During her tenure, she had done many of the absurd things that an officer does but that don’t seem absurd when the plans you’ve come to wrest from a sham curl of dog shit are for India’s fast breeder test reactor. But mostly this was adjunct work. Assignments to divert her self-regard from evidence that she’d devoted her career to the study and pursuit of Thurlow Dan. Had they really been married once? It seemed like another lifetime.
Martin fit her wig over a Styrofoam head and combed out a snag.
“The morgue called,” he said.
“What’d you tell them?”
“Same as always. You’ll call them back.”
“They say anything new?”
“Your parents are fine.”
She smiled despite herself. Her parents were dead. How else would they be?
He checked his BlackBerry. “When will you be needing me again?”
She’d put on a terry cloth robe and slippers, which she kicked off from bed. “Not until tomorrow,” she said glumly, before pilling what makeup and glue were left hewn to her chin with her fingertips.
“And now?”
“Reading files. Go on, have fun.”
Sometimes Martin forgot who he was — butler or F/X man — so he backed out of the room and bowed at the waist. Other times, he did not forget, and bowed just the same. Esme Haas was one scary woman.
She watched him go. Sad. Martin had a life outside the one he experienced in her charge. She wished she had that life, too. But no. Her house was sized for God; it was cold and quiet and quarantining of intimacies that inhered between people.
On a console of TVs set into her walclass="underline" footage from every room in the house. Her daughter was asleep. Everyone else was out. If she killed the radio, it would be deadly. On the topic of isolation, she liked to blame her work: This isn’t my fault. Only it was her fault. Her character. Type A shy: gregarious, lively, protected. Prized qualities in a sleuthing mercenary, less so for the woman inside. But never mind — she was her job 95 percent of the time.
And so: manila envelopes on the table. She opened them one by one. Looked at photos, résumés, stats. It wasn’t like she was unprepared to do Jim’s bidding. She was always plugging people into the system she might need later. People she paid for small jobs here and there. People who were willing to do something odd for reasons she would divine first and exploit later. For this gig, she chose four who seemed perfect: Ned Hammerstein, Anne-Janet Tabetha Riggs, Olgo Panjabi, Bruce Bollinger. She’d wooed them to the Department of the Interior a few weeks ago, them and fifty like them, because who kept track of what went on at the Department of the Interior? Most everyone there was astonishingly without job description. She’d once caught a guy arranging the envelopes in the mail room by size, and when she returned three hours later, he was still doing it.
At the bottom of her files was a letter she didn’t want to see, which was why it was on the bottom. A note from her daughter’s boarding school, a report card plus blurb from each teacher re: the emotional stylings of Ida Haas midway through fourth grade. She was, they said, good with the other kids. Played nice. Appeared to compensate for surplus rage with martyring gestures that won her many friends, though perhaps this way of things would not go over as well in the real world, be advised.
Esme skimmed the rest. She did not enjoy having to get news of who her child was, though it was probably better to have something to go on next time Ida showed, which was now. She could feel it, her daughter’s gaze scalding the back of her neck. She did not even have to turn around.
“What’s the matter, tulip? I thought you were asleep.”
“Ma and Pop let me stay up till whenever.”
Esme considered all the other ways her parents might have let her child grow up unbridled and decided this was okay. Besides, who was she to have an opinion? She didn’t know if she’d done wrong today, but no matter: yesterday’s guilt imported fine.
Ida was leaning against the wall, one bare foot flamingoed to her calf, working a Twizzler across her lips.
“Then stay up. You want to play a game?”
“No.”
“Want me to come read to you?”
“Ha,” Ida said, and she threw herself on the couch. She was wearing cotton pajamas — green with white stripes — that had banded cuffs at the wrists and ankles. It was hard to reconcile the scorn in her voice with the dress of her choosing, but so be it. Esme thought this conversation ranked among their finest in days.
“I’ve got work, honey bun. But you can stay. Tomorrow I’ll take you to dance class.”
Ida nose-dived for the files. Flipped one open. Stared at Ned. “Nope,” she said. “Too young.” She rolled on her back, legs in the air.
“For what?”
“For Dad. Duh,” and she grabbed at the next file, which Esme had in hand and wouldn’t let go.
“Mohhm. Give it.”
“Okay, this is not playtime, and we’re not looking for your dad.”
“Are, too,” Ida said. And, as though buffeted by the fury of it all, she lifted herself from the couch and sailed out of the room.
Esme shook her head. She had not done the easy thing of telling Ida that Thurlow was dead, just that he had vanished when she was a baby. And because she had never elaborated or furnished the story with verisimilitude — what he did for a living, what he looked like, where he was last — Ida must have known she was lying. But who was to say what went on in the mind of a nine-year-old? She was so much like her father, the passions accreting with each year. Sometimes Esme looked at her and thought, How do you even have the room?
She put her files away. Tried to relax. The years without Thurlow were cairned in her heart for the life they never had, but just because she’d grown used to the weight did not mean that it wasn’t heavy or that sometimes she could not bear it.
And to think it was her job that had brought them together. They’d known each other since they were kids, but their first real encounter came after she’d been assigned to him. And he never knew. He still didn’t. And now, a decade later, she was still following him around. Five minutes at a Laundromat. A few hours in North Korea.
Under her bed was a queen-size strongbox instead of a box spring. It was designed to conceal thirty-five rifles and seventy handguns, though she used it for DVDs and letters. Four hundred eighty-two letters from Thurlow. A thousand DVDs. She grabbed one from last year, marked 11/04, right after the election. She had filmed that night herself; the weather had been awful — a storm, a flood — but everyone still came.
She popped the DVD into her computer and closed her eyes. Thurlow’s voice was enough for her; she knew the rest by heart. He’d been wearing jeans and a long-sleeved polyester crew that hung off his shoulders. His hair was mopped across his face because he’d just showered and that was what conditioner did to it. His skin was pale and freckled, which gave him an injured, boyish look that made the traumas issuing from his lips seem all the more unjust. He had put his hands on the lectern, and she could make out the swollen knuckle that had never healed from when he fell off his bike at age twelve. He thanked everyone for coming. Three hundred in the audience? Four? A drop in the bucket.
“Now, listen,” he said. “A lot of people think solitude comes from a deep need attached in our social history to the dread of convention. Or even just the dread of belonging. How can I belong? I live in darker registers of inquiry and feeling than anyone else on earth. Does that sound familiar?”