Agents of Treachery – Spy Stories

SLEEPING WITH MY ASSASSIN by Andrew Klavan

I knew why she had come-of course I did-but I fell for her anyway-of course. That was what she’d been designed for and who I was, who they’d made me. I didn’t even question it much, to be honest. I’d come to hate philosophizing of that sort by then. Endless discussions about nature versus nurture or fate versus free will. In the end, what are you even talking about really? Nothing: the way words work, the way the human brain puts ideas together-what we’re capable of conceiving, I mean, not the real, underlying truth of the matter. I’m sure there’s some logic to a person’s life and all that. Some algorithm of accident and providence and inborn character that explains it. Maybe God can work it out, if he exists and has a calculator handy. Maybe even he shrugs the whole thing off as a pain in the celestial ass.

But for me, in the event, it was more poetry than philosophy or math. I saw her and I thought, “Ah, yes, of course, that’s who they would send, isn’t it?” She was death and the past and my dreams incarnate. And I fell for her, even knowing why she’d come.

I had premonitions of the end as soon as I read about the train wreck. I saw it on the Drudge Report over my morning coffee and suspected right away it was one of ours. A computer glitch on the D.C.-New York corridor. A head-on collision, twenty-seven dead, no one, seemingly, to blame. They were still digging bodies from the smoking wreckage when the FBI announced it wasn’t terrorism. A likely story. Of course it was terrorism. By afternoon and through the two days following, various Islamist groups were claiming credit by way of various YouTube videos featuring various magi with greasy beards and colorful noses and utterly ridiculous hats. That was a likely story, too. Those hate-crazy clowns-they didn’t have the network for it, not in this country.

Which meant it was a genuine riddle. Because we did have the network, but we had no cause.

I worried at it for a day or two, trying to sort out the possibilities. Stein was our man on the eastern railways, and I suppose, after so many decades of silence and unknowing, he might have just flipped and pressed the button. But he was always a stolid character, unlikely to go rogue. And anyway, instinct told me this was something else, something more disturbing. It had the smell of genuine catastrophe.

Finally, the anxiety got to be too much for me. I decided to take a risk. I couldn’t contact Stein himself, of course. If we weren’t active, it would be a useless danger. If we were, it would mean death to us both. Using my cover, I called a contact at the Agency instead-a threat analyst in the New York office-and he and I took a lunchtime stroll around the hole in the ground where the World Trade Center used to be.

There was nothing particularly strange about this. There are plenty of gabby spooks around. You’d be surprised. A lot of these guys are just overeducated bureaucrats playing Spy vs. Spy. They graduate with an ideology and maybe some computer skills but no real sense of evil whatsoever. Secrecy doesn’t mean that much to them. Gossip is the only real talent they have-and the only real power they have-and they know you have to give to get. Buy them a drink and they’ll spill state secrets like your Aunt May talking about Cousin Jane’s abortion: all raised eyebrows and confidential murmurs and theoretically subtle hints you’d have to be an idiot not to understand.

But Jay-I’ll call him Jay-was different. He’d been in Afghanistan, for one thing. He’d seen the sort of things people do to one another on the strength of bad religion or through the logic of misguided ideas or just out of plain monkey meanness. He knew the moral universe was not a simple machine in which you pour goodness in one end and goodness reliably comes out the other. All this made him better at his job than the academic whiz kids, more circumspect, more paranoid and thoughtful, less likely to make an easy trade for information. Subtlety, in fact, was the whole point for him. The unsaid thing that left open a world of possibilities. Which was his world-because, the way Jay saw it, you never really knew.

We were on the walkway beside the wreckage pit, moving in slow, measured steps amid a quick, jerky, time-lapse lunch crowd. We were shoulder to shoulder, our eyes front. Both of us in overcoats, both of us with our hands in our pockets. It was a biting October day.

Jay made the slightest gesture with his head toward the damage. Not dramatic at all-barely perceptible. But just enough to answer my objections to blaming the jihadis, just enough to say, They did that, didn’t they?

“That was different,” I said. Muttering, tight-lipped. “Primitive. Plus they got lucky. Plus we were stupid then.”

“Oh, we’re stupid now,” he said with a laugh. “Believe me.”

“Still.”

He looked at me as we walked along-looked until I turned and read his eyes. I saw that he was puzzled, too; he smelled catastrophe, too.

“You know something?” he asked me.

I shrugged. I didn’t. “There was some chatter before the fact,” I said. “They knew it was on the way.”

This was just a guess, but I felt sure it was a good one. It was the only reason I could think of why the YouTube wise men in their absurd hats should have had any measure of credibility with Jay at all. I could tell by his reaction that I’d gotten it right. There had been chatter. They had known.

Jay pursed his lips and let out a breath, a whispered whistle. We both faced front again. I saw him nodding from the corner of my eyes, confirming my suspicions.

“So why are there no fingerprints?” he wondered aloud.

Well, exactly. That was the question. Because the Arabs leave fingerprints. They pretty much have to. They pretty much want to, but even if they didn’t, they would. Because they don’t have the network. They aren’t implanted, integrated, invisible the way we are. How could they be? Think of our preparation, the time we had to establish ourselves here. Time enough, in fact, so that the whole point and purpose of us passed away.

Which brought me right back where I’d started. They had the cause but not the network. We had the network but not the cause. I couldn’t make any sense of it, and it had me worried. I kept circling around it in my mind as I walked uptown on Broadway toward my office.

It was a long walk in the brisk, wistful weather. Soon enough, the useless round of reasoning wore itself out, and I wasn’t thinking at all anymore but had drifted instead into daydreams.

I’d always been like that, a dreamer, all my life. Lately, though, the quality of the dreams had changed. There was an aspect of compulsion to them, maybe even of addiction. They’d acquired a disturbing and ambient realism, too. I was there sometimes almost more than I was here. I wanted to be there more. I found a kind of peace when I was dreaming that I never had otherwise.

It was always about the Village. Always about Centerville. Not memories of my childhood, mind you. I had those, too, but the daydreams were something different, something more pathetic really, when you consider it. In the daydreams, I was in my hometown again but as a man in his early thirties, say, a man some quarter century younger than I am now but some fifteen years older than I was when I left the Village for good. I suppose, if you wanted to get psychological about it, you could say I was imagining myself at my father’s age, the age my father was when I was little. But I think, more to the point, I was dreaming about myself at an age when I was still romantic but not unrecognizably young, more like myself than a seventeen-year-old but vigorous enough to play the handsome hero of a love story.

That’s what they were, my daydreams: love stories. Their plots are too childish and embarrassing to go into at length, but a few details give their flavor. The setting played a major role: Centerville’s green lawns and trim clapboard houses, the Stars and Stripes waving above the verandas, the bikes and trikes rattling along the sidewalks. Churches, parks and ponds, and elm-shaded walkways. And the school, of course, the gray, shingled, all-American elementary school. The world of my boyhood, in other words.

She-the girl, the love interest-was variously named Mary or Sally or Jane. Smith was always her last name. Mary or Sally or Jane Smith. She was always very prim and proper- sometimes shy, sometimes warm and outgoing, but always proper and modest as good women were back there, back then. That, I think, was the heart of what I pined for. Not the Village’s peaceful lawns and houses-or not only its lawns and houses and tree-lined walks-but the sweetness of its women, their virginity or at least their virtue or at least what I had thought as a boy was their virtue and had so admired and desired and loved.

The rest of the daydream-the plot-was, as I say, all nonsense. I would be some romantic figure just home from some war or adventure, usually with a dashing scar on my cheek to show for it. There would be misunderstandings and separations, physical heroism sometimes and finally reconciliation, even marriage, even, if I was dreaming at leisure in the solitude of my apartment, a wedding night. Insipid, adolescent scenarios, I know, but it would be difficult to overstate how engrossed I could become in them, how soothing it was to me to return in my mind to the innocence and peace of that American smalltown setting, circa 1960, to reexperience the virtue and propriety of women in the days before radicalism and feminism and sex on demand. That old and innocent America, all gone now, all forever gone.

Walking home from Ground Zero that day, I was so immersed, in fact, that I reached the middle of Washington Square Park before I came back to myself-and then I woke to my surroundings with a sort of breathless rush, a threatening flutter of panic. I stood still by the dry, leaf-littered fountain. I stood with my hands in my pockets and scanned swaths of landscape to the right and the left of the marble arch. Then I turned around and scanned the paths behind me. I had the unnerving sense that I was being followed or watched. I was almost sure of it. My eyes went over the faces of the few people sitting on the benches, the few sitting on the rim of the fountain, and the several others passing on the walks beneath the naked trees. I had the feeling that I had seen someone I knew or recognized, that it was that that had jolted me out of my daydreaming fugue state.

But there was no one. After another moment or two, I moved on. I was rattled, but uncertain what to make of it. On the one hand, my spycraft had grown rusty from long disuse, and I was doubtful it could be trusted. On the other hand, I hated even to entertain the thought that this train wreck and its riddles might mark a return to the paranoia of the bad days.

The bad days, as I still thought of them, came in the early nineties, after the system collapsed and the wall came tumbling down. Communication with our controls, always infrequent, had ceased entirely and, forbidden to make contact with one another, we were completely in the dark. Sleepers-any undercover operatives, but sleepers especially-are always in danger of losing their sense of purpose, of becoming so immersed and identified with the culture they’ve infiltrated that they become estranged from their motherland and their mission. But now our purpose was lost in fact; our motherland and mission were gone well and truly. What’s the point of a Soviet pretending to be an American once the Soviet Union no longer exists?

That little conundrum was inner hell enough, believe me, but then the deaths began. Three of us in the space of a year and a half. David Cumberland, the movie director, collapsed on top of a terrified starlet after he or she or his dealer or personal assistant or someone, the investigators never determined who, misjudged the ratio of morphine to cocaine in one of his speedballs. Then Kent Sheffield went out the window of a Paris hotel in the wake of rumors he’d embezzled some of his clients’ investments. And finally, Jonathan Synge, one of the first of the Internet billionaires, went down with his twenty-six-foot sailboat in the choppy waves outside the Golden Gate. All of which could have been coincidental or could have meant that the network was blown and the Americans were mopping up or that our own masters were getting rid of us, covering their tracks in light of the new situation. The uncertainty only added to the terror of it.

And the terror, I will not lie, was awful. There was no information, no contact, nothing but the deaths and the waiting. I was rudderless and ceaselessly afraid. My discipline collapsed. I started drinking. My marriage, such as it was, unraveled into a series of affairs and violent arguments and “discussions” that were even more vicious arguments in disguise. I couldn’t tell Sharon the truth, of course, so our fights were always off the point and only served to increase my isolation.

“It was bad enough when you were just cold and silent, but now you’re disgusting,” she said to me. I was coming through the door in the dark of first morning. She was standing in the bedroom doorway in a pink nightgown, her arms hugged tight beneath her breasts. Her face was haggard and grim. She was a competent, sophisticated woman, but anger made her look weak and humorless. As long as we’d been minimally civilized with each other, her company-the mindless conformity of her expectations, the low normalcy of her social-climbing ambitions, just her reliable, undemanding presence day to day-had been some sort of comfort to me. Now even that was gone.

“Let me at least close the door,” I said. “The whole building doesn’t have to hear you.”

“Jesus. I can smell her on you from here.”

“So you wash the smell of them off first. What does that make you? The Virgin Mary?” Naturally, it wasn’t what I wanted to say. I wanted to tell her about the never-ending fear and silence and the loneliness that made the fear and silence worse. I wanted to cry out to her that my whole purpose in life was gone and that I had known it was gone for years, but now that I could read all about it on the front page there was no denying it to myself any longer. I wanted to fall on my knees and bury my face in her belly and cling to her like a stanchion in high winds and tell her oh, oh, oh, I didn’t want to die, not now when it had all become so useless and not like this, hustled into the center of some drab tabloid scenario by a pair of deadpanned experts in faked suicides and accidents, my extermination just another job.

“Oh, and don’t give me that look,” I said to her instead- even though she had turned her face away now to hide her crying. “We don’t even make any sense anymore, do we? I mean, what’s the point? Why shouldn’t I cheat? What the hell am I getting out of it? It isn’t as if you keep house or bring me my drinks and slippers. You’re not the mother of my children…”

“Whose fault is that?” she said raggedly, in a tearful rage.

“You work, you make as much money as I do. It isn’t as if you need me the way a man wants to be needed. Women…” I waved a hand in the air, too drunk to form the thought I wanted, something about the way it used to be, what women were like, what marriage was like in the good old days. “You’re just a roommate with a vagina,” I finished finally. “As if that’s supposed to count for everything. Well, I like a different vagina from time to time, if that’s all it comes down to, so sue me…”

The phone rang, interrupting this learned disquisition on modern social mores. Both Sharon and I reared up and stared at the instrument, indignant, as if it were some underling who had dared to break in on important business between us. If a couple can’t rip each other to shreds in peace at four in the morning, what’s the world coming to?

It rang again. Sharon said, “Go on and talk to your whore.” Then she whirled in her pink nightgown and stormed back into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

“My whore doesn’t have our number,” I said-but only softly, because Sharon was no longer there to be hurt by it. Meanwhile, I was thinking What the hell? A wrong number? A neighbor complaining about the noise? The signal to set off a disaster or a harbinger of my own assassination? What? I was trying to talk myself out of the less pleasant scenarios, but it was no good. When the phone rang again, I tasted fear, chemical and sour, in the back of my throat.

I stepped to the lampstand by the sofa, took up the handset. Listened without a word.

“I can’t stand it anymore,” a terrified voice said at once.

“Who is this?” But I already knew-I could guess anyway.

“I don’t care about the protocol.” He was whining shamelessly. I could practically hear him sweat. “What good is protocol to me? We can t just sit here and be picked off one by one. We have to do something.”

“You have the wrong number,” I said.

I hung up. I stood in the center of the room and stared at nothing and swallowed the sour taste in my mouth. I was suddenly fully sober.

That was almost-was it possible?-yes, almost twenty years ago. And that night-that was the worst of it. Whatever their cause, the deaths among us stopped at three. As time went by with no contact and no further disasters, the paranoia faded almost away.

Twenty years. Twenty years of silence and unknowing, the network an orphan, the regime that spawned it gone. The mission? It became a vestigial habit of thought, like some outmoded quirk of inclination or desire acquired in childhood but useless to or even at odds with adult life. I went on as I was trained to go on because I had been trained and for no other reason. What had once been the purpose of my every movement became more like a neurotic superstition, an obsessive compulsion like repeatedly washing the hands. I maneuvered my career and cultivated my contacts with an eye to sabotage, positioned myself where I could do the most damage. But there was no damage to do, and no point in doing it. And I didn’t want to anyway. Why would I? Why would I hurt this country now?

Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t that I had come to love America. I didn’t love America. Not this America, weak and drab and stagnant. Its elites in a self-righteous circle jerk and its fat farm fucks muttering “nigger” and its niggers shrunken to bug-eyed skeletons on the watery milk of the government tit. Corrupt politician-alchemists spinning guilt and fear into power. Depraved celebrities with no talent for anything but self-destruction. And John Q. Public? Turn on the television and there he was, trying to win a million dollars on some hidden-camera game show by wallowing in the slime of his own debauchery. That was entertainment now-that was culture-that was art. And then the women. Go out on the street and there they were, barking fuck and shit into their cell phones. Working like men while their men behaved like children, playing video games and slapping hands and drinking beers with their baseball caps on sideways, then trudging sheepishly home with a “yes, dear,” to their grim, sexless fuck-and-shit mommy-wives. There was no spirit in the land. No spiritual logic to lead anyone to love or charity. Nothing for the soul to strive for but welfare bread and online circuses. A Rome without a world worth conquering. I did not love this America; no. If I was loyal to anything, it was the country I had known in childhood. The innocent small-town community with its flags and churches and lawns. The women in their virtue and their skirts below the knee. The fathers in their probity and suits and ties. I loved the pride in liberty back then-not the liberty of screwing whom you wanted and cursing whatever curses-but the liberty born of self-reliance and self-control. The Village-I loved the Village. I loved Centerville. And Centerville was gone.

All the same-all the same, what was left of it-what was left of this country here and now-was still a relative paradise of comfort and convenience. What else was there left to care about but that? Revolution? Whatever came of revolution but slavery and blood? No. I had my routines, I had my successful business, the restaurants I enjoyed, my golf games, my sports on TV my occasional women. Why-in the name of what forsaken cause?-would I do damage to such a pleasant ruin of a place to live and die in as this?

So when I sensed our hand in the train wreck, I just felt my comforts threatened, frankly. I was unnerved-worried almost to the point of panic-to think that I might lose my easy, pleasant life.

What else was I supposed to feel, given the realistic possibilities?

I spent the next several days after my meeting with Jay in virtual isolation in my apartment, trolling the Internet obsessively, searching for answers. Stein had been put in charge of the internal investigation now, so there was nothing like trustworthy information from any of the official sources. But there were clues. At least I thought there were. I thought I sensed traces of the truth lying right out in the open, right there in the daily news. A resurgence of Russian arrogance despite plummeting oil prices. A cat-and-canary silence in the Middle Eastern capitals despite all the outlying wise men beating their breasts. It all made for a sort of faint, wispy, curling smoke trail of reasoning if you knew how to see it, how to follow it. The implications were too horrible for me to face directly, but I must’ve understood them at some subconscious level all the same, because my anxiety grew more unbearable every day. Protocol or no, the impulse to try to contact Stein himself was almost irresistible.

I might’ve done it, too, if I hadn’t remembered Leonard Densham.

It was Densham who had called me that early morning twenty years ago-that morning of my fight with Sharon. His was the whining, sweaty voice on the phone: I can’t stand it anymore. We have to do something. He had always been the weak link, always, even when we were boys back in Centerville. The last to take a dare, the first to seize on an excuse for cowardice. He should’ve been eliminated then, but he had peculiar aptitudes when it came to rockets and satellites and so on, the big things at the time. In fact, he had ended up at the Department of Defense, working on the global navigation satellite system. But he was a weak link all the same. He should have been left behind.

As the days went by-those obsessive, anxiety-ridden days in my apartment, at my computer-I became convinced that he- Densham-was the one who had been following me in Washington Square Park. It made sense. If there was danger, uncertainty, anxiety, it made sense that Densham would be the first to break, the first to make contact, now as before. I became convinced that I had actually seen him in the park and subconsciously recognized his face, that it was that that had brought me out of my reverie.

Assuming I was right, I didn’t think he would be hard to find. If he was following me, he must’ve been looking for a chance to make a safe approach. All I needed to do was give him the opportunity.

I chose a place called Smoke-a small smoking club amid the old brick warehouses on the lower west side. Nothing but two rows of cocktail tables in a narrow room of red carpet and red walls and black curtains with no windows behind them. The light was low and the music was loud: impossible to wire, difficult to observe. I went there three days running, arriving in the early evening before the crowds. I sat at the table nearest the back, where I could see everyone who came and went. Each day, I smoked one long Sherman and had one glass of malt and left.

On the third day, just as my smoke burned down to the nub, Densham pushed through the door and came hurrying down the center aisle toward my table.

Once upon a time, I would have said he had gone mad. No one really uses that word anymore. There are syndromes now and pathologies. Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and this disorder and that. I suppose the notion that someone could just lose touch with reality is problematic in an age when no one is quite certain reality even exists. But Densham was something, all right: delusional, paranoid, anxiety-ridden, fevered, a raging whack job-make up your own diagnosis.

You only had to look at him to see it. It was bone-cold outside-there were snow flurries-and the club was poorly heated. I had sat through my drink with my overcoat on. But Densham? The sweat was gleaming on his face when he came in. His hair was limp and shiny with it. His eyes burned. His fingers worked constantly. He sat across from me at the small round table, bent over, rocking slightly with his fingers working so that he seemed to be playing an invisible clarinet in the empty air.

The waitress was a pretty young thing in a white blouse and black skirt and black stockings, but he barely glanced at her. He brushed her away at first, in fact, with those fiddling fingers, and only called her back to him and ordered a beer as an afterthought-so as not to look suspicious, I guess. Likewise, he shook his head when I opened my box of Shermans to him- and then quickly held my wrist before I could withdraw it. He took a cigarette and leaned into my plastic lighter so that, even through the smell of smoke, I caught a whiff of something on him, some vintage feminine perfume that touched me somehow.

“Calm down,” I murmured to him as I held the flame. “You’ll only draw attention to yourself. Just calm down.”

I lit a fresh cigarette for myself as well, and we both sat back and drew smoke. Densham tried frantically to smile and seem relaxed. It just made him look even crazier.

“You understand what they’ve done, don’t you? Can you see it?” The moment he spoke, the clues and my suspicions began to fall into place. But before I could put them all together, he leaned forward again, hot-eyed and urgent, his fingers drumming the table spasmodically. And he said, “They’ve sold us. They’ve sold the network.”

My stomach dropped and my thoughts became clear. “To the Arabs.”

“Of course, to the Arabs! Who else would…?”

The waitress brought his beer, and he fell back against his chair, sucking crazily on his cigarette until he choked and coughed. I watched the girl’s skirt retreating. Then, more calmly than I felt, I said, “That’s ridiculous, Densham. Pull yourself together. Look at you. You’re falling apart.”

“Of course I’m falling apart! I didn’t come here to blow things up for a bunch of camel-fucking madmen!”

“Quiet! For God’s sake.”

He clapped his cigarette hand to his mouth as if to hush himself.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “What would they sell us for?”

Densham gave a jerky shrug, his hand fluttering up into the air now like a butterfly on a string, the cigarette trailing smoke behind. “Oil. What else? The price of oil. That’s all they have left now, after all the fine philosophy they fed us. They need a lift in the price of oil-and fast. And what do they have to sell in return that the Arabs want? Us! The network.”

I laughed, or tried to make a noise like laughter. “You’re crazy You’re making this up.”

“I’m not making it up. I deduce it.”

“You can deduce anything. It may just be a train crash, Densham. For God’s sake.”

He stared at me, searched me with that peculiar power of insight crazy people have. “You know it. You know I’m right, don’t you?”

I hid behind my drink. “Ah! Things go through your mind when you’re on edge. It happens to all of us.”

“I think Stein must have gone over.”

“What? Gone over to whom?”

“The Americans!” he hissed. “Else why haven’t they killed him like they did Cumberland and the others? Or arrested him at least?”

I didn’t bother to answer him this time. I saw how it was with him now. He had sat at home in whatever life he had these twenty years and stewed in his terrors and suspicions, and now every outlandish theory seemed like the plain truth to him, every worst-case scenario seemed the obvious fact of the matter. He was like one of those people who call into radio shows at night to talk about flying saucers and government conspiracies. He saw it all clearly and everyone else was blind. He was mad, in other words.

“You’ll see. You’ll see,” he said. “We’re activated. Activated and blown. In a week, a month, a year, we’ll each get the call to serve the jihad. Refuse it, and our masters hurl us out a window. Accept it, and the Americans run us down with a car in some alley. We’re dead either way” He laughed bitterly.

I’d had enough. I reached for my wallet. “You’re out of your mind. You’ve been stewing in your own juices. You need to get out more. Get a good psychiatrist. Whatever you do, don’t come near me again.”

“I’m not going to do it! You understand? Camel-fucking madmen. I won’t do it. That’s not what I agreed to.”

I shrugged. “We were children. None of us ever agreed to anything.”

“Maybe the Americans can use me,” Densham went on. “They’ll spare me. Why not? They spared Stein, didn’t they? Americans have always been sentimental that way. They’ll see how it is. They’ll see I have something to live for now. Finally. Something to live for…”

“Shut up. Would you shut up? Pull yourself together. Damn it!”

I threw some cash down on the table and stood. Densham looked up at me as if he only now remembered I was there. He nibbled at the end of his cigarette like a squirrel nibbling on a nut. He seemed small and furtive and ashamed.

“Do you ever miss it?” he said.

“What are you talking about?” I said irritably. I stood there, buttoning my overcoat. “Miss what?”

“The Village. Centerville. I miss it sometimes. I miss it a lot.”

I looked away from him, embarrassed. It was as if he’d read my daydreams. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “There’s nothing to miss.”

“There is to me.” He gave another pathetic little laugh, a sob almost. “I loved it. It’s the only thing I ever did love really.”

“We all… idealize our childhoods.”

“No. No,” he repeated earnestly. “That life, that way of life. That’s what we should’ve been fighting for all along.”

I felt my face go hot. I stared down at him as if he were saying something incredible, something I hadn’t thought myself a thousand times. “Fighting for?” I said, trying to keep my voice down. “How could we fight for it? It wasn’t even real.”

“It was real to me.”

I sneered, disgusted by him-disgusted because he seemed just then to me to be my own pathetic Inner Man made flesh.

“Get yourself some help, Densham,” I said.

He laughed or sobbed again. I left him there and strode across the room to the door.

His death made the news, small splashes on the inside pages of the tabloids, likewise small but more stately obituaries in the broadsheets, and then, inevitably, links online. Instapundit was where I found it. They linked to a New York Post story: Satellite Pioneer in Shocking SM Suicide. Densham had been found hanging from the clothes rod in his closet strangled with his own belt and dressed in bizarre leather corsetry and other paraphernalia. A fatal wardrobe malfunction during an otherwise quiet evening of autoerotic asphyxiation-so said the local constabulary.

As murder, it was art-if it was murder. That was the genius of it. How could you know for sure? But I knew. At least, I thought I knew. I read the story with my stomach in a tailspin. I recognized it right away as the end of peace of mind for me, the end of what was left of my peace of mind. What sort of mental breakwater would stand against the flood of paranoia now? No. There was no getting away from it: The bad days had returned.

How awful suspense is! Worse than any actual catastrophe. How often have you heard a cancer patient tell you, “The worst part was waiting for the test results.” Worse than the cancer itself: the waiting, not knowing, afraid. Awful. And there were days of it now, weeks of it, months.

Maybe that was also part of the reason I fell in love with her. Not just what she looked like and how she behaved and what she represented. That was all in the mix, of course. But maybe I was also just grateful-so grateful-that she had finally arrived.

By then, the dark, snowy winter had given way to a spring so mild it seemed a kind of silent music. I forced myself to go out of doors just to experience it, just to feel the air. The wistful air. Truly, just like a strain of half-remembered music. Even in New York with the heat of its traffic, its noises and smells, you couldn’t feel that air without a softness opening in you, a sense of longing for the past-whatever past it was you happened to long for. I, of course, walked the city streets and dreamed of Centerville, dreamed myself into love stories set in the Village. It was the only relief I had from the suspense, the heavy winter cloud of waiting, unknowing and afraid.

I was lost in those dreams even as she approached me. I was in a coffee shop, at the window counter, my hand limp around the cardboard cup as I gazed unseeing at the storefront glass.

“Do you mind if I sit here?” she said. She had a beautiful voice. I noticed it right away. It was clear and mellow with diction at once flowing and precise. It was the way that women used to speak when they thought about how they should speak, when they trained themselves to speak like ladies.

I looked up and she was lovely. Maybe twenty years younger than I, in her thirties. Poised, but not with that brusque, mannish confidence I so often see in women today. Consciously graceful rather, as if her grace was a thing she did for people, a gift she gave them. Her whole style was graceful and vaguely old-fashioned in a sweet, pretty way. Shoulder-length blonde hair in a band. A blue spring dress wide at the shoulders, nipped at the waist, and ending modestly over the knee. I caught the scent she was wearing, and it was lovely, too, graceful and old-fashioned, too. I thought I knew it from somewhere but couldn’t remember where.

“Do you mind if I sit here next to you?”

“Not at all,” I said to her-but at the same time, my eyes swept the room and I saw there were plenty of tables open, plenty of other places she could sit.

She saw my eyes, read my thoughts. “There was a man outside,” she told me. “Following me, making remarks. I thought if I sat next to you, if it seemed as if we knew each other…”

What happened next happened very quickly, my brain working things out, my emotions responding, all in a cascading flash. My first reaction was instinctive, automatic. An attractive woman had asked for my protection: I was warmed and immediately alert to the possibility of romance. But in the next moment-or in the next segment of that moment-it was all so quick-I remembered where I’d smelled that perfume before. It was the same scent I’d caught coming off Densham in the club when he had leaned toward me so I could light his cigarette. I have something to live for now, he had told me. Finally. Something to live for.

My eyes went to her eyes-her pale blue eyes-and I thought, Ah, yes, of course, that’s who they would send, isn’t it? And what was, I suppose, horrible-horrible and yet mesmerizing somehow-was that I saw she saw my thought, I saw she saw that I understood everything, and I saw that she understood, understood that it didn’t matter to me, that it was to her advantage, in fact, because I wanted her, welcomed her.

She was death and the past and my dreams incarnate, and I was in love with her already. I always had been.

You would think what followed would have been more or less bizarre, but it wasn’t. Not to me. Every lover at the start is in a kind of fiction anyway. The restraint, the things held back, the best foot forward. Even this latest generation of whores and boors must have some courting ritual or other before they go at it like monkeys and then wander off to nurse their hangovers. Every mammal has its manners, its method of approach.

So the fact that she and I never acknowledged the reality of our situation didn’t seem to me as strange as all that. We dined together and went to the movies and took long walks in Central Park and took drives into the country to see the spring scenery, just like anyone. We talked more or less at random about what we enjoyed and what we’d seen and what we ought to do. I told her about my business, which offered secure storage and online backup for the computer files of major corporations and government agencies. She told me about teaching English as a second language to visitors and immigrants. That was a nice touch: I was a wealthy entrepreneur, and she was a do-gooder, just getting by. It gave me all kinds of opportunities to take care of her, to play the man. She liked that, being taken care of. She liked for me to open the door for her and stand when she entered a room and hold her chair when she sat down. She accepted these tokens of gentlemanly respect with grace but also with gratitude. She had a way of nestling in my kindnesses, of luxuriating in my protection and the vulnerability it allowed her. She had a way of looking up at me in expectant deference when there was a decision to be made so that I felt helpless to make any decision but the one that would ultimately please and shelter her. She was all softness and beauty, and I found myself tending to her as if she were the last flower left in an otherwise stony world.

As for the past-as for talking about the past: We shared only fragments of it in those first days, fragments at intervals now and then, and if my memories were distortions and hers were lies, how different were we from anyone in the early stages of attraction?

We became lovers in the prettiest way, the gentlest and most graceful way, only after weeks and weeks of courtship and subtle seduction and slow surrender. I wish I had the words to describe the sweetness of her reticence, her modesty, and the measured yielding of her modesty to her passions and to mine. You want to tell me it was all inauthentic? False? A performance? As the kids say nowadays: Whatever! Have such things ever been anything other than a kind of performance, a kind of dance? An art form, if you will. And what’s art but a special sort of falsehood, a falsehood by which we express the inexpressible truth about ourselves and about the human condition?

Well, that was the way I thought about it anyway-as a kind of art, a kind of story we were telling with our lives, a kind of lovely dance. Right up until the moment of climax, right up until the moment I came, holding her naked in my arms and thanking God-really, thanking God-for the late-life blessing of her. And then it all crumbled in my mind to ashes. What is it, I wonder, about the male orgasm that vaporizes every standing structure of sentiment and enchantment?

An hour later I sat bitterly in the dark, smoking a Sherman by the open window, staring balefully at the shape of her asleep on the bed. The taste of the cigarette brought my meeting with Densham back to me. His squirrelly, nervous voice beneath the smoke and music...We’re activated. Activated and blown. In a week, a month, a year, we’ll each get the call to serve the jihad. Refuse it, and our masters hurl us out a window. Accept it, and the Americans run us down with a car in some alley. We’re dead either way.

She stirred in the shadows and murmured my name. Then, finding me there at the window framed by the relative light of the night city, she propped herself up on an elbow. “Are you all right, sweetheart?”

“Which was it?” I said to her. “Did he take the mission or refuse it?”

“What? Who?”

“Densham. He said he was going to turn them down and trust in the protection of the Americans. But I don’t think he would have had the courage in the end. Once he was actually confronted with the choice, it would’ve been easier just to go along.” The words came out of me in a low, tumbling rush. “He would’ve told himself that he was all wrong about the Americans, that they had no clue about us, that that’s why Stein had gone along and gotten away with it scot-free. He could’ve convinced himself of anything if he thought it meant being with you. You were all he wanted, what he was living for. And there you were, all the while, waiting patiently, watching to see what he knew, who he spoke to, which way he’d turn. Just like you’re doing with me.”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t say, I don’t know what you’re talking about. It was chilling. She didn’t even bother to pretend.

“I suppose that means that you are with the Americans,” I said. “He took the mission and you had to stop him… Or, who knows, maybe you’re one of ours. Maybe he did refuse and that’s why you did it…”

“What time is it?” she murmured. “I’m sorry-I’m still asleep. Whatever it is, we can talk in the morning. Come back to bed and be with me.”

Eventually, the mood passed and I did.

Strangely, as much as I was expecting the final call, it came unexpectedly. Because I was that lost in her, that immersed in the living dream of our romance. Hours and days at a time, I would forget the call was coming, though I always knew. When it finally did come, nothing could have been further from my mind.

We were in the park. It was an early summer’s day. We were eating lunch at the café overlooking the lake. I was telling a funny story about a website I had sold to a teenage millionaire who had dropped out of high school and had all the money in the world but no manners whatsoever. She was laughing in the most charming and flattering way, graciously covering her mouth with one hand. I was thinking how lovely, how truly lovely she was and what a joy.

The phone in my jacket pocket began to vibrate. Normally, of course, I wouldn’t have answered during lunch, but this was the third time it had gone off in as many minutes.

“Excuse me,” I said to her. “It might be an emergency at my office.” I believed it, too. That was how completely submerged I was in our fairy tale.

I fetched out the cell phone and held it to my ear and even then, even when I heard the cantata in the background, it was a moment before I understood. Bach 140: the first part of the signal. And then a voice said, “George?” which was the other part.

“I’m sorry, you have the wrong number,” I responded automatically.

“Oh, sorry, my mistake,” the man said. The music was cut short as he hung up.

I slipped the phone back into my pocket, my eyes on her the whole time now.

“Wrong number?” she said finally. Just like that, completely natural, completely believable.

And in the same way, the same tone, almost believing it myself, I answered, “Yes. Sorry. Now what was I saying?”

As we walked back to my apartment, I found myself saddened more than anything, saddened that it was over. Though the light of the summer day stayed bright through the late afternoon, it had acquired, I noticed, an aura of emotional indigo, a brooding border of darkness that I remembered seeing in my college days when I had walked a lover to the train station for what I knew to be the last time. Now I held her cool hand in mine and glanced down from time to time at her fresh, upturned face and listened to that flowing, ladylike diction as she chattered about this or that future plan-and I ached for every passing minute, every minute that brought us closer to the end.

“Why don t you pour us some wine?” I said, as I helped her with her coat in the foyer. “I just have to check my e-mail for a moment.”

I went into the study, consciously cherishing the domestic noises she made moving around the kitchen. I switched on the computer.

Our procedures had last been updated more than twenty years ago. They still included quaint arrangements like drop points and locker keys and corner meetings. I doubted that sort of thing was operational anymore and, as it turned out, I was right. They had sent the material straight to my computer: an untraceable packet that simply appeared as an icon on the desktop when I turned the machine on. I didn t read the whole code. Just enough to see what it was. A virus I could spread through my backup apparatus so that my clients would lose some of their files. Then, when they went to restore the files through my service, they would be rewritten with instructions that would plant minor, undetectable but ultimately devastating glitches throughout entire systems. It was, in other words, a cyber time bomb that would hobble key security responses at essential moments and render the nation helpless to defend against… whatever it was our camel-fucking friends were planning to do. At a glance, the business seemed quite elegant and devastating. But I think what struck me most about it was its clinical and efficient realism. It was as devoid of romance as a bad news X-ray. It pushed the whole notion of romance out of my mind.

Maybe that’s why I seemed to see her afresh when I walked back into the living room. There she stood now in the center of the floor with our wineglasses, one in each hand. Wearing a pleated skirt and a buttoned blouse and a pearl necklace against her pink skin. It was the first time she seemed simply fraudulent to me. Beautiful, but fraudulent. Like a satire of a fifties housewife. Not even that. A satire of a television program about a fifties housewife. The sight of her brought a bitter taste of irony into my mouth and into my mind, and as I took a glass from her, I smirked into those wonderful eyes-while they regarded me with nothing I could detect but wide, blue innocence.

I sat in my favorite easy chair. She sat on the rug at my feet. That, too, in my suddenly prosaic mood, struck me as somewhat overintentional: a patent construct, a cynical tableau of a woman modest in her youth doting on a somewhat older man in his authority.

All the same, I held my glass down to hers and she lifted hers to mine and we clinked them together. I sipped and sighed.

“I was raised,” I said, “in a town called Centerville.” I don’t know why I felt I had to tell her this, but I did. It was the last act of the play, I guess. The only way I could think to keep it going just a little longer.

She did her part as well. She put her head on my knee and gazed up at me dreamily as I stroked her hair. “Yes,” she said. “You’ve mentioned it. In Indiana, you said.”

“Yes. Yes. It was supposed to be in Indiana, a small town in Indiana. But, in fact, of course, it was in the Ukraine somewhere. Surrounded by these vast wheat fields. Quite beautiful really Quite typically American. They wanted us to grow up as typical Americans. That’s what the place was made for. Even as they trained us for what we were going to do, they wanted us to develop American habits of manner and mind so we could be slipped into the places they prepared for us, so we wouldn’t stand out, you know, wouldn’t give ourselves away.”

She was very good. Quiet and attentive, her expression unreadable. She could’ve been thinking anything. She could’ve simply been waiting for the sense of it to be made clear.

“The problem was, of course, that our intelligence services… well, let’s say they never had much of a sense of nuance. Or a sense of humor, for that matter.” I laughed. “No, never a lot in the way of humor, that’s for sure. They constructed the place out of self-serious field reports and magazine articles they accepted without question and programs they saw on TV. Especially the programs they saw on TV those half-hour situation comedies that were so popular in the fifties, you know, about small-town family life. They developed the whole program around them. Trained our guardians and teachers with them. Reproduced them wholesale in their plodding, literal Russian way, as the setting for our upbringing. As a result, I would say now, we grew up in an America no actual American ever did. We grew up in the America America wanted to be or thought of itself as or… I don’t know how you would express it exactly. It was a strange dichotomy, that’s for sure. Brutal psychologically, in some ways. We were planted as children in the middle of the American Dream and then taught that it was evil and had to be destroyed…”

I sipped my wine. I stroked her hair. I gazed into the middle distance, talking to myself more than anything now, musing out loud, summing up, if you will. “But it was… my childhood. You know? I was a boy there. There were, you know, friends and summer days and snowfalls. Happy memories. It was my childhood.”

“You sound as though you miss it,” she said.

“Oh, terribly. Almost as if it had been real.” I looked down at her again. Her sweet, gentle, young and old-fashioned face. “As I love you. As if you were real.”

She sat up. She took my hand. “But I am real.” I was surprised. It was the first lie she’d ever told me-aside from everything, I mean. “You see me, don’t you? Of course I’m real.”

“I’m not going to do it,” I told her. “You can tell whoever sent you. I’ve already deleted the code.” Now, again, she simply waited, simply watched me. I stroked her cheek fondly with the back of my hand. “I’ve given it a lot of thought. It was difficult to know how to approach it actually. Should I try to outguess you, determine what would activate your protocol? Or try to figure out the right and wrong of the matter-though I suppose it’s a little late for that. In the end, though… in the end, you know what it was? It was a matter of authenticity. Of all things. But really, I mean it. When I was younger, I tried to figure out: Who am I? Who was I meant to be? Who would I have been if none of this had ever happened? But what good is any of that? Thinking that way? We all have histories. We all have childhoods. Accidents, betrayals, cruelties that leave their scars. We’re none of us how we were made. So I thought, well, if I can’t be who I am, let me at least be what I seem. Let me be loyal to my longings, at least. Let me be loyal to the things I love. Even if they are just daydreams, they’re mine, aren’t they? Let me be loyal to my dreams.”

She didn’t answer. Of course. And the look on her face remained impossible to decipher. I found myself appreciating that at this point. I was grateful for it, though her beauty broke my heart.

I took a final sip of wine and set the glass down on a table and stood. I touched her face a final time, my fingers lingering, then trailing across the softness of her cheek as I moved away.

I didn’t turn to her again until I reached the bedroom doorway. And then I did stop and turn and I looked back at her. She made a nice picture, sitting on the rug, her feet tucked under her and her skirt spread out around her like a blue pool. She had followed me with her eyes and was watching me, and now she smiled tentatively.

“Look at you,” I said, full of feeling. “Look at you. You were never more beautiful.”

And as I turned again to leave the room, I added tenderly, “Come to bed.”