by Michael Oren
Not that there was time to contemplate the deviousness. The first task was to get Sir Nigel to safety, first at Mutassif’s, whose mother nursed the traumatized diplomat with an extra scoop of mashed hermit crabs. Later, I stashed the money under the rag-filled mattress and took my superior by the arm to my own humble flat near the port.
“Humble” might be an inappropriate word, conjuring as it does cushy armchairs and low-wattage bulbs. My place was a dump. Four concrete walls, a cot and a kitchenette that I barely used but which afforded a view of any randomly anchoring vessel. Such as the small ship, unmarked yet unmistakably Naval, moored there the next morning.
I didn’t ask Sir Nigel about it, though—curled up on the cot, he snored dolefully—until I returned from the souq. While shopping for flatbread and coffee, I noticed more than the usual litter of carcasses in the street. Not just cats and vermin this time, but the goats and sheep that Darjans often valued more than blood-relatives. Only when I served my guest his breakfast did I mention the strange sight, and only then did I hear him murmur, “Bailout.”
Mistaking the word for a certain brand of whiskey, I apologized for being plum out, and suggested we locate one of the island’s two or three phones and communicate our situation. But Sir Nigel merely grumbled again, “Bailout,” and rather violently shook his head. That was when I realized that something else was afoot, something perverse.
My first instinct was to rush to Mutassif, but instead of weaving through the usual beggars and goatherds, I found myself face to mask with men in full-body bio-suits. Through megaphones, they were warning—in English!—of some dire bacterial danger, and urging all residents to evacuate at once. Some of the men were spraying the street, others assisting the elderly to depart. Others, still, prodded the majority who were more than content to watch this all half-snoozing until stirred into motion at rifle-point.
In seconds, the unpaved drag of what Sir Nigel once called Darja’s capital was a torrent of panicked islanders. The flood was too intense to penetrate—on the contrary, it swept me with it toward the port. The mysterious boat was no longer alone now but accompanied by far larger military transports. A helicopter thwacked overhead. “Mutassif!” I shouted, straining on my toes, but the noise was all-drowning. Brown, black, mulatto faces melded in the heat as they surged toward the transports’ ramps. Howling “Mutassif!” I tried to break through the corridor of Royal Marines arrayed, for some reason, in battle gear.
“Sorry, sir. Off-limits,” one pumped-up sergeant apologized in a voice which, underscored by his brandished weapon, sounded threatening.
I was about to start arguing with him, was ready to plead, when I again spied that incongruous duo. They were spectating, it seemed, Kabashkin with his Soviet architecture features, and Coulson, all freckles and cream, moustache shielding his smirk.
“Happy are you, Nate?” I accosted him. “Is this what you wanted?”
The Panama hat was already half-pushed up the American’s head, but he tipped it up further. “It’s a sight to be seen, I do confess,” he drawled. “Though another outcome might have been preferred. If I had my druthers.”
“If I had my druthers,” I lurched at him. “You’d both be on a leaky dhow to Bombay.”
And I might have taken a swipe at Coulson, anything to wipe off that sneer, if my name was not just then called.
“Allah Istar! Over here! Allah Istar!”
Mutassif. Between the human flotsam, for a fleeting second, I glimpsed his quiet beauty. Perhaps his mother was with him, too, and his assorted siblings. Perhaps, in the burlap sack he hauled with all his family’s belongings, was the bag I’d hidden under the bed.
“Wait for me! I’m coming!”
I rushed toward the line of Marines. “Let me in!”
“Sorry, sir.” This time no garnishing the threat.
“Goddamn you…”
I wasn’t thinking, not even feeling, and only vaguely aware of reaching under the small of my back. And then, somehow, I found myself pointing that pistol straight at the sergeant’s nose. He didn’t budge, though, didn’t blink. And barely had I yammered, “Let me in or I’ll…” when another Marine’s rifle butt knocked me senseless on the jaw.
Puking, I awoke on a military hospital ship some hours later, handcuffed to the bed and guarded. Yet, by chatting up the orderlies, I managed to piece together much of what happened. How the entire population of Darja, several thousand souls, had been hauled East and West and deposited on foreign shores. Among the last to leave, I learned were the U.S. and Soviet legations. Once the flotillas were out of range, a massive explosion enveloped the island. The flash could be seen from as far away as Sri Lanka.
I understood that if Britain couldn’t keep the island, no one would. Not so much as a last gasp but as the final spit-in-the-world’s-eye from a dying empire. Thus ended our thirty-year rule over Darja, with a whimper as well as a bang.
I understood and so did senior officials in Whitehall. A week later, I was back in the Foreign Office, seated in an overstuffed Edwardian chair, surrounded by furnishings pilfered from Delhi and Rangoon, in a high-ceiling office overlooking Buckingham Palace. There, I was informed of my pending resignation from the service as well as the terms of my retirement.
The backstory, it seemed, was complete. The germs that contaminated Darja were anomalous but deadly, the evacuation a humanitarian necessity. As for the bomb, the press obligingly attributed it to Israel, whose leaders were chided by London. Only the internal record remained to be closed and that task—given Sir Nigel’s incapacity—fell to me. Write the summary and all charges of insubordination and attempting to shoot a Royal Marine would be dropped, the deal offered. Write it, and I could fade unremarked into history.
Leaning back into the brocade, rubbing my still-swollen jaw, I contemplated this for a moment. Whether to conclude my public career with pride or turpitude, complicity or honor. I pictured myself in prison, on the one hand, and on the other, a free man unburdened of all but the truth.
* * * * *
The document, the last in FO 145/4871, jiggles slightly in my grip. The date on top, August 25, 1980, remains a kind of anniversary for me, a day of remembrance and regret. Under the antiseptic light of the archive reading room, even the heading seems unholy:
To: The Permanent Under-Secretary
From: Embassy, Darja
Sir,
It is my duty to summarize recent events in Darja. Following the outbreak of disease, our Mission effected a temporary relocation of the populace.
Lies! Lies! I want to scream out. There was no outbreak, no disease, only the deliberate poisoning of flocks. No temporary relocation but a permanent cleansing. Yet still the prevarications unwound.
Despite the attack on his office, Ambassador Ringwald remained in complete control, ensuring the suppression of all rebel groups and the orderly return of the Sultan.
Of course, Ambassador Ringwald was hors de combat, as we say in diplomacy, and in life, totally out of it. Rather than being suppressed, Razi the brigand was hauled off with the others and could conceivably be seen even today selling turnips in Sana’a. Sultan Qaboos was derailed, as it were, and cast into Manchester exile.
Finally, the ultimate fallacy—the whopper:
I have stayed in our Mission preparing for a peaceful transition from Colonial rule to a popular republic happily secured in our Commonwealth.
Never would I see Darja again and nor would anyone else. The few strips of the island not reduced below sea level were rendered indefinitely toxic to all life forms. As for staying in the Mission, that part was true if it referred to the San Francisco neighborhood where I took my little severance pay and opened a kitchen accessories store. There, amidst the French presses and edge grain cutting boards, I still watch the front door and wait, hoping against logic, that Mutassif will enter.
He will not have aged a day—so my fantasy spools—but will have remained as he was, kind-hearted and pristine. My imagination occasio
nally allows for a proper education, not only for him but for his many brothers and sisters, and an international profession that brings him to the Bay Area. All this was paid for, I daydream, by that single bag of cash. “Allah Istar!” he’ll bellow, all teeth and dimples. “Allah Istar, you are still so good and fat!
But then the door opens, the bell rings, and instead of a supple, smiling islander there’s some giggly newlyweds waving gift certificates or a rich family’s cook searching for a microplane zester. Sometimes, they know my name, though not the real one I left back in Britain. The name I used for the last time to sign this final fakery from Darja.
Be assured, sir, of my highest considerations,
Alistair Crosthwaite (Second Secretary)
* * * * *
The reading room is nearly empty when I look up from the file. The couples—the Asian boy and the English girl, the two randy graduates—have gone off to some pub somewhere and from there quite possibly to bed. For that is the prerogative, or better yet, the imperative, of youth. Only the pensioner remains, awakened now and trembling even harder, his nose an indignant maroon.
“I’ll tell you wot it is,” he barks at me as if I’d asked. “It’s foked. That’s what it is. Foked.”
He slams his file closed and I slam mine, though careful to retie the ribbon. “Foked,” I agree. “Indeed.”
Outside, darkness has replaced the rain as Kew’s preservative. The Victorian homes are gripped by it, the gardens encaged. Only the moon, embedded in the reflector pool, defies the gloom. But that image is also a fiction—all of it is, the village, the Victorian station. The only reality is the one we file away in our hearts, whether for thirty years or three hundred. Everlastingly, love rules us, and so willingly we submit.
Personal Assistance
Chloe knocked again, brisker this time, with knuckles, and tried to keep the coffee cup still. “Mister Anthony, sir,” she began, whispering, then added several decibels to her tone. “Please open up, Mister Anthony. I have your latte.”
Behind the luxury suite doors, she could hear an alarm clock buzzing and even the wake-up call. But no other sounds emanated, certainly no movement, and she considered employing her whole fist. She pounded once, twice, gritting her teeth at the sight of the saucer wobbling. “Please, Mister Anthony, get up. You’re supposed to be on set in an hour!”
She was about to wallop when an even harsher voice thundered from the end of the hall.
“Stop that, Zoe! Are you insane?”
The young woman turned toward Cheryl—Miss Milgram—with a crosscurrent of emotions. Hurt, anger, but mostly confusion coursed across her face. Not only young, but Afro-Caribbean and pretty, a recent graduate of Yale, she was unaccustomed to being spoken to so tartly. And how was she to respond to this much older person with the sexless hairstyle and doughy pants suit, white but probably uneducated? Disdain? Indignation? The most she could muster was fear.
“But my schedule says ten o’clock wake-up.”
She tried to reach into her rear pocket for her cell phone and nearly spilled some coffee.
“Jesus, Zoe,” Cheryl snapped and plucked the cup by its handle. “Now get out of here.”
Producing an electronic key, Cheryl let herself into the room and slammed the doors behind her. The personal assistant’s helper shivered in the hallway alone.
“Not Zoe,” she sobbed into the empty saucer. “Chloe.”
In a single gulp, Cheryl downed the latte and got to work. The odor choking the room could only be less offensive than the sight awaiting her inside. Vomit, sweat, stale booze, and cheap lubricant, she’d long ago learned to deal with, but she still dreaded pulling back the knotted covers to the cadaverous scene underneath.
Actually, “cadaverous” was insulting to the dead. Few stiffs would exhibit the varicose veins and distended belly, the pallor broken only by capillaries, the pores like termite holes. A forensic identification, she often thought, would be cake compared to recognizing the body which once evoked Michelangelo’s David. Summoning Banquo’s ghost was easier than slapping one of those wattled cheeks and barking, “Yo, Bogdan, Dobro jutro. Time to get your ass out of bed.”
Anthony got his ass up, or at least half of it, by groaning onto his side. The other portion had to be hoisted by Cheryl, by inserting her wrists under his armpits. She balanced his naked torso against hers, indifferent to its jellied coldness, even to the prune-like knob that pleasured numerous starlets—“pleasured” being his word.
Like a half-paralyzed crab, she hauled him into the shower and lowered him onto the tiles. The water rained artic cold at first and then lukewarm, but only because she pitied him.
“But what about her?” he groaned and raised a flaccid wrist.
“Her,” she understood, was the woman who supposedly remained in the bed. But there was no woman nor any signs that there had been. Just a few empty minibar items and the syringe which she diligently disposed. “It’s okay, honey,” Cheryl assured him. “She left you all her love.”
“Good. Good,” Anthony blubbered as Cheryl with accordioned sleeves shaved and shampooed him. “You’re a fine person, Milgram, you know that? Fucking first class. Where did I ever find you?”
Dabbing the lather from his earlobes, she sighed as always, “Under a rock.”
Under the worker wanted list was more like it. A bland request for a personal assistant’s helper, minimum salary, no experience necessary. The latter stipulation especially appealed to her, just out of Michigan State and newly arrived in Hollywood. The ad said nothing about films, but at twenty-two she already exhibited the gut for opportunity and danger that assured her long-term survival.
The address took her to a production studio much like the ones she’d seen in the movies—dour executives, perky extras, grips and gaffers ambling at unionized rates—and to a trailer emblazoned with a star. There she met Miss Houlihan, reviled on the lot as Mothra, a sour, strident woman of indeterminate age and barbarous disposition.
“You don’t do a thing unless I tell you to. Period,” she spat at Cheryl. “Even if he asks. Specifically, if he asks.”
It took another two days before she even found out who “he” was. Two days of ferrying bottles of Mey Eden water and Siberian cedar nuts in Lalique crystal bowls to and from the trailer. Each morning she delivered a latte that was mostly booze and another in the evening almost coffee-less. How many cups had she ferried before finally meeting her employer—accidentally—as he stepped out of his trailer. He breathed triumphantly and yanked up his fly.
“I’m so sorry,” Cheryl muttered and wished she had worn makeup that day, if only to cover her blush.
“Hi, there,” he chirped from the top of his stairs, three above Cheryl. He thrust his hand down to shake. “Yes, it’s me, Robert P. Anthony.”
Cheryl fumbled the bottle but managed to pin it between her elbow and flank. She took the star’s hand and almost introduced herself before Mothra came screeching at her.
“You! New girl! Get away from there and do your job!”
Their fingers unwound but not before Cheryl accorded him a view down the front of her T-shirt. Her hair was the color of maple candy and her eyes sylvan green. When her lips smiled sweetly, she knew, his would lasciviously respond. These, too, were instincts.
And she needed them, for the average longevity of a personal assistant’s helper, she learned, was less than a month. She had to be quick on her feet, responsible but cunning, innocent yet seductive. At twenty-two, in her first Hollywood job, Cheryl already understood that her only option was murder.
* * * * *
Deodorized, combed-over, and girdled, he was ready to be Robert P. Anthony. Getting him into the elevator, though, through the lobby’s swarm of autograph hounds and paparazzi, and into the limo without splintering his skull remained her daily ordeal. Yet, Cheryl weathered it as she always did, with grit and a backhand swat capable of dislodging a lens.
“Can’t be late,” Anthony reminded her as he str
ode, waving, toward the revolving doors.
Cheryl wanted to curse him for refusing to take the service entrance. Instead, she replied, “No worry, we’re right on time,” and, in the same breath, shoulder-butted a portly man with a camcorder. “Hey, fatso, that fucking thing’s out of here or I’m making it part of your head.”
“Can’t keep Lilly waiting.”
“She’ll wait,” Cheryl patted the pashmina sleeve of the suit she had crammed him into that morning. “And you! Want to taste that Canon?”
The Lilly in waiting was Lillian Drop, Anthony’s co-star, a petite brunette whose name, alone, was genuine. The rest was rhinoplasty and silicon, courtesy of a career which, if not meteoric, at least paid the surgeon’s bills. In this feature, Sidebar, she played a young, ambitious attorney struggling against an equally spry and gamey prosecutor trying to put her client, a wrongly accused ne’er-do-well, behind bars. Anthony portrayed the judge, sage and curmudgeonly. And when not in character, he was insanely in love with Lilly.
Such on-set crushes were common in Cheryl’s line of work. A box office draw such as Anthony was almost expected to have his way with the leading lady or at least a supporting actress, a kind of seigniorial right. But technology had all but done in privacy without retarding the old idol’s decline. Yet the truth about Lillian, Cheryl knew, was harsher than that. She did not need him. A romp in his trailer or a night feigning bliss was no longer a career enhancer. Professionally speaking, Robert P. Anthony could not help anybody, least of all himself.
Cheryl knew all of that but kept it from him. She could see him debauched and hung over or even strung out, but not hurt. More than caring for what remained of his body, her job was to watch out for his heart. She was its guardian, ruthlessly monitoring who gained entry and who didn’t. Preserving the tiny corner that was hers.
* * * * *
When Mothra caught her a second time approaching Anthony’s room, she realized there would not be a third. A message on Cheryl’s hotel phone asked her to fetch a cold compress for an ankle Anthony had strained during the day’s shooting. A comedy, The Mean Streets of Cleveland required him to run, and his feet needed nursing.