Spy Mom

by Beth McMullen

  “Why are you here?” they demanded.

  “I’m an American citizen here to take pictures for a magazine. I’m a photographer.” One of the guards picked up my small digital camera from the floor.

  “With this?”

  I shrugged. “Low rent,” I said. “I’m not the kind of girl to sit in a snow cave for six months in the Uzbekistan mountains waiting for the elusive snow leopard to show itself. If you know what I mean.”

  “Who said anything about a snow leopard?”

  “I did. I’m not who you think I am.” My cheek stung and every time I opened my mouth, the skin felt oddly loose and detached.

  “Put her in a cell,” the head guy said, suddenly bored with this whole affair.

  My new accommodations were underground. The cement block walls were tinged green with mold and a slow trickle of water came down from the ceiling, pooling in the middle of the floor. I sat down on the wooden platform I assumed was meant as a bed, pulling my legs up tight to my chest to conserve what little warmth I had left. I concentrated on keeping my face still, allowing a scab to form over the slice in my cheek.

  “Hey. Hey, you,” came a voice. “On the other side of the wall. Is someone there?”

  “Yes,” I said, standing at the bars, trying to see into the next cell. “I’m here. Where are you?”

  “I’m next to you. I don’t think there is anyone else down here.”

  “Where are we?”

  “The dungeon.”

  Fabulous. Really, an actual dungeon was just what I needed. Now, if they could arrange for a purple dragon or two, things would be looking up.

  “How long have you been down here?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Years maybe.”

  Years? I’ll admit I started to panic a little bit with that news.

  “Why are you here?” I asked. A burst of laughter came from the other side of the wall.

  “I can no longer recall. Made someone angry. Killed the wrong person. It’s not so bad down here once you get used to it.”

  “And how long did that take?”

  “A few years. At the most.”

  “Lovely.” It was dark but I got the feeling not even Martha Stewart could do all that much with the place.

  “So how about you?” my new cell block friend asked from the other side of the wall. “What did you do?”

  I wasn’t big on confessions. Besides, the list of things I’d done was so very long it might take the rest of my life to get it all out and I sincerely hoped I wouldn’t be here quite that long.

  “I’m innocent,” I said. “A case of mistaken identity.”

  The man laughed and laughed as if this were the first joke he’d heard in a decade, which might actually have been the case. Being in this dark damp cave was punishment enough. Being down here alone was just plain cruel.

  But his question was a good one that I could not answer even to myself. I had no dealings in Belgrade. I had no assets. I had no interests. The whole thing started to feel like a setup to me, from the badly forged passport to the waiting guards at the airport. It was as if someone arranged for events to unfold in this fashion and was now standing back and watching what happened.

  In my limited life experience thus far there was only one person with that kind of power. That we were supposed to be playing for the same team did not seem to matter.

  The next day, two wiry men in flannel shirts hauled me into a room lit with a single bare bulb. There was a metal chair, rope, a generator of some sort, buckets of water, and a variety of tools not available at the local Home Depot. Knowing I would die before I gave up any information, I took a deep breath and tried to clear my mind for the inevitable questions and pain that would soon rain down upon me.

  And rain down it did. I tried to disassociate from the pain as I had been taught to do but the men in charge of dispensing it were chattering away incessantly about the World Cup, distracting me from my attempts to disappear to my happy place. And to make matters worse my happy place on this day turned out to be an image of me building sandcastles with a small blond child, clearly of my own design. My normal happy place was indeed a beach but with swaying palms and warm white sand and a giant fruity cocktail in my tanned and manicured hand. My normal happy place did not include a child of any sort.

  Through it all, the two men in charge did not ask me one single question. There was no shouting in my face, no degradation, no rage on their part. They were just a couple of guys doing a day’s work that happened to involve the torture of another human being. They were oddly detached, as if working from an agenda they didn’t quite understand nor care particularly about.

  After five hours of this business, I’ll admit I was feeling rather low and would have happily considered trading state secrets for a little relief. But then one of the guys glanced at his watch and nodded to his partner.

  “We’re done, looks like,” he said.

  “Went fast, didn’t it?” the other said.

  Speak for yourself. They dragged me under the armpits down the deserted hallway and chucked me back into my cell. I don’t know how long I lay there moaning before my dungeon friend called out to me.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “That depends on what you mean by ‘okay,’” I groaned. I was alive but beyond that, I wasn’t willing to say.

  “What do they want from you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I croaked. “They didn’t ask me any questions.”

  There was silence from the other side of the wall.

  “Nothing?”

  “No.”

  “Strange.”

  “Yes,” I said. “And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go ahead and die.”

  I must have fallen asleep right there on my cell floor because hours later when the approach of heavy footsteps woke me I was still facedown on the couch. The steps had a familiar cadence, an urgency that the guards who’d tortured me earlier had lacked. Sure I was hallucinating, I rolled over so I could look through the cell bars at whoever was coming. Everything hurt. My very skin seemed to scream out in agony.

  “Jesus, Sal. You look like shit.” Simon stood outside the cell, a curious expression on his face.

  “Well, it’s not like I’ve been spending company time at a spa or anything,” I said, trying to sit up. Simon gestured to several of the men, dressed head to toe in black and carrying automatic weapons, standing behind him.

  “Open the cell,” he said. A small charge was rigged to the lock and almost silently blew it open. A puff of white smoke floated into the dank prison air. Simon pulled open the door and squatted down in front of me. He poked at my face and at the open wounds across my shoulders.

  “You’ll live,” he announced. “But there might be some scarring. Help her up.” Each man grabbed me under an arm and hauled me up from the bed. I wanted to cry but I’d die before doing so in front of Simon.

  “Wait,” I groaned, freeing myself from the two agents. I wobbled over to the next cell but it was empty. “There was a man in here. What happened to him?”

  Simon looked at his watch. “Sally, it’s not as if we have a whole lot of time here. Can we move it along?” Before I could protest further, I was carried off down the hallway and pushed through a hole in the concrete wall. Outside, they stuffed me into the back of a waiting black Mercedes and away we raced, lights off, into the night.

  A week later, still limping and generally pathetic, I was back to work. Shuffling slowly toward the stained Mr. Coffee machine in what passed for our lounge, I heard two agents talking behind a partially closed office door.

  “So he let it go for five hours?” one of them said.

  “Yes,” the other answered, “but the Serbs are a tough bunch. It had to look legit.”

  “An experiment. First time I ever heard of it. And I’ve heard a lot of crazy shit.”

  “Simon had to know how long it would take Gray to order her removal.”

  The sudden intake
of air at these words hurt my cracked ribs. The conversation behind the door stopped. I didn’t move.

  “Anyway,” the one guy went on, “it took less than a day. That’s what I heard.”

  “But when was the last time Gray ordered a retrieval of anyone?”

  “Never. That’s when.”

  The two agents burst out laughing.

  “Our sorry asses would have been left for dead.”

  “No shit. But did you see her?”

  The laughter faded.

  “Yeah. She’s pretty messed up.”

  Dragging myself back toward my office, I pressed the palm of my hand hard into the dark bruise covering my rib cage. The pain flashed brightly before my eyes, pushing all thoughts of Simon and Gray and why I was really sent to Belgrade from my mind.

  At least for the moment.

  27

  Hunched over in a squat that’s making my inner thighs burn, I sweep shattered glass I missed earlier carefully into a dust pan. Theo sits at the kitchen table with a green crayon in hand, poised like an artist in front of a blank canvas. He looks thoughtful. I need to talk to him about what just happened but I’m at a loss as to how to explain it and make it real and yet not terrify him at the same time. I somehow doubt there’s a parenting book for this kind of problem.

  “There’s some more glass,” he says, pointing to a glimmering shard under the refrigerator. “How do I spell my other name?”

  I sit on the floor and marvel at how beautiful the light is, bouncing off the shard of glass, and also at Theo’s ability to so easily turn his attention to the next project, in this case writing his last name. He seems remarkably unfazed by the fact that a bunch of machine-gun-toting lunatics dressed in black smashed up our kitchen and took away Richard Yoder before he could even finish his coffee. Theo’s ability to compartmentalize reminds me of my own, which is indeed disturbing. I had, possibly naïvely, hoped for Will’s genes to overpower mine.

  I spell “Hamilton” and Theo writes it in green crayon. Part of the name is on the paper; the rest is on the table. I gave up on the table long ago. If he carved his name into the kitchen table with a pair of scissors, my main concern would be that he spelled it correctly. There are things in life you need to let go of. My lovely kitchen table is one of them.

  “That’s a great ‘T,’ Theo,” I say, now standing over him. “Nice work.”

  “Mom, did you know in Star Wars there’s a guy with two light sabers? He’s a bad guy.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I say. “That’s very interesting. Is pasta okay for dinner?”

  “Yeah. And plums. And strawberries and cheese sticks.”

  “I thought you hated cheese sticks.”

  Theo looks at me as if I have lost what little remains of my mind.

  “I love cheese sticks, Mom. Me and Henry love cheese sticks.”

  Now if I were a gambler, I’d bet my life savings one hundred to one that when I suggest including a cheese stick in Theo’s snack tomorrow the idea will be met with shock and outrage. After which I will happily retire to Maui on the proceeds of my bet.

  Cheese sticks aside, there’s no escaping the fact that I have made a giant mess of things. I have no idea where Simon will take Yoder and therefore no possibility of getting him back. I could call Simon and offer to trade what I know about the black book for Yoder’s life, but Simon made it a point to take back his one-button cell phone from me that morning in the coffee shop. I guess I could try the Bat Signal, but it might attract the wrong sort of attention.

  The situation fills me with despair. I pour about half a bottle of wine into a glass. It reaches right to the lip and I have to bend down and slurp it up as it sits on the counter. It makes a loud sucking sound, the kind I’m always telling Theo it’s impolite to make when he’s eating soup. I’m out of the game. I lose.

  I really hate to lose.

  “You know, there’s a LEGO set with that guy with the two light sabers,” Theo says. He draws a rocket ship on his paper that looks as if a purple penis has been set on fire. “I have to pee. When’s dinner? I’m starving.”

  Without waiting for an answer, he runs off to the bathroom. I remind him to wash his hands and flush the toilet. Inevitably, he’ll stop on the way to the bathroom to collect a bunch of LEGO guys to line up on the sink while he pees, after which he’ll get to playing with them and forget all about hand-washing and toilet-flushing. When he comes back to the kitchen, I’ll remind him and he’ll get mad that I keep telling him things he already knows. We’ve had this conversation about three hundred times. He does not yet accept that the difference between knowing and doing is wide and deep and often everything.

  As it is right now. If I were a good agent, I would be analyzing the situation and reformulating my plan accordingly. But I’m not a good agent; I’m a rogue agent and I have no idea how they go about things. My solution is to make pasta.

  I fill two bowls, sprinkle some Parmesan on top, and call it good. A plate of sliced plums sits in the middle of the table. Theo aims his fork like a spear and stabs a plum.

  “Gotcha,” he says, shoving it into his mouth.

  “So, Theo,” I say, “what happened this afternoon, those guys who broke the window, they were bad guys. They wanted to take something that wasn’t theirs. And we had to let them because it wasn’t safe for us to do anything else. Does that make sense?” Quite frankly, Mommy would love to have shown you how to kick puffy-muscle ass, but you can’t always do what you want to.

  Theo attempts to squeeze an enormous amount of spaghetti into his mouth. Bits of it hang out at the sides so he could be a blond walrus. He says something but while I speak many languages, I do not speak spaghetti.

  “Swallow your food,” I remind him. He rolls his eyes. I’m so annoying. It’s hard for him to handle.

  “You should have karate-chopped him,” Theo says.

  “Well, no. In that situation, fighting was the wrong choice,” I say. “Fighting is almost always the wrong choice.”

  “I would have done the karate chop.” He hops down from his chair to demonstrate, giving me a whack right in the arm.

  “Ow. That hurt. Sit. Eat,” I command. “No karate-chopping.”

  “Why? It’s cool. Conroy’s mother lets him karate-chop.” Okay. Conroy is now relegated to the no-fly zone, too. I’m concerned that if this keeps up, Theo is going to be left with only me as a playmate and the jury is still way out on what sort of influence I’m turning out to be. The best I can hope for is that when Will comes home tomorrow, Theo has completely forgotten the assault on our kitchen. Or that, while explaining it to his dad, he throws in a few references to Han Solo or Luke Skywalker and Will just naturally assumes it’s an extension of Theo’s ongoing internal Star Wars dialogue, which shows no signs of abating.

  “Hey, Mom?”

  “Hey, Theo?”

  “How do you spell ‘bad guy with two light sabers’?”

  I get up from the table, my overflowing wineglass now tragically empty. Cardboard secured with duct tape covers the two gaping holes in the door. The other two panes are cracked but functional. It is through those broken panes that I see a shadow, an arm snaking in under the edge of the cardboard, a hand grasping the doorknob and pushing the door open with an almost silent nudge.

  “Mom, how do you spell ‘bad guy with two light sabers’?” Theo asks again, growing impatient.

  “B-L-A-C-K-F-O-R-D,” I say, filling my wineglass right back up to the brim. But perhaps I’m not thinking broadly enough. Perhaps the solution in this situation is to skip the glass altogether and drop a straw right into the bottle.

  28

  As Ian Blackford steps into the room, I automatically scan for suitable weapons. Anything with a point will do. I pull the big carving knife from the wood block and lay it flat on the counter. My heart plays staccato in my chest. When did my kitchen become Grand Central Terminal for uninvited guests? It’s starting to wear me down.

  Amazingly, Blackford loo
ks older than the last time I saw him. I swear I see a single gray hair mixed in with his famously dark coif. But I know better than to point out its presence to him.

  “Sally,” he says with a slow syrupy smile. “I’m so pleased to be back here.”

  Theo licks the last bits of Parmesan from the bottom of his bowl, apparently unconcerned about the terrorist in his kitchen. My fingers close around the knife handle.

  “Hi,” Theo says to Blackford. I watch for a reaction, some evidence of recognition, but there’s none. Whatever Theo remembers of this man is buried in his subconscious and seems only to reveal itself in his artwork.

  “Hi,” Blackford says, giving Theo a little wave. Children freak him out. It’s something I might enjoy watching if I didn’t feel on the verge of a heart attack any second now.

  “Can I be excused?” Theo asks politely.

  “Yes,” I say, my fingers sweaty on the knife handle.

  “Should I clear my plate?” he asks.

  “No, I’d say you can leave it for now.” I talk to Theo but my eyes are on Blackford. Any sudden moves and I will pin him to the wall with the steak knife. “Go and play for a few minutes and then I’ll read you some stories.”

  Theo is gone before I finish my sentence. Blackford eyes the knife, a look of detachment on his face.

  “Put that away,” he says. “You should know better by now.”

  He’s right. There is no point. Slowly, I slide the knife back into the block and pick up my wineglass. The red liquid sloshes over the rim, running down my hand as if I accidentally severed an artery. I gulp down half the glass in one swig. Blackford watches me, amused. I hate that look.

  “I’m not offering any to you,” I say. “You weren’t invited so I don’t need to be polite.”

  “I don’t drink,” he says.

  “You lie.”

  “About many things. Yes.”

  “Theo is drawing little evil stick figure Blackfords at preschool. The teacher thinks he’s growing up in a house full of psychotics.” I don’t know why I feel compelled to tell him this.