Lion Eyes

by Claire Berlinski

  “Yeah, but it takes time to write personal letters like that. And why did he come up to Paris? That takes money.”

  “Good ops do take time and money. But Internet marketing’s incredibly cost-effective compared to almost anything else. I just gave a presentation last Tuesday about the way Coke’s shifting its marketing dollars to digital. Integrated Internet marketing strategy’s where it’s at.”

  I thought about it. If you decided spy novelists were worth a try, you’d probably have my name at the top of your list. Anyone who did a Google search under “CIA” would see my Google ad. At the top of my home page was a blurb for Loose Lips. It had been written by a real, well-known former CIA case officer named Bob Baer whose name was always in the news. I’d interviewed him while doing my research. “This looks like an insider’s account,” he had obligingly written when my editor asked him to provide a few words for the dust jacket. My editor was thrilled with that blurb; he thought the more it sounded as if I were a disgruntled former CIA employee, the better it was for publicity. I could see how someone might wonder if I had a connection to the place, the kind of connection that would make the CIA take a glance at my mail every now and again.

  Finally I said, “Charlene, what was the point of all of this?”

  “The point of all of what?”

  I looked down at my notepad. I had put snouts and fangs on all the little cats, transforming them into wolves. “Why did they want to run a double against the CIA so badly that they’d go to all this trouble?”

  “You run doubles in order to feed the other guy disinformation. He says he’s an archaeologist; he knows where the underground bunkers are, right? He tells them they’re beneath some priceless ruin he’s been digging up. When it comes time to drop the bombs, the U.S. wipes out ancient whatever, the world goes nuts, and the Iranians still have their nukes, which are actually beneath his outhouse.”

  I wondered out loud if the CIA had realized its mistake yet. “Well sure,” she said. “They read the papers, long as they’re written in English. Someone there’s having a real bad day right about now. Hey, look, I’ve got to go—I’ve got to finish this report before noon. And I gotta stop lookin’ at this guy’s picture! If I stare at it anymore I’m gonna have to take my hormones out back and separate ’em with a hose. Don’t feel bad; I woulda done it with him too, even if I’d known. He’s too fine.”

  • • •

  I went over my conversation with Charlene in my head from every angle.

  “. . . What do you say, boss, we gonna give this Arsalan character an adorable feline sidekick again?”

  “Yeah, that worked good the last time. And don’t forget to croak his mom, the infidels always think that’s so touching . . .”

  She had to be right, I concluded. I had been conned, and so had the CIA. But what I didn’t understand was this: who was the man who had conned me? If not the man I thought I knew so well, then who had written to me about Isfahan’s caravansaries and the shafts of bright light that punctured the dusty interior of the bazaar? Who had written about the arcades of copper workers banging loudly, the gold sellers and carpet merchants, the craftsmen who painted delicate designs on the copper plates and vases? Spam might be cheap to send, but I had not fallen in love with Obafemi Ogunleye, manager in foreign remittance to the Nigerian Electric Power Authority. He too dropped me notes every now and again to see if I might like to strike up a friendly correspondence. I had fallen in love with the Lion, instead, and not just because Nigerian lyric poetry hasn’t much to commend it.

  I had fallen in love with something real. The letters were real, if not the man who had written them, and I had fallen in love with what they evoked. I had fallen in love with a man who had explained to me the complex harmony and austere beauty of the Friday mosque, where the marble pool with festooned edges reflected every architectural age of Iran, from the simplicity of the Seljuk period through the baroque Safavid. I had fallen in love with a man who could tell me why Turks would rather buy satellite dishes than fix their streets. I had fallen in love with a man who understood why I would want to know.

  Someone had written those letters, and that person had understood exactly what would interest me—and move me. Was the man who wrote those letters to me really an archaeologist? Had he truly dropped and broken a goblet displaying the world’s earliest example of animation? Had he really grown up in a working-class neighborhood of London? The mother he had described so affectionately—were his descriptions of the woman based on his own mother? Or was it all entirely made up? There was some intersection between the author of those letters and the fictional narrator he had created. Of that I was sure. I write fiction—and trust me: there is always some intersection between what you write and the truth.

  I suspected that most of the story he had told me about himself was true. Spies, after all, are taught to keep their lies simple and easy to remember, and the best way to do that is to lie as little as necessary. Somehow, after all, he had learned to speak and write English like that and had acquired a vast knowledge of the ancient world. The cat I had seen in his arms trusted him in the way only a much-pampered pet trusts his caretaker—that was no stray he’d snatched up in the street to use as a prop. But why would a man like him become a spy? When had he become a spy? Was he an ideologue? If he was an ideologue, was he a nationalist ideologue or a religious ideologue? Had he been visited in his youth with mystic visions, like the character in The Mantle of the Prophet? Had these persuaded him of the justice of the Islamic Revolution?

  When I tried to answer this question to my own satisfaction, my mind returned over and over to two points: his family, he wrote, had gone back to Iran after the Revolution, and he had turned down a fellowship at the London School of Oriental and African Studies—because Iran, he said, was his home. I had no idea whether one single word he had written me was literally true, but perhaps those were clues—even if offered from an unconscious recess—about the true state of his psyche, about the depth of the nationalism of the person who had written to me.

  Perhaps he had become a spy because he had never forgiven the English brats who bullied him as a child. Perhaps he had become a spy because he felt it would please his father. Or perhaps, like Sally, he just liked lying.

  And the night he spent with me. I wondered about that, too. Was that business or pleasure? If it was business, I thought sourly, these martyrdom operations were getting to be a much better deal for the martyrs nowadays.

  And for their victims, too. I had to give them that.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Dear Claire, I know who you really are and I know who all the people you write about really are. In all reality I shouldn’t be yappin’ all my info to some writer who works for THEM, but I guess after what I’ve been through I’m fearless and you can’t do worse to me than you’ve already done. . . .

  —Strange e-mail from a Loose Lips fan

  When my book was published one month later, I no longer had time to dwell on the Lion. My frighteningly keen publicist sent me on a monthlong American publicity tour. She arranged for me to sign books and give readings at every college function, retirement home, veterans’ association, Jewish Community Center, and Rotary Club from Grain Ball City to Leper’s Depot. Every toilet I used that month was sanitized for my protection.

  In Los Angeles, I dropped in on Samantha and Lynne, who had purchased a Spanish Colonial hacienda in Bel Air with the proceeds of the endorsement deal they’d signed with Benetton. I had never seen Samantha as Samantha before, and I was once again astonished. She had plucked her eyebrows on the way, shaved her legs, and he was a she—and she was every bit as convincing that way as she had been as a man. She was wearing a slim wool skirt, elegant high-heeled pumps, and a black Lycra bodysuit; her hair was in chin-length curls. Her strong features made her face handsome and interesting. I noticed that she had nice ankles. Like that, her low voice sounded really sexy, in a Marlene Dietrich way. Lynne too had blossomed. She told me she’d found
a terrific allergist.

  I flew back through London. Since I had a long layover, I dropped in on Imran for lunch. He had never looked happier. Gulmira’s dowry of shyrdaks, tush-kiyizes, and ala-kiyizes were draped over his faux-chryselephantine Art Deco sculpture collection. His bride, he told me, had embroidered the shyrdaks herself. Her children were running about the living room, crawling under the table legs and over the Italian leather sofa, fencing with Imran’s badger-bristle shaving brushes. “They’ve been playing with my loudspeakers all day,” said Imran cheerfully, tousling Bogdan’s hair. “This little rascal punched holes in the drivers with his fingers. All jammy, too. I fear the sonic characteristics may be changed forever.” He said this as if it were the cleverest thing any child had ever done.

  Gulmira, itty-bitty and kitten-faced, was a lioness of fashion in a Lurex minidress made out of the British flag and thigh-high white go-go boots. Imran fussed over her proudly, and she spent most of the meal gazing at him adoringly. “England must be a change for you,” I said to her. “How are you liking the weather here?”

  “Yes, too happy. Very love man. Father in Kyrgyzstan—no good! Too much controlling.” Nodding sagely, Imran speared himself a largish hunk of plov and popped it into his mouth. We spent the meal chatting about her father—at least I think that was what we were chatting about.

  When at last I returned to Paris, I was looking forward to sleeping in my own bed. I set down my bags and washed my face, then, since it had been several days since I had last checked my e-mail, turned on my computer. Waiting for me were messages from my mother and my editor, about three hundred pieces of spam, and a missive from an e-mail address I didn’t know—abs@ubirmingham.uk.edu. There was no subject line, but I opened it anyway.

  From: abs@ubirmingham.uk.edu

  Date: March 6, 2005 09:45 AM

  To: Claire Berlinski claire@berlinski.com

  Subject: (No subject)

  Dear Claire,

  How long it has been since I have permitted myself the luxury and the pleasure of writing your name!

  My dear Claire, I hope you are not too angry with me. Your absence, far from making me forget you, has caused my affections to burn with greater vehemence, if that were possible. I know, I am certain, that this whole unfortunate business has had the most terrible repercussions for your career. For that, I know no apology from me will suffice, but perhaps you will take comfort in my certainty that you will land ever so nimbly on your feet, if you have not already? For your intellect is keener than a pointed sword; of this I am certain, and you have your youth and robust constitution. May I be permitted to suggest that I see the secret working of Providence in the retirement we have both been obliged prematurely to enter? For if you can forgive me my deceits, certainly I can forgive yours, and now, with no obstacle in place, we might resume our correspondence. A friendship such as ours is, after all, a delicious cake—and we do have so much in common.

  And so I prostrate myself at your feet, my Claire, in the deepest humility and hope of your forgiveness. . . .

  A.

  PS: Perhaps you would wish to keep abreast of my recent research? I have made a most fascinating discovery.

  Birmingham Journal of Antiquity Vol 79:304, 2005 pp 257–268—Cloak . . .

  Blinking rapidly, I clicked on the link in the message. It took me to a page of abstracts in the online version of the Birmingham Journal of Antiquity. I scanned the page.

  Arsalan Safavi

  Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity

  University of Birmingham

  Cloak and Letters:

  Rogue Espionage in the Persian Achaemenid Empire

  Birmingham Journal of Antiquity 30 (2005) 163–180

  Abstract: As detailed by Herodotus, Darius, the third of the great Persian kings, invaded Scythia in 514 BC. As the Persian army marched across the Danube to the Russian steppes, what should have been a casual victory resulted in chaos and confusion as Scythian nomads, retreating, devastated the countryside, forcing Darius to abandon the campaign for lack of supplies. The Scythian ability to anticipate and evade the Persians has until now been a mystery, but in the course of an emergency salvage operation to protect Persepolis from flood damage, an unusual and well-preserved baked-clay cuneiform cylinder, with a trilingual inscription in Elamite, Babylonian, and Persian, was uncovered. The cylinder seal depicts a lion trampling Darius’s chariot horse—a most unusual image—and its contents afford us a rare insight into espionage techniques used to undermine the Persians’ military efforts. The cylinder inscription suggests that the historic rout may be attributed to a deliberate, sophisticated disinformation campaign—one contrived not by the Scythians themselves but by a rogue Scythian counselor who subsequently confessed his activities to his Persian captors. Horrified by the prospect of an attack on ancestral Scythian sepulchers, and fearful that Scythian provocations would invite such an attack, the counselor launched a private counterespionage campaign to feed disinformation to Darius’s army. Entering into a romantic correspondence with a vulnerable member of Darius’s harem whose correspondence he believed—correctly—would be intercepted by Darius’s spies, the counselor systematically misled Darius’s army, drawing them repeatedly into fruitless military exercises while obscuring the real location of the sepulcher.

  Volume 30 Number 2 (Summer 2005) Table of Contents Main Author Listing

  List of Indices

  BJA Home Page

  http://www.birmingham.edu/ja

  Birmingham Journal of Antiquity All rights reserved.

  I tried to find the article in its entirety, but every link on the page took me to an error message. The page cannot be displayed. The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. I searched Google, looking for another link to the article. I didn’t find it, nor in fact did I find any further reference to the Birmingham Journal of Antiquity, but when I entered the term “Scythians” I did quickly learn something rather telling.

  The Scythians were in no position to correspond with anyone. They were completely illiterate.

  • • •

  I supposed I could see why Arsalan had felt the need to encode his confession—if indeed it was a confession—given that every message we had ever sent each other had been intercepted. His point seemed clear enough: He was the Scythian who had run a rogue operation to protect his ancestral sepulchers from attack by feeding the enemy disinformation.

  I read and reread his letter and the odd, phony abstract, trying to determine how it had transpired.

  . . . It began two years ago, when Arsalan made a puzzling discovery at the Burnt City. While excavating at the bottom of the known ruins, he stumbled upon a second set of ruins—a small, subterranean complex of chambers and tunnels. Intrigued, he crawled through the largest tunnel. At the very end of the tunnel, he found something strange—was it some kind of lid? Perhaps, he thought, it was a well? When he gently pried it open, he discovered to his surprise that it was a shaft. He shined his flashlight down but couldn’t see the bottom. It seemed to descend hundreds of meters.

  He returned to his car for his rappelling gear.

  As he descended, near the bottom of the shaft his flashlight glinted off a reflective surface. Odd, he thought. What could be reflective down here? But when he reached the bottom he saw exactly what it was.

  He was in a massive cavern. In the middle was an object—a huge object. He did not know what it was, but one thing he did know: it had not been built 5000 years ago. Big as a small warehouse, the grotesque, gleaming thing was sitting on shock absorbers, surrounded by elaborate cooling and filtering ducts. He saw writing on the side—in Korean.

  Terrified, he clambered back up. When he returned to the surface, he took a soil sample and later tested it in his laboratory. The concentration of uranium above the Burnt City was nearly twenty times greater than natural levels.

  He was stunned—and he was furious. The United States

  had recently invaded Iraq, ostensibly to neutralize its
weapons of mass destruction. His beloved Lady of Warka had disappeared in the looting of the Iraqi National Museum. It was widely believed that Iran would be next. An invasion would be prefaced by air strikes against suspected underground bunkers. Artifacts could not be trusted to the care and competence of American military commanders!

  If he could find this site, he thought, so could the CIA. So could American missiles. The Iranian government had put the whole Burnt City at risk. He imagined the ancient city obliterated, the remains of the ancient civilization vaporized. It was unacceptable, unthinkable. . . .

  Several weeks later, he switched on the radio. He heard on the news that the United States had bombed a village wedding party in Afghanistan, killing many of the guests. The Americans blamed “mistaken targeting information.” They had, they claimed, been given bad intelligence. Suddenly, it came to him: What if someone were to give the CIA bad intelligence about the location of the nuclear site? What if he told them it was half a mile to the south of the Burnt City? They would bomb the wrong place. They would realize their mistake sooner or later, of course, but it would buy him time. An extra year, an extra two years to excavate. . . .

  “. . . a vulnerable member of Darius’s harem whose correspondence he believed—correctly—would be intercepted by Darius’s spies. . . .”

  But he is an archaeologist, not a spy. He has no idea how to contact the CIA. Is there a phone number? A website? He searches under the initials “CIA” on the Internet and sees a Google ad for Loose Lips. He reads the reviews. He concludes that the author must be connected to the CIA. Perhaps she is an undercover officer. He writes to her.