The Mulberry Bush (8 page)

Amzi Strange said, “You've got five years' worth of unused vacation time and money in the bank, and considering what you've been up to, you've gotta want to recharge the battery, so why don't you take some time off? Two months, say.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“To get away from it all.”

“I've been away from it all for five years.”

“So?”

“I'm tired of being alone.”

“You don't have to be alone. Take a woman along.”

“I don't know any women.”

“Find one when you get where you're going. You can hire a good-looking hooker in the prime of life anywhere in the world for maybe three hundred a pop, so if you get laid every other day, sixty days would cost you ten grand, max.”

It was hard not to be amused by this brute.

I said, “That's not a low estimate?”

“Double it. It's still the price of two months of marriage with five times as much sex, more variety, and a lot less grief.”

“So what do you and Headquarters get out of that?”

“Time to think. Like I told you, nobody knows what to do with you.”

I said, “It's obvious what to do with me. You know what I can do. Find a way for me to do more of it.”

“Send you back to the Land of Nod? You'd be dead in a week.”

“To quote you, Islamists are not the only terrorists in the world. If I can penetrate the jihad, I can penetrate other things.”

“Like what?”

“Like Russians. Or whoever except maybe North Koreans. Name it. But as part of the whole. Inside. Not as a singleton.”

“Why not? Working alone with your ass hanging out is what you're good at. You just said so yourself.”

“It's too limiting. I belong inside and you know it. You'd be remiss if you let me go to waste, and I won't stand in the corner because you guys are too insular to see what you've got and make use of it.”

Amzi mimed a smile.

He said, “I'm fucking stunned. Such modesty.”

I said, “Let me ask you a question. Is the problem that you don't have a slot for me and can't invent one, or that somebody doesn't want the competition?”

No reply, but I had expected none.

Amzi said, “Do you speak Russian?”

“Not yet.”

“But next week you will?”

The answer to Amzi's question was no. I'd have to study and listen a little longer than that. Amzi spoke Russian, and I guessed from the way he spoke English that learning it hadn't been easy for him. But actually it was easy for me to learn languages. I soaked up strange tongues and
remembered them the way other people memorize a Gershwin tune after hearing it once. This ear for gibberish was my only natural aptitude.

I said, “You're interested in Russia?”

“You could say that,” Amzi replied. “Everybody's interested in the Russians. Fuckers just won't quit.”

Amzi's demeanor changed. He had kidded around long enough. He said, “Are you serious about Russia?”

“Yes.”

Amzi glanced at the row of clocks on his office wall that told him what time it was in half a dozen foreign capitals. He waved his hand, as if shooing a fly, and perched his reading glasses on his nose. He picked up a file, put his feet on his desk, and began to read. He paid no further attention to me. I left.

Despite Amzi's history with my father, despite his foul mouth and his insulting manner, I found it difficult to dislike this man. His was one of the first names on the short list of people I intended to destroy if he gave me the start I needed, and I felt no guilt or regret about that. However, I could like him in spite of myself and still not forget what he was and what he had done and what he deserved.

Hate the sin, love the sinner.

I was given an office whose size befitted my rank, a telephone, a computer, a safe, a burn basket, but no assistant or guide who knew the ropes, so my contact with my fellow spooks was limited. I was as isolated and as different in this hive of spies as I had been in the crowds of shouting Muslims in which I had lately lived. In a way this was an affirmation—you have to be noticed to be ignored. Once in a while someone nodded to me in the cafeteria or gazed at me through the glass walls of my office as if I were a tropical fish. Few ventured to speak to me. I did not hunger for company but I wondered what it all meant. Was this an organized shunning? Was I reliving Father's last days in this building? I saw him in
my mind as I had seen him in our final moment together: the rags, the backpack, the jaunty wave good-bye, the wry half smile on his dirty face.

I asked Amzi for an explanation.

He said, “Relax. There's no fucking conspiracy. You're a legend, I already told you that, so the troops don't know whether to genuflect or wash your feet when they run into you in the hallways. Sooner or later they'll realize what a wonderful person you really are and you'll have more friends than you need. It would spoil everything if I ordered everybody to be nice to you. Give it time. They'll work up their courage and make the moves.”

I would have felt better if it
had
been a conspiracy. Apart from Amzi, who was too busy hoodwinking the rest of mankind to spend much time manipulating me, I had no superior between me and Amzi and no subordinates. Therefore I had nothing to do.

I bought a home study course in Russian and spent most of my days listening to stilted conversations over earphones and repeating what I heard or listening to audiobooks in Russian. At night I watched Russian movies from Netflix. After a month or so I understood about half the dialogue unless there was a lot of slang.

One day while I was listening to a Chekhov short story with my eyes closed, my telephone rang. When I picked up, a female voice, lifting half an octave as she spoke her name, said, “This is
Rose
mary?”

From me, silence. I didn't remember anybody named Rosemary.

The voice said, “In Mr.
Strange's
office?”

“Yes?”

“You are to report to the director's reception room at zero eight-fifteen tomorrow morning. Mr. Strange will meet you five minutes earlier, outside the door.”

“Why?”

“Zero eight-ten, outside the door,” Rosemary said, and hung up.

I called her back. “Where is the director's reception room?”

She gave me directions.

At 8:10 Amzi appeared and ushered me into the sanctum sanctorum. Half a dozen self-confident men and women including, inevitably, a couple of faces I vaguely remembered from childhood, were bunched up on the large Persian carpet. A bottle of champagne stood in an ice bucket on a side table. Conversation was muted.

At precisely 8:15, a second door was opened by a short man, not quite a midget. The Director, who looked like the high-powered Wall Street lawyer he used to be and would be again, and then some, after he had served his hitch as a not-so-public servant, strode briskly into the room. He took up a position in front of the flags, and while a photographer took pictures, read a citation in a mellifluous baritone. The short man produced a leather box embossed in gold with the Headquarters seal. The Director removed a medal from the box, shook out the ribbon, and hung it around my neck.

He shook my hand firmly, looked me straight in the eyes for a count of five, and said, “Congratulations. Brilliant work. The president of the United States has been made aware of your outstanding service to your country.”

He looked at me as if to let me know that these ritualistic words carried more than their usual weight because, as the media never tired of repeating, he was a friend of the president's, a kingmaker. He had known him When.

A champagne cork popped. A waiter in a white jacket materialized. He poured a tablespoon of California champagne into glasses and passed them around. The Director lifted his glass. Everyone else followed suit.

From his diaphragm the Director said, “To good deeds in the service of this country that we love. And to you, sir.”

That was all he had time for. The short man opened the door and held it. The Director walked through it. Some but not all of the others shook hands with me and then, like the Director, they had to dash.

A tall man whom I vaguely remembered from the old days was the last to shake hands.

He said, “Tom Terhune. Your father would be proud.”

Terhune was a murmurer, so I had to listen hard to hear him.

“More likely amused.”

“Don't be too sure. He expected great things from you.”

This was news to me. But a wave of emotion ran through me. Not for the first or the last time, I wondered where this overwhelming love for a man I hardly knew until our last hour together had come from and how it had become the driving force in my life.

Terhune, a watchful fellow, noticed that his words had had an effect on me.

He said, “I'd like to renew acquaintances. Are you free for dinner a week from Wednesday?”

I said, “Yes.”

I was always free for dinner, and I wanted to find out more about this man whom I was not quite sure I remembered.

“Seven o'clock then, at Kazan's in McLean. It's in a shopping center. Do you remember it?”

I did. Turkish food. The place had been one of Father's hangouts. He had taken me there for my birthday a couple of times.

I said, “It's still there? Fine.”

Terhune nodded, glanced at his watch, and left. Like the others, he stepped lively, not a second to waste.

Outside the door, Amzi was waiting for me.

He said, “You know Terhune?”

“Not really.”

“Good man, but only his dog can hear him. Nice medal. People have killed for it. Just like you did. Or died for it. How come you're still wearing it?”

“What else would I do with it?”

“It's customary to give it back so they can lock it up in the Director's safe. They give it to your widow when you die. She can hang it around her neck while she bangs her second husband or melt it down for the next hero.”

As Amzi spoke the Director's private door opened and the short man reentered, carrying the empty medal box in his hand. He gave me an expectant look. I took off the medal and handed it to him. I hadn't had a chance to examine it, so I never did find out what motto, if any, was stamped on the obverse.

Terhune was known in Kazan's restaurant. He didn't have to order because the waiter already knew what he wanted. I ordered the same, lamb stew cooked in yogurt. Terhune ordered a brand of vodka I had never heard of—chilled, no ice. When the waiter asked me what I wanted, I asked for spring water.

Terhune said, “You don't drink alcohol?”

“I gave it up so the Muslims wouldn't smell it on me.”

He asked me how my mother was. I didn't know. While I was in the Middle East, she had sold the house in which I had grown up. She wrote, tersely, that she could not go on living in the wreckage of her old life, meeting people who knew all about her husband's shame and turned away their faces every time she ran into them in Safeway. She was moving far away to be with her lover. She didn't specify where. This parting was not so very different from my father's good-bye to me.

I said, “My mother and I are not in touch.”

Terhune, showing no unseemly surprise, dropped the subject.

He said, “Fill me in. What does Amzi have you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Literally?”

“Yes.”

“No busywork while he finds the right slot for you?”

“So far, no.”

“The days must go by slowly.”

“Not really.”

“No? How do you pass the time?”

“I study Russian. One of those home study courses.”

“Why?”

“In case it comes in handy. And I like learning languages.”

“Is it any good at this point?”

“Hard to tell when I have no one to talk to but myself.”

In Russian, Terhune said, “Can you read it, write it, understand it over the telephone, recognize the words in a song?”

In the same language I replied, “About half.”

“How long have you been at this?”

“About a month.”

“And already you halfway understand? You must be a quick study.”

“I watch a lot of Russian movies and listen to audiobooks.”

“Which books?”

“So far, Pushkin's poetry and Chekhov's short stories.”

“Good choices. Pure pleasure in the original. Why, really, are you doing this?”

“I want to run operations against the Russians.”

“Not the Chinese, the target of the moment?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it's beyond us, because it's pointless, because it has no alphabet. Because no outside power has ever destroyed China, but if you hang around long enough, it always destroys itself.”

Terhune said, “You should write an op-ed. In English.”

The waiter reappeared. Terhune ordered two Turkish coffees. Switching to English he asked me how long it had taken me to learn Arabic and Farsi to the point of fluency. I told him the truth: not very long. He looked like he believed me, but given the life he had led, how would you know?

He said, speaking English again, “What you need now is someone to speak Russian to. I know a native speaker who might help if you're interested.”

“I'm interested if he or she is up-to-date on slang.”

“This fellow is up-to-date on pretty much everything. A Jesuit priest. He was born in Russia of Russian parents and left when he was twelve and emigrated to the States when his mother married an American citizen. His father had been shot for the usual Soviet reasons, which is to say no sane reason. He and his mother always spoke Russian to each other and she had Russian friends, so he kept up on the language. Because he spoke it like a native and knew the culture as if he had never left Moscow, he was sent into the Soviet Union by the Jesuit order and lived there as a hidden priest for twenty years. He worked in mines and factories during the day and at night baptized babies, heard confessions, said mass in secret. And wrote intelligence reports in Aramaic to his father provincial in the USA that the Moscow station transmitted for him.”