Enemy of the Good

by Matthew Palmer

  “And I will feed you well, I promise. But you’re going to have to play for me first.”

  “Now?”

  “Absolutely. I’m serving an excellent wine with dinner, and if we wait you’ll be too blotto to play and I’ll be in no position to appreciate your skills. Come. It’s been too long.”

  Meryem appeared at the ambassador’s elbow with a tumbler of scotch and ice balanced on a small silver tray. He took it, nodding his appreciation.

  The living room was dominated by a jet black Steinway grand piano. It was an older model, but it looked to have been beautifully maintained.

  “Is that beast in tune?” Kate asked.

  “It should be. Although it’s been a while since the ivories have been tickled by someone of your talent.”

  Kate sat at the bench and considered what to play. Music had been one of the few constants of her peripatetic youth. She had started playing at five, and at every post she had auditioned successfully for the state-run music academy that was a staple institution across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet space. Kate had been good, at her best better than good, entering and scoring well at international competitions. At one point, she had considered a career in music, but she had chosen a different path and was now more a recreational player than the serious concert musician she had been. Even so, thousands of hours of practice had helped her build a sizable repertoire. And she could still play.

  After a moment’s thought, she launched into the opening bars of Schubert’s Sonata in A Major. Schubert was Kate’s favorite composer, and this was one of the first competition pieces she had mastered as a girl. Playing it elicited strong memories of Madame Raisa in St. Petersburg, who would rap her knuckles sharply with a ruler if her tempo ever faltered. It also reminded her of her father, who had loved to sit in his leather chair by the fire sipping cognac and listening to Kate practice. Schubert had been his favorite as well.

  When she had finished, Kate transitioned seamlessly to Estar Enamorado by the Cuban great Adolfo Guzmán. She glanced at the ambassador, who raised a quizzical eyebrow. This was not the typical music of a pianist trained in the Russian classical tradition. Kate had fallen in love with Cuban music in Havana. It was free and spontaneous, the opposite of what Cuban society had become but also a promise of hope for what it could be again. Culture was stronger than any political system, no matter how repressive.

  The last notes of Estar Enamorado fluttered lightly from her fingers and she thought about Reuben. Had he made it off the island? Was he sipping rum on the beach in Dominica? Or hiding in a dark basement in Las Tunas waiting for the agents of the G2 to find him?

  At the final flourish, her uncle drained the last dram of scotch in his glass as though toasting her performance.

  “I see that you’ve fallen under the spell of the Caribbean communists. Does diplomatic security know about this?”

  “It comes from spending all my time there with the anti-regime activists. Many of them were artists of some sort. Painters. Writers. Musicians. Artists make the best dissidents.”

  “Passion?” her uncle asked.

  “Yes. But there’s something else about them. They speak a language those with power don’t fully understand. It’s made up of symbols and allusions and shared cultural touchstones. Authoritarians are literal thinkers, almost entirely concrete. They don’t understand art, and they often don’t know enough to be afraid of it. It’s like the sculptor in Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ mocking the Pharaoh by carving his face on a megalomaniacal statue with wrinkled lips and a sneer of cold command. Ozy just knows that the statue is big and imposing. He doesn’t have the sense or sensibility to know that he’s being ridiculed and that the sculptor’s mockery will outlast his empire by three thousand years. The autocrats can’t confront the artists on their terms, and in the end art wins. It has to.”

  “That’s pretty profound, Kate. But I am also reminded of a little girl I knew who used to bring home stray kittens and baby birds with broken wings. The patron saint of the forlorn and abandoned.”

  “What can I say? I’m a hopeless romantic.”

  “And a hungry one, I hope. I have a new chef. Belgian-trained. And I asked him to make your favorite. Uzgen paloo.”

  “And he agreed?”

  “Under protest. Said it was peasant food. I’m sure he’s finding some way to fancy it up. Deconstruct it, as they say. Maybe add sea foam or acacia berries or something or other that’s all the rage in Brooklyn. Whatever. To the table with us.”

  Kate giggled. It was good to be with family. The Hollister clan was accomplished but not especially fecund. She did not have many close relatives on her father’s side. And her mother’s side of the family tree had had nearly all of its leaves stripped, first by the Soviets and then by the Eraliev regime.

  The dining room was enormous, much of it taken up by a table large enough to seat at least twenty-four guests. Kate was pleased to see that the staff had set their plates at one corner of the table, so they would not have to talk across acres of walnut. Even so, certain formalities had to be observed and there was a hand-engraved name card at Kate’s place setting and a menu card propped up on the table.

  Warm Salad of Seared Scallops, Haricots Verts, and Bell Peppers in Walnut Vinaigrette

  Uzgen Paloo “Nouveau”

  Caramel Pear Terrine

  The wines listed at the bottom of the menu were a pinot noir from Sonoma and a sauvignon blanc from the Rogue River Valley in Oregon. Kate recognized the vineyards. These wines were almost a hundred dollars a bottle. It was not the typical embassy function swill.

  “You’re bringing out the good stuff, Uncle. I’m flattered.”

  “Nothing’s too good for my brother’s little girl.”

  “It’s nice to be with family. Speaking of which, how’s Beverly?”

  “She’s well, thank you. You’ll see her soon enough. She’s in the States visiting the boys. But she’ll be back in a few weeks.”

  Harry and Beverly had twin boys about six years older than Kate. One was an ophthalmologist in New Jersey and the other was a successful commodities trader in Chicago. Like Kate, they had grown up mostly abroad, but neither had been bitten by the foreign affairs bug. She knew little enough of them beyond the exchange of Christmas cards and carefully curated Facebook posts. They had grown up on different continents and they were not close.

  A waiter that Kate did not know poured the sauvignon blanc.

  Meryem appeared with the first course. It was delicious. The scallops were lightly seared and tender and the peppers sautéed just enough to bring out the flavor while still leaving them crispy.

  They talked about family, but there were so few relatives to get caught up on that the conversation veered quickly to shop talk. Kate told her uncle, somewhat sheepishly, about disobeying direct instructions in Havana and warning Morales and the other dissidents about the raid.

  “You did the right thing,” Harry said. “Although, had you done the opposite, I could have said the same. It’s easy enough to argue both sides.”

  This, Kate thought, was the classic answer of the diplomat. Nothing was certain. Everything was open to debate, interpretation, and compromise. It could be maddening.

  “I suppose so. But there didn’t seem to be anything else I could do. And the Cuban government couldn’t wait to get me out of there. Thanks for giving me a soft place to land.”

  “There are times when you gotta do what you believe needs to be done.”

  “Thanks, Uncle.”

  “But Kate . . .”

  “Yeah.”

  “You ever do that to me and you’re on the first plane out of here. Family or not. This is my mission and you’re under my orders. Do we still have a consulate in Greenland? ’Cause that’s where you’ll be, eating fried whale blubber and stamping visas for Inuit pipe welders.”

  “Underst
ood.”

  As if to make up for the threat, he poured Kate a glass of the pinot noir.

  “Time to switch to red.”

  As her uncle had promised, the wine was excellent.

  “I’m happy to have you here, Kate. You’re going to be an important part of this team. And I believe you can do great things here.”

  “And I’m glad to be back here. Back home.”

  “Kyrgyzstan has changed since your salad days. There are some things that you really need to know.”

  Meryem removed the empty plates from the first course and set dishes of Uzgen paloo in front of Kate and the ambassador. Paloo was the unofficial national dish of Kyrgyzstan, rice mixed with mutton and shredded carrots that had been fried in a large cast-iron cauldron called a qazan. Traditionally, it was garnished with whole fried cloves of garlic and hot red peppers. The rice came from Kyrgyzstan’s Uzgen region and was brownish red with a slightly nutty flavor. As the ambassador had predicted, the chef had tried mightily to make the humble paloo sufficiently sophisticated for the diplomatic table. The rice was formed into a tall cylinder and topped by a three-dimensional lattice made of garlic cloves and hot peppers that looked like the steel frame of a skyscraper.

  “See what I mean?” Harry said. “There was no way that Michel was going to do the paloo straight up.”

  “I think it’s cute. Thanks for asking him to do this.”

  Kate took a bite. It was perhaps the best paloo she had ever tried, rich and earthy and spicy. But even in the hands of a world-class chef it was never going to be more than the Kyrgyz version of comfort food. It was as if Le Cirque were serving meat loaf or mac and cheese.

  The ambassador was less interested in the paloo than his exposition on the latest developments in Kyrgyz politics. Dinners with the Hollisters were always like that. Given the choice between talking and eating, talking always won. It was a wonder the Hollisters were not all as thin as sticks.

  “When you were here before, our stated goal was regime change. It was the Bush years and that was all the rage. Axis of Evil. No negotiating with terrorists. No compromise. No prisoners . . . well, maybe one or two so we would have somebody to waterboard. It seems a little silly to talk about those days as naïve, but that’s what they were. The neocons were ascendant and our plan, such as it was, was to bomb and bully the Muslim world into embracing democracy and the free market and—god willing—start voting Republican. The world as they saw it was Manichaean. Everything in black and white. But the lines in the real world are never quite so crisp and defined. It’s all shades of gray bleeding into each other.

  “Americans have been conditioned to think that victory looks like the surrender ceremony on the deck of the battleship Missouri. Unconditional and absolute. Total domination. A clean win with sharp corners and no room for uncertainty or ambiguity. But that’s a fantasy, at least in this century. If you insist on absolute purity, you risk coming away with nothing. Diplomacy is the art of the possible. And you should never allow the best to be the enemy of the good. That’s the world that you and I inhabit.”

  “The purists certainly had their comeuppance in Iraq,” Kate observed. “Things didn’t quite work out the way the neocons had envisioned.”

  “Indeed not. They promised we would be greeted with flowers as liberators, and at the time I suspect they very much believed that that was true. So now the pendulum has swung back the other way and we are prepared to accept a little bit less purity in exchange for a little bit more security.”

  “And does that include Eraliev?”

  “Up to a point.”

  “He killed your brother.”

  The expression on his face betrayed a sense of grief and loss. It was fleeting, but that only made it more powerful, and Kate felt guilty for making the point so bluntly. Her uncle was in a difficult position, caught between duty to country and obligation to family.

  “It’s possible,” he admitted after a moment’s thought. “And I understand why you’re so committed to that theory. There’s no larger meaning in a tragic accident. But there’s no hard evidence of government involvement. And even if the rumors were true, it wouldn’t really matter. This isn’t about me or you. It’s about the United States. Regime change is not our policy here. Not for now, at least.”

  Kate wished that she could be so dispassionate about the man she believed responsible for her parents’ death. But she knew that she would never develop that sense of professional distance. It was all too close and too personal.

  “But isn’t it in the interest of the United States to get rid of Eraliev? To help build a democratic Kyrgyzstan?”

  “Without a doubt. But if we aren’t prepared to invade and occupy this place to make it so, then we are going to have to learn to work with this government, at least for a while, and support change slowly over time. And until that day, there are certain things that we are going to want from this government, no matter how unattractive it is.”

  “So what do we want from Eraliev?”

  “Birlik.”

  “The one-horse town down near the border with Tajikistan?”

  “One horse, yes. And one Soviet air base, albeit one that needs to be rebuilt from the ground up at considerable expense. But still and all, one that offers unprecedented opportunities to project air power across central Asia. And we are negotiating with the Eraliev government on a ninety-nine-year lease for that base. This will help us amortize the costs.”

  “Why do we need the base?”

  “In a word: China. The Great Game in Central Asia is back on, only with the U.S. and China dueling on the Field of Mars rather than the UK and Russia.”

  For much of the nineteenth century, the British and Russian empires had rubbed up against each other in Central Asia with the kind of tectonic force that produced the Himalayas. The British were afraid that the tsar’s troops would subdue the Central Asian Khanates of Khiva, Bukhara, and Kokand and use Afghanistan as a staging area for an invasion of India, the jewel in the crown of the empire. The Great Game, the struggle for influence and dominance, was played on the battlefield, but it was also played by spymasters and diplomats, journalists, and businessmen. It was the kind of full-spectrum conflict at which successful empires excel, and which can ultimately drain even the most powerful of them dry.

  “It’s hard to see how one little air base is going to determine the future of big power relationships. We had an air base here until two years ago out at Manas airport. That hardly seems to have been a game changer in the region.”

  “That was a transit base,” her uncle replied. “It was all oriented toward supplying the troops in Afghanistan. That fight was always destined to be a sideshow. The base at Birlik would be the real thing, a platform for power projection across Central Asia and western China with advanced fighters, bombers, and AWACS aircraft. It would force China to shift significant forces inland, away from the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, to counter our position in the interior. The Birlik base would actually be bolstering our position in the Pacific, and that’s the biggest prize of this century.”

  “I understand that,” Kate said. And she did. It was Great Power Diplomacy 101. “So, are you running the negotiations with Eraliev?”

  “I’m just the local muscle,” the ambassador demurred. “I work the issues from here, but the overall lead is Winston Crandle.”

  “The Fossil?”

  “The same. Still nostalgic for Mutually Assured Destruction.”

  Ambassador Winston Crandle was the deputy secretary of defense, a one-time FSO who had transitioned to Democratic Party politics and reinvented himself as the leader of the party’s “realist wing” of foreign policy strategists. He did not lack for experience. Crandle had joined the Foreign Service in the early days of the Johnson administration and had been a staff aid to Dean Rusk. Later he had hitched his wagon to a rising star named Henry Kissinge
r. He had been ambassador three times, most recently to NATO, and although he was well into his seventies, his nickname, the Fossil, was more a comment on his worldview than his advanced age. He was a hardened Cold Warrior—one of the fire-breathers who secretly hoped that China’s ascension to the rank of peer competitor of the United States would return a kind of moral clarity to American foreign policy and push the self-defeating “war on terror” to the margins of global affairs where it belonged.

  “And he comes here?”

  “Regularly. I’ll make you his control officer for the next visit, but you’ll have to behave yourself.”

  “I’ll be good, I promise. But I have to tell you that I’m not sold on this.”

  “How so?”

  “The base deal would come at a price, a steep price. And I’m afraid that we’re falling victim, again, to short-termism. We have a clear vision for what we want this country to become: stable, free, prosperous, democratic, and allied to the West. But we want something from Eraliev right now and we’re prepared to mortgage that future in exchange for immediate gratification. It’s not a recipe for long-term success in this region.”

  “I wouldn’t use that frame,” the ambassador suggested. “What we struggle with, not only here in Kyrgyzstan but everywhere in the world, is what I call values complexity.”

  “A new term for me, I’ll admit.”

  “My own coinage. The United States of America is an empire. Our interests span the globe and our appetites are all but limitless. Every problem is our problem and we want many, many things. Sometimes our interests are complementary. We want country X to buy American goods, so we hope it’s rich enough to afford our airplanes and iPads. As it so happens, country X is also an American ally and a functioning democracy, so we want it politically stable. Prosperity supports both goals. Everyone wins.

  “But sometimes our interests are contradictory. We support human rights and religious freedom, but not if it means Saudi Arabia won’t sell us oil or make nice to Israel. So we tend to downplay the whole freedom thing when we’re kissing al-Saud’s . . . ring. We oppose human trafficking and forced labor, but we like cheap sneakers. Democracy is great. But what do we do when the public votes in leaders we find objectionable, genocidal scumbags, for example, or fanatical jihadists? Life is complicated. In any given situation there are hundreds of factors and dozens of values that we need to balance against each other. The process of finding that balance is what we call policy making. It’s what you and I do for a living on behalf of the American people, and it is an honor and a privilege to shoulder that responsibility.”