She turned down the heat on the sauce, and together we walked to the sitting room off the kitchen, which, like every room in the house, was a mess of lumber, spackling compound buckets, copper pipes, and such, and everything covered with a fine layer of plaster dust. We sat down in the overstuffed armchairs that were protected temporarily with plastic drop cloths.
Molly and I had bought a beautiful old town house in Boston’s Back Bay, on Marlborough Street, five years ago. Beautiful, that is, on the exterior. The interior was potentially beautiful. It was the height of the market, a few months before the bottom fell out-you’d think I’d have been smarter, but like everyone else I figured real estate prices had to keep skyrocketing-and the house was what real estate ads sometimes call a “handyman’s dream.” “Roll up your sleeves,” the ads say, “and use your imagination!” The realtor didn’t call it a handyman’s dream, but then, the realtor also didn’t tell us about the arthritic plumbing, the carpenter ants, or the rotten plasterboard. People used to say in the 1980s that cocaine was God’s way of telling you you have too much money. In the 1990s, it’s a mortgage.
I got what I deserved. The renovation was an ongoing project not unlike the construction of the pyramids at Giza. One thing led to another. If you want to repair the crumbling staircase you must put in a new load-bearing wall, which necessitates… well, you get it.
At least there were no rats. I have always had a rat phobia, an irrational, uncontrollable terror of the little beasts beyond the revulsion everyone else experiences. I had ruled out several houses before this, houses Molly adored, because I was convinced I’d glimpsed the silhouette of a rat. Exterminators were out of the question; I believe that rats, like cockroaches, are fundamentally nonexterminable. They will survive us all. Every once in a while, while we were browsing in a video store, Molly would have a little fun at my expense by pulling out a cassette of the rat horror movie Willard and suggesting we rent it for the evening. Not funny.
And as if we needed more stress, we had been arguing for months about whether to have a child. Unlike the normal pattern-the woman wants one while the husband doesn’t-I wanted a kid, or several kids, and Molly vehemently didn’t. I thought it odd for a pediatrician such as she to insist that the secret of raising a kid right is not to be its parent. As she saw it, her career was just getting started, and the timing was all wrong. This always touched off the fiercest quarrels. I’d say I was willing to split the responsibilities with her equally; she’d counter that no male in the history of civilization has ever shared the child-raising duties equally. The plain fact was, I was ready to have a family-when my first wife, Laura, died, she was pregnant-and Molly wasn’t. So the arguments continued.
“We could sell Dad’s house in Alexandria,” she began.
“In this market we’d make next to nothing. And your father didn’t leave you anything. He never cared much about money.”
“Can we take out a loan?”
“Using what as collateral?”
“I can moonlight.”
“That’s not going to do it,” I said, “and you’ll just wear yourself out.”
“But what does Alexander Truslow want with you?”
What, indeed, when the world swarms with lawyers far more qualified? I didn’t want to repeat Stearns’s suspicion that Molly’s father had been murdered: in any case, that didn’t explain why Truslow wanted to sign me on. No reason to upset her further.
“I don’t like to think about why he wants me,” I said lamely. Both of us knew it had to do with my CIA background, probably with my fearsome reputation, but that still didn’t answer why, precisely.
“How was the NICU?” I asked, meaning the neonatal intensive-care unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, where, since her father’s funeral, she had been doing her rotation.
She shook her head, refusing to let me off the hook. “I want to talk about this Truslow thing,” she said. She fingered one of her curls anxiously and said, “My father and Truslow were friends. Trusted colleagues, I mean, not necessarily close personal friends. But he always liked Alex.”
“Fine,” I said. “He’s a good person. But once a spy, always a spy.”
“The same could be said for you.”
“I made a promise to you, Mol.”
“So you think Truslow wants you to do clandestine work for him?”
“I doubt it. Not at my billing rate.”
“But it involves CIA.”
“No question about that. CIA is the Corporation’s single biggest client.”
“I don’t want you doing it,” Molly said. “We talked about it already-that’s your past. You made a clean break-stay away.”
She knew how important it was to me to separate myself from the clandestine operative work that brought out the icy ruthlessness in me. “That’s my instinct, too,” I said. “But Stearns is going to make it as hard for me to say no as he possibly can.”
Now she got up and knelt on the floor facing me, her hands on my knees. “I don’t want you working for them again. You promised me that.” She was rubbing her hands back and forth on my thighs as she spoke, seducing me away, and fixed me with a beseeching stare, more inscrutable than usual “Is there anyone you can talk to about this?” she asked.
I thought for a moment, and at last said, “Ed Moore.”
Edmund Moore, who was retired from the Agency after thirty-some years, knew more about the inner workings of the CIA than just about anyone else in the world. He had been my mentor in my brief intelligence career-my “rabbi,” in intelligence argot-and he was and remained a man of rare instincts. He lived in Georgetown, in a wonderful old house, and he seemed to be busier now, since his retirement, than in his active days in the Agency: reading seemingly every biography ever published, attending meetings of CIA retirees, luncheons with old CIA cronies, testifying before Senate subcommittees, and doing a million other things I couldn’t keep track of.
“Call him,” she said.
“I’ll do better than that. If I can clear my calendar tomorrow afternoon, or the day after, I’ll fly to Washington to see him.”
“If he can spare the time to see you,” Molly said. She had begun to arouse me, no doubt her very intention, and as I leaned forward to kiss her neck, she suddenly exclaimed, “Oh, great. Now the damn puttanesca sauce is burning.”
I followed her into the kitchen, and as soon as she had turned off the burner-the sauce was now a hopeless cause-I encircled her from behind. Things were so charged between us that with a little nudge in either direction, we could be embroiled in an endless argument, or…
I kissed her right ear and made my way slowly downward, and we began to make love on the floor of the sitting room, plaster dust or no plaster dust, pausing only long enough for Molly to go find her diaphragm and put it in.
That evening I called Edmund Moore, who delightedly invited me to join him and his wife for a simple dinner at their home the next evening.
The next afternoon, having postponed three eminently postponable meetings, I caught the Delta shuttle to Washington National Airport, and as dusk began to settle over Georgetown, my taxi crossed the Key Bridge, rattled over the cobblestones of N Street, and pulled up to the wrought-iron fence in front of Edmund Moore’s town house.
THREE
Edmund Moore’s library, in which we sat after dinner, was a magnificent two-story affair lined with shelves of oak inset with cherry. The second tier was ringed with a catwalk; several library ladders rested against the first-tier cases. In the dim lighting the room seemed to glow amber. Moore had one of the finest personal libraries I had ever seen, which included an impressive collection of books about espionage and intelligence. Some of them were accounts by Soviet and East Bloc defectors, which Ed Moore had placed with American and British publishers, in the years when the CIA did such things. (Openly, anyway.) Entire bookcases were devoted to the works of Carlyle, Dickens, Ruskin. They had the look of those books you could purchase by the yard from an interior decorator to simulate the look of an old baronial library, but I knew that Ed Moore had painstakingly collected them all at auctions and in bookshops in Paris and London, and in secondhand stores and barns throughout the U.S., and no doubt had read them all, at one time or another.