Loose Lips

by Claire Berlinski

  CIA counterintelligence officers spend years on problems like this, sifting through the evidence, trying to figure out who was working for us and who was on the other side. To this day, the mystery of the Soviet defector Yurchenko has never been solved—was he a true defector or a double? Why did he evade his CIA handlers one afternoon and return to the Soviet Embassy? Had he meant to do that all along, or had he been so disillusioned with the CIA that he changed his mind? No one would ever know for sure. They say that espionage is a wilderness of mirrors, and they are absolutely right.

  When I thought it over logically, Brad was the likeliest candidate.

  Brad, wherever you are: Kudos.

  For months after I left, I had the dream every night.

  I’ve been thrown out. Everyone else is still on the inside. They are flying away—flying away to Moscow, to Beirut, to Bangkok. They are wearing suits, and I realize that I am not wearing anything at all. They look at me with contempt and pity, and I try to cover myself with my hands. They whisper among themselves. I want to know what they’re saying, but their voices are a babble. They are speaking a foreign language. I strain to understand, but it makes no sense at all.

  I call Stan, but he laughs contemptuously and hangs up the phone. I want to call again, but I am at a pay phone in Mysore and it falls silent, spontaneously out of order. Then Mysore and McLean merge, and I am trying to drive from the Shweta Varahaswamy temple in through the front gates of Headquarters, but they’ve taken away my badge. When I try to pass, the guards pull out their guns. I explain that I used to have a badge, but they don’t believe me. They yank my arms behind my back and march me away, and I feel terrible fear and shame.

  In the dream, I run into Stan. He doesn’t look like Stan, he looks like the president, but I know it’s him. “Did you do this to me?” I ask.

  “You’ll never know.” He sneers.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?”

  “Nyet. You did it to yourself. I have important work to do. Leave me alone.”

  I try to hit him, but my arms are too weak and they won’t move properly. My punches don’t connect, my fists flail in the air. He glides away, laughing at me. I’m on the outside looking in. I’m all alone. I can’t get back in. I start to cry with rage and frustration and humiliation.

  I wake up damp with sweat, shivering—although I am in India and the night air is warm.

  The hot season came, and then the monsoon. I sent my article about the gopuram to the Journal of Oriental Studies; they published it and sent me a small check.

  I received a letter from Iris and a check with the proceeds from the sale of my car. She was doing just great, she said: She and Brad were engaged and couldn’t be happier. She wrote that every now and again, she went out for drinks with Allison, who was still working at Headquarters. Allison told her the latest gossip: Nathan had formed a support group for Agency employees called Under Cover? Come Out of the Closet! Jade was apparently doing well in Central Africa, and had been promoted immediately. I imagined Jade running a small African republic as her personal dictatorship, a ring of skulls guarding her CIA station, where unspeakable rituals were performed to the sound of drumbeats around the bonfire at night.

  At the end of the letter, Iris wrote:

  … I ran into Stan at the Pizza Factory the other day. He’s gained back all the weight, and then some. He told me he’d resigned. He’s doing some kind of policymaking thing at the Department of Agriculture.

  I read that passage over and over, then I put the letter away.

  I would never know. I realized that now: No one would ever tell me the truth. The records were sealed in the bowels of the Central Intelligence Agency, the most secretive organization in the world, where they were guarded by passwords, combination locks, trip-wire safes, alarms, buzzers, armed guards, vehicle barriers, vicious dogs, and a twelve-foot-high razor-wire fence. Stan would never tell me the truth, and even if he did, how would I recognize it?

  Ye shall know the truth, says the inscription on the Agency’s marble wall, and the truth shall set you free. But I shall never know the truth.

  I wake up. I am in India and the dawn is warm. The perfume of chameli flowers stirs the air and mingles with the scent of jasmine from the tree on the temple grounds nearby. I hear the chanting of morning prayers. I am alone, no one is watching, and all of India is waiting for me. I turn on my side and then sit up; the loamy sweet air fills my lungs. I stretch, raising my hands so high that I can almost touch the lazy ceiling fan. The room is neat; the dhobiwalla has pressed my cotton clothing into crisp folds. In India, the money from the sale of my car will last a long time. I could take a train to Varanasi at noon. If I hurry, I could catch the morning train to Rajastan. But I don’t need to hurry. There is a train every day. And I could also stay here. Paul was right.

  I bring the bananas off the windowsill so the monkeys won’t snatch them, and tidy the residue from the incense and the hashish, which I smoked the night before on the veranda, watching India pass before my eyes. The sun’s rays splash over the peacock-green tiles of the temple and through the open window. I see Vishnu waiting for me outside in the serene garden. He is beckoning.

  I shall never know the truth.

  But I shall be free nonetheless.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I want my brother to share the credit for this book, but he modestly demurs, waving his hand absently and saying that he prefers just to share the money. As he wishes. I insist upon saying at least this: He improved every line. He wrote many of them. He spent days and weeks with me revising every sentence, conceiving every character, plotting every scene. He forced me to excise at least a hundred thousand words of bad material to which I had become inordinately attached. “Please let me keep it, Mischa?” I would plead.

  “No, Claire, it’s not funny.”

  “It is funny! That line is very funny!”

  “Do you see me laughing?”

  “I guess not,” I would say, crestfallen.

  And he was always right.

  The best ideas are his, the best jokes are his, and whether he admits it or not, the book is his as well.

  Moving up the generational tree: I showed up on my father’s doorstep in Paris on a bleak September afternoon, unemployed, depressed, unlucky in love, and absolutely penniless. I declared that I had no idea what to do with my life. “What would you like to do?” he asked kindly. I replied that perhaps I could write a novel. It was a scheme that would not inspire confidence in anyone but my father. “Of course you should,” he said. He then put a roof over my head and food on my table for an entire year as I wrote. He was serenely confident that whatever I wrote would be worth reading, and he ignored everyone—and I do mean everyone—who told him to cut that shiftless daughter of his loose and let her get a real job. My brother and I have taken my poor father to the brink of ruin with our literary aspirations, and never once has he complained. Well, a few times, maybe. But with every right.

  Then there is Jonathan Karp, my editor at Random House, who believed in this book so much that he bought it. His advice about everything was correct. I know I looked doubtful sometimes, Jon, but I say it now for all the world to see: You were right, I was wrong, and I’m woman enough to admit it. Above all, I am grateful to you for allowing me to return to my father and tell him his confidence was not misplaced and that Random House bought the damned thing.

  Now to Kathy Robbins, my literary agent. I looked for the words to express my gratitude to you and came up only with this: I love you; I love you so much. I would do anything for you. Kathy is the world’s finest literary agent, and the smartest and most beautiful, too, and if she asks for my firstborn child, I will give it to her—or 15 percent of it, anyway.

  To my friends in the blogosphere who generously publicized this book on their websites: There are too many of you to thank individually here, but if you consult my website, www.berlinski.com, you will see that I have returned the links, with love.

  And fina
lly, a private message to someone who must remain nameless: There are no hard feelings, and don’t worry: I didn’t tell them anything.

  APPENDIX

  My brother, Mischa, patiently suffered thousands of conversations like this, at all hours of the day and night. Often, when I was writing, I would call him long distance (grazie mille, Cristina, for allowing him to tie up your phone lines) or chat with him over the Internet, like this:

  Claire says: Hello?

  Mischa says: Hello!

  Claire says: Oh good, you’re there!

  Mischa says: How are you?

  Claire says: I need your help.

  Mischa says: Why? What’s up?

  Claire says: My editor thought this line was clichéd: “The experiment indicated a strong relationship between smoking dope and getting high as a kite.” What would you suggest instead?

  Mischa says: What’s his problem with that line?

  Claire says: He said, “avoid the cliché,” in the margins … I don’t know why.

  Mischa says: High as a kite?

  Mischa says: Maybe that could be a little wittier.

  Claire says: Like what? I’ve spent the whole day thinking about it.

  Mischa says: Yeah, maybe he’s right there.

  Mischa says: Let’s see …

  Mischa says: Toasted.

  Mischa says: Baked.

  Mischa says: Stoned.

  Mischa says: High.

  Mischa says: Blitzed.

  Claire says: None of those are better.

  Mischa says: Which of those is funniest?

  Claire says: “High as a kite” has a better rhythm.

  Mischa says: Yes, but I see his point too.

  Mischa says: The line could be even funnier, with a better simile.

  Claire says: Yes. I’ve been racking my brains.

  Mischa says: Have you had any contestants?

  Claire says: No. Everything I think of is dumb.

  Mischa says: Toasted like a waffle?

  Mischa says: Baked like lasagne?

  Mischa says: Nope.

  Claire says: Nope.

  Mischa says: Keep “high as a kite” for now.

  Mischa says: Something better will come to you—if there is something better.

  Mischa says: Our dad is always good on lines like that too.

  Claire says: Yes, that’s true.

  Claire says: Maybe you could ask him.

  Mischa says: I will.

  Mischa says: P. J. O’Rourke would do an excellent job at finishing that sentence.

  Claire says: Yes, Hunter S. Thompson might also be useful.

  Mischa says: I’m starting to wonder, though, if two jokes in the same sentence is not overkill.

  Mischa says: I mean, the WHOLE SENTENCE is a joke.

  Mischa says: Do you really need a flashy simile?

  Claire says: I thought it was fine the way it was.

  Mischa says: It’s very funny as is, and if the reader needs time

  Mischa says: to puzzle out “freaky as a ’74 Cadillac,”

  Mischa says: then maybe it wouldn’t be so funny,

  Mischa says: you know?

  Claire says: No, that’s not even funny.

  Claire says: It’s trying too hard, you know?

  Mischa says: Exactly.

  Mischa says: I say, keep it.

  Mischa says: That line made me laugh repeatedly.

  Claire says: Yes, lots of people like it.

  Mischa says: In fact, it’s one of the very funniest lines in the book.

  Claire says: OK. I’ll keep it. Thank you!

  Mischa says: Bye!

  Claire says: Bye!

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CLAIRE BERLINSKI was born in California in 1968. She grew up in San Francisco, New York, Paris, and the Pacific Northwest; as a teenager she studied philosophy at the University of Washington, then French literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. She moved to England in 1989, where she studied modern history and earned a doctorate in international relations at Balliol College of Oxford University. Her writings about politics, the CIA, and national security have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. She has also held a number of other jobs. She lives in Paris and Washington, D.C. She can be reached via the Internet at www.berlinski.com.