There it is, then. “You’re Israeli,” I said. “Mossad.”
She looked away and cocked her head slightly as though considering what I had said, meditating on it. Then she said, “What difference does it make who I am, who I’m with? From your perspective, none.”
She wasn’t going to tell me, I’d been wrong about that. Or maybe she already had told me, in her own oblique way, and I’d missed it. I wasn’t sure.
She took a sip of the Laphroaig and went on. “But from my perspective, your affiliations matter a great deal. The information we were able to put together on you suggested that you work for the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party. But I don’t see what interest the LDP could have in Belghazi. So I assume that, at least this time, you’re being paid by the Americans. And that concerns me.”
“Why?”
She waved her hands outward, palms to the ceiling, as if to say, Isn’t it obvious? “They’re big and factionalized,” she said, “so they’re not discreet. You have to be careful with them. You never know quite who you’re dealing with.”
“How do you mean?”
Now she put her hands on her hips, leaned back on the couch, and dropped her shoulders. The gesture read, Is he just playing dumb, or is this the genuine article? She started talking a moment later, so I figured she had decided it was #2. It shouldn’t have bothered me-on the contrary, in fact-but it did, a little. I assuaged my pride by reminding myself that it’s generally good to be underestimated.
“Did they explain to you why they want Belghazi removed?” she asked.
“They did.”
“Did you believe them?”
I shrugged. “I was barely listening.”
She laughed. “They must have told you about his arms networks, though, terrorists, fundamentalist group connections, blah, blah, blah.”
The disparaging idiom, rendered in her accented English, surprised me, and I laughed. “What, were they making it up?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No. It’s all true. And I’m sure that some parts of the U.S. government are upset over it, and might even be trying to do something about it. Some parts.”
“Meaning?”
She smiled and said, “You know, you haven’t even told me your name.”
I looked at her and said, “Call me John.”
“John, then,” she said, as though testing the sound of it.
“You were saying, ‘Some parts.’ ”
She shrugged. “Let’s just say that America is a very big place. It has a lot of competing interests. Not all of them might think Belghazi is such a bad guy.”
“Meaning?” I said again.
“Have you thought about why they want you to be ‘circumspect’ about the way you go about this particular assignment?”
“I have a general idea.”
“Well, consider this.” She leaned forward and brought her hands up, her fingers slightly splayed and her palms forward, as though framing a photograph. “Whatever faction hired you, they’re being oblique. They need deniability. Who do they need deniability from? And have you considered the position this puts you in?”
The relatively marked body language was new. I was seeing a different part of her personality, maybe a part that she ordinarily kept hidden. Interesting.
I thought for a moment. “The same position I’m always in, I would say.”
“Qualitatively, maybe,” she said, waving a hand, palm down, perhaps unconsciously erasing my point. “Quantitatively, the situation might be worse. Who do you think sent the man in the elevator?”
I paused, thinking, I half thought it was you. Instead I said, “I don’t know.”
The wave stopped and she stabbed the air with her index finger. “Correct. Any number of players could now be trying to counter you. Anyone who stands to benefit from what Belghazi does.”
Or who wants to keep him alive long enough to get access to his computer, I thought. I wondered if she was telling me all this to throw me off her scent. Or maybe she was trying to emphasize the hopelessness of my situation, to encourage me to quit. Maybe.
“I’ve always known that being in this business was a poor way to win a popularity contest,” I said.
She laughed. I picked up the bottle and refreshed first her glass, then mine.
I liked her laugh. It was an odd collection of incongruities: husky, but also sweet; womanly, in the sophistication that informed it, but somehow also girlish in its delighted timbre; spiced with a hint of irony, but one that seemed grounded more in a sense of the absurd than in sarcasm or cruelty. I smiled, feeling good, and realized I was getting a little buzzed from the whiskey.
She leaned back and took a sip, pausing with the glass under her nose. I liked that, liked that she appreciated the aroma. I did the same.
“The one thing you do know,” she said, “is that someone is on to you. Do you understand what that means for me? Someone could make the connection. And I don’t operate the way you do. I don’t have the luxury of being able to hide. To do what I need to do, I need to be close, and stay close.”
So now an appeal to sentiment. A two-pronged approach: logic, to the effect that the situation had changed and I could no longer accomplish my mission; emotion, to the effect that, if I continued to try, she would pay the price.
“I understand what you’re saying,” I told her. “But I also understand where you’re coming from. The second is what gives me pause about the first.”
It made me feel a little sad to say it. Things had been so relaxed for a while. Christ, the whiskey was getting to me. I’m not usually sentimental.
“That’s fair,” she said, nodding. “Nonetheless, what I’ve told you is accurate. Do a little digging-leaving me out of it, if you can, please-and you’ll see.”
I nodded. “The digging is already happening. Discreetly, you’re not part of it.” Not entirely true, but how my inquiry to Kanezaki might affect her was something I would think about later.
I took a sip of the Laphroaig. “Anyway, I need to figure out where this leak is coming from, so I can close it.”
“You think the problem is on your side?”
I shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the first time. I learned a long time ago that democracies are dangerous to work with. They’re hindered by all those annoying checks and balances, all that meddlesome public opinion, so they have built-in incentives to find ways of doing things off the books. Sometimes it gets a little hard to follow who you’re dealing with.”
She smiled. “Want Castro whacked? Hire the Mafia.”
I smiled back. “Sure. Or, if Congress won’t cough up the appropriations, fund the Contras through the Sultan of Brunei.”
“Or bankroll almost anything by getting the Saudis to pay for it.”
“Yeah, don’t worry, I see your point.”
She moved her hands up and down like a pedestrian trying to slow down an oncoming car, the gesture both impatient and suppliant. “Sorry to belabor it. But you have to understand, Nine-Eleven put America into a bad state of schizophrenia. The country committed itself to a ‘war on terrorism,’ but still pays billions of oil dollars to the Saudis, knowing that those dollars fund all the groups with whom America purports to be at war. Fifteen of the nineteen Nine-Eleven hijackers were Saudi, but no one wants to talk about that. Can you imagine the reaction if the hijackers had been Iranian, or North Korean? I think if America were a person, a psychiatrist would classify her as being in profound psychological denial. I don’t know how you can trust an employer like that.”
“Do you trust yours?” I asked.
She looked down. Her hands descended gently to her lap. After a moment, she said, “It’s complicated.”
“That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement.”
She sighed. “I trust their intentions. Some of the… the policies are stupid and outmoded. But I don’t have to agree with every decision to know I’m doing the right thing.”