“It’s not always a good ending,” I said.
“People won’t be satisfied,” Frank said.
But then he was quiet for a few moments, as if considering the possibility. Then he shook his head again. “Plus why would she drive off a cliff? You don’t drive off a cliff unless you don’t want to be found.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to be found.”
“She’s here, isn’t she?”
“Driving away.”
The girl was driving faster now, as if she’d found her rhythm. Frank had to pass a few cars to keep up.
“Anyway,” Frank said, once he was behind her again, “it doesn’t matter. She can’t drive off the cliff because the body has to be found. It’s an unsatisfying ending, if the body’s never discovered.”
At the next stoplight, he looked at me. His face was bloody because of her taillights. With two fingers and a thumb, he made the shape of a pistol. Then he swallowed the tip.
“She shoots herself,” he said. “Brains all over the seats.”
ON BROADWAY, THEY HEADED WEST. JUST BEFORE CHINATOWN, THE girl pulled over and parked. Frank found a spot at the far end of the block. We watched them in the side mirrors.
She didn’t wait for Opp to open her door. And once she’d stepped out onto the street, she brushed out the skirt of her dress with two brusque, practical gestures. Then she lifted one ankle and checked the sole of her shoe. Maybe she noticed the run in her stocking. Then she looked over her shoulder at Opp. He’d gotten out of the car and stepped off the sidewalk.
Crossing the street, they didn’t hold hands, but they walked so close together it wasn’t easy to see where her sleeve stopped and his arm began. By then, it was dark, and her dress was dark, too, so her pale face floated above it like some detached apparition. Where had she come from? He’d been at Los Alamos since the winter. He hadn’t told us anything about a girl he wanted to see in San Francisco. She was off the radar completely.
But now, suddenly, he’d flown back and summoned her out of the ether.
I watched her closely. I noted that while her lips were soft, her gait was a bit mannish. They headed toward a door with no sign overhead. He reached it first. Then he opened it for her, and she went in before him.
“Your turn, bub,” Frank said. He was already unfolding the crossword.
WHEN THE DOOR SWUNG SHUT BEHIND ME, IT SEEMED AS IF THE street outside had never really existed. The air was full of smoke. The lamps at the tables were dim. The waiters seemed to disappear every time they moved away from a table.
At the far end of the room, I saw Opp and the girl in a booth. I took a seat at the bar so I could watch them in the mirror. Then the bartender gave me a menu, and I saw the place was called the Xochimilco Café. They served Mexican food and cheap-looking cocktails. When I looked back up at the mirror to check on Opp and the girl, I realized it was almost opaque. It was as if the glass had been buttered. Opp and the girl were no more than shadows, flickering faintly at the back of the mirror. Every so often, I had to glance over my shoulder to reassure myself they were still sitting there at the table. Once I’d caught a glimpse—his hat, back on his head; the big silk bow at her neck—I turned back to the menu.
Looking down at the cocktails, I remembered the directives Pash gave us. You note every detail, he liked to say, striding up and down between the rows of desks where he had us sit during training. If he orders a martini, does he order a twist? Does he order it dirty? Often, during training, Pash got up close in our faces. There were sometimes white beads of spit on his moustache. What color are his socks? What material are they made from? It’s all important. For all you know the length of his fingernails is important. For all you know the size of his fucking ear holes is very fucking important. You don’t know. All you know is you watch him. You do what he does. He drinks a martini, you want a martini. He crosses the street, you cross the street, too. You’re a mirror image when there isn’t a mirror. You disappear if you’re doing your job right.
Outlining directives, he could work himself into a fever. With those beads of spit on his moustache, and that angry, rabbity face, he could seem ridiculous. Frank and the other agents imitated him when he was out of the office. But I had a soft spot for him and his stories. His father was a Russian Orthodox priest. They’d moved back from California to Moscow when Pash was a kid, just in time for the Bolsheviks to start burning cathedrals.
When he was sober, he drank beers and talked about coaching football. But if he got drunk, he’d switch to vodka. Then, if you let him, he could spend hours describing his father’s church: the lapis lazuli in the mosaics, the gold-leaf enamel, the dim light that filtered through the stained glass.
As a kid, he’d loved the way his father moved down the aisle, his chasuble belted with rope at the waist, a heavy cross on his chest, a trail of burning myrrh in his wake.
When the Bolsheviks took power and started rounding up priests, Pash joined the White Army. His claim to fame was serving under General Wrangel. The general, he told us, stood over six foot six inches tall. In a single tank, under heavy shell fire, he and a few soldiers single-handedly captured the fortified city of Tsaritsyn. It was a heroic time, he liked to remind us. But after the evacuation from the Crimea, when they’d washed up in Constantinople, there was too much waiting around. They were all in between, uncertain about where to go next. They spent their nights in opium dens. Even Wrangel fell into malaise. He lived on his yacht, moored in the harbor, and didn’t think about moving until the Reds tried to sink it.
After that, Pash moved to Germany for a year. Then he got married. He found his way to Pasadena. Wrangel was murdered by a servant in Brussels. Pash and his wife had a kid. He got a degree in physical education, and they changed their name from Pashkovsky.
Sometimes a man’s life goes to pieces. Then, if he has it in him, he pulls a life together again, though it’s usually not in the same shape that it once was.
In Pasadena, Pash trained for the reserves on the weekends. When he got called up the day after Pearl Harbor, they put him in charge of the San Francisco intelligence office. He ran it in remembrance of Wrangel, and also his defrocked father.
He stormed around with those beads of spit on his moustache, all action, no contemplation, until sometimes, in the late afternoon, when he’d called me into his office, he’d forget what he’d wanted to say.
He’d stare off out the window, over the bridge, past the blue whale humps of the peninsula, with his chin resting on his fingertips, pointed in the shape of a steeple. Sometimes I sat there in his office and could almost hear choral music rising off in the distance. As if the sun were made of gold leaf. As if the blue bay were lapis lazuli.
IN THE XOCHIMILCO CAFÉ, I TRIED TO FOLLOW PASH’S DIRECTIVES. I sipped my martini. I wondered why Opp had brought the girl there. Or why she’d brought him there, on the one night he was back in the city.
The martini was cheap, and the place was run-down. Both Opp and the girl seemed somewhat out of place, like they were trying to fit in somewhere they couldn’t.
For a while, I listened to the sounds of glasses clinking together when the waiters cleared off the tables. On the small dance floor, a few couples were dancing. Onstage, a Mexican girl was singing in front of the piano. It was dark on the stage, and you could barely distinguish her features. Her hair was drawn back from her face. She kept her eyes closed while she sang. And when the song finished, she opened them slowly, as if waking from a deep sleep.
Behind her, the piano was swallowed in darkness. All you could really hear was her voice.