The Mulberry Bush (19 page)

Burkov's BMW was parked at the end of the driveway. I followed it to a bar on a dark street in a part of town that tourists were advised to avoid. To understate the reality, the bar, called La Sombra, lived up to its name: “Darkness.” You couldn't make out the faces of the other customers. The booths were lit by night-lights, one per booth. These tiny bulbs were the only illumination apart from the dull glow of the bar's small fluorescent tube.

On the sound system Karen Carpenter sang “Close to You.”

The waiter, old enough to remember Miss Karen, shone a penlight on the table and said, in Cockney English, “Eat or drink?”

“One Stoli, one black Jack, both doubles,” Burkov replied in English.

He waited until the waiter went away.

Then he said, “That woman sings from the vagina. She's the one who starved herself to death, am I right?”

“Something like that.”

“Very American—your women are so unhappy. What's the problem?”

“Disappointment.”

The waiter came back with the drinks—British pub quantities, twenty drops in the bottom of a red wineglass.

Burkov paid in American dollars and said, “Two more. Doubles.”

“Those are doubles, sir.”

“Quadruples, then.”

“So,” Burkov said to me in English, “why are you following me?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Frankly, I am wondering why you're being so obvious about it.”

Burkov was even quicker than Boris to come to the point. The new version of the Cheka must have revised the field manual along with its acronym.

I said, “Just impetuous, I guess.”

Burkov lifted his glass and threw the vodka down his throat.

I didn't touch my glass. I did not like the idea of drinking, even in the line of duty, with this particular Russian.

In seconds, the waiter emerged from the dark with the second round. I tried to pay but Burkov was quicker.

“You can pay next time we meet,” he said.

“There's going to be a next time?”

“Why not? But I'll have to drink a little more with you to learn to trust you.”

For the rest of the evening—five quadruple vodkas for Burkov, five undrunk splashes of what purported to be Tennessee whiskey for me—we talked about football. He was a fan of Spartak Moscow—the old great Spartak clubs, not the feeble imitations that now wore the Spartak jerseys. Since the demise of communism, the only world powers with worse teams than post–Cold War Russia were the United States and China. Americans didn't even know the proper name of the game.

Sally was not mentioned. The fact that she was being watched—no doubt he had spotted earlier tails as easily as he detected mine—told him
all he needed to know. I didn't think he had serious regrets about losing her. The stuff she was feeding him was junk, so he must have considered the possibility that she was a dangle that the station controlled. That thought had also crossed my mind, but alas for Sally, the fact was that she was in heat but thought she was in love. For Burkov's purposes, same difference.

For my own reasons I hoped that the State Department, the Bureau, and Headquarters would jointly decide to let her run a little longer and that Burkov's masters would let him continue to service her so I would have time to get to know him better. I was as indifferent to Sally's fate as he was.

As Burkov and I talked and talked and told each other nothing, Karen Carpenter sang her greatest hits over and over again. After an hour or so the Russian began to feel the vodka and fell silent.

Around midnight he got up and walked toward the men's room with the deliberate steps of a man who knows he's almost drunk. He never came back. He left no tip. Because I did not wish to be remembered by the waiter, I tucked a banknote under his empty glass and left.

It was at least as dark in the street as it had been inside El Pub. I walked to my parked car with my hand on the .45 and hair rising on the back of my neck. I was somewhat surprised when the car started instead of exploding. It wasn't Burkov or anyone from his organization I feared, but there were more terrorists per square mile in Colombia than in Iraq and Yemen combined, and no matter where they lived or which splinter cause they served, they all knew about one another and did one another favors as if they were a new unique nationality, and who knew which lunatic might owe a favor to the friends of the Yemenis I had blown away? When you can feel risk as though it is right behind you, expecting the worst is not a bad idea.

In a certain sense, in certain ways, I had enjoyed the encounter with Burkov. It had been relaxing to spend a quiet hour with a disciplined
professional who worked to Cold War rules and killed only people who could not possibly be useful to him or the Motherland.

What I needed to know now was whether Burkov's first priority was the Motherland or Burkov or—God forbid—an ideal like the one Boris wanted me to believe motivated him.

The next morning I drafted a cable to Headquarters reporting the contact. After reading it, Dwayne called me into his office.

“I was warned that you work in mysterious ways,” he said, “but this baffles me. What are you up to?”

He was a shade ruddier and his voice was a bit louder than usual. He glowered. I knew why. I was stepping on his toes in a serious way.

I said, “Just doing what I believe I was sent here to do.”

“Which is what? Blow your cover to the Russians?”

I said, “Dwayne, I'm puzzled. I was sent down here to try to work on Burkov. You were informed about this. You arranged the invitations to the Chilean embassy. The whole idea of that was to make it possible for him and me to meet. We met. Were we then supposed to gaze longingly at each other across a crowded room and let it go at that?”

“This station selects its own targets and works them on its own territory using standard procedures,” Dwayne said in a tightly controlled voice. “We didn't ask for outside help, we don't need outside help. This is Bogotá, where people end up dead every day for making smaller mistakes than you seem to make every time you go out to play.”

I said nothing in return because there was nothing I could say that would mollify him—just the opposite.

Visibly telling himself to calm down, Dwayne stared at me in silence for longer than his tantrum had lasted. Maybe he was counting to fifty. Gradually his face reassembled itself.

Then he surprised me. He waved an apologetic hand.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “I know you mean no disrespect and even though I think your methods are off-the-wall, I know they've
worked for you in the past and that you're just trying to do whatever you think you were sent here to do. But thanks to you this guy Burkov is now a spoiled target for the station and the cunt that started all this hoohah is a sex-crazed idiot who has probably done us a favor that's going to land her in federal prison until she reaches menopause. We could have handled her and this guy Burkov in our own lackluster way. Bottom line, it ain't your fault but I can't live with this situation unless it's clarified.”

Again, silence seemed the best answer to this. Dwayne added a footnote in longhand to my cable. He handed this across the desk for me to read. It consisted of two sentences. The first employed kind words about the work I had done while making pointed reference to the unconventional methods I had employed. The second sentence recommended that I be called home for consultations before proceeding further with the operation.

That was fine by me. Luz awaited me, or so I hoped.

I said, “If you don't mind my asking, what do you have in mind for Burkov while I'm gone?”

“Hands off until the situation is clarified,” Dwayne said. “The sooner you go, obviously, the sooner we can decide what to do and how to do it.”

Half an hour later a cable arrived from Tom Terhune ordering me to take the next available flight to Virginia. Melanie had made the reservation even before I read the cable. I gave her the .45 and the rest of my kit and asked her to hold on to it in case I ever came back.

“And if you don't?”

“I'll let you know where to pouch it.”

Not counting time in the terminal, the flight to Dulles took eleven hours. As I commanded myself to fall asleep, I tried to picture Luz. Again I couldn't do it. Maybe her own inability to reimagine her parents was contagious. Maybe this was a sign that when I got back I would find
her gone. Two weeks had passed since last I saw her. For the first week I had thought of little besides her. In the second week I gave her barely a thought, and pixel by pixel, I had somehow lost the images of her that had haunted my memory since the moment we met in Los Bosques de Palermo. I loved her and lusted for her as much as I ever had, but my brain refused to access her image. Had she found some psychic means of hanging up on me? Was I going to spend the rest of my life listening to a dial tone?

From the Bogotá airport I had sent Luz a text telling her my time of arrival.

I had little hope she would be at Dulles to meet me. But when I emerged from customs at one in the morning, there she was. She gave me a chaste wifely kiss, placed a palm on my unshaven cheek, pinched my nose, grinned, showed me the animal look in her eyes.

In the parking garage she got out her car keys and pressed a button. The headlights flashed on a silver Mercedes cabriolet and its hardtop folded into the trunk.

Luz said, “How do you like it?”

No words came. The sticker price of a car like this was around a hundred thousand dollars.

I said, “Borrowed or rented?”

“Bought,” Luz said. “A birthday present to myself. You can pay for it if your conscience still bothers you. It's slightly used. I got a good price.”

I shut up. She drove. We left I-66 at the wrong exit, the one for the Key Bridge.

Before I could point out the mistake she said, “I have another surprise for you.”

In Georgetown she turned into the driveway of a house I had never seen before and pressed another button. The garage door opened. My pathetic
old piece of junk was already parked inside. She drove in, punched a number into a keypad, and led me into the house: fresh flowers, soft music played, low lights. Paintings on the walls, a sculpture or two, good Persian rugs, a bottle of Champagne in an ice bucket.

I started to speak. Luz put a finger on my lips. She said, “This is ours, too. Don't say a word. Open the Champagne. I'll get the caviar.”

Amzi said, “I see you've pissed off another chief of station.”

He was in a jocund mood. It was 6:00
A.M.—
early in the day for that. He and Tom and I were practically alone in the building, except for Rosemary, who noiselessly entered the room in her flat-heeled shoes bearing a tray with three cups of coffee and a box of sticky buns.

Amzi said, “So what happened in Bogotá, exactly?”

I told him about my audience with Dwayne. As Amzi listened, a small smile formed on his lips. His eyes were opaque as usual.

When I came to the end Amzi said, “Nothing else you want to tell me?”

“Like what?”

Amzi's smile had vanished. He said, “Oh, I don't know. Let's try what you think our chances are with Don Ivan, the great Slavic lover.”

“I think he wants us to think the chances are pretty good.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that it's not impossible that he genuinely wants to defect and that he seduced poor Sally, who is a no-value target if ever there was one, as a way of attracting our attention.”

“That's your favorite possibility?”

“No, just one possibility What do you want to do about Burkov while you figure out what to do about him?”

Amzi said, “Let him marinate for a while. Then we'll get together with Dwayne, like we should have done in the first place, and put his nose back in joint.”

“And what do I do in the meantime?”

“Help Tom with the dishes. We're done.”

I spent the rest of the day in my office, reading about Colombia. The whole country was a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life. Our fingerprints were all over the place. The list of Headquarters operations was long, and nearly every one of them was a mission impossible. It seemed to me that Dwayne had enough to do just keeping an eye on this circus without worrying about small fry like Burkov and me. But large issues spring from small resentments. I took it for granted that Amzi would choose Dwayne if the choice was between him and me. How could he not? Dwayne was right—I was trespassing on private property.

That evening Luz threw a catered dinner party for ten. The guests were Luz's American friends—some old, some new. Nearly all the women had jobs—lawyers, activists, scholars—and lamented the fact that they didn't see enough of their kids, who turned for love, comfort, and advice to their illiterate Latina nannies. A couple of the males were househusbands. One of these was a poet, married to an oncologist whose one-thousand-word poem on global warming (rhymes in the middle of the lines) had just been published.

Neither the men nor the women took an interest in me: Luz was the one with the money and the sainted parents. They all loved her—loved the house, loved the food, loved the wine, loved the display of riches and good taste. Hated Republicans.

They stayed until midnight. Luz went upstairs as soon as she had kissed the last one good-bye. I followed the trail of her clothes, which began at
the top of the stairs and ended at the bathroom door, which stood open. Naked, she stood at the sink, vigorously brushing her teeth. In the mirror she gave me a smile through the toothpaste.

I said, “We've got to talk.”

She took the toothbrush out of her mouth, rinsed, spat, met my eyes in the glass, and said, “Serious talk or pillow talk?”

“Serious talk.”

“Then I won't hurry.”

She closed the door. I heard the shower running, the hair dryer humming. Half an hour later she emerged, modestly wearing a bathrobe and to all appearances cold sober.

She said, “Let me answer your first question before you ask it. Yes, we can afford this place.”

“How?”

“I got a good price.”

“How good?”

No answer. The house was worth millions. Divide its market value by two and it was still worth millions.

“How come the price was so good?”

“A man from Buenos Aires lost his wife, an American girl much younger than he was. It was sudden—an aortal aneurysm. He was crazy about her. He didn't want to be reminded of her, he didn't need the money, so he let me have the place for a song and went back to Argentina.”

“Why the special price?”

“He's rich. He was a friend of Alejandro's. He's a friend of Diego's.”

Of course he was. I said, “How much is the monthly payment?”

“Zero.”

“You paid cash?”

“Yes.”

“You have that kind of money?”

She said, “Not to worry. If we go broke we can sell this place for a lot more than I paid for it. I hate the apartment, I hate that phony neighborhood and its snooty nobodies. I hate this soulless, heartless city and its ridiculous copycat architecture and its one-note babble in fifth-grade English. I hate being alone in this nowhere when you go away. I am a
porteña.
I need something in my life that reminds me of Buenos Aires.”

“The seller was someone you knew in Buenos Aires?”

No answer. Enough questions.

Luz turned off the lights. The drapes were drawn. It was as dark in the bedroom as it had been in La Sombra. Within seconds I had a naked woman straddling my body. I couldn't see her face. I put my hands on her. I knew her name, I knew her body, I knew the way her skin felt, I knew her scent and the texture of her hair. I wasn't sure who she was or why she seemed to love me. For all I knew, her passion was a pantomime. I had never been sure of her and now I knew I never would be. Before I stopped thinking altogether I realized that her elusiveness was the reason for this sweet apology.

At four in the morning I was still wide-awake, but my mind was elsewhere. Breathing softly, laughing, murmuring in her dreams, Luz slept the sleep of the just. There was no point in remaining where and as I was. I got out of bed, dressed for a run, and went downstairs, about as sure of where I was in this strange house as a sleepwalker. A crack of light showed under the kitchen door. I opened it and spotted keys suspended from hooks beside the door to the garage. I took the set that included the keys to the apartment and my old car, figured out how to open the garage door, and backed out. I had no destination in mind. After the interminable plane ride, the interminable day at Headquarters, and the long, long evening with Luz's one-mind-fits-all dinner guests, plus an hour of desperate sex, I was barely capable of thought, let alone conscious intent.

I rolled down all the windows. This turned the car into a sauna. Minutes later I found myself parking on our gentrified street, or what used to be our street, in Adams Morgan. A snowdrift of mail blocked the door.

I found a garbage bag and stuffed junk mail into it. I threw a cheap square envelope with a handwritten address into the bag before realizing what it was. I retrieved it and opened it. Inside was a postcard of a lighthouse in Trieste. The date was written in the European style on the back of the postcard, day and year in Arabic numerals and the month in between in Roman numerals. I decoded this to mean that Boris wanted to meet in front of the Reichstag in Berlin in two days' time.

But wait. How did he know my street address? I had given him the address of a post office box in Bethesda. Was this a trap, was the whole operation a trap, was Boris in cahoots with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula? Then I realized that Boris had probably gotten my address from the Internet, plus directions to the apartment, just as any marketing chiseler or terrorist could do.

While driving up Wisconsin Avenue I called Tom Terhune and in the obligatory telephone double-talk, told him I was going away for a few days for that chess tournament I had told him about.

In a sleepy voice he said, “Good luck.” And disconnected.

When I got back to the house Luz was still asleep. I went into the bathroom and used her cell phone to book, at outrageous cost to the taxpayer, a flight to Berlin and a hotel and a car. I packed a carry-on bag and left a note for Luz on the refrigerator door. If she had meant what she said the night before about hating to be left alone, she would be infuriated by the callous way I chose to say good-bye. Or not say good-bye.

I had no key to this house. When I came back and rang the doorbell would I be admitted?

The flight to Germany didn't leave until five in the afternoon. I couldn't face a visit to Headquarters that might include a meeting with Amzi, but I didn't want to be alone. I wanted to unburden myself. It would have
been nice to have had the option of dumping my guilty secrets onto a retired spy who was now a bartender—somebody who didn't give a rat's ass about the psychic wounds inflicted on me by Mommy and Daddy and Luz Aguilar but knew enough about the difference between psychosis and tradecraft to understand, as my mentor Fred of Moonshine Manor had mentioned, how little difference there was between the two.

The solution to this problem was as obvious to me as it had been to Alejandro all those many years ago in Buenos Aires. I called Father Yuri on his cell phone and asked in Russian if he was up to a walk in the woods.

We met as we used to do on the half hour at TR's statue. Father Yuri had brought two large navel oranges, and as we walked we peeled and ate them. We spoke Russian—or rather, I did. He listened in silence. I told him everything in minute detail. The relief of laying down this burden overwhelmed me. The talking cure was working.

At length but in what had seemed mere seconds, we arrived back at TR's statue. I was feeling a lot better. By now, though it was still very early in the day, the sun was bright. Father Yuri glanced at the shadow the statue cast upon the ground. I realized that he had always done this when we got to this place. Owing to his vow of poverty, he owned no watch, so this must be the way he told time.

He took a deep breath. We could hear the traffic across the river. Smell it.

I said, “Any suggestions?”

“Maybe you should ask yourself,” Father Yuri said, “whether it might be possible that the things you doubt are exactly what they seem to be instead of what you fear they might be.”

Then he walked away, leaving me to ponder the riddle.