Last Days of the Condor (25 page)

“Me,” she continued, “I might not have been wicked smart, but I was savvy functional when I was with David. Afterwards … Depression. Self-pity. Feeling stupid. If you cop to that, you're guilty of it. Inertia and kind bosses kept me in paychecks.

“Just as I was coming out of my cage of mirrors, Mom got everything that steals your last years. All she had was social security and what I could send back to Pennsylvania. I would go up and see her whimpering in a county nursing home that was all we could afford. Red Jell-O and the sound of scampering rats.

“The echo of dirt hitting her coffin was still in the air when I got lucky cancer.”

“There's no such thing as—”

“Yeah there is. It's the kind you survive without too much damage and only a small mountain of medical bills, thanks to health insurance from the job you gotta keep to keep the insurance. Nothing special, only about ten million of us like that.

“So,” she said straight into his stare, “here I am. With all my reasons
why
. No magic. No second chances. Men look past me for younger women. Women who didn't lose their chance to have babies. But I have a job I don't hate, a life I'm doing. All on my own. And until last night, all I had to fear was the real world.”

“Then I showed up.”

“Knock-knock,” she said.

Sheets rustled. He felt her legs shift somewhere in the bed.

“Let's say you win,” said Merle. “Then what?”

“Then I'm done being a target getting shot at by whoever, however, why-ever. Then maybe my life gets a new freedom. Depending on what I remember.”

“And what you forget.”

She sat up in the bed. The sheets fell to her lap. Merle turned so he saw the tumble of her gray-and-blond hair on the back of her blue sweatshirt. When she faced him again, she was unscrewing an aluminum water bottle. Held the lid in one hand while she drank, lowered the hard bottle from her lips, her now wet lips, handed a drink to him.

He drank without thought: fortified lemonade.

Passed the hard bottle back to her. Watched her drink again.

“Now we taste the same,” said Merle as she screwed the top back on.

She put the shiny metal bottle back on the bedstand, turned so she sat facing him. Her crossed yoga pants legs were mostly out of the bedcovers.

“If you lose, I'm fucked, right?” she said. “You made our interests coincide.

“But if you win and get out of this,” she said, “then what about me?”

“Then I'll do everything I can for you.”

“‘Everything' is a whole lot of ransom for a first kidnapping.”

He felt himself smile with her. Felt his heart pounding his ribs. Felt …

Merle said: “Was I
really
the only place you could go?”

“Yes.”

“Truth?”

“Yes, but … You were the only place I wanted to go.”

“I've never been somebody's only.”

Breathe. Just breathe.

The dark night outside her bedroom window faded toward morning gray.

Last time I saw that, I was in the garden of the dead.

Like a beautiful Buddha, Merle sat cross-legged and tangled up in the sheets on the bed in front of him. The ends of the drawstring securing her yoga pants dangled to her lap below the edge of her blue sweatshirt that covered trembling roundness he made his eyes leave, look up, see her tousled thick morning gray-and-sunshine hair. Her lemonade lips parted for soft, shallow breaths. He saw her face full on toward his as he sat across the bed from her, only an arm's length away, only that far from his touch. He felt all of him weighed by her cobalt blue eyes.

Her arms crossed and pulled off the blue sweatshirt, let it butterfly away.

She shook her head to settle her long hair. “You want to see the rest of my real.”

A truth, a question, a dare, a plea, an offer,
everything
.

Her breasts were tears full with time and gravity
oh yes
swollen top-hatted pink.

She whispered: “Good thing we've got all the right drugs.”

Like a laugh
as she unfolded toward him, yoga graceful, sitting again but now right in front of him, between his accommodating open legs, her arm holding her weight through her palm splayed on the bed a breath away from his aching groin as she took his right hand in her heart-side fingers, floated it to her warm breast to fill his grasp.

The lemonade fire of that first real kiss.

 

20

Maybe together we can get somewhere.

—Tracy Chapman, “Fast Car”

Knocking.

On the bedroom door.

Faye turned off the faucets on the sink in the bathroom across from the bedroom. She'd kept that bathroom door open. Refused to be trapped blind in there. Morning light filled this commandeered apartment. Condor's .45 lay on the bathroom sink. Her Glock rode in its holster on her hip. She wore the ballistic vest and pants from yesterday.

Yesterday, that was only yesterday.

She dried her palms on her pant legs.

Tucked Condor's pistol into the belt over her spine.

Stepped out of the bathroom without looking in its mirror so she could better ignore the best chance for Condor and her to escape, survive, and perhaps even triumph.

Knocking
.

“Just a minute.”

Faye stepped to the kitchen counter where a water glass stood tethered to the bedroom door. Lifted the glass free of its tether, a strand of dental floss that then fell like a fishing line to the kitchen floor and along the bedroom's white door.

“Okay.” Faye stood back to avoid a charge-out. Her gun hand hung empty.

The bedroom door eased open and out came Merle wearing a clean blue blouse and fresh jeans. Her curly blond-gray hair looked damp, her arms cradled …

“Those are Condor's clothes,” said Faye.

“Yes.”

Merle pulled the bedroom door shut before Faye could see much in that room. Her eyes dodged Faye's. The older woman walked with nervous courage to the stainless-steel washer-dryer unit built into her kitchen island. She kept her back to Faye as she loaded the washer-dryer—a tub Faye had already checked for stashed weapons.

“Who told you to knock?” said Faye.

“We thought it would be smart. A good idea.”

We,
noted Faye.

“And now you're washing his clothes.”

“They needed it. I can do yours next. I'm making coffee. Want some?”

“What's he doing in there?” Faye nodded to the closed bedroom door while her hostage poured coffee beans into a grinder, found a brown paper filter for a drip glass pot.

The grinder whined for thirty seconds. Anyone would have known better than to try to speak above that noise. Faye watched Merle's face brew answers for thirty seconds.

Merle shook the ground coffee into the filter-lined, cone-shaped dripper on top of the empty glass coffeepot and thus logically kept her eyes on what she was doing as she answered Faye: “You told me to see if I had clothes for him.”

Merle watched herself fill a white teakettle with water from the steel sink faucet.

“What else did you see?” asked the woman with the gun.

Merle swung the teakettle from the shut-off sink to the stove, set the white kettle on a black burner, turned its stove knob to birth a
whump
of blue flame.

Merle met the younger woman's eyes. “What do you want to ask?”

“I heard him cry out in there. Twice.”

“And yet you didn't come running to save your partner.” The older woman's shrug raised her lips in a smile. “Twice, huh. Maybe he's having a good day.”

“
Twice
is two truths that you better remember,” said Faye. “His day will be a hell of a long way from good. And your day is going to be no better than his.”

“Or yours.”

“We're in this together,” said Faye.

“Can we sit while the water boils? You look almost as bad as I feel.”

Faye let the older woman choose her chair in the living room. Sat on the couch where she could watch the nervous archivist, the apartment entrance, and that white,
still closed
bedroom door.

The woman old enough to be Faye's mother said: “Did you get any sleep?”

“Enough,” lied Faye.

Damp blond-and-gray hair nodded toward the closed bedroom door. “He got six hours. He could use six days.”

“Couldn't we all.”

Faye said: “When I was a kid, they told me it took six days to make this world.”

“Do you have that kind of faith?”

“I want that kind of hope.”

“Hope and perseverance and doing exactly what you're supposed to do when you're supposed to do it is our—
your
—best chance to make it in this world.”

“And you're in charge of
supposed to
.”

Faye nodded.

“I wouldn't want your job.”

Let's hope not,
thought Faye.

“I knew a woman cop—police officer. We were friends for a few years. She was mostly plainclothes on the Capitol Hill police force—Congress's force, security guards mostly, one of the
what,
twenty-some kinds of badges like yours out there in this city. We used to go out for dinner sometimes. Drinks. Check in with each other.”

“Who is she?”

“For nine years she's been Mrs. Her Boss Finally Retired And Divorced and they moved to Ohio where he's from.”

“Does she still check on you?”

“Nobody checks on me.” A sad smile signaled some greater truth in the older woman's words. “Look, I'm scared and nervous and trying to get to know you and this thing … It's all up to you.”

“Yeah, but it's all about him.”

“What about him?” said the woman who'd emerged from that bedroom.

“You can probably tell me as much about the man as I can tell you,” said Faye. Kept her tone neutral when she added: “More.”

The teakettle whistled.

“What I can tell you won't matter to what you gotta do,” said Merle, her yoga grace overriding her years and fears and unfolding her from her chair to walk into the kitchen, turn the fire out under the white teakettle.

Bullshit,
thought Faye:
You've built a bond with him and you're banking on it.

Her mind's eye blinked.
I hope some of fucking him was for real.

She knew Condor hoped so, too, even knowing what they all knew.

Merle poured steaming water over the coffee beans in the cone atop the glass pot.

Water trickling over ground coffee seemed to cue the older woman. She whirled, stared at Faye standing there wearing a ballistic vest and sidearm, said: “Does your mother know what you do?”

“Does yours,” said Faye.

“Never did.” Merle sighed. “And now I'm never going to get that chance.”

She blinked. Asked Faye: “How crazy is he?”

“Too much,” answered Faye.

“Or not enough.” The aroma of brewing coffee filled the apartment. “He thinks this is all happening because he was starting to lose the crazy that makes him forget.”

“Maybe, but that's the kind of intel development that only he would know.”

“Or maybe somebody inferred the possibility,” said Merle. “And sometimes, the possibility of what might happen is enough to motivate somebody to act, strike first.”

“I thought you were a mild-mannered librarian,” said Faye as she watched the woman in the kitchen take one, take two, take three cups from the cabinet.

“I watch a lot of movies,” said Merle. “And I worked for a movie called Congress.”

“They need a better script.”

The women shared a smile.

“Speaking of work,” said Faye. “What about your job?”

Merle looked at the practical watch on her wrist. “I can call in sick or—
No
.”

“No?”

“Better,” said the older woman who'd survived decades in Washington, D.C. “I can call my boss and say I want to save my sick days but take some time off now, and offer to let him count it as me being in that whole ‘sequester' budget-cutting mess the boys and girls in Congress forced on us. Him furloughing me for a few days will give him an out when the orders come down from our budget director, and they're gonna come, we're all just waiting to see if the cuts are going to make us personally bleed. I get credit for taking one for the team and nobody will come asking or looking for me.”

She shrugged. “As if they would anyway.”

Merle lifted the cone filled with dripped-through ground beans off the glass pot now filled with brown liquid she poured into two cups before setting down that pot of scalding brew she could have thrown at Faye's eyes, asked: “Milk? Sugar?”

“Black,” answered Faye.

“Straight,” said Merle as she passed the cup to her captor. She opened the refrigerator, topped off her own cup from a carton of milk she left on the counter.

Merle took a sip of her coffee, held the innocent cup in both her hands, said: “What else can I do to help?”

“So now you're on our team?”

“Looks like you two brought back the draft.”

“And you trust us? Believe us?”

“You mean how do I know you are who you say you are?” Merle shrugged. “How do you know anybody is who they say they are?”

She shook her head. “We lie to ourselves about who we see, we lie to ourselves about who we are. Then we buy our own lies and try to spend them as our lives.”

Merle gave Faye a smile both of them knew came from irony not amusement, said: “Guns are the ultimate reality check. You've got them, not me. But even without them, the odds of you two both being this particular crazy add up to unlikely, so who you are is probably who you say you are. Mostly.”