I read the ad.
GULMIRA FL6186
Height: 156 cm ~ 5 ft 1 in
Weight: 43 kg ~ 94 lb
Eye color: brown
Hair color: brown
Build body: slim
Smokes: No
Zodiac: Capricorn
Marital status: widowed, divorced
Languages: English, Level 1, very little knowledge, needs all letters translated
Seeks partner: 35–75 years old
Introduction: 4 credits
I am very kind, have open mind and never lie because I hate when somebody lie. I dislike coldness and onion. This not game for me and I am very serious about marriage in near future. I am ready for my love man make everything only good. I am have very tender character, always sincere, I am like beautiful things, flowers, cook food tasty, very love travel but never be in another country, only can see in TV this, and have dream about someday visit beautiful places in world. I one year ago have finished institute, and now I work in the insurance organization by the bookkeeper. At leisure I am engaged in sports and domestic colors. Like to have rest on nature in company of friends. You are brave, kind, undertaking, like dancing, small-arms- firing, swimming. I dream to meet my big love, for whom I can give all my passion, love, and tenderness. I dream to meet man with nice soul, who can be for me best friend and for my children nice and kind father. I can be naughty and affectionate like fluffy kitten, or enigmatic and charming like lioness of fashion. I can be calm and cozy like warm of fire-place in frosty evening or merry and bracing like fresh spring water in hot afternoon. I’m fragile and defenseless exotic flower, which wait for his own ray of sun and ready to bloom for him and always give happy and joy to him. Family it is the most important things for me. Every days and night which we spend with my beloved man, will be happiest time. I wish to live and to breathe only for him.
“Without hesitation,” Imran explained, “I wrote a letter to her that flowed directly from my heart.” If he felt nervous when he hit the send button, his heart nearly stopped when he checked his computer the next day and found a reply. After a whirlwind correspondence, he called her three days later at her grandmother’s apartment. Hers was the sweetest, most angelic voice he had ever heard. With the help of his English–Kyrgyz phrasebook, he managed to communicate his bravery, kindness, and undertaking. He caught a flight two days later to Bishkek.
The next ten days were written directly from the pages of a beautiful novel, he wrote, and proved that true romance is alive and not just for songs or movies. They took a tour on horseback of scenic Issyk-Kul’skiy Zapovednik (which was easier done than said), and on their fourth day together, Imran asked Gulmira to join him forever in marriage. “She has,” he wrote, “given my life new meaning.” Yes, he acknowledged, there was a difference in their ages, but women in Kyrgyzstan grew wise to the ways of the world early.
I had no doubt.
Imran said nothing to suggest what, precisely, he found so compelling about Gulmira. He seemed to think it obvious, and perhaps it was.
He reported that fermented mare’s milk was much better than one might expect.
• • •
The weather turned miserably cold, the kind of windy, penetrating cold that makes it seem as if nothing would be worth leaving the apartment for. And so I didn’t, for days. On one particularly frigid morning, though, I realized in the worst possible way that I was out of toilet paper and that yes, some things were worth leaving the apartment for. I bundled up in my sheepskin coat and my old Soviet frontier officer fur hat. I pulled down the earflaps. When I stepped outside, I half expected to see penguins and polar bears parading across the Place Dauphine.
I had my head down against the wind on the way back from the grocery store, so I didn’t see him coming over the bridge. I would have walked right past him if he hadn’t stopped me. “Claire?” said a familiar voice.
I looked up, startled. “Jimmy?”
“Hi.” We both stopped in the street. I was surprised by his hair. He had grown a shaggy shoulder-length mop. It gave him an unfamiliar sheepdog aspect.
“How are you?” I asked.
“I’m good.” We looked at each other in the awkward way ex-lovers do when they accidentally run into each other after a long time has passed. His nose was red, and he looked absolutely freezing: He wasn’t wearing a coat.
“What are you up to these days?” I asked.
A vile gust of wind blew over the Seine. He pulled his thin scarf tighter around his ears. “I’m moving out. Going back to Ireland.”
“You are?”
“Yeah, some mates are going into real estate in Belfast. Gonna give them a hand.”
If you had asked me five minutes before what Jimmy might have been into these days, real estate probably wouldn’t have been on my short list, but I nodded and said, “That sounds good.” Then, to fill the empty air between us, I said that I’d heard the Irish economy was really booming. We made a bit of small talk about the Irish economic miracle. Later it occurred to me that the conversation had nothing to do with what he’d just told me; Northern Ireland, unlike the mainland, is an economic basket case. I wasn’t thinking it through, and I have to assume he wasn’t either, then or in general. “I’m surprised to see you,” he said. “I thought you’d moved to Italy.”
“Italy? Why’d you think that?”
“I dropped by once, a while ago, to see if maybe I could pick up my coat. Some strange bugger answered the door and told me you’d moved there.” He took a deep drag on his cigarette and shivered. His face looked more lined and worn than I remembered. His teeth were chattering.
“You know,” I said, “I still have your coat in my storage room. Want to get it now?”
He looked surprised. “Yeah, I’d appreciate that.” I looked at his chattering teeth; he noticed me looking. “It belonged to me da,” he added, “so it’s got sentimental value.” As we walked he pulled a pouch of tobacco from his pocket and rolled himself another cigarette with one hand, then struggled to light it in the wind, trying over and over, failing, cursing, humping his hands and hunching his back in an effort to shelter the flame. The wind seemed to be coming at him from every direction at once. When he finally managed to get it lit, he mentioned that the man who had answered my door was “a right odd bastard.” I asked what he meant. He shrugged. “He was just an odd bugger. There were two women there with him, these two big black skanks. They looked like pros to me. He invited me in, but I had a weird feeling about what he wanted. I just got out of there.”
I rolled my eyes and said it came as no surprise.
When we got back to my building, I told him to wait in the lobby while I went down to the storage room. I found his coat under a pile of dust. I picked it up. It was threadbare and greasy. It sure didn’t look anything like a treasured family heirloom. I suspected he hadn’t been able to afford another one. I looked around and found an old Norwegian fisherman’s sweater that looked a bit warmer than the one he was wearing and a pair of my old ski gloves.
“What are these?” he said when I brought them up.
“They were yours. Don’t you remember?”
He looked puzzled. He tried to put the sweater on, but it was too small for him. He took off his own sweater to see if mine would fit over his T-shirt. When he did I noticed two little colored hooves on his muscular upper arm, poking out from under his sleeve. He noticed me trying to figure it out. “New tattoo,” he said. “Got it last summer.” He pushed up his sleeve to show me his bicep. The hooves belonged to a flute-playing Pan superimposed over a botched rendition of the Spanish flag.
He managed to fit the new sweater over the T-shirt. He wrapped the other one around his neck, put on that shabby hobo coat and the ski gloves—which were also too small for him—and thanked me.
“Well, I guess I’ll see you around,” he said as he headed for the door.
“Good luck in Ireland.”
For a second our eyes met, and then I looked a
way.
• • •
Fighting a powerful sense of melancholy, I went upstairs and ran a hot bath to warm up. After sitting in it for quite some time, thinking about the strange way things turn out, I got up and dried off, then got into my warm flannel pajamas and slippers. I sat down at my computer to do some work. I checked my e-mail first.
There was a message from Imran. He was writing to tell me that marriage was a splendid institution. He and his bride wished to add to their family as soon as possible. “Soon there will be a little Imran running around the house!” He furnished a long update on Gulmira’s progress—she had embroidered an eyeglass case for his spectacles; she had learned to use the microwave; she was reading Totem and Taboo. He signed his letter with love, then added a PS. “I saw this in the Kyrgyzstan Daily Digest. Isn’t this that bloke?”
I had no idea what he was talking about. I clicked on the link he sent below the postscript. The headline read: “Afghanistan Expels Iranian Culture Consultant.”
KABUL, Afghanistan—A UNESCO cultural consultant in Afghanistan has been ordered to leave the country within 48 hours, the Foreign Ministry has announced. The reason given for the expulsion was his “engagement in activities incompatible with his status.”
The Iranian national, Dr. Arsalan Safavi, has been in Kabul for eight months as an advisor to the Special Afghan Conference on the Repatriation of Cultural Property.
According to the Ministry’s official statement, “The Iranian ambassador was invited to the Foreign Affairs Ministry and informed that Dr. Safavi has been declared persona non grata in connection with activities causing damage to Afghan interests. The decision was taken after concluding the incompatibility of the activities of this person with the provisions of the Vienna Conventions.”
In a tit-for-tat move, the Iranian government immediately arrested and expelled two unnamed Afghan aid workers in Sistan-Baluchistan province whom they accused of committing unspecified “hostile acts.”
Above the article was a photograph. The caption identified the man in the photograph as the expelled UNESCO consultant. The man was—unquestionably—Arsalan.
I stared blankly at the photograph for a moment. What was he doing in Afghanistan, of all places? Why had he been expelled? At first I was excited to see a sign of life from him, but the more I looked at that article, the more queasy I felt.
I did a quick search on Google and found the same story reported in several outlets. An obscure online newspaper called Asia Times ran a longer article concerning the escalating espionage war between Iran and the new government of Afghanistan. It quoted unnamed “senior government sources” in Pakistan who claimed that Afghan intelligence agents on the American payroll had of late been attempting to infiltrate Iran’s eastern border in a hunt for nuclear installations buried in Sistan-Baluchistan. It mentioned Arsalan only in passing, in the sixth paragraph: it described him as “a member of an Iranian spy ring in Afghanistan.”
All at once I felt the way you do when you flip on the bathroom light in the middle of the night and see that the countertop is covered in roaches.
I looked for Charlene’s phone number in Prague. She picked up the phone on the first ring, sounding brisk—she was at the office, even though it was a Saturday morning. I asked her if she was in front of her computer and told her to check out the Kyrgyzstan Daily Digest. “Whoa!” she said when she saw it.
“What?” I asked.
“Dude’s a stone fox! Man, no wonder you were so hot for him!” “Charlene—what does the article mean?”
“What do you mean what does it mean? Means just what it says—dude’s one foxy-ass Iranian spy. Now you know why he never called you again.”
• • •
Charlene and I talked for about an hour. I’d never told her about Dave’s book or his revelations about Sally. She snorted when I did. “ ‘Textbook recruitment,’ huh? Yeah, I’ll bet. Another great moment in CIA history. What a bunch of asshats.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was a double.”
“What makes you so sure? I mean, maybe he was our spy over there. Isn’t that possible?”
“They would never tell an important Iranian asset to go to Afghanistan and spy on a friendly regime. I mean, he could get himself exposed that way. Which he did, as a matter of fact. Dumb-ass. If that guy was out there spying on Afghanistan, he was not our guy.”
“But wait, Charlene; did they know all along? Was that why they were after him?”
“You mean, they knew he was an Iranian spy, and they were thinking they’d recruit him and run him back against his own folks? Well, if they knew that, why would they have needed you? Nope, I’d say this is a good old-fashioned fuck-up. Big time. Lots of memos. Oh, can you hold on a second here? I’ve got another call.” She put me on hold.
While I waited, it began to sink in. Somehow, I had completely misunderstood everything that had transpired—and evidently I wasn’t the only one. She returned to the line. “Charlene Pierce,” she said professionally.
“Charlene, it’s me.”
“Oh, sorry. Hold on.” Two minutes later she came back, complaining about the way her vendors just couldn’t get their stupid former-command-economy heads around the growth potential of the energy-drink market. I tried to keep her focused.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Where were we?”
“You were saying why you were so sure they didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know what?”
“That he was an Iranian spy.”
“Yeah. Okay, it’s like this. You want to recruit another spy, you don’t have to work too hard to meet him, as long as you know who he is. He’s got the same job as you, so he’ll be going the same places you go, right? He’ll be at cocktail parties, working the room. He’ll be traveling overseas. He’s not hard to meet. If they knew he was some savvy-ass Iranian spy, they would have waited until he left Iran, then just walked up to him and said, ‘Hey, bro! We’re from the U.S. government and we’re here to help!’ But if they messed you up in it, they obviously didn’t think he’d be so easy to meet. They must have really thought he was some archaeologist who’d be hard to approach. Generally speaking, you don’t bring people who write books called Loose Lips into the loop if you can avoid it; you see what I’m saying?”
“But I don’t understand—if the Iranians were trying to run a double against the CIA, why would they make him out to be someone who’s so hard to approach? Why wouldn’t he just walk into an embassy somewhere and say, ‘I have information I want to share with the CIA’?”
Charlene spoke to me patiently, as if I were a child who was having trouble coming to grips with long division. “Because that would be way too suspicious. It would look too good to be true. CIA’s like everyone else—they don’t want to date anyone who’s too into them. Turns ’em off. Makes them wonder, What’s wrong with this guy? You play hard to get, and all of a sudden they get real excited.”
“So what you’re saying is, they create this guy, have him write to the not-very-renowned novelist Claire Berlinski about the finer points of Turkish grammar, and wait until the CIA shows up? That’s nuts.”
“I reckon he wrote to you about other things besides that. Didn’t he tell you where he works?”
“Yeah, so?”
“They probably knew the CIA was looking for an archaeologist who worked at those sites.”
“How would they know that?”
“Oh, lots of ways. Maybe some archaeologist over there told them the CIA tried to pick him up at a party. Maybe they heard it through the grapevine.” She hummed a few bars of the Marvin Gaye song. “Anyway, didn’t he ever mention being just a little unhappy with the way things were being run in Iran?”
I remembered how furious he was about the dam-building projects. “Sort of, I guess.”
“Wrote to you in really good English, right? Mentioned how he never really felt totally at home anywhere, seemed awfully Westernized for an Iranian?”
&
nbsp; I was doodling little cats on a notepad as I spoke to her. I stopped in mid-doodle, my pen in the air. “Yes.”
“Maybe drops a few hints that he’s kind of a loner, a risk-taker, thinks he’s a little bit special?”
I got her point. That was not just the classic profile of a man who would be attractive to women. It was the classic profile of a man who would be tempted to commit espionage. “But still, why would he think the CIA would be reading my mail?”
“He probably thought it was a reasonable bet, given the book you wrote. But I’m sure the Iranians didn’t just put all their eggs in one basket. They were probably writing to everyone they thought might get their mail read by the CIA.”
“Wouldn’t the CIA be suspicious of some guy who strikes up conversations with everyone on the planet who’s connected to the CIA?”
“Well, of course they would be, if it was that same guy. But that’s why the Internet is so great. Use a different e-mail account, different server, different story, change your name. Really good value for money, marketing-wise.”
“But why would they think there was the remotest chance that the CIA was reading my mail? I’m a novelist. Do you mean to tell me professional Iranian spies can’t tell the difference between a novel and reality? They can’t be writing to every single spy novelist out there, hoping maybe her book was really true and the CIA’s so pissed at her that they’ve got her under surveillance.”
“Sure they can. It’s free to send spam. That’s why your mailbox is full of it every morning.”
Lion Eyes Page 19