The Mulberry Bush (21 page)

I opened the trunk and gestured him inside. He climbed in as if this was the only way to travel—which in his case, it was. The lid silently closed itself.

By now it was almost six in the morning. The car started with its usual discreet purr.

I called Dwayne, already wide-awake, and asked him where I could drop off a large package.

He said, “The office. You will be met.”

Fifteen minutes later, Kirill Sergeivich Burkov went through the looking glass. One of Dwayne's people, a paunchy middle-aged officer I knew by sight but not by name because we had never been introduced, awaited us inside the embassy gate. He wore a rumpled corduroy clearance-sale suit and a wide paisley necktie that had gone out of style well before the turn of the millennium. We exchanged no words. I popped the trunk. Burkov unfolded himself and Dwayne's man led him to a waiting van. Both men got in. A young fellow I had never seen before was behind the wheel. While the door was still sliding to its closed position, the gate opened and the van drove through it.

All this happened in seconds. I left Burkov's weaponry in a heap on the passenger seat and went inside the embassy. The armored door to the station, which looked like an ordinary door, was locked. I rang the bell. No response. I called Dwayne's cell phone. He didn't answer.

I went home. This took a while because the city was awakening and traffic thickened by the minute. One of the CDs stored in the Mercedes's
player was a Rolling Stones album. I hate the Rolling Stones. I pressed
PLAY
and turned up the volume until I couldn't hear myself think, which was the whole idea.

At home I transferred Burkov's arsenal to the trunk, unloading the firearms and stuffing the clips into my coat pockets. I found Luz as I had left her, sound asleep, muttering under her breath to someone in a dream.

I locked up Kirill's weaponry. I took a shower, taking my .45 with me into the bathroom, and shaved even though I knew that washing away pheromones and removing stubble would displease Luz, who liked to smell the full aroma of the male who was in bed with her and be scratched by his beard. When I went back to bed, she was still asleep. I didn't wake her.

I didn't even try to sleep. My brain was releasing so much adrenaline that I couldn't possibly have done so. What I wanted to do was get my mind off the events of the previous evening, off everything that had happened since the day I played golf with Karim.

To that end, I recited poetry to myself. I memorized the entire text of
The Ancient Mariner
in eighth-grade English and ever since have silently recited it to myself when trying to overcome periodic fits of anger and regret and shame so strong that they could have been mistaken as epileptic seizures.

And so on through the cornfield of middle school English:
Evangeline,
“The Song of Hiawatha,” Hamlet, Shelley, Tennyson, gobs of Kipling.
Finally I fell asleep. My dreams were just as bad as I had expected. In the morning Luz woke in her usual fashion. After a sufficient number of orgasms she picked oranges from a tree in the garden and squeezed them. She made a dish, new to me, out of crumbled corn bread, butter, and white cheese that she said was called
arepa con quesito.
Diego had gotten the recipe from his fellow medical student Ernesto Guevara—it was Che's grandmother's recipe, therefore the manna of the revolution. Diego had taught Luz to make it when she was a child and she had forgotten all about it until she woke up this morning in Colombia.

I waited till late afternoon before presenting myself at the station. As usual, no heads were lifted as I passed by, not even—or maybe especially—that of the man in the corduroy suit who had taken custody of Burkov.

Dwayne's secretary gestured me into his office. He was reading a cable. He did not look up when I entered but held up a just-a-minute hand. He finished, signed the document, and rang for his secretary.

Dwayne said, “Take a pew.”

I sat down. I was calm again.

“Mariana and I really enjoyed meeting Luz last night,” Dwayne said. “She just loved her. Beautiful woman, great personality. How did you get so lucky?”

“I might ask you the same question,” I said. “I have something for you.” I had dumped Burkov's stuff into a string bag I found in the kitchen, and now I dropped it on his desk.

Dwayne turned the bag upside down and the arsenal spilled out onto his desk. The noise was considerable.

He said, “You took all this away from him?”

“He made me a present of it.”

“Your prints are on it?”

“Yes. So are his and now, yours.”

Dwayne's outward manner was a blank.

I said, “Where is he now?”

Dwayne said, “Beyond the reach of those who might do him harm.”

“That's a comfort—he's such a vulnerable soul.”

Dwayne said, “You look pissed off. What's the problem?”

“Where's my Russian?”

“We took him under our wing. That's what procedure dictates and Amzi insisted upon. Don't worry. He's safe, he'll always be safe in our hands no matter what he turns out to be. I'm real sorry, and I know Amzi will be even more contrite, that you didn't get to say good-bye. But that's the way it works.”

“OK, but where is he?”

“I don't know. My guys handed him over to some people at an airstrip and away he went. I never laid eyes on him and I never will. Case closed as far as this station is concerned. Your work here is done. Go home.”

“I just got here.”

“So you're a fast worker. Keep your perspective about Burkov. All's well that ends well, and he's in good hands. The chief negative is that Mariana and Luz won't get to be girlfriends.”

“That's a shame.”

“Yeah, but so many things in life are. You should be happy. You did your job. You'll never see Burkov, or whoever he really is, again. But if you've been reporting what was truly in your heart, you didn't like the bastard anyway, so what have you lost? Any questions?”

“What happens to Sally?”

“She's not our problem. Diplomatic security handed her over to the Justice Department. If she's smart she'll spill her guts and cop a plea and take her medicine. Conjugal visits from her well-hung boyfriend probably won't be part of the package. Bon voyage.”

In his brightly lit office at Headquarters, chilled to an arctic temperature, Amzi said, “Home again, home again, jiggedy-jig. You didn't waste any time in Bogotá.”

We were alone—no Tom, seemingly nobody at all in the empty, hushed building. Amzi's wall of clocks said it was 3:41
A.M
. Eastern Standard Time. He was wide-awake. I was dead tired. Amzi's secretary had called me while my flight was taxiing to the gate after landing at Dulles and told me to come straight to Headquarters. I had had no sleep for forty-eight hours, every one of which, this one especially, spent in places where I would rather not have been.

I said, “Give Dwayne some credit for my swift return. After he kidnapped Burkov there wasn't much left for me to do in Colombia.”

“He mentioned that you didn't seem to grasp the finer points on that one. Can I be of any help?”

“No need.”

“But you were miffed,” Amzi said. “Don't be. It's SOP. We have people who handle walk-ins like your guy. They quarantine the subject. Nobody
but them goes anywhere near him. The idea is for them to become the only friends the lost soul's got in the world.”

“Thanks for the explanation. Why am I here?”

Answering a direct question wasn't Amzi's strong suit.

He said, “Where's your wife?”

“Still in Bogotá. She has family friends there.”

“The usual, ‘Wow, I got-away-with-it crowd'?”

Well, yes. But I saw no reason to comment.

Amzi said, “I've got a question. How are you doing?”

“I'm a little tired after the flight.”

We had already been together for more than an hour. It was 4:28 in the morning.

“I meant all in all.”

“OK.”

“You like the work?”

“It has its moments.”

“You're better at it than a lot of people thought you'd be.”

“I'm glad you think so.”

Amzi said, “I wasn't one of the doubters. You've got the genes. Your father had a gift for this work, as much as anyone ever did, and the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. He had a lot of bad luck. You seem to specialize in good luck.”

This was the first time Amzi had ever mentioned my father, whose final stroke of bad luck he had arranged.

I said, “Good luck? Me? For example?”

“For example, you should be dead. The way you operate, it was a miracle that you didn't get yourself castrated and decapitated in Sana'a or somewhere else in holy Islam or that your Russian buddies didn't put something left over from the KGB poison store in your coffee.”

“You're worried about me?”

“No, but you need a rest,” he said. “It's a management situation. If you don't get some rest your luck will run out. I want you to take a vacation. This time I mean it, so don't try to wiggle out of it. Leave your cell phone in your safe and take Luz, when she's through hanging out with her father's jolly old comrades, to some romantic paradise in the Pacific. Bali would be good. No station there. Sunbathe, walk on the beach. Eat nonorganic fatty foods. Drink drinks with umbrellas in them. Sleep. Do what young couples do when there's no television and they don't have anything to read.”

I said, “No thanks.”

Amzi said, “Oh, really? Then maybe we should think about the options. You need sleep? The French used to have a treatment called the sleep cure. I'm not sure what it was supposed to cure—unhappiness, probably. They'd pump people full of drugs and feed them through tubes, change their diapers, and keep them asleep for I don't know how long—weeks, months, maybe years in serious cases. It was like space travel. A robot gives you a shot, you wake up happy and refreshed a thousand years later somewhere in Andromeda with everybody you knew back on Earth long since dead and muscles so weak you can't get out of your capsule. We probably even know a French shrink we can recommend.”

I said, “No thanks.”

The real Amzi awakened.

“Wrong fucking answer,” he said in his sandpaper voice. “You're fucking done with this case. You need a rest. Starting now. Get out of this building within fifteen minutes and go somewhere for not less than thirty days. We're fucking done.”

When I got to the house in Georgetown, which still smelled of the people who used to live there, I found a postcard from Boris.

It read: “Budapest. Three days hence.”

Fuck Amzi.

This time, Boris was wearing a navy blue blazer with brass buttons instead of his running togs. Following him through the streets of Bucharest resembled a guided tour of the city's landmarks. I had never been there before and the unexpected—the unsuspected—beauty of the city took me by surprise. The language, which sounded like gargled French, surprised me, too, because I half understood it. Before World War II, according to the guide to Romania, Bucharest had been called “Little Paris” because of its eclectic architecture, its broad boulevards, and its many parks. It had its own Arcul de Triumf that looked a lot like the one in the Place de l'Étoile, and its own Seine, the Dâmbovita River. After half a century of communism the architecture had some Stalinist monstrosities, such the monumental Palatul Parlamentului. According to the handbook this was the largest administrative building in the world. It was the monument to himself that the psychotic dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu completed shortly before he was deposed in 1989 and shot, along with his wife, by a firing squad.

Boris's destination was the Cişmigiu Gardens, a former royal pleasure park in the city center that was said to contain one hundred thousand
species of trees and shrubs and plants. At this early hour it was virtually empty. Boris headed straight for an outdoor chess table, sat down, and fished a set of chessmen from the bag slung from his shoulder. I had been keeping a discreet distance between us, so by the time I caught up with him and sat down, the board was ready.

Boris got the white pieces, so he made the first move. He opened with the bewildering Stonewall Attack. Neither of us said a word during the minutes it took him to destroy my defense and my illusions about ever becoming his equal at the game.

After I tipped over my king he said, “So where is Burkov?”

“Somewhere in the United States, I think.”

“You
think
? But where?”

“I don't know.”

“How can you not know?”

“By having no need to know.”

“You will overcome that problem.”

I said, “I will? Who says so?”

“I do. Don't be so touchy. Burkov is very good. He will charm his keepers. They are nice American boys who will learn to like him and trust him enough to make the one mistake it is necessary for them to make, and as soon as he has planted whatever lies he has been ordered to tell them, his superiors will order him to walk away.”

I said, “‘His superiors'? I thought you were in charge of the Americas.”

“He belongs to a different directorate,” Boris said. “This kind of switch has happened before, when your people took a man they thought was a defector to lunch in a restaurant in Washington, and can you imagine, let him go to the w. c. all by himself and never saw him again.”

Assuming that Headquarters had turned the escapee and was sending him back to the Russians as a penetration agent, yes, I could imagine such a parody. And so could Boris.

“In Moscow,” Boris was saying, “these fools would have been shot, and rightly so. It may look to Amzi like Kirill Sergeivich was kidnapped or murdered, but he will be alive and well and fucking some stupid woman during lunch hour and laughing his head off. He's a psychopath, yes. But a very, very smart psychopath.”

For Boris, a man of few words in any language, this speech was the equivalent of reading
War and Peace
aloud.

He said, “Help me. Please tell me exactly what happened between you and Kirill Sergeivich.”

Boris was turning the tables again, acting as if he was the handler and I was the asset. But he did have a right to know, and if we were partners, as our pantomime of an operation was supposed to suggest, he had a need to know. Besides, once he knew, what would he know that had the slightest value as intelligence? He and his superiors already knew that Burkov was in the hands of Headquarters and they knew everything that Burkov knew.

I told Boris as much as he needed to know.

When I was finished, Boris said, “So you're telling me he just disarmed himself then disarmed you in another way by leaping into your arms crying ‘
Save me
'?”

“You could put it that way.”

“This did not arouse your suspicions?”

“Boris, please.”

“But why did you let the other Americans take him away?”

“Why would I object? How could I stop them? In theory we were on the same side.”

“The fact remains that now he's of no value to us. We must restore his value.”

“Oh? How do we do that?”

“We kill him before the eyes of his minders. It's the only way to make Amzi believe Kirill Sergeivich really was a traitor to Russia, that he was
working sincerely with the Americans all along because he is a secret democrat, that he knew so much he had to be killed by evil Moscovites.”

This made sense—perverse sense, demented sense, but the only kind of sense that mattered to the Borises and the Amzis of this world. And increasingly, to me.

Trying to make a joke of this joke of an idea, I said, “Then you'll have to find some weird Russian way to kill him, like the polonium you so cleverly used on what's-his-name in London. Radiation poisoning is detectable, so even American fools should get the message.”

Boris said, “Listen to me. There is no such thing in assassination as too obvious. To be obvious is the point.”

He picked up the chessmen and in the process dropped a flash drive onto the board.

“That's for Amzi with love,” he said. “Find out where Kirill Sergeivich is being held. I will invent a death for him that will make the newspapers happy.”