The Mulberry Bush (17 page)

Two weeks after our final game of chess, Boris left for Moscow. I was instructed to report to Headquarters forthwith. There was nothing left for me to do in Argentina except marry Luz. We had to hurry. One of Luz's Aguilar relations who was a judge expedited the marriage license. The ceremony was performed by him, as required by law, in the Civil Registry office. Diego gave away the bride and was also the best man because I didn't know another soul in Buenos Aires, American or Argentinean, well enough to ask him to do the honors.

Diego wept when he kissed the bride. The
abuelos
attended, proper but aloof. They took no part in the ceremony. In the eyes of the church, therefore to the Aguilars, this ceremony was no wedding because it was no sacrament. Only God could authorize a marriage that no man could put asunder. A religious wedding was impossible because I had never been baptized and declined to pretend to be a Christian even for a day. Thanks to her grandparents, Luz had been baptized and taken first communion, so she had genuine-false religious credentials even though she had no faith. Afterward we went back to the grandparents' house where
most of the many Aguilars awaited us. Few of them were smiling as they drank the toast to the happy couple.

The next night, Diego hosted a more boisterous party at a restaurant. Speeches were made, everyone danced, some of the honorary cousins played and sang old revolutionary songs. When in his remarks Diego mentioned Alejandro and Felicia, the honorary aunts and uncles—eyes closed, heads bent—did whatever pious Maoists do at such moments instead of making the sign of the cross. Under the table Luz took her hand off my crotch and squeezed my hand, as if this were the more intimate gesture.

Diego's party lasted till dawn. We slept all day, and because I was required by regulations to travel on U. S. airlines, took Delta's evening flight to Dulles. As one of his many wedding presents, Diego had bought us an upgrade to first class. He wept again when he embraced Luz for a moment so prolonged that it was almost incestuous.

He shook my hand and said, “Remember, no matter where you are, you will always be among friends who will protect you. In case of emergency, call me on my cell phone. If I am operating and do not answer, leave a message. Speak these English words: ‘
My wife is homesick.
' Give me GPS coordinates for your location. Say nothing more than that. Help will come to you.”

I said, “I can't begin to tell you how reassuring it is to know that.”

“Luz's life is very precious,” he said, ignoring the irony.

“Does she know about this rescue option?”

“She has always known. Remember, nobody else—nobody—has a right to know.”

As we walked away from Diego, Luz was crying, too. She stumbled, also something new. I took her elbow to steady her. She shook off my hand as if I were trying to come between her and Diego and dried her eyes and walked a little faster toward the security gate.

With stopovers, the flight took eighteen hours. At our destination the climate was reversed. It had been autumn in Buenos Aires, it was late
spring in Washington—green trees, flowers all over the place, equatorial heat when we walked out of the air-conditioned terminal at Reagan National Airport. When I unlocked the door of my apartment we found the unholy mess I had left behind many months before: dirty dishes in the dishwasher, soiled clothes in the laundry basket, moldy food in the refrigerator, half a glass of red wine that had turned to sludge. Sticky surfaces. Bad smell. Flies. Cockroaches. More heat.

I said, “Let's get out of here.”

Luz said, “No. Let's get to work.”

She turned the air conditioner to maximum, stripped to her underwear, and went to work on the kitchen. I cleaned up the other three rooms, a far easier task. She washed the kitchen floor on her hands and knees, her bewitching bottom moving in rhythm with the scrub brush. She sprayed insecticide and air freshener. In no time the flies were dead and the cockroaches had scurried into hiding and the house smelled like lemon zest. The appliances had been scrubbed inside and out and disinfected, the dishwasher and the clothes washer and dryer were running, the aged garbage had gone down the disposal followed by a large dose of Lysol. She stripped the bed, found clean sheets, and remade it, and then attacked the bathrooms I thought I had already cleaned.

She said, “If you ever make another mess like this one you'll need a new wife.”

We tried out the bed.

As evening fell we ordered pizza and drank some of the beer I had left in the refrigerator. In the immemorial way of brides on their wedding night, Luz went into the bathroom and locked the door. I got into bed aching with fatigue. I heard the shower running, then the sound of a hair dryer. When she emerged at last, I was asleep. I was awakened by the scent of cologne and her tongue in my ear. When I opened my eyes, there was Luz, naked of course, but covering her pubis with an open hand.

She said, “Surprise.”

She moved her hand. She had shaved. The little goatee that I loved was gone. This didn't exactly make a new woman of her, but the novelty made enough of a difference that I forgot for the next hour or two that there was any such thing as sleep.

The next morning, early, so as to catch Amzi before the daily routine swallowed him, I crossed the Potomac and reported for duty at Headquarters. Through the station I had already reported, leaving out my surreal chats with Diego, the full operational narrative.

Amzi wanted to talk about my marriage, not Boris.

He said, “So how did you get your bride into the United States?”

“She already had a tourist visa.”

“Why?”

“She was planning to go to the ten-year reunion of her college class.”

“Wellesley, right?”

I nodded.

“You do know you're supposed to clear marriage to a foreign national
before
you tie the knot, especially if you're the lucky girl's case officer and she also happens to be the daughter of a world-famous terrorist and still hangs out with his old buddies?”

“Yes.”

“So why didn't you follow procedure?”

“I had other things to think about.”

“Don't fuck around,” Amzi said. “You have blotted your copybook. The Director is disappointed in you. Security is not pleased. They want you, and especially your bride, to be polygraphed cross-eyed.”

I said, “Be our guest. Is it all right for me to mention that my wife is a trusted asset of this organization …”

“
Trusted
?” said Amzi.

“… who has been polygraphed before and has always passed with flying colors? Or that Headquarters has been kept fully posted on our relationship and has given its tacit approval, including our intention to marry sooner or later?”

“Mention anything you want,” Amzi said. “Anybody can beat the box if they take the right pills. I don't give a shit who you marry. But that ain't gonna turn down the heat from Security. And by the way, congratulations.”

On what?
I wondered but I nodded my thanks.

Amzi said, “Whatever, you get your wish. You'll be working out of Headquarters for a while instead of going back to Buenos Aires because as usual we don't really know what to do with you. Tom will keep you busy while you wait for Godot. We're done.”

Tom gave me the same roomy office as before, a few doors down the hall from his own. He also, for a change, gave me things to keep me busy—meetings whose purpose evaded me and odd jobs that made use of my languages, mostly. There was nothing surprising about this: I still didn't know the routine, I had seldom been briefed on the subject at hand, I had no relationship with the other people who worked for Tom, let alone the hundreds who did not.

I wasn't exactly being welcomed to the club. Nobody invited me for a drink or a cup of coffee. In the cafeteria, people sometimes sat down at the same table and nodded but tended to study their cell phones rather than converse with me—or with each other, to be fair about it. There was no reason to take this personally. It was just the culture.

The bureaucracy dragged its feet when it came to documenting Luz. I did take this personally. By law Luz was entitled to American citizenship by virtue of our marriage, but since 9/11 the bureaucracy had processed applications very, very slowly. I gave Admin no peace on this issue, and though they were even more allergic than usual to embarrassment because like the rest of the federal apparatus they
were haunted by the fear of being responsible for another 9/11, the process moved along.

Many Headquarters people were married to foreigners, some of them to Russians and Chinese and Iranians and others you might have thought represented a potential security risk. This had always been true. Cold War brides from hostile countries had often dined at our house when I was too young to join them at the table, but as I remember it, most of them were more American than some of the American wives. They were happy—maybe as cover, maybe not—to be in the land of plenty. Unless they were French they even thought the food was good.

Six weeks passed. My meeting with Boris loomed. No one had discussed this encounter with me. In theory, and I hoped in reality, only the Director, Amzi and Tom, and Security knew about it and all of them had more pressing issues to worry about. Besides that, what was there to talk about? Boris would either come through or he wouldn't show up.

No matter what, I was in no danger from the Russians, nor was Boris in danger from us. His own service might whack him and mine might send me to prison if it discovered the truth, but those were internal matters. The embargo on assassination applied throughout the Cold War and it continued to apply afterward. Neither side wanted to go to the mattresses. Mutual assassination was unproductive, uncontrollable. Once begun, it turned into a vendetta, and there was no end to it. Who knew what algorithm of mayhem might result from one reckless homicide?

Luz played house. She bought a new bed for the apartment and as only she could do, made it the focus of our existence. At auctions and thrift shops she bought paintings and drawings, Persian rugs and antique furniture and china and silver and more. These were frugal expenditures, but over time they added up to a hefty total. She never asked me for money. I never asked where her own money came from. Savings, Alejandro's share of the proceeds of banks that his freedom fighters had robbed for the Cause or ransoms of plutocrats they had kidnapped? An allowance from
Diego? What difference did it make? Had the taxpayers known what I was doing with their money they would have stopped writing checks to the U. S. Treasury.

Luz knew many more people in Washington than I did. Within two weeks of our arrival she was having lunch and going to matinees at the Kennedy Center and doing volunteer work with sorority sisters, accepting dinner invitations from Foreign Service people and diplomats of other nations who had passed through Buenos Aires while she was working at the foreign ministry, and signing up for advanced classes at Georgetown Law School. One of her honorary uncles, hitherto unknown to me, was counselor to the Argentinean embassy. He invited us to embassy receptions, my favorite thing, and dinner parties where we met his friends from other South American nations who had returned to respectability in everything except their hidden but ineradicable faith in the brave new world to come.

These people couldn't understand how she could be married to a reptile like me. None, least of all State Department people, believed for a minute my feeble cover story that I worked for the State Department.

At the office, to pass empty time for some useful purpose, I worked on Russian as a written language, reading newspapers and magazines and books and translating the columns and editorials in the
Post
and the
Times
into Russian. Because nearly everything I typed into the memory of a laptop vanished from my mind as if transferred to another human consciousness, I wrote all this out by hand. At first this unaccustomed exercise induced painful muscle cramps, but soon I was scribbling away as if I had traveled backward in time to the glory days before the invention of the keyboard.

On the long slow drives back to Adams Morgan through rush hour traffic I listened to pop music and tried to empty my mind, but often found myself thinking about Diego's parting words to me. He had sounded psychotic, and in the part of him that was the fossil of his bloodthirsty
youth, I supposed he was psychotic. As far as I could tell, the rest of him, the visible Diego, the surgeon and doer of good works, was rational. So the questions were, which Diego had been whispering in my ear and had he been babbling or speaking in riddles? The more I thought about it, the more I tended to favor the riddles.

And if I was right about that, the invisible “friends” who would always watch over Luz and me and keep us from harm had to be terrorists for the simple reason that Diego was still a terrorist under very deep cover but still plugged in to the freemasonry of the revolution, and therefore the “rescue” he talked about would, in fact, be a kidnapping and the “protection” captivity.

And the end product of his protection, should I ever dial his number and speak the password, would be the end of me and Luz's return to him.

Precisely on time on the right day, Boris showed up at the Maunulan maja sauna in Helsinki. For the benefit of the bored receptionist we greeted each other as old friends—manly embrace, broad smiles, exclamations in Spanish. Neither of us resembled any native Spanish speaker who ever applied for a Finnish visa, but that was another issue. The sauna was crowded. As we sweated side by side among hungover Finns, Boris said next to nothing. I didn't interrupt. We hurried through the invigorating plunge into icy water, skipped the massage, and went for a walk in the all but deserted Central Park.

Without being asked, Boris told me he had in fact been promoted. He was now like a major general, the chief of his service's Directorate S, responsible for recruiting and running agents in the United States and the rest of the Americas. He was very busy. His service was hiring. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian espionage in the U. S. became more extensive and more intense than it ever had been during the Cold War. The intensification was a result of urgent need. The USSR under Bolshevism had been a chimera—a backward country with one foot in the Dark Ages
masquerading as a modern state. The rest of the world, with America far in the lead, was inventing more technological wonders than the Russians could hope to invent for themselves. This had always been true and it explained why Moscow had devoted so much wealth and energy to the theft of secrets. It was the particular business of Boris's directorate to pilfer the fruits of capitalism. The need was urgent, the methods were ruthless.

Recalcitrant Russian expatriates living in the United States were bullied into recruitment by threats to their families, and in stubborn cases, by filing bogus charges that forced them to return to the Motherland and submit to prosecution with conviction and prison as a foregone conclusion. The class of Americans that regarded their own country as the evil empire and Russia as the holder of the moral high ground required no coercion. Such volunteers, when they were successful, were rewarded with large sums of money and diamonds and rubies and, to encourage the worker bees, secret decorations for their heroic service to mankind. This approach was remarkably effective, as the NKVD had discovered in the long-ago days of the Comintern when its operatives in the United States were complaining to Moscow Center that they were overwhelmed by the mobs of American idealists who were walking into their offices and volunteering to spy for the Soviet Union.

Boris fairly quivered with contempt for such gullible fools: They were in the grip of a collective dementia that made it impossible for them to acknowledge reality. Did they not understand that they would be the first to be shot if the kind of America they so passionately wanted should ever come into being? This contagious mania to reject their country and all they thought it stood for left few sleeping beauties for the Borises of this world to awaken with a bear hug. This was frustrating! How could such intellectual weaklings ever be trusted?

How much this tirade represented Boris's true opinion and how much of it was secondhand marijuana smoke was an unanswerable question. Either way, I suspected that I would be hearing it again. And again.

Boris said, “I have brought you a list of names.”

He handed me a flash drive.

I said, “Who are these people?”

“Americans who are betraying their country by working for us.”

“Are any of them inside Headquarters or involved with someone who is?”

“Their handlers don't think so.”

“Are any of them connected to terrorism?”

Boris said, “They are mostly of the type we have been discussing, so probably they are sympathetic to suicide bombers. But as far as we know none of them makes bombs.”

I handed the flash drive back to him. “Send this to the FBI,” I said. “It would be easier for you to do that, no?”

“Not without telling them the source. You are none of their business.”

Boris shook his head. Americans! He put his hands behind his back, refusing to accept the flash drive. It was an incongruously peevish gesture.

I said, “Boris, hear me. This list is useless to Headquarters, which has no police powers and is prohibited by law from investigating U. S. citizens or running operations against them on American soil.”

“Ha! No exceptions?”

He already knew, or thought he knew, the answer to that question.

Boris said, “But you can recruit your fellow Americans, turn them, give us a reason to punish them.”

“It's seldom worth the bother. And wooing them only makes them feel important.”

Boris and I were speaking Russian now, but softly, and for the benefit of anyone who might be watching we wore jovial expressions and sometimes for effect, Boris laughed loudly.

I handed the flash drive back to him. Again he refused it.

He said, “Why are you doing this?”

I said, “I came for product. This is not product.”

“Then tell me, please, what would you call product?”

“Paté de foie gras is product. This stuff is the same color but it comes from the other end of the goose.”

“You look like a nice boy, but you are very uncultured. Again, why are you here if not to receive information?”

“To begin the work we agreed to do together,” I said. “I want the names and the current locations of your service's most effective officers who are targeted on the United States.”

After taking this body punch, Boris closed his eyes—no movement, no sign of life. He didn't seem even to be breathing. Then he held out his hand, palm upward. I put the flash drive on his palm. He made a fist.

He said, “What would you do with this list of our most valued officers?”

“Find a way to make it look like I have turned them and they work for us.”

“To what end?”

“Then your service will kill them all. You want to damage the system. I want to do the same. Your side will think it is penetrated. My side will think the same. Panic will lift its ugly head. They will start to destroy themselves.”

“The dog will bite itself, is that the objective?”

“Dogs, plural.”

“Then both of us will die.”

“What if we do?”

Boris said, “How much goose liver do I get in return?”

“Payment in kind. The names of our most effective people.”

“Your service has no effective people where Russia is concerned. Every single source your service has ever had in the USSR or the Russian Federation has not been recruited. He has been a traitor who volunteered.”

Just like Boris.

I said, “True enough. Another good reason to save the American taxpayer a hundred billion dollars a year.”

Boris went on the alert. “That's Headquarters's budget?”

“No, a figure of speech. I have no idea what it costs to breed dinosaurs. Boris, if you want to go on with this, I need to take something useful home with me. For now it doesn't have to be one of the crown jewels, merely a sign of good faith.”

He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a different flash drive. This one had a tiny red dot on it. The other had not.

Gazing at a long-legged young woman in athletic garb who all of a sudden was running in place within earshot, he said, in barely audible tones, “We must be very careful. The next time I'm available I will mail you a postcard of a city. Prague means Sofia, Budapest means Bucharest, Trieste means Berlin. Date is fourteen days after the date written on the postcard, not the postmark. Same time as today, place is always in front of the local parliament building. Opposite sidewalks, you on the parliament side, me across the street. From there you will follow me to the place where we will do business.”

“Fallback?”

“No fallback. Be there the first time, on time.”

Another girl caught up to the one who had been running in place and they took off together.

Boris had nothing more to report or demand. Without so much as a nod, he stood up and took his leave.

On the morning I got back to Washington, a Saturday, I slept until noon, then read the mail at the breakfast table while Luz showered and decided what to wear for the weekend outing she had planned. She had made arrangements to go to colonial Williamsburg, dine, and spend the night making the bed squeak at the Williamsburg Inn. Williamsburg was not far from the Plantation, so the weekend would give me an opportunity to meditate about Father.

Among the junk mail and the bills on the kitchen counter I found a letter with an actual postage stamp on it from a lawyer in Eugene, Oregon, advising me that my mother had died two months earlier of pancreatic cancer and bequeathed me her entire estate. For details, call the following number.

This was the first word of her I had had for ten years. I told myself I felt nothing. I lied. I stopped breathing. I smothered the sob that rose from my chest.

The picture that came into my mind at this moment was not Mother the cool beauty but Father the jaunty hobo, smiling wryly as he welcomed her to eternity or wherever it was that people like them went to shun each other after death.