The Mulberry Bush

by Charles McCarry

  I said, “Look, there’s something I want to tell you.”

  Father nodded amiably. Go right ahead.

  “I’m taking a job in Washington,” I said.

  “Congratulations. May you be happy in your work.”

  “Here’s the thing. I’ll have a good-size apartment. I hope you’ll move in with me.”

  “Oh, my,” Father said.

  He didn’t ask who I was going to be working for or what I was going to be doing. After a moment he looked me in the eyes again.

  “The prodigal to the rescue,” he said. “How good of you to invite me. I am touched. But really, I think not.”

  “Why not?”

  “We just got through discussing that. I am otherwise engaged.”

  “Don’t worry about being a burden to me,” I said.

  “Why would I worry about that? You were a burden to me. But really, I couldn’t. I don’t want to. I’m where I want to be.”

  “Jesus!”

  Father grinned. “I hate to ask,” he said, “but have you found Jesus? Is that what’s going on here?”

  “Not even a brush contact,” I replied.

  “‘A brush contact.’ You remember the lingo, I see.”

  “Actually I remember almost everything you ever tried to teach me in spite of my best efforts to ignore it. You won’t change your mind?”

  “No. But thank you.”

  Clearly this was his last word.

  I said, “I hope you don’t rule out our staying in touch.”

  “Of course not. Maybe I’ll drop by every now and again for a shower and the use of your washing machine. But let me make the moves. I have no fixed abode, so finding me may not be a simple matter.”

  I scribbled my cell phone number on a scrap of paper.

  Father took the number and buttoned it into a pocket.

  “Thanks, I’ll keep this,” he said. “But it’s hard to find a pay phone nowadays, so actually calling you might be a problem.”

  He held out his hand. The nails were rimmed with black. I knew I might never see him again. I did not take his hand, but instead embraced him. He hugged me back, patted me consolingly on the back. The rancid smell of him, so different from the mingled scents of Roger & Gallet shampoo, fresh air, and Tanqueray No. Ten gin that I had known so well, was memorable. I wondered what passersby made of this spectacle of a derelict and a weeping young man locked in an embrace. After a moment, Father disentangled us.

  He said, “Awfully good to see you.”

  And then he turned on his heel and walked away—purposefully, quickly, but not hurriedly. It was not in his genes to hurry.

  Soon after this, I moved to Washington and on my lunch hours checked out the Metro stations where he might be begging, but never found him. He never called the cell phone number I had given him.

  In early winter on a day after a heavy snowfall, I received a call from the police, who had found my cell phone number in the pocket of a street person who had been stabbed to death as he slept in the doorway of a building not far from the Capitol. I went to the morgue and identified the body. I had never before seen his naked body. When I had imagined him as a corpse, he was always lying in dim light in a coffin, fully dressed, wearing his habitual half-smile. Now, in the bluish fluorescent light, his deeply peaceful face looked quite Christ-like—something like the talismanic photographs of Che Guevara’s face after he was slain in Bolivia by friends of Headquarters.

  With the help of the staff of a congressman who was a member of Father’s Yale society, I arranged for his ashes to be placed in the columbarium in Arlington National Cemetery. The urn was carried to its niche by an honor guard of frozen-faced young soldiers wearing dress-blue uniforms. A chaplain read from scripture. I did not listen to the words. A recording of “Taps” was played.

  I was the only mourner. I had bought a funeral notice in the Washington Post and informed a silent Mother of his death by telephone. She did not show up, and neither did anyone from Headquarters or his secret society or anywhere else from the lost city of his past. I placed the urn in its niche, and as I did so, my unconscious mind, if that’s what the agent of these visions was, provided me with another surprise.

  Without warning, rage took possession of me. I shook with the palsy of it. The diffident chaplain looked at me with alarm, so I guess my face was contorted—red, possibly, wet with tears certainly. I could no more control what was happening to me than I could have controlled a fall from the top of the Empire State Building. I uttered a loud sob, then another and another—not because I was grief-stricken, but because I felt uncontrollable anger. I had never experienced anything like this before, but I immediately recognized it for what it was, the internal savage bursting out of the cave.

  This time a different being had come up behind me and laid another kind of hands upon me. I wanted revenge. I hungered for it. I cared for nothing else.

  This was what those bastards had done to my father to avenge a joke—a fucking joke!

  In an act that would have been unimaginable to me before I met my real self that day, I swore on Father’s ashes that I would make Headquarters pay. I would make it my life’s purpose to make it pay.

  3

  It was exhilarating to have a secret purpose to live by. Until that bonerattling epiphany in the columbarium at Arlington I had been a stranger to such excitement, just as I was new to hatred. Nevertheless I would have my revenge. It was all I wanted. My intention was irrevocable. The problem was, how to put the plot in motion. Obviously the only way to carry out my plan to wreck the mechanism that had destroyed my father, to put an end to the damned thing, was to get inside it and by doing good work, earn the absolute trust that alone could make my revenge possible.

  Given my father’s odor among the old guard, this was no small undertaking. Any number of approaches were open to me, most of them unpromising. However, I was not a babe in the woods. I knew how the Headquarters mind worked. I had been around Headquarters people for most of my life, and I was sure that at least some of Father’s admirers would wish to help me. Even his enemies would be impelled to give me the benefit of the doubt because one of their delusions about themselves was that they believed in fair play, that the code they lived by mandated fair play. They weren’t the sort of fellows, they told themselves, who punished sin unto the third, or even the second, generation. The problem was finding a way in, so as to give them their favorite thing: an opportunity to congratulate themselves.

  According to a training manual called Locks, Picks, Flaps and Seals that Father liked to quote, there was no lock that could not be picked, no code that could not be broken. What man had devised, man could circumvent. He was fond of quoting his favorite author, W. Somerset Maugham, whom he loved for his clear-eyed cynicism, to the effect that happiness comes only by indirection and can never be achieved by a conscious effort of the will. In other words, don’t try to create opportunity. Instead, wait for it to come your way and when it does, manage it. Of course he had done exactly that at the Plantation and in Moscow, and it had cost him dearly. But that didn’t mean that the principle was unsound.

  Actually I suspected that the opportunity I awaited had already come my way. I assumed that the venture capitalist who had appeared out of the blue was in the employ of Headquarters, or at least did Headquarters favors in return for the favors it could do for him. Further, I suspected that this absurdly easy job with the venture capitalist, for which I was grossly overpaid, was something Father’s admirers at Headquarters had arranged as a way of assuaging their guilt for not having had the stones to stand up for him. The bottom line was that I was not sure who I was working for, or what exactly I was doing, or who benefitted from the result-free things I did.

  Sometimes days, even weeks, would go by without a word from the venture capitalist. When he did call, he sounded like he had spoken to me ten minutes earlier, in tones normally used when talking to one’s best friend. To kill time I read scholarly books on jihadism and pos
tmodern novels dripping with narcissism in which nothing interesting ever happened. I watched movies on the enormous flat television screen that came with the free apartment, had dinner with old friends, looked up women I had known in school who now had power jobs in the administration or on Capitol Hill and were in many cases freshly divorced and adventurous in their sex lives. Few asked questions about my work. Rarely did they imagine it could be as interesting or as important as what they were doing. Washington was full of people who made good money for achieving results that could not be measured and that they couldn’t talk about.

  It is easier to agree with a theory such as Father’s notion about opportunity than it is to live by it. Little by little I grew tired of keeping an ear cocked for opportunity to knock. I liked to go to the National Gallery. Viewing the paintings that great artists had plucked from thin air was an experience as close to spiritual escape as the modern world provides. The negative part was that, thanks to twenty-first-century technology from which there was no escape, you remained in constant touch with anyone who wanted to punch in your cell phone number and yank you back into the world.

  One day as I approached Jan de Bray’s Portrait of the Artist’s Parents, a lanky man stepped between me and the painting as if I were invisible. I half recognized him: something about his shoulders, which were high and unnaturally square. I drifted to the next picture and looked him over more carefully. I knew his profile—long straight nose, clean jaw-line, oddly whorled ear. He was bald now and wore a hearing aid, but I remembered him from my childhood, when he was often at our house. He had been Father’s classmate at school and they had both ended up at Headquarters—in those days there was nothing unusual about that in their circle. A quarter century before, he had been Robert Redford handsome, with a full head of thick blond hair and keen blue eyes beneath thick eyebrows. Now he was a cartoon of that person in shades of gray.

  Still I remembered him as he had been—in every way. Once during a party in our large overfurnished apartment in Budapest when I was twelve or so, I wandered into the kitchen and found him kissing my mother, who was kissing him back in a way that suggested they had done this many times before.

  I said, “Bill Stringfellow?”

  Stringfellow hadn’t seen me in twenty years.

  He looked me up and down and said, “Good grief, you look just like your old man.”

  The National Gallery of Art was the last place I would have expected to bump into the Bill Stringfellow I used to know. He was no art lover. What I remembered best about him was his hunger for exercise. Back then, he ran miles before breakfast, he played tennis on his lunch hour and handball after work, he swam laps and played water polo in the YMCA pool. On Saturdays he took thirty-mile bicycle rides and sometimes, on Sundays, organized Kennedy-style neighborhood touch football games. The gym fad had not yet come into being, but if that form of exertion had then existed, I have no doubt that Bill would have found time to work out on the apparatuses.

  He and his pretty but eerily silent wife lived just down the street from our house in McLean, and he and Father sometimes overlapped in the same foreign capital. I found myself remembering, as the artist’s grim parents looked the other way, that Mother had taken up predawn running in the months before we were posted to Hungary, so maybe Bill did find time for another form of exercise. Certainly Mother returned flushed and smiling from her daily workout.

  Stringfellow took no time to exchange pleasantries but glanced at his watch and said, “Look, I’ve got an appointment in two minutes. But let’s meet in the café in the underground passage at eleven sharp and talk about old times. Now shoo. You don’t want to meet this character.”

  I understood. Stringfellow was meeting an agent and I was—by inheritance, I guess—still eligible to know this. This was good news. If he was having clandestine meetings, he was still working. Therefore he was a godsend, because his looks and brains and good work had won him high rank, so he knew the combination to the invisible lock on Headquarters.

  His invitation to coffee might just mean that he thought he owed Father’s memory a favor—that because of those encounters with Mother and the fact that he had in cold blood watched Father drown, he might blackmail himself into lending me a hand. Bill Stringfellow might be a stranger to guilt. But he lived by the code of snobs. If he and Father had not actually been fast friends, they had for most of their lives been members of the same cohort. Sticking together, doing each other favors, was the founding obligation of the code. I was not sure where Bill’s screwing my mother fitted into that value system.

  At the café, instead of coffee he drank a bottle of water, my treat. He asked what I had been up to. I told him.

  He said, “Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew? Anything else?”

  “Pashto. I flounder around in a couple of European languages.”

  “Credentials?”

  “Doctorate in Islamic studies.”

  “What university?”

  I told him. He whistled. “You’re a recruiter’s dream.”

  Stringfellow leaned toward me, lowered his voice as if sharing a delicate secret, and said, “Look, I’m sorry about your father. Damn shame.”

  “I agree.”

  Stringfellow said, “Where was he buried?”

  “He wasn’t. He was cremated and inurned—that’s the official term—in the columbarium, quote-unquote, at Arlington.”

  Stringfellow snorted. “He would have gotten a kick out of that.”

  “Out of what?”

  “The terminology. He was in the all-time backfield of the politically incorrect. Brilliant, but reckless.”

  “He was?”

  “All his life. He was the same at school, a disruptive influence. The faculty detested him because he made fun of them, joked circles around them in class, made the boys laugh at them. He was constantly in the doghouse, not that it made a particle of difference to him. He was what he was. So are all of us from the moment the sperm penetrates the egg, but your father absolutely insisted on it.”

  “That was the problem?”

  “There were those who thought he was too witty to be lovable. He refused to hide his intelligence or suppress his amusement—just simply refused to accept the principle. Not that he didn’t have his successes. He did, the other guys admired him even if they didn’t have the guts to emulate him, which didn’t cause the people in charge to love him any the more.”

  All true. I waited to hear more.

  Stringfellow filled the silence. “Don’t misunderstand me. He got a raw deal. Lots of us were unhappy about that.”

  “That’s good to know. There were no sympathy cards.”

  “No? I’m not surprised. Nobody writes to a pariah. Who was at the—what’s the word?”

  “Inurnment,” I said. “Me.”

  “Just you? Not your Mother?”

  I maintained my silence. Stringfellow searched my face for an answer, and found it, I guess.

  “Damn shame,” he said again.

  He looked as though he had just begun to talk, but I didn’t want him to unload everything at this meeting. If that happened I might never see him again, and I wanted this conversation to go on. Stringfellow was my best chance, my way in.

  I said, “Tell me what you’re up to. Or as much as you can.”

  “Same old same old,” said Stringfellow.

  “You must be near retirement.”

  “I am retired.”

  “But you still meet people at a prearranged time in front of a particular Dutch painting?”

  He smiled. “I went back to work on a contract. Lots of formers do that. The money is pretty good—government pensions are not all they’re cracked up to be.”

  “So our war on terror has blown someone some good?”

  “Make that terror’s war on us. But yes. There are a lot more slots since 9/11 and a lot of the younger fellows don’t want to go to places where there are suicide bombers and boredom and very little pussy. That’s not what they signed up for.
A faint heart is now regarded as acceptable, I can’t imagine why.”

  We talked about the past, about my childhood. He remembered a surprising amount about me—for example, the time he threw me a pass in a touch football game when I was about ten and somehow I caught the ball in the end zone. He had taught me to play backgammon and cribbage. Our families picnicked together at home and abroad, boated on the Danube and, cheering, watched the Germans tear down the Wall in Berlin. When everyone was in Virginia at the same time, Stringfellow had sometimes taken me to Orioles games during the team’s great days: Ripken, Mussina, Eddie Murray.

  We talked for an hour or more before he got a phone call and had to run. In the process I think I was transformed in his mind from the child he remembered into the grown-up I had become. I came back into focus. This was vital.

  I gave him my business card. He told me his phone number, speaking the digits rapidly, as if I were a junior spook required to memorize it. In fact I did remember it long enough to write it down as he rode the moving walkway into the crowd of sightseers.

  As we parted—no handshake—he said, “Funny, you do look like your father but you don’t remind me of him in any way.”

  He offered this rude insult to my father’s memory as if it were a compliment.

  After a fashion, this was encouraging. Although federal law prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or national origin, and by implication, DNA, and all that jazz about fair play, I was still under no illusion that Headquarters would be eager to hire my father’s son. On the other hand, Bill Stringfellow had a point—I was a recruiter’s dream, possessed of all the skills and credentials an intelligence service looks for in a candidate for seduction.

  Besides that, I was a Headquarters brat who knew the rules, even if my parent had broken nearly all of them. In my case, however, qualifications would not be enough to overcome the distaste of the old guard for anyone related to my father. Knocking on the front door would be futile. Headquarters—or more accurately, someone within Headquarters who had been on Father’s side—had to seek me out and let me in the back door. Stringfellow was perfect for the part. The back door to an intelligence service is always open. When an operational purpose exists, the most unbreakable rules can be finessed.