“I don’t smoke.”
“The only thing lacking in the image, you’re going to have to consider it.” She smiled again and touched his hand with affection. “But that’s not what I mean.” The gesture of affection so uncalculated, warmed him. He did not know what to say with her; he had not bantered with a woman for a long time.
“Foley,” he said, because he did not know what else to say. “Died of LSD.”
“So the rumors were right. This town is positively jittery on the subject of bizarre religious experiments.”
“Coming on the heels of that ‘incident,’ ” Devereaux said. “The miracle.”
“The miracle,” she repeated. “I don’t believe this is happening except I’m beginning to believe everything. Nothing is as bizarre as the truth.” She stopped eating and stared at him. “When those black children were murdered in Atlanta. And a bunch of thugs called the Guardian Angels came down from New York to teach the kids of Atlanta how to protect themselves. And then a bunch of Hollywood stars came out to do a concert, for God’s sake. Everything becomes bizarre.”
“Only when it gets too big to handle on a rational level,” Devereaux said. “It’s the human mechanism that allows the spring to unwind quickly without snapping. Otherwise, we would all go crazy.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s it exactly. And now you tell me Foley was taking LSD.”
“No. I didn’t say that.”
She waited.
He picked up his cup of black coffee and sipped it. He put it down and the waitress came over and filled it to the brim again. He fingered the handle of the heavy cup and stared at the saucer. What he would say now would be difficult; he would have to be on guard.
“He was from the Vatican,” Devereaux began. “He came here for some reason. Probably to oversee Tunney, to question him. Tunney had already been questioned by the CIA.”
“What are you saying?”
“Foley had LSD in him. It didn’t mean he took it.”
“You think that that cook, Mrs. Jones, in the rectory, gave it to him in his cookies?”
Devereaux said nothing.
“This is fantastic,” she said. “Like a spy novel. I read in Gordon Liddy’s book that the CIA types were into dosing people with drugs to make them do crazy things—”
Devereaux looked up, sharply. “Why does it have to be the CIA?”
“What do you mean?”
Dangerous ground, he cautioned himself. He backed away from it. “Drug dealers do it all the time. And pimps dose their girls with drugs, to control them sometimes, to kill them other times.”
She stared at him and saw no sense of horror in him at what he had just said. For the first time, he frightened her and she felt chilled.
“What does the coroner’s report conclude?”
“Nothing. Except that there was LSD in the body. And that he died by drowning.” He opened a sheet of paper and passed it to her.
“How did you get it?”
“It wasn’t so difficult.”
She glanced at it. “You’re saying someone killed Foley?”
“It’s possible.”
“Why?”
“Because he knew too much.”
“What?”
“Or because he was the wrong man.” She stared at him.
“Do you see, Rita?” His voice had resumed a low quality, a surging flatness that made the words drift along without individual emphasis on them. “Tunney comes out of Asia. That is bizarre to begin with. The CIA locks him up. Another oddity. He is released here and a man from Rome comes to shut him up or find out what he knows, or something. Third oddity in the chain. And then the real wild card — a woman claims to have been the recipient of a miraculous touch from our missionary. Finally, the man from Rome is killed. Now, are all the oddities connected? If you assume they are, then you have to start looking at all that’s happened not as a bizarre series of strange and singular random events but as parts of a pattern.”
“The reasoning behind all conspiracy theories,” Rita said.
“Yes. But just because so many of them are wrong, don’t think conspiracies don’t exist.”
She was silent for a moment. “You gave me this story. This is a good story. Why?”
“You mean, why don’t I steal it?”
“Yes. Something like that.”
“You said it yourself. I’m an old-fashioned type.”
“That could make you a bad reporter.”
“No. Only a tired one.” His voice reflected a weariness that was not a lie or part of his disguise to her. He was tired, he realized, not because he had awakened again at three in the morning but because of the lies and the truths he had given her. The truths exhausted him; lies and truths were becoming mixed in his mind.
Like Denisov’s lies to him. Denisov was his mirror; he saw Denisov and saw himself; heard him and heard himself.
“Maybe it’s more than being tired,” she said, touching his hand again. “Maybe it is just the honorable thing.”
“A man of honor,” Devereaux said, mocking himself.
“Yes.”
“Not honor,” he said. “Part of my line, like plying you with food.” Truths in the lies again, he realized.
“When this is done.” She hesitated. “We’re going to see each other again, aren’t we?”
“You mean in Washington? When you go back to Kaiser? You’re going back to work for him?”
“No. I may go back to D.C. but not to Kaiser. I can’t do that.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because that’s finished,” she said, her words final and hard. “We split. He let me go and it was bad, the way it happened between us.”
“But you’ve done stories for him here—”
“Freelance. I work for myself now. I’ll freelance for the devil and that’s different, that’s not working for someone. Besides, I have to get the story out, I need an outlet. But I couldn’t work for him again.”
“You say it like someone ending a friendship. Or a love affair.”
Spoken softly.
She glanced up at him and shook her head. “We were friends is all. Yes. We were friends. I liked him and I still do maybe, he taught me so many things. But that’s all past now. It turns out to be something like trust. When you work for someone, it’s part of the trust. If one side betrays the other, then you can’t go back and shake hands later and say you didn’t mean it.”
“How did he betray you?”
“He stopped me. I don’t know why but he lied to me, about this story. I kept feeling that he didn’t want me to go on it, not because he thought it was a waste of time — it was because he knew there was something here, something he didn’t want me to know. But he wouldn’t tell me. It was lying, not telling me. The trust breaks and you can’t put it back together again.”
The words wounded him.
Rita looked at his face and took his hand. She saw a mark of pain in his gray eyes and imagined it was pity for her.
“Don’t worry,” Rita said. “I’ll get by all right. Especially after all this down here. This is a hell of a story. And when I get the journal—”
The gray eyes changed; they were cold again, unfathomable, the Arctic Ocean stretching to infinity. “You’re going to get it.”
“Sure. I know it.”
“The confidence of youth.”
“Watch me.”
“I’ll watch you, Rita.”
“It must be something. Something in that journal, something worth having, something worth all this.”
“You mean Foley’s murder.”
“You say it’s murder.”
“Yes. Just what I say,” Devereaux said.
“Dev.” She held his hand tightly across the tabletop. “I trust you. There are things I can tell you I wouldn’t — well, I would have told Kaiser. Before. But I can tell you.”