Borderless Deceit

by Adrian de Hoog

  I nodded approval. No wonder Jaime and I hadn’t found a thing.

  “I can make light of it now, but I had barely slept for two days and was emotionally wiped. When Iain opened the door he stared at me as if I was a ghost. I collapsed. Iain swore. I partially got up, so that we both staggered in. He wanted to call an ambulance. I shrieked and clawed at him to prevent that. Delicious melodrama the whole time. I made it to the couch. He went to make coffee which revived me a little. When he poured himself a Scotch and offered me one too, I announced I was done with drinking for at least the next eight months. ‘Rachel,’ he replied, his voice lilting, the delicate sarcasm coming back, ‘you look a wee bit shipwrecked. Did you acquire motherhood during a storm? Did the vessel splinter on the rocks? Was it all quite unforseen?’ I nodded wearily. He sighed. ‘Rest first. Tell me then.’

  “I came to around noon the next day. Eight days before, mere blocks away, I had been on my way to meet Nikko. Things had come full circle.

  “Iain said adventure tales should be shared sitting around a fire while drinking whiskey. For this one time, though, would I settle for central heating, Turkish coffee and Viennese pastries? Once we had eaten he asked if the shipwreck had been bad. ‘Nothing left,’ I replied. ‘Truly?’ ‘Truly, Iain. Nothing. Nothing at all.’

  “I told him the entire story: meeting Nikko in Geneva long before, then Morsi on his estate in Kenya, and the years of sitting on the board of the Foundation. Iain made his ironic asides. ‘A not unfamiliar story,’ he said, ‘a white queen, a black knight disguised as her white king with a black bishop out to usurp him.’ When I finished, he said, ‘So, each black piece will think the other has taken the white queen. What they don’t know is that a white pawn came through. You’re here now, Rachel, on the other side of the board. You’re queen again.’ I laughed. ‘A queen, but no realm, and in hiding too.’ ‘Not at all,’ he answered smugly. ‘Don’t forget, you’re half owner of a chunk of Costa Rican territory. The palace may be smallish, but it’s nice enough. And what’s better, it’s secret. The only challenge is to get you there unseen.’

  “Within days he’d made arrangements. There was a place for me on a UN cargo flight to Nicaruaga. I sat buckled in between supplies for a disaster relief stockpile. I also had a carte d’ entree, and an official-looking letter from him, the head of the Vienna Office of the UN legal advisor. Another UN travel document he issued was for me to go from Nicaragua into Costa Rica. There was no fuss anywhere. They looked at the papers and ignored them.”

  “Not bad,” I said. “Your own purdah.”

  “Purdah?”

  I explained what it was, but she shook her head. “Iain doesn’t have that kind of power. I was untraceable because my last name has changed. I now have Iain’s.”

  My jaw dropped.

  “I’m no longer Rachel Dunn. I’ve become Rachel Bruce.”

  My mind began yet more hectic reordering. “Rachel, no,” I stammered. “You’re married?”

  “I think so. Iain did the paperwork. It was rushed. But maybe he only adopted me.”

  22 CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  Diego, slouched under a tree by the entrance to the driveway, had been waiting steadfastly as a shepherd. When he saw me coming he burst out: “Señor!” He inspected me closely for some indication of what had happened, but wasn’t getting a read. He probed: “You talk long.”

  “Thanks for staying, Diego. Gracias.”

  He frowned and opened the passenger door. “You and freend ees okay now? You say all?”

  “I didn’t say much. Mostly I listened.”

  He sucked in his breath with a cry – Ay! – and drew his hand back sharply, as if he had touched a hotplate. He slammed the car door, ran around to his side, installed himself behind the wheel, and said, “When man listen to whoaman and it goes long, ees trouble, no? You say sorry but she say: No! Sorry too easy! All afternoon you listen to your badness.” He studied me some more. “You have pain?” He turned the starter.

  “She confided in me, Diego.”

  “Confayded? No comprendo.”

  “As in confession.”

  “Confehshun? Ah, confehshun. Si, comprendo. Confesión. Comprendo. She say to me: you have half story, she has half story. Half she has, ees bad also? Like you?” Diego chuckled. “You no have pain. You happy. You happy she bad also.”

  “It’s complex, Diego.”

  “Si. Si. Complejo. Naturalmente.” The car fell and rose back over the track to the main road. “You go back tomorrow? More badness talk? Mucha Confesión? Ees nice, confesión. Ees agradable. What time you go? I drive.”

  And he did, because Rachel had insisted I should come again. So much to catch up on. He drove the day after that too. And on the fourth day, beaming with pride, Diego also transported my sack of belongings, Rachel in her casual manner having proposed that I should stay with her. The house design – you know – it makes it easy to have guests.

  The days at the casa developed a routine, almost a settled domesticity. They blended and blurred and began adding up to weeks. And all through this Diego kept a close watch on his two black sheep. Early each day he took up a vigil at the driveway entrance, waiting for breakfast on the verandah to run its leisurely course. One wave from the verandah and he’d come sprinting over, bursting with advice on what that day was suited for. Señor, señora. Dia excelente para… With a show of formality Rachel and I would get nobly installed in the lumpy back seat of his taxi. The Countess of Turrialba and Consort! Diego would next negotiate the track, the back seat occupants getting tossed about like rubber duckies. Sometimes we went to a market where, with elaborate ceremony, Diego would visit every stall before picking out the freshest fruit. Sometimes we were tourists: visits to nearby attractions – Guayabo, the park around the volcano, villages and churches throughout the Central Valley. Acting on orders, Diego finally did something about his car’s front end. He glowered at first, but after a single proud nod agreed that the cost of the shimmy repair would be added to next week’s honorarium. And now the outings were grander, one to the Caribbean coast, another across the mountains to the Pacific. The days were uncomplicated, the silences easy, the banter lively, and laughter erupted at every trivial situation. Twelve long, aching years of gloomy self-contempt, and now, Rachel having waved the wand of charity, all this?

  Of course, at the beginning, before I became Rachel’s guest, before we settled into our routine, there was some further untangling to be done. Her name change, for example. It shocked me. Rachel insisted it was temporary, a mere convenience. As a listed dependent of a senior UN official, she had privileges; she wouldn’t have to be in hiding. But was this the full story? It struck me that Rachel was now very closely joined to Iain. First a shared property, followed by having the same family name. It was a lot to have in common. Where was this leading? What would be the last name of the baby? I asked Rachel. She hesitated, then inquired why I was asking. I replied I had no right to an answer, but I wasn’t asking out of curiosity either.

  “Back to thinking you’re number thirteen?” she teased.

  “I have things to sort out, Rachel.”

  “Such as?”

  “On the postcard to Anne-Marie you wrote your future won’t be anything like the past. That applies to me too. I have to find new pasturage.” I spread my hands and looked around. Rachel’s house, the stunning grounds, the human coziness of the Central Valley, Costa Rica. “Is this it? Could I play a role here? Can we turn the clock back? I’ve thought about our picnic in Berlin. We could decide this minute to become incorrect. We could go back to where we were then and restart the future. We could pretend all that happened in between didn’t. We could go on another picnic.”

  Rachel took her time. Finally she said softly, “Carson, I’m here to bring my child into the world. I savour the days. They’re unhurried. I have peace to get ready to become a mother. I’m also glad you came. I value you being here and I hope you’ll stay a long time. But, really, this is no place
for you. Not long term. With all that’s happened…” She stopped and began massaging her hands, as if this issue, of her and me, had to be kneaded once and for all into a realistic state. With a thin smile, part apology, part regret, she said, “In Berlin many strands came together, yet didn’t add up. And so it wasn’t a starting point. It can’t be one now. I think time has passed us by.”

  I took this in. Since arriving in Turrialba and locating Rachel’s casa, I had developed a vague unease, but hadn’t given it attention, steadily pushing it aside. But now it stood in clear focus. Rachel with her gentleness had summed up the situation. She was right, time had passed us by. Somewhere there had been a turning point and I had missed it. With her oncoming motherhood, there was much I would have to learn to see differently.

  All the same I wanted to know how Iain figured. Rachel was evasive every time I inquired. But she wasn’t hesitant to talk about me, as if my future needed definition before she could reveal hers. And if I was short of ideas about my new pasturage, she wasn’t. “You have strengths, Carson,” she said. “Too few people benefit from them. You could do much good. You should expand your audience.” She made it sound as if I ought to turn into some kind of TV evangelist.

  Expand my audience? Yes, she believed I should reach out. I was perplexed. How? Then, for longer than an hour, mesmerised, I listened to a sweeping vision – Rachel’s vision – of where the world was at. Globalization, huge new opportunities, equitable development, shared scientific and medical breakthroughs, education becoming widely available. I never knew her optimism for humanity was that strong. But then she talked about the afflictions. Gangrenous social conditions in numerous places, economic lacerations, the cancerous impact everywhere of the self-serving politicians, states being held back, states failing. She described the only cure she knew: people unafraid to roll up their sleeves to push for a better future. “There are too few of them,” she concluded.

  She wove her insights into an elegant collage. I loved it when Rachel talked like this, thoughts set loose, the diction calm, the direction compelling. She tried to make it seem it wasn’t herself she was describing. But it was. She had lived these ideals, forced breakthroughs and worked wonders. Is this your valedictory? I thought of asking. I wondered what it had to do with me. In my line of work, I had seen the world as a sick organism too, but my dealings were with its underside, with the blights. I always considered them beyond healing. Compared to Rachel’s, what had been my contribution? A fumigator’s? I thought wryly. It’s an essential service, even if not exactly noble. When Rachel paused, in so many words, that’s what I said.

  She didn’t buy it. “Your strengths, Carson,” she repeated. “Focus on them.” She began listing them.

  “But that isn’t me,” I began to protest. True, I had done some of the things she described, the big picture syntheses, the sorting out of the important from the trivial. And I had tried to provide clarity when others were in a muddle. “But it was only ever done to prevent – never to build,” I countered anew.

  Rachel waved this away too. “Another thing you’re good at is staring down the bigwigs,” she laughed. “You don’t kowtow. How it bothered them. I remember watching their squirming. It was refreshing.”

  Even so, having seldom ventured outside my Service cell, whatever strengths I had were monkish ones, unsuitable for deployment in the tumultuous settings where Rachel had magically pulled the strings. In the places she thrived, I said emphatically, I would be dysfunctional.

  Glibly she replied: “What you’re really saying is that you intend to hold yourself back.” She counselled the opposite, urged me to re-invest in myself, to prepare a new focus, a new passion. “In a year or two, who knows, you could be leading an international movement. It wouldn’t be difficult, not for you.”

  “Rachel, you’re talking in riddles. Leading an international movement? Me? I’m the wallflower, remember. Years ago you called me that. Anyway, people instinctively avoid me. I think they see something misshapen, a werewolf, something like that.”

  “Werewolf? No. And now that I think about it, not a wallflower either. Maybe you’re a cross, a wereflower, or a wererose: a few prickly thorns, but when the bud opens it’s priceless. Anyway, I’m not suggesting you go out on the street to wave placards and lead people on marches. You can lead them with ideas. There’s no end to the subjects you could investigate and explain. And you could come up with sensible suggestions for action. Take new international security concepts. Few people understand the linkages between population growth, disease, the environment, the arms trade, the economy and the comforts of living in the suburbs. Or look at the challenge of forcing organisations running the world’s affairs finally to become responsible. Organisations are inherently arrogant. They always convince themselves they are right all the time. Which ones admit to error? Which ones learn? Imagine putting that in the light of a thorough rational analysis. You have a tracking nose, Carson. You know where to find information. You know how to present it and draw convincing conclusions. You have all the skills.” Rachel shrugged and spread her hands to emphasise that for her all this was obvious.

  I wasn’t convinced. “Who would listen to me?”

  “Many. Because you command the medium. For years you’ve been writing brilliant reports that enlighten tiny communities of spooks. Ignore them. Post what you produce. Flog it. Use the Internet. You would soon have a following and eventually you would be a respected authority. Think about it.”

  I fell silent. I had always scoffed at activists. I despised their naivety. But the way Rachel presented it…could I be a self-appointed intervener? Could I really help redirect the world?

  Rachel said no more, not then, not later. Having planted a seed she seemed satisfied. Weeks later I came to understand what she had done. By spelling out her vision of my future, Rachel was transferring the one she had had of herself. She had turned her back on the world’s hurly-burly and placed her crown, bejewelled with her ideals, onto my head. Could I decide I shouldn’t wear it?

  But her subtle stage-management wasn’t finished.

  It occurred again when I decided to change my tack on Iain. For a week I’d been a casa guest and for me he hovered like a ghost, as if in every room he was an unseen listener. To ask about him was to deepen a near denial by Rachel that he even existed. So instead, why not assert that he was present?

  One morning Diego insisted that the weather – the rainy season was ending and the showers were infrequent now – was perfect for an excursion to Guyabo. The drive wasn’t long. We soon found that as archeological sites go it was modest, though interesting enough. Rachel and I wandered around and paused in a shady spot with a view down to where the centre of the ancient settlement once was. I hauled out biscuits and bananas. A picnic. She reclined full-out on the grass, crossed her ankles and placed a hand on her belly. “It’s growing,” she said, although if there was a swelling, it was still slight. She wore a light cotton dress, azure, with thin halters and to my eye it revealed a lovely feminine roundness. I made a mental calculation of her baby’s approximate delivery date and this led to a further connection. I said, “You should let me know in good time when Iain is coming.” Rachel asked why I said that. “I should be gone before he arrives.”

  Rachel sat up, leaning back on her arms. With a sultry inquisitiveness. she studied me. “But he wouldn’t mind if you were here. Actually, I would like you two to meet. You would have fascinating discussions. I’d enjoy listening.”

  Iain finding me in his casa as Rachel’s guest? Didn’t she see there would be tension? Did she have her own blind spot after all? I shook my head. “I’ll be gone before he gets here. I have to get started with that reinvestment in myself. I can’t do that here. Anyway, you and Iain, you’ll need time to get used to being together.”

  It was as if an ice-jam had been dynamited. Iain’s vacation plans gushed into the open: his plans to work on the casa garden; how he would get the track to the main road fixed; his inten
tion to go back to Vienna, but only to finalise retirement arrangements, following which he’d live in Turrialba permanently. “He’ll be here for the baby’s arrival.”

  “He’ll be a good father figure.”

  “You think that?” Rachel asked keenly. “Why?”

  I visualised him as a dry, droll character, gentle, generous, completely unselfish and with a capacity to feel. Wasn’t that prime fatherhood material?

  “I see you’ve thought about him,” Rachel laughed. She paused, her expression becoming spicier. “Tell me, Carson, have you thought about him and me?”

  “Rachel,” I chided. “It’s not my right.”

  “Why not? You did it before.”

  “I’ve apologised for that. I won’t do it again.”

  “Actually, I’m not asking for voyeurism. I’m asking for extrapolation. How do you think things will develop between him and me?”

  I shifted position, coming upright, and sitting cross-legged, looking down at Rachel who was again stretched full-out. How would her life develop? I didn’t have a fortune teller’s aids, but all the same I plunged in. “You and Ian? Well, I see conventionality. I see you being happy with that because you’ve had all the experiences anyone could possibly want and you have that in the bank. Good memories carry a very decent rate of interest and you can live off them. Iain will adopt your baby so it will have a legal father and soon enough you’ll have a second child. You’ll be here in Turrialba for a few years and when the question of the children’s education looms you’ll move. To the Scottish Highlands is my prediction. Iain will convince you it will be good there for the children. He’ll buy a farm on the shore of a loch. There will be dogs, cats, ponies, all that. He’ll run the household; you’ll become active on local committees. Your children will grow up a little bit wild. And all of you will love the absence of boundaries in life.”