The Terrorist, page 4
“In Saint Leon,” said Louis, “and on this very spot. A Nazi officer was executed by the resistance right here.”
“You know,” said Pauline, “it’s an odd coincidence that my daughter lives nearby. I actually passed through Saint Leon during the War. In my parents’ arms, of course. I was a newborn. We were Jews. We started in Paris. We were helped by partisans. We were taken from place to place, sort of like the American Underground Railroad. When the War ended, we had made it as far as Foix, not far from the Spanish border. When I was old enough, my parents showed me our entire journey on a map. It came right through Saint Leon.”
Pauline untied her shoes, took them off, then took off her socks. “Let’s go swimming,” she said. She did not wait for Louis to say anything. She stood up and removed her clothes. Her body was slim and muscular. Louis watched astonished as she climbed down the rocks and slid into the water. She let out a whoop of delight and swam away from the shore. Louis took off his clothes and followed her.
“What else could I do?” he said that night as they lay in his bed.
“You know,” said Pauline, “when I was a practicing physician, I saw hundreds of people naked. You would think I would have gotten used to it over time, even gotten bored looking at naked people. But I never did; I still haven’t. It has always thrilled me. I never got tired of seeing my patients’ bodies. It was their uniqueness, the particularities of each body that I loved. And their beauty.
“I never once had an affair with a patient. But I admired all their bodies. Secretly, of course. I had one patient who had been in a terrible street bombing. He had lost part of a leg and had wounds up and down the right side of his body. Still, I found him beautiful to look at. He was tall and thin with narrow muscles. He had pale, pale skin. His blue veins showed through everywhere. He seemed nearly transparent. Which,” she said, “is why I made you take off your clothes at the quarry.”
“You made me…?” Louis looked doubtful.
“Of course I did,” said Pauline. “Why else do you think I took off my own clothes? I knew you were too much a gentleman not to follow suit. You have an interesting and beautiful body. That is why I undressed. It was my way of undressing you.”
Louis ran his hands over her shoulders and down her back. “Well, of course, that too,” she said with a little shiver. “There was that.”
The next Thursday, Louis met Pauline’s train in Saint Pierre. He tried to take her bag. She squinted at him. “I carry my own bag,” she said. “Or don’t you remember?”
“I remember,” said Louis. They drove in silence.
“You have something to tell me,” she said.
How did she always seem to know what he was thinking? Louis drove in silence for a while before he said, “Yes, I have something to tell you.” He took a deep breath. “I want to tell you about myself as a young man living in Virginia, with a young wife and two small children. Sarah was my wife, Jennifer and Michael my children. I’ve spoken about them before.”
“Yes, you have,” said Pauline. “But not much.”
“No,” said Louis. “I know it doesn’t work this way, but not speaking of them is my way of protecting them. Or trying to. Well.” He looked across at Pauline. “We lived in Arlington, Virginia, outside Washington. I was working for the State Department. My wife was smart and beautiful, my children—Jennifer and Michael—were … lovely.”
“Say more about them,” said Pauline.
Louis pulled to the side of the road and stopped the car. “As astonishing as it may seem,” he said, “I did not pay much attention to them.” He held the steering wheel as though he were still driving. “I sometimes held them on my lap after supper, or I played with them in the yard. But while I was pushing the swing, my mind was elsewhere—a meeting the next day, a position paper I had to write. Sometimes I would look at them playing or sleeping and wonder, Who are these little people? What do they have to do with me?
“Jennifer was always organizing the neighborhood children into groups to put on plays or sell lemonade. One summer she organized things so that there was a stand on nearly every corner. No adult could get home from work without passing at least one stand, and more likely several. Jennifer broke their resistance. Eventually they had to buy a cup of lemonade. All the children divided up the profits. How did she think to do that?
“And Michael. Michael loved to draw. He drew endlessly. Once I found him lying on his stomach on the porch drawing a dead mouse. He would squint at the tiny body, then draw, then look again. A long line of ants went from the edge of the porch to the dead mouse, and he drew the ants too. How did he even know how to do that? What was he seeing?
“I didn’t ask myself—or them—any of those things I should have asked. I was young and self-absorbed. I was getting rapid promotions to good and responsible jobs. I sat in on presidential briefings. I thought I was important.
“In retrospect the briefings were mostly boring. And alarming.”
“Alarming?”
“They revealed, if I had been willing to see it, how ill equipped these people were to rule the world.”
“Did they rule the world?” said Pauline.
“In a manner of speaking they did,” said Louis. “And I actually thought I would too. Eventually I was posted to the CIA. It was the Cold War. I was sent to Cairo, Algiers, Istanbul. I was on a fast track, I was told. I had a big career ahead of me, I was told.
“One day, I was called into the secretary of state’s office. I thought I was going to be promoted.” Louis laughed. “That shows how little I actually understood. Instead I was read a nasty bill of particulars accusing me of all sorts of wrongdoing. I was dismissed from the government. I was escorted from the building by guards.” He paused and looked at Pauline. “I don’t know how much to tell you,” he said.
“Everything,” said Pauline.
“Yes,” said Louis. “Everything. So. I had not done any of the things I was accused of—revealing secrets, compromising operations, endangering agents. I had been sabotaged by the man who had been my mentor. His name was Hugh Bowes. He was very powerful.”
“Hugh Bowes?” said Pauline. “Wasn’t he the…?”
“Secretary of state,” said Louis. He nodded. “This was long before he was the secretary of state. But even then he was jealous of his power. Because I was ambitious, on the rise, I don’t know, because of all that, he was jealous of me.”
“And that made him want to ruin you?” said Pauline.
“I know,” said Louis. “It sounds ridiculous. From this vantage it sounds impossible. But operating in that rarified, claustrophobic world does that to you. It unhinges you. It separates you from reality. You invent your own truths and begin believing them. Anyway, that is when my life began to unravel. My promising career was in ruins. My marriage came apart. I left my family. I came to France.”
“Your children?” said Pauline.
“Yes,” said Louis. “I left my children. They were small, and they needed me, and I left them. I didn’t see them for years.” He met Pauline’s eyes.
“And what about now?” said Pauline.
“Oh, now. I see them, I write to them, I call them,” said Louis. “They are wonderful—generous and loving. Far more generous and loving than I deserve.”
Pauline reached across and touched his hand.
“And you moved to France,” she said.
“Coming here made as much sense as anything else I could think of. I wanted to leave my past behind and start over. And I did. I bought my house, fixed it up. Saint Leon came to feel like home. There was Solesme. My friends, the Renards. And others.
“Then, not too many years ago, when I thought that sordid political world was gone forever, I came out onto my terrace one morning, carrying my breakfast tray, and almost tripped over a dead body. An African. Or so I thought. At first.”
Pauline’s green eyes had grown wide with astonishment.
“As I eventually discovered, Hugh Bowes, my old enemy, had arranged it. It—the dead man—was part of an elaborate scheme to do me in once and for all. My destruction had somehow—don’t ask me how or why—become his obsession.”
Pauline turned away from Louis. She leaned forward and peered hard through the windshield, as though she were trying to get her bearings. She looked at the fields of yellow wheat stubble in front of them, at the sunlight dancing off the winding creek, at the tractor pulling a wagon piled high with bales of hay. The bales teetered and rocked but didn’t fall. She watched a flock of sparrows scatter across the sky, heard the wind rattling the poplars beside the road. This was the world as she knew it. Routine, ordinary. She turned back to Louis. “Is that all over?” she said. “Is it finished, or is it still going on?”
Louis smiled. “Hugh Bowes is dead. Several years now. Maybe it is over. But these stories don’t end easily. I don’t know whether it is over. What makes me bring this up now is that last week a man from the CIA calling himself Peter Sanchez showed up at my house. I had had no contact with anyone from that world for years. I didn’t know he was coming. He just showed up.
“Peter Sanchez wants me to take up with some of my old contacts in Egypt. I would tell you their names, but they would mean nothing to you…”
“I thought such matters were state secrets, or whatever you call them,” said Pauline.
“I no longer believe in such secrets. Sanchez is asking me to go on this ‘mission,’ and I am trying to decide whether to do it or not.”
“And are you thinking this is another plot to entrap you somehow? Doesn’t that seem a little … unlikely?”
Louis smiled. “Yes, it seems unlikely. Even to me. That’s not what I’m thinking.”
“Then why are you telling me all this?” said Pauline.
“Because you have a right to know about me. Because I want you to know who I am. This history I have. My history is a kind of … poison that’s in me.”
“Poison?”
“I think of it that way.”
Pauline gave him a hard look. “You think your history is who you are?”
“It’s part of who I am,” said Louis.
“And will you go on their mission?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you know? Why would you do it? Can’t you just decide not to do it? Just refuse to do it?” she said. “Don’t you have a choice?”
“I don’t know whether I have a choice. The only way to know would be to refuse to do it. And if I don’t have a choice after all, then the consequences could be worse than they would have been if I had not refused.”
“You mean, they would do something to force you to do whatever it is they want you to do?”
“That sort of thing happens,” said Louis.
Pauline frowned while she studied Louis for a long moment. “What is the real reason you don’t refuse? Just refuse … unless it interests you.”
Louis looked down at his hands.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” she said. “It interests you.”
“Yes,” said Louis, “it interests me.”
“So, does it interest you because you think it is a good thing to do? Or because it is an obligation? Or because it is an exciting adventure? Why?”
“I think it … might be a … useful thing to do.”
“Useful? Might be useful? ” Pauline was angry.
“I might find a way to get to some harmful person,” said Louis. “Some terrorist, say…”
“In order to kill him?”
“I wouldn’t do it, but someone else would. Yes, that would be the objective,” said Louis.
“And how would killing him be useful?” Before Louis could answer, Pauline continued. “Wouldn’t killing him just make him a martyr? Aren’t there more who could easily take his place? I know it’s not my area of expertise, but killing him doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“That is not the way the world is, Pauline.” His voice had taken on a hard tone. “That kind of nuanced world is the world you wish we lived in. The world we actually live in is a nasty, brutal world, governed by violence and power…”
“I don’t believe you,” Pauline said. She had turned in her seat to face him. “I don’t believe you, Louis. I don’t believe your reasons. I’ve only known you a short time. But I don’t believe that is the way you think. I believe your continuing anguish at having left your children many years ago. I believe you when you say you quit that political, Hugh Bowes world because you found it confusing and treacherous and corrupt. Morally repugnant. Contemptible. Bankrupt. Those were your words.”
IV
I have decided that I cannot help you, Mr. Sanchez.”
“I understand, Mr. Morgon. I understand completely. I will not bother you again.” Sanchez hung up the phone.
The summer turned into fall. Louis continued as he had before. He took long walks in the fields and forests around Saint Leon, with Pauline when she was in town, alone when she wasn’t. He worked on a series of portraits he had begun of his friends. “They’re strong paintings, Louis,” said Isabelle.
Pauline thought so too. “You should exhibit them.”
“I don’t think so. Not yet, anyway,” said Louis. “The trick with a portrait is to get a strong and lively likeness, and a good painting at the same time. And to know when to stop. I’m still learning when to stop. Look at Sargent’s paintings.” He pulled a large book of Sargent’s work from the shelf, and he and Pauline sat with the book on their knees while Louis turned the pages. “Look there,” he said. “One more brushstroke, and he would have killed it. That’s what I have to learn.”
“There’s a Sargent show opening,” said Pauline the next time she called. She mailed Louis the catalog. “Come up and see it. It’s wonderful. A lot of things from private collections. Wonderful portraits of children.”
“No one was better with children than Sargent,” said Louis.
“You won’t see them again,” said Pauline.
“I just can’t make it,” said Louis. “I’m just too busy.”
He saw Renard and Isabelle when he could, and other friends too. Marianne invited him for dinner. Pauline was there, of course, along with some young people Marianne thought Louis might like to meet. “A couple of them are artists,” she said. “Like you.” Louis enjoyed talking with them. He invited them to see his work.
“Representational art is dead,” said Paolo, a young Parisian. He stood in front of Louis’s canvases with his arms crossed. “It just doesn’t know it.”
“If it doesn’t know it,” said Louis, “then everything is fine.”
Paolo laughed. “It’s only fair that I give you a shot at my work,” he said.
Paolo had made part of an old workshop on the edge of town into his studio. He constructed enormous sculptures out of old computers and televisions that he stacked in a heap, wrapped in plastic sheeting, and dribbled with tar and other industrial materials. Then he plugged everything in. The television and computer images were refracted by the coated and splattered plastic into shimmering and winking specters. “Industro-apocolyptic,” said Paolo.
“I see,” said Louis, sounding doubtful. Louis liked Paolo, and Paolo liked him. They met for coffee at the Hôtel de France. Louis talked about his need for color and beauty. Paolo needed energy and chaos.
“Louis finally has somebody to talk to about art,” said Renard.
Pauline invited Louis to come to Paris again. And once again he didn’t go.
Pauline came to Saint Leon nearly every week now. She and Louis took walks, they cooked dinners together, they sat side by side on his sagging sofa and read. One evening Pauline laid her book aside. “Louis,” she said. “Tell me what is going on with you.” Louis tried to continue reading, but she wouldn’t let him. “Louis, what is going on?” She put her hand over where he was reading.
“Going on?” said Louis. “We’re reading. Or trying to.”
“We’re reading,” she said. “But that is not what is going on. There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“We’re having a relaxed evening.”
“Stop being evasive,” she said. “You skipped the Sargent show, which you know you would have loved. You didn’t…”
“I’m waiting,” he said.
“Waiting for what?” said Pauline.
“I’m waiting,” he said, “for the other shoe to drop.”
“The other shoe…?”
Louis explained the expression to her.
A week later the other shoe dropped.
The telephone rang. “Dad,” said Michael. His voice sounded panicked.
“What’s wrong, Michael?”
“They’ve arrested Zaharia. They took him away. We don’t know where.”
At the Algiers airport, Zaharia Lefort had kissed his grandmother again and again. “Don’t cry, Granny,” he said, “I’ll write. I promise.”
“I know you will,” said Camille, but she only held him tighter. Tears rolled down her cheeks.
“Aren’t you happy for me?” he said.
“Oh, yes. Of course I am,” she said. “And very proud.” She smiled up through her tears and pinched his cheek.
“I’ve got to go, Granny. Everybody else is on the plane.” He embraced her once more and turned and walked to the gate. He turned again and waved and then was gone.
Zaharia held his face pressed against the window nearly all the way to Paris. He found his way through the corridors and gangways to the Washington Dulles flight.
The flight itself seemed endless. He had studied the flight information, so he knew exactly how many miles it was. But the ocean was bigger than he could have imagined. It went on and on, steel gray and unchanging, like a great, unblinking eye. Then finally they were flying over forested land dotted with lakes. Then there were roads. Then there were farms and cities and houses with swimming pools. Then they were on the ground.
Zaharia lined up with the non-U.S. citizens and waited behind the yellow line, as instructed. The agent signaled him forward, leafed through his passport, studied the visa, and put the open passport facedown on a scanner.
“What’s the purpose of your visit?”
