The Mulberry Bush

by Charles McCarry

  Tom passed my intention on to Amzi, who continued to behave like my ultimate case officer even though in theory I was Tom’s agent. Amzi gave his approval with the proviso that I should fucking well keep Headquarters informed of every in- and outstroke.

  “Direct quote,” said Tom.

  Needless to say I had no intention of following this instruction. But this was an opportunity to build cover for my hidden purposes, so I did submit largely fictitious details of a measured and cold-blooded seduction. In the end, as we know, Luz grabbed the tiller, and the plan for disinterested seduction flew into the wastebasket.

  From the start she and I abandoned tradecraft—or more accurately, substituted a higher form of tradecraft, namely reality. We were lovers. We behaved like lovers. We spent every free hour with each other, including lunch hours, during which we remained on our feet only long enough to gulp something at a fast-food counter on our way back to our offices. We groped each other in the back row at the movies, we dined and nuzzled in restaurants, we kissed on the street. If there was a more demonstrative couple in Buenos Aires, we never ran into them.

  The local station chief thought, as he was meant to do, that all this was good if unconventional cover. He also thought it was unseemly, but he had had little or no authority over me. I was Amzi’s boy, attached to the station for office space and communications support. I reported directly to Headquarters. Besides that, there was my reputation as a lone wolf, my premature rank (I had been promoted twice and was now the same pay grade as a brigadier general even though I had no troops to command), along with my bizarre position as an outsider who was actually an insider who had powerful champions. For appearances’ sake, I asked the COS to give me things to do for the benefit of the locals. This would help them to look upon Luz and me as a genuine case of a crazy love. That happened to be the truth, the advantages of which tend to escape those who live within a culture of deceit. I couldn’t have stopped making unprotected love to Luz if she had told me she had AIDS. She seemed to feel the same. Given the choice by Satan between dominion over heaven and earth and her vagina, I would have chosen her vagina.

  Luz wasn’t interested in foreplay. She rarely had a sexual impulse or any other kind of impulse she did not act upon without hesitation. What she wanted to do, she did. She had no caution. In this as in practically every other way, she was unlike any other woman I had ever known. It wasn’t as though she didn’t look before she leaped, but no matter what, she always leaped, never hesitated.

  This recklessness spoke a language I understood. In my own life, almost everything I had ever done on impulse had turned out well, whereas nearly everything I had done by calculation, such as treating my father like a dog, had ended badly. This did not bode well in terms of finding happiness in the life of calculation I had chosen on impulse. Lost in that contradiction? So was I.

  I understood on the day I saw Luz shimmering in that mirror that there was no point in telling her the truth on the installment plan. Out with it! was the only way to deliver the message. However, given Luz’s almost pathological decisiveness, there were only two possible reactions: Yes or Get Lost. If the answer was Get Lost, her next decision would be to walk out of my life. I would never fuck her again. The thought was unbearable. It intensified my need for her, so we fucked even more, fucked ourselves to sleep. When at home we lived without clothes so that we wouldn’t lose a minute before acting on desire. This was Luz’s idea. We cooked, ate, read, watched movies naked so as not to waste a second in acting on the controlling, the irresistible impulse that drove our lives. Even if we were five steps away from the bed, we did not stagger toward it but coupled where we found ourselves.

  One Sunday I woke from a nap and found Luz in the kitchen, grinding coffee. She was fully dressed, trousers and turtleneck, every centimeter of skin but her hands and face covered up. What did this mean?

  She said, “Get dressed. I want to talk to you.”

  She gave me a large bowl of café con leche, as if it were breakfast time instead of ten o’clock in the evening. We sat opposite each other, the kitchen table between us, and drank the whole bowlful of coffee. Too much sugar as usual.

  Luz said, “I’ve been reading your mind again.”

  “Has the movie changed?”

  “In a way.”

  No smile. Overnight she had once again become the cool and collected stranger I had met in Los Bosques de Palermo. What was this? Would the Luz I loved ever come back to me?

  As it turned out, she was just having an intuitive moment.

  She said, “You want to tell me something. I can feel it. Get it out of the way. Tell me.”

  I was only too glad to do as she asked. I said, “I want you to help me burn down Headquarters.”

  “That’s a figure of speech?”

  I nodded.

  She said, “For what purpose would we do this? Say what you mean, no metaphors, no similes.”

  She gestured for more.

  I dumped the whole demented operational plan on her. She listened intently. Gradually her thoughts began to show on her face. Watching her as this happened was something like watching a reader who is becoming interested in a book and is entering a different world: tiny smiles, quick pursing of the lips, forefinger lifting the corner of a page so as to turn it without losing a moment.

  Any other woman would have thought I was crazy and changed the subject. Luz was unfazed. I might as well have been talking about the weather. I couldn’t tell whether this reaction signified disinterest or was a sign that she was just as crazy as I was.

  I told her more—far more. I told her what I knew about Amzi and her parents. I didn’t want to give her false hope that her parents might be alive. I was a fool to do this, but I wanted to leave nothing unsaid between us.

  When I was done, Luz burst into tears. She was wracked by sobs. She was the very picture of heartbreak. It was beautiful, in some incomprehensible way, to be present at the moment that such a thing happened to another human being, let alone to someone you loved with every cell in your body. You might think that what I was doing was a greater cruelty than what Amzi had done. But if I left anything out, she would sooner or later have discovered that I had deceived her, and this would kill the absolute trust that was the essential element of our partnership in vengeance.

  And then what would we have had left?

  I knew better than to touch her or even speak. This lasted for a long time. When it was over, and this happened abruptly, she let the tears dry on her face before she spoke.

  When she did, she said in a steady voice, “I think we had better get married if we’re going to do this thing together.”

  I thought so, too.

  13

  Luz took me home to meet her grandparents, who looked like royalty that had walked out of a Velázquez on the day it was painted and had been aging gracefully ever since.

  Alejandro, their only child, was born just before his mother entered menopause. Joy had gone out of their lives when he renounced them and everything they had taught him. A quarter of a century later they were very sad people still. But they were a pleasure to be with because of their transparent love for Luz, their exquisite manners, and their beautiful Spanish. Both had been educated in Spain. By now I understood the language well enough—even spoke it well enough so that porteños did not cringe at the sound of my voice—to know that I was hearing from them a kind of Castilian that was on the point of extinction.

  How, I wondered, had they felt while listening to Marx torturing Cervantes in the coarsened speech of their deluded son and his joyless wife? If they were surprised that Luz had brought a Yanqui home with her—she hardly paused for breath after the introductions before informing them that we intended to marry—nothing showed on their faces apart from a very brief widening of the eyes.

  We drank aged Argentinean Manzanilla, ate a five-course, three-wine dinner served by a butler in frayed livery that was almost as old as he was. We lingered over coffee in front
of a wood fire. The abuelos, as Luz always called her grandparents no matter which language she was speaking, never asked me a question about myself. There was no need: Luz itemized the essentials. They listened as if they had somehow known all about me before they knew I existed. Luz loved them deeply, and we went back to their house often, but their manner never changed. The abuelos were proper in every way. They offered hospitality, not quite the same thing as acceptance, but more than I deserved. After all, I was inflicting upon them the loss of the only descendant they had left to love. I was going to make her disappear, transport her to my barbarous country.

  Luz also introduced me, one by one, to her honorary uncles and aunts, the former terrorists Alejandro had handed over to Amzi instead of giving them to the military. Few of them had accepted Amzi’s offers of secret employment, but most must have given him information and other kinds of help or they wouldn’t have been where they were today—or even alive if he had chosen to tell the military who they were. Some of them could barely contain the loathing they felt for me and would have felt for any North American who worked inside the U.S. embassy. Even if I was not a baddy personally, I was still an agent of capitalist imperialism and deserved death even if it was merely social death, the only sort of assassination still available to them. Others were more mannerly, if only to preserve the illusion that they had left the folly of their youth behind them. They were respectable now, and because the respectability was a disguise, they took care not to let the masks slip. One and all behaved as if they were at all times gazing into invisible mirrors.

  None of this meant they had foresworn the true faith. The catechism of the radical left still trumped reality. In the United States they would have gone on shouting out the vocabulary of slogans that was the Esperanto of their youth. For them, such behavior remained unwise. They were in hiding for life. They never knew whom they might be talking to or what that fellow down the table who didn’t sing with the choir might really be—or worse, what he used to be. Or whom he knew.

  I did not regard their hostility as a problem. From an operational viewpoint, it was a good thing that they had never changed. The important thing was, they hated the same Headquarters I had targeted. When offered the chance to carry out one last revolutionary act, perhaps with luck to slay the vile monster, they would not refuse, as long as they didn’t have to be suicide bombers, which was a job best left to persons of less value than themselves.

  Luz shared this analysis. This surprised me. Politically speaking, these people had raised her. They had baptized and confirmed her. They had shown themselves to her as they really were because it was her birthright to be trusted. They were her political tutors. They had taught her to be undyingly proud of her father and mother. They had told her stories of their heroism, told her secrets, painted in her mind a picture of Alejandro as paladin of the people, slayer of fascist dragons, the very definition of righteousness, and of Felicia as his Joan of Ark.

  Alejandro, they believed, had saved every one of their lives. They knew he had done this by sacrificing everyone else, but by the time Luz was old enough to be told the legend, they had buried the memory of the price he had paid. They assumed he had done what he had done to save the revolution, namely themselves. He had not, after all, sacrificed anyone who mattered. They knew what they knew because they had been what they had been, and in their minds they had never changed even if capitalism had made some of them very rich.

  Money and respectability were their impenetrable cover. Alejandro’s pragmatism, learned from Marx and Mao and his own intestines, had taught them this. They owed him too much, he had sacrificed too much, for them ever to change their ideas.

  Luz was the living credential I had needed to enter this fun house. She was the only credential I needed, because I had no plan to ask these people personally for help or information. I knew they would refuse me out of hand. They would not, could not refuse Luz. They would assume that the political education they had given her meant that whatever she did for the rest of her life, she would do for the cause, which lived on in her like a transmission of genes. They never doubted that they were right about her. By nature and nurture she was the enemy of the enemies of mankind. If she was marrying one of those enemies, it had to be for correct reasons. They would help her carry out whatever secret purpose she might have. It was their duty to help—their penance for living on after Alejandro had died for what they told themselves they themselves had been willing to die for.

  By wink, nudge, and tone, Luz made silent excuses for me: After all, they could hardly expect me, as a serving officer of the U.S. government, to join openly in their Orwellian hour of hate. The fact that I was in love with the daughter of two of the greatest haters of America who ever lived must mean that there might, just possibly, be hope for me after all.

  One of the regulars at these affairs was a quiet man named Diego Aguilar Ordoñez. He was a distant cousin of Alejandro’s and looked a little like him, though less tall, less handsome, less charismatic. Diego had salt-and-pepper hair, quiet eyes, an arched nose out of a cinquecento painting, a look of perpetually amused, benevolent intelligence. He stood out for his modest manner, his plain dress. Sometimes I tried to visualize the rest of this crowd, now wearing bespoke suits and designer dresses, as they must have looked in their terrorist days—both genders wearing descamisados clothing, though they had never in their lives performed an hour of manual labor. Unwashed, braless, bearded, long-haired, in need of a bath. Solemn in their narcissism.

  Oddly, Diego was the only one who still wore a beard—a well-kept spade but a beard just the same. He was a surgeon. During the revolution he had somehow completed his residency at the Hospital Británico in Buenos Aires while acting as Alejandro’s chief of operations. It was he who had planned the bombings and the assassinations and assigned others to carry them out. He was, Luz said, Alejandro’s oldest and closest friend. The way the others treated him, as if he had inherited custody of Alejandro’s aura, set him apart. If anyone in this crowd had been a primary target for recruitment by the Russians, Diego was the likeliest candidate. He had been the administrator of the revolution—in bourgeois terminology, prime minister to Alejandro’s president for eternity. Through him the KGB could manipulate Alejandro. With his help, they could nurse the revolution. By helping him they could befriend and eventually control Alejandro, who might become Argentina’s Lenin. There was small chance of this actually happening, but if conditions were right, stranger things had come to pass: Consider the improbable Fidel Castro. Everything begins with 1.

  At these parties, Luz invariably had private moments with the aunts and uncles. One or another of them would put an arm around her and lead her into another room. I would see the two of them talking intently, looking deeply into each other’s smiling eyes, the aunts and uncles touching Luz’s hands or cheeks as if they had wandered out of the moment and into a memory.

  This behavior seemed more intense in Diego’s case, the conversations lasted longer, Luz usually came back from their encounters with shining eyes. Clearly he was special, closer to her than the rest. She had almost never spoken about him. I felt something like jealousy.

  One evening I asked her on the way home what was going on.

  She said, “After the worst happened, Diego saved me. He was the one who loved me the most, actually loved me for myself, not just because I was my father’s child. I could feel that. I still do. He knew my father and mother better than anyone in the world, better than a child ever could know them, and he made them real in my mind. When I look at Diego I see Alejandro standing beside him. If the others are like aunts and uncles, Diego is like the father. He has always looked after me as a father looks after a daughter. Sometimes I think Alejandro willed me to him.”

  In bed after her visits with Diego, Luz seemed more tender, less aggressive than usual—shy, even, as if her hour with him had subtracted some of her love for me. Had the shade of Alejandro followed us home from the party and now stood guard over o
ur bed? Was that what she imagined? Luz murmured in her sleep, so I could only be sure she was awake when she was silent. I seldom caught words but detected changes in her tone of voice. Often she sounded as if she were arguing with some figment in her dream, stridently demanding that something that belonged to her be given back.

  On Diego nights her voice was soft. She sounded like a child wheedling for something she wanted. She smiled and laughed softly. This kept me awake for hours.

  The next morning as we ate our bread and jam and drank our café con leche, she still had a faraway look in her eye. After breakfast she brushed her teeth, a lengthy process in Luz’s case, while I scanned the newspapers.

  When she came back to the kitchen there was something different about her. She gave me a searching look, as if in the night she had learned something about me she had not known before.

  I asked her the question that had kept me awake most of the night.

  “You think Diego is the one we can trust?”

  She immediately knew what I was talking about, as though she had picked up the scent of my intentions.

  She said, “The only one. But he knows who you work for, so that’s a problem.”

  “How does he know?”

  “My love, everyone knows.”

  “You told them?”

  “You think I would reveal such a thing? It wasn’t necessary. They can tell.”

  We began to see Diego alone, just the three of us together, always in out-of-the-way places outside the city—small country restaurants, day sails aboard Diego’s ketch among the picture puzzle islands of the Paraná River Delta, days on horseback on the pampas, picnics. Diego was good at everything—sailor, rider, cook, you name it. He was always the host, and like a man who is wary of being poisoned, he would not allow us to provide a crumb or a bottle of wine for the picnic basket or pay for so much as a cup of coffee.