The Mulberry Bush Page 5

  I let a few days go by, then called the cell phone number Stringfellow had given me. I half expected a female computer to answer and tell me the number I had reached was not in service. Instead, after six rings, I heard Bill’s preppy drawl repeating the last four digits of the number, as was Headquarters’ style.

  I identified myself.

  A droplet of silence. Then, in a flat tone, he said, “What?”—as in, “what do you want?”

  “I’m calling to invite you to lunch.”

  “You are? Why?”

  “Because our last conversation was left unfinished.”

  “And you think we need to tie up the loose ends?”

  More gratuitous rudeness. This was a test.

  I said, “Come on, Bill. I’m just inviting you to lunch. A simple yes or no will do.”

  More silence. Then, “Where? When?”

  I named a pricey wheeler-dealers’ hangout on K Street.

  “Thursday at twelve?”

  “Do they know you in this place?”

  “I’ve been there once before. We’ll probably get a table next to the kitchen.”

  “All right. But if I’m more than ten minutes late, it means something has come up and I can’t make it.”

  Click. The scene was set, and I hoped Stringfellow thought he was the one who had set it.

  I was in no way sure that Bill Stringfellow would show up, but if he did, it would be for an operational purpose and the ball would be rolling. On Thursday I waited in the restaurant suppressing expectation, and eight minutes after I was seated Stringfellow appeared.

  He spotted me at once and made his way to my table. He beckoned a waiter.

  “Pellegrino,” he said. “Cold. Large bottle, in an ice bucket.”

  The waiter scurried away. His Master’s Voice.

  To me, Stringfellow said, “So what’s edible here?”

  “Wild mushroom strudel. The rockfish. I haven’t tried anything else.”

  “You always eat the same thing?”

  “As I said, this is the second time I’ve been here.”

  “No wonder you got such a good table.”

  We were, as I had expected, at the worst table in the restaurant. Stringfellow’s tone was just short of contemptuous and offered no hint that he was kidding. You might think he was a son of a bitch, but Stringfellow didn’t mind that. It didn’t matter to him what you thought of him. Playing this role was his stock-in-trade, and it occurred to me as the waiter poured his Italian mineral water that this might be one of the reasons for his success with women. His scorn made them want to make amends for giving offense when none was intended.

  Stringfellow ordered the dishes I had recommended—the first step in his imminent transformation into a nice guy. He was a workmanlike eater and gave his food his full attention, picking up the crumbs of the strudel crust with his fingers and popping them into his mouth, demolishing the fish and the four tiny potatoes that came with it. He ordered Gorgonzola and a pear for dessert. I asked for a different kind of cheese and grapes.

  He pointed a finger at the grapes: “Little capsules of sugar,” he said.

  I said, “Then I’m surprised you didn’t order them yourself. All that exercise must burn up a lot of sugar. Or are you no longer into that?”

  “Shorter distances, slower time, less sweat, creakier joints, but I still work out whenever I can. And you’re right, burning up sugar is one of the benefits.”

  I ordered a double espresso. Stringfellow stuck to Pellegrino. He didn’t need caffeine.

  He put a slice of pear into his mouth and chewed. “You mentioned the other day that you had a job,” he said. “Doing what?”

  I described what I did.

  He said, “You get paid for this?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much?”

  He asked for this information as if he had a natural right to know it. Why should I object? He could keep a secret, he had known me all my life. He was more to me than my father’s colleague and my mother’s lover.

  I gave him a number, less than my actual salary and bonuses but more, I was sure, than he had made in the best year he ever worked at Headquarters.

  “Impressive,” Stringfellow said. “And who exactly do you work for again?”

  I told him the venture capitalist’s name.

  “Rings no bells,” Stringfellow said. “Who is he?”

  “He’s a venture capitalist.”

  “Where does the money come from?”

  “Capitalistic ventures, I guess.”

  “You guess? You checked him out, of course. What did you find out?”

  “I Googled him. Sixty-five entries, all of which confirmed his story.”

  “What kind of entries?”

  “Mentions in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times about deals he was involved in. He says he went to Yale, and sure enough, he’s listed on the rolls as an alumnus. Ezra Stiles College, class of ‘86, economics major with a minor in Japanese.”

  Stringfellow said, “And he just appeared out of the blue and said he wanted to pay you all that money to run errands?”

  “You could say that. He was introduced by a professor we both had. The professor vouched for him.”

  “Which professor?”

  “Maude Fisk, the Arabist.”

  “Don’t know her, either. After my time. You’re not worried that you might be working unwittingly for the Saudi intelligence service or the Mossad or that this man of mystery finances terrorist operations?”

  I said, “Let me ask you a question. Why are you asking me these questions?”

  “Professional habit,” Stringfellow replied. “Avuncular concern. To postpone talking about your father. Also because I like asking questions better than I like answering them.”

  “Are we here to talk about my father?”

  “Aren’t we?”

  “There’s not much to be said about him I haven’t already heard. I know how he was and what he is said to have done and what the consequences were.”

  “He did it up brown, all right. You think he got what was coming to him?”

  “I think he got screwed. But it’s over. He’s ashes. There aren’t twenty people left in the world who would recognize his name if they read it on his niche in the columbarium.”

  “You’re not going to brief your kids, supposing you have any?”

  “No, and no.”

  This was profoundly misleading, but lies are the truth of spies, and in every way that mattered, I was already an operative in the field, laying the groundwork for an operation that might take twenty-five years to bear fruit. By that time, of course, the people on whom I was planning to take my revenge would be gone and forgotten, but it was the institution I wanted to shatter.

  This was a new thought. It made me smile to myself.

  Stringfellow said, “What’s so funny?”

  “Just thinking of Father.”

  “You learned to like him, then?”

  “I always did.”

  “Really? You didn’t seem to like him all that much when you were a kid.”

  As if he had just hooked me up to a polygraph, Headquarters’s tool of tools, he watched for a reaction.

  When none emerged, Stringfellow said, “He and I had a funny sort of relationship. I liked him well enough, and I think he may have thought I was all right, but that warped sense of humor of his was a problem. You couldn’t penetrate it. It was his psychological hiding place. That was true even when he was fourteen.”

  And until the day he died, I thought.

  “Your mother talked about that,” Stringfellow said. “She—”

  I showed him my palm. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather not talk to you about my mother.”

  This turned the tables. Stringfellow looked as if he had just walked full tilt into a plate glass door. He shut up and gave me a look of surprise.

  I knew. He had been caught in the act by a child. He hadn’t expected this.

  T
he next few minutes were wordless. I paid the check. We made our way outside. The moment we emerged from the refrigerated restaurant into the sweltering Washington day, our clothes began to absorb—suck—the humidity.

  Stringfellow said, “Are you still an Orioles fan?”

  “I guess so, but I can’t tell the new players without a scorecard. I lost touch with the team while I was abroad.”

  “That happens. They’ll be in town, playing the Nats in an interleague game on Sunday. I have a couple of tickets behind the third-base dugout. Want to join me?”

  “Gladly.”

  He fished a ticket from his coat pocket and handed it to me. “See you there, game starts at one o’clock. And, oh, we’ll be joined by another guy. An admirer of your father’s.”

  The ball was rolling.

  4

  On the day of the game the venture capitalist phoned at six in the morning and asked me to meet a client at a golf resort in West Virginia.

  “Take your clubs,” he said. “Tee time is eleven o’clock. Lunch afterward. Shortish, stocky fellow, Mediterranean looks, call him Karim. You won’t have to let him win.”

  “Any particular topic of conversation?”

  “He’ll fill you in.”

  It was a four-hour drive from Washington to the resort. I left regrets on Bill Stringfellow’s voice mail and was on my way in twenty minutes, golf clubs and spikes in the trunk, cup of coffee in my left hand, NPR’s Morning Edition on the radio. In the dappled morning light the city, wrapped in a light mist, looked more beautiful than it really was.

  Karim turned out to be an unsmiling Iranian with cold brown eyes and a dark blue chin. He wore a white visor and shirt that made the stubble more noticeable. He shook my hand, looked me straight in the eye and nodded, as if my face matched a face he had seen in photographs. For the first five minutes he spoke native American English. After we teed off and were alone, he switched to Farsi and, when I spoke the language, became more genial. He made small talk about the shots we made or didn’t make and the magnificent course, which had been designed with people who could afford the heavy greens fees in mind. He paid me no compliments on my fluency, unless simply talking to me as if I were a native speaker could be considered a nod of approval.

  We played nine holes. He was a very good golfer. We had bet a dollar a stroke, and after nine holes I paid my debt.

  He took the twenty-dollar bill. This was six dollars more than I owed him but he offered no change. Now that we were no longer alone, he switched back to English.

  “If you don’t mind, we’ll have lunch in my room,” he said.

  A table was already set—cold soup, grilled salmon, and salad. No alcohol, no dessert. Like Bill Stringfellow, Karim was a businesslike eater—no conversation. Evidently he had got the pleasantries out of the way on the fairway.

  Karim poured the coffee, thin, bitter, scalding-hot American stuff, and as we drank it he produced a thin canvas briefcase from behind a sofa cushion. He extracted the six one-dollar bills he owed me and handed them to me along with a sheet of paper folded in quarters and a pen. He handed both to me, dollars with one hand, paper and pen with the other.

  I unfolded the paper. It was a secrecy agreement. In the lingo, it was sterile—no letterhead, no hint of exactly whose secrets I was, by signing it, promising never to divulge to anyone, under any circumstances, under penalty of perjury and other more punitive federal laws.

  Karim said, “If you’ll sign that paper, we can get down to the business at hand.”

  I signed it.

  Karim put the document back into the briefcase and withdrew a blue-backed legal document.

  He said, “Read this carefully, please. Twice. Take your time. Then we’ll talk. Please hold the questions until after you’ve read it.”

  He moved to another chair and opened a copy of the Washington Post.

  The blue-backed document was, as I had surmised, a contract of employment. No one had ever described such a contract to me, but as a little spy at my parents’ parties and barbecues I had overheard enough so that its appearance and contents and the manner in which it had been rendered came as no surprise.

  The contract was addressed, as if it were a letter, to Mr. Randolph A. Sinclair. That is not my name, but I knew, too, that it was the pseudonym—”funny name”—by which I would be identified in top secret files, and with which I would sign this contract and all official internal documents throughout the career that was being offered to me.

  The terms were simple and clear. I would do as I was told, go where I was sent, and keep the secrets I was entrusted with. I could be fired with or without cause at any time without notice or explanation. These were the essentials. There was also a certain amount of boilerplate, but no more than any contract contains. I would be deemed to have reported for duty by signing the contract. My starting salary would be that of a Step 5 GS-13, the civil service grade that corresponds to the military rank of lieutenant-colonel—the same as Father’s before he was busted to GS-11. The salary was significantly less than I was now being paid, but there would be allowances, mostly tax free, that would narrow the gap.

  I said, “What will I be doing, exactly?”

  “It’s impossible to predict,” Karim said. “As your contract states, whatever is required.”

  “Where will I be doing this?”

  “Wherever you’re needed.”

  “Inside or outside?”

  “An insider on the outside for the time being. You’ll have too much rank, given your age and experience, to work at Headquarters. We can hardly start you off as a deputy branch chief.”

  “This says I start immediately. I don’t have a security clearance.”

  “But you do. You’ll have to be polygraphed before your employment becomes official, but that’s a formality. You’ll do that in the next room before you leave here. It’s like an electrocardiogram.”

  “Why are you interested in me? And why are you paying me so much money?”

  “Your qualifications, the job you did for Jeffrey.”

  Jeffrey was the venture capitalist’s name.

  “But actually for Headquarters?”

  No answer.

  I said, “You do know who my father was?”

  Karim was prepared for this question.

  He said, “We’re not hiring your father.”

  “How can his reputation not enter into it?”

  Karim looked at me without expression, wordlessly, for a long moment. Why was I arguing against my own interests?

  Finally he said, “If you sign this contract, your life starts over on Monday. If you don’t, you’ll be unemployed. We won’t bother you again.”

  “What exactly will happen on Monday if I sign?”

  “You will be collected at seven-thirty A.M. in front of Zorba’s Café—you know where it is—by a man in a gray Toyota Corolla with Maryland plates. Take a suitcase—one suit or blazer and dress trousers, a week’s worth of casual clothes, a rain jacket, a sweater, walking shoes. The driver will roll down the window and say, ‘Top of the mornin’, George, climb in.’ You will respond, ‘You’re right on time, Harold, let’s hit the highway.’”

  Karim got up and knocked on the door that led to the next room. The polygraph operator, a fiftyish fellow in jeans who looked like he had tucked a medicine ball under his T-shirt, opened the door. He hooked me up to his machine and tonelessly asked me the questions you might expect him to ask. Was I a traitor, a thief, did I use illegal drugs, did I ever get drunk, how often did I masturbate and did I watch pornography while I did it? Had I ever committed murder, rape, or sexually molested a child or an animal? Since none of these was the right question—how could it be?—I answered truthfully. The whole process was as painless as Karim had suggested it would be.

  Apparently I passed, because I signed the contract moments after I returned to Karim’s room.

  Karim administered the oath. Before he did so, he said, “This is not an oath to an abstraction
. It is a promise, sacred and irrevocable, to human beings who will entrust you with their lives, their families, their reputations. Bear that always in mind.”

  I had never taken oaths seriously. In the past, I knew, they had led to a lot of mischief. I raised my right hand and repeated the words of the oath. They were simple and written in such a way that they could not possibly be misunderstood. We shook on it.

  As I closed the door behind me I was shaking hands with myself. Against all odds I had done what I had set out to do, and it had been a walk in the park, requiring nothing but a straight face and my signature. My father’s friends had made this happen. What other explanation could there be? I didn’t speculate on their reasons. I was in, as I had wanted to be. That’s all I needed to know.

  But was it?

  After I had driven a hundred miles in a euphoric daze, I felt the body punch of reality. What had I done? I stopped the car and got out. It was a bright midsummer day, so hot that the view of the Blue Ridge Mountains was slightly blurred by the overheated air. A tamed landscape, picture-book fields of crops in the near distance, green forest beyond, lay between the mountains and me.

  I was all alone in the rest area, no sound to be heard, no other human being or dwelling to be seen. A wave of anxiety broke over me. For a long moment, as if I were in fact underwater, I could not breathe. I saw myself signing the contract, smelled the ink, heard the scratch of the pen. Good God, what had I done in the grip of exaltation? I didn’t really know. Had I signed up with Headquarters, as I had believed, and thereby hammered the first nail into the coffin I planned to build for it, or had I walked into a trap from which I would never escape? Would the gray Toyota Corolla that was going to pick me up in front of Zorba’s Café the next morning bright and early carry me a mile closer to my revenge, or render me into the hands of torturers who awaited me at some black site in Turkey or Egypt or Afghanistan?