by Robin Kirman
“Never mind: you weren’t yourself, I get it.”
“Of course, you know what a manic episode does to a person; you saw me at my worst.” Alice bit into her shrimp and dropped the tail onto her bread plate. “We never properly discussed that either, your visit to the hospital in New York. Our heart-to-heart there in the ward. That you initiated about Storrow.”
“I initiated?”
“For a while I was angry with you about it.”
“You were angry with me?”
Alice seemed to be choosing her next words carefully: “I’m not here to apportion blame, or not to anybody but myself. One reason why I never responded to your postcard, though not the full explanation…” She left off, distracted, and pointed across the table. “You have something. On your shirt.”
Georgia looked down. A wet stain had spread across the left side of her chest; she’d neglected to put pads into her bra, and her breasts were leaking. She dabbed at herself with a napkin while Alice set down her shrimp, quietly embarrassed.
“Why don’t you just get to it,” Georgia demanded. “Whatever it is you brought me here for, you want to clear your conscience, go ahead.”
Alice offered Georgia her napkin. “There’s another spot down there.”
The right side was leaking now. The milk wouldn’t stop flowing; it was feeding time, her body programmed, matched to the baby’s needs.
A phone was ringing, the sound coming from her purse. The bag was crammed with items—a spare diaper, cream, extra formula. Unable to find her cell, Georgia tossed the mess onto the table. She’d missed the call. It was the sitter.
Violet must be causing trouble: refusing to take the bottle, screaming until the neighbors came knocking on the door again. And here she was, in a fine restaurant, waiting for Alice to muster the will to apologize—if that was what Alice meant to do, and not simply to enjoy the sight of her old friend coming undone before her—her shirt wet, her face red, her meager possessions in a heap—unable to keep up appearances even for an hour of pretend normality.
“I need to go; I don’t have time for this.”
“Georgia, please. Don’t run away.”
“You’re telling me?” For ten years Alice had been the one avoiding her and any possibility that the matter of the murder or Storrow might be raised. Ten years since Alice had betrayed her and, in all that time, no sign of remorse, no sign that Alice gave a damn what had become of her. Only now that Georgia was, as Alice put it, “in the shit,” did Alice care to face her, now that Alice was without cause for envy: independent, poised, and free.
“Why did you call me here? You want to know that you’re forgiven? Fine. You’re forgiven.”
Georgia seized her wallet and placed a wad of bills, uncounted, on the table. Alice pushed the bills away.
“Let me. You came because I asked you to, and it was wrong of me. I shouldn’t have forced my concerns on you.”
“Anyway, I can pay for myself, thanks.”
Alice nodded and slid the bills beneath a glass: “About the money issue: I’d like to say again, that’s the last thing you need to worry about now. I realize we haven’t kept up, but I still know you, I think. Hard reality is not for you. Take Charlie’s help. Nothing’s gained by punishing yourself with all of this.”
This—meaning her life now; this, the family she’d chosen, the people she loved—these weren’t punishments. “You have no idea what I need. Neither does Charlie.”
“Actually I think I do know. I know when my father died—”
“For Christ’s sake, Alice: nobody has died.” Georgia turned from the table. Her coat was at the front, her blouse soaked through. People in the restaurant stared. She wanted only to be home then, away from Alice and the strain of old suspicions and resentments, returned to her current and vital concerns: Violet. Mark. The small family she’d only just found and feared to lose.
Back to punishment, as Alice saw it—Alice who was finally, perhaps, groping toward concern for others, but had not yet, Georgia felt sure, made her own discovery of love.
23
Charlie parked his car—a Mercedes hybrid—in the back of the lot outside his office: no space reserved for chief executives, no privileges to reflect a hierarchy. Birds chirped in the trees along the pathway to the entrance, and the lingering smell of optimism greeted him inside—floor polish, paint. Triathlon’s doors had opened just a year before: six thousand square feet, replete with stocked minifridges, movie screens, Razor scooters, all the amenities to satisfy employees average age twenty-six, dreamy kids whom he’d persuaded that Triathlon was less a business than an ideological mission: a means of making government more effective and accountable, a weapon for defense, and a tool for reform.
He greeted his staff by name, lingering among the rows of desks. Boys and girls in jeans and fleece spun on their chairs to ask about his weekend, or to wish him luck on his talk that afternoon. At three he was due to lecture at the Startup Conference at Stanford; people were surprised that he’d stopped in.
In the last few months, he’d been spending more and more time away from this office he and Udi had been so proud to create; either he was in Boston or New York, meeting with his next round of investors, or else he was appearing on campuses or at conventions, promoting their company, garnering positive press. Just that month he’d had invitations from TED and Charlie Rose. He was becoming a sought-after speaker, but not because people cared about the details of big data analytics; what they liked was his song and dance about a less invasive intelligence program. They liked to see a boyish, gentle face posing as the future of national defense, and to hear that security and liberty didn’t need to be at odds.
Or they had liked it; lately, some of those who’d lavished praise had begun voicing suspicions. Triathlon, with its idealistic image, its freckle-faced CEO, was really a government PR tool: its much-touted privacy protections a mere distraction from the systematic agency abuses that were now coming to light; the last allegations, enumerated in the Baltimore Sun, relied on testimony from three ex-NSA employees.
Everyone within these walls—savvy, up-to-date young men and women—must be aware of the Sun reports, not to mention the rumors circling the blogs. Triathlon hadn’t yet been directly implicated and McCraw insisted it would not be. Nonetheless, the main reason Charlie had come in that morning was to bolster confidence, so that his team could see him looking so deliberately carefree.
Gwen, his assistant, rose from her desk to greet him with a hug. Gwen was Triathlon’s newest addition—only brought in reluctantly once Charlie had to admit the volume of his calls and e-mails, along with the intricacy of his schedule, were more than he could handle on his own. Gwen wore dreadlocks and wrote plays in the evenings. He’d hired her for all those ways in which she failed to resemble a career secretary; still, in such a progressive company, it didn’t quite sit right, his starting his days like Welch and countless other professional white men over the past century—with a woman trailing him into his office to relay his messages.
The Baltimore Sun had called, she said, and handed him a stack of names and numbers.
“Anything from Roger or Shuster?”
For the last four months, Roger had been wooing JP Morgan Chase; they were on the cusp of a deal, and Shuster, their main contact over there, had agreed to send over a provisional contract. It hadn’t yet arrived, a sign that Shuster, or whomever he took orders from, was skittish, reluctant to employ a company that might be tainted by scandal—no other explanation for Shuster’s name being absent from the pile before him now.
All in his head, McCraw would say, if Charlie were to share such thoughts with him; McCraw insisted no one else was connecting Triathlon to the NSA rumors, rumors that, in any case, would never be confirmed. “Keep it cool, Charlie,” McCraw had warned him, paranoia was an occupational hazard.
Gwen eyed him from the doorway; she was uneasy, fussing with the charm at her neck—if “charm” was the right term to describe a si
lver skull.
“Is something wrong?” he asked her.
“I thought you should know. A woman called for you, too, twice. She sounded upset.”
“A woman?” He still wasn’t accustomed to this arrangement with Gwen, a stranger so intimately entangled in his dealings. He hardly knew Gwen, really—couldn’t say if she had a boyfriend or a girlfriend or name the subject of her latest play—and yet she knew far too much about him: that he phoned Chicago every evening to get Roger’s advice; that he sent his mom checks and that she sent them back; that he kept canceling appointments to look at apartments with Melissa. She also knew when women who were not Melissa called him and which ones he hastened to call back.
“She left her name. Georgia Reese.”
—
“I hope you’re not too busy, Charlie.”
It was so like Georgia to begin that way. She was well aware that he was busy—when wasn’t he busy?—and aware, too, that he’d always make allowances to speak with her.
Her voice remained a rarity; it was just a month since Alice had persuaded him to phone Georgia and put an end to their long silence. Each time he pictured Georgia on the other end of the line, he had to remind himself how much had changed since they’d last met, that she was no longer the twenty-five-year-old semiprofessional who’d, miraculously, disrobed that single night in his apartment. For a while he’d sought to remember every detail of her body: the texture of her skin, the heft of her breast, the way her lower lip felt between his teeth, but memory always disappointed, proved so indifferent to one’s wishes; these sensations had been conflated with others he’d experienced in the years since. All of it faded.
No matter. Whatever he’d forgotten and whoever they were now, however freighted she was with cares—husband’s illness, helpless infant—however importantly occupied he might then be, every time he heard her voice, she was again his airy fantasy and he a dreaming boy of nineteen.
“How are you, Georgia?”
“Me? I’m fine, fine. Honest.”
“And Mark?”
“Mark, too, I’m afraid to say it.” She laughed, a high, tight laugh he hadn’t heard from her before. “Illness makes you superstitious. Mark came home from the hospital yesterday; sleeping in his own bed again. He responded well to the chemo. Exceeded expectations.”
Of course, he would: heroic Mark. Under the circumstances, it would be awful to feel anything but pity for the husband, and yet Charlie couldn’t help but be irked, a bit, each time Georgia spoke of Mark, the saintly, brave doctor who, before the cancer, spent his days tending to the weak and poor in the deserts of Mongolia or wherever the hell she’d met him. Feats of altruism to which his own efforts could not compare, though Georgia tried to make something grand of them: full of praise for his Patel Scholarship fund. Really all Alice’s project, he’d replied. It was Alice who’d shown genuine concern for the Patels; his own intentions felt less pure, especially while Georgia expressed her admiration.
Just a month until the memorial, and still he hadn’t asked Georgia if she planned on attending. Insensitive to even wonder, what with Mark so sick and so many concerns weighing on her then.
Georgia’s father had laid out her situation for him—overcome by worry and exhaustion, she seemed bent on destroying herself, too, out of some mad guilt or pride. No doubt Mr. Calvin had taken artistic liberties; Charlie recalled the man’s maudlin photographs, those care-lined faces. Probably, too, he figured that the boy his daughter had rejected must be a little gleeful to hear how she now suffered. Instead, Charlie found their talk depressing, disliked the chastened Georgia of her dad’s description, with her worn-down, duller virtue. He preferred the vivid, thrilling Georgia of his memory: the source of his worst pains, but of his most intense excitements, too.
He heard a beep, another call was coming in: Roger this time, possibly with news from Shuster. He hesitated, kicking his foot against the leg of his desk, then let the call go, trying to concentrate on whatever had Georgia sounding so disturbed.
She’d had a visit, she was saying. A reporter. Come the day before to discuss Julie Patel. Had Charlie heard from him as well? Nat Krauss, was his name, from the Crimson.
For Christ’s sake, it was a student reporter who had her so worked up. Meanwhile, the Baltimore Sun meant to reach him and over a matter of vital public interest. Not that Georgia was likely to be aware; people absorbed in their own crises tended not to be avid followers of national news.
Georgia was in a crisis, he must remember; given her condition, he’d be callous not to hear her out, not to offer reassurance.
Probably that was all she needed—simple comfort, since her husband, doped up on pain meds and whatever other chemicals were coursing through his veins, could provide her only greater cause for anguish. And so she’d turned to him, thought Charlie, as she’d have done at twenty, to help her feel calm again.
“I had this feeling when the reporter was talking—as if Storrow might be pulling the strings here somehow. Not that I have any idea what he might do, but you know, the timing seems dubious; the ten-year memorial, and suddenly Storrow turns up again.”
He chose not to correct her, to inform her that Storrow had reappeared in his own life almost four years earlier. She didn’t need to hear it: not about his brush with the man in Washington, nor about the harassment that had followed.
In his last call, eight months ago, Storrow had sounded so unhinged that Charlie felt compelled to involve one of his security consultants: Jarred Flynn, a retired investigator, brought in on retainer while Triathlon worked up software to sell to the LAPD.
Thanks to Flynn, Charlie knew more about Storrow than he had a right to—but there was no sense including Georgia in this mess. All she needed from him now were a few words of reassurance, to be set at ease by a man in the know. That was what he’d become for her, apparently—no longer an adoring, clumsy boy, but a man who could speak with authority.
“I’m looking after it. Don’t worry. The Patels will have their ceremony, and everything will go perfectly smoothly.”
“I hope so, Charlie. I’ll worry less knowing you’re there.”
“Put it out of your head; you have Mark and Violet to think of.”
Satisfied, she let him go. Mark would be up soon, Violet needed feeding, and he must be—of course he was—so very busy.
—
Busy, yes—with a lecture to prepare and a call from Roger that required his attention—but before he lost himself again in the business of the day, he dialed Flynn’s office and told his secretary he wished to speak to him as soon as possible.
Flynn, Charlie believed, would make good on the promise given Georgia. After all, the man was trained to deal with threatening types like Storrow; that was why Charlie had chosen to consult him when Storrow’s messages had become more frequent, his tone less controlled: I know what lies you’re facing, Charlie; you won’t survive this without me—you know I’m right; it’s happening just like I said; they’ll lie and call you crazy; they’ll lie and make you crazy.
Of course, Storrow was the crazy one, his madness with deeper origins, surely, than double-dealing from men like Mike McCraw. Moreover, Charlie told himself, Storrow was the one who’d lie, who’d say anything to get what he was after: boasting and then fawning, imploring and then threatening: Don’t ignore me, Charlie. Don’t forget who it is you’re dealing with: I still have a few teeth left.
“You’re concerned he might come after you?” Flynn had been very direct at their first meeting. He had a scrubby, old Irish face, spotted in a way that also made him appear more frank than his slicker colleagues, though Charlie knew better than to judge by surfaces, or to trust a face that reminded him, he’d come to realize since, of home.
“Do you think I need to worry?”
“Is it advice you want? Or protection.”
“Just advice. Unless your advice is that protection’s necessary.”
Flynn could only make his recommendation, he
said, after conducting some research.
A nasty business, surveillance; it was the one Charlie was in, after all. If he’d managed to sugarcoat this for his employees and sympathizers, others inevitably found ways to remind him. There were always a few such unnerving e-mails awaiting him on his Triathlon account each day: capitalist fascist—you hunt us, we hunt you. As a result, McCraw and the board were pressing for a security detail to guard their offices. Charlie remained staunchly opposed: this would undermine the values Triathlon was meant to represent and now, more than ever, it was important to keep up company morale. He wondered what those kids, typing away outside his door, would think to hear he’d hired a PI.
“Let’s try to make this quick and quiet,” he’d told Flynn. Their following meeting had taken place in Charlie’s apartment, a light-flooded condo on Alma Street in downtown North Palo Alto. Flynn had come bearing a twenty-page typed report, which, on principle, Charlie refused to read. “Just tell me if there’s anything I need to know.”
Flynn had obliged him, confining his remarks to the essentials: for the last five years, Rufus Storrow had been living mostly in Mumbai and Delhi, with occasional visits to his mother in Great Falls. Great Falls was where Storrow resided currently, in a boarding house ten miles away from his family home. According to the owner of the house, Storrow seemed a solitary type, keeping to himself. He’d alluded to a wife and children, but none had ever accompanied him to Virginia. About his current business, Storrow was tight-lipped; the story going around Great Falls was that he was employed as a legal consultant for the U.S. embassy, but no one at any of the embassies in India, said Flynn, had confirmed his employment. Instead, Flynn had found a paper trail linking Storrow to a Mumbai law firm, one with a rather shady reputation, a history of defending local mafia, dealers in blood diamonds and opium.