The Mulberry Bush

by Charles McCarry

  On a misty morning very like the one on which we met, Father Yuri said, “I think we’re finished. Keep working on vocabulary, not because you’ll need to use more words than you already know, but so you’ll understand what’s being said to you.”

  I said, “I’m very grateful.”

  Father Yuri, on the brink of a smile, nodded and without offering to shake hands, departed.

  On the way to Headquarters I called Tom Terhune, also in his car from the sound of the background noise, and gave him the news.

  Tom said, “Same restaurant, same time, tomorrow.”

  When I arrived on the stroke of seven, he was waiting at his table, the same one as the last time, which made me wonder if it might be the one bugged by Turkish intelligence or the Bureau, or Headquarters, or all three.

  We spoke Russian. Between the appetizer and the entrée, Tom said, still talking Russian, “I was told by our friend that you were an above-average student, and you certainly don’t sound like someone who didn’t speak a word a couple of months ago.”

  “Thanks to you, I had a good teacher.”

  “We must arrange more exposure to the language. I’ve talked to Amzi about this.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s the way we do things. Also, it’s unwise to try to keep secrets from Amzi.”

  “What was his reaction?”

  “None, essentially. I asked if I could have you. He said yes. He seemed pleased to get you off his hands.”

  Tom was the chief of the division that included Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union.

  I said, “So what are you going to do with me?”

  “Send you out into the world and hope that you’ll be loved and understood. You can’t hang around Headquarters much longer. You’re a born singleton. Please accept this. Working alone in the field is your natural role, therefore your professional destiny, and there’s no escape from it any more than John Wayne could avoid being typecast as a gunfighter with a heart of gold.”

  I liked plain talk, but this was a blow. I had to know the essential secrets in order to do what I wanted to do, and Headquarters was their only repository. After I knew these things, I would go into the field, yes. That was the plan. But first, penetration.

  I said, “What exactly do you have in mind?”

  Tom said, “I’m open to suggestions.”

  “Good. I have the bare bones of an idea, but I can’t write you a detailed outline. Not yet.”

  “Then give me the bare bones.”

  This took a few minutes. One of Father Yuri’s stories—parables, really, in which no one was ever identified, so I never knew whether they were reportages or addenda to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—revealed to me an unlocked door into the Russian connections with terrorism. It was a feeling rather than a well-reasoned plan. I didn’t quite know how to convey this to Tom Terhune, who, I thought, was not the kind of man to trust leaps of intuition.

  After Russia, Father Yuri was sent to South America—or so I deduced because he didn’t name the continent, let alone the specific country where he worked. At the time, leftist youth in many countries were waging revolution with Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book as their field manual. During the counterculture there were probably as many copies of Mao’s scripture in the hands of activists and dilettantes as there now are copies of the Holy Koran. Father Yuri or his superiors reasoned, or more likely took it for granted, that what had been true about the children of Spanish Communists in Russia must be true about Communists in Latin America. All were fugitives from the Church. The subconscious longing for a reunion with Jesus must be the same in both places. Father Yuri had saved captive souls in Russia, why should he not rescue lost souls in Uruguay or Colombia or Argentina?

  Everything—this is me talking, not Father Yuri, though he certainly knew it as well as I did—begins with 1. Find a single person who wants something you have the power to give him and you’re in business. Often, even usually, this single person will find you. After that it is just a matter of reading the signs and establishing, as lovers do, how much alike you and the target are, and turning down the bed.

  One person who found Father Yuri, a handsome young man with an incandescent personality and the smile, as Father Yuri put it, of an angel, approached the Jesuit very early one spring morning in a city park in a grove of lush rosewood trees and giant jacarandas in full purple bloom. Father Yuri had noticed him before. This was the first time their eyes had met. The young man looked behind him, looked down the path behind Father Yuri, then stopped in his tracks and waited.

  When Father Yuri was close enough, the young man whispered, “Father, will you hear my confession?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Here, now.”

  “As you wish.”

  “Thank you. Keep walking, please. I will follow and confess as we walk.”

  “No. You can’t walk and worry about discovery and make a proper confession at the same time. Under that tree.” Father Yuri nodded at the large trunk of a rosewood, a few meters ahead. “We can stand on either side of the tree if you like.”

  The young man looked behind him again. He was not trembling, he was in command of himself. But he was afraid. What had he done to be in such a state? Whom did he fear?

  He said, “This will take a long time, Father.”

  Beneath the great trees the light was dim, as in a confessional. After the young man uttered—detonated—his first sentence, Father Yuri knew why he needed a priest. This was an anguished soul. More than that, it was the soul he had come here to find—or, as the Jesuit had it, the one soul God had sent him here to help.

  This boy was a murderer many times over. He had killed or ordered the killing of many men (he did not murder women or children except by accident). He didn’t know exactly how many because he had licensed others to kill in his name and he did not always know about all their homicides. He was a terrorist and not only a terrorist but the leader of a terrorist group whose objective was to destroy the Establishment, the very history of his country, to raze its institutions, to liquidate as many of the bourgeoisie as necessary to force them to submit to the power of the people. He was a kidnapper, too: He and his group routinely abducted bankers, politicians, lawyers, and rich men and other capitalist exploiters and held them in “people’s prisons,” such as a closet or a makeshift tent in a slum apartment, before trying them and in most cases executing them for crimes against the people. Some of the zealots betrayed their own fathers to the avengers of the people, because the destruction of the family, the basic unit of this corrupt society and the only thing stronger than politics, was the first imperative of the revolution.

  Now this man had seen the other side of vengeance. Military intelligence had arrested his wife. He showed Father Yuri a picture of a breathtakingly beautiful woman, as if seeing her perfect face would help the priest understand his desperation. If he had married a plain girl, would his loss have been smaller? The young man’s estranged father, a member of parliament, had confirmed that she was being interrogated at a military base. This meant beatings, electric shock, repeated near-drowning, broken bones, torn flesh. It meant rape and every form of sodomy by many rapists. Because she was guilty—she was a devoted comrade and had killed to prove it—it meant, in the end, painful death. The young man, though he was an atheist, thought it possible that God had punished her in order to punish him, and that He wasn’t done yet. The couple had a daughter, now twelve years old. Was she next?

  God had come back to this young man in wrath, showing him that He existed. He had made him understand how he deserved the punishment meted out to him. The young man felt that Jesus was waiting for him to make amends, that some great penance was expected of him, that perhaps his wife would be spared further suffering if he understood what was expected of him. He wanted to be told what that was, what he had to do to end this nightmare.

  Father Yuri, who knew that everything he was hearing might well be a lie this supplicant wa
s telling himself but also that it might not be, asked what he thought his wife’s torturers wanted.

  “They want names,” the young man said. “She will never tell them.”

  “Will you tell them?”

  “Never. It would betray her and everything she is.”

  “God understands that. That doesn’t mean He will forgive your rejecting the penance you think He is demanding. Do you pray?”

  “Not since I was a child. But since she was taken, yes.”

  “Has your daughter been raised in the faith?”

  “No. Just the opposite.”

  “Then you have put a child’s soul in peril. Have you considered the possibility that this is the reason for His anger?”

  “No. The idea terrifies me.”

  “Your penance is this: a hundred Our Fathers every day you remain alive. A hundred thoughts each day about how to give God what He wants. You know what it is. You must find a way to give it to Him. You cannot keep the faith with evil and with Him, too. You must pray for a Good Samaritan to raise you up and make you see the way. There is a way. Begin to believe by believing that.”

  “What is that way, Father?”

  “I am not the Good Samaritan,” said Father Yuri. “God will send him to you. But you must recognize him, accept him, do as he asks.”

  At this point I had asked Father Yuri if this had in fact happened.

  Father Yuri said, “Only God knows that.”

  In the restaurant, Tom Terhune listened to Father Yuri’s story without interrupting. He was amused.

  “Actually,” he said, “Amzi was the Good Samaritan.”

  10

  Terhune advised me to read the Headquarters file on Father Yuri’s young man in torment. After that we’d talk to Amzi.

  After all my scheming, it was as simple as that. It was a thick file. It confirmed what Father Yuri had already told me and a good deal more besides—names, photographs, details. Father Yuri’s supplicant was named Alejandro Aguilar. In photographs his wife, Felicia, was indeed beautiful—a Madonna with the fierce eyes of a hater.

  Both had genteel parents, distinguished ancestors. The difference between them was at the same time trivial and profound: Felicia was penniless, Alejandro had a trust fund. They named their daughter Luz because communism had shown them the light when she was still a fetus. There were pictures of her as a child and as the striking twenty-nine-year-old woman she was now. She was not as photogenic as her parents, how could anyone be? I wondered how much of this information was fiction or guesswork or wishful thinking—not least because Alejandro Aguilar himself was the source for most of it and he was a zealot who subscribed to a belief system in which virtuous lies were authentic truth because any evil act or intention ascribed to the class enemy was almost certainly true and even if it was not, served the purposes of the revolution.

  At the time in question, almost twenty years in the past, Amzi had been chief of the Latin America division. He had seen in Alejandros’s distress an opportunity to take possession of a terrorist commander. Because Amzi wanted the chief of station in Buenos Aires to stay out of this for the sake of future relations with the locals, whose toes would be stepped upon by the operation he had in mind, he had flown down from Virginia to handle it himself.

  “It wasn’t rocket science,” Amzi said. “We knew the military had taken this guy’s wife. We knew this was driving him crazy. We overheard him saying so over and over again on wiretaps. His wife must have been one hell of a piece of ass, because he just lost it when they took her away. We were listening to him. He had some nutty idea he could rescue her, storm the military base or something. This guy thought he was a pimpernel. He never spent two nights running in any one of the hidey-holes he used. We knew this because one of our techs sneaked into one of his dumps while he slept—Alejandro didn’t believe in lookouts. He knew the military’s goon squad, if it found him, would just shoot the guards and blow the door and grab him. The only defense was to make it impossible for the enemy to find him.

  “He had this rucksack he carried at all times. Some people thought it had a bomb in it so he could blow up himself and anyone who tried to capture him, but the tech said it was just an overnight bag with a couple of guns inside. The tech bugged the rucksack. Also one of Alejandro’s shoes—he only had one pair because he lived in poverty like the downtrodden masses. So we knew where he was every minute and most of the time we could hear him talking if we stayed close enough to pick up the transmission. Which we did. I took a whole surveillance team with me, faces the locals didn’t know. Very costly. But we had to get there first.

  “Alejandro was right: The army would just grab him and torture everything he knew out of him,” Amzi said. “They had faith in their methods, but there was no possibility he’d tell them anything but lies. He’d die with Felicia and the two of them wouldn’t even tell Saint Peter or the devil, depending on which one was handling the interrogation of their immortal souls. What we wanted was people we could turn and work with in the future. The military just wanted to exterminate the bastards. They weren’t stupid enough to think we’d ever tell them everything if we got our hands on Aguilar, but something was better than nothing and they might find him before we turned him and made him untouchable because he belonged to us.”

  One night when Alejandro was returning from interrogating an enemy of the people, Amzi stepped out of the shadows.

  In Spanish he said, “Hello, Alejandro. I mean you no harm. I think you know where I come from and what I do for a living. If you want your wife back, you’ll listen to me.”

  Aguilar moved his hand toward his belt. Amzi stabbed him hard on the chest with a blunt forefinger. “Don’t even think about it. Guns are pointed at you from every direction by men who can see in the dark. If you make a move on me, you’re a dead man. Ask yourself how that would help your wife.”

  At these words, four of Amzi’s men, standing within ten feet of him and Aguilar, whistled the first four notes of “Yankee Doodle.” An Amzi touch—a night without ridicule was a night wasted.

  To me Amzi said, “My guys were wearing night-vision goggles, but there were no guns pointed at him. In a situation like this, the sound of gunfire is the sound of failure. But he thought he was in the presence of the Big Bad Wolf, so he believed me.”

  Amzi told Aguilar the deal. Aguilar would give him the names of his fighters. Amzi would trade some of the names to the military in return for the release of the wife. Headquarters, which Aguilar, like a lot of other brainwashed nutcases, thought was omnipresent and omniscient and possessed unlimited power and wealth, would get him and his wife and daughter out of the country and give them a new identity with genuine-false credentials and an introduction to a world-class plastic surgeon, and pay all the bills. They would be protected, and paid, for the rest of their lives.

  Aguilar said, in English, “Never, you son of a bitch.”

  “OK,” Amzi said. “Then what’s happening to your wife will go on happening and in the end, trust me, they’ll beat her and gang-bang her until she tells them everything. They won’t let her die until she does that, even if it takes years. Then the same thing will happen to you and you will break, too.”

  “So you say.”

  Amzi said, “Has your daughter reached puberty?”

  “WHAT?”

  “It’s something to consider, my friend, knowing what you know about your enemy’s interrogation techniques. If your wife won’t break and you won’t use your head, what do you think they’ll do next to encourage you to change your minds?”

  The night sky was overcast. It was pitch-dark—no moon, no stars, no glimmer of streetlight in the blighted neighborhood where they stood. The two men had not seen each other’s faces, only heard voices. Now Amzi pointed a small flashlight at his own face and turned it on. Aguilar he left in the dark, because he already knew what he looked like.

  He said, “That’s so’s you’ll know who I am the next time we get together. Think it over whe
n you calm down, Alejandro. I’ll find you again. Soon, in daylight, because one way or another, you may not have much time left. You can tell me then what your decision is and we’ll go from there.”

  Three mornings later, in a different part of the city, Amzi was waiting for Alejandro when he emerged from a different lair he thought only he knew existed. When he caught sight of the North American he looked, Amzi said, like his heart had squirted out of his asshole. He brushed past Amzi, ignoring him, and walked rapidly down the street. Amzi followed. Two of his men shadowed them on the opposite sidewalk. Alejandro didn’t seem to pick up on them.

  Amzi said, “I was surprised he didn’t see them, this guy supposedly being such a Moriarty, but I thought maybe he figured he was safe with us—not because he realized what pussies we really were, but because we wanted something from him and wouldn’t whack him until he gave it to us. Or even then, but how could he believe that? He thought he was swimming in the sea of the noble workers he was always talking about and they would protect him. The fact is they would have taken one look at him and known he was a rich kid in disguise, so they would have just stood back and let him be grabbed, hoping he’d get what was coming to him.”

  After ten minutes or so during which Amzi determined that no one was following him, he closed the gap between him and Alejandro and in his shittiest Spanish (Amzi’s phrase) he said, “Yes or no or don’t know?”

  Alejandro, eyes front, trudged on in silence.

  Amzi said, “OK. I’m going to go around you and lead on. Don’t shoot me in the back unless you think this is a good day to die. If you stay with me, I’ll know you want to talk business.”

  Alejandro stayed with him. A couple of blocks ahead, a van was parked at the curb. As they approached, the rear door slid open. Amzi got in. Alejandro followed him.

  I said, “What if he hadn’t done that?”

  Amzi glowered at the interruption.

  He said, “There was no Plan B because Plan B is a fucking cop-out.”