43. I did not have a new place to live, but only because I wasn’t ready to look. I’d have to start over. Send Ida to safety. Recommit to my work and stay away from you. If I went back, I’d have told you everything and put us all at risk. And I was done hurting. Enough.
But I was also running out of time. Ida was cranky or teething or maybe she just had heartburn. Whichever the case, she wailed with a frequency that, in the abstract, was admirable for its allegiance to habit but that began to annoy the Koreans, not to mention the other customers. The State Department had given the Korean mission a twenty-five-mile leash in any direction from Columbus Circle, but there were plenty of other bakeries to patronize, and also, my time there was not proving effective. The guys talked about hunting and baseball and sometimes about how to win respect from the West via the pluming of their nuclear capacity, but even this was more like jock talk than actionable intelligence. They never mentioned MIAs. They never mentioned my soldiers. So I had to produce something fast, which was when I came on the idea of posing as an orthopedic physician for the Mets and going with J.T. to North Korea. He’d already befriended the team’s pitching coach and once taken him to the North as a companion and wingman. He’d already taken the Koreans to many games, and to the dugout for autographs. The plan was feasible. A little crazy, but feasible. And anyway, I wanted out of that shit-hole kitchen. I wanted my passions released. I wanted to reclaim the protected intimacy of being thrust into a target’s life on the sly and for a limited time, and I wanted to escape the fear born of love for you and Ida — the fear that there were feelings in this world that could undo your resolve to live isolated from the trauma and wreckage that come in train of relations with other people.
44. Sure, my parents were not so keen to divorce their identities, but only on principle. And yes, they were not so keen to take Ida, but only in practice. In the end, something of their ideals and de facto needs got answered in the assumption of a new life in North Carolina.
As for me, I hired Martin. We worked up the face of a doctor any shortstop would trust. I studied tensegrity, contractile structures, capsular and noncapsular patterns of motion. The rig was up in a month; passable intelligence on the stuff of orthopedics took two, and so at the end of 1997, I took my first plunge into the most isolated, radically autonomous, and lonely community of millions on earth.
I never managed to get in touch with the defected soldiers. But I did make contacts on the inside and was able to pass on information about North Korea’s weapons program that seemed credible. I was doing my job and doing it well except that my life continued to feel elsewhere. It was elsewhere, since even as I was working North Korea, I never stopped working you.
So naturally when Jim got wind of your rapport with the North, it made all the sense in the world to give the job to me. And when you went ahead and accepted their money—are you insane? — I said I’d help shut you down. So long as the government came to me, I could protect you. So now you know: all along, I’ve been protecting you.
They were racing down the highway. Civilian traffic had been diverted and their jeep absorbed into a caravan of the policing authority. Ida had posed no questions about what was going on and did not appear in the least riled by the sirens or fanfare, but this did not mean she wouldn’t be soon enough. Esme, who had been working on what to tell her about Thurlow for ten minutes plus ten years, made a joke about them knowing how to make an entrance, and when this got no response, she said, “Ladies and gents, please welcome to Cincinnati the lovely, the talented, Ms. Ida Haas!” She ventured the play din of a crowd.
Ida said, “Stop it.” And, “No wonder Dad left you.”
Esme did not move; she was lock-eyed with the mongrel of feeling that had reared up in the car. The outrage (Thurlow left her?), the relief of seeing Ida blame Esme and not herself, the wilderness of her child’s mind (What else does she think she knows?), and then just the dread of having to set her straight. Because if they were going to get a moment together, all three of them, Esme wanted Ida to know enough to try to keep it with her for life.
No traffic, no people, herewith: Cincinnati. The river blue, molared with ice, the wind patrolling the city street by street; this place was bleak like Pyongyang but without the excuse, which meant it was actually bleaker. They rolled through downtown and then doubled back, and in the way you can sense a water mass well before you see it, so it is with the ambience of a crisis in play. Sirens and floodlights might beacon the news, but it’s the sublimated chaos — chaos in hand — that radiates for miles.
A tony neighborhood. Mansions. Many architectural dogmas in effect. Tudors, castles, Victorians, and there, up a hill, the stone square presidio Thurlow Dan called home.
The cordon site was like a fern whose pot was entirely too small. It had proliferated well beyond the road — a two-way lane, but barely — up neighboring lawns, and into a Tudor opposite the Helix House, whose family had been moved to the Marriot and given plane tickets to Puerto Rico in thanks. On scene: special ops, National Guard, local police, Men in Charge. Women, too, but no matter, just people whose job was to revise, at a clip, how best to storm the castle.
The road was a gauntlet of authority vehicles. Paper cups in the gutter, caskets of four-way chili swept curbside. Two loudspeakers rigged to gaslights. A pumper truck with coffee on the grill; three ambulances up a lawn and the rest parked at a golf course nearby.
There was no way to drive through this mess, so they had to park and wend, which was no picnic. Noah had Esme’s arm in a pinch. Ida refused to take her hand, so Esme tried to keep her one step ahead, which meant treading her heels and getting nasty looks for it. It was freezing, and since no one knew how to talk to one another despite the headgear and mics and direct connect, they got stopped every two feet.
At first Noah just flashed his badge and passed them through, but as they got closer, and the barring command got more imposing, the badge no longer cut it. What was needed at this point was a badge plus an extraordinarily compelling reason to bother the assistant special agent in charge — so what, exactly, was their business here?
“It’s the ex-wife,” Noah said. “That good enough?”
He said it loud; there was no way Ida had missed it. And so, there it was. Esme died a thousand times over. And based on the Moses part that opened up before them, the information must have struck the ops with similar intensity, likewise the news choppers overhead, which nearly clipped each other for best vantage of the freedom given this mother and child. Who were they that the way was clear?
Not that Esme had moved. To have had the work of disclosure done for her, without fuss or warning — she was exhilarated and traumatized, though both fell short of the flowered comprehension in her daughter’s face, upturned and saying with unmistakable clarity: Yep, now is the moment when the tropism of my attachments could go this way or that. Now is your chance to shine on me the torch you’ve been carrying for my dad, and we can be a family whether we get to him or not.
Esme knelt so they were eye level. She didn’t know where to begin. But Ida had it figured out; she turned away and headed straight for the Helix House.
Ran for the house, so that when a cop scooped her up, it was a tantrum like no other. She bit his arm. Drew blood. Esme did not expect her to listen, but she said, “Sweetie, stop, I’ll explain everything, I swear,” and like that, Ida was calm. She walked back and pressed her whole body into Esme like she was the dunce and Mom was the corner. It was Ida’s first kindness in days and maybe her first ever apropos the labor of forgiving your parents, and so when she whispered, having pulled her mom in close, “Can you help Dad?” Esme didn’t have it in her to say no.