The Mulberry Bush (11 page)

“Is that what happened?”

Again, no answer. He drank the rest of his coffee.

I said, “The daughter?”

“Nothing happened to her except orphanhood. Her grandparents raised her. If it's OK by you, I want to ask
you
a question. What exactly makes you need to know all this?”

I told him. Of course Tom Terhune had already told him what I had in mind or Amzi wouldn't have wasted this fifteen minutes on me. Even if Amzi skipped lunch there were only thirty-two such chunks of time in an eight-hour working day and he had many applicants for them. My idea was a simple one, so making my pitch didn't take long.

I wasn't quite finished when he looked at the clocks again and said, “Pretty good idea. Slim fucking chance of it working out. But go ahead. Go slow, step carefully. This girl is just as smart as her mother, which means she's just as crazy, too, so watch your ass. If you get thrown out of an airplane we don't know you.”

Something resembling a flicker of benevolence crossed Amzi's face. While it lasted I almost thought he might wish me well. He saw the point: Alejandro Aguilar's daughter was the key to his old idea that the freedom fighters he had saved for future use, her secret family, might come in handy after all.

What he didn't know was, there was something about Luz Aguilar that came to me off the glossy prints like a pheromone.

For a couple of months after our first meeting on that summer morning in Los Bosques de Palermo, my relationship with Luz was a model of decorum. We met monthly under strict rules of tradecraft. She played the game and behaved with a solemnity that suggested she was handing over nuclear secrets. This wasn't entirely a charade. No matter how much times had changed, military intelligence and the secret police had not forgotten whose blood ran in her veins, and I had to assume they kept an eye on her.

So did I, and through my contact reports, so did Tom Terhune and Amzi. I was no more certain of what he was up to—why he was letting me do what I was doing—than I knew about intelligent life in another galaxy, but it was best to step carefully.

Luz never stepped out of character—cool, careful, dressed like a
Vogue
model, yet sexually aloof in a don't-even-think-about-it way. But I did think about it. I had no sex life, and had had none for some time. In the Near East it would have been suicidal to mess around with the women I handled, almost all of whom were devout Muslims who didn't dally with
unclean unbelievers, and anyway they were usually dressed in hijab so it was impossible even to imagine the body that lurked inside the chador or the burka. For five years I had never been in any one place long enough to get to know a Western woman well enough even to speak the word
bed.
Prostitutes were too perfunctory to be worth the risk and expense.

The truth was, I hadn't gotten laid on a regular basis since college. Therefore I was as horny as a fifteen-year-old. Luz rendered this condition infinitely worse. I hadn't expected this when I made my plans for her. But I was susceptible and I knew I wasn't going to get over it. She was a woman after all, so occasionally she tossed me the bone of a sidelong glance, even a smile, or when making a point, touched the back of my hand with a fingertip. But usually she was all-business. She submitted to the puppetry of tradecraft as if it were a testimonial to my importance.

Our stilted behavior in public was an advertisement of espionage to anyone who knew what tradecraft looked like. I mean to say, why would a man and a woman in the prime of life keep on meeting at odd hours in out-of-the-way places and never smile at each other or touch? By every rule of espionage, Luz could never be trusted. She was the child of a man and woman whose ghosts, unhinged by politics as they had been in life, cried out for revenge.

We met on weekdays in the early morning when the streets were deserted, or nearly so. After a couple of months, she suggested meeting, instead, on a Sunday afternoon. Why didn't I come to her place for lunch? This would give us privacy, shield us from inquisitive eyes.

“On the street, when men look at me, they see you, too,” she said. “Women look at you and do the same. It makes me nervous.”

Her building, she said, usually was quiet on weekends—people slept late or went to the country, to the parks, to Grandmother's house. Amzi would have said I was out of my fucking mind to agree to ignore procedure like an amateur and walk into a place I had to assume was bugged, but I had testosterone running out of my ears, so I ignored the rules and agreed.

When I rang the doorbell Luz greeted me with a polite smile and a handshake. I thought the pressure lingered ever so briefly. If so, this was the most intimate physical contact we had ever had, but she gave me no reason to hope for more. She was as modestly dressed as a nun—black trousers, crisp white shirt buttoned to the throat, no jewelry except her little gold cross, no perfume, hair pulled back. The apartment was flooded with sunlight: good furniture, abstract paintings, flowers, a large photograph of her parents with a small child that was unmistakably Luz. Even at five or six she had looked like a preliminary sketch of the woman she became. She gave me a glass of orange juice mixed with Argentinean sparkling wine. We chatted as we drank—neutral subjects only. She could not have been more ladylike or sent me a plainer message that I should get no ungentlemanly ideas.

Incongruously, romantic music played on the stereo—Bruch's “Second Violin Concerto.” Did I like Bruch? She thought the music, clearly composed in a sexual daze, was ravishing.

We ate a cold lunch, drank rosé wine from small glasses. We said nothing worth remembering. After dessert she shooed me into the living room. I heard her clearing away the dishes and putting them in the sink. I smelled coffee, and she brought two large cups of it. Standing over me, she took a sip. This slight movement caused her slim body to move inside her clothes: the lift of a hip, the curve of a breast.

In English, speaking it to me for the first time, she said, “I've been reading your mind.”

“In Spanish or English?”

“No words. Just pictures.”

“And what do you see?”

“Mostly you're fucking me.”

She was watching me. Would my cup rattle in its saucer? Was I going to deny the fantasy or admit my furtive guilt? Her face, still as a picture, told me nothing about which she might prefer.

Smiling pleasantly, as if we were just passing the time of day, I said, “ESP lives.”

“So what I see is the reality?”

“Sadly, no. Daydreams.”

“You daydream a lot?”

I told her the truth. “Where you are concerned, I do hardly anything else.”

No smile, no frown, no lifting of the eyebrows, nothing in the unreadable brown eyes. Luz finished her coffee. She smiled her tiny smile. She turned her back and walked out of the room and disappeared into a hallway.

I finished the teaspoon of espresso left in my cup, cleaned out her cup with my tongue, and then followed her down the hall past arty photographs of Alejandro and his sad-faced, breathtaking Felicia. The door at the end of the hall was ajar. I pushed it open all the way and walked in. Luz stood in front of a full-length mirror.

She was naked. I saw all of her, every pore, front and back, at the same time and realized what a poor thing imagination is. I took off my clothes and dropped them where I stood. She had done the same.

She looked downward and said, “My, you
do
think forbidden thoughts.”

She took the part of my body in which all the rest of me, body and switched-off mind, was concentrated, and as if it were a tiller, turned me ninety degrees to the left so she could see herself in the mirror, and then fell to her knees.

In the next half hour Luz got the full benefit of my five years of sexual deprivation and filled the room with loud, seemingly involuntary shouts of pleasure in a throaty voice I had never heard before. She knew
The Joy of Sex
forward and backward and every time we changed positions I felt I was inside a different woman.

After a while we fell asleep, or at least I did. I smelled her in my sleep, felt her skin, felt the warm, sticky moisture of her drying on myself. I
had an erection. I wanted to wake up and wake Luz by sliding it into her. I swam upward toward this wondrous reality.

Before I could open my eyes, a shrill male voice screamed, “
Wake up, you son of a bitch!
”

Luz sat bolt upright—I felt this rather than saw it—and uttered a theatrical scream. In a theatrical voice she cried, “Pedro!”

I opened my eyes. Pedro, a very young, skinny, wild-eyed person showering spit as he shouted, needed a shave. In his trembling hand he held an open switchblade knife to my throat. He wore a heavy gold signet ring on his knife hand. He smelled of whiskey and sweat and of something I had often smelled before in the course of duty—madness. As I had been taught at Moonshine Manor, I grabbed his wrist with my left hand and slammed the heel of my right hand into his chin. His eyes rolled back in his head. He was catapulted from the bed as if weightless. The knife spun in the air—all this happening in slow motion. Pedro's nerveless body hit the floor with a soft thump. He was unconscious, or dead, I couldn't tell which.

Neither could Luz. She screamed again, this time as if she meant it.

In English, as if it were the language of murder, she cried, “You've killed him!”

She leaped out of bed and knelt beside Pedro. He looked like a child that had been hit by a car. She pinched his lower lip, hard. His eyes fluttered. She slapped his face. He groaned. She slapped him again, harder. His eyes opened. He saw me standing over him, switchblade in hand, and tried to scream. He croaked instead. Naked Luz helped him gently to his feet and murmuring words of encouragement, helped him stagger out the door. I heard the front door close and the snick of the lock.

Luz came back into the room, her hair wild, her eyes shining. She had curly pubic hair. One tendril hung from the point of the delta, like a little goatee. I had not noticed this charming detail before. It had an immediate physical effect. I was still standing, the glittering knife in my hand.

I said, “What was that supposed to be?”

“Pedro's a cousin, doing me a favor.”

“He's crazy?”

“A little, in a nice way. He's gay. He's done it before. It was a game. The knife was supposed to expose the real you. Would you jump out the window or see the joke, have an erection, and jump on me?”

She looked down, checking my condition, and for the first time ever, smiled a real, a delighted smile.

She said, “So what's it going to be, the window or me?”

After that Sunday afternoon, sex became our medium of communication. Neither of us could get enough of it and though in the beginning each suspected that the other was faking it—how could this state of constant arousal be real, how could it last?—doubts weakened with each hour in bed. Lust turned incrementally into love. Against my nature and my will, I began to understand that the absurd phrase “grand passion” was, like most clichés, shorthand for an ancient and undeniable truth.

I had no choice but to tell Headquarters what was going on—not the deep truth I have just told you, but the bare fact that my agent and I were having sex. This was risky. Case officers are not supposed to fall into bed with their assets.

Moonshine Manor wisdom:
Steer clear of temptation and she is ours, put a hand on her breast and you are hers.

Like every other intelligence service, Headquarters had people under contract to do whatever fucking might be necessary. The forbidden does occur, however, and when it does, the officer who has cuckolded Headquarters is expected to report the violation, introduce his replacement—ideally
a member of the same sex as the tumbled agent—with the least possible delay, and break the connection forever. Usually they do just that because they know that the guilty secret will make the needle skid at the next polygraph session. Marrying the agent is an option, but Headquarters (think Amzi) would assume that this meant that the agent had, so to speak, run a successful penetration op and screwed her way into the inner circle of trust in the service of whatever dark force was running him or her. I don't know what the procedure is in the case of gay lovers.

However, the rules were more flexible in my case. Soon after I realized that I would not be able to resist the flesh-and-blood Luz, I told Tom Terhune that I planned to do anything necessary, up to and including marriage, to gain full control of Luz. Tom had reservations, but he understood that Luz was the indispensable element in the operation. Through Luz and only through Luz would I reach the disciples of her father who could identify the Russians whom Headquarters hoped to beguile, bewilder, and betray. I had to put her into my pocket by any means necessary.

Tom passed my intention on to Amzi, who continued to behave like my ultimate case officer even though in theory I was Tom's agent. Amzi gave his approval with the proviso that I should fucking well keep Headquarters informed of every in- and outstroke.

“Direct quote,” said Tom.

Needless to say I had no intention of following this instruction. But this was an opportunity to build cover for my hidden purposes, so I did submit largely fictitious details of a measured and cold-blooded seduction. In the end, as we know, Luz grabbed the tiller, and the plan for disinterested seduction flew into the wastebasket.

From the start she and I abandoned tradecraft—or more accurately, substituted a higher form of tradecraft, namely reality. We were lovers. We behaved like lovers. We spent every free hour with each other, including
lunch hours, during which we remained on our feet only long enough to gulp something at a fast-food counter on our way back to our offices. We groped each other in the back row at the movies, we dined and nuzzled in restaurants, we kissed on the street. If there was a more demonstrative couple in Buenos Aires, we never ran into them.

The local station chief thought, as he was meant to do, that all this was good if unconventional cover. He also thought it was unseemly, but he had had little or no authority over me. I was Amzi's boy, attached to the station for office space and communications support. I reported directly to Headquarters. Besides that, there was my reputation as a lone wolf, my premature rank (I had been promoted twice and was now the same pay grade as a brigadier general even though I had no troops to command), along with my bizarre position as an outsider who was actually an insider who had powerful champions. For appearances' sake, I asked the COS to give me things to do for the benefit of the locals. This would help them to look upon Luz and me as a genuine case of a crazy love. That happened to be the truth, the advantages of which tend to escape those who live within a culture of deceit. I couldn't have stopped making unprotected love to Luz if she had told me she had AIDS. She seemed to feel the same. Given the choice by Satan between dominion over heaven and earth and her vagina, I would have chosen her vagina.

Luz wasn't interested in foreplay. She rarely had a sexual impulse or any other kind of impulse she did not act upon without hesitation. What she wanted to do, she did. She had no caution. In this as in practically every other way, she was unlike any other woman I had ever known. It wasn't as though she didn't look before she leaped, but no matter what, she always leaped, never hesitated.

This recklessness spoke a language I understood. In my own life, almost everything I had ever done on impulse had turned out well, whereas nearly everything I had done by calculation, such as treating my father
like a dog, had ended badly. This did not bode well in terms of finding happiness in the life of calculation I had chosen on impulse. Lost in that contradiction? So was I.

I understood on the day I saw Luz shimmering in that mirror that there was no point in telling her the truth on the installment plan. Out with it! was the only way to deliver the message. However, given Luz's almost pathological decisiveness, there were only two possible reactions: Yes or Get Lost. If the answer was Get Lost, her next decision would be to walk out of my life. I would never fuck her again. The thought was unbearable. It intensified my need for her, so we fucked even more, fucked ourselves to sleep. When at home we lived without clothes so that we wouldn't lose a minute before acting on desire. This was Luz's idea. We cooked, ate, read, watched movies naked so as not to waste a second in acting on the controlling, the irresistible impulse that drove our lives. Even if we were five steps away from the bed, we did not stagger toward it but coupled where we found ourselves.

One Sunday I woke from a nap and found Luz in the kitchen, grinding coffee. She was fully dressed, trousers and turtleneck, every centimeter of skin but her hands and face covered up. What did this mean?

She said, “Get dressed. I want to talk to you.”

She gave me a large bowl of café con leche, as if it were breakfast time instead of ten o'clock in the evening. We sat opposite each other, the kitchen table between us, and drank the whole bowlful of coffee. Too much sugar as usual.

Luz said, “I've been reading your mind again.”

“Has the movie changed?”

“In a way.”

No smile. Overnight she had once again become the cool and collected stranger I had met in Los Bosques de Palermo.
What was this?
Would the Luz I loved ever come back to me?

As it turned out, she was just having an intuitive moment.

She said, “You want to tell me something. I can feel it. Get it out of the way. Tell me.”

I was only too glad to do as she asked. I said, “I want you to help me burn down Headquarters.”

“That's a figure of speech?”

I nodded.

She said, “For what purpose would we do this? Say what you mean, no metaphors, no similes.”

She gestured for more.

I dumped the whole demented operational plan on her. She listened intently. Gradually her thoughts began to show on her face. Watching her as this happened was something like watching a reader who is becoming interested in a book and is entering a different world: tiny smiles, quick pursing of the lips, forefinger lifting the corner of a page so as to turn it without losing a moment.

Any other woman would have thought I was crazy and changed the subject. Luz was unfazed. I might as well have been talking about the weather. I couldn't tell whether this reaction signified disinterest or was a sign that she was just as crazy as I was.

I told her more—far more. I told her what I knew about Amzi and her parents. I didn't want to give her false hope that her parents might be alive. I was a fool to do this, but I wanted to leave nothing unsaid between us.

When I was done, Luz burst into tears. She was wracked by sobs. She was the very picture of heartbreak. It was beautiful, in some incomprehensible way, to be present at the moment that such a thing happened to another human being, let alone to someone you loved with every cell in your body. You might think that what I was doing was a greater cruelty than what Amzi had done. But if I left anything out, she would sooner or later have discovered that I had deceived her, and this would kill the absolute trust that was the essential element of our partnership in vengeance.

And then what would we have had left?

I knew better than to touch her or even speak. This lasted for a long time. When it was over, and this happened abruptly, she let the tears dry on her face before she spoke.

When she did, she said in a steady voice, “I think we had better get married if we're going to do this thing together.”

I thought so, too.