Red, White, Blue

by Lea Carpenter

  * * *

  —

  In the park Anna envied the children’s immunity to the cold. Admiring all that white, she made a decision. When the weather turned she would return to the Cap. Walking home, she made another decision. She was going to open the email.

  Q.

  A.

  Have you ever broken the law? Say you stole classified documents from our enemy. The answer in that case is clear, it’s yes. Well what about that lollipop you slipped in your pocket that day in sixth grade, was that a crime, too? Can you recall the thoughts that led to the choice to steal the lollipop, can you recall its color or taste? Someone who arrives at a quick no on questions of memory is likely a sociopath. Sociopaths don’t experience empathy, or guilt. In their minds, truth has no nuance. Their belief that they know where all the moral red lines are affords them the illusion of never having crossed one.

  Yes is a mirage in the desert.

  The night before the exfiltration I cooked for her in the safe house. We knew we were being listened to, so she talked about the weather and I brought water to boil, like we always had, perhaps pretending things were not about to change forever. All those nights I had placed plates of food in front of her, she had never once acknowledged it, or me; she would simply keep talking and eating and then she would stand and nod and leave. That last night was different. When I put the plate down, she stopped talking. She looked up at me. I didn’t move and she didn’t move and after a very long pause, very slowly and clearly, she mouthed a phrase in Mandarin, not English.

  Xiexie.

  Thank you.

  Aardwolf.

  FROM: Me

  TO: You

  RE: Paint a Starry Night Again, Man

  DATE: December 19, 2017

  By those buoys.

  When it’s warm.

  Q.

  A.

  The English don’t believe in the polygraph and so they don’t use it. When MI6 officer Nicholas Elliott was interrogated by their equivalent of the Office of Security, he was asked whether his wife knew what he did for a living. He told the truth, which was, Yes, she does. The interrogators were shocked. They asked how his wife knew, and again he told the truth, which was, Well, she was my secretary for two years and I think the penny must have dropped. Sometimes the truth is a powerful weapon, Anna.

  Nicholas Elliott was Kim Philby’s closest friend. He was the one who knocked on Philby’s door in Beirut after Philby had come under suspicion, after they had amassed the evidence. It was one old friend arriving to expose the other as a traitor, one friend sent specifically to indict the other as a spy. Philby had a blessed life in Lebanon, a gorgeous wife, a pet fox, fine friends; he had planned to live out his days there in the Paris of the Middle East. When Elliott arrived, Philby opened the door and said, “I knew it would be you.” Occasionally you can indict a friend and also free him, Anna. The day after Nicholas Elliott arrived in Beirut, Kim Philby fled to Moscow, where he was greeted as a hero.

  Breathing.

  Lulu had not come for Christmas after all, though she had been open to the idea. Lulu had elected to give the happy couple the holidays in peace and so had arrived later in the dead of winter, on the coldest day of the year, in a storm. When Lulu called from the hotel, Anna told her to come to the loft, explaining that during this period of transition they were living there. Lulu held on to her daughter in the doorway long after Anna had let her own arms fall down by her side.

  “You’re too thin,” her mother said. Lulu looked exactly the same, barely fifty at almost seventy. Those genes. “I can feel your ribs,” she said.

  Her mother let go and began moving through the home, investigating. Anna felt anxiety slide from her shoulder blades down along her spine. Had she emptied the sink. Was their home too spare. And all the pots lined up on the floor, the orchids in various states of distress, despite her care. Was what she was wearing acceptable. Did this look like the home of a United States senator.

  Watching this woman, who was so known and also a stranger, Anna could barely remember times with her mother when she was a child. Her father was so clear. Her mother was white space. As Lulu moved from room to room, eyeing the moldings and the furniture, despairing over the orchids (“What are they doing on the floor and why are there so many of them”) and opening her icebox to see shelves of Pellegrino lined up like soldiers (“Is this an installation?”), Anna closed her eyes and tried to will a memory to mind that would calm her nerves, a picture of what it once felt like to be the little girl who had a mother before her mother left. In the memory Anna was lying in her bed, around age six, eating English biscuits stolen from her nanny. Her mother was selecting a book from a shelf. It was bedtime. She could see the book’s gold spine, the animals on its cover, and she could see her mother turning to her and gently removing the box of biscuits from her hold on it, placing it on the wooden nightstand. Lulu sat on the edge of her daughter’s bed, smoothed the pillowcase, kissed Anna on her forehead, and opened the book—

  “Christ,” her mother called out from the bedroom. The intimate image in Anna’s mind exploded into tiny pink hearts, emotion into cartoon. She found Lulu in her husband’s closet, standing between long rows of perfectly pressed shirts hung at equal intervals, white, blue, blue, white, white, blue, black, repeat. He had more than one hundred of them, cut by tailors in London and Milan.

  “Christ,” Lulu repeated, and she turned to face the daughter she had not seen in more than ten years. “Does he let you breathe?”

  Anna closed her eyes, and for a second and with absolute clarity she saw the girl and the biscuits and the mother and the book. And she looked at them until she was ready and then she opened her eyes and responded. “He taught me how to breathe.”

  Q.

  A.

  Did you talk to this reporter at The Washington Post? Did you have tea in Misrata that time? Are you a spy? Spectral evidence always says yes, Anna. There are people who never stand up and say, This is wrong. There are people who progress along a straight line, always asking permission, filing their reports. These are often fine people capable of accomplishing fine things. These are also the people who, with the gun cocked and while looking in the eyes of the target, will say, Wait, what about permission? The operating philosophy for so long at the Agency was Ask Forgiveness, Not Permission. That’s an effective philosophy, Anna. Operating under that philosophy, you can imagine that on occasion by the time Headquarters sends a cable denying permission for something, no one is left in the station to receive it. That cable is a tree falling in the forest. It doesn’t make a sound. I never asked for permission. And I don’t need forgiveness.

  Answer.

  She wanted to write so many things in her response.

  She wanted to say that she was stronger than she looked. She wanted to say that she hadn’t minded being taken advantage of, once, on that swim, if in fact she was being taken advantage of. She wanted to say she didn’t appreciate the theory she believed he was operating on, which was that she could be used in some way. She wanted to understand his intentions, why he wanted to meet her again, what he planned to tell her, was she at risk? She wanted to confront him and to scold him for not telling her more before, for perhaps setting her up for everything she’d endured over the last months. She wanted to scold and then confide in him. She wanted to tell him she was angry and afraid and felt alone. She wanted to say she had been thinking about him, and not only the him she met on her honeymoon at the Cap but also the him whose voice she heard questioning God and describing God’s rooms. She had been thinking about the little boy throwing snowballs, somersaulting across sand dunes, and expressing a certainty about the world. She wanted to understand how this boy had grown up to make the choices that he did. She wanted to hear stories of Noel at another time in his life, and she wanted to know what Noel had said about her. She wanted to know if Noel’s life had been
lies, if the business had been real, if her own experience of her father tracked with who he actually was. She believed in the eggshells. She believed that mothers don’t leave daughters so easily, and perhaps there was something to Lulu’s choices she was only starting to understand. She wanted to ask to see him again because when you lose someone you love, you only want to be around people who loved him, too. She wanted to understand where the meeting place was.

  She wanted to ask if he had committed crimes.

  She wouldn’t write anything rash.

  She wouldn’t write anything out of line.

  She had been told not to trust him.

  In the end she wrote three words, and hit send:

  When is warm?

  Q.

  A.

  We are all chasing shiny things. I was chasing impact, and impact is the real chimera, impact is anger at dirt. It’s ripping out smoke alarms, it’s kneeling in the grass watching dogs attack a colleague while taking no action, it’s worrying the bill at the bar exceeds the system’s definition of the limit. They can tell you how to deal with the idea that you might die in this line of work, but they can’t tell you how to deal with the idea that you’re never really living. There are stars on the wall for the deaths but there are no stars on the wall for the lives we are not living. Noel was drawn to the East because he was drawn to a certain way of thinking, the idea of letting go. He assisted in her exfiltration not because he was in love with her but because he understood her. And maybe because she reminded him of you. Veritas was his legacy. He saw China’s future in her. If a spy steals your secrets and a hero sets you free, your father was not a spy for the Chinese, Anna. He was a hero.

  He wrote his last note to me on a piece of silk, a nod to how soldiers once hid escape and evasion charts. Silk fits easily into a pocket. Silk does not dissolve in water. The silk was his way of saying, We are soldiers. His way of saying, You did it, you chose your battle, this is it.

  Van Gogh.

  It’s so blue. Whether this reflects the artist’s mood at the time of its creation is unclear, but what is clear is that the artist chose to place things on the canvas he couldn’t actually see. He had studied at the feet of the realists, but he wanted to show things differently.

  The artist placed the moon near the corner. Only the artist wasn’t painting at night; there was not enough light for that—there was no moon. He couldn’t actually observe a moon when he was painting one. Yet there is the moon. There are also buildings, signs of life, all illuminated by a moon the artist never saw. A critic later described Van Gogh as “longing for concision and grace.”

  It was March though still wintry in Manhattan. Anna had started going to the Museum of Modern Art afternoons, hoping to stop thinking about pink elephants by staring straight at one, by looking at the painting they had talked about that night on the Cap outside the restaurant, by processing the things that had happened since that time. The choice to paint a sky filled with stars from one’s room at the asylum struck her as so sad. Anna had never liked the Post-Impressionists, not even those lilies or the lunch on the grass. Her interest in this painting had nothing to do with art.

  Things were feeling chaotic lately, with Lulu now in and around the house all the time and even threatening to move to town—“to help.” With her husband increasingly tied up in new civic catastrophes and in laying the groundwork for the next election. With contractors and architects and interior designers in the uptown house.

  When she arrived home from the museum, it was dark and pouring. She nodded to the security guard in the hall, she was used to him now. Her mother was horrified by the presence of a man holding a gun at her door, a fact Anna felt belied Lulu’s naïveté. Isn’t it odd to fear a gun carried by a man sent to protect you. It was true, her mother no longer floated above. She simply stood outside. She had always seen her mother as fearless, but now increasingly experienced her fragility.

  “He’s there to protect me,” Anna told Lulu, of the guard. “I mean, in theory.”

  Her husband was singing in the kitchen. His favorite album raged through state-of-the-art speakers whose value exceeded that of her engagement ring. I went down to the demonstration / To get my fair share of abuse. She walked in and saw the senator had made dinner, sent the assistants home. Everything was a mess. His eyes popped when he saw her, a look that still made her shy, made her miss him even in his presence. He pulled her into an old dance move, the one with the spin, then the dip. He could dance. “No, I’ll get you wet,” she protested, to which his response was, “Yes, please.” This was not a guy who cared about staying dry. It was part of what drew people to him, it had drawn her, had complemented her fears. Well I could tell by her bloodstained hands. His mouth was right by her ear. He repeated the move, and the lyric. She wondered whether, if he kept holding her close, the instinct to go back to those rocks would evaporate. Though she knew it wouldn’t, the instinct wasn’t about him. He wouldn’t send a guard with her. He believed in her. She put her hands on his face. She planned to tell him that night that she was going back to France. When the case officer responded to her email, he had told her what was warm and where was warm and when was warm. In the end they would go back to the place where they started.

  Q.

  A.

  And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

  There’s a very detailed document in the station emergency communication plan called the “reserve,” or the “universal.” It includes a time and place for potential re-contact with assets at some point in the future. It’s used when the connection between an officer and an asset is broken or lost, usually in the wake of some catastrophe: if a war breaks out, if a bomb goes off. The location indicated in the plan is usually a wide-open space, like a park. The time indicated is highly specific, the second Saturday of each month at eleven-fifteen in the morning, for example. You know you will be going to that place at that time and if the other person is not there, you will go again the next month and the month after that and the month after that. In theory there are thousands of parks around the world right now where spies or their assets are waiting. They will return to those parks on the second Saturdays of the month with their Financial Times or their Falcons hats or whatever the protocols require. We call the location the “universal meeting place.” An asset knows that if I ever miss a meeting, she should go there. If she keeps returning there, she knows one day I will come or I will send someone in my place to collect her and bring her home.

  “And you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free” is the Agency motto.

  The Hard Verb.

  What was warm? It was a code of sorts.

  Noel had been buried on a hillside in Switzerland, under snow, the day after he died and the day before Anna had wrestled with that fire and those newspapers. It was hard not to think about all the history around those mountains, the images we associate with the place, edelweiss and Swiss knives and mountain dogs with whiskey barrels hung around their necks.

  It had been so cold that day. It was almost evening by the time they had everything organized. Anna had gathered a tiny bouquet of edelweiss on their walk up the hill; somehow the flowers were poking through the snow. Anna and her husband and the priest stood over the grave and she placed the edelweiss. She had cried herself out. She had nothing left. She thought about setting fire to the chalet. She longed for some rash action to make it all go away.

  “Don’t you want him closer to you, somewhere you can check in on him?” her husband had asked, when she’d made the choice to bury Noel immediately, and there, rather than take him home.

  “This is where he was happiest,” she said, remembering the wedding in Klosters, the prayer flags.

  Later, when he questioned the choice one last time, her response was different.

  “He’s here, actually,” she’d said, touching her heart. “This is
where he is.” She said it like you say something you need to believe but for which you have absolutely no evidence.

  A jeweler in Gstaad engraved a simple flat stone with the date and Noel’s initials. The jeweler delivered it himself to them that day. Noel would have liked the stone. He liked to personalize things. When Lulu saw it later she liked it, too.

  * * *

  —

  What was warm?

  * * *

  —

  At the memorial, a month later in Manhattan, Edmund delivered the eulogy. He started out with “Noel was—” And then his voice broke. He took a pause before saying, “There it is, the hard verb.” Anna always remembered that, the hard verb. Was. The hard verb is an idea applicable for the living, too, as we try to understand who we have been and who we are, what we might one day be.

  * * *

  —

  It was April and Anna had been thinking a lot about hard verbs lately—elected, wanted, trusted. Interrogated. Edmund had taken her to lunch to check in and she’d deflected when he asked how she was doing. He knew exactly how she was doing, he knew her so well, he could tell she was restless. He saw restlessness as a threat.

  “Is this the lunch where you make me promise not to leave until we’re in the White House?” she asked, only half teasing.

  “I wanted to thank you, actually, is all,” he said, tucking his napkin into his collar like a child. He always ordered spaghetti with meat sauce, which wasn’t on the menu, which is how you do it when you’re a power player in a power player place.