She hesitated. He noticed but pretended not to.
“I mean, there are just tens of thousands — more than a million in total that we are aware of — men and women languishing in rotten jails all over the world, their crime being dissent or political differences. We don’t lobby for their release. We do something about it.” She said the last flatly and it carried an edge of menace.
“Such as,” he said. Still politely.
She was the eager student who stayed after class to talk about world problems and was half in love with the professor. Who joined the Peace Corps. Who protested the war in the streets. Who never grew old. Who never chipped the cup.
She went on: “You’d think of England — the font of democratic ideals—”
The professor in him corrected: Ancient Athens. He did not say it.
“It’s been six years since internment and they still have prisoners who have never been tried or even formally charged—”
He frowned. Ireland again. He did not want to get into this or discuss August, 1971, when British soldiers had gone from house to house and arrested hundreds of suspected IRA sympathizers in Belfast and Londonderry. The British had locked the men on boats in Belfast’s harbor and kept them incommunicado, without charge, while they tortured them. He knew about it as a professional in the world of information; knew about it the way someone knows about his field but does not concern himself with every part of it.
He noticed her hands. She gestured like a man.
“You must know about the efforts to free those men—”
Protests. Rallies. He had put them out of his mind a long time ago. He was bored by it all, by rhetoric and empty passion.
“Our people are in negotiation right now with the justice ministry and the Northern Ireland office to do just that. To get the remaining interred freed. And — I can tell you. We are making real progress. Not the kind you hold press conferences about but real progress. The hell with publicity anyway.”
Did she believe that? He saw a clerk in the justice ministry, polite, offering tea, listening, making notes, nodding his head. Sympathetic to all they said, like Hastings to O’Neill. Did she believe it meant anything to the British government now?
But she was so intense. There was something a bit frightening about her intensity, which he found attractive. He suddenly wished she would stop talking and just sit with him in the darkness looking at the old travelogue about Asia and about being young.
He did not remember her, but she remembered him. It was almost enough, almost a perfect imitation of friendship. As close as Devereaux had gotten in years.
“I’m happy to see a friend, Elizabeth,” he said at last, pronouncing her name formally.
“And what are you doing?” she demanded gaily.
“On my way through. To home. From Thailand,” he lied. “Doing stories for Central Press Service.”
“Oh, God,” she said and did not laugh now. “It is good to see you.” The warmth of her words would have alarmed Devereaux in New York. But there was so little warmth in England, so little comfort. “I mean, you were the reason I got into all this, do you know that? You’re… you were my beginning—”
She impulsively grabbed his hand. And held it.
“I was so vapid, so drifting. I can’t believe myself then.”
He was glad she held his hand.
“For a long time after Kennedy was killed, I felt it was all uphill — but there were so many just like us who never gave up—”
Not us. My cup is cracked; I’ve thrown it away.
“All those kids in Chicago—”
He felt uncomfortable. He wanted Elizabeth to hold his hand and to share her warmth and energy. And yet he felt the little corners of coldness in himself react against her, against what she said. He would have liked to tell her what he felt about “those kids” in Chicago in 1968 and 1969 and their rhetoric and their minor rebellion which masked their own private fears. Tell her about the faces in Asia then, while caviar radicalism reigned in Chicago. About blacks and hillbilly whites he saw, gaunt and tired and just as frightened, but without the wealth or leisure to understand that it was not their war either—
“Well, I just never gave up, you know? That’s why I’m here now. Look at me — past thirty and still a radical, still a bomb-thrower.” She laughed at herself.
“Good,” he said. Maybe that was wrong. Her smile faded. He found it difficult to small-talk anymore. With anyone. He had forgotten the little bridges of words that did not lead anywhere.
“I didn’t know you were with the media—”
He hated that word.
“When you left Columbia to take a government job, I remember I wanted to thank you. After I came back I was in New York, but you were gone. I couldn’t believe it — you were a great teacher. Central Press?”
Never heard of it, I’ll bet, said Devereaux to himself.
“Tell me, what do you do? What did you do? For the government?”
Did. Do. Became a listener, Elizabeth. A professional betrayer of secrets of others. A friend, an enemy. A spy, Elizabeth. I killed nine men and arranged the deaths of others, but that was strictly professional. Betrayed a fat Englishman on a Greek island. Professionally. He was killed, though, much later.
He blinked then and warned the self-pity away; he told the coldness in him to stay in its dark corner. He would not give in to these things, even if he was tired and alone.
“Dull things,” he said at last. He thought his voice sounded a little stagy. “But an opportunity came from the State Department to study Cambodian culture and I took it. When the war came along — I found myself stringing for a few magazines and then I fell into this Central Press Service. There’s not much to say — I’ve been dabbling for a long time, treating everything like a hobby, and then one day I looked up and found myself a forty-three-year-old dabbler—”
No, that was not what he should have said; but she didn’t seem to hear him.
“And you still love Asia so much,” she said. She invested the remark with such enthusiasm that he could not hide it in himself; he let her see, by a gesture, by the color of his eyes, that it was true: He did still love the East of the world.
“I wish I had something like that,” she said. He looked up, surprised by her tone; the remark, so banal, sounded true.
Or was he only imagining it for the sake of his own self-pity?
“Staying here?” He hated fake-casual the way he asked it.
She pretended not to notice. “Not here.” She smiled. “Too grand for our organization — we have a bank of rooms at the Shelbourne Arms. It’s a decent enough place. I suppose you’re staying here—”
“It was the first place—” He realized that he was apologizing. She smiled.
“Would you like a drink?”
“No,” she said. “I’m too tired.” Her signal to leave? But she did not leave, did not release his hand. Another signal. He was flattered by her attention. He realized again he was not handling it very well. So he did not say anything further.
She looked at him.
Speak. “Elizabeth, I would like to say all the right things,” he said. “But it’s impossible because I don’t seem to have the gift for small talk anymore. Or seduction.” He tried a smile at the last.
The smile seemed to give a lie to the rest of his face, to the cold eyes and the flinty features. For a moment, the smile said he was no longer so certain.
He had been very sure of himself at Columbia. In a way, it had made him oddly off-putting. The world is too bound up in its own uncertainty to very much like a winner, Elizabeth thought, returning his smile, making it truer.