“No problema,” said Clement. “But how ’bout doing me a favor? Tell ’em I’m going to do big things real soon. Sell it to ’em, okay?”
“You got it,” said Rice, the soul of sincerity. “I’ll sell it hard.” He glanced at the stage. “I owe you, man.” He stood, patted Clement on the arm. “Hang out…I’ll be back in a flash with the first installment.”
Clement lowered his head, slowly letting out a breath. He was going to have to pull off a big-yardage play, he thought. Find somebody useful to hand over. Somebody with political sex appeal. It was too late in the game for anything else. And probably too late for that.
“Hey, when’s Lily comin’ back from the market?” asked Rice, sitting back down.
“She’s going to meet us for dinner.”
“How you two doin’, anyway? You still in love?”
“Love.” Clement made a derisive noise. “It’s better than love.”
Rice smiled. “Miko!” he called, and the Japanese singer came to stand between the two men. She gave Clement an arch look. “Miko here’s been dyin’ to meet you, Roy,” said Rice. “She’s a…how’d you put it, babe?”
“Pal-ty animal,” said Miko, and inhaled for Clement.
Clement said, “Shit,” laughed, and draped an arm around Miko. He lifted his glass to Rice, who joined him in the toast.
“To good company,” said Rice, placing strong emphasis on the word company. Their eyes engaged over the rims of their glasses. It felt like a moment of bonding, a moment during which assurances were offered and confirmations exchanged. But Clement wasn’t fool enough to trust it.
At twenty-nine, with light brown hair falling to the middle of her back, Lily still looked like a college girl. Willowy; long-limbed; the marks of age—faint lines bracketing her mouth, the hint of crow’s-feet—barely sketched in. Her face was lean, finely boned, a bit horsey, and her features had an assertive refinement that Clement associated with East Hampton and West Palm Beach; she was beautiful, but one only noticed that after noticing her aura of health and style, as if beauty were merely an accessory that she displayed whenever she wished to show to advantage. Moving about the hotel room, preparing for bed, her gestures were eloquent and precise, and this, too, was a quality that Clement associated with the milieu of polo matches and expensive claret, with lives that had the clarity of sparkling water. In the beginning, her elegance had made him painfully aware of the commonality of his own roots, and this had caused him to view her as an acquisition, something he had obtained by nefarious means; sooner or later, he’d believed, she would see through to his essential crudity and leave him. But four years of marriage had erased most of those feelings, and despite his infidelity with Miko—a tactical infidelity to ratify the masculine contract he had made with Rice—he loved her. And more importantly, he trusted her.
Trust, to Clement’s mind, was better than love, a thing of far greater rarity and consequence. He had only trusted one other person in his life—Robert D’allessandro—and he realized that the strain of emotion he’d felt for D’allessandro was akin to what he felt for Lily. In each instance he had surrendered himself not like a lover, but like a child, sensing that the object of his affections was more competent than he in a sphere of existence to which he could only aspire, an altitude of feeling denied him by the abuses of an orphaned childhood. He had permitted D’allessandro to steer him through this unfamiliar medium, and after the old man had died, he had been lost until Lily had come along and reoriented him. She had been doing graduate work in economics and had interviewed him in regard to the financial resurgence of Calcutta, a matter of sensitivity to Clement, since it had been instrumental in stalling his career. He’d had her investigated, and during the course of the investigation, he had become fascinated by her. With her Vassar education and aristocratic bloodlines, she had seemed alien, unfathomable, and it had taken him a long time to accept that she could sympathize with his work. But the upshot had been that she had renewed his enthusiasm for the Company by imbuing him with a sense of his own worth. And that had been the beginning of trust.
She dimmed the lights and slipped into bed, turning to face him, her breasts flattening against his chest. He grew hard against her belly, and he started to pull away, knowing that she was worn out from her day in the market; but she hooked her fingers into his back and kept him close.
“Thought you were too tired,” he said.
She kissed his chest. “I just want you inside me a minute, okay?” She rested a knee on his hip, letting him slip between her legs.
“A minute, huh?”
“Maybe two.”
Her breath quickened, warming his cheek, and when he entered her, she tensed until he had gone deep.
“God,” she said. “God, you feel good.”
He fucked her heavily, watching her face grow slack, slivers of white showing beneath her eyelids. After a few seconds he stopped, content to hold her and touch her breasts. The knowledge that he was possessing a rich man’s woman, having her in a rich man’s hotel, with its cool sheets and androgynous luxury…this never failed to give him a venal satisfaction.
“I want you to finish,” she said, her eyes still closed.
“You’re falling asleep.”
“It’s nice…falling asleep like that.” She ran a hand along his arm. “Roy?”
“Yeah.”
“Why do you want to see that woman?”
“The one in Mustang? I just want to find out what it was like to be a goddess.”
“Oh.” She sounded distressed.
“What’s the matter?”
“I was hoping it was business. I wouldn’t be jealous of business.”
“You’ve got no reason to be jealous.”
She opened her eyes; in the half-light they were small puzzles of gleam and shadow. “Maybe not.”
“Definitely not.”
“I don’t know. You’re always looking for something else…like with D’allessandro. You say he’s dead, and still you keep looking for him.”
“That’s not real,” he said. “I know he’s dead, but I just keep hoping that somebody’ll beat the game. It’s got nothing to do with us.”
“Yes, it does. It’s like saying I’m not enough.” She twisted her head away, stared at the ceiling. “Christ, that sounds stupid!”
Clement was losing his erection, and wanting to maintain intimacy, he pulled her hard against him. “Would you like me to cancel the trip?”
“Of course I would. You’re going to see a goddess.”
“An ex-goddess. She probably looks like a fucking yak.”
“It isn’t just that I’m jealous,” she said after a bit. “All this with D’allessandro, and now Kumari, it’s covering up something else. You’ve got a problem, and you’re using this to avoid dealing with it. That’s not like you.”
He slipped out of her, and she gasped, tried to guide him back in.
“I’ve kinda lost the mood,” he said.
“Are you angry with me?”
“Nah. I’m a little screwed up right now is all.” He flopped onto his back. He wanted to be open with her, but openness seemed arduous, a chore demanding too much energy. “I need a couple of days to sort things out. When I get back, we’ll talk about it…all right?”
“All right,” she said, disappointment in her voice. She settled against him, her head tucked into the join of his neck and shoulder, an arm flung across his chest. Her breathing soon became deep and regular.
Clement felt he had passed some crisis and realized that although he had been giving evasive answers to Lily’s questions, he had believed every word he’d said. That was SOP, lying to oneself. It had taken him a while to understand that the name The Company referred as much to an acting company as to a business concern. Agents were accomplished actors. They went from role to role, less interpreting than inhabiting them, and by doing so they often lost track of their identities. But that was a survival trait. If you had no solid identity, you could
shrug off morality with the same ease that you removed a costume, and that immunized you to an extent against pain. Clement’s problem was that he had begun to remember who he was, and he blamed Robert D’allessandro for this.
He recalled sitting with D’allessandro and watching the old man—as slow and ponderous as a gray bear—carve his toy animals, his form of stress therapy, and talking about how he wished he could get away and live up in the hills. Malaysia, maybe. Thailand. On one occasion he had laughed and said, “Y’know, Roy, I used to want to own a goddamn country, and now all I want is to sit somewhere peaceful and learn how to get these bastards right.” He’d held up a half-finished tiger, regarding it sourly. “Fuckers always turn out looking like striped dogs.”
It occurred to Clement that D’allessandro had carved him into shape just as he had his wooden animals, and that he had done as clumsy a job on him as he had with the tigers. He had taken a rough chunk of human material and created a new man, one with a conscience and the capacity for love, and so had rendered him totally unfit for his job. What Rice had said, that he was becoming an eccentric…no doubt about it. Lately he had been screwing up everything, and he didn’t much care. It was as if he had admitted his sins, and by that admission had lost the ability to endure them. And maybe Lily had been right, too. Maybe in searching for D’allessandro, for Kumari, he was really searching for an alternative to supplant every facet of his life.
He tried to answer Lily’s question about why he wanted to see Cheni Abdurachan; but instead he began to assemble a portrait of the Newar woman, giving her a slim body and large eyes and black hair braided into a pigtail, seeing her as neither beautiful nor ugly, but passable, with delicate features obscured beneath a mask of grime. Once he had finished, she hovered at the center of a diffuse golden light, an island of Buddhist glow, and appeared to be staring directly into his eyes. He had the impression that she was afraid, that although she possessed a core of strength, she was losing a battle against some menacing force. His sense of her grew more specific, so intense and individual that he became unnerved and the image flew apart. He lay blinking, confused. Everything, the shadowed drapes, the dim reflection in the mirror, even Lily, seemed ghostly by comparison to his apprehension of Cheni. This was more than eccentricity, he thought; he was slipping badly. He’d given lip service to the idea of sorting things out, but that might be exactly what he should do. Take the trip and try to get a grip on his life. He almost laughed out loud. His life. Christ! Life had never been his. From orphanage to Army to CIA, he’d always been part of a bureaucratic nightmare, always owned, controlled.
Lily stirred, her arm tightening about his chest. “You say something?”
He stroked her hair. “Go back to sleep.”
She was silent a few seconds and then said, “I’m scared, Roy. I know something’s going on with you, and it scares me.”
He started to reassure her, but didn’t think he could be convincing. He felt very fragile in his head, very shaky. If there were one problem, one wall against which to hurl himself, he might be able to pull it together. But everything was becoming a problem now, and he had no idea what to do.
An hour from Tasang-partsi. The air was bitter cold, unbelievably clear, the dark blue of the sky overhead shading down toward the horizon on every side to a band of pale turquoise. Miles to the east, the crevasses of glaciers on the slopes of a snowy peak looked as defined as the folds of the dun-colored rock above him. He was negotiating a trail along the flank of a hill; below, at the base of a cliff, a thin torrent of silvery water coursed down the center of a wide gravel bed and flowed off into a cut between the hills. Stunted thistles and gray brushes of wormwood sprouted alongside the trail; ahead lay pinnacles of reddish rock, their eastern faces shadowed to purple. D’allessandro would have loved this country, Clement thought. Clean and empty, yet with a feel of spiritual fecundity. Maybe he would have learned how to carve a tiger by now.
Clement had been twenty-eight when he had been assigned to D’allessandro, who was living then in Costa Rica, unable to leave for fear of being extradited on charges of fraud and extortion; however, D’allessandro had devised a plan that had engaged the favorable attention of the CIA. It was at heart altruistic, though he hid that fact from almost everyone; but eventually it became apparent that he wanted to leave a legacy, something to absolve his sins. The plan took seven years to implement and incorporated—among other elements—a bogus breakthrough in cinematic technology, an effective synthetic cocaine, a string of gambling resorts built in the Maldives and along the Malabar Coast, and, most importantly, a foundation whose purpose was to create low-cost housing outside Calcutta and stimulate the economy of the city. The foundation, fronted by respectable Hindu businessmen who had no idea of the skulduggery taking place around them, served as the holding company for the various properties; the foundation’s accounts, seeded by a sizable investment of CIA funds, were swelled by investments in the billions solicited from every major criminal organization in the world. The CIA believed they were pulling off the greatest sting in history, an operation that would throw the criminal world into chaos and increase American influence on the subcontinent by a thousand percent. The criminal organizations had been led to believe that they would wind up in control of the world’s entertainment industry, that their own political influence would increase. The plan was a masterpiece of misdirection, a work of genius depending upon dozens of lesser plans and ruthless covert maneuvers, most engineered by Clement, whom D’allessandro had at last taken into his confidence and revealed the ultimate misdirection—that at some point a series of traps would be sprung and the foundation’s funds would be channeled into several UN agencies, who were ready with schemes for their charitable disposition.
D’allessandro’s recruitment of Clement to be his accomplice had been a beautifully managed seduction. He’d played upon Clement’s orphaned childhood in Wyoming and an attendant sympathy for the disenfranchised, and had made himself into a father figure. Clement had genuinely loved the old man, and D’allessandro, he believed, had loved him; he had certainly taken pains to make sure that Clement had not been implicated. As he scrambled up a rise, it seemed for the first time that he could feel how large a space the old man had filled in his life; he had been father, brother, friend…and creator. By contrast, the space filled by Lily, that of lover, was small indeed. Thinking this hurt Clement, and because he was no longer a competent actor, he was unable to disregard his feelings, but could only force himself to walk faster and faster, until the aching of his muscles overwhelmed thought.
It was late afternoon by the time he reached Tasang-partsi. Ridges of leaden cloud seamed with tin-colored glare draped the hills. The wind blew in fitful gusts, whirling up a pale grit that appeared to sparkle as it vanished. The village consisted of about thirty black sod houses with slate roofs that sheltered against a cliff, mired in its shadow; a hill rose from the summit of the cliff, resembling more a pile of granitic rubble than an actual geologic formation. The river had narrowed to a fouled trickle that meandered over a gravelly flat, and a couple of mangy yaks with paper flowers tied to their horns were drinking from it; they looked as unreal to Clement, cumbersome and stupid as dinosaurs. Comic-strip beasts. They twitched their tails and gazed mournfully at him as he passed. The row of houses paralleled the stream, and the path that ran alongside them was of deeply rutted frozen mud; protruding from a glaze of cracked yellowish ice at its center was the decaying body of a mastiff, and this added a hint of cloying mustiness to the fearsome stink of the place. Two ravens perched atop the carcass had the look of bizarre ornaments until they spread their wings and flapped away toward the clifftop. Garbage and offal had been banked against the walls of the houses to the level of the first-floor windows, which were framed with rickety match-boarding; holes had been chopped in the filth to permit access to the doors. The squalor was appalling, yet was so absolute, so in keeping with the gloomy sky and bleak surround, it lent a kind of morbid grandeur to
the village, as if Tasang-partsi were an outpost on the border of some doomed mythical kingdom.
A young boy guided Clement to a house at the far end of the village, and after paying the boy, he stood staring at the door—three blackened planks and a huge brass padlock, a construction that seemed at once simple and complex, like a child’s puzzle. He knocked, feeling foolish now at having come all this way on a whim. The instant before the door opened, he recalled the portrait he’d conjured of Cheni Abdurachan back in Katmandu—a slim woman with doe eyes and a pigtail—and when she appeared in the doorway, wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, she was so like that portrait, he was stunned and a little afraid of what this might mean. She was prettier than he had imagined, and less dirty, her skin bronzed by a fine layer of soot; but the resemblance was startling, nonetheless. Her hair was tied back with a piece of red velvet.
She met his eyes for a second or two, then, pinching the bridge of her nose with thumb and forefinger, lowering her head, gestures that spoke to him of impatience and weariness, she said, “You’re from the university?”
He had the impression that unless he came up with a good excuse, he would be turned away. “My name’s Roy Clement,” he said. “And I’m not from the university. I had a dream about you…a hallucination or something. I saw your face, I pictured it just like you are now. I know it sounds crazy, but I thought it was important to come visit you.”
“You think you’re lying,” she said after giving him a searching look. “That’s interesting. You’re telling the truth, and you think you’re lying.”
She stepped aside to let him enter and laughed—the laughter had a distressed, erratic quality.
The front room was choked with bluish haze that seeped from a stone oven, and was dimly lit by butter lamps—brass bowls with floating wicks—resting on a table at the back. A wooden trapdoor was inset into the ceiling. Every visible surface was coated with sooty residue, even the brass cooking utensils hung on pegs above the oven. Tips of yak bones and horns used to strengthen the construction stuck out from the walls like gray blunted teeth. Clement took a chair at the table, and Cheni removed a wheel of bread from the oven. She set it on the table, handed him a knife, and dropped into the chair opposite him. The bread was hot and crusty, but the stink of burning yak dung was so powerful, it ruined the taste. Clement chewed stoically, watching Cheni’s face. Her features were, he decided, all too voluptuous for her delicate bone structure. Huge eyes, prominent nose, full mouth. They made it appear that something behind the face, some terrible pressure, was causing her skin to bulge. And yet viewed in another light, with an eye for the overall effect, that voluptuousness was her most attractive quality. It was hard to look at her, he thought; the dissonant values of her face forced you to choose a way of seeing, to decide whether or not she was pretty.
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