She laughed and burrowed deeper between his legs. She worked her lips and jaw and the studs gleamed and his heart cracked because whatever optimism he’d marshaled under the banner of finding his wife in D.C. had starved in the poverty of his chances.
“I’m serious,” he said. “I think you should go home. It’s not safe with me anymore.”
She paused—“Uh-huh”—and then carried on. After a minute more, “This isn’t working, is it?”
He helped her to her feet.
“Can I try again later?” she said.
He shook his head. “Go home, Vick.”
“I am home. Remember? You’re scaring me, Thurlow. Can’t I just sit here with you? Talk for a little, like you say all the time?”
It was dark outside, but he turned off the lights and led her to bed. She got on her side to face him. It was true, she was home. And in this he could take comfort. He could say his TCs had benefited from their association with him. Vicki, and before her Lois, Charlotte, Isolde, Ruth. A girl like Ruth would never have seen Santa Cruz or the Rockies if she hadn’t joined up. When he found her, she was anemic and homeless, trading blow jobs for blow under the BQE in New York. Had her life gotten worse? Or what about Isolde, whose name marked the extent to which she knew anything beyond the one-mile radius around her shack on the banks of the Cache River in Arkansas? He’d taken her to South Korea. He’d taken her to North Korea, where she’d doled out mints to children who’d spent the morning exercising outside the Study House of the People.
Vicki pressed her body up against his and said, “So, you know how my parents are sick and everything?”
“Yes, but tell me again. Tell me everything.”
And she did. She’d been a griddle chef at a diner off I-95 while also teaching adult literacy at the corrections facility in town. Working eighty hours a week to pay off interest on debts acquired from her parents, who had been in a house fire and lived in hospice because neither could breathe on his own.
“But you know what?” she said. “I couldn’t even bring myself to visit them. It was too hard. Isn’t that horrible? That’s my dark secret.”
He looked at the clock. He said that one time, when he was a kid, the Christmas tree had caught fire, and for the seconds he should have been calling for help or getting a bucket, he just watched the flames lash the wall and craze the windows — the bubbles were mesmerizing — but when the firemen showed, he pretended to have been asleep.
“Oh, I get that,” she said. “That’s a fear of responsibility. I fantasize about my parents dying at the same time because, as bad off as they are, it’ll be worse if they don’t have each other, and worse for me, too. Which is even more horrible. I mean, I love them, but still.”
And when he didn’t respond, she said, “Is this helping? Do you feel better? You always say that being always happens in a social context. Is this a social context?”
He took her hand in the dark and held it to his chest.
She kept talking until the winter dawn grayed up the walls and bedspread. And so, for Thurlow, another sleepless night. Alone, but not. Ever thus.
ESME RUSHED OUT OF THE METRO. Or walked as fast as possible, given the rubber gams distending her legs, and her chest vest, which weighed a ton. A C-cup bosom that swung low, and a furl of belly fat that D-curved around her waist, not to mention the load of vulcanized ass piled on her rear. Christ, this fat suit. Christ, this life.
Times like these, she wished she and Jim had a more convenient rendezvous point. The Air and Space Museum was in the middle of nowhere. She spotted him at the entrance. She pinched his arm, and when he gave her a confused look, she laughed and said, “Hey, it’s me.”
“My God,” he said. “You are terrifying.”
“Nice to see you, too,” and she pecked him on the cheek.
“Totally unrecognizable. I don’t think I’ve ever seen your face all worked up.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” she said, and she glanced at her reflection in a window. Today’s prosthetic: a nose brinked on caricature that appeared to have been launched from the putty of her face like a dart. Today’s chin: prognathous. She wore a wig. Sawdust blond, washed out, limp. Bowl cut — a vase, really — that came in at her chin.
“Terrifying,” he said. “And what, like, fifty pounds heavier? You seem shorter, too.”
“I think the word you’re looking for is matronly. I call this look the Lynne Five-Oh. Effective, right?”
He took her arm as they made for the space hangar. Rocket boosters hung from the ceiling like Christmas ornaments. Jim said, “So how’s our boy?”
“Back in Cincinnati in a few days.”
“And you?”
“Fine.”
“Good, because after what happened in North Korea, you’re lucky to be getting another chance.”
“For what? Everything’s status quo, everything’s fine over there.”
He stopped walking. “Are we even talking about the same guy anymore? Do you need a leave of absence?”
“What? No. I’m just saying I don’t know why now is the time to try again. Nothing happened in North Korea. Thurlow never met anyone. He just drove around. I was on him the whole time. I was even in a car with him, face-to-face. Didn’t recognize me at all.”
“In this getup?”
“No. Something even better.”
“Wow.”
“So what more do you want? Should I have made something up?”
He gave her a nasty look and pinched his earlobe, which he did when stressed. He’d been working on this assignment nonstop — his file was huge — but the bureaucracy was worse. Under whose purview did a man like Thurlow Dan even fall? A domestic cult leader with foreign ties sounded like simple Joint Terrorism Task Force fare — the FBI doing its worst — but then the National Counterproliferation Center was not likely to hands-off a guy in chat with North Korea. Of course, it wasn’t like the center actually talked to the JTTF, which was probably for the best, since the JTTF took its lead from the NJTTF, which was just sixty guys stumped even by having to order lunch. Jim was at the Pentagon with Homeland Security — who knew how the job of dismantling the Helix had fallen to him. No one understood how business was run at that level.
What’s the latest, Jim? Don’t screw this up, Jim. You got nothing from North Korea, Jim? The pressure was intense. And he was losing patience. How could Esme have screwed up North Korea? And how many chances was she supposed to get? He’d been told she was the best. And when she did that Kegel thing, he knew she was the best. Also, to her credit, she did produce a lot of information. And she always knew where Thurlow was. So he would be patient. All they needed was a smoking gun.
Esme paused to admire a Corona film return capsule and to read news of its magic: a film bucket dropped from outer space, bearing snaps of the Soviet Union. And then she remembered why she liked this place so much. The early Explorer satellites — Explorer 1, which launched in ’58—marked the start of modern espionage, at which she was expert.
Jim leaned over the case.
“Unmanned surveillance,” he said. “Take the human factor out of things, and nine times out of ten, it goes better.”
“Your confidence in me is overwhelming,” she said. “I am touched.”
She leaned over the case, too, and pressed her fingers onto the glass. He left smudge prints; she did not. She never would, and in this was a reminder that you are often born perfect for the life you get. When she was eleven weeks fetal, thanks to the genetic perversion dermatopathia pigmentosa reticularis, the cells in the upper layers of her skin were marked for death. Six months later, she was born with no fingerprints. Luckily, other symptoms attached to the disorder did not present. Her hair was thick, her teeth were intact, and the rawhide that should have been her hands and feet was but your average volar padding. No, it was better than average. Smooth and soft. She had no friction ridges on the parts of her most likely to extend themselves in love, which was depressing, since in the transmission of love one hopes for (a) friction and (b) cells buoyant and irrepressible. She left no trace of herself wherever she went.