“I assume this is your first trip to Paris.”
“And there’s where you would be wrong.”
“Now you’re shittin’ me.”
“Why, because I ordered a cheeseburger and a Coke?”
“Among other things, yeah.”
“My senior-class trip was a week in Paris and Amsterdam. In college, the end of my sophomore year, my parents took me to France for a month.” At what she knew must be the look on her face, Buchanan added, “It was an attempt at breaking up the relationship I was in at the time.”
“It’s not that. I’m trying to process the thought of you in college.”
“Wow, anyone ever tell you what a laugh riot you are?”
“Did it work—your parents’ plan?”
Buchanan shook his head. “The second I was back in the US, I knocked her up. We were married by the end of the summer.”
“How romantic.”
“Hey.” Buchanan shrugged.
“That why you enlisted, support your new family?”
“More or less. Heidi’s dad owned a bunch of McDonald’s; for the first six months of our marriage, I tried to assistant manage one of them.”
“With your people skills, that must have been a match made in heaven.”
The retort forming on Buchanan’s lips was cut short by the reappearance of their waiter, encumbered with their drinks and their food. He set their plates before them with a madame and m’sieu, then, as he was distributing their drinks, said, “Everything is okay? Зa va?”
“Oui,” Vasquez said. “C’est bon. Merзi.”
With the slightest of bows, the waiter left them to their food.
While Buchanan worked his hands around his cheeseburger, Vasquez said, “I don’t think I realized you were married.”
“Were,” Buchanan said. “She wasn’t happy about my deploying in the first place, and when the shit hit the fan . . .” He bit into the burger. Through a mouthful of bun and meat, he said, “The court-martial was the excuse she needed. Couldn’t handle the shame, she said. The humiliation of being married to one of the guards who’d tortured an innocent man to death. What kind of role model would I be for our son?
“I tried—I tried to tell her it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t that—you know what I’m talking about.”
Vasquez studied her neatly folded crкpe. “Yeah.” Mr. White had favored a flint knife for what he called the delicate work.
“If that’s what she wants, fine, fuck her. But she made it so I can’t see my son. The second she decided we were splitting up, there was her dad with money for a lawyer. I get a call from this asshole—this is right in the middle of the court-martial—and he tells me Heidi’s filing for divorce—no surprise—and they’re going to make it easy for me: no alimony, no child support, nothing. The only catch is, I have to sign away all my rights to Sam. If I don’t, they’re fully prepared to go to court, and how do I like my chances in front of a judge? What choice did I have?”
Vasquez tasted her coffee. She saw her mother, holding open the front door for her, unable to meet her eyes.
“Bad enough about that poor bastard who died—what was his name? If there’s one thing you’d think I’d know . . .”
“Mahbub Ali,” Vasquez said. What kind of a person are you? her father had shouted. What kind of person is part of such things?
“Mahbub Ali,” Buchanan said. “Bad enough what happened to him; I just wish I’d known what was happening to the rest of us, as well.”
They ate the rest of their meal in silence. When the waiter returned to ask if they wanted dessert, they declined.
—
II
Vasquez had compiled a list of reasons for crossing the avenue and walking to the Eiffel Tower, from It’s an open, crowded space—it’s a better place to review the plan’s details, to I want to see the fucking Eiffel Tower once before I die, okay? But Buchanan agreed to her proposal without argument; nor did he complain about the fifteen euros she spent on a pair of sunglasses on the walk there. Did she need to ask to know he was back in the concrete room they’d called the Closet, its air full of the stink of fear and piss?
Herself, she was doing her best not to think about the chamber under the prison’s subbasement Just-Call-Me-Bill had taken her to. This was maybe a week after the tall, portly man she knew for a fact was CIA had started spending every waking moment with Mr. White. Vasquez had followed Bill down poured-concrete stairs that led from the labyrinth of the basement and its handful of high-value captives in their scattered cells (not to mention the Closet, whose precise location she’d been unable to fix) to the subbasement, where he had clicked on the large yellow flashlight he was carrying. Its beam had ranged over brick walls, an assortment of junk (some of it Soviet-era aircraft parts, some of it tools to repair those parts, some of it more recent: stacks of toilet paper, boxes of plastic cutlery, a pair of hospital gurneys). They had made their way through that place to a low doorway that opened on carved stone steps whose curved surfaces testified to the passage of generations of feet. All the time, Just-Call-Me-Bill had been talking, lecturing, detailing the history of the prison, from its time as a repair center for the aircraft the Soviets flew in and out of here, until some KGB officer decided the building was perfect for housing prisoners, a change everyone who subsequently held possession of it had maintained. Vasquez had struggled to pay attention, especially as they had descended the last set of stairs and the air grew warm, moist, the rock to either side of her damp. Before, the CIA operative was saying. Oh, before. Did you know a detachment of Alexander the Great’s army stopped here? One man returned.
The stairs had ended in a wide, circular area. The roof was flat, low, the walls no more than shadowy suggestions. Just-Call-Me-Bill’s flashlight had roamed the floor, picked out a symbol incised in the rock at their feet: a rough circle, the diameter of a manhole cover, broken at about eight o’clock. Its circumference was stained black, its interior a map of dark brown splotches. Hold this, he had said, passing her the flashlight, which had occupied her for the two or three seconds it took him to remove a plastic baggie from one of the pockets of his safari vest. When Vasquez had directed the light at him, he was dumping the bag’s contents in his right hand, tugging at the plastic with his left to pull it away from the dull red wad. The stink of blood and meat on the turn had made her step back. Steady, specialist. The bag’s contents had landed inside the broken circle with a heavy, wet smack. Vasquez had done her best not to study it too closely.
A sound, the scrape of bare flesh dragging over stone, from behind and to her left, had spun Vasquez around, the flashlight held out to blind, her sidearm freed and following the light’s path. This section of the curving wall opened in a black arch like the top of an enormous throat. For a moment, that space had been full of a great, pale figure. Vasquez had had a confused impression of hands large as tires grasping either side of the arch, a boulder of a head, its mouth gaping amidst a frenzy of beard, its eyes vast, idiot. It was scrambling toward her; she didn’t know where to aim—
And then Mr. White had been standing in the archway, dressed in the white linen suit that somehow always seemed stained, even though no discoloration was visible on any of it. He had not blinked at the flashlight beam stabbing his face; nor had he appeared to judge Vasquez’s gun pointing at him of much concern. Muttering an apology, Vasquez had lowered gun and light immediately. Mr. White had ignored her, strolling across the round chamber to the foot of the stairs, which he had climbed quickly. Just-Call-Me-Bill had hurried after, a look on his bland face that Vasquez took for amusement. She had brought up the rear, sweeping the flashlight over the floor as she reached the lowest step. The broken circle had been empty, except for a red smear that shone in the light.