“It was Adam’s handlers who fed the pulp fiction about you and Henry to the tabloids,” Melissa said.
“How do we know that?”
“Clementine hands out very impressive bribes.”
“She bribed the CIA?”
“No, dear. She bribed people at the tabloids. It was Adam’s friends who took that photo of you and Adam.”
“They did? They exposed their own agent? That’s so weird it doesn’t even happen in books.”
“I’m quoting Clementine,” Melissa said. “Maybe spooks are even stranger than we think. Maybe they’re stupid. Maybe they don’t know what they’re doing, just like everybody else. Who knows?”
“Does that include Clementine?”
“You’re entitled to your opinion of Clementine. But don’t let it fog your judgment.”
“I’m not the one with the foggy mind,” I said. “Maybe Adam does work for the CIA or something worse. Maybe the weirdos he works for ordered him to do what he did to a lonely little writer living in New York. But the idea that they’d then put his picture in the paper and show him to the world while he was carrying out his secret mission is preposterous and you know it, Melissa.”
Melissa gave me a lingering, lawyerly look, but no spoken answer: I was a sad case. She knew the facts. If I wouldn’t accept them, she understood. I was besotted by Adam, a woman in lust. I was beyond reason. After giving me this moment to cool off, she drew breath to go on with her report.
Before she could speak, I said, “I think there’s a far simpler explanation. I think the chaps took the pictures and Clementine gave them to the tabloid. Clementine wanted to bust up the operation before Adam and his employers got any closer to Henry. I think Adam’s wife saw the pictures in the rag like everybody else, and gave him an ultimatum—get rid of the home wrecker or get divorced. He chose her and the kids over giving her every cent he owned and living in an efficiency apartment on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the rest of his life.”
“According to Clementine, the wife knew exactly what he did for a living.”
“Come on. I saw how he behaved when he dumped me. The pictures were the reason. I know how he behaved at the last and how he behaved before that. If ever I saw a man doing something he didn’t want to do, it was Adam walking out on me. He was under duress.”
“So what are you saying, that he loved you?”
“I never thought so for a moment. But there were things we liked about each other.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Melissa said. She shrugged. “Suppose you’re right?” she asked. “Whether his wife or his boss gave the orders, his cover was blown and he got out of town.”
My throat was dry. I cleared it and said, “Does Henry know all this?”
“Clementine briefed him this morning. He was not pleased.”
“Why?”
“Because, sweetie-pie, you’re the apple of Henry’s eye even if you were too wound around James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree to notice. That’s why.”
Melissa looked at me as though it was time for me to get a grip on myself and breathe a sigh of relief on hearing the whole truth about the confidence trick that had made me, briefly, the least frustrated woman in New York. Frankly, I would just as soon have gone on living in ignorance.
I said, “If you knew all this, why were you playing that game with me in the restaurant, talking about Adam as if you didn’t have a clue?”
“Sorry about that,” Melissa said. “Those thugs at the next table were probably Adam’s buddies.”
“Who told you that?”
“The chaps. They called me on my cell and warned me I was being followed while I was walking to the restaurant.”
“Then why didn’t you warn me? We could have gone to the ladies’ room if you were afraid they were going to read your lips.”
“Gosh,” said Melissa, “why didn’t I think of that?”
“That does it,” I said, and left.
Alone in the elevator, I imagined what Adam’s life must have been like when he was J. J.: the nice brick house in a Virginia suburb with a tree in the front yard that got a little bigger every year, just like the children; the refrigerator with the kids’ drawings and photos stuck to it by magnets; the two green cars that ran on electricity generated by coal-fired plants; the freshly shampooed wife dashing off to work in her lawyer’s togs; the blond noisy kids spilling out the front door; dad loading them into the car and telling them to fasten their seatbelts and stop fighting. He’d have one of those inner-sanctum Washington photo IDs hung around his neck on a chain of steel BBs.
Across the Potomac, as he approached the capital in traffic that barely moved, he’d see the sound stage for a Cecil B. DeMille epic that was the federal city. He’d do this every day, except on weekends when he coached soccer and the days when he was ordered to New York to commit the unspeakable acts I remembered so fondly.
3
I TOOK THE SUBWAY TO Chelsea. My idea was to count my memories as a way of purging them from my mind. It was three days before Christmas. The sun was bright, the weather was cold. Though it hadn’t yet snowed in the city, the air smelled of snow. As I walked to the station, the sidewalk shook. Everyone knew at once that it wasn’t a train. They stopped in unison, as if choreographed, and looked downward at the pavement. After a beat or two, the concrete shook again, harder. Then it stopped. The crowd waited attentively for another sign that something was awakening deep in the earth, and when nothing further happened, walked on. Was this just another aftershock, or had fifty thousand people been buried alive in Turkey? No one seemed to care one way or the other.
In the gallery where Adam and I first met, the big paintings of galaxies had been taken down and replaced by sweet little watercolors. Most were awful. I wasn’t really looking at the pictures, just walking by them in a daze and glancing at them for something to do. One of them caught my eye. I didn’t realize what I had seen until I was three or four paintings beyond it. I spun around and went back to it. And there it was, the O. Laster watercolor.
I felt a surge of anger. The bastard had sold it! He really was as bad as Melissa said. Was anything about him as it should have been? Had he read my novels and read up on paintings as part of his cover? What other evidence of his perfidy still awaited discovery? But wait a minute. What else could he have done, poor guy? How could he have explained the picture to his angry wife? He had no choice but to get rid of it. Maybe he had spent the proceeds at Costco on a ring to give her as a peace offering at a candlelit dinner.
I asked the price. The clerk said, “You do understand that it’s an original O. Laster.” I just stared at him. This caused him to dislike me. He looked up the price and when I told him to wrap it up, said, “If you want the frame, that’s fifty dollars more.”
I paid with a credit card, thus purposely leaving a record of the transaction that Adam’s handlers could easily retrieve. From my Visa bill, I hoped, they would be able to deduce that I knew all about J. J. Would they let me live in possession of this classified information? Would I be hit by a car as soon as I went outside, or would the end come more suddenly—a poison pinprick as I ran around the Reservoir, a bullet behind the ear in a check-out line?
Back in the apartment, I hung up the watercolor in its old spot on the office wall. If Clementine ever came again for tea, there it would be, and there would I be, sadder but wiser.
Eight
1
AS HENRY ATTEMPTED TO EAT his sliver of fruitcake at Christmas dinner, he answered Clementine’s questions about earthquakes. She and I had been invited to the glass house in the Grenadines for the holidays. Doors and windows were open, admitting the sea breeze. Brilliant sunlight flooded the dining room.
Millions of earthquakes occur each year, Henry said, though only a million and a half or so are recorded. Those registering from 8 to 8.9 on the Richter scale, called great earthquakes, had in the past occurred at a rate of one a year. Every twenty years or so, a great
quake measuring between 9 and 9.9 was detected by seismographs. No quake as strong as 10 on the Richter scale had ever been recorded.
“So what is your estimate of the force of the ultimate earthquake you predict, should it actually occur?” Clementine asked.
Her eyes shone. She was an interrogator by nature and training, and therefore she loved questioning Henry, who came as close to having all the answers as anyone since Euclid.
“Conceivably, 20 or more on the Richter scale,” Henry replied.
“And what does that mean in comparative terms to your 8 to 10 on the Richter scale category of earthquakes?”
“The energy released by a category 20 earthquake would be equivalent to the detonation of several trillion tons of TNT,” Henry said, “or about the same force as a meteor five kilometers in diameter crashing into the planet.”
“Unimaginable,” Clementine said.
Henry, who had imagined the apocalypse in detail, gave her one of his faint smiles.
Clementine was just back from a mission to Hsi-tau, where she had met with General Yao. She had hit it off with one of the chow chows. She and the dog that had been assigned to protect her were great friends now. I asked Clementine if she had tested the relationship by removing her protective identity badge. Of course she had. The chow had been quite happy to smell the real Clementine.
“Of course,” said Clementine with a fond smile, “he could also smell the identity disk in my bag.”
She had painted a watercolor of the dog, which had posed for its portrait like an angel.
Neither Henry nor I volunteered a new subject, so Clementine kept talking about dogs.
“Have you ever wondered,” she asked, “how we and dogs got together in the Paleolithic, and why we formed such an enduring friendship?”
“Yes,” I said, “My theory is that the dogs helped us hunt down Neanderthals and eat them.”
“What a perfectly outrageous idea,” Clementine said.
“Maybe, Clementine, but think about it. We know Neanderthals were cannibalized, and we’re the logical suspects.”
From deep inside her, Clementine made a sound of disgust.
“In what way does that incriminate dogs?” she asked.
“It would explain why dogs are so fawning. They’re our partners in original sin.”
“You do go too far,” Clementine said. But she stopped asking questions.
Henry was gazing out to sea. He had long since tuned out. Now he excused himself in an almost inaudible voice and went away. Clementine gazed in fond admiration at his retreating figure.
She said, “I have what might be called a Christmas gift for you. General Yao informs me that Mulligan’s DNA matches evidence collected at the scene of all three rapes in China. The Chinese act very quickly in such matters. Mulligan has been sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of release. He is in a very secure, very remote prison in Hsi-tau.”
I kissed Clementine on the cheek. She looked as though she wanted to kiss me back, but exercised self-control.
She chattered on. Clementine knew all sorts of things—such as what each of the gifts in “The Twelve Days of Christmas” symbolized in English folklore. There was a reason for her encyclopedic bent. As a schoolgirl, she had made a business of studying up on out-of-the-way facts.
“Because I wasn’t pretty, I strove to be interesting,” she said, “but of course it was hopeless. I was avoided as the most boring girl at school.”
I asked how she knew that. She listed the cruelties that had been visited upon her by the blackshirts in the sixth form. By the time she flew back to New York on the fifth day of Christmas (the five gold rings are a code term for the first five books of the Old Testament), I was learned in her miseries. It turned out we had a good deal in common. Any two people plunked down together on an uninhabited island might have made the same discovery, but the important thing was that we made friends and closed our eyes to each other’s peculiarities.
On her day of departure I walked her down to the airstrip. I carried her easel and paint box. On the tarmac, we kissed each other on both cheeks. I told her I sincerely hoped neither of us would be buried alive before we met again. Clementine considered this, then laughed for the first time in my presence. It came out as a series of yips that must have been much imitated at her school.
“Look after Henry,” she said. “He seems to be on the verge of something.”
Henry was breakfasting on the terrace and fiddling with his laptop when I got back to the house. He lifted a careless hand. I gestured in return and sat down opposite him at the table. Since Christmas dinner, he had been hiding out, and mostly had not even joined Clementine and me for meals. Clementine assumed he was thinking great thoughts in his solitude.
Finally he looked up. “Clementine told you the news from China?” he said.
“If you mean Bear’s fate, yes.”
Although I had questions—where exactly in Inner Mongolia was Bear imprisoned? what would his life be like? might General Yao, at some future moment, decide to swap him for a Chinese spy held by the CIA?—it seemed inappropriate to ask the questions or to thank Henry for putting the man who wanted to murder me away for the rest of his life. Justice had been done. That was enough.
Henry said, “Would you mind going back to China for a few days? There’s something I want you to see.”
We left the next morning. In Hsi-tau I was assigned to my usual yurt and chow chow. After more than three years, the dog and I knew each other pretty well, but if the animal recognized me, it didn’t let me know. Looking over the pack, I wondered which one was Clementine’s chum. It might even be my friend.
On my way to the big yurt for dinner, I saw Chinese soldiers lounging around their armored vehicles. I smelled their cigarette smoke before I saw the men. Inside, General Yao gallantly kissed my hand and gave me a mock-flirtatious look. He had brought a gaggle of cooks and waiters and all the other necessities for a Chinese banquet. He was attentive throughout the evening, transferring delicacies to my plate and making small talk. His subject tonight was the New York theater. He read all the reviews online and knew far more about it than I did. He was shocked by my ignorance. How could I live in a theatrical paradise and pay so little attention to it? One day he would come to New York and we would go to all the best plays together for at least a week, matinees and evening performances. I would emerge reeducated, hungry—insatiable—for more theater. He had a hundred different smiles and let me know with one of them that this promise was double entendre.
When dinner was over, General Yao dismissed his aides, and he and Henry talked very intently in English. Their voices were low. The exchange lasted no more than five minutes. I listened in, of course, but I missed most of what they were saying. Both men seemed tense, even uncomfortable with each other. As was so often the case, Henry’s mind seemed to be elsewhere.
At last the conversation ended. General Yao turned to me with his smoothy’s smile and once again bowed over my hand.
“Until tomorrow, then,” he said.
What was going to happen tomorrow? No one told me. I smiled and said good night. Henry saw General Yao to his car and didn’t come back.
At first light the following morning, General Yao called for us in an unmarked helicopter. It was the biggest helicopter I had ever seen. Its twin rotors created a pall of brown dust as it landed. The chow chows’ frantic barking could not be heard above the noise of the machine. Henry watched the landing impassively. He had done everything impassively for many days now—few words, no smiles, hardly a gesture. Something was eating him, but who knew what?
We flew much lower in the giant helicopter than we had done in the rickety little brown airplane Ng Fred had sent for us the last time we went on a field trip. The passenger compartment of the ship wasn’t insulated against noise. The whack-whack of the rotors was deafening. After maybe an hour, Yao got to his feet and pointed out the window. When I didn’t respond right away—what could ther
e be to look at in this wilderness?—he touched the skin under his eye with a fingertip to indicate that I should take a look. I did as suggested, and there below us was a vast prison camp surrounded by a high fence that enclosed a great many buildings. Hundreds of human beings, all dressed alike in blue, marched across its open spaces in long columns, like worker ants. The helicopter flew lower and circled. The ants, apparently under orders to pretend that this intrusion wasn’t happening, did not look up. Soon they were hidden in a cloud of dust. The helicopter was now flying so close to the ground that I could see the faces of the guards in the watchtowers. They too were ignoring us.
The helicopter hovered. General Yao put his lips close to my ear. I felt the warmth and moisture of his breath.
“Mulligan,” he shouted, pointing.
I looked hard and sure enough, there was Bear himself, standing on a rooftop with his red hair blowing in the wash of the chopper’s rotors. He now had a red beard to go with his mustache, and the beard was windblown, too. Bear was in chains—not shackles but actual chains, very heavy ones, secured by padlocks. Like the rest of the prisoners, he wore a blue uniform. Four smaller men in brown uniforms held his arms. Half a dozen other guards surrounded them. Bear struggled, silently roared. It was a version of the theater scene in King Kong. The guards beat him with truncheons. He shrugged off their puny blows. In his mind he was still the lord of the jungle. He had not yet realized he was now an ant and could never change back into the invincible creature he used to be. He glared upward. Could he see my face in the window? One of the guards struck him in the small of the back with a baton. Bear paid no heed, but continued to snarl at the helicopter. Would he leap upward, take hold of the helicopter, and smash it into the ground? Evidently the pilot had a similar thought. Abruptly, the machine climbed to a much higher altitude. Hundreds of kilometers of empty desert surrounded the camp in all directions.
“No escape possible,” General Yao shouted in my ear. “Finished.”
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