good.”

  “Where’s that photo album I gave you?” I asked. It was in her room.

  “Let me show you a picture of your daddy before he became a star,” I said when I returned to the porch, grudgingly endorsing my mother’s fiction. I pulled a photo from the album, the one of my sister and a soldier in uniform. William, you’re too quick for me. You slipped off the sofa and managed to pluck it from my hand. I watched as you brought it close to your face and inspected it in the lamplight.

  “Be careful!” your brother scolded as he came over and tried to snatch the picture from you. I took it, told you to get on the sofa and sit nicely. Crouching in front of you, I held the photo out so you both could see. “That’s him and Aunt Helene.”

  “Is she a star?” William asked. “She is,” Agathe said.

  “ ’Cause Daddy’s a star why—umm…” William, you covered your upper lip with your tongue for a moment as you thought. “Why can’t he come back?”

  “You mean, after you die, why can’t you come back and be alive again?”

  You nodded.

  “That’s a hard one,” I admitted. “Why’d he die?” William asked. “That’s a hard one too.”

  The nature and quantity of the questions you ask are staggering. As is how much the both of you talk. Until you came along, I hadn’t realized how quiet my life had been. As I was trying to figure out what else to tell you, Tommy, you put your hand on my cheek. “Maman?”

  I looked down at your sweetly stern little face.

  “Don’t be sad.”

  I smiled at the seriousness of the command. It made me think of how much like your father you are. You believe you can correct me, my feelings, purely through the force of your will. That impulse at its most essential is what your father understood love to be. And, William, you are just as full of energy as he was. Just as fast. Just as impatient. Just as generous. I wondered all the time what kind of men you’d be. I hoped that if I could help you focus all that energy and will, you’d be as extraordinary as your dad was.

  “Okay. For you,” I said, and kissed your cheek.

  That was yesterday evening. Later, Tommy, you woke up from a nightmare screaming and scared the hell out of your brother. I went to your room to bring you water and rub your back, then lay at the foot of the bed you’re sharing until you both fell back asleep.

  Now it’s early in the morning. It’s dark out, and the house is still. Agathe is asleep in my uncle’s old room because she insisted I stay in hers, which is much larger and across the hall from yours. The furniture here is
all oversized. Resting on the giant vanity is the only artifact from our house in Queens, a framed photo that my father took during his photography phase.

  It’s from Christmas 1962. I’d wanted our Airedale, Bunny, to wear a Santa cap for the picture, so to please me, Helene is trying (and failing) to keep him from shaking it off his head. Bunny’s a brown blur, and she’s glaring at him in openmouthed frustration. I’m grinning though. Helene was like a little mother to me: always more dedicated to my happiness than to her own. It’s my favorite photo of us.

  Last night on the porch, I told you your daddy died because he was in a war, that he was in a plane and it got shot down. What I said corresponded with what I’d already told Agathe: Your father was an American soldier who’d died in the line of duty, and his family wanted nothing to do with us. I knew my mother didn’t believe that cover, because I wouldn’t have believed it. Every lie I’d told her about your father has come with a silent dare for her to call me on it. She never has.

  I’d found the picture I showed you in one of the boxes of my sister’s things that Pop was storing in her room.

  In it she’s in her backyard in North Carolina poised over a decrepit barbecue with tongs. The man in the photo is smiling and holding a beer and looking down at whatever’s smoking on the grill. He’s handsome. The only thing I know about him is his name. Ray. I’m a hypocrite. How can I be annoyed with your grandmother for telling you a fairy tale, then turn around and do the same thing?

  I’ve pulled my mother’s armchair up to the vanity, and I’m sitting here, trying to put as much of our story down on paper as possible before you wake up. While I can’t explain why death is irreversible, I can explain why your father died. I can explain who he really was and what he meant to me. I can tell you who sent that man to our house and why. I’m writing this to give you honest answers to the questions I hazard to guess you’ll ask while you’re growing up. I’m writing it all down here just in case I’m not around to tell you.

  2

  NEW YORK, 1987

  I WAS A SPECIAL AGENT IN THE FBI from 1983 to 1987, and in that time CIA hired me twice as a temporary contractor, the phrase they use for spy. That’s how I met your father.

  After my training at Quantico, I was assigned to the Indianapolis field office, where I had to put in two years as a first-office agent, the bureau’s version of a rookie, before I could transfer. I chose New York, my hometown, as my officer preference, and was surprised to get it. I’d assumed it was popular, but as it turned out, New York was understaffed. Few agents wanted to be in the city because it was too expensive and because of the rumors that circulated through the other field offices about New York agents being mugged while working surveillance.

  Our field office was the largest in the bureau. At the time, I was one of the more than twelve hundred agents in my department alone. I was a part of the Intelligence division, intelligence being a misnomer that the bureau has since corrected. Our division was actually concerned with counterintelligence; officially speaking we were supposed to be working to combat espionage, not engaging in it. On a personal note, I considered the name inaccurate because the division wasn’t exactly a brain trust.

  A sense of self-importance permeated the culture. So did machismo and knee-jerk conservatism. To get by, I told my colleagues that I didn’t care about politics, which felt like a ridiculous thing to claim. They bought it though. Very few of those men understood having no choice about whether they were political or not: Unlike me, they weren’t people who’d had their existence politicized on their behalf.

  Although New York’s Criminal division was better represented on film and in television, in the mid-eighties Intelligence was more active and better funded. One of the balms being applied to a Cold War–chafed public was a major influx in funding and support of the bureau’s counterintelligence programs. DC’s field office and our own got the lion’s share of the money. We were stewards of the two regions that boasted, by leagues, the highest concentrations of suspected KGB agents in the country.

  I started at the New York field office in 1985, which the newspapers called the “Year of the Spy.” Eight major spy arrests had been made public that year. After each story broke, you’d watch interviews on the nightly news of people out in the middle of nowhere reacting to them. They’d talk about the precautions they were now taking, the suspicions they had of people who weren’t like them. And of course it was crazy: What exactly would it earn the KGB to infiltrate Betty Johnson’s prayer meeting in Great Falls, Montana? But the fear that it could happen was so present in so many minds that it dictated lives. It was an awe-inspiring thing. And more than a little frightening.

  Don’t let me suggest that I was completely immune to spy fever. I followed the Sharon Scranage case particularly closely because she was the only black woman among the eight, and it was the first time an American had been caught spying for an African intelligence outlet. The case suggested a broader and deeper scope to CIA’s covert operations in West Africa than I’d ever considered before.

  Scranage, who’d been a CIA clerk in Ghana, had been the target of a honeypot. Can you imagine? It was an absolutely wild, cinematic story that just so happened to be 100 percent true. She’d leaked the names of more than a half-dozen CIA employees and informants to her boyfriend, Michael Soussoudis, who turned out to be a Ghanaian intelligence officer. He was also related to the head of state, Jerry Rawlings, who’d assigned Soussoudis the operation because he believed CIA was trying to orchestrate a coup in the country. Looking back, it’s hard to accuse Rawlings of baseless paranoia.

  The field office was in the Jacob Javits building, which was located in an especially barren part of lower Manhattan, down near the Brooklyn Bridge and Tweed courthouse. As a kid I’d read something about the courthouse that has stuck with me my entire life: In the nineteenth century, Boss Tweed had used its construction as a pretext to embezzle millions from New York State. When they finally got around to trying him for that crime, they did it in the courthouse named after him. How hilarious an irony—here was a city government building celebrating one of the most corrupt members in its history. To be a New Yorker was to be assaulted from every possible angle by political double-dealing and corporate deception. It was quite literally built into the architecture of the place. In general, New Yorkers weren’t afraid of outsiders—KGB agents—moving into town and betraying the public trust. Not when we had such a rich history of insiders doing it.

  My division was on the twenty-sixth floor. I worked in a large, open-plan room scattered with chocolate-colored desks and busy with scurrying men in white shirts and black ties. Mr. Ali, my father’s friend, had one of the few offices. My boss, the assistant special agent in charge—or ASAC—had another. Rick Gold was a squat, thick-necked man who looked like he might’ve been a high school athlete, maybe a wrestler, but had since let himself go to pot.

  I didn’t like him. During my first division meeting at the office, he’d interrupted himself during a briefing to ask me to run to the kitchen and get him a cup of coffee. Everyone in the room had laughed.

  “I’ll bring you back a mug of something, sir,” I’d answered, tucking my anger as far into my chest as it would go. “But don’t expect it all to be coffee.”

  There was a beat before Gold laughed at that. The rest of the men in the room joined in, and my training agent called out over the clamor: “Watch it, Ricky, that coffee’s gonna come back looking yellow!”

  I pretended to laugh too, compelled to prove that although I was a woman, I wasn’t a killjoy. None of it was funny though, and I mean that as a statement of fact, not opinion: The basic premise of my training agent’s joke didn’t make sense, and Gold’s was an embarrassing cliché.

  My ASAC in Indianapolis had treated me well. In New York, Gold’s behavior set a bad precedent in the office; my colleagues were emboldened by his obvious lack of respect for me. I was delib
erately excluded from operational meetings and told it was because men were better at that kind of planning. I was left off certain surveillance squads, because agents “didn’t feel safe” with me backing them up.

  I’d fought my way into a few surveillance operations, but most of my work was concerned with recruiting informants. That and filling out oppressive amounts of paperwork—above all else the FBI is a sprawling, creaking bureaucracy.

  Having Gold as a boss was stalling my career. But transferring out of New York would’ve felt like he’d won, and I was too competitive for that. So I was biding my time. I believed I would eventually get around Gold by outsmarting him.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS LATE IN the morning, but I was still home. I had plans to meet one of my informants at Pan Pan, a diner a few blocks north of my apartment, and head down to the field office in the afternoon.

  Pan Pan was on the corner of 135th and Lenox, just a few blocks north of my apartment. I liked the place; the easy warmth of the women employed there and the food they served gave it a distinctly southern charm.

  I walked in and sat at one of the U-shaped sienna tables. When the waitress approached to ask what I wanted, I ordered my usual lunch—a cup of coffee and a large fruit cup—then glanced out the wide windows. The day was warm and overcast; it looked like it was going to rain. There was still no sign of my snitch.

  You might be surprised to learn how often I met my snitches in diners. The conversations we had looked (and generally were) boring, which I’d found was as good a security measure as total privacy.

  In the two years that I’d been at the New York field office, I’d recruited a respectable number of informants and a couple of “hip pockets,” guys I had no administrative file on but touched base with every once in a while. Aisha was the only woman. Actually, as far as I am aware, she was the only female informant developed by any agent in my division while I was there.