I had prepared a plausible story. “Language cards,” I said. “We’re doing a review of embassy requirements and it looks like we haven’t updated them in years. I need Kazakh, Uzbek, Ukrainian, Turkmen—”
“Don’t those come from the sixth floor?”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, that’s what they told me, too. But the woman up there told me that FBIS handles them now, and then the FBIS guy said he’d sent them to the regional security officers. You got ‘em?” I sat down uninvited on one of the plastic chairs in front of his desk. A stack of files rested on the other chair.
“I don’t think so …” He opened up the cabinet against the wall; papers fluttered out and fell to the floor.
“Take your time, Brad. How’ve you been lately?” I hadn’t seen him since Iris broke up with him. I looked him in the eye. “Getting by?”
“Oh, you know. Hangin’ in there … looking forward to Friday.”
I needed a way to get time on target, as they said down on the Farm. I tried to remember what Iris had told me about his tastes. He liked jazz. I couldn’t ask him to go to a jazz concert, though. Too much like a date. Did he collect stamps? Shoot birds? God, I hoped he didn’t shoot birds. “Got anything interesting going for the weekend? Big plans?”
“Oh no, just hanging out. Chilling. Maybe play some soccer on Saturday morning, barbecue on Sunday at my cousin’s place.”
“Man, I haven’t played soccer since I was a kid. Where do you play? You part of a team?”
“Just the interagency thing.” I had seen the notices on the bulletin boards, but I hadn’t paid much attention. The tournament was a team-building exercise for the Intelligence Community. The first game was CIA versus FBI. NSA and State and DoD were supposed to get in the act. Some GS-11 expert on policy coordination had probably dreamt the thing up to impress her promotion panel and then spent a year organizing it. Oh God, I thought. Couldn’t it have been birds?
“That sounds like a hoot!” I said. “Do you think it’s too late to sign up?”
The soccer tournament had one redeeming virtue, I supposed. I couldn’t imagine Stan would want to come. I brought it up with him on the drive home. We were listening, as usual, to his Russian tapes. “You know that interagency soccer thing?”
Stan paused the tape player.
“The thing with State and DoD? Yeah, why?”
“I was thinking I might go.”
“To a soccer game? Against those striped-pants ninnies at State?”
“Fresh air. Exercise. Some people actually like that. When’s the last time you played soccer?”
“Sixth grade. Haven’t missed it since.”
“You want to give it a try?”
“Nyet. I’d rather eat nails.”
I pressed play on the stereo. I had thought that Stan was going to be more suspicious, and was vaguely disappointed that he wasn’t.
I arrived at the soccer field a few minutes early. It was a clear morning and the leaves were just starting to turn. A lot of parents had woken up and decided it was just too beautiful outdoors to watch cartoons. A lot of kids seemed unhappy about that decision. There were young mothers by the jungle gym, urging their kids to share the slide and for Pete’s sake stop biting their sisters. Awkward fathers pushed strollers and carried diaper bags; they doled out bottles of apple juice. A pair of identical golden retrievers raced madly across the field to greet a beagle. An elderly Asian woman practiced a graceless but enthusiastic species of Tai Chi.
Brad was already there, stretching out and running in place on the spongy grass. The soccer pitch was dotted with big men in gray jerseys running synchronized wind sprints. The jerseys said FBI: WE KICK BALLS! and depicted an enormous G-man in a double-breasted suit towering over a terrified soccer ball. The ball sprouted little hands, with which it brandished a tommy gun. On the sign-up form, CIA employees had been instructed to wear blue T-shirts sans Agency insignia. I was wearing my light-blue COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF SANSKRIT T-shirt. I was feeling pretty sporty.
“Brad!” I called, and walked in his direction.
“You made it,” Brad said with a smile. For a big man, he was surprisingly flexible, touching his toes and holding them, then leaning far back into the air to limber his spine.
“Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
Brad was about to say something, but before he could get the words out, a wiry, silver-haired man in knee-high socks ran by, slapped Brad on the butt, and shouted at us: “Time to huddle up, big guy. Let’s huddle up!” He reminded me of a sheep dog rounding up strays. The wiry man loped off, and Brad and I followed him to a circle of blue jerseys that had formed on the edge of the field.
The soccer tournament was the kind of event that drew out the Agency lifers. I was the only representative, as far as I could tell, of the Clandestine Service. These were the kind of people who, when asked where they worked, could say, “the CIA.” The man who had summoned us to the circle was the team captain. His introduced himself as Clive and said that he worked in facilities management. “I’m the fella who keeps you guys warm in the winter, cool in the summer.” He chuckled at his joke, and we chuckled back.
Clive lined up a soccer ball in front of himself and kicked it across the circle to a tall woman wearing a T-shirt that read ARLINGTON VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT. She stopped the ball with the side of her foot and said that she was a geographer; she kicked the ball to a stout man, who introduced himself as a bookbinder. The ball went around the circle: There was a psychiatrist who looked like a reptile, and two human resource consultants; there were a half-dozen men from packing and shipping—they had evidently come as a group—and a woman just shy of middle age who translated sign language. A cost estimator kicked the ball high in the air to a cost analyst, who stopped it with his head. When the ball arrived at my feet, I said that I worked on the Canada Task Force and passed it over to Brad.
Finally, the ball came back to Clive. He tucked the ball under his heel and stared at us intently. “Ready to kick some FBI butt?” he asked.
There was a low rumble of replies.
Clive repeated himself: “I said, are you reaaaady to kiiiiiick some FBI butt?”
We clapped hands and a man who had introduced himself as a press operator shouted, “Hooo-ah!”
Clive said, “That’s the spirit,” and assigned us positions. Everyone would get to play, he said—this was all about fun. He made himself a center and Brad a wing. I was put in the backfield.
I’d never been good at team sports. It wasn’t that I was unathletic—in yoga, I had always prided myself on getting closer to God than anyone else in the class. I guess my problem with team sports goes all the way back to kindergarten, when I struck out in kick ball—but I’m not making any excuses.
The woman from the Arlington Fire Department showed me where to stand. My job, she explained, was to kick the ball thattaway—she gestured in the direction of the Feds’ distant goal. I wasn’t supposed to run upfield, she said; we had specialists for that. I was supposed to protect our goal. I imitated her crouch and practiced kicking an imaginary ball far down the pitch.
For the first few minutes of the game, the action was all on the other side of the field. Clive passed the ball to Brad, who bounced it off his meaty chest and passed it to the cost analyst. When Arlington clapped and said, “Woo-hoo,” I clapped too, and added a throaty, “Way to go, guys!” Arlington back-pedaled when one of the Feds intercepted the ball and started to run toward her, so I retreated toward the goal as well, mimicking her defensive stance. The ball threatened to come in my direction once, but a speedy cartographer cut off the FBI pass and kicked the ball downfield.
After a little while, I began to get bored. There were butterflies in the grass, and birds chirping, and an agreeable bonhomie in the air. Someone on our team with a T-shirt that read LOU’S BAR & DELI shot at the opposing goal, and when the FBI goalie gracefully dove left to stop the shot, we all applauded. About twenty minutes had passed and
neither side had scored a goal, but it was pleasant enough to stand in the sunshine.
I had just noticed that my T-shirt had a stain and was examining it very carefully when a chorus of voices started shouting my name. I looked up from my inspection to see three of the Feds pounding down the field in my direction. I assumed my defensive stance and tried to run after the ball, but the head Fed easily passed the ball to his confrere, leaving me standing all alone in a wide open field. I felt shame and sorrow.
I’ll never know if the FBI would have scored; they never had the chance. The G-man who had passed me by, a burly fellow with a walrus mustache, was lining up his shot when the paws of God intervened: An enormous shaggy mutt, seeing the ball and wanting to play too, raced onto the field. The dog didn’t snout the ball far, but it was just enough. The striker’s shot sailed long over the goal.
“Goddammit!” someone from their team shouted.
“Attaboy, Pelé!” shouted someone from ours.
The confusion intensified when the dog’s owner ran onto the field, trying to rein in his animal. He looked Mexican, maybe, and no older than twenty. I had noticed him earlier, treating himself to a little morning wake’n’bake on the other side of the field, and I can only imagine what kind of crazy bad trip he must have been having when he looked up and saw eleven enormous brutes in FBI jerseys thundering down on him. The poor kid stopped and turned a peculiar shade of pale. He dragged his dog off the field by the collar.
That’s when it all went horribly wrong.
Clive picked up the ball and threw it to the referee. The dog had been an “act of God,” said Clive, so the ball should be respotted in the center of the field. The captain of the FBI team disagreed: The dog was “an impediment on the field of play,” he insisted, so the game should recommence exactly where it had been interrupted. The referee, some guy from the Secret Service, bought Clive’s line, and the Feds were furious. “This is a game you play by the rules!” someone shouted. “In this country we live by the rules. You can pull that shit in Zimbabwe but not in the goddamned United States!” We maintained a stoical silence, refusing to reply to the G-men’s taunts. Finally, the Feds were coaxed back, and play grudgingly resumed.
At halftime, Clive took me out of the game. I spent the second half lounging on the grass, watching the squirrels perform daring acrobatics in the trees. For a moment, I missed Stan. He would have gotten a kick out of them. At one point, I heard a shout: One of our guys, a graphic designer, had scored a goal. It was the only point of the game. When it was over, the Feds didn’t offer us any of the beers from their coolers. We were grimly satisfied, and figured we’d put them in their place.
Great sport, I thought.
After the game I asked Brad if he’d walk down to the Safeway with me to get a sandwich. His eager acceptance suggested that in the appointment book of life, all he’d penciled in for the afternoon—perhaps for the rest of his life—was “waiting for Iris’s call.” Maybe he’d scheduled some moping for the early evening, followed up by a brisk wallow in his own despair.
We talked soccer on the way to the deli section, where we ordered up a couple of tuna subs. I was surprised to find that he was almost as new to the game as I was.
“Back where I grew up, only the Mexican kids played soccer,” he said.
I tried to pay for the sandwiches, but Brad wouldn’t let me. He told me I could get the next one. We strolled back to the park and sat in the grass under a maple tree.
I asked him where he’d grown up.
“Oakland,” he said.
Lilia had gone to Berkeley, and her then boyfriend had boxed at a place called King’s Gym in Oakland. I went with them once. Some parts of Oakland were nice, but most of them were pretty rough.
I asked Brad about himself, and he told me his story in a long, halting monologue. I didn’t have to say much to keep him talking. His mother was a post office clerk and his father had died of a brain aneurysm when he was a toddler. Growing up, he’d been bigger than the other boys, and quieter. In the seventh grade, he wrote a paper about the history of jazz that greatly excited his English teacher. She told his mother that he was gifted. Brad’s mother decided her son deserved better than the drug-ridden local high schools. She arranged a complicated ruse to allow him to attend a better school, across the Bay. The school was for San Francisco residents, and the scheme required that all of Brad’s official documents be sent to his grandmother’s address in the city. “I got a lot out of it,” he said. “I really came out of my shell.” He was a reporter on the student newspaper and the lead in the school production of Yojimbo. He made respectable grades, and was accepted to UC Riverside. His brother hadn’t gone to college and was still managing a convenience store. Brad wore an enormous class ring on his finger. When the CIA recruiter came to campus and explained the Agency’s complicated benefits package, it had sounded like a good deal to him.
I steered the conversation gently toward Iris. “Iris and you are both such self-starters,” I said. “I admire that.”
Brad had told me about his father’s death without notable drama. He said it as if he were telling me some other man’s story. But at the mention of Iris’s name, his voice grew thick and heavy: “I don’t know … I don’t know what happened there.”
“What do you think happened?”
Brad turned the class ring around his finger. “I think she got scared. I think she wasn’t ready for the kind of relationship we were having.”
I’ve never heard someone with a broken heart say that he reckoned she just didn’t love him. But then, I’ve never said that either.
“What do you think made her so scared?”
“The way I would always treat her right. Always treat her with respect. When I told her I would always try to be humble and compassionate, I think it scared her. Not everyone’s ready to be treated right.” This theory tumbled out of his mouth as if he’d explained it to himself many times already, in just those words. He didn’t meet my eyes; he was staring out across the soccer field at the children playing on the slide.
“This hasn’t been easy for her either,” I said. “She’s been going through so much lately.”
He pulled a handful of grass from the earth and rolled it between his immense hands. “I just want her to know I’m there for her. That I’m not going anywhere.”
It seemed cruel to me that such a sweet and gentle man could so wildly misunderstand a woman’s heart.
Stan smiled happily when I walked in the door after the game. He was in the kitchenette, taking a quiche from the oven. He had chilled a bottle of Sancerre, prepared a green salad, and set the table. I felt bad for having ruined my appetite with that sandwich. I took a quick shower, then, over lunch, recounted the story of the dog and the Feds and the poor Mexican schnook. He laughed. I told him about Captain Clive and the squirrels. “Did you feed them any nuts?” he asked, and looked disappointed when I said I hadn’t. He told me that he kept nuts in his pocket when he went to the park. I ate as much quiche as I could.
We did the dishes together. When we finished, Stan grabbed the TetraFin and went over to the fish tank to give Milton and Sheldrake their lunch. “Oh no,” he said suddenly. “Something’s wrong with Milton.”
That morning, Stan had told me that he was going to replace the gravel in the fish tank, explaining that fish waste and uneaten food, trapped in the gravel, tended over time to form poisonous nitrates. He had carefully changed the gravel while I was playing soccer. But now the goldfish was floating at the surface, its belly swollen. Stan put the little fish in a glass of Evian for an hour in the hope that it would revive. It didn’t. “I think it’s nitrate poisoning,” he said. His expression was utterly forlorn. He gravely flushed the fish, which was rapidly turning black, down the toilet. “I should have taken him out sooner. When I changed the gravel, a poison bubble must have come up.”
Sheldrake was swimming fretfully from corner to corner of the tank. “I was trying to make the tank safer,” Stan
said. “I was just trying to take care of them.”
I tried to comfort him. “Stan, you were trying to do the right thing. You took good care of those fish—I know that. It’s not your fault.”
“Whose fault is it, then? He was alive two hours ago and swimming around. It’s not like me to make mistakes like that.”
I came into the office Monday morning to find a cable that began: “C/O REGRETS TO INFORM HQS.” That’s never a good thing. C/O ROSENBLATT had scheduled a meeting with RAINBOW for Saturday evening in C/O ROSENBLATT’s hotel room. RAINBOW arrived reeking of sweat. He accepted C/O ROSENBLATT’s offer of a drink and began to curse. “Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch!”
C/O ROSENBLATT stayed calm. “Son, tell me what’s wrong.”
“I’m sitting at the fucking conference and the American son of a bitch … how the hell did he know our coho yield numbers north of the Fraser for the last two years? He sure as hell wasn’t out there counting those fucking fish. I was. I told you. I thought you said this shit was con-fucking-fidential.”
C/O ROSENBLATT went back to the basics he’d been taught at the Farm: Admit nothing, deny everything, make counteraccusations. “Son,” he said. “I have no idea. Sounds like someone on your team has loose lips.”
“It’s not possible. It’s just not. Only Lipscomb, you, and me knew the exact coho breeding numbers.” Bill Lipscomb was the head of environmental studies for the Canadian Ministry of Fisheries. He was an ardent Canadian nationalist.
“Son, I can see how terrible you feel,” said C/O ROSENBLATT. “You put a lot of work into those fish. Those folks might have taken a damn good guess—I mean, that’s the way these things work in the business world, for sure, so it wouldn’t surprise me—but I promise you, I never gave your reports to anyone who shouldn’t have them. Neither would anyone I work with.”
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