The Revisionists

by Thomas Mullen

  He kept it short: He had met a young Indonesian maid who was possibly being abused by a South Korean diplomat. He could prove nothing, but he let slip a few of the more telling details.

  “What did she say about her situation?” Bale asked.

  “Nothing. I think she was just so stunned I spoke Bahasa. But she took my name and number.”

  Rising eyebrows undid Bale’s poker face. “You get hers?”

  “No. She had a cell, but when it rang she seemed scared of it. I don’t think it was hers.”

  “Still, a diplomat beating a maid isn’t exactly illegal. Neither is keeping her chained in the basement and raping her—nothing they do is.”

  “But Korean men have their pride. It’s all about face with them. If we have something that could embarrass him—he’s beating this poor girl, or not paying her—that’s leverage.”

  “And if it turns out he’s raping her, that’s even more leverage, huh?”

  It was one of Washington’s dirty little secrets, how diplomats sometimes brought over servants from their home countries, usually immigrants there, whom they paid slave wages or no wages at all. Sometimes the servants were kept locked in the house, or were beaten, or worse. Diplomatic immunity protected their ambassadorial bosses, as did the fact that, usually, no one ever saw the servants or had any idea what was going on inside that charming Tudor in the Palisades. The Americans were hesitant to raise a stink, as their own people working abroad were hardly without fault. Leo knew from experience that American diplomats hired entire crews of locals for pennies a day, and often the young women’s services extended to duties more physical than dusting. The moral line was fuzzy when national borders were crossed, and no one wanted to lose his own perks by eliminating someone else’s.

  Bale leaned back in his seat. “Even if it’s really egregious, the worst we could do is pass it on to State, and they can complain and maybe the diplomat gets reassigned.”

  “I’m not saying we should bust the guy, just scare him. Let him know we know what he’s doing, see what we can get out of him if he’s afraid he’ll be reassigned to Uzbekistan. But even before that—what if I can run the maid, get her to eavesdrop around the house, see if she can copy some documents or clone a laptop? That worth anything to anyone?”

  TES, Leo had been told many times, was in the business of collecting information. Usually this was done for a specific client, most often a government one, but that didn’t mean the company’s employees couldn’t snoop for themselves. Sometimes they sought out information simply because it was there and they could get it; they liked to hoard what they learned, as one never knew what someone else might one day find valuable. It was entrepreneurial intelligence—a growing field now that the government espiocracy was drowning in liquid cash but thirsting for information.

  Leo hadn’t meant to say anything about Sari, had still been weighing the best way to handle it. But Bale’s condescending tone had left him needing to prove himself.

  “Anything we could use on a Korean is gold these days,” Bale mused. “The guys on North Korea? They have nothing. It’s like that country doesn’t exist. You think we’re bad in the Arab states, Jesus, North Korea is the fucking moon.”

  Leo waited.

  “Was she pretty?”

  Somehow Leo had known Bale would ask that. “Yes.”

  Bale smiled. “Why hire ugly domestic help? Gotta admire the balls, you know?” He shook his head. “Grocery stores are fascinating windows. I saw a black guy hit his kid in a Safeway once. Kid was maybe five or six. In the produce section. His kid asked him something I didn’t quite hear, and bam, dude whales on the kid’s shoulder, one blow, knocks him on his ass. Kid just started howling. Crazy things happen in grocery stores.” He stared into space for a moment. “How do you know her boss is Korean?”

  “Checked her plates.”

  “She was cute, huh? Followed her into the parking lot and everything.”

  “Just curious.”

  “I know a lot of guys love doing the Asian thing, but those chicks are too petite for me. Nothing to hold on to while you bang ’em, you know?”

  Leo figured he was supposed to nod, so he did.

  “What would your next step be if I was to approve this?”

  “I think she’s going to call me. I think she’s thrilled to have discovered someone in this city she can talk to. But she’s probably watched, so she’ll skulk off to the phone late one night. If she calls me, I can—”

  “Their phones might be tapped.”

  “I’ll keep it brief, invite her to meet me again.”

  “She probably isn’t allowed out very much.”

  “So I meet her on her next grocery run, or at the dry cleaner’s, or wherever.”

  Bale nodded. “Don’t tip your hand yet. I want to do some digging on the diplomat first.”

  Leo recited the tags and Bale said he’d talk to some people. With that, Leo was dismissed, off to another day trolling the paranoid sites of the leftist mind.

  The people at the party were talking about reality.

  “The wars aren’t real to us,” one of them said. “I mean, it’s something that happens to other people, far away. None of us are in the military or even know anyone who is. We’re totally detached. This is the horrible thing about it. It makes it somehow unreal.”

  They all nodded. Leo had just walked into the kitchen in search of the booze. He reminded himself he was supposed to be having fun.

  He’d been back in D.C. for weeks and hadn’t done anything more social than see a few movies alone and then loiter in Kramerbooks hoping to bump into a hot-librarian type. Which never happened. Most of his friends from the Agency were stationed abroad, or were too busy to meet up, or were distrustful enough to concoct excuses. This left the old friends from his earlier life, people he had cut off for years. He’d bumped into one of them, a friend from Harvard named John, on the Metro the other day. John knew a bunch of other Harvard pals who lived in D.C.; they were having a party in a few nights, Leo should totally come by.

  So here he was, in a cramped Glover Park apartment that struggled to contain all the brilliant theories and witty takes on society that its partyers were offering. There were a few old faces from college and grad school, some of whom Leo remembered fondly and others he remembered less fondly.

  Interpol and Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand and other retro-eighties impostors were jangling on the speakers, and at one point Leo hovered on the periphery of a fierce debate about whether such bands were fabulous reinventors of a once-neglected sound or apologists for a horrible, horrible decade.

  All the attractive women wore the same glasses and were attached to boring men.

  John was now an associate professor of American Studies at GW. He’d just helped his chances of winning tenure by publishing a novel of which several newspapers’ book critics were very fond. The party was a sort of celebration for this. When Leo arrived at the party, he’d asked John what the book was about, and John had answered, “Real life.”

  He went on, “It’s about real people, you know, there’s this family, the eldest kid is a graduate student, the younger one wants to be in a band, and the father is a financial analyst having an affair with his secretary. It’s kind of about all of them and also about this illegal immigrant one of them hits with their car.”

  Leo was desperate for a smoke. Smoking had almost been a requirement for every important social interaction in Indonesia; he’d surely erased years of his life standing on street corners and sitting in cafés and restaurants sharing cigarettes with prospective agents. Ever since returning to D.C., he’d been trying to quit, which was yet another reason he felt jittery and uncomfortable at this weirdly smoke-free party.

  He attempted to smile when meeting new people and tried to remember the way one was supposed to act at soirees like this. It had been his job to meet people in Jakarta, of course, but the circumstances were quite different. Tonight’s crowded bookshelves and philosophical
air and loud music and spirit of very safe adventure (Let’s get wasted in the city!) were familiar. Yet the women’s low-rise jeans and the men’s snug T-shirts were evidence of the stylistic changes a few years could bring, as were the occasional gray hairs and bald spots. This was the real life Leo could have had. It was as though he’d slipped into a slightly broken time-travel machine and emerged in a new time on an alternate path.

  He wondered if there was something wrong with him. If what he had done in Indonesia, and what he had witnessed in his brief trips to the satellite locations, had scarred him somehow. He had chosen his new life and rejected this one. Then the new life had rejected him.

  “When people complain about Washington,” a young adjunct politics professor at Georgetown was saying, “what are they really complaining about? The people of the District of Columbia? No; we have nothing to do with national politics—we don’t even have a vote in Congress, thank you very much. No, they’re complaining about the congressmen and senators. But guess where those people come from? Not from D.C. No, they send those congressmen and senators to our town. The politicians they all claim to hate are their politicians, not from Washington but from the fifty states, from their own hometowns and districts. So when people bitch about Washington, they’re really bitching about themselves. They’re bitching about democracy.”

  “They don’t want democracy,” someone else said, “they all want a tyranny of their own desires. A despotism of their personal politics.”

  A few drinks in and Leo was ready to leave. He walked up to John and tried to find a polite way of bowing out.

  “What was it you were doing in Indonesia, man?” John asked him. They were in a circle with John’s friends.

  Leo had lied to his school buddies about his job. They were landing fellowships and teaching positions and gigs at research firms, and he’d told them he was taking a job doing risk analysis for some international conglomerate in Asia.

  Leo retold the old lies, hoping they were the same lies he’d given them those many years ago.

  “Very vague, Mr. Hastings,” John said, his cheeks red with drink. “Very suspicious. It’s like, the other day, I met a guy at a party, a big guy, and when I asked what he did he said, ‘I work with the Justice Department,’ and that’s it. Like, basically saying, I do things you aren’t allowed to know about, and leave it at that.”

  “It’s a weird city,” Leo conceded.

  John drunkenly put his hand on Leo’s shoulder and faced the group, as if forgetting that he’d already introduced Leo to them a couple of hours ago. “This is my pal Leo, and though he says he did some obscure sort of business work in Indonesia, he was most likely a CIA agent.”

  Leo wondered if John could feel his shoulder muscles tense up.

  “So you were a waterboarder!” one of them said with a wasted smile.

  “Is it true we were torturing monks in Thailand,” another asked, perhaps only half in jest, “pulling out their fingernails?”

  “We didn’t really waterboard them,” Leo said. “We dunked them in vats of our own urine. Sometimes we poured boiling oil down their nostrils. I personally chopped off their ears. Although it’s not really chopping; you kind of have to saw them off.”

  The music was still terse and frenetic but the faces pointed at him were silent.

  “Nice meeting you all.” He walked toward the door.

  Leo was outside wondering how often cabs visited this neighborhood when John hurried after him, jacketless shoulders huddled against the cold.

  “Dude, you okay?”

  “I’m fine, just tired. Thanks for having me. Your friends are great.”

  “I’m sorry if what I said was out of line. I just meant it as a joke, you know. You kind of disappeared, for years, and I just thought—”

  “Just thought what?”

  John seemed to be shrinking. “I just thought I was being funny.”

  “You were.” Leo paused. “Have fun with your real life, John. I hope nothing fake ever intrudes on it.”

  If he’d seen an old cigarette butt on the ground, he would have picked it up and lit it, but there was none. He’d walked a few blocks toward Wisconsin when his cell started ringing. He didn’t want to answer, figuring it was John or someone else calling from the party. On the third ring he took it out and checked the number, which he didn’t recognize. He answered it anyway.

  “Hello, is this Leo?” she asked in Bahasa, and he stopped walking.

  5.

  Lately, chains of events had become confusing to Tasha. Everything seemed connected, and twisted; it was hard to discern where one event ended and the ramifications began. But if she had to figure out what had brought her to Troy Jones and Leo Hastings, and to all her subsequent troubles, it was not the vigil by the White House but an event a few weeks earlier than that, the day she’d taken both a physical and figurative walk away from her job and discovered the forgotten memorial.

  Walking was what she’d been doing with whatever free time she’d had since Marshall died. Walking along the buckling brick sidewalks of Capitol Hill, where she’d bought a row house a year ago; strolling north of the Mall through the cold shadows of the office buildings, where she worked; trudging up Meridian Hill and into the gentrifying frenzy of Columbia Heights, where she’d been born. Her parents lived out in P.G. County now, had moved there in the eighties after fifteen years of fallout from the riots had finally turned them against their once-beloved city. She walked the old neighborhoods, seeing some familiar faces and many new ones; the racial makeup was changing, the former homes of African Americans now welcoming the whites and the Latinos, the multicolored row houses themselves not seeming to care but the old-timers on the stoops looking skeptical. She spent hours walking, hours she should have been billing for the firm, her feet wasting the potential for thousands of dollars, her very self nothing but a financial pedometer in reverse. She would return home after a few hours, her feet sore and her head worse. Sometimes she would cry somewhere, hopefully in an inconspicuous spot, the back of a chain bookstore or on one of the overlooked benches that the District placed beside the third-tier statues—Taft, or maybe Gandhi—that no one ever looked at.

  On this particular Sunday, weeks prior to the White House vigil, she had been working at the firm. She and five other young associates were in a conference room exhuming boxes of documents provided by one of their clients, GTK Industries, a sprawling conglomerate that made and built and sold and did more things than even the most anal of accountants could keep track of. Among GTK’s many other pursuits, it earned a fortune as a contractor for the wars, building army camps in the desert, shipping food to the soldiers, erecting cellular towers, and setting up satellite TV hookups to provide the overworked troops with some entertainment. Tasha had handled various projects for the client, and she’d always felt a strange fondness for the work, a sense that it kept her closer to her brother. It felt different now.

  GTK was having a dispute with a subcontractor that provided its ships with oil for their long voyages to the Middle East. Rates were not what had been promised; surcharges had added up mysteriously. Unseemly opportunism and perhaps even foul play hidden in the fog of war were suspected. The lawyers were trying to determine if the subcontractor’s fluctuating oil rates were legit—if the contracts had possibly provided the subcontractor with legitimate loopholes—or if GTK should threaten legal action.

  Tasha had already spent many hours that week learning about the intricacies of international marine transport laws and treaties, and poring over contracts, e-mails, correspondence, and other files. Her skull felt numb from reading things that weren’t relevant or were relevant but really, really boring.

  It was past one and she hadn’t had lunch yet when she read, and then reread, a certain e-mail exchange.

  “Hey, Jill,” she said to her coworker, “read through these and tell me what you think.”

  She and Jill had attended GW Law together, had crammed and quizzed each other and co
nsumed far too much espresso together, had uproariously celebrated each academic and then professional milestone with nights of dancing at Dream and the Eighteenth Street Lounge. They’d interviewed at the firm the same day and for the past two years had served as each other’s bodyguards and shrinks as they tried to survive the long hours and intense pace.

  Jill read the e-mails, Tasha guiding her through them chronologically.

  “I think this isn’t material,” Jill finally said. “Nothing about the subcontractor or the dispute.”

  “I know. But, Jesus.”

  The e-mails were linked to cost-benefit analyses and noted that GTK could save millions of dollars on shipping if it delayed the processing of one of the government’s orders by a few weeks. Tasha knew from other research that the shipment in question consisted of bulletproof vests, ammunition, and other matériel. There was even a tidy back-and-forth between two midlevel executives, one of them positing the theory that it might be unethical to delay items deemed essential by the grunts in the desert, the other exec assuring him that this was a simple business decision, and if the dollars made sense, the company should do it.

  “We gotta focus, Tash. I want to be home in time for the Skins game.” Jill handed back the files.

  “You can’t tell me you don’t think this is wrong. People probably died because of this.”

  She felt her throat tightening, and Jill looked at her. “Sweetie, come on.” Jill put a hand on her friend’s arm, squeezed it. “I know what it makes you think. But we’re stressed as hell and you’re connecting dots you shouldn’t. You need to put that away now, and keep your mind on this, okay?”

  All she could do was nod.

  “Maybe you should get lunch, clear your head a minute.”

  They were surrounded by boxes and stacks of paper, and at the far end of the conference room four other associates were reading and scribbling, oblivious to this drama. Tasha felt herself nodding as she floated toward the elevator, dazed.