Supernotes

by Agent Kasper

  Zelger. Bob Zelger.

  The clerk who took down Kasper’s deposition writes that the defendant (Kasper) says he received notification of Bischoff’s passage through Milan from “one Bob Zelger, a U.S. citizen concerning whom no further information is given.”

  Who’s Zelger?

  “To this question the defendant responds, ‘I don’t know.’ ”

  But that name—she’s heard that name before. She’s sure she’s come across him somewhere. The problem is she doesn’t remember how or where.

  —

  Manuela Sanchez’s voice is low. Almost a whisper. She’s speaking softly so as not to wake Kasper’s mother. The elderly lady had a difficult night and is now resting. Two days previously, she was well enough to speak to her son on the telephone. She thought he sounded very low in spirit, and she perceived that his situation was becoming more and more difficult.

  “She’s a strong woman, but she’s having to come to terms with the worst possible outcome,” Manuela explains. “That her son may never come back.”

  “Do you think that’s what’s going to happen?” Barbara asks.

  “Whatever happens, his story won’t be disappearing. You can bet on that.”

  “I need some information.”

  “On the telephone?”

  “We have no alternative. I’m about to leave, and—”

  “All right. No names, though.”

  “But that’s what I need you for, a name.”

  Silence on the other end of the line. Then comes a long sigh. “Go on,” Manuela murmurs.

  “An American named Bob Zelger.”

  “He was behind that business in Milan in 2005.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”

  “It’s a name I’ve come across before. I know I’ve heard it. I thought maybe I heard it from you….”

  “Not from me.”

  “Maybe from Lanna, the consular official.”

  “No more names. But yeah, it may have been him.”

  Barbara thinks it over. She makes an effort to remember. “Yes, it may have been,” she murmurs. “I’ll ask him as soon as I see him in Phnom Penh.”

  “What did you say?” The pitch of Manuela’s voice has risen by an octave.

  “I’m about to leave for Phnom Penh,” Barbara explains. “I’m in the airport now. It won’t be—”

  “Don’t do it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Did someone ask you to do this?”

  “No, to tell the truth—”

  “You planned this trip on your own?”

  “It’s my idea, yes—”

  “Stop everything.”

  “But…but I’ve already gone through check-in….I’m at the gate!”

  “Listen, I can’t explain it to you. Not now. But don’t do it. I repeat: don’t go. Stay in Rome. Tear up that fucking ticket, try to get your luggage back, and—”

  “I’ve only got a carry-on…So, what, when they call for boarding, I’m already on the ring road, is that your idea? I go home and say it was all a joke?”

  “You got it. That’s exactly what you have to do. I’ll come to Rome and explain why. You’ll see you’ve done the right thing.”

  31

  A Year Ago Today

  Prey Sar Correctional Center, near Phnom Penh, Cambodia

  Friday, March 27, 2009

  “It’s a year ago today,” says Kasper.

  Louis Bastien looks at him, stroking his mustache and wrinkling his brow as if trying to decipher every syllable. “A year…”

  “They snatched me exactly one year ago. March 27, 2008.”

  “My poor friend, a year in this place…”

  “Not just ‘this place.’ You have to include Preah Monivong Hospital and all the other places I was held in during the first few months.”

  “But you’re still alive.”

  “Or not dead yet. It depends on your point of view.”

  “The half-French guy, this Lieutenant Darrha who kept you alive so he could squeeze you good and hard—if he’s really put himself crosswise with the Americans, you can be sure he’ll pay dearly for it sooner or later. His greed will fuck him up. One of these mornings they’ll find him facedown in a paddy field. Voilà.”

  “Maybe so. But in the meanwhile, he’s showed up again. He came here a few days ago, wanting more money.”

  “And what did you tell him?”

  “I told him my money’s all gone. Which is the truth.”

  Bastien nods. “My friend, it’s really time for you to relocate.” And then, after a pause: “Come on, let’s not waste this visit. We need to discuss our topic.”

  Escape.

  Bastien never refers to it as such. He calls it la partenza, “the departure.”

  The date has been decided: Saturday, April 11.

  Bastien has a plan that he submits to Kasper again. They examine every detail together. Every move, every transition. Every possible flaw.

  On paper the plan is pretty simple. The thought of it in practice is terrifying. If something goes wrong, there won’t be any way of turning back.

  “You have to promise me you won’t deviate if things don’t go according to plan,” the French diplomat says. “We’ll find other ways. But you must absolutely keep a hold of yourself. No hero behavior. Don’t talk. You don’t know anything. You haven’t done anything. Agreed?”

  Kasper gives a slight nod.

  “In the next two weeks, I’m going to cut way back on my visits. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “But if something urgent comes up, you know how to reach me.”

  “Unless you go on tour again,” Kasper jokes.

  “Touring is suspended until after Saturday, April 11.”

  —

  “How did all this start? I’ve racked my brains over that question for twelve months.”

  “You don’t have to find the answer right now.”

  Manuela Sanchez’s voice on the telephone is soft and low, as usual, but to Kasper it seems incredibly close. It seems she’s talking to him from an adjoining room and not from his mother’s home in Florence, thousands of kilometers away.

  “It’s not important,” Manuela says. “Especially now,” she adds, with the emphasis of a person who knows the upcoming agenda.

  She’s the only one who knows. The only one to whom Kasper has revealed what’s about to happen. Just a few words in code, and she understood. Their contacts will have to be less frequent. They’ll have to ward off all possible disruptions. Not many hours ago, she stopped Barbara Belli from traveling to Phnom Penh. In the nick of time.

  “Going back over the past does no good,” Manuela says emphatically. “Forget about it.”

  “I’ve never understood how anyone can measure the importance of things. Is there any such thing as objectivity? Who makes the judgment about what the standards are? I listen to the voice inside me, I always have, especially when it shouts. I try to answer its questions and respond to its doubts. I think everybody does that.”

  “Everybody? I don’t think so.”

  “Well, that’s how I function. And in spite of this nasty business, I’m still the same.”

  Silence falls. A sudden, strange silence. An unspoken armistice.

  “Don’t waste your energy,” Manuela admonishes him again. “You’re going to need it.”

  But now Kasper is far away. He seems not to hear her. “It’s not important to understand why I’m here?” Kasper asks. “It’s not important to trace the steps I took? To know if I made mistakes? If I underestimated anything? If I didn’t see? Or if I saw too much…? And in that case, I should just concentrate on getting out of here and then forget everything, right? Leave it all behind?”

  Maybe that’s what everybody wants from me, Kasper reflects. Enemies and friends. Those who want me to die like a dog in here as well as those who seem disposed to help me. Just forget everything.

 
“Forget the past…,” he mutters in a flash of anger. “Yeah, maybe you’re right, Manuela. After all, we come from the land of forgetting. Why look back? We’ve got our little present and our little future and it’s hard to turn around. Tremendously hard. Forget the past. Because that’s what you did, Manuela, isn’t it.”

  “Yes, it was the only way for me to survive. And you have to do that too, if you want to stay alive. If you want to come back home.”

  —

  Louis Bastien returns four days later, dressed as usual: light-colored cotton suit, blue shirt, unbuttoned collar, no tie, black loafers with gold buckles.

  Kasper too is dressed as usual: short pants and military-green T-shirt. The same clothes he’s been wearing for months. They could stand up by themselves. On his feet, sandals made from recycled car tires—the famous Ho Chi Minhs.

  They’re seated facing each other in the surreal meeting room adjoining the administrative offices in Prey Sar. They wait in silence while the guard puts a tray with water, coffee, and Coca-Cola on the table. When the door closes behind him, the French diplomat leans forward across the table and makes a sign to Kasper to do the same.

  “It’s in three days,” he says softly. Then he repeats, “Three,” making the number with his right hand.

  “Three? But today’s only the first of April!”

  “We have to move it up to April 4. Le chat parti, les souris dansent, my friend. Cat’s away, so we’re gonna play. Next weekend is mouse time. Besides, the Visitors, as you call them, are getting restless.”

  “Which means what?”

  “I believe the Americans are going to be dropping in on you any minute now. They’ve found out about my visits, and I don’t think they like them much. You know how they feel about the French.”

  “Always allies, never friends.”

  “Exactly.”

  Kasper studies him, trying to assess the situation. “What kind of relationship do you have with them?”

  “Zero. You’ve seen them up close. They’re government superagents. I’m just a humble civil servant. A Frenchman from the provinces temporarily transferred here.”

  “Yes indeed, and I’m the emperor Napoleon.”

  Bastien gazes at Kasper’s stony expression and smiles. “Very well, my emperor. Then let us prepare to leave this place of exile. And let us take care not to end up at some dishonorable Waterloo.”

  —

  The following day, Louis Bastien’s there again.

  With only two days to go until zero hour, it would have been advisable to remain calm and stay away. But Kasper has asked him to alter the plan. His request was categorical.

  “I believe the moment has come,” he says.

  Bastien knows perfectly well what moment Kasper’s referring to. They talked about it yesterday. The look on Kasper’s face, ranging from serious to grim, is the result of his great mental labors. Accelerating the plan has prodigiously increased the torment of questions and answers.

  Kasper needs to lay it all out.

  “All right, here I am.” Bastien smiles and whispers, “But we have to stop meeting like this. People will talk.”

  Kasper appreciates the humor but doesn’t lighten up. He can’t.

  He hasn’t slept a wink for several nights. Not only because of his imminent escape. He has ruminated and reconstructed. He’s tried hard to remember. He’s written. Frantically. He’s torn a page out of his notebook and jotted down some dates. Some places and circumstances. Some names.

  Here’s where we have to start.

  Names and people.

  They’re the first to be blocked out when we’re suffering, a strategy the mind adopts to defend itself from serious trauma. And so we pull down one curtain after another. People are hidden in some dark corner of the stage. Until—for reasons that aren’t always logical—a light starts working again, and those same people are thrust forward, front and center. Sometimes dreams turn the light on. Especially nightmares.

  In last night’s dreams, Kasper saw himself descending into a narrow, convoluted fissure. Headfirst. Deaf to his own rebukes. Immune to all prudence and logic.

  He saw himself rashly proceeding to his fate as a human guinea pig. In the name of games and interests he’d probably never entirely understand.

  It was a nightmare. But it was useful to him. It helped him remember.

  “Everything started with him,” Kasper mutters, staring into space. “Everything.”

  Bastien realizes the moment has come. He’ll have to make himself comfortable and listen. Because the story won’t be short. It won’t be easy.

  “With him. Who?”

  “Two years ago. First in Phnom Penh and then in Bangkok. That’s how it started. In February 2007.”

  “With him who?” Bastien insists.

  “With my best friend, naturally. With Clancy.”

  32

  Supernotes

  Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Bangkok, Thailand

  February 2007

  “They’re going to rule the world, my friend. There’s not a fucking thing we can do about it.”

  John Bauer moves his head, very slightly, to indicate the small group of people a couple of sofas away. Businessmen meeting for a pleasant drink at the hotel bar after a day of work.

  Happy hour with colleagues. All of them Chinese.

  “Take a good look at them. Wherever they are, they feel at home. But not like us Americans. They cause no ruckus. They’re all sobriety and good manners, smiling and stealthy. They’ll stick you in the back and you won’t even notice.”

  Bauer raises his glass of bourbon in a toast, and Kasper does likewise with his flute of champagne. Outside, the lights of Chao Phraya and the metropolis evoke a sleepless, frantic world, a world of perpetual motion.

  Not far away, in the streets of Bangkok’s Chinatown, the celebration of the Chinese New Year is in full swing. The Thai capital is teeming with even more tourists than usual.

  “It’s the Year of the Pig, 2007 is,” Bauer remarks. “The Fire Pig. A particularly lucky year, they say, because it comes only every sixty years or so. The Chinese call it ‘the golden year.’ People born this year will have an easy life, it seems.”

  The American stops talking and sniggers a little. Then he says, “I must ask the Chinese what kind of year 1947 was for them. Not a golden year, I’m sure of that.”

  Kasper smiles, humoring the apparently autobiographical reference. And he recalls what Clancy told him a few days ago, when he suggested this meeting with Bauer in Bangkok: “For the thing they’ve got, they need a non-American who thinks, speaks, and moves like an American. I told them I’d talk to you about it. You can see for yourself if it interests you. Assess it and then decide.”

  Kasper’s been there nearly an hour, but John Bauer has yet to mention the thing. For now, he’s holding his cards close to his chest.

  Kasper doesn’t know a great deal about Bauer, but what he knows seems like enough. He arrived in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, and like many other Americans, remained in the region after the American defeat. He worked for the CIA, that’s for sure, but Clancy didn’t elaborate very much on Bauer’s role. In any case, he wasn’t an operative during those years. “Not in the traditional sense,” Clancy explained by way of summary.

  A man of strategies and connections, John Bauer. A real spy, probably. Decisive, crafty, few doubts.

  These days he sells himself as a security and antiterrorism expert. And sells himself very well, to all appearances. He works throughout Asia for American para-governmental agencies, like Blackwater and others that collaborate on national security. He has his own organization: men and transport.

  At the moment, the Chinese question is apparently pretty important, because Bauer won’t let it go. “They’re good, those guys. The subjects of the Celestial Empire,” he mutters sulkily to his bourbon. “We ought to learn from them. I say that again and again to our friends in Washington, but you know how they are, they breathe a di
fferent kind of air. Nobody who hasn’t ever been to the East, who’s never lived among these people, can understand. But you understand what I mean….”

  “I think so,” Kasper nods. “Wherever you turn, you see the Chinese calling the shots in this part of the world. Maybe all over the world, by now…”

  “Exactly right. Take the Mediterranean. They’ve landed in Piraeus and Sicily, and I don’t mean a few of them; entire communities have settled there. They’re buying Africa up one piece at a time, entering into agreements with those crap regimes: I’ll give you industries and know-how; you’ll give me raw materials. As for human rights, there’s no debate because we all think about them the same way. Know what I mean?”

  He tosses back the rest of his bourbon and puts the glass on the low table between them. He makes a gesture of measured vagueness. And starts in again: “Here in Thailand, too, they have incredible influence. The poor prime minister they kicked out last year, his ancestors three, four generations back are Chinese. Not everyone knows this. He remains in exile, but you can be certain things are going to get pretty turbulent in Thailand in the next few months.”

  “Is that a prediction?”

  “It’s more than a prediction, my friend. It’s how the Chinese are: they withdraw, they disappear, and when you least expect it they come down on you as ferociously as they possibly can. We should fucking learn from them. What do you say we go and get something to eat?”

  —

  They’ve just finished their meal when the American finally comes to the point. No more fascinating geopolitical theories. He’s interested in talking about Cambodia. And about North Korea.

  And there it is, the pièce de résistance.

  “North Korea?”

  Bauer gazes at him with a strange smile on his face. “Does that surprise you? It’s a rogue state, right?”

  “That’s the definition you all have given it,” Kasper replies.

  “Right. These days, as you know, the list of rogue states has been basically reduced to Iran and North Korea. At one time or another, the club included Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Cuba, Libya. But now some of them have reformed, others we’ve bought, and still others we’ve invaded….”