“Easy, Spook. Just me. What you been up to, man?”
Michael squinted, pushed at the air in front of Wintergreen, hissed “Shit” with annoyance, and sat down hard on the stoop. “I’m just sitting here…Jesus Christ, I grew up in this place and I’m just sitting here…” Michael wiped his eye with the palm of a hand and smeared blood over it. “Fuck it, y’know? I’m from nowhere…I got nothing and I’m from fucking nowhere…” He said something in Ukrainian, let his face sink into his hands.
Wintergreen got on the horn to Pompian, and the ropy son of a bitch was down there in ten flat. He took a single long look at his charge and, without going near him, ordered Wintergreen to load Michael into the car and drive him directly to the airport. They washed him in the bathroom, dressed him in Pompian’s blazer to make him presentable, dragged him onto a Pan Am flight with a one-way ticket to Walter Reed, and wiped their hands of it.
Pompian hired a shipping company to box up everything at Michael’s house and move it in one day, but a mix-up happened with the new station secretary. Michael’s primary residence was in Arlington, Virginia, but he’d recently sent his wife’s body home to her hometown of Mendocino, California, and that was where the secretary directed his belongings. There wasn’t any commercial storage in Mendocino, so she had it dumped in Bakersfield, figuring, in a Rhode Island way: Well, it’s the same state.
By the hard, shadowy light of a single bulb, the room, with its drop cloths and dusty crates, had an attic feel. Fifteen years had passed since he’d looked in on any of this, and it was still about a thousand too soon. The suggestion of tables and chairs under grimy oil covers, the silhouette of another life, gutted him and made it difficult to stand.
After Karen’s death—After I killed her, Michael reminded himself—during the numb, stupid months he hung on as a husk at the station, he had, during moments of paranoia, begun hiding money, personal articles, even station property in the linings of his furniture. There it stayed during the days of his decline, and there it remained when they crated his life and dumped it here.
He used a box cutter on an edge of a couch, a screwdriver on a cabinet back. From them he removed a Brazilian .25 handgun, a pair of low-light agency binoculars, and a Technical Support Division lock-picking set.
He reached deeper into the insulation of his furniture, and his mental slide presented itself in a midden of stashed fetishes: car keys, fifty-peso notes, routine station memos, his wife’s picture, the envelope with a lock of Evita’s hair.
The kid came back sometime before dawn. Shined a flashlight in on Michael curled in a drop cloth.
“—Hey.”
Michael jerked awake, and there was coma misery in his red-rimmed, mourning eyes.
“You can’t sleep here, man.”
Michael drifted shuttered streets, found a biker bar, stayed long enough to drown half a ghost and score a box of amphetamines. At first purple light he bought a coffee at Winchell’s, spilled half of it on his lap, and left town.
The wingtip caught a cloud, banked, and Los Angeles—stucco white and Central American lazy—filled his window and was pushed aside by an arc of Pacific.
Michael let the seat take him, slipped out the Gary Phillips passport Hector had updated, and looked at the same picture inside from so many years ago. It was a snapshot of Michael at twenty-eight, blown up and cut down to passport dimensions. In it he wore an amused, toothy grin, his black tie askew. Michael recognized the moment: standing against a wall at a garden party thrown by the Indian ambassador. He’d been happy that afternoon, the organization of his life in that instant making a brief, uncomplicated sense. Hector had taken the picture, but it wasn’t he who had provoked the amused grin. It had been Karen, a small aside, her arm around his waist. Only you couldn’t see her in the frame. Like the day, the moment, that whole stretch of life, she’d been cropped out.
August 31, 1971
21.
Goddamn him.
She’d called in sick to the bar, changed her mind, and now regretted it, swirling damp circles with a beer rag, smiling flatly at miner yahoos. She’d leave, call her sister in Reno, and take the room over the garage. She’d get the hell out of here.
On the way home Rosa steered clear of his place but somehow did a circle and ended up on its porch.
Goddamn him.
Softer now, damp.
Another promise to herself out the window as she went inside. Just to tidy up some. For when he came back. When…whatever.
She turned on a single lamp, nosed through the kitchen. There was nothing of him in this place anymore. What little he had, what tiny piece of his aura left behind, was already a century gone. Rosa finished the glasses—nobody’s glasses that had come with the place—tried to keep a sigh from worming into a sob…
And realized she wasn’t alone.
There was no question of it being Michael. The feeling filled the whole space the way Michael never did, crowding like a hand on her shoulder blade.
“It’s okay. You turn around. All right?” The voice was heavily accented. Latin. It had a strange, ruined quality that made it seem to be coming from every corner at once. Rosa set the glass down and turned.
“What do you want?” She faced an empty room.
“We talk, okay? Just talk.” It was then she saw him, emerging from shadows near the bathroom. He carried no weapon and his face was a haphazard confusion of burns. His frame had a hard, peaceful core of purpose, freezing Rosa in place.
“Please. What is your name?”
She didn’t respond.
“What is your name?”
“Rosa.”
“Please sit, Rosa.”
She lowered herself on an edge of mattress.
“This is Michael Suslov’s home, no?”
She didn’t answer, only stared, wide-eyed. The figure sighed and sat down beside her. “I think you understand, Rosa. Understand that I ask questions and you answer them. I think you understand that it is the way it must be. My English is not so good but I think we can understand, yes? You do not know me, but we can be friends, I think.” He touched her arm, just a little, let her feel the power ebb through his fingers.
“I know you,” she said, not looking at him.
“I do not think so.”
“Yes, I know you.” She turned to him. “You’re Michael’s past.”
There had been empty pill bags everywhere in the trailer that spoke of a man afraid of his dreams. But that he had chosen this place meant he was also a man with a secret. Such a man would always have a place—a bolt-hole—that in the hollow of a broken night he would flee to with that secret.
He left Rosa in the trailer to her confusion and miseries and walked into the desert. It didn’t take long to find the man’s tracks. The desperation in each barefoot stagger across the years of his exile here, each always ending at the same protrusion of basalt rock. There, scratched over and over across a thousand nights, were “Garden 41,” “Lot 86,” and “Milan”…
Seven and a half miles out of Beatty, Alejandro pulled into a Richfield for gas. At the same moment he realized the station was closed, they jumped him. Two unmarked Fords screeching in from the back and side. Alejandro hit the accelerator and tried to make the highway. The first shotgun blast ripped out the front tire and fender. Alejandro fishtailed, felt the car hit by another blast from the opposite side, and understood any other theatrics were pointless, as the car spun out into a sandbank.
Figures approached warily across the asphalt, shotguns held low, like cops. They flanked the car, trying to read him. He gave them nothing and they lingered, edging up the fender till two muzzles pushed their way roughly against his head as someone yanked on the door, but it wouldn’t open. A voice said: Shit.
The opposite door obeyed, and they dragged him across the seat onto hot dirt. It stank of radiator fluid.
“Is he alive?”
“He’s alive.”
The first voice yanked his head up by the scalp
, and even in the fiery halo of a sledgehammer afternoon the face looking down at Alejandro was a wasted mask of years.
“Not that I care if you live. Understand?”
He let go of Alejandro’s scalp, but his head stayed up, eyes still locked, even in the glare tearing them apart. The voice snorted and walked away.
“Get him out of here before I get sunstroke.”
They put him in the back of their Ford, cuffed, just like home. Even the car was the same—navy-blue instead of dark-green and newer—but the same smell of cigarettes and stakeout coffee. They’d left one of the shooters behind with his peppered rental, and he rode with the other three in silence. They were clearly Americans, though who they represented wasn’t pinned either on their clothes or the car door.
The wasted face in the front passenger seat turned and grinned. “Jesus Christ, you’re an ugly one.”
They took him to the Nye County Sheriff station in Pahrump and parked him in an interrogation room, cuffed to a bar. It was suffocating, but he’d been in places more suffocating still. After an hour the wasted one entered alone, took his coat off, and fell into a chair, .38 visible on his waistband. A cop. From his pocket he unscrewed a small flask and swallowed a bolt. Wiping his mouth he looked at Alejandro across the tiny room. His face was both pallid and flushed at the same time, a universe of veins coursing its translucent surface.
“Go ahead, kid, stare all you want. Believe me, it’s a pleasure coming from someone actually less attractive than myself.”
Alejandro figured him for a hard sixty-five. This was clearly his show.
“Piece of advice, son. Next time, you, a known terrorist, decide to travel to the United States, don’t use a document forger that’s on our embassy’s snitch payroll.”
Corada. So that’s why they were waiting for him.
“You want to tell me why you’re looking for Michael Suslov?”
Alejandro didn’t answer. The cop leaned closer, and Alejandro could smell decades of self-abuse on his breath as he said, quietly, for just the two of them:
“Was it about Her?”
September 1, 1971
22.
It was clouds as they came in. The stewardess asked him to buckle his seatbelt. He hadn’t slept on the way, and the world was a muddy daze. He smiled at the stewardess, but it was awkward. The pilot mumbled something, mumbled it again in Italian. The wing flexed, and the strata below broke away on red-roofed apartment blocks skirting khaki cornfields.
He walked from the plane to the terminal with the other passengers, squinting at the day and feeling his face flush as machine-gun uniforms rolled gazes over his creased sport coat and crumpled chinos. Spook clothes. He folded sunglasses over his eyes, ran a hand through damp hair. Inside he fished for his Gary Phillips passport and was seized with a certainty this could never work. He weighed turning around, getting out…
“Passport, please.”
He slid it over along with his second awkward smile in an hour. Christ, what’s wrong with me? Slow down. And take the sunglasses off.
The passport disappeared behind the counter. “How long will you be in Italia?”
He’d spent the entire landing rehearsing “tourist,” his fantasy home address, a sunny, bogus itinerary. It had never occurred to him how long he’d be here. His gears froze on it and he stuttered. The passport kid looked up suspiciously, and Michael forced words out of his mouth.
“Two days.”
The kid knotted his eyebrows. “You’ve come to Italia for only two days?”
Fuck. “Uh, two days in Milan. I meant two days here, here in Milan.”
“Where do you go after Milano?”
The rehearsal kicked in, and he rattled off Tuscany towns from a Frommer’s guide.
“Where will you be staying in Milano?”
He had a hotel name too. A reservation he wouldn’t show up for. His voice steadied, heat came back into his veins. He felt human.
“Are you sick, Signore?”
“I don’t fly well.”
The passport kid studied him some more, sighed, glanced in the direction of a supervisor as if for guidance, then stamped his documents with a fierce wallop.
“This is good for one month.”
“Thank you.”
“Enjoy your stay.”
The smart thing, the spook thing, would have been to pick up his bags right then and walk through customs. Instead he went to the toilet, locked the door, and threw up.
He splashed his face in the sink and thought, I’ve lost everything I ever knew of this work. He swallowed a couple pills to coax a frame of mind, flushed the rest in case it didn’t work. He sat on the toilet lid, hung his head between his knees till gravity worked the pharmacology into his brain. Feeling half stable, he retucked his shirt and straightened his fifteen-year-old tie.
Just walk through like you own the place. The only thing airport stiffs—stiffs anywhere—can smell is dog fear. You took a piss first. So what? They bought a sixteen-year-old passport photo; they’ll buy the next thirty seconds.
A hand banged on the bathroom door. “Mr. Phillips? Are you all right?”
Michael hoisted his bags, unlocked the door, and found the passport kid waiting outside checking his watch. Michael shrugged like the kid was out of his mind and walked resolutely through the green NOTHING TO DECLARE exit.
They stopped and searched everything in his luggage.
The TSD skeleton keys were tucked individually throughout the lining—he’d remembered that much—and the rest was at least vaguely turistico. When they’d properly emptied his possessions into a jumble, the customs suits stood back without apology and waited for him to pack and zip them up himself. He did so, forcing with monumental effort to keep it slow and unhurried. Done, he dragged them off the table, avoided giving the day’s third awkward smile, and showed them his back for maybe seven steps.
“Mr. Phillips.”
The passport kid’s voice. Michael stopped, managed an exasperated I’m-late-for-a-train sigh…
And heard a submachine gun cock.
“Please put your hands up, Mr. Phillips.”
“What?” Michael fairly squeaked with it. He still hadn’t turned, a bag in each hand.
“Your hands, Mr. Phillips. Pronto.”
Michael set his luggage down and raised his arms. It was the passport kid who stepped up and pulled the Brazilian .25 from his waistband. He didn’t have to bother reaching under Michael’s coat to do it. The American tourist on a two-day visit had saved him the trouble by jamming his coattail into his pants along with the gun.
They had him in back now, an interrogation room with a view of yellow fuel trucks. You could feel the throb of jet engines through the walls.
“Why do you bring a gun into Italy on vacation, Mr. Phillips?” It was the supervisor, speaking across a table where the Brazilian pistol lay.
“It wasn’t loaded.” Not technically. He had two clips for it but they had been in different pockets. The stiffs found both of them. Michael’s head throbbed—probably dehydration from the flight. One more addition to his list of blood-chemistry disorders.
“I bought the gun for self-protection.”
“Protection from whom?”
“From anyone.”
“Are you ill?”
“I’m uncomfortable.”
“Are you on medication?”
Ha. “NoDoz, maybe.”
“Why do you not want to sleep?”
“Bad dreams.” Whole world of truth in that, Mr. Airport Man.
“What business are you on in Italy?”
“No business. I’m on vacation.”
“When was your last vacation?”
“I don’t remember.”
“1956?”
The supervisor had a telex. Sure. Gary Phillips had been here in ’56.
“I’ve had vacations since then.”
“Your last visit to Milan, in 1956, you also stayed only two days.”
; “Yes.”
“Why?”
“To visit a friend.”
“Which friend?”
“She’s dead.”
“When did she die?”
“Then.”
“1956?”
“Yes.”
“You came for a funeral?”
“Yes. Yes I did.”
“What was her name?”
They’d check that. If he made one up and luck wasn’t on his side, it would mean a night or two in here at least. Telling the truth would risk…what? Digging her up?
“María Maggi.” The truth. Paint it red. The supervisor wrote it down.
“Where is she buried?”
“Musocco.” The supervisor wrote that down too and passed it to an assistant who disappeared. Here we go.
“We’ll check, of course.”
“I’m sure she’s still there.” That bunched up the supervisor, and for the first time Michael felt on top of the moment. That old, very old feeling.
“What did this María Maggi do for a living?”
“She was a nun.”
“Italian?”
“Yes. I knew her as a boy in Argentina.”
“And you came all this way for her funeral?”
“She meant a lot to me.” And might even be still alive, but that would take time to check.
“Did you bring a gun the last time too?”
“No.” Another truth. They felt good. And the Truth Shall Make You Free—the CIA’s motto, inscribed on the lobby wall. To 99 percent of the people who worked there, its meaning was obvious, even quaint. To the other 1 percent, to the Clandestine Service officers, it held a maxim that was the flip side of Paint It Red. Always tell the truth. Even when you lie, make some part of it a truth you know. Only then will a lie take on wings.
Blood Makes Noise Page 17