He set his bag down on a chair next to the southern windows, dropped onto the bed, unbuckled his belt, and fell asleep.
Someone was knocking furiously. He lay immobilized, stupefied by the sound. “Time to go, Marcus.” The voice was Jennifer’s. “Your ten minutes are up.”
“Okay,” he croaked.
She didn’t reply, but he knew she was still out there, shifting her weight from one hip to the other, her head tilted in annoyance.
His own head was full of wet sand. In his mouth, a taste like dirt. He needed a shower and wished he could stomach a cup of vicious black coffee. He staggered to the door and jerked it open. Jennifer stood looking at him under the surgical brightness of the corridor lights. She wore red lipstick, several shades wilder than her usual color.
“Mr. Secretary and the others are in the lobby waiting for us,” she said. “Before we meet with the Premier, we’re taking a tour of the area where they disinterred the sixty-three bodies last week.”
“Great.”
She blinked, her face briefly showing uncertainty, but she said nothing. He turned around and rebuckled his belt.
“You’re not nervous?” he asked when they were in the hall moving toward the elevator.
“About what?” She didn’t stop and look at him as she spoke.
“Seeing where all those women were killed?”
“We don’t know if they were killed there. It’s just where they were buried. I don’t see why I should be nervous.”
“It makes me a little nervous,” he said.
She called the elevator. When it arrived a few seconds later with its reassuring, universal ding, they stepped into the empty car; he moved to the back but she stayed by the doors. It was disconcerting to see her so privately and close, her lean, feminine body available to him as it was to no other man at that moment, as the murdered women had at one time been available to their killers. If he had been like those men, he could have closed the gap between Jennifer and himself in less than a second, leapt upon her, fastened his hands to her neck and squeezed so hard she would have been dead in little more than the time it took to plummet from the eightieth floor to the first.
He was shivering when they emerged into the lobby and met the others. The Secretary had changed his red striped tie to a solid navy blue one and had combed his dark hair straight back from his forehead, as if he were a playboy. He was a handsome enough man, but his cheeks sagged a little and his nose had the broken blood vessels of a heavy drinker.
In the car, the Secretary smiled at him warily. “Have you ever been to this country before?”
Marcus shook his head. “No.”
“It’s too bad that your first visit has to be such a somber occasion. It’s a beautiful place.”
“I’m sure it must be.” He could feel Jennifer dismissing him with a look of disdain. He stared out the window, trying not to detest her. Soon this trip would be over. They planned to leave early the next morning. As they had discussed before their departure from the capital, the Secretary’s strategy, with such a brief visit, was to promise a return trip. But it was doubtful that he would make one, at least not for the dead women.
Their two-car caravan took them past men selling bags of oranges and unshelled nuts, bouquets of dyed flowers, bundles of sticks and what looked like wheat. They passed children playing soccer and others who stood by side of the road, waving as the strangers’ cars passed. There were skinny dogs and skinny chickens loitering in front of tents and tin-roofed shacks and colorful tattered shirts and trousers hanging on clotheslines, old shoes dangling from power lines. He looked for flashy, feral men, the supposed drug dealers and pimps, but saw no one who fit the description. He was afraid he would see ghosts but only a few long shadows flitted before his tired eyes.
At the place in the wind-scoured desert where sixty-three mangled female bodies had been discovered a week earlier, they found five of the Premier’s henchmen and a dozen soldiers with rifles upright at their sides. The soldiers raised their hands in salute when the Secretary emerged from one of the two Mercedes that had been employed to ferry him from luxury hotel to scene of sixty-three unceremonious burials. Marcus wondered if there had been more bodies, ones the Premier had decided not to count.
“This is a sad day for all democracy-loving people,” the Secretary proclaimed to the Premier an hour and a half later, after they had arrived at the Premier’s gilded offices. Both men nodded soberly at each other. Two state-sanctioned photographers were there, snapping pictures of the Premier shaking the Secretary’s hand. No reporters had been allowed into the meeting room. “What I have seen this morning deeply troubles me,” the Secretary continued, his face a mask of pious grief.
What he had seen was nothing. All evidence of the dead women had been spirited away, taken to a federal morgue where their bodies had been packaged in plastic after tags were attached to their toes, if any toes were available. At least as Marcus imagined it. He had no idea what had been done to the dead women’s remains—had grieving, dread-filled relatives come forward to identify them? Many of the women, however, apparently were immigrants, here only to work in the vast, thriving factories that their own home countries did not yet feature in such large numbers. They had come to make a little money and send it home to their sprawling families, to stay out of trouble with men and boys and avoid, for now, marriage and indefinite servitude to husbands and children.
The site featured nothing but crude wooden stakes and roped-off rectangles of sand and scrub to demarcate where the bodies had been disinterred. Marcus and the others had stood gawking at the mass grave and then had been herded into their cars and driven back to the city to meet with the Premier. Marcus composed the perfect headline for the Secretary’s first press release: SITE VISIT = FOOL’S ERRAND. But instead it would have to be SITE VISIT PROVIDES PERSPECTIVE ON UNSOLVED MURDERS, or DIPLOMATIC METHODS USED TO ADDRESS TRAGIC MURDERS. The morgue or wherever the remains had been taken would have been a better place to visit, but the Premier would never have let them see it. An actual corpse was gratuitous. It was ugly and real, too expensive and inconvenient to consider. Bad feelings all around, as Marcus had once heard the Secretary say. And what use are they?
He stared out the window on the drive back to the city, Jennifer and the Secretary talking intermittently, though both were subdued, his boss addressing him only once to say that he hoped Marcus had enough to work with for that evening’s press conference. Marcus nodded. “It won’t be a problem,” he said.
The Secretary smiled, his eyes brutal. “Good, good.”
He wasn’t so tired now, but he had a headache, one that hung on during the meeting with the Premier. Marcus filled a page of his notebook with doodles rather than quotes, drawing the Premier’s sharp nose and his small hands with their disturbing fingernails. This short muscular man, ruler of forty-one million poor people, reminded him of a bird of prey. Only once did the Premier make eye contact with him. When they were introduced, the statesman repeated Marcus’s name in his throaty, accented voice and smiled at the wall behind Marcus’s head, but a half an hour into the meeting, when Marcus glanced up at the ceiling and noticed the water stains shaped like the Great Lakes before returning his eyes to ground level, the Premier gave him a hostile look that he did not try to decipher.
His notebook had almost suffered an interdiction anyway, the Premier and his advisers not wanting any of their remarks taken out of context. The Secretary had assured them that they could review his prepared comments for the press conference before it aired. Marcus had already written the script before flying to the Premier’s country, but the Secretary did not know this. The common phrases were startlingly interchangeable: We are cooperating/working hard/conferring with our allies on this matter … We are making progress …
It is with regret … Any enemy of our democratic ideals will be vanquished … The voice of reason has spoken and it is our duty to respond …
As with oil and water, or throats and knives,
candid disclosure and dead women did not easily mix.
In his hotel room before the press conference, Marcus printed out the script and fell asleep on his bed a second time. Again it was Jennifer who used his door and her fists as an alarm clock. She had brought along a bottle of pills this time. “Take one,” she commanded.
“What are they?” asked Marcus, looking at the blue pills inside the green bottle.
“They’ll help keep you awake for a few more hours.”
He shook his head. “No thanks.”
“Don’t think of it as a drug. It’s like food. A sugar pill.”
He blinked. “Call it whatever you want but I’m not taking it.”
She put the bottle back in her handbag with an irritated sigh. Perhaps she did want to help him. Or else she was trying to poison him.
“You’re not going to last if you don’t learn to be more flexible,” she said.
“Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.”
“All of this is a test,” she said. “Every second.”
He had already assumed this. “Who’s being tested?”
“Who do you think? You and me, for starters.”
He shrugged on his suit coat and straightened his tie, saying nothing. He had fallen asleep with his shoes on and traces of sand were now at the foot of the bed. He brushed them onto the beige carpet and went into the hall, Jennifer following him.
The press conference, staged in a ballroom at the hotel with dozens of the Premier’s frightened loyalists, was later pronounced a success. The Secretary addressed reporters for five minutes using Marcus’s prewritten speech, answering questions for ten more, before the Premier took the podium to address the reporters and answer the same questions. Almost nothing said would be remembered a month or even a week later, not until it was time for re-election and the past was mined for the most egregious claims and promises. The next morning, however, as Marcus and the others were flying home, seven men were arrested in conjunction with the murders. Whether these men had anything to do with the dead women could not be determined by the human rights activists who arrived within the week to investigate the arrests, but along with everyone else, they had only two options: to believe what they were told or to hope that the real murderers would eventually be apprehended if they were not among these seven drifters and petty thieves.
Dead women kept appearing, but in less malicious numbers. Marcus read the news in the papers that he reviewed for the Secretary and dutifully summarized and submitted by three thirty on many afternoons. A cold, coursing stream of questions arrived in his head: Did the women weep when the men killed them or were they silent with disbelief and horror? Had some of them dreamt that their lives would end this way? What was the last thing they had eaten before they were murdered? Had anyone ever written a love poem for them? Had they ever learned how to swim? What were the songs that played repeatedly in their heads? Had they had any money to spend on movie tickets when they weren’t working? Were they always worrying about their weight or were they starving? Did they plead with their murderers to tell their families that they loved them, that they were good girls?
When he went home at night, he still could not sleep and began to look at the objects in his apartment with disgust. Why did he need seven pairs of shoes, five pairs of running shorts, eleven neckties? He no longer understood the point of the TV shows he had watched and laughed at for years. He hadn’t been on a date or made love to a woman since the first month he’d started working for the Secretary. His job had taken over his life, as predicted, but at the time he had not expected to mind so much.
He tried to put his insomnia to better use and studied the two cookbooks in his cupboard, A Treasury of Great Recipes and The Joy of Cooking, with the dim hope that he could teach himself to become a chef and begin a new career, but he quickly discovered that he did not have the patience to retry a failed recipe multiple times. He thought about learning graphology so that he might study handwriting samples and solve crimes; then he checked out a book on tax accounting before moving to portraiture and musical composition, but he knew he would never master any of these arts and sciences without years of intensive study and practice. His neglected friend D. called once during the week after his trip to visit the bogus gravesite of the dead women but hung up before leaving a message. Marcus’s widowed mother called regularly on weekends. Sometimes she worried aloud that she was responsible for his unhappiness, which she had begun to speak of long before he realized that he was unhappy.
In the underground room, talks focused on new weapons technology and assassination plots, both at home and abroad, and the Secretary invited him to go down with him among the important smokers less often than usual. Apparently he was needed in the office, where he was instructed to spend less time on the newspapers in favor of writing notes and sketches related to the major world events of the past several years, ones that the Secretary said he would use as the basis for his memoirs.
After several days of writing detailed notes about earthquakes, hurricanes, genocide, suicide bombings, tsunamis, typhoons, school shootings, military coups, famine, water shortages, oil crises, mudslides, vote recounts, earthquakes, domestic terrorism, and prison riots, Marcus thought he could see ghosts in the middle of the night, faceless wraiths that collected at his bedroom window and looked on while he lay in bed and tried not to see them. He began to leave the lights on and covered his face with a pillow but could rarely sleep for more than an hour at a time. At work, his eyes dark and baleful, Jennifer and the other office staff eyed him warily but said nothing. Few appeared better off.
Instead of sketches, he began to write lists. At first they were practical—old movies he wanted to see, cities he hoped to visit—but soon his lists became flippant and indulgent: actresses he planned to seduce, sports cars he would drive off cliffs if ever told to do so. Sweaty-palmed and with a queer feeling of victory, he left one of these lists on the Secretary’s desk, but it was briskly intercepted by Jennifer, who brought it back to him, holding the yellow legal paper in front of her chest like a squalid rag. Her shoulders were small and shapely, her waist tiny in her cinched shirtdress. He wondered if she, too, watched pointless comedies and hated herself for it. The current state of the union: catatonia, drug- and food-induced obliviousness.
“Are you trying to get yourself arrested?” she said, eyes wide behind her decorative eyeglasses.
He blinked. “Arrested?”
“They can do whatever they want to you. You know that as well as anyone.”
“Why do you care what happens to me?”
“I care what happens to me,” she said. “For all I know, I could be implicated in this.”
The list was “What I Did at Work Today,” ghostwritten by Marcus for the Secretary, who would not have liked it, not at all, but Marcus doubted that he would have suspected Jennifer of collusion.
1.Took call from Premier S—; assured him we would keep backing arrests
2.Named some of the dead women after famous actresses in report: Jane, Marilyn, Joan, Barbara, Jodie I, Jodie II, Brooke, Claire, Stephanie, Rita, Katharine, Julia, Jill, Amy, Faye, Sarah, Helena, Julianne, Courtney, Liz, Jean, Karen, Annie, Jenna, Zoe
3.Looked at three favorite skin sites
4.Had lunch with the Reverend, the General, and the VP to discuss monitoring of human rights activists
5.Gave all-clear for air strike on market district in insurgents’ triangle of influence
6.Had J. make appointment for teeth cleaning and checkup, 4/23, 8 A.M.
“I don’t think he looks at porn while he’s in the office,” Jennifer whispered. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”
He thought that she was only pretending to be obtuse. He also doubted that she needed to whisper. The bug would pick up their voices no matter what. It seemed likely that the Secretary had the budget for the most sophisticated in-house surveillance available.
“I’d like to get to know you better,” he said. “Outside of the offi
ce. Would you like to have dinner with me tonight?”
“Is that what this is about?” She shook the paper at him. “Do you think this kind of thing impresses me?”
“I have no idea what impresses you.”
“Not this,” she said. “That’s for sure.”
“We could go wherever you want, but I know a good Mexican place a few blocks from here.”
She paused and looked at him for a second before ripping up the list and throwing it into his wastebasket. “I don’t usually date people from work.”
“Usually?” he said. “So you’ll make an exception for me?”
She regarded him. “If I go out with you, Marcus, I want you to stop writing lists. I’ve seen the others you’ve written.”
“Have you seen Rashomon? If you haven’t, maybe we could watch it together.”
“I haven’t seen it.”
“Do you want to watch it with me later?”
She shook her head. “I’ll go to dinner with you, but that’s all. Eight o’clock. Let’s meet at J. Paul’s in Georgetown. Do you know it?”
“Of course I do.”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course you do.”
He was at the restaurant before she was, his palms damp, his face tender from having been shaved twice in one day. He could not quite believe that she’d said yes and that she would not stand him up, but at last she appeared, twenty minutes late. He noticed other men’s eyes following her as she walked toward him. Her long, dark hair was loose, liquid and edible-looking, the first time he had seen it out of its constraints. At the office, she kept it subdued in a tight twist at the nape of her neck. He could not stop staring at her. “You look great,” he blurted, then took a big swallow of his beer, nearly choking on it.
The Virginity of Famous Men Page 8
