Terrorist (31 page)

"Sir, begging your pardon," she says, "but I talk with my sister in New Jersey, and I'm not sure the people know what to do different as the levels go up."

The Secretary chews this over a moment, with his powerful, rueful masseters, then asserts, "No, but the authorities do. They up their own levels; they have a whole menu of emergency measures in front of them." Yet even as he utters this reassurance he feels irritation—she can tell by the way his fine eyes narrow under their thoroughly masculine but beautifully formed brunette brows—at the gaps that exist

between his single isolated will and the myriad assorted officers, efficient and indifferent, corrupt and sterling, who, like frayed neuron-endings, make contact or not with the vast, sluggish, carefree populace.

Helplessly Hermione offers, "But I think people
do
like the sensation that steps are being taken, by a whole government department devoted to their homeland security."

"My trouble is," the Secretary blurts, helpless in turn, "I love this damn country so much I can't imagine why anybody would want to bring it down. What do tbese people have to offer instead? More Taliban—more oppression of women, more blowing up statues of Buddha. The mullahs in northern Nigeria are telling people not to let their children be given polio vaccine, and then the kids are brought in paralyzed to the health-aid clinic! They wait until they're totally paralyzed to bring them in, after they've gone all the way with the local mumbo-jumbo."

"They fear losing something, something precious to them," Hermione says, trembling on the edge of a new degree (the degrees are subtle, and are negotiated within the strict proprieties of a thoroughly Republican and Christian administration) of intimacy. "So precious they will sacrifice their own children to it. It happens in this country, too. The marginal sects, where some charismatic leader seals them off from common sense. The children die, and then the parents cry in court and are acquitted—they're children themselves. It's frightening, the power of abuse adults have over their children. It makes me glad, frankly, I never had any."

Is this a plea? A complaint that, standing together tbough they are on the lip of a splendid Sunday in the capital of the greatest nation on Earth, she is a spinster and he a married man bound by the vows of his religion to be as one, spiritu-

ally and legally, with the mother of his own children? They should be
her
children. In the workings of the national government, spending twelve, fourteen hours a day in the same room or adjacent rooms, they are just as much one as if legally married. His wife hardly knows him, compared with Hermione. This thought gives her so much satisfaction that she must quickly erase an inadvertent smile from her face.

"Damn!" he explodes, his mind having been moving on its own track and coming up against the sore matter that has brought him back to his office on this day supposedly of rest. "I
hate
losing an asset. We got so few in the Muslim community, that's one of our weaknesses, that's how they caught us with our pants down. We don't have enough Arabic speakers, and half of those we do have don't think like we do. There's something weird about the language—it makes them feeble-minded, somehow. Their Internet chatter—
Heaven will split asunder beneath the Western river. The light shall be admitted.
What the fuck kind of sense does that make? Pardon my French, Hermione."

She murmurs forgivingly, marking the new level of intimacy.

He goes on, "Our problem is, the asset was holding out on us, keeping too many cards in his own hands. He wasn't following procedure. He had some vision of a great revelation and round-up, like in the movies, starring guess who? Him. We know about the money conduit in Florida, but the bagman has vanished. He and his brother own a cut-rate furniture store up in northern New Jersey, but nobody answers any phones or comes to the door. We know something about a truck, but don't know where it is or who's doing the driving. The explosives team, we got two out of the four, but they aren't talking, or else the translator isn't telling us what

they're saying. They all cover for each other, even the ones on our payroll, you can't trust your own recruits any more. It's an unholy mess, and wouldn't you know the body turns up on a Sunday morning!"

In their native Pennsylvania, she knows, people could be trusted. A dollar is still a dollar there, a meal a meal, a deal a deal. Rocky looks like a boxer should, and dishonest men smoke cigars, wear checked suits, and wink a lot. She and the Secretary have wandered far from that elemental land of genial sincerity, of row houses numbered with stained glass in unchanging fanlights, of miners' sons who become star quarterbacks, of pork sausage sizzling in its own fat and scrapple drenched in maple syrup—foods that make no pretense of not being loaded with lethal cholesterol. She longs to comfort the Secretary, to press her lean body like a poultice upon his ache of overwhelming responsibility; she wants to take his meaty weight, which strains against his
de rigueur
black suit, upon her bony frame, and cradle him on her pelvis. Instead, she asks, "Where is the store?"

"A city called New Prospect. Nobody ever goes there."

"My sister lives there."

"Yeah? She should get out. It's full of Arabs—Arab-Americans, so-called. The old mills brought them in and then slowly folded. The way things are going, there won't be a thing America makes. Except movies, which are getting crappier every year. My wife and I—you've met Grace, haven't you?—used to love them, we used to go all the time, before the kids came and we had to get sitters. Judy Garland, Kirk Douglas—they gave good honest value, every performance, one hundred ten percent. Now all you hear about these kid movie actors—the women don't like being called actresses any more, everybody's an
actor
—is drunk

driving and who's pregnant out of wedlock. They make these poor black teen-age girls think it's just the thing, to bring a baby into the world without any father. Except Uncle Sam. He gets the bills, and no thanks from them: welfare's their right. If there's anything wrong with this country—and I'm not saying there is, compared to any other, France and Norway included—is we have too many rights and not enough duties. Well, when the Arab League takes over the country, people'll learn what duties are."

"Exactly so, sir." The "sir" is meant to recall him to himself, his own duties in the present emergency.

He hears her. He turns back to moody contemplation of the capital's Sunday calm, with its distant prospect of the Tidal Basin and the smooth white knob, like an observatory with no opening for the telescope, of the Jefferson Memorial. People blame Jefferson now for holding on to his slaves and fathering children by one of them, but they forget the economic context of the times and the fact that Sally Hem-mings was very pale.
It's a heartless city,
the Secretary thinks, a tangle of slippery power, a scattering of great white buildings like the field of icebergs that sank the
Titanic.
He turns and tells his undersecretary, "If this thing in New Jersey blows up, there'll be no sitting on fat-cat boards for me. No speaker's fees. No million-dollar advance on my memoirs." It was the sort of confession a man should make only to his wife.

Hermione is shocked. He has come closer to her but has fallen in her estimation. She tells him a shade tartly, trying to recall this beautiful, selfless public servant to himself, "Mr. Secretary, no man can serve two masters. Mammon is one; it would be presumptuous of me to name the other."

The Secretary takes this in, blinks his surprisingly light

blue eyes, and swears, "Thank God for you, Hermione. Of course. Forget Mammon." He settles at his exiguous desk and vehemently punches beeping triplets of code numbers into the electric console, and leans back in his ergonomically correct chair to bark into the speaker-phone.

Hermione doesn't usually phone on a Sunday. She prefers weekdays, when she knows Jack isn't likely to be there. She has never had much to say to Jack, which used to slightly hurt Beth's feelings; it was as if Herm were carrying on their parents' ridiculous Lutheran anti-Semitic prejudices. Also, Beth has deduced, on a weekday her "big" sister has the excuse of her red light blinking on her other phone when she thinks Beth is rambling on too long. But today she calls while church bells are ringing, and Beth is glad to hear her voice. She wants to share her good news. "Herm, I've gone on this diet and in just five days I've lost twelve pounds!"

"The first pounds are the easiest," Hermione says, always putting down anything Beth does or says. "At this point you're just losing water, which will come right back. The real test comes when you can see the difference and decide to pig out to celebrate. Is this the Atkins diet, by the way? They say it's dangerous. He was about to be sued by a thousand people, that's why his sudden death seemed so fishy."

"It's just the carrot-and-celery diet," Beth tells her. "Whenever I have the urge to nibble, I go for one of these baby carrots they sell everywhere now. Remember how carrots used to come into Philly from the Delaware truck farms, in a tied bunch with the dirt and sand still on them? Oh, how I used to hate that feeling of biting down on grains of sand— it sounded so loud in your head! No danger of that with these baby ones; they must come out of California and are

all peeled down to exactly the same size. The only trouble is, if they sit too long in the sealed pack they come out slimy. The trouble with
celery
is, after a couple of stalks this ball of string collects in your mouth. But I'm determined to stick with it. It's easier to nibble cookies, God knows, but every bite adds on calories. A hundred thirty each, I was shocked to read on the package! The print is so fine, it's diabolical!"

That Hermione hasn't yet cut her short seems odd; Beth knows she's boring on the subject of doing without food, but it's all she can think about, and talking about it out loud holds her to it, keeps her from backsliding, despite her faint spells and stomach cramps. Her stomach doesn't understand what she's doing to it, why it's being punished, not knowing it's been her worst enemy for years, lying there under her heart crying out to be filled. Carmela won't lie on her lap any more, she's become so jumpy and irritable.

"What does Jack make of all this?" Hermione asks. Her voice sounds level and grave, a little halting and solemn, weighing her words. This prospect of a new, slim, presentable sister is something they both could be giggling about, the way they used to when sharing their room in tbe Pleasant Street house, sharing die sheer joy of being alive. As she got more serious and studious, Hermione stopped knowing how to giggle; she found it hard to lighten up. Beth wonders if that is the reason she never found a husband— Herm didn't know how to make men forget their troubles. She lacked
ballon,
as Miss Dimitrova had said.

Beth lowers her voice. Jack is in the bedroom reading and he may have read himself to sleep. Central High has started up again, and he has volunteered to teach a course on civics, saying he needs more exposure to these kids he is supposed to counsel. He claims they are getting away from him. He claims he is too old, but that's his depression talking. "He

doesn't say much," she tells Hermione in answer to her question. "I think he's afraid to jinx it. But he
has
to be pleased; I'm doing it for
him."

Herm asks, shooting her down again, "Is that ever a good idea, to do something because you think your husband wants it? I'm just asking—I've never been married."

Poor Herm, this has to be on her mind all the time. "Well, you're"—Beth stops her tongue; she had been about to say that Hermione was as good as married, to that bull-headed linebacker of a boss of hers—"as wise as anybody else, any other woman. I'm doing it for myself, too. I feel so much better, with just the twelve pounds off. The girls at the library can see the difference—they're very supportive, though at their age I couldn't imagine my figure ever getting out of hand. I said I'd like to help with the shelving instead of just sitting on my fat ass behind the desk Googling for kids too lazy to learn to Google for themselves."

"How does Jack like the change in his diet?"

"Well, I've tried not to change his, still giving him meat and potatoes. But he says he'd just as soon have simple salads with me. The older he gets, he says, the more eating anything disgusts him."

"That's the Jew in him," Hermione cuts in.

"Oh, I don't think so," Beth says, haughtily.

Hermione is then so silent Beth wonders if the connection has been broken off. Terrorists are blowing up oil pipes and power plants in Iraq, nothing is utterly secure any more. "How's the weather down there?" Beth asks.

"Still hot, once you leave the building. September in the District can be still muggy. The trees don't turn with all that color we used to get in the Arboretum. Spring is the season here, with the cherry blossoms."

"Today," Betfr says, as her starved stomach gives a pang that makes her grip the back of the kitchen chair for support, "I felt fall in the air. The sky is so absolutely clear, like"—
like the day of Nine-Eleven,
she started to say, but stopped, thinking it might be tactless to mention that to an undersecretary of Homeland Security, the fabled blue sky that has become mythic, a Heavenly irony, part of American legend like the rockets' red glare.