by Неизвестный
‘You should be in bed,’ he says, pouring two more glasses. ‘Take these in to them, would you?’
She taps Mr Ali’s shoulder and he lifts his hat, smiles, taking the glass. ‘You’re a pretty girl, Marie, and nice. I tell you, we need some nicer girls working for the Bureau, don’t we, Al? The one who used to answer my phones was mean as a snake.’
In February, two days after Marie turns ten, Malcolm X is shot. Daddy comes home and says he saw Betty Shabazz with his own eyes; she was pregnant and looked exhausted. He says she told the police no white cops near Brother Malcolm’s body and because Daddy is the only black cop in his precinct he gets to be an honorary pall-bearer at the funeral.
Hélène is making dinner and Marie is watching TV. During the evening news she tells her sister to come quick because their father is standing beside an easel spray of what must be red and white carnations arranged to look like the Nation of Islam flag. He looks nervous and solemn in his uniform. Then John Ali is talking at a podium, and as the news goes on, Marie comes to understand that he doesn’t only work for the Bureau. He’s the Nation of Islam’s secretary too.
For days after the funeral William talks about communism. ‘Your mother was sympathetic to communists, did you know that? She was a beatnik and that’s why she just up and left us.’ He uses the past tense like she’s dead.
The girls grow up. Hélène enlists and is sent to Long Binh. She’s away for a year and, after her first tour, returns safely to the USA. Then dies in a head-on collision while driving back home from the Oakland Army base.
Marie finds her father in the kitchen with his forehead down on the table and assumes he’s drunk until she hears his voice. He says, ‘She flew halfway across the world just to die on US soil because of some boozer in Las fucking Vegas, that son-of-a-bitch city! It all gets me, but that gets me the most.’
Marie’s mother shows up for the funeral and William refuses to speak to her. Marlène is only in her early fifties but looks much older, frail. Wandering back down the aisle from the coffin she looks like Hélène’s ghost.
On the Saturday after the funeral, Marie gives her mother a ride back to LaGuardia. At the airport they pay their dimes and go up to the observation deck. There aren’t too many other people up there, just a handful of businessmen. A redhead in a grey suit is watching the taxiing planes through a binocular machine. Marlène leans against the guard rail looking out towards Co-op City and pulling hard on her cigarette.
Maman’s back. The same black A-line dress she wore to the funeral and a dark-brown wig to hide her natural hair. What if she said, right now, I won’t go. You’ve got to have someone here to take care of you, Marie.
Marlène turns to face her and says something Marie can’t hear over the plane engines screaming out on the tarmac. Marie moves to the guard rail.
‘Feel that,’ her mother says again in French, taking Marie’s hand and putting it on the rail. ‘The engines are making it vibrate. Because sound is just energy, you know? That’s all anything is. All we are. Nothing dies because you can’t destroy energy.’
Marie nods and, without saying goodbye, begins walking towards the stairs. She’s hurt by what her mother has said. Her mother, who should be able to understand her grief, who should be feeling as bad – worse – should know better than to talk about the universe or whatever hippy bullshit it was that she was trying to drive at.
In the parking lot she sits in her father’s car for a while with her eyes closed. Thinking: she doesn’t know me. And: she didn’t know Hélène. She feels let down by this and so exhausted by everything else that she briefly considers taking a nap, but opens her eyes instead and puts the key in the ignition, thinking: I’m eighteen now. I’m an adult and I can’t just sit here in a goddamn parking lot all day long.
2
John Ali dies under suspicious circumstances – his brakes fail one day while he’s out driving.
Marie enrols in the ROTC at Queens College. The army keeps her in Texas for five years, then she gets the runaround trying to apply for a job as an officer at the CIA. When she complains about it to her father he says, sounding unsympathetic, ‘I told you it was a good ol’ boys club over there.’
‘But that don’t make no damn sense, Daddy,’ she says, frustrated, pacing the blue shag carpet in her father’s living room. ‘They only want to send white boys to China?’
‘I just know they don’t want to send black girls from Queens.’ He scratches the back of his salt-and-pepper head and looks at her. ‘Look, I’m not saying you give up on it just yet. But why not go talk to Al and see what he can do for you?’
‘Maybe I should’ve joined the navy instead,’ Marie is telling Albert Taylor as she sits across from him in his office. ‘I would’ve seen more. Different people, different places.’
‘If you want to join the CIA ’cause you want to work overseas, you should know we also send agents abroad. The way I see it, the FBI is the better fit for you. Or the USSS; I’ve got friends over there who’d look out for you.’
She nods, standing.
He walks her out to the elevator and hugs her goodbye. Holding her out at arm’s length he says, smiling, ‘Shoot, still pretty as all get out. Why law enforcement at all, Marie? Why not go out to Hollywood and learn to act?’
She applies for several positions at the Bureau and despite Albert Taylor’s recommendation still has to endure a six-month background check before she’s cleared to head to Quantico, Virginia, for the twenty-one-week training.
Her Behavioural Science instructor, Stewart Reid, a ruddy fair-haired man whom she suspects is an alcoholic, holds her back after class one day to tell her she’s got an aptitude for the subject. He asks her out for a drink later, to talk more, he says. But she turns him down.
She works for a couple of years in the New York field office, as an agent in the foreign counter-intelligence division. Occasionally she goes out to lunch with Al Taylor, who works in the same office. He always pays and lets her fantasize out loud about working abroad some day.
She lives alone in a tan tenement building on 127th Street and Lenox. She dates plenty of boring men and sometimes lets one come home with her.
In March of 1984 a man named Alan Johnson contacts her. He claims to be from the CIA, but because he asks to meet with her in the Mid-Manhattan Library, she assumes he’s lying. She agrees to go anyway out of curiosity. He says she’ll find him by the microfiche readers.
When she gets up to the fourth floor she sees a man who must be Johnson: bald and with a walrus moustache, wearing khakis and a white polo. He nods towards the chair beside him. ‘Take a seat. We’re waiting for someone. He didn’t go far, just to the restroom.’
She sits. Two readers over is a man in a green cardigan, wearing two pairs of eyeglasses on his face. Johnson tries making small talk until finally Marie’s former instructor, Stewart Reid, appears. Reid’s wrist is wrapped in a bandage and there are deep circles under his blue eyes. He looks somewhat startled.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Johnson says.
‘A man was shaving his head in there. He told me not to stare at him.’
All at once, Marie realizes she’s amused. She asks Reid, maybe a little incredulous, ‘You’re CIA?’
As the three of them stroll among the reference shelves Johnson tells her that, based on Reid’s recommendation, she’s being considered as a candidate for a special training programme. Eventually, he says, she’d be able to come work for the agency full time. But for now she’d be a specialist.
She requests a leave of absence from the FBI and goes to Camp Peary for a nine-month-long CIA training. She is one of a half-dozen female contractors from different branches of law enforcement. Two drop out after the first week and another is told to leave at the end of the month.
She is taught several methods of execution, about sniping and poisoning, about shooting a man at point-blank range and the accompanying psychological fallout.
Each woman is give
n a different target. Hers is Thierry Bernard, a New York-based French national who’s both a private arms broker and an engineer. When she first sees a picture of him she says to Johnson, ‘He looks like a college professor.’
‘Bernard is a genius, which makes him an asset to several powerful governments. But the fact that he has access to a lot of sensitive defence information also makes him a liability. Unfortunately for us he’s in the bad habit of revealing our secrets to our enemies, if the price is right.’
Towards the end of her training, she begins having the same anxiety dream again and again. She has just left her apartment to kill Bernard; she’s on her stoop patting her pockets in a panic, realizing that she’s forgotten the scope for her sniper rifle. When she goes back up to her apartment to try and find it – for some reason she suspects it’s in her closet hidden in a shoe – suddenly there is Bernard sitting on the edge of her bed, tapping his watch and looking very impatient.
By the end of her training Marie is sleep-deprived and knows she’s performing poorly because of it. So when Johnson calls a meeting with her she assumes it’s to reprimand her or to dismiss her from the programme. Instead, he informs her that the target has been terminated.
‘What do you mean?’ she says from out of her haze, not quite understanding him.
‘He’s dead. Shot three times in the head when he went to answer his front door. It looks like Mossad were behind it.’
Although she receives a lot of money for her specialist training, she doesn’t hear any more about moving into a formal position at the CIA. She continues to work for the FBI and is not sure if she’ll ever hear from Johnson again.
In February of 1987, she does. At their meeting place in the Mid-Manhattan Library, he says, ‘Your next target, Thomas Sankara, the president of Upper Volta – Burkina Faso – is scheduled to speak up here in New York. I want you to attend the rally and get a sense of who he is before you go to his country.’
At the rally, she stands towards the back. First a hulking man in a loud polyester shirt takes the stage; Sankara’s translator. He introduces President Sankara, who’s sitting in the front row of the audience, and calls him to the stage. Sankara wears a military uniform, a red beret and a dainty moustache. At the podium he raises a clenched fist.
‘L’impérialisme!’ he says into the microphone.
‘À bas!’ the French speakers in the crowd return.
‘Le néocolonialisme!’ he shouts.
‘À bas!’
‘Le racisme!’ he shouts.
‘À bas!’ the crowd says.
Marie says it too each time. It feels odd to be so energized by what she knows to be propaganda.
Sankara is undeniably magnetic.
After his speech, he goes into the crowd. As he moves in her direction, she starts a mental list of his crimes. He’s letting the Soviets build a base in his country. He’s purchased hundreds of thousands of artillery shells and is instigating war with Ivory Coast – but still, when she shakes his hand, she holds it for maybe a little too long.
Two months later, on the evening before her flight to Burkina Faso, she spends the night at her father’s house. In the morning, she sees his wallet on the kitchen table and starts flipping through it before she even knows what she’s doing. Inside she finds a list, typed up and laminated, that makes her laugh:
10 WOMEN NOT TO DATE
1. Friends’ Wives
2. Wife’s Friends
3. Friends’ Daughters
4. Daughters’ Friends
5. Girls Younger than my Oldest
6. Family members
7. Ex-cons
8. Ex-Christians
9. White girls
10. Substance abusers
She is living in Ouagadougou and working at the US Embassy, posing as an FBI legal attaché, ostensibly helping to track a US fugitive who’s fled to West Africa.
A private birthday party is held at the embassy for Jean Compaoré, the assistant minister of security. She works closely with Jean. She doesn’t have much respect for him. And yet, he’s the only person she’s met in Ouaga who is suspicious of her motives for being in the country. Maybe he understands her because he’s also hiding in plain sight – the better she gets to know him the more she suspects that his politics aren’t revolutionary at all.
Influential people attend the party, including Blaise Compaoré, Jean’s first cousin, whom Jean introduces as Le Capitaine.Compaoré is also President Sankara’s deputy and his oldest friend. He is a tall, lanky man with boyish features. His eyes turn down at the corners when he smiles, which she likes, and his face seems wide open and trustworthy.
Near the end of the night, Sankara himself appears. From across the room he seems small, flanked by two bodyguards much bigger than he is. And he’s wearing a tracksuit, which she thinks looks a bit goofy on him.
Jean introduces Marie to Sankara and the three of them discuss imperialism and food aid. Sankara talks a little bit about music and tells her what she already knows, that he plays guitar in a band called Tout-à-Coup Jazz. A bored Jean steps away and Sankara tells his bodyguards that they don’t need to stay either. He says, ‘I think I’m mostly in the company of friends here.’
Although he’s easy-going and chatty, talking to the president makes her jumpy. They argue about the situation in Ethiopia. He tells her about his anti-desertification campaign and about impatience – ‘People are always telling me I expect things to get done too quickly,’ he says.
Other partygoers float towards them, join their conversation and drift away. They talk about his plans for his own birthday: in two weeks he’ll be thirty-six and far away from home, in Addis Ababa for a conference. He talks about whether or not a united Africa is possible. He’s funny and he communicates well, like a woman she thinks, he expresses himself as well as a woman might.
Later, standing in front of the embassy building, she watches Sankara slip a leg over his motorbike. His wife approaches. Marie watches as he takes her by the wrist and kisses it. But she doesn’t get on the back of the bike. Instead she and her driver walk towards a government car and speed off.
Sankara lifts a hand and smiles at Marie, waves her over. When she goes to him, he starts his engine and says, ‘I’ll take you home.’
CDRs, Committees for the Defence of the Revolution, are cropping up rapidly throughout the country. Thomas imported the idea of the committees after visiting Cuba. CDRs are supposed to be democratically run organizations through which the Burkinabé can exert power in their own communities. CDRs do things like organize the construction of schools and clinics.
‘But the secondary function of Fidel’s CDRs is spying; the head of each one keeps a file on everyone in their neighbourhood. And Burkinabé CDR heads are starting to act like spies too. Always listening. Watching. I don’t like it. Neighbours spying on neighbours, les murs ont des oreilles.’
He explains all of this to her as they lie in her bed together, her legs wrapped around his.
In the morning, sitting with her back propped up against the headboard, she watches Thomas get dressed. Outside it’s pouring; it was the sound of rain battering the corrugated roof that woke them. As he paces the room looking for his beret, she asks to see his pistol. Without hesitating he removes it from the holster and hands it to her. He sits on the edge of the bed with his back to her and begins wrestling a boot onto his foot.
The handle is made of mother-of-pearl. She says, ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘Don’t shoot,’ he jokes, leaning over to tie his shoes.
Mostly they meet at her home; she pays her guard, Youssouf, well to encourage his silence. Occasionally they meet in the cities and villages where he speaks at public assemblies. She is always careful about how she regards him in public and never asks him about his sons.
A regular schedule would be impossible; it is more like he steals the time that he can to be with her. When Marie’s phone rings at three in the morning, it can only be Thomas. He is at
her house before the sun is up. He has his guitar and looks angry. She lets him in and asks, ‘Have you had breakfast?’
He hasn’t. She begins preparing bouillie de mil. It’s lucky that his favourite food is so easy to make, especially since she can buy the millet pre-prepared in a plastic baggie from the grocery store. If she had to pound it herself, she’d be in trouble.
She stirs the millet porridge and he begins playing around on his guitar.
Marie is waiting for Jean Compaoré to pick her up from in front of the embassy; when a Renault pulls up instead of his Mercedes she is surprised. When she gets into the back seat beside Jean, the driver greets her in heavily accented French, instead of Mòoré, which she takes as a subtle reminder of how conspicuously foreign she is. Her clothes and her complexion, even the way she walks, all mark her.
She says, ‘Nice car. Why the downgrade?’
‘Sankara sold my other one,’ Jean complains, kissing her on both cheeks like a Parisian. ‘He sold the entire government fleet. Now we’re all stuck with these cheap pieces of shit. Even the top ministers. Even Blaise.’
‘Why do you even need a car? Why not learn to ride a motorbike like Sankara?’ she says, teasing him.
‘That asshole and his motorcycle. He thinks he’s Che.’
As Jean often does when upset about something, he blows his nose into his handkerchief. She sees a glimpse of red on it before he folds it up, not blood, but the red Sahel dirt of the road that gets in her nose too when the windows are down in her car or whenever she takes one of the intercity buses. They turn onto rue 213, where traffic is at a standstill. The driver shuts down the engine and they wait to move forward. Jean grabs her hand and she grudgingly lets him hold it.