The Mulberry Bush

by Charles McCarry

  Amzi didn’t search Alejandro. He was a guest, a possible colleague and future friend, not a prisoner. They drove in silence to the countryside. Alejandro showed no fear but he refused to speak inside the van.

  “He thought the vehicle was bugged,” Amzi said. “How right he was, for a change.”

  It was a long ride and for all Alejandro knew he was being kidnapped. His behavior was stoic. Amzi gave him no credit for this. He figured Alejandro was just another college-educated, which was to say indoctrinated, upper-class brat who thought he was untouchable.

  “To eliminate any idea that I was wired,” Amzi said, “I suggested we both take off all our clothes and go for a walk bare ass. He nodded and stripped, and off we went into the woods like the odd couple. He took his pistola with him—a Makarov, naturally. Don’t ask me why. There were four of my guys within earshot. He must have known he wouldn’t live long if he fixed his weapon. Maybe he planned to shoot himself if I led him into an ambush. I didn’t say a word about it.”

  When they were out of earshot of the van, Alejandro said, “Tell me exactly how this would work.”

  Amzi repeated what he had said in the dark.

  Alejandro said, “All the names?”

  “That’s right. If you’re as smart as I think you are, you’ve kept your troops in a state of ignorance so they can’t do you much harm if they break. For this thing to work, though, I’ll need two who can tell them everything or almost everything.”

  “Why two?”

  “In case one of them dies while refusing to answer questions. The military has to get the information it wants or they’ll never let your wife go.”

  “Why would they let her go?”

  “Because they’ll get zip from us if they don’t promise to let her go.”

  “They’ll lie.”

  “Not to us.”

  Alejandro said, “What happens to the people you don’t hand over?”

  Amzi knew Alejandro would save his friends, men and women of his own class, and born commissar that he was, put the peasants and workers on the death list with godlike indifference. That was why he was interested in the survivors. They would be welcomed home by their families. All they had to do when playtime was over was get a haircut and show up, put on suits and ties, and accept their elders’ blessing. They would go back to respectability as if nothing had ever happened.

  Amzi said, “We’ll take care of them. Your friends will be our friends.”

  “Good luck. You can’t buy them.”

  Amzi, whose experience had taught him you could buy anyone if you made the right offer, let that pass. He knew Alejandro’s crowd didn’t need the money. But they had other needs.

  He said, “You’ll be long gone before they can figure everything out. They’ll think you’re dead and your wife, too, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “What I’m worried about,” Alejandro said, “is trusting you.”

  “There’s no eleventh commandment that says you have to trust anybody except the Almighty, and like the Bible tells us, that’s usually a mistake. But what other choice have you got? If you do nothing, your wife will die and so will you. Same thing happens if I screw you over. But if I don’t screw you over, and I won’t, you get her back, you live to a ripe old age in a country of your choice where nobody knows who you are, and after a while nobody in Argentina will remember who you were anyway. So what have you got to lose?”

  “Except my honor.”

  Amzi said, “I wanted to ask this shithead what the fuck he thought that was and how much it would bring at auction, but I just smiled sympathetically, like I understood all too well how hard it was for an idealist like him to sell out his principles.”

  Amzi drank coffee from the mug on his desk.

  “Coffee’s cold, goddam it,” he said.

  He picked up the phone and told Rosemary to bring him another cup.

  When the new, steaming coffee arrived he gulped half a cup of it as if it were ice water.

  Then he said, “Meanwhile, back at the nudist camp, Alejandro walked away into the woods to think things over in solitude. I stayed where I was. Where was he going to go with no clothes on? After half an hour or so he came back.

  He said, “All right. But if I don’t get her back, I’ll kill you, and if you kill me first, somebody else will kill you and your entire family if it takes twenty years.”

  Amzi said, “You’ve got a deal. Let’s get back to the vehicle where you can make out the list.”

  At this point, Amzi stopped talking. He drank the rest of his coffee in two or three swallows, his cold eyes on me all the while—honest Amzi, tough as nails, gruff as Zeus, all-business.

  He said, “Questions?”

  “Only one,” I said. “Then what happened?”

  “He gave me the names. I gave the military the ones I had no reason to keep for myself. The military arrested the whole bunch in one big raid. After they pumped them out, they let Alejandro’s wife go as agreed. She led them straight to Alejandro. Before the happy couple could kiss, they arrested him and rearrested her.”

  “They broke their word to you?”

  “They hadn’t promised not to rearrest her or to let him go.”

  “You stood aside and let them take them?”

  Amzi answered this question by not answering it.

  “They disappeared,” he said. “In those days that was like saying the military threw them out of an airplane over the Atlantic Ocean—from a mile up, so they’d have time to think on the way down.”

  “Is that what happened?”

  Again, no answer. He drank the rest of his coffee.

  I said, “The daughter?”

  “Nothing happened to her except orphanhood. Her grandparents raised her. If it’s OK by you, I want to ask you a question. What exactly makes you need to know all this?”

  I told him. Of course Tom Terhune had already told him what I had in mind or Amzi wouldn’t have wasted this fifteen minutes on me. Even if Amzi skipped lunch there were only thirty-two such chunks of time in an eight-hour working day and he had many applicants for them. My idea was a simple one, so making my pitch didn’t take long.

  I wasn’t quite finished when he looked at the clocks again and said, “Pretty good idea. Slim fucking chance of it working out. But go ahead. Go slow, step carefully. This girl is just as smart as her mother, which means she’s just as crazy, too, so watch your ass. If you get thrown out of an airplane we don’t know you.”

  Something resembling a flicker of benevolence crossed Amzi’s face. While it lasted I almost thought he might wish me well. He saw the point: Alejandro Aguilar’s daughter was the key to his old idea that the freedom fighters he had saved for future use, her secret family, might come in handy after all.

  What he didn’t know was, there was something about Luz Aguilar that came to me off the glossy prints like a pheromone.

  11

  For a couple of months after our first meeting on that summer morning in Los Bosques de Palermo, my relationship with Luz was a model of decorum. We met monthly under strict rules of tradecraft. She played the game and behaved with a solemnity that suggested she was handing over nuclear secrets. This wasn’t entirely a charade. No matter how much times had changed, military intelligence and the secret police had not forgotten whose blood ran in her veins, and I had to assume they kept an eye on her.

  So did I, and through my contact reports, so did Tom Terhune and Amzi. I was no more certain of what he was up to—why he was letting me do what I was doing—than I knew about intelligent life in another galaxy, but it was best to step carefully.

  Luz never stepped out of character—cool, careful, dressed like a Vogue model, yet sexually aloof in a don’t-even-think-about-it way. But I did think about it. I had no sex life, and had had none for some time. In the Near East it would have been suicidal to mess around with the women I handled, almost all of whom were devout Muslims who didn’t dally with unclean unbelievers, and anyway
they were usually dressed in hijab so it was impossible even to imagine the body that lurked inside the chador or the burka. For five years I had never been in any one place long enough to get to know a Western woman well enough even to speak the word bed. Prostitutes were too perfunctory to be worth the risk and expense.

  The truth was, I hadn’t gotten laid on a regular basis since college. Therefore I was as horny as a fifteen-year-old. Luz rendered this condition infinitely worse. I hadn’t expected this when I made my plans for her. But I was susceptible and I knew I wasn’t going to get over it. She was a woman after all, so occasionally she tossed me the bone of a sidelong glance, even a smile, or when making a point, touched the back of my hand with a fingertip. But usually she was all-business. She submitted to the puppetry of tradecraft as if it were a testimonial to my importance.

  Our stilted behavior in public was an advertisement of espionage to anyone who knew what tradecraft looked like. I mean to say, why would a man and a woman in the prime of life keep on meeting at odd hours in out-of-the-way places and never smile at each other or touch? By every rule of espionage, Luz could never be trusted. She was the child of a man and woman whose ghosts, unhinged by politics as they had been in life, cried out for revenge.

  We met on weekdays in the early morning when the streets were deserted, or nearly so. After a couple of months, she suggested meeting, instead, on a Sunday afternoon. Why didn’t I come to her place for lunch? This would give us privacy, shield us from inquisitive eyes.

  “On the street, when men look at me, they see you, too,” she said. “Women look at you and do the same. It makes me nervous.”

  Her building, she said, usually was quiet on weekends—people slept late or went to the country, to the parks, to Grandmother’s house. Amzi would have said I was out of my fucking mind to agree to ignore procedure like an amateur and walk into a place I had to assume was bugged, but I had testosterone running out of my ears, so I ignored the rules and agreed.

  When I rang the doorbell Luz greeted me with a polite smile and a handshake. I thought the pressure lingered ever so briefly. If so, this was the most intimate physical contact we had ever had, but she gave me no reason to hope for more. She was as modestly dressed as a nun—black trousers, crisp white shirt buttoned to the throat, no jewelry except her little gold cross, no perfume, hair pulled back. The apartment was flooded with sunlight: good furniture, abstract paintings, flowers, a large photograph of her parents with a small child that was unmistakably Luz. Even at five or six she had looked like a preliminary sketch of the woman she became. She gave me a glass of orange juice mixed with Argentinean sparkling wine. We chatted as we drank—neutral subjects only. She could not have been more ladylike or sent me a plainer message that I should get no ungentlemanly ideas.

  Incongruously, romantic music played on the stereo—Bruch’s “Second Violin Concerto.” Did I like Bruch? She thought the music, clearly composed in a sexual daze, was ravishing.

  We ate a cold lunch, drank rosé wine from small glasses. We said nothing worth remembering. After dessert she shooed me into the living room. I heard her clearing away the dishes and putting them in the sink. I smelled coffee, and she brought two large cups of it. Standing over me, she took a sip. This slight movement caused her slim body to move inside her clothes: the lift of a hip, the curve of a breast.

  In English, speaking it to me for the first time, she said, “I’ve been reading your mind.”

  “In Spanish or English?”

  “No words. Just pictures.”

  “And what do you see?”

  “Mostly you’re fucking me.”

  She was watching me. Would my cup rattle in its saucer? Was I going to deny the fantasy or admit my furtive guilt? Her face, still as a picture, told me nothing about which she might prefer.

  Smiling pleasantly, as if we were just passing the time of day, I said, “ESP lives.”

  “So what I see is the reality?”

  “Sadly, no. Daydreams.”

  “You daydream a lot?”

  I told her the truth. “Where you are concerned, I do hardly anything else.”

  No smile, no frown, no lifting of the eyebrows, nothing in the unreadable brown eyes. Luz finished her coffee. She smiled her tiny smile. She turned her back and walked out of the room and disappeared into a hallway.

  I finished the teaspoon of espresso left in my cup, cleaned out her cup with my tongue, and then followed her down the hall past arty photographs of Alejandro and his sad-faced, breathtaking Felicia. The door at the end of the hall was ajar. I pushed it open all the way and walked in. Luz stood in front of a full-length mirror.

  She was naked. I saw all of her, every pore, front and back, at the same time and realized what a poor thing imagination is. I took off my clothes and dropped them where I stood. She had done the same.

  She looked downward and said, “My, you do think forbidden thoughts.”

  She took the part of my body in which all the rest of me, body and switched-off mind, was concentrated, and as if it were a tiller, turned me ninety degrees to the left so she could see herself in the mirror, and then fell to her knees.

  In the next half hour Luz got the full benefit of my five years of sexual deprivation and filled the room with loud, seemingly involuntary shouts of pleasure in a throaty voice I had never heard before. She knew The Joy of Sex forward and backward and every time we changed positions I felt I was inside a different woman.

  After a while we fell asleep, or at least I did. I smelled her in my sleep, felt her skin, felt the warm, sticky moisture of her drying on myself. I had an erection. I wanted to wake up and wake Luz by sliding it into her. I swam upward toward this wondrous reality.

  Before I could open my eyes, a shrill male voice screamed, “Wake up, you son of a bitch!”

  Luz sat bolt upright—I felt this rather than saw it—and uttered a theatrical scream. In a theatrical voice she cried, “Pedro!”

  I opened my eyes. Pedro, a very young, skinny, wild-eyed person showering spit as he shouted, needed a shave. In his trembling hand he held an open switchblade knife to my throat. He wore a heavy gold signet ring on his knife hand. He smelled of whiskey and sweat and of something I had often smelled before in the course of duty—madness. As I had been taught at Moonshine Manor, I grabbed his wrist with my left hand and slammed the heel of my right hand into his chin. His eyes rolled back in his head. He was catapulted from the bed as if weightless. The knife spun in the air—all this happening in slow motion. Pedro’s nerveless body hit the floor with a soft thump. He was unconscious, or dead, I couldn’t tell which.

  Neither could Luz. She screamed again, this time as if she meant it.

  In English, as if it were the language of murder, she cried, “You’ve killed him!”

  She leaped out of bed and knelt beside Pedro. He looked like a child that had been hit by a car. She pinched his lower lip, hard. His eyes fluttered. She slapped his face. He groaned. She slapped him again, harder. His eyes opened. He saw me standing over him, switchblade in hand, and tried to scream. He croaked instead. Naked Luz helped him gently to his feet and murmuring words of encouragement, helped him stagger out the door. I heard the front door close and the snick of the lock.

  Luz came back into the room, her hair wild, her eyes shining. She had curly pubic hair. One tendril hung from the point of the delta, like a little goatee. I had not noticed this charming detail before. It had an immediate physical effect. I was still standing, the glittering knife in my hand.

  I said, “What was that supposed to be?”

  “Pedro’s a cousin, doing me a favor.”

  “He’s crazy?”

  “A little, in a nice way. He’s gay. He’s done it before. It was a game. The knife was supposed to expose the real you. Would you jump out the window or see the joke, have an erection, and jump on me?”

  She looked down, checking my condition, and for the first time ever, smiled a real, a delighted smile.

  She said
, “So what’s it going to be, the window or me?”

  12

  After that Sunday afternoon, sex became our medium of communication. Neither of us could get enough of it and though in the beginning each suspected that the other was faking it—how could this state of constant arousal be real, how could it last?—doubts weakened with each hour in bed. Lust turned incrementally into love. Against my nature and my will, I began to understand that the absurd phrase “grand passion” was, like most clichés, shorthand for an ancient and undeniable truth.

  I had no choice but to tell Headquarters what was going on—not the deep truth I have just told you, but the bare fact that my agent and I were having sex. This was risky. Case officers are not supposed to fall into bed with their assets.

  Moonshine Manor wisdom: Steer clear of temptation and she is ours, put a hand on her breast and you are hers.

  Like every other intelligence service, Headquarters had people under contract to do whatever fucking might be necessary. The forbidden does occur, however, and when it does, the officer who has cuckolded Headquarters is expected to report the violation, introduce his replacement—ideally a member of the same sex as the tumbled agent—with the least possible delay, and break the connection forever. Usually they do just that because they know that the guilty secret will make the needle skid at the next polygraph session. Marrying the agent is an option, but Headquarters (think Amzi) would assume that this meant that the agent had, so to speak, run a successful penetration op and screwed her way into the inner circle of trust in the service of whatever dark force was running him or her. I don’t know what the procedure is in the case of gay lovers.

  However, the rules were more flexible in my case. Soon after I realized that I would not be able to resist the flesh-and-blood Luz, I told Tom Terhune that I planned to do anything necessary, up to and including marriage, to gain full control of Luz. Tom had reservations, but he understood that Luz was the indispensable element in the operation. Through Luz and only through Luz would I reach the disciples of her father who could identify the Russians whom Headquarters hoped to beguile, bewilder, and betray. I had to put her into my pocket by any means necessary.