The Mulberry Bush

by Charles McCarry

  “What chance, you fucking nutcase?”

  “Amzi, really. Instead of hurling obscenities at me you should be thinking about the benefits you might reap.”

  “Benefits? Like what for example? Dismissal? Disgrace?”

  “If all goes well, admiration of the nation, possibly a medal, almost surely a promotion—branch chief, chief of division, eventually. I’m on my way out. You can run this op, reap the glory, without ever mentioning my name.”

  Amzi Strange locked eyes with Father. Neither man yielded. By his own account, Father was calm, in control, enjoying himself. Strange was red in the face, breathing audibly, teeth clenched.

  Trusting his voice at last, he said, “You’re so fucking right about being on your way out. Get your sorry ass out of here. You’re toast.”

  2

  Father had committed the ultimate Washington sin of baring the ass of the Establishment. His Moscow prank made his betters look foolish, exposed the hesitancy of an agency that was chartered to be bold, and made it the jest of the month at Georgetown dinner parties. At Headquarters, a full internal investigation began. Amzi Strange was summoned home to be debriefed by the inspector general, who was in charge of this exercise. The IG operated on the assumption that everyone at Headquarters except him was a potential if not an actual double agent controlled by the intelligence service of a hostile power. Father thought that the IG was a psychopath in desperate need of treatment. The IG thought that Father was a dangerous saboteur who should long since have been fired—or, better yet, prosecuted for his antics at the Plantation.

  Downfall in Washington among the mighty and the obscure alike typically stems from a trivial incident. In a cubbyhole outside the Oval Office, a president undergoes fellatio by a woman not his wife or discusses ways to cover up a Keystone Kops burglary, and thereby provides his enemies with an opportunity to destroy him without revealing their real purpose, which is to reverse the outcome of an election they lost but should have won if the voters had not been deceived by the political Beelzebub they feel it is their moral duty to overthrow.

  The same rule applies to more humble figures, like Father, who discomfit the elite. Whether you are carrying out a coup d’état or the shaming of a nobody, it is essential that you be perceived as the virtuous avenger, and that your victim to be unmasked as the evil person he is and always has been.

  In Father’s case, kangaroo justice was swift and thorough. He was reduced two civil service grades in rank, fired for cause, and threatened with prosecution for violation of federal espionage laws and for cheating on his expense account. Father was not deprived of his pension, a pittance based on a percentage of his pay and his years of service, but the IG ruled that he had to wait until he reached retirement age to start collecting it. Meanwhile he had no income, and as a result of the divorce, few assets.

  He was unemployable in any profession where Headquarters had friends. Former colleagues who had gone into business as government contractors shunned him. So did everyone else he had ever known at Headquarters. He was a fluent writer, but he soon discovered there was no market for his memoirs (which in any case would have to be cleared by Headquarters before publication), so he wrote a comic novel about undercover life, casting the leading character, based on himself, as the Little Tramp of espionage. The manuscript was rejected by twenty different publishers, none of whom read past page ten because they saw nothing funny about the unspeakable doings of the satanic thugs who, they devoutly believed, worked at Headquarters.

  Finally, when Father was down to his last few dollars, he got a job working for a shady private investigator, but he had been a spy by trade, not a cop, so this didn’t work out and he was let go after the probationary period. In letters to me he joked about buying a used taxicab and becoming a mobile philosopher.

  As I have already reported, he and my mother, who was a lawyer at a backwater government agency, had led separate lives for many years. She had long since stopped accompanying him on foreign assignments, so I hardly ever saw him after the age of twelve, though he wrote me monthly letters and every summer he and I got together for two weeks wherever he happened to be posted. We went on safari in Tanganyika (I shot a kudu), hiked in the Himalayas, toured three-star restaurants in France. Among other ancient ruins, we visited Angkor Wat and the Taj Mahal and the ruined architecture of the Roman Near East, sailed in the Mediterranean and dived in the Red Sea.

  He had real affection for me, I now realize. He made an effort to be amusing. Little shit that I was, I never laughed at his jokes.

  When he was home he and Mother slept, while the marriage endured, in separate bedrooms and dined in silence. They never went out as a couple. Mother had an active social life, Father had none in the United States outside of bars. It all ended when, after his return from Moscow, he showed up at the house with his luggage. Mother shut the door in his face. From the Headquarters grapevine she had heard all about his latest outrage. She wanted no part of his disgrace, and besides, because of his heartless neglect, she had fallen in love with someone else.

  Under the terms of an estate plan, executed years before, when my parents were still on speaking terms, the house was in her name, and Father’s bank accounts were held jointly with her. Mother’s own name—she was a lawyer, after all—was the only one on the bank accounts in which she deposited her earnings and the profits on the stocks and bonds she had inherited from her parents. When they divorced, she was awarded alimony and somewhat more than half of what remained of Father’s paltry wealth.

  When the final decree was handed down, I was studying in Beirut, and when I asked Mother over the telephone what Father was going to do now, she said, “I really have no idea. Maybe roam the world naked with his begging bowl.”

  In a way, Mother’s quip about the begging bowl came true. Father was not left naked by the combination of disgrace and divorce, but he had exhausted his savings and sold everything of value that he still owned. After Mother and his lawyer took their share of the spoils—including, in Mother’s case, thirty-six months of alimony in advance—he was literally penniless. He had three years to wait for his pension to start, and even after that happened, he would be left after taxes and alimony with a net annual income that was only slightly above the poverty line. Meanwhile he was well below it with no prospect of escape because the job market was closed to him. He applied for positions for which he was well qualified—he spoke four languages, had contacts all over the world, and was a capable manager—but never received a reply.

  He bagged groceries at the Safeway where Mother’s friends shopped, washed dishes in a restaurant and cars in a car wash. He begged for coins on the street, ate in soup kitchens, slept in shelters for the homeless in winter and in doorways in warm weather, and sometimes when the police were rounding up vagrants, spent a night in jail. He stopped writing to me, maybe because he couldn’t afford the postage.

  All this I learned later on. Mother, my only source of information about him, never mentioned Father in her breezy notes, invariably dashed off on tasteful blank greeting cards from the gift shop of the National Gallery of Art. The handwriting on these missives was slightly askew, as if she had written to me while waiting for traffic lights to change on commutes to and from the office.

  Although I knew he was in trouble and adrift, I had little idea what was happening to Father—for all I knew he was dead or in prison—and to be truthful, I was not interested in knowing more. He was long gone from my life. Except for our annual quality time together, he had been absent since I was twelve years old. In theory I knew he loved me, or wanted to love me, but I gave him little encouragement and almost no thought. His face flickered in my memory as if I only had seen it, like that of a passerby, for a split second. I seldom bothered to read his letters, though I always opened them promptly to see if money was enclosed. Usually I found a twenty, or at Christmas and birthdays, a fifty. The bills were always fresh from the bank, crisp and new and good to smell. I seldom answered his le
tters. They were, I thought, false, contrived, presumptuous because the intimacy between us that they suggested did not exist and had never existed.

  A couple of years passed before I completed my studies and went back to America. I had a knack for languages. Because I spoke and read and after a fashion wrote Arabic and Hebrew and three major Persian languages spoken in Iran and Afghanistan and had lived among Muslims in the Near East and knew a few who were educated and well placed, I was deluged with job offers from multinational corporations and government agencies. Billions were being poured into the war on terrorism, and everyone in Washington, it seemed, wanted to listen in on the enemies of the United States or interrogate them. Among other degrees—I prolonged adolescence for as long as I could—I had a PhD in Islamic studies and a passing acquaintance with a few people who counted in Muslim countries. My ambition was to teach languages and Islamic history and culture at a reputable small college and live in a large gingerbreaded Victorian brick house with a good-looking, good-natured, intelligent wife whose appetite for sex was as insatiable as my own and who wanted no kids.

  Soon after I got off the plane in New York, a former professor introduced me to a friend, ostensibly a venture capitalist, who wined and dined me and one night offered me a handsome salary, a rent-free apartment in Washington, a leased car, and the opportunity to travel a lot and do good in the world and for myself in return for, as he put it, encouraging in their own languages certain persons in the Middle East to look kindly on his firm.

  We were dining, just the two of us, in a New York restaurant where dinner for two cost five hundred dollars even if you ordered the secondbest wine.

  I had about as much interest in accepting this offer as of lying down on the FDR Drive at rush hour. However, my connection with Father had not left me in a state of total naïveté, so after listening to his pitch I said, “By the way, what’s the name of your firm? You’ve never mentioned it.”

  “Actually it doesn’t have a name, just a reputation. Ambiguity is an asset in my business.”

  “I see. Does your nameless firm ever do business with a large ambiguous enterprise with headquarters in northern Virginia?”

  He smiled. “You ask the right questions,” he said. “That’s one of the things I like about you.”

  But he didn’t answer the question.

  I said, “Let me ask you this, then. Do you know who my father is?”

  “I know a little about him. Very able man, as I understand it. A bit too able for some tastes, some say, and that was the problem.”

  At that point in the conversation, knowing the little I knew but also knowing what was coming next, I should have laid my silverware on my plate, dropped my napkin on the tablecloth, and left. Instead, because I had been living on kebab for a long time and I wanted to finish this elegant meal.

  My suitor smiled. I had given him the key to my room.

  “Be patient,” he said. “There are better ways than taxable salary to be compensated for good work.”

  I told him I needed time to consider the offer.

  As we parted on the sidewalk I said, “These people who talk about my father. Do you think they know how he can be found?”

  “Let me get back to you on that,” he replied.

  A few days later he called me with the answer to my question.

  A couple of weeks after that I found Father outside the Metro station at Gallery Place. He was begging for coins. He had stationed himself at the top of the escalator. When he saw me rise like an apparition from the underground, he took an exaggerated step backward and, still kidding, looked furtively right and left, as if seeking an escape route.

  He was dressed in stained corduroy trousers, runover sneakers, tattered golf cap, worn-out tweed blazer torn at the shoulder. He carried a large khaki rucksack that was much the worse for wear. It was the same one he had bought for our two-week climbing expedition in the Alps when I was sixteen. I still owned its duplicate. I realized that the rucksack contained all his worldly goods—sleeping bag and overcoat, clothes and whatever other street person’s essentials he carried around with him because he had no other place to keep them. He had lost weight, he had grown a full beard or let it grow for want of a razor. He looked beyond me, as if expecting someone more interesting to rise into view.

  I said, “Hello, Father.”

  He said, “Hi. Is this encounter a stroke of fate or are you acting on information?”

  “Someone told me you might be here at this time of day.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “He says not.”

  “He would say that. How do you know this person?”

  “A friend introduced us.”

  “In that case,” Father said, “beware. What time is it?”

  I looked at my watch, an entry-level Rolex he had given me as a graduation present when I was eighteen. “Quarter after twelve.”

  “Have a seat over there, will you, and give me half an hour to work the crowd. That’s why I’m here, to catch the lunchtime rush. Then we’ll have lunch.”

  Despite the threadbare affect, he was behaving as if he still wore a tailormade suit and shirt, a Sulka tie and Allen Edmonds shoes, and would be taking me to the Metropolitan Club for the midday meal. I sat down on a bench and watched him beg. He was good at it. He looked like what he was, a former somebody who had had a great fall. Most people gave him quarters. A few who perhaps saw him for what he used to be or what he was now or what they themselves might become, handed him dollar bills.

  When the crowd dwindled, we walked down to Constitution Avenue, where lunch wagons were lined up at the curb near the National Gallery. He ordered two of the fat spicy hot dogs that Washingtonians call half-smokes, two bags of chips, and two bottles of spring water. When I tried to pay, he pushed my hand aside and counted out the money in quarters. We found a bench on the Mall and ate our half-smokes and Fritos in silence. Father gathered up our empty bags and plastic bottles and threw them into an overflowing trash basket.

  He said, “So what prompted you to look me up?”

  “Curiosity. Concern.”

  “In that order?”

  “I haven’t sorted that out.”

  Father spread his hands. “Well, here I am. Don’t leap to conclusions. This is not such a bad life once you get over the surprise of having ended up a derelict. Simplicity, the absence of possessions, really does have more good points than bad. I used to think that was goody-goody bullshit, but it’s true.”

  “You don’t miss anything about the old life?”

  “Hot showers, tennis, king-size beds with warm female bodies in them. Cleanliness. Being dirty all the time is an itchy way of life.”

  “You look thinner. Do you get enough food?”

  “Oh, yes. Do-gooders supply plenty of day-old bread and soup and canned beans and venison—Park Service hunters secretly shoot the deer in Rock Creek Park at night and give the meat to the shelters. They say it’s beef stew—otherwise the bums won’t eat it. The experience is something like wandering bare-ass with a begging bowl in India, except not many people in this culture mistake the homeless for holy men.”

  “Funny you should say that about the begging bowl. Mother made a similar reference.”

  He lifted his eyebrows but made no comment.

  I said, “What about conversation, the company of the like-minded?”

  “Actually I never ran into many like-minded people,” Father said. “But you might be surprised. Some of these outcasts are credentialed. A larger percentage are crazy, of course, but the demented can sound learned, and some of them are learned. You run into alcoholic ex-professors, disbarred lawyers, drug-addict doctors who have lost their licenses for selling prescriptions to pushers or jumping on their female patients, a few former wheeler-dealers who owe the Mob money. All sorts, all of them interesting in a one–dinner party kind of way.”

  “You don’t mind living without money?”

  “But I don’t live without it. On a sunny da
y—never beg in the rain, son—I can make fifty bucks. That’s where I stop. For one thing, fifty dollars’ worth of quarters weighs a lot. That’s one reason to spend them right away. Also, because of the addicts, it can be dangerous to go to sleep with money in your pocket. I work the crowd in different locations—Dupont Circle and the Zoo are good—two or three days a week, depending on the take, and have more than I can spend, tax free. You can buy cooked food and canned stuff and salads in supermarkets, so I eat a healthful diet. I have no expenses, no wants, no mortgage. No family obligations. No possessions anyone would want to steal. All very liberating. I’m sorry to have cut you off without a penny, but you look like you’re doing all right.”

  Father was perfectly relaxed, as he always had been, and for the first time since early childhood I saw him for what he really was. As if some sort of psychic curtain had been pulled aside, I realized that I had disliked and resented him as an adolescent because, as I saw it, he had left Mother and me. Rejected us. Rejected me in particular. I wanted to pay him back, to let him know that there was no chance, none whatsoever, that he would ever recover the love he had forfeited. His only child would never come back to him. Take that, you bastard!

  Seeing Father as he was now and always had been, watching as his original face became ever more visible through the grime and the beard, I realized all of a sudden how deeply I loved him and what powerful reasons I had to do so. He had put up with me when I was at my worst. Long before I was a man, he had treated me like a man. He might not have made a man of me, but he equipped me to make a man of myself without once letting me know what he was doing. Now he was showing me how to lose everything with effortless grace.

  This was—I am going to come right out and say this—a religious moment. Something came over me. Some invisible savior in whom I had never believed had laid his invisible hands upon me. Mixed with this total stranger of a thought was a sudden resolution: now that I had found my father, I wanted never to let him go. On the spot and in this mystical moment I decided to take the job in Washington that the venture capitalist had offered me.