The Revisionists

by Thomas Mullen

  My boss followed me to my desk and stood a few feet away. At the end of the hallway, a briefing room was filled with analysts who wanted to chat with me, presumably about things Dalton had said in his Dark Room, but I was wondering if I myself was a target now. Or Cemby. I told myself not to sit there stewing, not to let myself get nervous. I picked up the comm and called her.

  It was midmorning and she sounded tired, an extra exhalation when she said hello. Like she was letting go of something.

  “How was Laurynn this morning?” I asked.

  “Normal.” Our daughter had developed an aversion to waking up on time; Cemby literally pulled her out of bed to get her ready for school, she told me. They’d had to eat breakfast in the pod.

  I told her I was sorry she’d had to do so much on her own and that I loved her. I mentioned that the project I’d gotten sucked into was going to keep sucking at me for another day, possibly longer.

  “They’re letting you sleep at least?”

  “A little. In shifts. I’m okay, it’s nothing serious. They just want me here until it’s over. I’ll get a few off days next month in return. Maybe we can escape the city for a vacation.”

  “Are you all right? You sound sad.”

  “Just a temporary crash.” I wondered how long it would be until she found out about her father. I wondered how quickly she’d realize that I had known during this call.

  I wondered what she knew about what her father was doing, and I hated myself for thinking that.

  She said she had to go, she was late on a deadline of her own. On my vidder was a still image of her from a few weeks earlier—video calls were banned in the office, for obvious reasons. In the image she was smiling, her arm around Laurynn, who grinned beside her like a miniature, idealized version of Cemby.

  I told her, “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right. I understand.”

  I couldn’t tell her what I was really apologizing for. One of the analysts was already walking to my desk to hurry me along.

  She told me she loved me too, and I didn’t realize that I’d never hear her say that again.

  * * *

  After dinner (I surprise, and borderline amaze, Tasha by confessing that I’m vegetarian) and a gratuitous dessert, we step outside, the air cool and the wind surprisingly strong. Her braids snap against my face for a moment. We walk alongside each other and she holds my hand. I hadn’t expected that and I tense up despite myself.

  “We should do this again sometime,” she says. I’m not even sure where we’re walking.

  “That would be great.” Wanting to tell her, You have so little time. But thank you for tonight just the same.

  Traffic is sparse and the only pedestrians on the street are hurrying toward the shelter of a Metro station or an ATM kiosk. No suspicious watchers are loitering anywhere I can see.

  “Do you have a phone number yet?” she asks.

  Technically I don’t, but I’ve trolled the network for dead numbers and have appropriated one for my own use, linking it to an internal switch in my brain. I even set up a voice-mail greeting, so I give her the number. She says she’ll call me soon.

  She leans in and kisses me, a peck, but not a quick one. Funny how similar certain rituals are through time. I wonder if it’s attraction she feels or just pity, if she sees in me something she needs, or if the story about my wife and daughter has made her feel sorry for me, sorry enough for this consolation prize. But I do feel consoled.

  And then she’s stepping into a cab that has magically appeared before us, and she’s gone. I stand and watch the taillights fade.

  “Enjoying yourself, Zed?”

  I must have been standing here and staring for longer than I thought, because I didn’t even hear him coming. He’s good at what he does. We all are.

  “Having fun with all that 21st-century womanhood has to offer?” he continues, not smiling. I don’t recognize the face—he too has had his appearance altered—but I do recognize the voice. He has a not entirely time-appropriate fedora pulled low over his eyes, and a dark trench coat. I’ve seen a few of the black contemps dress like this, but not many.

  “Wills?” If I look closely into his eyes, I can recognize him, despite what the Engineers have done to the rest of his face. “What are you doing in my beat?”

  “Funny,” he says, glancing up and down the street. “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

  13.

  When Leo’s cell rang at 11:45 one night, he knew who it was before he checked the caller ID. He answered with hello in Bahasa.

  “Hello.” Her voice quiet, as it was the last time. “I’m sorry, am I calling too late?”

  “No, no, it’s fine.” He’d been staying up late all week, hoping she’d call. “How are you?”

  “I am well.” She was a good liar—that would help. “Um, I was wondering if you’d like to meet me again tomorrow?”

  “Of course. What time?”

  “I think it will be three o’clock. The mistress wants the shopping finished before dinner—she’ll probably send me when the twins are napping.”

  “Has she given you the grocery list yet?”

  “No. But she’ll be away in the afternoon when I leave, so she’ll have to give it to me before then, sometime in the morning.”

  “Call me as soon as you get the list. If I don’t answer, leave a message and read the entire list—call a second time if it cuts you off. I’ll buy everything and have it ready in my car.” He’d already bought four large coolers and ice packs to keep things cold.

  “She always asks me for the receipt.”

  “I’ll give it to you. Does she give you a credit card or cash?”

  “Cash.”

  Perfect. He’d just tear off the bottom of the receipt where it showed time of purchase.

  “What if someone sees me driving where I’m not supposed to?”

  He assured her he’d thought everything out. He told her to get a pencil and paper, then told her she should drive the first few minutes as if heading to Whole Foods. Next he narrated a detour to a parking lot near Logan Circle, where they’d be able to talk. He told her not to bring her phone, and reminded her to turn it off as soon as they finished this call.

  “I’m still not sure this is a good idea,” she said. “I, I appreciate your concern, but if she were to find out—”

  “You have to trust me. This is the best way to get you out of there. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  Another pause. He worried he’d overplayed his hand. Slow down, he reminded himself. Let her think she’s the one coming to you.

  “Of course.”

  “Good. Just call me as soon as you get that list.”

  “All right. Thank you.”

  He hung up. They’d been on the phone for three minutes. His heart was pounding and he had too much adrenaline to think about sleep. He poured himself a bourbon. It was too late to catch the Wizards or the Caps, so he turned the TV to cable news and watched some war.

  He followed her to the parking lot the next day. He’d already shopped at Whole Foods, put the perishables in his coolers, and driven back to Mount Pleasant, where he waited two blocks from the diplomat’s house. After twenty minutes he saw the familiar black SUV with diminutive Sari visible through the windshield. He let her pass and waited for another car to fill in between them before he pulled out, curious if anyone was following her. No one was, other than himself.

  Traffic was thickening, the long bell curve of D.C.’s rush hour beginning to spike two full hours before its peak. The drive took fifteen minutes, exactly what he’d thought it would. He had timed her departure and knew when she would be expected back at the house.

  His chosen parking lot was in the back of an elementary school that had recently closed due to a collapsed roof. Utility trucks and a crane sat outside the building, but there were no workers and hadn’t been for days—the school system’s limited repairs budget had been diverted to a high school in Northeast th
at had caught fire last week. Leo parked his Accord alongside Sari’s SUV. He smiled at her, then motioned for her to get in shotgun of his car. He doubted the SUV was bugged, but there was no reason to chance it.

  Her hair was pulled back, and again some of the strands had broken free. She was wearing a black hoodie and matching sweatpants, both of which actually fit. She looked like any Asian American student at Georgetown or GW, rushing from class to the gym in mommy and daddy’s eighteenth-birthday present, just off the phone with her buds to coordinate which bars to hit that night. He wondered if she had any idea how stunning she was. And he wondered how much longer she’d look this good with a life like hers.

  The last time he’d seen her, she had seemed less nervous around him. Her black eye had completely faded, though a certain puffiness of exhaustion had been evident. Still, he had been struck by her beauty. Simply getting to sit with her, being allowed to look into her eyes for those few minutes, felt like a gift he didn’t deserve. He’d had to tell himself to stop leering, to stay focused.

  His good-bye kiss on her cheek had been pure impulse. And desire. It was stupid, as it risked scaring her away. He’d spent the next few hours of that day regretting the kiss. And then later, trying to fall asleep, he’d spent the rest of the night imagining all the other things he would have liked to do afterward.

  So, in his car with her now, he was relieved by the genuine smile she wore when she said, “Hello, Leo.”

  She was brave to be doing this. Or stupid, or desperate. Getting in the car of a man she didn’t know well, in a country she didn’t understand. He tried to imagine what it was like to be an immigrant, one of the only people of your kind in this vast and challenging land, always in the midst of situations whose designs perplexed you. Spooks were supposed to be trained for exactly this kind of disorientation, but they had no idea. Those classes should be taught not by case officers but by first-generation Americans: This is how it feels to stumble off the boat. This is how it feels to smile dumbly when someone says something you don’t follow. This is how it feels to have no friends.

  He asked how she was, what she thought of the encroaching winter. He noticed that she sat with her hands pressed together tightly, her thin fingers obviously chilled even though the air felt comfortably crisp to him, football weather.

  One of the plastic grocery bags settled behind them, and she turned her head at the sound of the crinkling. She thanked him again for doing her shopping.

  “How much did she give you to pay for them?” he asked.

  She told him, he did the math, then he handed her some change and told her to keep what the mistress had given her. She looked frightened by the offer.

  “I shouldn’t keep that. If they found it…”

  He nodded, told her to forget it. She handed him the grocery money.

  “I have a question for you,” he said. “You told me you’re working for that couple against your will. I want you to tell me what you’d want if you could have anything. Anything at all. Do you want to be back in Seoul? Do you have family in Indonesia you want to be with? Any family you need to care for?”

  She gazed outside. “It’s complicated.”

  “Do you want to go back to Jakarta?”

  She thought for a moment, then shook her head.

  “Do you want to go back to Seoul?”

  She waited again. “It’s where my sisters are, but… I don’t really know them anymore. Soon they’ll marry anyway, and I’d be on my own there.”

  “Do you want to stay in America?”

  “I don’t know anyone here.”

  This was going to be harder than he’d thought.

  These sorts of barters required clear goals. Even if the other side’s goal was obscured by lies and subterfuge, even if you didn’t truly know what they wanted, you knew they wanted something. Something they figured you could provide. Money was the obvious goal with poor agents, but sometimes people could be so poor, so beyond hope, that they didn’t even know what to ask for. It was hard for Leo to trust such people because he didn’t understand them.

  “What do you know about your employers?”

  “I know what they like to eat, what they wear, how they like their house kept.”

  “What does Sang Hee do most days?”

  She seemed surprised he knew her name. “She writes on her computer.”

  “Is she sending messages or typing a document?”

  “She said she’s writing a book. But she doesn’t let me get close enough to see, even though I don’t read Korean very well.”

  “What does she do other than type on her computer? Take me through her day.”

  “She goes visiting most of the afternoons—other diplomats’ wives, I think.”

  “How do you know? Does she use names?”

  “No. Or sometimes she does, when speaking to her husband, but they don’t mean anything to me.”

  “I need you to start paying attention to the names. What else does she do?”

  “She shops a lot. Or she used to, before she broke her ankle. It’s hard for her to get around stores with the cast.”

  “What does she buy?”

  “Clothes, perfume, electronics. Things to send back home.”

  “Does she mail things very often?”

  “Once a week, I think. She doesn’t take me with her to the post office; I just see her with packages sometimes.”

  “Okay. Her computer, is it a laptop or one that’s on a desk?”

  “A laptop.”

  “Where does she keep it when she isn’t using it?”

  “Her room. Sometimes downstairs, if she writes there at night, when she’s drinking. Sometimes she’s very drunk and she leaves it there. I brought it up to her room once but she said she didn’t want me to touch it. Why are you asking all this?”

  “I know some people in the government here, in our Immigration department. I’ve told them about your situation and asked how we could help you. Because your employer is a diplomat, he’s protected from most of our laws.” He paused for a beat. “But I talked to my friends and I said there must be some way we can help you. They said there was, but they’d need to get something from you first.”

  She looked at her hands for a moment. Leo was used to the reticent, deferential behavior of Indonesian women, but it was hard to tell what effect his words were having on her. “What do they want from me?” she asked.

  “They’re very interested in your employers. Especially Sang Hee. Because you work in their house, you can learn certain things.”

  “My Korean isn’t perfect. They don’t talk to each other much in my presence, and when they do, I don’t always understand what they’re saying.”

  “But even if you don’t understand them, we can.” He turned to reach into the backseat, leaning toward her a bit, and she leaned back, surprised or uncomfortable to have him so close. He took out a small cardboard box. “This is a digital camera, this is a portable copier, and these are flash drives,” he said, opening the box. He explained how to use them.

  “I don’t… I don’t understand.”

  She wasn’t stupid; she was nervous. Now was the time to press. “They’ve hit you, haven’t they?”

  She looked out the window.

  “Has Hyun Ki Shim ever touched you?”

  Her head snapped back. “No. His wife is the evil one.”

  Part of Leo felt disappointed. Sexual abuse would make their leverage on the diplomat all the stronger. But part of him—a much greater part—felt relief, for her sake. And for the sake of his own fantasies.

  “Sari, you are in danger. They can do anything they want to you; they can keep beating you like this, can even kill you if they want, and there’s nothing anyone can do. You are their slave, and we can’t protect you from them. Unless you help us with this.”

  He was trying to keep his voice calm and steady. Here was the key moment, the point at which this would be consummated or not. At the same time, he saw the look in her eyes
, the sadness and fear, and he felt the awful knowledge that all he really needed to do to save her was drive her to the Indonesian embassy. He could drop her off and they would likely repatriate her, even without her passport, and protect her from her employers. Hell, she could drive to the embassy herself; all he had to do was tell her where it was, less than ten minutes away. He couldn’t let her know how easy it was. He had to limit her world, limit her possibilities. Luckily she seemed familiar with such constraints.

  “I know you’re scared of them. But the longer you stay there, the worse they will treat you. I’ve seen other situations like this. If you do what I’m asking, we can get you someplace else. Maybe to another city in another country, if that’s what you want. Or American citizenship, and some money, and you can start over. People like Hyun Ki and Sang Hee will never be able to hurt you again.”

  He had no friends in Immigration and no right to offer her citizenship. Maybe, if this went well, he could ask Bale to talk to someone, inquire if any strings could in fact be pulled. But he doubted it. At the Agency, dangling false promises like this could get him seriously reprimanded, but at TES anything seemed allowable.

  “What is this building?” she asked, looking straight ahead.

  “A school.”

  “What are they doing to it?”

  “Fixing it. The roof collapsed.”

  She looked horrified. “On top of children?”

  “No, it happened over the weekend, when no one was inside.” Actually, he had no idea. It might well have taken out a handful of the District’s seven-year-olds; he didn’t keep up with local news.

  “This is what happens to schools here?”

  “In this city, we spend most of our time worrying about other places instead of taking care of ourselves.”

  “If I had a child in America, would the roof collapse on him?”

  He looked at her—at the wide eyes he wanted to see himself reflected in, at those full lips that he wanted to gently take between his teeth—and tried to control his expression. So hard to present yourself correctly when all these cultural cues are different. And when you’ve forgotten who the correct you is.