Persona

by Genevieve Valentine

  This was it. This was the IA security team, and they were only calling him so they could pinpoint where he was before they stormed the place.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s unlikely,” the woman said, “since I’m looking at a camera we recovered that has your fingerprints all over it.”

  Breathe, Daniel thought. (He thought, They really don’t waste time before they put the pressure on, do they?)

  “Did you get it from the bastard who stole it from me?” he snapped. “What an asshole.”

  The woman laughed—round and genuine, and for a long time. When she finished he had the phone pressed to his ear so hard his earlobe ached.

  “I’m not government. And I’m not interested in the camera. I want to talk to you about what’s missing.”

  The data card burned in his pocket. Hang up, he thought. Then: this is the call I’ve been waiting for.

  “Okay,” he said. “Talk.”

  × × × × × × ×

  Once Suyana closed the door, her shoulders sagged; still more poised than normal people, but she looked a little less like she was addressing the nation. She let out a breath just short of a sigh, pushed her fingers into a steeple, and winced down at her wounded arm as if she’d forgotten about it.

  Her fingers must ache, Daniel thought; she must be as tense as he was.

  He fought his first instinct, which was to push past her and make a run for it.

  His second instinct—to reach for her shoulder—was stranger, and somehow more dangerous, and he sat back down on the bed and pressed his curled hands into the bedspread just so he wouldn’t be tempted.

  “You look awful,” he said.

  She shot him a look, raised an eyebrow.

  He bit down on a smile, moved aside. “Lie down for a minute, if you want. You could use the rest.”

  “You’re starting to sound like Magnus,” she said, but still she lay down, trying to favor both her left arm and her right leg. She wasn’t tall; it was easy to forget, but she fit on the bed with her head well short of the pillow. Magnus always towered over her in pictures.

  “Given how today has gone, I take offense to you thinking I’m like him,” Daniel said.

  Her eyes were closed, but she rolled her head toward him. “He does what it takes.”

  “And what about when he sold you out just now?”

  She went still for a moment, and he felt guilty when she opened her eyes. That much more rest, gone.

  “It solved his problem. Looking for me would be embarrassing, and cutting me off put the UARC in a position of sympathy and public support. He’s not a good person, but you don’t have to be, to have your reasons.”

  She sounded very understanding for someone who had nearly died. She must be really tired.

  That necklace was still in his pocket. It felt heavy, unwieldy, like it knew they were talking around it. He opened his mouth to ask, Are you forgiving him? but the words didn’t make it.

  Suyana’s eyes were closed and her hands slack, one along the bed and one across her stomach. If she kept pushing herself on no rest, she’d die from flesh wounds, which wasn’t as heroically as she’d probably want to go.

  He frowned at the necklace he’d spread across his palms, tried to see if he could remember which stone had been turned over. (It bothered him a little that Magnus had found fault, that he’d turned one of the stones in his fingers like it was an extension of him and not her.) Then he shoved the necklace and card into his pocket and licked his teeth, thinking what the look on Magnus’s slick diplomat face would be when this story broke.

  It was good. It kept him from thinking about what the look on Suyana’s face would be.

  × × × × × × ×

  Things someone can know, before they ever call you on a number that you never gave:

  • how you were in the alley of a hotel at five minutes to noon with a stolen camera and no official IA itineraries; how you’d come from Korea alone, with only cash in your pockets, and how it must be so different from home (a city that was never mentioned, but home was spoken with grave import, and Daniel thought about the picture he’d taken and the family he’d abandoned and could hardly breathe);

  • how you impersonated an IA operative to break Suyana Sapaki out of medical care;

  • how you met up with notable people and walked through the city, through a tourist crowd that should have lost any trails, to a flat that had a pedigree with certain types of people that the government did not look upon with fondness;

  • that they can tell you all this without caring what it reveals about them, because they have so much more where this came from that it was just politeness on their side not to put the bullet in your head first and then read you the evidence;

  • how to make you realize, before they ever level with you, that you were going to do whatever they told you to do.

  There was a knock on the door an hour later; it had felt like longer, like night would be over before anyone came to find them.

  Daniel started and dropped the magazine he was reading (the annual International Assembly Gala feature—Suyana wore a gown patterned with huge palm leaves, rated C+).

  “I have her things,” Onca said when Daniel answered.

  “But she’s sleeping.” He frowned; what on earth did he sound like?

  From behind him, Suyana said, “I’m ready.”

  When he looked over, she was already sitting at the edge of the bed, smoothing her hair with her good hand. She sounded younger when she was tired. It was awful, somehow.

  Daniel stepped aside to let Onca in, feeling like a bouncer, and moved for the hallway so Suyana could change.

  Nattereri looked him over as he passed.

  “I’m not changing,” Daniel said. “I look fine.”

  Nattereri flexed his knife hand, the fingers spreading out over the blade and back around the handle. “How’d you say you ran into her?”

  “Blind date.”

  Nattereri raised his eyebrows, shifted toward the edge of his chair, and rested his forearms on his knees.

  Daniel winked at him, leaned against the wall, and wished the bedroom door would open again already.

  When Onca finally came out (sparing Daniel one circumspect look he didn’t like), he slid in without waiting for an invitation. Too late, he hoped she was fully dressed. He closed his eyes and put up an open hand. “Sorry for the bad manners, but if I stand in the hallway any longer he’ll stab me.”

  “Serves you right,” Suyana said, and then, “Everything’s decent.”

  After all that subterfuge, he’d expected her to come out looking like an IA charity gala, long gown and gloves and swinging earrings. He’d have wanted to see that.

  Instead, she was barefaced, wearing her stolen boots and black pants and a black button-down, and had a square black scarf in her hand, and it was all so plain he thought she might as well have stayed stolen.

  “Please tell me I don’t have to wear this too.”

  Suyana shot him a look. “It’s what I asked for.” Then she turned to Onca in the doorway. “If we don’t make contact in three hours, close the route.”

  Onca nodded, her face grim, and vanished.

  Daniel turned to Suyana. “Where did you tell her we were going?”

  “To try to make contact with Magnus off the grid, and see what the word is within the IA about my shooting, and what can be done.”

  He had an unsettling moment, a quiet click in the back of his mind as he heard the words hidden under the words.

  “Where are we really going?”

  She looked startled. After a moment, she grinned.

  × × × × × × ×

  “I’m sorry,” Daniel said. “I can’t help you. I didn’t get anything good. You hear gunshots from somewhere, you get the fuck out of there, you know?”

  “And where are you now, having gotten the fuck out?”

  Damn, that voice would pry off your fingernails with
out you ever noticing.

  “Nowhere.”

  “Mr. Park, you’re not the best liar we’ve come across. Here or on your forged papers.”

  She was not doing a good job convincing him she wasn’t government. She was, however, doing a bang-up job of painting Daniel into a nasty corner.

  His uncle had forged his papers. If she followed that trail with any intent, it wouldn’t go well back home. She had to know that’s what he was thinking, and which way he’d fall.

  “Then why don’t you just quit the show and tell me how you think this goes.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” she said, sounding as if a veil had fallen away. He imagined her sitting back in her chair. “I’m better at the practical than at games.”

  I’ll bet, Daniel thought.

  He’d lost feeling in his wrists and ankles. As she explained, he sank slowly onto the bed, as if his body, inch by inch, was giving out.

  × × × × × × ×

  As he and Suyana left the apartment building, he fought not to look back at the flat, fought not to look around at whoever might be taking pictures of them.

  (Daniel could usually spot a camera at twenty paces—how could he have missed whoever this woman had slipped into the crowd?)

  “We’ll split up a block away from here,” she said. Her limp was a little better; she kept too far away to lean on him. “I have to go on no matter what happens, but turn back if you need to.”

  “You keep trying to make me turn back,” he said, glancing over. “Isn’t it too late? Either you trust me or you don’t.”

  Her hands disappeared inside the pockets of her shapeless, borrowed jacket.

  “Yes,” she said, not looking at him. “I guess it is.”

  She knew how to discomfit him with the minimum effort, he’d give her that. Maybe that was his own fault, asking for a straight answer when he wasn’t sure he’d recognize the truth if she told him.

  Still, his heart had twisted, just for a second, in between “yes” and everything else.

  They came to the corner, where the narrow street opened onto the avenue.

  “We should stay out of sight,” he said. “Keep to the small streets. Some of your friends might have followed us.” He looked behind them.

  She shrugged with her good arm. “Until they can prove I’m a loose end, it’s better for them to leave me alone than kill me.”

  God, how did you walk without looking behind you when that’s what you were up against?

  “Fine. Then I just hope they’re loyal enough not to kill us before we get there.”

  “Me too.” She turned onto the avenue. “Let’s go.”

  They crossed in the middle of a crush of tourists and ducked off the avenue again a few streets later, where they could connect through back streets for a while without hitting the security cameras of a hotel.

  Daniel didn’t look behind them. Whoever might be following would just have to get in line to murder them. (The hair on his neck stood up, thinking about it.)

  “I don’t understand the hold they have over you,” he said finally. “They’re ecoterrorists who nearly ruined your country’s standing in the IA with a single stroke. Is it just a message? Is it the forest? It doesn’t make sense to me.”

  She looked up sharply. It must have sounded strange.

  For five streets they were quiet. Then she said, “It would, if you’d ever seen home.”

  It was his turn to glance over. She looked tense and wistful, like she was thinking of a country she’d never set foot in again.

  His lungs ached. He wrapped his fingers around the card in his pocket. He opened his mouth to tell her the truth.

  “We’re here,” she said.

  × × × × × × ×

  “We know where you are,” the woman said. “We’ll have someone make contact with you once you’re on the move, at a point where you can provide us with the card as a gesture of good faith. If we like what you provide us, we’ll make an offer of employment.”

  “What if I can’t provide?”

  “That’s probably not in either of our best interests.”

  He didn’t doubt that for a second.

  (On the other side of the door, Suyana was talking with Onca in a low voice; decisions were being made.)

  “All right,” he said, his stomach churning. “I’ll keep my eyes open for any of Ethan’s business that seems interesting.”

  The woman said, “We’re after Sapaki.”

  His mouth went dry. He hung up.

  Suyana opened the door.

  11

  The IA annual portrait had to be taken in the Palais Garnier, because nothing else would hold them all, but at the request of several national press outlets, for the most recent portrait a few weeks back they’d been arranged in rows in the orchestra section instead of on bleachers on the stage. It made for a more regal picture.

  “Thank God,” Ethan had said to Satoshi as they settled in. He’d forgotten to undo the button on his blazer, and it was straining across his shoulders. “Those bleachers reminded me of high school.”

  “You’ve never seen a high school,” Martine said from the row behind him. “Stop pretending to be populist.”

  Suyana was seated a few rows behind them, between the Netherlands and India—strategically less desirable than among the Big Nine, but from here she could watch the whole expanse of formal suits and carefully selected cocktail dresses, which was always illuminating. The IA floor was regimented; it was different, watching Iceland’s and Turkey’s Faces chatting from adjacent seats as their handlers stood helpless along the far aisles, clenching their fists at the possibility of untoward statecraft they couldn’t wade in to prevent. Stylists moved quickly through the rows, silhouetted like puppeteers as they arranged the last of everyone’s hair.

  “I’ve seen the inside of a lot of high schools, Martine.”

  “Movies don’t count,” said Grace from beside Martine. Down the row, China and Italy laughed. So did Ethan.

  “I mean I go on a lot of school visits,” he said. “School visits count!”

  “And so populist,” said Suyana.

  Ethan and Grace both turned to look at her; Ethan with raised eyebrows and the ghost of a smile, and Grace with an expression Suyana couldn’t determine before she turned away.

  “Okay, places!” someone called. On stage, three dozen photographers took up positions behind their cameras; the stylists melted away.

  Suyana took off the leaf-printed jacket she’d been given. The shirt underneath was plain and black. From the sidelines, Magnus started to say something, and settled for looking strained. When Suyana sat back in her seat, she saw that Margot had come onstage and was watching her, unblinking.

  “Members of the International Assembly,” she said, and everybody in the room fell silent. Ethan, midjoke with Grace, froze, still twisted around in his seat, as if afraid to interrupt her by turning to face front.

  “Thank you for being here today, and congratulations on another productive year. For those who have been here before, welcome back. Your exemplary work has been much appreciated.”

  Down toward the front of the orchestra, Korea’s Hae Soo-jin shifted in her seat. Margot never looked down, but one corner of her mouth turned up.

  Martine and Grace exchanged a glance. Suyana wondered what Hae Soo-jin had done.

  Still twisted to face them, Ethan mouthed, “What happened?” Suyana couldn’t hear Grace’s response, but Ethan made a pained, sympathetic face.

  Suyana thought about the contract Ethan needed to sign; the contract Magnus said didn’t have enough appeal.

  “For those who are taking their first portrait, it’s a pleasure to have you in the Assembly. Let’s all work toward a better world again this year.” Margot stepped off the stage even before the applause could really get going. Suyana appreciated that. Margot was a monster for power, but at least she didn’t bother grubbing for approval.

  “All right, let’s rehearse,” the stag
e manager called, and clapped her hands. Before he turned around, Ethan gave Suyana another look, a longer look.

  She pulled out her tablet and made an adjustment to her calendar. Global news updates would have to wait.

  She was going to a party.

  Magnus had written her three messages telling her to put the jacket back on. The last one just said, “National identity, please,” and Suyana had to fight not to make a face. She kept the jacket off.

  It was spring, and everyone was trying not to look intimidating; the Netherlands, India, and most of the rest of the row were in pastels. When the picture came out, Suyana was a negative space—black hair, black shirt—that tugged the eye.

  “That was lucky,” said Magnus when he saw it, with a sidelong look at her, which was as close as he got to praising her.

  “Margot thought so too,” Suyana said, which was as close as she got to confiding in him.

  × × × × × × ×

  Terrain’s facade was flush with the unbroken off-white line of buildings in its narrow street; the green door was so dark it was almost black. If you passed it, you’d think it was an old townhouse, and not wonder for a second about what was going on inside.

  That was because places like Terrain could afford not to advertise.

  “You’re heading for the seventh door on the left,” she told Daniel.

  Daniel followed her gaze. “Looks deserted.”

  “That’s the idea.” She took the scarf from her neck and let it fall open at her waist.

  When she tried to wrap the ends behind her back, there was a jolt of pain up her arm. She hissed and froze—she couldn’t afford to make anything worse, she’d be bleeding all over the kitchen.

  Then Daniel was behind her, his fingers nudging hers out of the way (they were cold).

  “What’s the idea here?” he asked quietly.

  “Apron.”

  The fabric pulled tight around her waist as he knotted it; his knuckles brushed her back. When she looked at him over her shoulder (she didn’t know what she was looking for), he didn’t quite meet her eye.

  “I’m going through the kitchen. Nobody pays attention to barbacks.” She hoped. “You get to lie your way in from the front.”

  “Wonderful.” He straightened his shoulders, ran his tongue over his teeth. “How private is it? Just Faces? Members only?”