Loose Lips

by Claire Berlinski

  Iris crossed her hands, extended her forefingers, and put the long digits against her lips.

  I continued, “Maybe Nathan. Anyone who had a problem with me.”

  “Who do you really think did it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ll never know. Why? Who do you think it was?”

  “If I say what I think, will you be angry with me?”

  I felt vaguely apprehensive. I wanted to tell her to stop, but I told her to speak her mind.

  “You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?”

  I swiveled my head from side to side.

  “I’d say it was your man.”

  I must have looked shocked, because Iris put her hand on mine. Her skin was soft. “My God, why would you say something like that?” I said. “He wants to marry me, for the love of God.”

  Iris took a shallow breath and exhaled audibly. “Selena, you come from a nice kind of folk—folk who go to the symphony. Where you come from, when a woman steps out on her man, y’all visit Lionel Humberdolt, Esquire, and then you divvy up the house and the furniture and the kids, and you still go to your Passover seder together so no one gets too sad. You’re an awful smart girl and I love you, but you don’t know folks. My uncle put a knife in my aunt’s thigh when he thought she was messing on him, then dragged her around the house by her hair, hollering, ‘You bad bitch, I’ll put you down.’ That’s the kind of man Stan is, deep down, under all the white. When he came back from Headquarters that time, he was saying to himself, ‘Kirk and that girl made a fool of me.’ Next thing you know, Kirk’s out of a job, your best friend’s out of a job, and you’ve been reported to security. I’d say Stan ain’t the kind of man who lets a woman make a fool of him.”

  I took my hand away from hers. “Iris, Stan loves me.”

  “Love’s not always a beautiful thing.”

  We sat silently under the spinning ceiling fans. I could feel my heart beating in all my veins, behind my knees, in my shoulders, in my belly. After a minute, Iris’s cell phone rang; she answered it and in a flirtatious voice made a dinner date with someone named Max. She told him he was sweet as sugar and hung up.

  ROSENBLATT had diligently gathered background information—biodata, as we called it—about RAINBOW. His file was growing thick with reports from their lunch meetings. They had taken a snowboarding trip together, and now that the weather was fine, RAINBOW had accompanied our case officer on a series of weekend fly-fishing expeditions.

  I had been asked by my supervisor to study the RAINBOW file and draft a cable with an appropriate recruitment scenario. ROSENBLATT believed RAINBOW was nearly ripe.

  I studied RAINBOW’s Personal Record Questionnaires. He had been born in Finn Slough, population 352, a fishing village named for the Finnish immigrants who had settled the town in the late nineteenth century. The Slough, on the banks of the whimsically named Lulu Island, lay on the north arm of the Fraser River. RAINBOW’s dour great-grandfather, who had immigrated to Canada after taking leave from an Astoria coal mine in Washington, had taken in the island, with its lush green meadows and melancholy northern skies, and pronounced the place a New Finland—a promised land. The town’s main road still bore the RAINBOW family name. The miner’s four diligent sons had become commercial fishermen, their seventeen children had followed suit, and indeed every member of RAINBOW’s extended family earned a livelihood from the water. RAINBOW had grown up in the floating wooden scow house his grandfather built. His childhood had been organized by the rise and fall of the Fraser’s tidal waters. In the summer he caught frogs and tended the family’s garden and potato fields; in the winter, he attended the modest local public school.

  RAINBOW was, to his family’s surprise, unusually good with numbers and figures. When his teacher proposed that he attend the University of British Columbia, his parents and older brothers mortgaged the family fishing boat—the Mikko Hinhalla, named after his great-grandfather—to make it possible. RAINBOW was the first member of his family (and one of the first residents of the Slough) ever to receive a university degree.

  He had studied fish conservation at the university, graduating with a respectable 3.6 grade-point average. There, he had become active in environmental politics. Passionate about preserving the river that had sustained his family’s way of life for generations, he had accepted an internship with the Canadian Ministry of Fisheries after his graduation, where he discharged his duties so effectively that he was offered a permanent post. Although he loved his work, he found Toronto enormous, impersonal, alienating. He was deeply shy with women, and C/O ROSENBLATT perceived in him a terrible loneliness. When C/O ROSENBLATT invited him on weekend excursions to the countryside, RAINBOW accepted gratefully. The two men drank beer and swapped fish tales. As they cast their lures into the river, RAINBOW told C/O ROSENBLATT about the difficulties his family faced because of the decline in the salmon stock. His brothers, all of whom had small children to feed, had fallen on hard times. RAINBOW recalled that when he was growing up, it hadn’t been unusual for his father to catch as many as five hundred fish in a day. His brothers were lucky now to come home with half that. RAINBOW’s terrible fear was that the bank would repossess the Mikko Hinhalla. Since the boat had been mortgaged to pay for his education, the prospect filled him not only with anxiety but with agonizing guilt.

  Clearly, I wrote in the cable, RAINBOW had ample economic motivation to commit espionage. C/O ROSENBLATT had done an excellent job in establishing rapport with the target and engendering his trust. There was no way on earth RAINBOW would give us the information we wanted if he knew it would be used to bolster the U.S. trade negotiators’ position, but ROSENBLATT was pretending to be an executive with Chicken of the Sea, which gave him the perfect pretext for talking fish.

  I sketched out the scenario: C/O ROSENBLATT should tell RAINBOW that he would like him to write a series of confidential reports about Canadian salmon policy, with special reference to the U.S.–Canada salmon dispute. He would pay him $5,000 U.S. for each report, “but only if it really adds value, Dirk. My bosses won’t pay for anything they can read in the papers. They need to be a step ahead of the competition—they need to know what’s going down before the guys at Bumble Bee do.” To make the offer still more attractive, C/O ROSENBLATT could tell RAINBOW that his company was studying plans to open several new canneries in British Columbia, near RAINBOW’s hometown. “It could mean tens of thousands of new jobs for the folks back there, but they won’t have the confidence to do it unless they really feel like they have a handle on this salmon situation. They can’t afford to be caught short, you know what I mean?” C/O ROSENBLATT, I added, should immediately ask RAINBOW to sign a confidentiality agreement. “This is pretty much industry standard,” he should say, motioning at the contract that would swear RAINBOW to eternal secrecy. “We’ve got to keep our backsides covered. Salmon’s a ruthless business, and those guys at Bumble Bee are real sharks.”

  I wondered what objections RAINBOW might offer. What if he said he thought it was inappropriate to pass along government secrets? “Dirk, I love the way you’re still so idealistic,” C/O ROSENBLATT might say, “but let’s face it—lecture fees and consulting, that’s how everyone in government pays the bills. They can’t really expect you to live on what they’re paying you. They know you have to survive. You know, Norman Schwarzkopf gets $50,000 per lecture. It’s just the way the world works these days.” I added that he should tell RAINBOW how glad he was to be able to help him out. “I consider you a personal friend, Dirk. I hate the thought of your brothers having to sell that boat—I mean, how many years has that been in the family? It’s not right to let that go. It’s just not right.” I imagined him lowering his voice conspiratorially and placing a manly hand on RAINBOW’s shoulder. “I’ll level with you, Dirk—I had to pull a lot of strings to get this deal for you. Frankly, they wanted someone with a bigger name, and they thought five thou was pretty steep. But I told ’em, ‘I have confidence in Dirk. He knows salmon be
tter than anyone else alive, and he’s got a work ethic like you wouldn’t believe. He’ll pull through for us. I’ll stake my job on it.’ ”

  I finished the cable and sent it to Bob for approval. He liked it. “Great stuff. Send it out,” he said. “Kudos.”

  Iris hadn’t been quite right about the folk I grew up with. Admittedly, I had seen the inside of a symphony hall. But my family sure didn’t go to Passover seders together. My mother and father hadn’t had a civil conversation since I was eleven. One evening, when I was in the sixth grade, the phone rang at our house. My mother answered. She turned pale when she heard the voice on the other end. She said, “How dare you!” then slammed the phone back on its cradle. Then she grabbed my father’s key ring and went outside where his taxicab was parked on the street. She put on the seat belt, put the key in the ignition, put the car into drive, and stepped on the accelerator, smashing the car into the brick wall of our two-story brownstone. Then she backed up and did it again. Then again. And again. The front of the taxi was crumpled like an accordion. When she came back into the house, her face was bloody from slamming into the steering wheel. The cab was destroyed, and my father never spent another night under our roof.

  So I did know something about folks. But Iris was just plumb loco about Stan. She didn’t know Stan like I knew Stan. She didn’t like Stan like I liked Stan. I would know if what she said were true. I would sense it. There was no way I could share a bed with Stan without feeling something like that. That’s not the kind of secret lovers can hide.

  Two days after my conversation with Iris, Stan’s mother called. I told her he was out picking up the dry cleaning. Stan’s mom had a broad Midwestern accent; she sounded like she baked Toll House cookies and drove car pool. She asked me how Stan was doing, and when I told her he seemed just great, she admitted that she’d been worried about him—the last time she had spoken to him, he’d told her he was under a lot of stress at the office. “I told him it’s not a race to make partner, we’re proud of him no matter what,” she said. “Are they still taking depositions? Did they get the case relocated? He was so worried about that judge up in New York.” She sighed proudly. I told her the deposition phase had been wrapped up, but there was no decision yet on the jurisdiction. She asked if Stan was taking time to eat properly. I told her Stan was eating just fine.

  That night, I dreamt it was the last week of high school. Finals were over; the next day was the senior-class picnic. I saw Adam Goldenberg in the hall outside the machine shop. He was headed to Harvard in the fall. He was pleased with himself. Lee Cheng was going to Swarthmore. Jennifer Stoloff was taking a year off to work on a kibbutz, then returning to study at NYU. An enormous banner fluttered over the south staircase: CONGRATULATIONS SENIORS!

  My homeroom teacher passed me a note from the guidance counselor. I was to see him immediately. I knew this couldn’t be good news. I went to his office. Mr. Wasserman was abrupt. “Selena,” he said, “I can’t seem to find on file any record of your having taken, much less passed, Russian. Russian is a graduation requirement, you know.”

  “But—”

  Stan’s enormous face loomed over the desk at me. “You do speak Russian, don’t you, Selenuschka?”

  I realized that I had never once attended my Russian class. What had I been thinking? Maybe I could bluff it out? “Da,” I replied. “Da, da.”

  Stan began yelling at me in voluble Russian. He pounded his shoe on the table. I couldn’t understand a word but somehow knew exactly what he was saying: How could you do this to me? We will bury you!

  Stan gently shook me awake. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “You were having a bad dream. You were whimpering.” He held me tight. “Go back to sleep. Everything’s okay.” He ruffled my hair and kept murmuring. “You’re going to dream about fat little puppies who tug on your shoelaces. I’m a puppy and you’re a puppy, and we’re all curled up in a big feather bed and we’re happy ’cause we’ve chewed up all those yummy shoes …” He kept whispering this tender nonsense, and I fell back asleep, dreaming the dream he had told me to dream.

  In early September, in honor of the one hundred eighty-eighth anniversary of the Battle of Borodino, Stan decided to prepare a Russian feast. His Russian teacher had lent him an antique illuminated cookbook entitled Cuisine of the Czars. He carefully sliced the eggs and garlic for the salat iz yaits and folded them with sour cream and scallions. For the forshmak, he soaked herring in milk, then chopped it finely and fried it in butter with caramelized onions, adding eggs and potatoes and pepper and then turning the mixture into a casserole. As it baked, he applied himself to fixing a lamb and raisin plov, spiced with cinnamon and saffron and studded with plump dates. Exotic aromas filled the apartment. For dessert, he made Gourevskaya kasha, a concoction of semolina, cream, nuts, and sugared apricots. He told me that he had searched in vain for kvass, the fermented beverage that would ordinarily accompany such a meal, but having failed to find it, served the meal with a 1998 Bordeaux.

  The Special Investigations Branch had sent me an e-mail that morning. Janet had told me to describe my relationship with Paolo, who lived with my sister and was the father of her children. The message asked if he was a U.S. citizen. At dinner, I asked Stan why they cared.

  “They have to figure that if he’s living with Lilia, everything on her computer’s been compromised to him, too. Way bigger deal if a foreign national had access to the information,” he said, matter-of-factly. He speared a largish hunk of lamb and popped it into his mouth.

  As we did the dishes after dinner, I asked him.

  “Stan?”

  “Da!” Stan had taken to replying to me in Russian. He took his Russian class very seriously. He played his Russian tapes in the bathroom when he showered in the morning and on the tape deck as we drove to work. I was beginning to know the tapes by heart myself. Vam vyplachivayem vysokuyu tsendu dlya tekhnicheskikh usloviy modifikatsiy v esminets Sovremmenovo klassa, the speaker enjoined over and over. Vam vyplachivayem vysokuyu tsendu dlya tekhnicheskikh usloviy modifikatsiy v esminets Sovremmenovo klassa, Stan repeated in his heavy American accent. His Russian teacher was thrilled with his progress, pronouncing him the best pupil he’d ever had.

  “Stan, you didn’t do it, did you?”

  “Do what, my little Selenuschka?”

  “Turn me in. To Security.”

  “Yup!” he said cheerfully, wiping the good china with a dishcloth.

  “Seriously, Stan. Did you?”

  “You bet. Also told them about the unmarked bills you keep in the broom closet—thought that you could slip that one past me?—and that meeting in Mexico City with Igor, and those weird phone calls we get from that Chinese guy who wants to know whether the dry cleaner is careful with silk, and—”

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, but I’m serious. I need to know.”

  “Selena,” he said, putting down the dish towel and looking directly at me. “Listen. I want you to be the mother of my children. Can you seriously imagine that I would sneak off behind your back, go to Security, and deliberately harm you? Can you seriously imagine that I would jeopardize our future together? Can you seriously imagine that I would spend the evening cooking you a meal fit for Catherine the Great, all the while watching you twist in the wind? Is that consistent with anything you know about me? Is that consistent with how I treat you? Is that fair?”

  I searched his face. His expression was completely convincing and honest.

  But then, like all of us, he was a trained professional liar.

  A week later, the Cover division called me at my desk. I had received a piece of mail—my first ever—at my Department of Agriculture address. They told me I could pick it up at my convenience. I went downstairs right away. It was a postcard with a picture of the kind of beach you see on a postcard: white sand, turquoise sea, single palm tree, beach umbrella. It was postmarked Mexico, but there was no return address. On the back was written: “Life is better on the other side. Love, Paul.”

/>   I felt a sharper pang than I would have expected after all that time. I stared at the postcard, turning it over and over as I wandered back through the long, gray halls to my office. I imagined Paul, looking wistful as hell, on a lonely stretch of the Pacific, sanding the barnacles off the hull of his sailboat, the Annette. In my mind’s eye, he was wearing a tattered pair of Levi’s, no shoes or shirt, and a terrific tan.

  I thumbtacked the postcard to the wall of my new cubicle, right above an elaborate list of instructions that Mary Jane, the Canada desk officer, had left for me when she went away on medical leave: I was to water her spider fern twice weekly, bring in doughnuts for the Friday staff meeting, make sure the coffeepot was unplugged at the end of the day (she had underlined this twice in red ink), and call maintenance about her defective window blind, which remained sullenly frozen at half-mast. “Good luck!” she signed off. She had drawn a smiley face underneath.

  Still staring at Paul’s card, I sat down and waited for my computer to boot up. The computer groaned; a little choo-choo train chugged across the screen for several minutes. At last I was invited to enter my secure password. A warning flashed across the screen: By using the computer, I was consenting to being monitored; my every keystroke would be logged.

  I called up the latest cable from Toronto. The subject line was RECRUITMENT OF RAINBOW. ROSENBLATT’s missive was rapturous, even by CIA standards. C/O ROSENBLATT had taken RAINBOW to Jumping Caribou Lake, about 250 miles north of Toronto, for a weekend of fly-fishing. He had left nothing to chance, packing a cooler of Pabst Blue Ribbon, sharp Cheddar cheese, and dried venison. “I brought something for you,” C/O ROSENBLATT said when they unloaded the trunk of his Isuzu four-by-four. He pulled out a Battenkill fly-fishing reel and handed it to RAINBOW. “The company gave it to me as a Christmas bonus, but I already have two, so I thought you’d like it.”

  RAINBOW was delighted. “Are you sure?” he said, fingering the reel’s frame. “Wouldn’t you rather give it to one of your kids?”