‘Hi, Billy. I haven’t forgotten the party, if that’s what’
‘Your sister wouldn’t let you, John-Boy.’
‘I remember her birthday, anyway.’
‘Sure. Say, is that the second or third martini?’
Lock smiled. ‘So you guessed. But it’s the first.’
‘OK. Look, Beth — me, too — we want you to come out to the house as soon as you can — there’s nothing wrong, by the way.
We just want to see something of you before the guests arrive.
So, drink up fast and get over here. Beth’s orders.’
‘Right. Thanks, Billy.’ He slipped the cellular phone into his topcoat. At once, a hand fell on his shoulder, its grip almost immediately doubtful, as if the hand’s owner wondered whether he would be recognized.
‘John Lock! This still your favourite watering-hole?’ The man was taller than Lock, even when he hitched himself onto the adjacent barstool. Thicker-set and somehow more loosely arranged. Or designed for activity no longer undertaken. ‘I haven’t seen you around here lately.’
‘Bob. Good to see you, man!’ The lobby bar was beginning to crowd with office workers and government people. Bob Kauffman was Company — the other government. ‘How’re things on the farm?’
‘I’m still working.’ A shrug. Bob Kauffman had been a senior case officer in the field. Reagan, Gorbachev and Thatcher lately, Yeltsin and Clinton and Major — had foreclosed on him like realtors, just as on most of his breed. ‘Jeez, I wish State would take me on like they did you. Lucky sonofabitch.’ It was said entirely without resentment. ‘Maybe then I could get away from the sour smell of guys waiting and wondering, kicking their heels … This administration’s gonna dump the Company, man, like it was politically non-correct!’ He clicked his fingers and a bourbon on the rocks appeared magically. ‘Unless you’re a desk-jock, an image analyser or a computer whizz — or you recommend we da nothing about the world — forget it!’ He swallowed at his drink.
Lock, smiling, murmured: ‘I guess things are tight all round.
I’ve just been confined to my desk myself, though I’m not complaining.
What have they gotten you doing. Bob?’
‘When I’m not being bored out of my skull in meetings and committees, I ride shotgun on a bunch of college kids and their computers. Middle East stuff mainly — the ayatollahs and the rest of the bandits. You know the kind of thing-‘ He shrugged dismissively. ‘I’m like their grandfathers. A dinosaur.
You?’
Lock studied their images in the mirror. Kauffman seemed, at that moment, like an unwelcome drunk narrating his history.
And, as he had described himself, out of time and place. Lock’s own slimmer, dark-haired, more youthful form stared back at him, looking like the future, just as Kauffman represented the past gone to seed. Loose-jowled, disgruntled, grey-eyed, while he appeared sleeker, more tanned, like a business executive watching the world from behind sharp blue eyes.
‘It’s mainly trade, investment, that kind of thing.’
‘But you’re still hanging around the old places, the old crowd.’
Kauffman made the Cold War seem like a college fraternity, viewed all the more romantically with twenty-twenty hindsight.
‘The nearest I get to the old action is when my college boys discover our old friends have sold a bunch of tanks or missiles to the ayatollahs. Or a scientist-‘ He grinned sourly. A second bourbon had appeared in front of him, another martini near Lock’s hand.
‘Sell a scientist?’ he murmured to humour Kauffman. He’d heard other, more substantiated rumours echoing around State, and during his own travels in Russia. Scientists were going south and east, a few west. The poorly paid bastards were dribbling out of the former Soviet Union. Bui it wasn’t wholesale, they weren’t shipping them out like books or machine parts.
‘Some crazy theory. College boys! They think our old friends are selling brains now, to whoever will buy. People. All those redundant atom guys, germ warfare experts, you know. Jeez, you wonder why I get nostalgic for Afghanistan or Europe even
‘Nam?’ His glass was empty again. ‘Let me buy you another, John — very dry martini, right?’ Lock paused, his eyes halfway to his watch, listening to the warmth of two dozen conversations on the eternally fascinating subject — power. Hillary’s latest dressing-down of a senior insider, the snub of a meagre Clinton working lunch, the President’s ratings slump, the situation in obliterated Bosnia, those asshole Europeans … The politics of power and the power of politics. It would be churlish to reject Bob Kauffman’s offer. He was the kid with his nose pressed up against this most wonderful of candy-stores. It would be arrogant to demonstrate to him how far outside he was.
Thanks, Bob. Though I must watch the time.’
Kauffman ordered the drinks. The occasional tourist conversation was hemmed in securely by the political gossip. Lock felt comfortable within those verbal walls, just as Kauffman felt shut out.
‘Your college boys are exaggerating. There have been some disappearances — a trickle, no more. The Russians have a very real interest in keeping their top guys at home, and happy.’ He grinned. ‘Look, Bob, a job at State these days is just as much out of the old line. I get to study Russian economics.’
‘Is there Russian economics?’
They both laughed at the joke.
‘What have they turned you into — a salesman or an insurance assessor?’
‘A little of both.’
‘Some brave new world order, uh? Like letting the Bosnian Moslems go down the tubes. The old guy with the Grecian 2000 wouldn’t have done that. Cheers.’ Their conversation rapidly became desultory, as if they were both misplaced among the political chatterers. Lock occasionally waved to people he knew from State and other departments of government. Kauffman evidently wanted to enlist his aid, solicit information and maybe introductions; yet knowing all the time that the State Department would have no interest in a semiredundant CIA case officer. Meanwhile, the names of the great and the good, their deeds and misdeeds, flew about them like paper missiles.
Kauffman became progressively maudlin. Instead of Yanks Go Home, the walls of the world told the spies of the world they were surplus to requirements. Not wanted on voyage. And the Clinton administration told them, with equal certainty, that the w6rld was no longer their playground or their policeman’s beat.
The rest of the planet was not America’s 111th Precinct, and Langley its Precinct House. Instead, the CIA headquarters was a slaveship full of bitter, displaced and betrayed men; a factory making the wrong goods in the wrong age.
Suddenly, he tired oft Kauffman and the scents of their professional past, eager to be at Beth’s birthday party. The memories of other birthdays, mostly spent apart, were easier to shrug off now. His own uncelebrated days — always bleak and snowbound, it seemed, with himself occupying an icy corridor, staring through tall windows at the white fields of the expensive private school. Their years of separation had now thankfully come to an end. Unheated dormitories and the glad escape of sportsfields and music from the brusque, suspicious indifference of boys who were not orphaned. He had found basketball and a singing voice and a fascination with musical scores rather than the printed pages into which Beth, in her isolation, had retreated. She’d discovered books — any books, all books.
He smiled to himself. He had always suspected that her own horror stories of lonely birthdays were fictitious, invented to give him sympathy. She had always generated a strong magnetic field that attracted other people, bound them in orbits of friendship.
She’d never have been alone on any of her birthdays. Just like this one.