The UnAmericans

by Michael Carter

  Menteshashvilli’s cigarette mingled with pine and sea scents; the moon was lifting behind the headland, quiet conversation from wedding guests burbled up through the magnolia way below. From somewhere in the trees a slight rustle of repositioning, or hitching up of clothing conjured the grotesque thought of his ex-wife skipping the light fandango with a fish killer. No other sound percolated through the tide and cicada. The sweat was sticking Max’s shirt to the base of his back; he was a spinning-top of second hand jealousy, yet Peg was a horror, Baby Jane with rough trade in the bushes. Then her laugh descended on him free and young, unshackled from the battened down warrior he had seen in the last two days, and its independence shocked him. It transcended age and held him on a long line back to the young beauty he had to enslave then lose only after he had ruined her for others. “Menteshashvilli. Go home,” he said in Georgian. The strong smell of bark sucked into him as he listened.

  “He’s not my husband.” Peg’s voice was clear and defiant.

  He hid his shock in the darkness and their sounds snapped and scattered past him, geriatrics tottering back from Paradise Un-regained. Eventually Menteshashvilli’s outline edged into the light spill from Shota’s and wandered off, a cool thief attracting no attention. Peg was hanging back so they wouldn’t be witnessed together. He stood till he saw her stagger towards Masha’s. She was very drunk, and that shocked him too.

  Henry’s voice carried through the thick foliage. The posse was coming. Max descended quietly, picked up the Pepsis and found Timmy, staring up at the night sky in some sort of rapture and wondered if he had taken a drug. While Timmy was retelling tales of his hippy infancy, Menteshashvilli’s squat figure made a reappearance, waltzing to his jacket on the chair beside Peg’s where he found his spectacles and placed them carefully in his inside pocket. Then he wrapped his tie round his fist and deposited it in a side pocket, drained his glass of wine, wiped the wet moustache, found his cigarettes, lit one, lifted his jacket, turned and left without so much as a how do you do.

  “That the guy?”

  Max nodded.

  “George Clooney he ain’t.”

  Peg’s truck-stop profanities burst through the darkness in Masha’s house, stopping Lucy dead at the foot of the stairs. This was something she had never heard in her mother; she had never seen her anywhere near drunk, never mind in this blue-collar coarseness. Arnold’s voice climbed rapidly to restrain the obscenities. Lucy called. The invective switched off. Then the word ‘fuck’ floated through the darkness. Lucy half saw Arnold’s pale face looming at the door, then it disappeared and she heard the snick of the lock.

  The intensity of her mother’s rage and the obscenity of her language left her trembling. From Masha’s front door she watched the magnolia lights burn above the remnants of her wedding. The greatest day of her life had degenerated into madness. Her husband stood with her father, drinking Pepsi. Behind them locals drank and amused each other. A couple danced unsteadily. She stood watching them, breathing softly and loathing everyone. The thought arrived casually, an innocent suggestion from a patient opportunist. If her father were the drunk they said he was, some would be hidden away, and as a fellow worshipper, she would know where to look. The clichés, mantras and slogans of the AA rooms turned to dust and were buried a million miles away beside her dead wedding. She left the shadow of Masha’s door and jogged onto the road to Max’s. A Mercedes swerved past her and four men in t-shirts looked at her as if she were an as yet unclassified species.

  Pools of moonlight patterned Max’s floors and walls; ivory keys glowed on the piano, the red velvet stool looked purple. She pressed a key and the note filled the room like liquid silver, smothering the sounds of the beach and the last exhalations of her wedding. She tried another, then another. There was a beautiful independence in the sounds, a single note could penetrate any remoteness and set it shivering. She looked at the dots and tails on the staves, at another code her father and Masha understood but she would never break. Everyone knew something she didn’t.

  She kept the lights off and methodically searched all the likely places, then moved to the unlikely. Through a small kitchen window the hill behind the house was luminous, an amphitheatre of moonlit trees witnessing how quickly the calm she experienced in the ceremony had evaporated. Others were caught by occasional madness, then returned to calm. Her home base was madness from which there was occasional relief. Some unknown process had produced marriage; she had no idea how. She opened a cupboard and saw bottles of cleaning fluids.

  From the day Max defected Henry had driven with the brakes on. Over the years, long stretches would pass when he could forget. Then it would smack him out of a clear sky and leave him toxic for days. Curiosity sent him to Max’s mother in a public mental ward reeking of piss and run by staff stressed to within an inch of sadism. A sallow, wafer of oblivion didn’t recognise her son’s name, and he left with nothing but pity and fear of the future.

  Even when Max and his tribe were reduced to Berlin rubble, it didn’t stop. He experienced no sense of vindication or victory, only depression when the wall came down and the Big Game was over. It had been a game in which his own side engaged enthusiastically and he had been a player, run by a nation defined by the enemy, his life handed over to a construct.

  His little sister withdrew into a shell. Equipped for nothing but Baccarat crystal in the suburbs, she floundered in streams of martyrdom and enraged him with her helplessness. Then Arnold picked up the pieces and glued back some dignity. But under the moonlit magnolia Arnold had become a new victim; Max had made them all mad again. Peg’s insanity with the scummy little fisherman had shaken Henry badly, and the scramble through woods against stinging branches to find her before she made a complete idiot of herself left him sore, breathless and furious.

  When she was discovered raving at Masha’s he had to withdraw somewhere quiet and stuff back tears. Then the anger boiled up and he advanced on Max, positioned with Timmy as his shield, sharing a Pepsi and light wedding banter. Could Max just say something to Peg at some point, that didn’t keep her out in the cold, that let her squeeze a little of the poison, it wouldn’t kill him for Christ’s sake? But all he got was the Cyclopean gaze bricking up the distances between them, and the Cold War relaunched.

  Henry never really got over being betrayed. In some sense, the politics were irrelevant. It was the act itself. Something fundamental was destroyed swiftly and brutally and for months after the defection he moved around as a mass of cells, flesh, bone and nerves, reduced to the primal level of food, shelter, excretion and little else. He observed human behaviour from a distance that seemed unbridgeable. Inch by painful inch he crossed back over. But it took a long time and any serious trauma or disappointment could yank him back to that distant outsider position, as if he were attached by elastic. When the KGB files were opened in the early Nineties and he discovered it was Peter who had tipped the wink to Max, he lay winded and broken again, and felt he had known nothing about his own life. That was what treachery did; it stole your life. He opened the exchange that had been festering for three and a half decades by talking about Peter, someone they had both loved for different reasons.

  “He played golf with Bob Hope.”

  “Yes. He was a good golfer,” said Max.

  “Peter was dead when they opened the KGB files, so the press hounded his sons and daughter. One was a Hollywood movie producer who had licked a cocaine habit.”

  “Really? Cocaine?”

  Everything glanced off Max; nailing him was like grabbing a shadow, and when Henry’s voice bounced back from the stone terrace it sounded weak and full of self-pity. The anger that glowed down the decades vanished and left him sweating with self-consciousness. He was aware everyone was watching and lost all idea of where to take things. He could see Max, gloves up with no intention of fighting and simultaneously felt something weaken in his own resolve.
He knew both of them were riding losers; it was obvious debate was pointless, how could they sort out stuff that happened so long ago? They might as well debate the Indian Wars. However he had to have a tilt, he owed it to his sister, to the niece who could be on a vodka aphrodisiac behind a bush lifting her wedding dress for a stranger, to lists of names in unmarked graves, to history, to something.

  The morning after he left the Service he thought what now and wondered if Max had woken to the same chasm in the Moscow morning. How had he dealt with Hungary, the Prague Spring, delaying puberty in gymnasts?

  Max didn’t recall Henry questioning any of the scams they got up to out of Langley. “The clasping of mafia hands to get Fidel? The assassination of the fascist Trujillo in case, in case, he provoked a Communist revolution? Did you question those? I wouldn’t have, if I held your position. I just saw it from another side. But please don’t play the ‘we were the good guys and you were the Evil Empire’ cliché.” A litany of American transgressions was trotted out, from the drug runs for Vietnamese warlords and right-wing Central American terrorists that inflated addiction in black communities across America that were given the wink by the ‘office’, to the programmes of destabilisation in Uruguay, Persia, Chile, Vietnam, Central America. “Did you question any of that? Of course not. You kept your nose clean. I kept mine clean here.”

  “Most of that stuff was long after us.”

  “And if you’d been there you would have made a difference?”

  “We didn’t kill millions in gulags.”

  “That was long before me, and you think my coming here was an approval of that?”

  “If you’d been there, would you have made a difference?”

  “If you had been born later, Max,” offered Timmy, “you mighta gone hippy. You know, like parleyed your politics into a Hopi candle trade on the Big Sur.”

  The voice of youth pulled them up. Jagger pouted from the music system. Shota muttered something to Max and Max reassured him all was fine. Masha jiggled Shota’s granddaughter till she gave a gummy grin at the blurring light bulbs in the magnolia. To Timmy, the two old men shaking up the sediment of their past, were ridiculous. His wedding day was not the ground for history’s dead battles. McCarthy and the Cuban missile crisis were nostalgia trips for unemployed National Guardsmen. The jibe of youth reminded Max and Henry that the rest of the world gave not one damn about their historical principles. Their language was as dead as Latin or Assyrian. Only for Henry, a faint notion that he had to set a few things straight remained, but Max insisted that if he had come for revenge or explanations he had no idea how to provide them.

  “How often you get asked the big one Max?”

  “What’s that Timmy?”

  “Do you still believe?”

  Timmy offered shelter from Henry’s prosecution. “Do you believe in anything Timmy?”

  “I don’t think we need those big beliefs anymore. In fact, I think they get in the way.”

  “In the way of what?”

  “Aah, just in the way.”

  The Cold War vets stared at a young face replete with a life collected at the checkout, unsure if he were dumb or a lot smarter than they.

  “Has anyone seen Lucy?” Timmy asked.

  Henry shook his head. “What..? Is she…?”

  “This is a tradition on her wedding night.”

  “What tradition?” asked Max.

  “Going missing.”

  “Is there any booze in your place, Max?” whispered Henry.

  “There may be a little somewhere.”

  “Shit,” said Henry, and Timmy’s silence endorsed the concern. Max thought of his precious liqueur among the cleaning chemicals, and prayed Lucy missed it, not for her sake, but for his. He was shaken up and a drink would settle him. “I’ll go back and check.”

  “Leave it Max,” said Timmy, “It’s probably too late or we’re up our asses over nothing. I’m staying put.” He shook his head at ship lights, far out to sea. “I wonder where he’s going.”

  “Maybe Max should go back and…”

  “Forget it, Henry. I can’t go chasing this all my life. Get back to treason.”

  But the wind was out of their sails. Max’s problem with the stuff was another secret distancing them. A long silence left both men hopelessly self conscious, and to sow peace and lower the siren calls from his cleaning cupboard, Max slipped into nostalgia, and Henry grudgingly joined him, as former enemies do in a time that has no regard for their old differences. Timmy became audience to a double act from a History Channel trailer.

  “Somebody says Castro dives for deep-sea clams. So we rig dozens of clams with high explosive and fix them in the beds, so when Fidel cuts them free, they blow him to Kingdom Come.”

  “And…?” asked Timmy.

  “He never dived for them.”

  Henry asked if Max remembered the poison they used in the diving suit.

  “Madura fungus and tubercle bacilli.”

  “They impregnated a diving suit with this stuff. Somehow they got it to him. As soon as he put it on it would kill him.”

  “What happened?”

  “He didn’t put it on.”

  “If I proposed this to my boss as an idea for a strip she’d say get outa here poisoned diving suits and exploding clams, get real.”

  A scuffle from the bar turned everyone. A glass fell. Shota shouted something in Georgian.

  “Is that a fight?” asked Timmy.

  “Probably,” said Max.

  “I better check my wife hasn’t started it.” And they watched Timmy disappear into the bar.

  “Poor sonofabitch.” Henry scanned the headland and the hills. “Where the hell could she have got to?”

  “It is a problem then?”

  “Beyond comprehension,” answered Henry. But he was less concerned with his foolish niece than the corpses over Central and South America, the Caribbean, Vientiane, nagging him from unknown graves. Max would claim there were no widows at his door; the dead were anonymous files closed when the shit hit the fan, and that was true; that was how they operated. But voices of the dead mumbled round the luminous sea.

  “Henry, we were all killers by proxy; a memo here, locals with a bent for torture, promotions won over anonymous corpses. If that’s what the boss wanted, that’s what we gave him. If he liked the middle way, everyone became enlightened. Mostly what the struggle led to was another pension payment.”

  “You gave names, Max. And a lot of those names found a bullet or a garrotte. Kids were left with no fathers. Or mothers. Sometimes whole families.”

  “What do you want me to do, Henry?”

  “Just admit it. Have the guts to say ‘yes, I did that’.”

  Max laughed, “What? You were right and we were wrong?”

  Henry shook his head. “I’m not interested in that crap. It’s just about you, Max, just about you.”

  A tiny insect crawled over a leaf. Plates on its back lifted, transparent wings extended and it took off. A bonfire burst up way down the beach.

  “And all the corpses with Uncle Sam stamped on their ass? How do you feel about those, Henry?”

  “I have no blood on my hands.”

  “I seem to recall you worked on the Bay of Pigs fiasco.”

  “Over a minor, specific issue. Purely administrative. I was nothing more than a clerk…”

  “We’re all clerks on Judgement Day.” Max moved into theory. “At the end of the day, espionage is simply an alternative negotiation.”

  “You could make the same argument for genocide.”

  “No one died in vain. We’ve had peace for fifty years.”

  “Thank you.”

  “That was not an admission, Henry,” Max became agitated. Then the energy s
eeped out of him. The whole thing was too big, too complex and full of too many traps.

  “Peg and Lucy?”

  “I regret that.”

  Henry laughed bitterly. “And me?”

  “I regret that too.”

  “What did you feel? When you went through with it?”

  “Fear. Numbness.”

  “What was behind it though? Who were you getting back?”

  “No one. It was balance in a world of fanatics.”

  “Oh come on, Max, get off that shit.”

  “There was a guy called Freddie Ancellotti drove the school bus in the town where I’m from: nice guy, loved the kids, we loved him – he was funny. He joined a truck regiment in the war, no hero, but did his bit, and came back set against segregation; blacks had died for America, why couldn’t they have a cup of coffee where they wanted? Freddie was no more a Communist than Frank Sinatra, but he believed in unions and had opinions. He wasn’t trying to undermine anything or change anything other than a few ugly old prejudices and a couple of unreasonable working conditions. But when the McCarthy circus came through town my father fingered Freddie and he lost his job, his wife, his kids, and the whole town turned its back on him. Even the school kids he used to drive wouldn’t speak to him. He was completely isolated in his own neighbourhood. There was a breaker’s yard called Bruno’s had one of those small cranes ran on rails, you know? Freddie hanged himself on it with an old pair of his wife’s stockings. It was the best day of my father’s life. Not one voice raised in sympathy for Freddie. Not even a kid’s. That was the scary bit. The kids said he deserved it.”

  Henry looked up and saw the word ‘bullshit’ neon-blinking round the moon. The Rolling Stones whined from the music stack and the horizon was a strip of Jagger’s silver Lurex. Way beyond lay the shore of the country whose malign influence had given his life a point. “So you went to Russia and lived happily ever after.”