by James Reich
“That’s very fucking interesting, Royce. Thank you.”
“I was just . . . ”
“Reporting what is front-page news for every newspaper in the state. Believe me, I have a stack of them right beside me on the passenger seat. I watched it on TV in a motel this morning. Don’t be a creep, Royce.” He hung up.
The satisfaction he gained from reasserting himself returned Robert Dresner’s wide, gleaming grin as he drove. The fact that it would take him eight hours to reach D.C. only buttressed his pleasure. He could rest in his own apartment for one night before travelling to New York to interview Evelyn and Frederick Winters. He had resolved to sustain the illusion that Kip Winters was merely missing. That way, he could deny his killer the vindication of a media circus. He caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror. Yes, he looked tired, but through that fatigue, the fixed white sheen of his confidence had returned to him. He was tempted to turn on the radio, but resolved that this period of silence was what he required most urgently. Kip Winters had been assassinated on the same day that John Wilkes Booth had assassinated President Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre: April 14. Hunting the killer down had taken until April 26, when, Dresner recalled, he was shot in the throat, cornered at a farmhouse northeast of Bowling Green, Virginia. That was her date, April 26, the day of her birth and the Chernobyl disaster. He would take her before then. It was while driving through Raleigh, North Carolina, that he received a summons from his director.
“Robert. I’d like to speak with you in the morning. In person.”
Jesus Fucking Christ. It was as though a razor sharp icicle was being forced into his scalp and down into his balls, where it spun in a frenzy of panic. There was no precedent for this in his career in rendition. “Shall I come to Langley?”
“No. I’ll come to your apartment at nine AM.”
“I’ll try to get some sleep,” he said, uncertain of how many more of these violent oscillations and disappointments he could endure.
April 16, 2011. At 9 AM, Robert Dresner answered the door to his apartment and saw his director for the first time in his twenty-five-year career with the Central Intelligence Agency. His gaze was met by that of a tall, gaunt man in his seventies with thinning copper hair, streaked with white. He was dressed in a gray flannel suit and a white shirt, with a herringbone necktie. There was a small American flag at his lapel. He inclined his head by way of greeting. Dresner put out his hand, and The Voice gave it cursory attention as he drifted into the apartment. The effect was spectral and cold, as though he possessed only a limited facility to engage with the warm-blooded. As they moved to the seating area, the illusion paled away, and now more clearly observing something like rheumatism or arthritis dogging The Voice’s movements, he became solidified, tangible, and intimidating in a melancholy paternal fashion. Dresner poured coffee from a French press, pushing the cream and the sugar bowl toward The Voice, finally embodied on the black leather couch of his apartment. His face was freckled and worn, the blades of his cheeks converging on a thin patrician nose and ruminating red lips. Dresner sat opposite him in the matching recliner chair. Reaching slowly for his cup and adding four sugar cubes and letting the cream overflow, the old man relaxed into Dresner’s environment, regarding the Vettriano print on the wall and the plasma screen before rolling his green eyes with disgust. Dresner followed the old man’s eyes without comprehension. Finally, The Voice spoke.
“Royce tells me that you haven’t informed the Winters family that Kip is dead.”
Dresner discovered that in immediate proximity, aligned with the physical presence of its owner, the voice that had electrified him with anxiety was disarmingly tender. It struck him with such force that it eclipsed his anger at Royce’s grassing and manipulated him into a suppliant sobriety. His fears passed. All that remained was his loyalty, and his desire to clean the slate of the past two weeks of uncharacteristic failures.
“That is correct.”
“Can you explain that to me?” The Voice tried to cross his gray flannel legs, but some pain in his hips prevented him. Witnessing this, Dresner felt something like a dog attending its wounded master. He sipped at his coffee before answering in a calm, conciliatory tone, conscious now of the need to deliver Royce as some tactless sniper.
“I’m going to inform them tomorrow, in person.” He let that intimate gesture swell. “I’m going to Manhattan myself. My rationale is as follows. Firstly, and most importantly, she did not intend to kill Kip Winters, and I believe that she was attempting to dispose of the body, in her amateurish way, hoping that he would be burned beyond recognition, or never be discovered, at least not yet. She will go to New York and attempt some form of extortion. She will attempt to sustain the illusion that Kip Winters is still alive to facilitate this.”
“But Evelyn and Frederick Winters will know of the homicide. A Russian PSS? Lord, I haven’t heard of those in a long time. I used one in Red Square in 1986. She brings back curious memories, this girl.”
“You were in the Soviet Union when she was born?”
“We were pulled out after Chernobyl; those red winds. But let’s fix upon the present, and the future.”
“Yes. Of course, the Winters family will be grief-stricken, sequestered in mourning. So, I will have them agree to let me act either in their person in the case of Frederick—we’re about the same age, and she almost certainly does not know his voice, so that when she calls I can answer the telephone as the elder son, or at minimum I can act as an intermediary for them. They won’t need to be involved. We can let them to their grief. While we indulge our girl and her bluff, we can also frustrate her and bring her out. Then: bag and tag.”
“You are convinced that time remains for rendition?”
“There are still ten days until April 26. Her date. It is profoundly significant for her, and it is my contention that she will want to string the Winters family, or the Winters Corporation, along until that date.”
“And you believe that you can get to her while she does so.”
“Yes. Inevitably, as she forces more interaction with Evelyn and Frederick Winters, she will render herself more vulnerable.”
The old man smiled. A trickle of coffee ran from the crease of his mouth. “It’s not beyond the precincts of possibility, Robert. But . . . ” He pulled himself forward using the armrest of Dresner’s couch. “Listen lad, you’re not a man I associate with carelessness, lack of control.” He spread his hands in a gesture of bafflement, showing metallic blue veins and age spots. His voice remained surprisingly mellifluous and sympathetic.
“No mistakes in twenty-five years.” Dresner smiled.
“Your service has been immaculate. Until now.”
“I understand.”
They were silent for a moment. Dresner watched The Voice gather himself.
“How is your confidence, Robert?” His green eyes glinted enthusiasm.
“Sky-high. Truly sky-high.” Dresner sat forward in his seat, eager.
“Royce seems to think—”
“Royce can go fuck himself. I don’t get him. I’ve never encouraged any sense that he should get bigger shoes. I know he’s ambitious, but—”
“Perhaps, he heard it from us, Robert.” The old man cast his gaze about the room. In a sense, it belonged to him, to the CIA. “Cross Spikes will go on, you know.”
“I still have ten days.”
“You’re getting married.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We can get through these next ten days, can’t we?”
“Assuredly.”
“Then all right.” The old man smiled and let both palms fall upon his thighs. “You’ve come a long way since Oklahoma.”
Dresner grinned. “I’d prefer not to think about it.”
“Yes, how did Thomas Wolfe put it? You Can’t Go Home Again . . . ‘to the escapes of Time and Memory.’ Will you assist me in getting up?” Dresner rose and ushered The Voice gently to the door of his apartment, holding it open for h
im. The man’s torso was thin as a paper lantern. Even through the herringbone suit, he thought that he could feel his heart running. “I hope that you have a magical last night in D.C., Robert.”
CASH AND JANELLE HAD STAYED AWAKE INTO THE EARLY HOURS OF the morning. Before she left Madrid, Cash had imagined herself finding her old friends and asking them for their help, but she had come to realize that she was seeing them for the last time and that these were unspoken farewells; she would not be returning from New York City. Nona was suspicious of her, and with Janelle established in her new life, she could not involve them further. During the night, she wept as she thought of Molly, and the distant, occluded certainty of her death. She imagined the black slag heaps sliding down upon Madrid, a grinding tenebrous wave. The blackness pouring in through imploding windows, drowning the weak and sleeping houses, impenetrable soot choking the breathless street, uprooting the light-strung trees, and washing up against the black iron locomotive that stood close to the tavern, smothering the tracks, fossilizing the people in their beds. Regions of the earth were closing behind her, parts of her world snuffed out. They ate sandwiches beneath the Washington Monument obelisk, the great stone spike rising, a horn of ivory behind them in the sunlight. Cash imagined it twinned with the embarrassed stunt of a monolith erected at Trinity, the small and shameful lava bricks.
“I wish that I could stay longer,” she said. Tourists swarmed toward the needle, shielding their eyes as they regarded its height, a luminous geometry breaking the azure sky from the epicenter of the free world.
They walked together to Columbus Circle.
“Do you want me to tell Nona about Zelda?”
“I’ll do it from New York.”
“You’ll call me, too?”
“Of course. I will. Listen out for me!”
Beyond the eagle-wrapped stone of the Columbus Fountain, the shadowed voyager and the opposing statuary figures of the Old and New Worlds flanking him, Cash strode into the vast hall of Union Station. The long vault was a mausoleum anticipating a titanic mechanical corpse. The arc of it was studded with octagons of gold. The smooth ribs of the architecture curled over her, folding her in. Sunlight poured over the polished floor and the dark wooden benches. Trees grew inside its cloisters, and the mass of people there moved with the automatic purpose of insects loyal to a great colony. She had trailed her fingertips over the cold fluted columns as she watched Janelle walk away, falsely promising to see her soon. Cash handed over a $50 bill at the ticket office, preparing to ride an Amtrak north to Penn Station, New York. The elderly man in the booth reminded her of a photograph of Leon Trotsky. “How long does it take?” she inquired, sipping on a cardboard cup of coffee.
“About three hours,” he replied, pushing her single dollar of change back through the glass division between them. His voice was amplified through a small speaker. “It leaves in twenty-five minutes.”
They’re so strange here, the trains . . .
She saw Yanov railway station, the red abandoned carriages penetrated by weeds, irradiated flora pushing through the pockmarks of corrosion. Bright green grasses fringed the rails. It could be any station in America at any moment. For Cash, waiting rooms, departure lounges, and stations were all invested with sorrow. She stared at the blur of innocents marching along the gleaming concourse. What she could accomplish at Indian Point and what she could accomplish with the deaths of the patriarchs of the Winters Corporation might save all of these people, these mothers, fathers, and their children. Aboard the Amtrak, she passed easily into sleep.
17
PEOPLE BEGAN TO RISE FROM THEIR SEATS AS THE AMTRAK PULLED into Manhattan, crushing together close to the doors. Cash remained in her seat, bending to the deceleration and leaning her brow against the cold vibrating window, lost in the blur of concrete and bodies along the platforms. Finally, she too rose and walked with her bag to the train doors. Stepping onto the platform, the rush of diesel fumes and chill air roused her. The noise of the station reverberated endlessly. There were whistles and shouts and the sound of slamming metal. As the other travelers and commuters grazed past her, she looked around for a bathroom where she could change her clothes. Static blown voices blared from the PA system as she passed cascading information boards.
The bathroom was quiet. There was a smell of ammonia. She listened to the taps dripping outside the stall, the sound echoing from the hard tiles of a bathroom. Undressing furtively and swapping her street clothes with those in her bag, she recalled undressing on the edge of the desert in New Mexico. Standing in her underwear, she closed the toilet lid and wiped it before using it as a brace for pushups. She counted twenty-five in rapid beats, forcing the anxiety from her flesh. Emerging, she wore a black designer skirt and jacket that she had taken from the Washington apartment while Janelle had slept in a fuzz of red wine. Being taller than Cash, Janelle’s suit did not fit correctly. The sleeves obscured her hands, and the skirt fell toward her calves; a white blouse was buttoned over her throat. She flattened her unkempt hair down with water from fountain before pulling on her platinum blonde bombshell wig. Cash pressed along the shining concourse and climbing polished steps; she emerged to a dense crowd under the Penn Station pavilion on Seventh Avenue, the lurid blizzard of the city, yellow cabs, Stars and Stripes whipping in the wind across the front of the Hotel Pennsylvania before her, the tenebrous glass and LED screens of Madison Square Garden behind her, all of it roiling at slats of blue sky with girders and neon, neoclassical columns, marble façades, and stained ochre brickwork. Sirens wailed over laughter and conversation. Music boomed out of the traffic. To her left, she saw the tomb of Macy’s, and for an instant she put her hand to her throat, aching for Zelda. Yet, now there was also the spiking pulse of life, the vivid arteries of this city, so unlike the sarcophagus that shadowed her own.
She understood that she experienced the world through the shattered lens of natal fixation. The meltdown of Reactor IV at Chernobyl at the moment of her birth had set a strange fission in train, a splitting of her consciousness. One was interrupted by projections of the other: Varyushka who was never evacuated from the city of radiation, and Cash who had been moving toward New York. This was the means by which the inescapable facts of the atomic city imposed themselves upon her. Natal fixation drew her back to the vortex, the thermonuclear bulb of her mother’s womb, her labor pains drowned in the sound of alarm sirens. She was as much a child of the city as she was a child of her mother’s body.
The Chernobyl disaster was a disaster of Taurus. Of those who died in the meltdown, struggling against the inferno or fighting to contain the radioactive fallout at Chernobyl, a disproportionate quarter of them—Aleksandr Akimov, “Slava” Brazhnik, Klavdia Luzganova, Valery Perevozchenko, Nikolai Titenok, Vladimir Shashenok, and, on the cusp, Yuriy Vershynin—were all born under Taurus. Also, Cash reflected, two-thirds of the thirty who perished in the immediate aftermath died while that constellation still held sway. It would be over them again soon, twenty-five years later as she moved against Indian Point. She knew the moment was approaching. She fought against constructing ever more zodiacal perversions in her mind as the bright bulbs of the billboards turned, but there they were, angry fists against interior doors, the Minotaur in its labyrinth. Time would do its work. Walking south on Fashion Avenue, wary of the white police cars, she became aware that the billboards and bookstores all betrayed a desire for dead time to hatch out of these beautiful skyscrapers and that perhaps every one of the vigorous people about her possessed more than a flickering sense of the war between the past and the present: Here was 200 years since the demarcation of the Manhattan street grid and City Hall; here was the centennial of the New York Public Library; here was 100 years of naval aviation; here was 100 years of Ronald Reagan’s natal chart; 100 years of Gypsy Rose Lee, whose communist burlesque closed with cancer on April 26, Cash’s date; here was 100 years since the catastrophic fire that incinerated Dreamland and its freak shows at Coney Island. Cash envisaged Tod Bro
wning’s mutants limping along the burning boardwalks . . . Then, signs for the Easter Egg Hunt, and a centennial Ferris wheel in Central Park, for the library, for Reagan, for Dreamland? She was walking too fast to see. Nowhere, except in the tortured flesh and bones of Varyushka Cash, was a sign of twenty-five years since the disaster at Chernobyl.
She regretted having let Janelle photograph her with her cell phone. She wanted sole control over her image. She passed beneath the deli awnings and the permanent lightbulbs of the hotels that glowed in the afternoon, brown bricks and red fire escapes, graffiti tags on pale cement, through the poetic canyons and spikes of Chelsea, discount tailors, liquor stores, the Village Vanguard, the Stonewall Inn, battle zones of the Sex War, and onward until the hip red buildings began to surrender to the Financial District and the precincts of Wall Street. If she could lift the nuclear shadow from Manhattan, it might fade everywhere. Striding over the broad striped crosswalk, interrupting the frenzy of traffic, she was grateful for the loose security of rail travel; the gun was perfectly safe in her bag. At last, she found herself only an hour’s walk away, south through Greenwich Village to Trinity Place, and the offices of the Winters Corporation. She began to feel the thousands of miles between Chernobyl and Manhattan unraveling behind her. She dragged the umbilicus like a vast Atlantic cable.
Within the Financial District, the Winters Corporation building was a high-rise tower of smoked glass and burnished steel. Cash studied the tall windows. Men and women slid between the vacuum hiss of the automatic doors; electronic stock and currency prices moved across the façade above the doors. In common with so many other buildings of the financial zone, its actual purpose was obscure, its primary occupants anonymous and hidden, save for a small copper plaque embossed with the WINTERS name beside the entrance. Her fingertips left a bluish smear upon it. Finally, she was almost upon them. They would be inside, the son and the father bent over like morbid crones at their smooth modern furniture, perhaps weeping across the maps of their nuclear territory, perhaps not knowing what had happened to the third of them. She did not know if they would be informed that Kip Winters was dead, or if they believed he had disappeared. Was it safer to assume that his body had been found and identified in the radioactive shade of one of their plants? She would have to present herself with ambiguity to get close enough to them to deal her death blows. Still without entering, she scrutinized the omniscient black domes of the security cameras protruding slightly from the lobby ceiling as the doors breathed in front of her. She hesitated further at the threshold, adjusting the bag on her shoulder, aware that there was no way to commit this act without the dissemination of her image, some version of it, perhaps setting off more alarms throughout the whole nuclear industry. That was what she wanted. Yet, this would make her final assault on the Winters Corporation reactors at Indian Point more difficult.
