“Everything feels out of balance now,” she said. Across the street a man in fatigues stood, glaring in their direction. “There are two sides. I still wonder how much of that story you told me about Hue was true? When I’m high I just take in what you say and let it flow but this morning I woke seriously wondering what I’m supposed to make of the fact that we’re together. I mean, when I’m lectured about having to go out and be Intuitive, and we break a major regulation and no one seems to care, if they know about it, and I think they do know, and then we make love and you unfold something that immediately confirms that the pills you got from some street guy are authentic and then we just wake up and pretend that nothing really happened.”
There were tears in her eyes when she turned back from the window.
“Wendy, you know I can’t really confirm that all the stuff I said last night was completely true,” he said. “And I’m not sure I know what you mean by two sides, except maybe to say that the other side might be your feelings, your gut feeling, your intuition.”
She looked up at him and smiled. “Jesus, that’s not what I’m talking about at all. Not even close. I’m trying to say I didn’t sign up for this shit. I signed up for some kind of structure, not to nurse a guy into unfolding, bit by bit. I think we kind of owe it to ourselves to figure out what our function might be as members of the organization.”
“How do you propose to do that?” he said.
“Well, if they’re aware that we’re together and haven’t stepped in, my guess would be we’re supposed to be talking openly to each other about our cases. My guess would be we’re actually here to exchange information on our cases.”
The waitress came over with the coffee. “You two want anything else? I’ve seen agents come in like you, paired up, and I’ve seen them go away and never come back, but I’ve never seen them come in and go out and come in again like you two.”
“What does that mean?” Wendy said.
“It means you’d better work this out, whatever it is.”
“Who sent you to talk to us?” Singleton said. “Did Klein send you here?”
“Don’t get conspiratorial on me,” the waitress said. “I get enough of that around here. I just saw the two of you, and I saw her crying, and I came over to give you a word. Take it or leave it. I’ve seen the likes of you come and go. I’ve seen you crying. I’ve seen folks come in with clean-cut uniforms, enfolded and cured, and then come back a few months later looking like rejects from the reject pile.”
She ripped the check off the pad and slapped it on the table.
“What was that?” Wendy said when she was gone.
“That was the voice of wisdom, or else the voice of a secret operative who is trying to nudge us into a certain modality.”
“Don’t you think it’s obvious?” Wendy said.
“In what way?”
“In the way of all of these things. If she’s not part of some grand conspiracy denying she’s in a conspiracy, at least she knows something we don’t know.”
“Everyone knows something we don’t know.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Look,” Singleton said. “Again, I’m sure that the flash I got of the Chaplain had to do with Hue. I got a taste of dust — and I don’t think I’m making it up — of city dust. I can only say that it’s an educated guess.”
Music came on the jukebox, and the noise of the diner seemed to lower to let it in. The man across the street was gone.
“I think we both know that we’re on the same case,” she said. “I think that’s been this unspoken thing between us for weeks now and that we’ve been gaming each other — and enjoying it — from about the second or third day, at least until that time you unfolded Rake’s image and saw the look on my face in the car, because I remember you gave me a wink, or maybe not a wink but you indicated that you saw me respond to Rake’s name.”
“You’re projecting, Wendy. I didn’t see you respond to me when I said his name, but I remember you didn’t seem to respond at all and that was weird, so yeah, yeah, yeah, OK, I think we can both agree that we’re making this big revelation. I mean talking here, speaking what has been unspoken and all of that, but to hear you say you’re on Rake’s case shines a light on the fact that we’re both now articulating the fact out loud, right here in the old fucking coffee joint.”
“We’ve been working together and knowing it but not openly admitting it. Keeping that tension tense.”
“And when I mentioned Rake to you in the car, when I let that out, you knew for sure but I didn’t really know for sure, so for the last few weeks it’s been a listing ship of intuitive blah blah blah,” he said. “For the last few weeks I’ve been trying to stay within the bounds of the Credo, or whatever, for your sake, thinking you were staying in the bounds — verbally, I mean — for my sake. You were waiting for me to break, and I was following your lead, waiting for you.”
“So if we’re on the same case, then you have to ponder why Klein wouldn’t care, or at least act like he doesn’t know, or if he does know and knows I know, then at least put on a pretense of not knowing,” Wendy said. “I’d say they knew all along, from the start. I’d say they have some theory that makes sense, some idea of mirroring two trainees after an assessment of their histories — mine with my father, listening to him go on about the war, and then the fact that my boyfriend came back with his legs missing.”
She lit a cigarette, nodded at the waitress, and sat back. “She’s seen couples like us come in and out over the last two years.”
MAPS
The air-conditioning was down, the vents quiet, and Klein, sweating, paused to wipe his face with a handkerchief, holding it by the corners in an unusually dainty gesture, dabbing his brow first and then his cheeks and finally his chin as he briefed Singleton on new sightings: a man found dead in a ditch north of the bridge, up along the straits, with smears of blood similar to ones Rake liked to leave but different enough, he stressed, to know, if you knew these things, that it was fraudulent. Another couple murdered, in their farmhouse near Alpena, and again the cops called the Liaison and said they were sure as all hell it was the mark of a failed enfold because there was blood on the walls, smeared finger painting, and again a residual smell of a young woman’s perfume. But Klein insisted that they had it wrong, they were simply overflowing with cases and were passing the buck.
“I have a feeling,” he said, “that you think my passing the buck back to the local law enforcement on these new cases might have something to do with the rumor that you might’ve heard about Rake being dead. But I want you to know that even if the rumor is confirmed by Intelligence — and I assure you it will be — I’m not going to buy it. I’ve seen too many fakes, and there’s nobody better at faking than a soldier like Rake, who from what we do know saw a lot of action — of course we aren’t privy to the facts, the report that came from upstairs is heavily redacted — and is versed in the art of deception, particularly a type of self-deception. Let me give you an example,” he said. He packed his pipe, took a few draws, wiped his brow on his sleeve, and then began to talk about an old friend of his at West Point who had made a study of the shooting habits of men in combat in Korea and found that in a huge number of cases men shot away from the target, because killing another human isn’t all that easy. He had concluded that many soldiers deluded themselves into thinking they aimed for and struck the target, whereas their internal governing systems — he stressed that he abhorred the word subconscious—guided them away from the target.