The Company We Keep (32 page)

“Yes, I do believe you that it’s on the charts, but …”

He stops to listen.

“No, they never built it,” Bob says. “I’m telling you, it’s not there. Tell your pilot that what he’s looking at is a landing strip plotted out in 1947. They just never made new maps.”

“Who was that?” I ask when he hangs up.

“Some guy named Patrick calling from his jet.”

Patrick tracked down Bob through a journalist at
Newsweek
. There’s something he wants to discuss with Bob that he can’t put in writing or talk about over the phone.

All right, I knew Bob hadn’t fallen off the edge of the earth in moving to Silverton, but a cold call from a stranger in a private jet trying to land on an imaginary airstrip is more than odd. And while we stopped being spies a long time ago, old habits die hard. I tell Bob he has to meet this guy in a public place, somewhere I can watch. I suggest Handlebars, a bar owned by a friend. It’s a charmingly rustic place decorated with game trophies and other backcounty bricabrac, and it’s crowded all day. A couple of times I volunteered there, and it will be a good place for me to go unnoticed, as if I were working there. If there’s trouble, I’ll call Mike McQueen, the undersheriff.

McQueen is not someone you want to mess with. A few months ago a guy in a ski mask fled a traffic stop in Ouray, a mining town across Red Mountain Pass. McQueen chased the man from the top of the pass, down the most dangerous highway in America, across two more 11,000-foot passes. The state patrol was waiting on the south side of the pass, and, knowing he was trapped, the driver headed off on a dirt road. McQueen followed him to the road’s end. He’d alerted the police tactical squad in Durango, but now decided he could take care of this himself. As McQueen approached the car, he spotted the man putting on a flak jacket and taking a rifle out from behind the seat. When the man aimed his rifle at him, Mike drew his .45 and shot him in the forehead, killing him instantly. He was a hundred feet away. The Colorado
Bureau of Investigation said they’d never seen precision shooting like that.

I’m behind the bar when Bob comes through the door first, followed by a bear of a man dressed in a turtleneck and Levi’s. Just behind him is a much smaller man with olive skin, a thick beard, and an old-fashioned hunter’s cap with the flaps down but untied. He’s definitely Middle Eastern.

Handlebars isn’t too busy, and between making drinks and talking to Ken, the owner, I keep an eye on Bob’s table. Whatever they’re talking about has Bob engrossed. As I probably should have expected, the duo’s odd arrival aside, nothing out of the ordinary happens.

When I get home, Bob shows me Patrick’s business card. He’s Patrick Byrne, CEO of
Overstock.com
. It’s the company that has commercials with the catchy line, “It’s all about the O.” The man in the hunting cap is the son of a famous Lebanese politician.

“What did they want?” I ask.

“They told me the financial markets are going to collapse. Something to do with naked short trading, and corrupt Wall Street bankers ripping off widows and orphans. I understood about a tenth of it.”

“You don’t know anything about finance.”

“I told them that. But they had this idea that somehow an ex-CIA operative could get to the bottom of it. Too many Hollywood movies, I guess. They wanted me to go home, pack, drive to Durango with them, and jump on their jet.”

“You shoulda gone.”

Silverton, Colorado:
BOB

T
he last week in October there’s already a good dusting of snow on the peaks around Silverton. The aspens are bare, and the shop owners are nailing up plywood over their windows against snowdrifts soon to come. The only cars on Greene Street belong to the last hunters of the season.

Our two Labs watch as I clean out the fireplace. I know what they want: a hike in the mountains. They don’t care what the season is. Cabin fever is cabin fever. Dayna is restlessly surfing the Internet.

“What do you want to do today?” I ask.

Instead of answering, she turns her laptop so I can see the screen. A woman in Grand Junction has a litter of Lab puppies up for adoption.

The next day on the way to Grand Junction, we tell each other we’re just going to take a look. Do we really need three big dogs? Can we fit three Labs in our station wagon? Another dog is a big decision, and we should take time to think about it. But I’ve seen the list Dayna has folded in her pocket: a puppy bed, a dish, tiny rawhide bones—the whole starter kit.

Dayna is first out of the pickup and walks over to a lady standing behind a wire mesh fence. I stand back and watch, pretty certain how this is going to end. As soon as Dayna lets herself into
the enclosure, a little yellow puppy breaks from the litter and runs up to her. She picks it up in both arms and turns to me with a very happy smile. I know we’re not leaving without it. Dogs adopt Dayna, not the other way around.

As soon as we get back home, Dayna makes a bed for the puppy next to ours, on her side. That night she gets up at least five times, clutching the tiny Lab tightly as she descends the steep stairs from our loft. She stands out in the cold to let it pee. In the morning, she makes a bed out of old blankets for the puppy so it can sit at her feet while she’s on the computer.

In December we drive to Corona del Mar to spend Christmas with Dayna’s parents, taking our three dogs with us.

On Christmas Eve, Dayna’s mother asks her husband to make a fire. He’s now eighty-two. He gets up without saying a word and disappears into the garage that connects with the house. Five minutes later he’s back, unsteadily crossing the living room with a lighted blowtorch in one hand.

At the end of dinner, right after dessert, Dayna’s father stands up and announces matter-of-factly that he’s going to go see “his other daughter.” I see Dayna’s head whip around like a barn owl. He finds his jacket and walks out the door.

Dayna and I look at each other.
Other daughter?
There’s only Dayna and her brother. But I know who he’s talking about: his accountant, a woman Dayna’s age. The summer before, Dayna’s father and the accountant raced to Hawaii on a sailboat they’d bought together. But calling her his daughter? The woman has a father of her own. All along, Dayna’s mother keeps loading the dishwasher, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Dayna has to hold back her tears.

Two days after we’re back in Silverton, we agree to meet a couple in Ouray for dinner. The sky is dry when we leave the house, but as we wind our way up Red Mountain pass it starts to snow. And by the time we get to the top of the pass, it’s a whiteout. I can’t see the side of the road, and stop and turn off the engine. No other cars are moving, either, so it’s okay. We watch the snow in silence for a while.

“You know running a dog kennel isn’t going to do it for you,” I tell her. “Or for us.” Neither of us confuses dogs with people.

We go back to looking straight ahead at the snow. We’re not going to make it to Ouray for dinner. I try my cell phone to call the couple we’re supposed to have dinner with. But there’s no signal.

I finally ask the question that’s been on my mind for a long time. “Hey, what do you think about adopting?”

“Don’t joke about this.”

“I’m not.”

“This is serious stuff.”

Dayna’s surprised, but in a way we’ve been edging toward this moment ever since we first moved in together. While we talked around the subject of having a child for a long time, we never could come to a decision, mainly because our lives kept slipping moorage: Beirut, Geneva, New York, Washington, now Colorado. It’s been on my mind because my family has been drifting away.

My three children now all live abroad. My two daughters are in school, one in Paris and the other in Cairo. Having grown up with their mother, they spend their vacations with her. Robert is living in the French house, and I rarely see him. Phone calls and e-mails are infrequent. It’s all even harder to take because it’s only now that I understand how thin is the thread our relationship hangs from. It’s impossible to know what will happen to us, being apart for so long.

I’ve been estranged from my mother since 1997, when I stupidly wandered into the Democratic Party’s campaign-finance scandal.
It happened when one of my informants told me he was giving money to the Democratic Party in return for White House favors. I reported everything to my bosses, sending memo after memo. No one said anything, but when the scandal broke in the press, I somehow was dragged into it. When I had to hire a lawyer to represent me for a grand jury hearing, I told my mother. I’d thought she’d be merely curious, but she assumed the worst. “You wouldn’t be so nervous if you hadn’t done something wrong,” she wrote. When I asked to come to Los Angeles to explain that I’d only done my duty, she said no. “I don’t feel like cleaning my house.” There were a few more calls, but they all ended acrimoniously.

Silverton has been a wonderful way station and refuge, the Alp I dreamed about living on with Dayna. But we both realize that we can’t stay here forever, on our own like this, only thinking about taking care of ourselves. If nothing else, it’s too remote. So last spring we found a two-bedroom Craftsman house in Berkeley, California, on a blocked-off street, a place where you don’t worry about kids and cars. A school sits catty-corner, a grocery store four blocks away. BART is another block away, and from there it’s a twenty-minute hop into San Francisco—suburbia and city lights in the same package. Dayna’s the one who picked out the neighborhood, and I have this inkling it’s with a child in mind. But, biologically, the clock has already raced past where it needs to be.

The snow is thinning out now, and I start the pickup.

“Are you sure you really want another child?” Dayna asks.

“I’m sure.”