The Girl at the Border

by Leslie Archer

Dumped in front of his beaten-down tenement, he unlocked the front door and slogged up the three flights of stairs that had lately seemed like thirty, reminding him of his ascent up the Statue of Liberty when he was a kid, when his whole life was ahead of him and he’d been too stupid to realize it.

  His apartment smelled of Lionel, his cat who had died two weeks ago. He knew he should air out the rooms, but Lionel’s smell was all that was left of him. Hard to say goodbye these days. The cat had been his companion for four years. It had been a present from Dey—a kind of joke, he had latterly realized: one ratcatcher joining another.

  Collapsing into his easy chair, cracked and duct taped, he pressed the remote, set the fifty-five-inch flat-screen to Netflix. Poured himself three fingers of Jim Beam while scrolling through potential candidates, the only multitasking he was up to these days. Sipped his whiskey, settled on No Country for Old Men, which made him laugh and cry at the same time. Anton Chigurh’s toilet-bowl haircut, always good for a laugh, but the looming end of the line for Ed Tom Bell was pure anguish. The question Jimmy Self always asked himself was this: Was Ed Tom Bell’s refusal to stand up to Chigurh fear or pragmatism? After all, if you know you can’t win, why jeopardize your life? Frankly, Jimmy Self thought as he mouthed the dialogue along with the actors, in his current condition he wouldn’t want to go up against Chigurh. Fuck him. Let him trigger his captive bolt pistol on someone else’s forehead.

  And what, he thought now, if his own Anton Chigurh was Byron Dey? Should he have faced up to him? Should he have taken the assignment to run Helene Messer to ground? Part of him had always been pleased that she had robbed the robber. The irony wasn’t lost on him, though Dey had never wanted any part of irony. Wasn’t in his bloodthirsty DNA. And yet, Jimmy Self thought, I took his money, willingly, greedily, without a thought as to what it meant.

  Setting his glass of Jim Beam aside, he opened the manila folder on his lap, slid out the photo of Helene Messer that Goodwood had printed out for him from his digital files. Four long years he had looked for this girl, four long years of failure, of obsession while his business cracked, fractured, and fell to ruins around him. He hadn’t cared. And now that he’d found her, what? Fly to Crete? Confront her? Get Dey’s pound of flesh off her? Even if he did, who would he give the money to? Dey’s heirs were either dead or in jail. Their successors were the Chinese, Russians, Vietnamese, whose history of violence and brutality Jimmy Self wanted nothing to do with.

  While Chigurh was forcing his victims to flip a coin in order to stay alive, Jimmy Self stared at the photo of Helene Messer, not a girl anymore, but young, so very young. He fell asleep in that position, in that frame of mind, and had a similar dream to the one Ed Tom Bell related to his wife: Jimmy Self was in Chinatown with his father, who went ahead to hold a table for them. Then all the power failed, plunging Jimmy Self into absolute darkness.

  The next morning, Jimmy Self, stirring in his chair, slowly revived. No Country for Old Men was long gone, and so was his dream of darkness, death. Nevertheless, he had the impression that his father was waiting for him somewhere ahead.

  He rose with a groan and shambled into the kitchenette, but he was all out of coffee, and there was nothing in the refrigerator but a smell, as of a body decomposing. In the bathroom, he splashed cold water on his face, ran a comb through his thinning hair. He avoided looking at himself in the mirror. He was already frightened enough.

  Downstairs, the gray morning struck him a blow that almost brought him to his cranky knees. Fumbling on a pair of sunglasses, he made his way the three blocks to his local Starbucks, where he ordered his usual Venti. When the salesperson asked him what brew, he ordered the Reserve Sumatra Longberry. He might be dying, but he hadn’t lost his taste for good coffee.

  While waiting for the coffee to be made in the Clover, he watched the girls come and go, admiring their legs and butts in the vague sort of way museum goers looked at sculpture they liked but didn’t quite understand. He took his Venti and sat at the counter that overlooked the street. The very early crowd had gone, leaving behind the detritus of low tide.

  Taking possession of a leftover copy of today’s paper, he thumbed through it idly while the aromatic coffee stimulated his taste buds and his mind. His brain, sadly, was beyond help even from the Longberry.

  The pages were filled with a double homicide in Brooklyn, a major fender bender on the Cross Bronx Expressway, the indictment of a local pol paying hush money to keep photos of him and a young man out of the press, another mosque burning in Michigan. Dearborn, was it? And speaking of Dearborn, a hit-and-run death, which would never be picked up in a New York paper except for the fact that the victim was Richard Mathis, renowned archaeologist, lecturer, and professor. Jimmy Self’s heart skipped a beat, and for a moment, he was overcome by dizziness. When his vision cleared, he saw the photo of Mathis, and sure enough, it was one of the series that had been taken some days ago on Crete, standing side by side with Angela Chase, better known to Jimmy Self as Helene Messer. The paper had zoomed in on Mathis’s face, but Jimmy Self could see just a bit of Helene’s shoulder at the right-hand margin of the shot.

  Mathis had left Crete, returned home, and was struck dead by a hit-and-run? He smelled a three-day-old mackerel. Slamming the top on his Venti, Jimmy Self exited the Starbucks, newspaper under his arm. Twenty minutes later, having delivered a pair of tuna sandwiches and a container of orange juice to Stinking Man down in the lobby, he was settling in behind his desk. He switched on his computer.

  While he waited for the old machine to awaken, he gulped his Longberry and made some calls to very long lost friends, who nevertheless owed him big-time for a troublesome this and a let’s-not-get-into-it that. Troublesome for them, not him. He was the one who had dragged their tits out of the fire. Now it was payback time.

  While he waited for the info he’d requested to arrive via his cell, he thought again about Helene Messer. If Mathis had returned to the States, where was she? Should she stay, or should she go? His mind now in gear, he considered: if he were her, knowing that her photo was being plastered all over the newspapers and undoubtedly the internet, he’d get the hell out of Dodge on the first plane. But where would she go? That was the billion-dollar question.

  Boot up complete, he sent out the first tentacle. Dearborn, Michigan, it turned out, had a large Muslim population, which had come under close scrutiny over the last nine months—imams questioned, suspected terrorists pulled in, mosques burned, blah, blah, yadda, yadda, yadda. Jimmy Self had no interest in Islamics of any sort. He didn’t know any, didn’t want to know any. He didn’t get what they were about; he’d had a hard enough time figuring out what made the Italian Catholics tick.

  The one story from Dearborn that held any interest for him was the description, brief though it was, of Mathis’s death. It seemed he had been hit outside his home by an SUV with blacked-out windows going at an insane speed in a residential area. That was it. Only one witness, a pensioner who lived across the street. Looking out his window into the eternal gloaming of the alley, Jimmy Self, detective through and through, found the lack of other details curious in and of itself. He kept going but could find no investigation, no follow-up in any of the local papers. Also curious. He was hopeful the information he had asked for from those people who remained in power due to his burying their dirt would provide some answers.

  Backing out of Dearborn, he turned his attention to the daily sites to which he subscribed, database updates on missing persons, surveillance tapes of airport departures and arrivals. After an hour, having finished off his Venti, he opened a drawer, popped a couple of stims. He couldn’t afford to nod off. Eighty minutes later he stopped the streaming tape on the face of Helene Messer, entering the United States at JFK airport.

  For long moments, Jimmy Self stared at that photo, a snapshot of a life in motion. Helene Messer was back in New York a day after her inamorato had been killed in a hit-and-run in Dearborn, Michigan. Why would she risk coming back t
o the States? Jimmy Self asked himself. But he already knew the answer. Once he had been a first-rate detective, once he was possessed of impeccable instincts. Now that same man, so long buried in the muck and mire of a life unlived, did not want the end of his life to be as meaningless as what had gone before. His instincts, now hauled out of mothballs by the scent of Helene Messer, told him that she had come to find out how and why Richard Mathis had died. After all, if he were in her shoes, he’d want to know. Hell, he’d need to know.

  So. He knew where she was going.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Hashim was returned home in one of three official-looking cars. Thirty-six hours had passed since he had been taken forcibly from his home. He was let out of the middle vehicle without a word of explanation, let alone an apology. No one seemed in the mood for an apology. They turned him out as they would a street mongrel suffering from mange. It was clear he disgusted them.

  The household rightly rejoiced. Hashim was overjoyed to see his family again, but he spoke frankly to Lely in the bathroom where she had guided him and was now ministering to his cuts, scrapes, and bruises.

  “Where is that girl who has been living here?” he asked of Lely. “You already burdened me with one daughter. What need have I for another?”

  Clucking her tongue, Lely crossed to the door, closed it to give them some privacy. “Husband, you make me ashamed—”

  “A proper response, I assure you. Her people dragged me out of my home.” He pointed to his forehead. “This is from them, a reminder of who they are and what we are to them. I don’t know what’s happening in this country; thanks to the actions of a tiny minority of Islamic fanatics, we good citizens—loyal Americans—are all seen as criminals and traitors.”

  “Well, it was Bella’s father—one of those hounds—who was instrumental in freeing you.”

  Hashim stared at her, blinking slowly. “How on earth did he do that?”

  Lely threw up her hands. “How should I know, Hashim? I made a deal with him.”

  “You made a deal?” Hashim stared at her wide-eyed. “With Bella’s father?”

  She nodded. “He needed my help. He was willing to pay me. I asked for your release instead.”

  “You begged him, you mean. Like a rank servant.” He shook his head, rising to his feet. “Lely, my wife, you have made a terrible mistake. You have made a deal with the devil himself.”

  And perhaps she had. The next day, the same three black SUVs with blacked-out windows arrived outside the family’s house. This time it was Lely who was removed while the family and the neighbors watched, helpless.

  When Elin called her to tell her, Bella felt as if the rage inside her would burst through the walls of her chest. Umm being taken away. What had she ever done to deserve this kind of treatment? Lely was an Islamic; Islamics were now enemies of the state. Bella had been warned. She had been told not to be here, to distance herself from the Shehadis. She hadn’t, and now this.

  A decade before that night, Richard had flown back to the States from his third stint in Sinai, not directly to Dearborn but to Washington, DC. There, he had met first with a high-ranking executive at the State Department who, unlike his brethren toiling away in the Harry S. Truman Building, worked out of an anonymous office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building across the street from the West Wing of the White House. He was a thoroughly unprepossessing human being with a steel-gray buzz cut; deep-set eyes, pouched and wounded looking; a nose that had clearly been broken more than once. Perhaps this man didn’t work for State at all but rather the DOD, the Pentagon, the CIA. These were some of Richard’s guesses, though he never did find out the executive’s official affiliation. He introduced himself as Perry White, which Richard, conversant with Superman comics, took to be a joke. Except that Perry White did not strike him as one to make jokes. After five minutes with him, he was convinced that when Perry White had been born, the doctor had slapped all sense of humor out of him.

  Richard had been romanced for sixteen months. It was Janet Margolies, his old comparative religions professor from Georgetown, who had done the romancing. She, heavy of beam and jaw, was an unlikely suitor, which, in retrospect, made her the perfect recruiter. She judged Richard an excellent candidate. His work took him to all the right places; he was so well respected in his field as to be above suspicion. He also, Perry White said in his bland midwestern accent as he paged through what could only be a government dossier on Richard, had had conversations with extremist elements in Sinai on three separate occasions.

  Perry White, looking up from the dossier that Richard had no doubt contained every detail of his life, said, “That terrorist act in Sinai a day after 9/11 must’ve unnerved you.”

  Richard sat nervously, hands in his lap. When he became aware of Perry White staring at his fidgeting fingers, he clasped his hands together.

  Perry White read through several more pages of the dossier, reduced to ones and zeros, then processed for his reading pleasure. The silence was unnerving, as, Richard realized later, it was meant to be. Pale-gray eyes flicked up. “That moment changed you. That’s what you told Ms. Margolies in your last interview with her. You became radicalized, is what you told her. What were your exact words? ‘As I was—’”

  “Baptized in Ben’s blood,” Richard said, taking back control of his own words, wanting—needing—to have some stake in what he now perceived to be an interrogation.

  “What precisely did you mean by radicalized?”

  “Before . . . before Ben’s murder I’d had no real stake in the war on terror. Afterward . . .” He seemed not to want to go on.

  “Survivor’s remorse?”

  Richard cleared his throat. “What?”

  Perry White contemplated him for a moment, turned over a page in the dossier. “Did you feel survivor’s remorse?”

  “I wished I had been the one to kill the terrorist.”

  Perry White nodded, his expression blank as a prison facade. “Are you aligned in any way with the extremists you met with on—” And here he named the three dates of the meetings.

  The question was so absurd that Richard could not help but laugh, even though part of him was certain that Perry White found nothing funny in the question. He was correct.

  “Why did you meet with them?” Perry White asked, following his “Of course not.”

  “To understand them.”

  “Why would you want to understand them?”

  “So that the next time I met them, I would know how to act and react.”

  After another forty minutes of questioning, which to Richard seemed all sound and fury signifying nothing, he was escorted down to a waiting car, which sped him through DC, across the Potomac, and into Virginia.

  Forty-eight hours after being the guest of persons unknown who questioned him incessantly somewhere in the bowels of Langley, asking the same questions in slightly different forms over and over, he was deemed “sanitized,” in the language of these people in the clandestine services.

  Perry White came to see him off. The following five weeks were spent in a vast complex of anonymous-looking buildings set among the rolling hills of Virginia’s horse country. At the Farm, as it was known colloquially, he was taught the fundamentals of field tradecraft. He learned signals, dead drops, code words—decidedly low-tech stuff he thought long out-of-date in the high-tech world of cyberwarfare and ubiquitous NSA surveillance.

  “Not in your world. Not in the countries you work in. Not with the people you’re rubbing shoulders with,” his bruising instructor said, in answer to his query. “Besides, with all the firewall breaches, we’re safer being neo-Luddites. No electronic data trail whatsoever.”

  Perry White was in the Navigator that transported him to Dulles International Airport. “Easier to control surveillance at Reagan,” he said in a vaguely accusatory manner, as if it was Richard’s fault they were going to Dulles. “But, hell in a freezer, we can cover anyone, anywhere.”

  Even in Sinai? Richard wonder
ed, realizing with a minor shock that he was already thinking like one of “us.” That didn’t take long, he thought with a whole fistful of mixed emotions. How easy it is to have one’s view of the world changed.

  He rested for a while—or tried to. Sitting close to Perry White made his skin itch. He preferred to think of his control as his private nanny. It gave him a sense of freedom, however illusory. “How’d I do?”

  “To specs,” Perry White said. “Until this moment.”

  The rebuke shut Richard up for the rest of the journey. As the staircase of descending planes came into view, Perry White turned to him. “What we do, you and I, is a form of religion. This is something they don’t tell you on the Farm. They teach tactics there. I’m all about strategy. Why? Because the enemy is all about strategy.”

  “Fight fire with fire,” Richard said.

  Perry White was unblinking. Also unnerving. “The enemy needs to be fought strategically. This is how you must think.”

  “I get it,” Richard said, because slowly but surely that way of thinking was becoming second nature to him.

  “No,” Perry White said. “You don’t.” He shifted from one narrow midwestern buttock to another. “We have entered the Age of Destruction,” he said. “An era where warfare has again come to the fore. Mankind’s most primitive nature is now in play. The extremists on both ends of the spectrum are gaining ground with every day that passes. Every action spawns a reaction: it’s a fact of life, of nature. Contempt breeds contempt. Hate breeds hate. Death breeds death. The unknowing, as I’m inclined to think of chaos, runs rampant.”

  He ran fingers through the bristles on his scalp and sighed. “That’s why I got into this game—when it was a game—to do some good.” He shook his head. “But it doesn’t work like that. I feel like a salmon trying to swim upstream.”

  “It must be exhausting,” Richard offered.

  “Exhausting, yes. I expected that; how could it be otherwise? I had a friend who said to me, ‘What are you doing? Beware working for the feds. They run around the world like headless chickens.’ All right, I accepted that. What I came up against is the impossibility of the task. The people who run this country have no strategy. They had none in Vietnam, so any intelligent person would expect them to have learned from that debacle. But no, they steadfastly refuse to learn from history. Bull-rushed into Afghanistan, ignoring the long, drawn-out Russian defeat there. As is their avowed tactic, they armed the insurgents, who then, as the Taliban, used those weapons against them. Went into Iraq with absolutely no idea of what would happen when they won. Chaos ensued, creating the perfect breeding ground for extremists where before there were none.