The Faithful Spy

“It’s me,” he said.

“John?”

“Be on your front steps in five minutes.” He hung up. Calling her was a mistake. He should be on the road to New York already. There he would ditch the Jeep, pick up the money he had hidden, and find a Greyhound that would get him to Atlanta without coming through D.C. She could stop him with a ten-second phone call. But he needed to say good-bye to her. He needed to believe there was at least one person he could trust.

SHE TROTTED OVER to the Jeep. He popped open the door and reached out a hand.

“Watch the glass.” He’d tried to sweep it onto the floor but hadn’t completely succeeded. He was surprised to see she was wearing a knee-high skirt. She ought to wear skirts more often, he thought. Even the Talibs would approve. Well, maybe not.

She swept off the window fragments and arranged herself gingerly on the seat. He drove off, north on Thirteenth Street.

“You stole this?”

“Borrowed.” He held up the Jeep’s registration. “I guess I owe Elizabeth Jones a few bucks.”

“Where are we going?”

“We’re not going anywhere. I just wanted to see you. For a minute.”

“Where are you going?”

“Away.”

“John—”

AND SUDDENLY EXLEY understood. Shafer had set this up, like he’d set up Wells’s trip to the camps so many years before. Shafer had known that Duto, out of stupidity or spite, would shut down anything Wells tried to do. So Shafer had taken Wells for himself. Then he’d let Wells twist until Wells believed he had no choice but to run. That was why they hadn’t told Wells he’d passed the poly, why they’d kept him at arm’s length. Why Shafer had put Wells at that safe house instead of someplace more secure. It was the only way to get Wells out.

“It’s so risky,” Exley said aloud. What if Duto called out the dogs? But he wouldn’t. He didn’t think Wells was dangerous, and he’d be happy to let Shafer twist over the loss of his prize pet.

“I know what I’m doing,” Wells said.

Do you, John? Exley wondered. She put her hand on his arm.

AT HER TOUCH Wells wanted to pull the Jeep over and have her there, on the side of the street. Let the neighbors watch. Let them call the cops. And then Langley can bail you both out, he thought. She took her hand from his arm.

“John? There’s something I’ve been wondering.”

“Yes?”

“Why’d you go see Heather?”

“It wasn’t Heather I wanted to see. It was Evan.”

They sat in silence for a moment, and Wells wondered if he’d understood the question properly: Do you still love her? Then Exley put her hand on his arm again, and he knew he was right.

“Tell me a story,” he said. To distract himself. To hear her voice for a little while more before he disappeared.

“What kind of story?”

“Anything. I don’t care. Something personal.”

SHE WONDERED WHAT to tell him. All she did was work. Should she explain how her son had yelled at her the last time she’d seen him, told her he liked Randy better than her? About how she kept the radio in her bedroom tuned to sports talk, not because she cared about the Nationals but because if she woke up at three A.M. she could turn it on and be sure of hearing a man’s voice?

“You want a story,” she said. “Okay.” And before she could stop herself she said, “So, the night I lost my virginity. I was fifteen—”

“Fifteen?” Wells sounded surprised, she thought. He didn’t know what he’d gotten himself into. She wasn’t sure she did either. She’d never told this to any man before, not even her husband.

“You want me to keep going?” She wanted to keep going.

“Please.” His voice was steady again.

“Anyway, I was fifteen. My family was going through a rough patch. My dad, he was always a drinker, but about then he started to head off the cliff. Took him five more years to hit bottom, but we could see where he was going. And my brother, Danny, he’d just gotten kicked out of freshman year at UCLA. He was hearing voices and he hit his roommate in the head with a Tabasco bottle.”

“A Tabasco bottle?”

She laughed, with an edge. “I know it sounds ridiculous, but it wasn’t one of those little ones you see in restaurants. It was big enough to do some damage. He got brought up on aggravated-assault charges. He would have gone to jail if we hadn’t convinced the judge he was schizo. Which he was.”

“I didn’t even know you had a brother, Jenny.”

“He killed himself a few years after that. I don’t talk about it.”

Wells slowed down, put his hand on her shoulder. “Exley.”

“Lots of them do, you know. Schizophrenics. He just couldn’t bear it.” She shook his arm off her. They were still heading north on Thirteenth. The apartment buildings had turned into two-story houses, indistinguishable in the night.

“You’re gonna have to drop me off soon,” she said. “They’re going to call my cell to tell me you’re gone, and they’re going to wonder if I don’t answer. So you want to hear the rest of my story or not?”

“You still want to tell it?”

“Yes. Strange but true.” She didn’t know why, or maybe she did. Because it would be his when she told him, a gift she wouldn’t give anyone else, in its way more intimate than any other. “So I’m fifteen, cutting school, smoking pot, acting out. Wearing black. The whole deal. You know, my brother’s crazy, my dad’s an alkie, and I’m just ignoring my mom, who’s doing her best. And I decide a couple weeks before my birthday that there’s no way — no way — I’m still gonna be a virgin when I’m sixteen. Great plan, right, John?”

“Lucky boyfriend.”

“Only — no. I didn’t have a boyfriend back then. And I didn’t want a high school boy. I wanted a man. Somebody who would fuck me. I didn’t even know what that meant, but my new girlfriends, the ones I cut class with, they were always talking about guys who fucked them, really fucked them. And some of it was crap, maybe most of it, I knew that. But some of it wasn’t. So, about a week before my birthday, Jodie, who was a couple years older, the nicest of them, told me about this party she was going to, in Oakland, across the bay, with some college guys. She said I should go. And then the next day she told me she couldn’t go, but I made her give me the address. And so I told my mother I was going to some concert — I remember I was so happy I put one over on her, my poor mother — and I got all dolled up and I went.”

He slowed down. “Is it wrong for me to imagine how you must have looked back then?”

“I looked good. I mean, I can say it now that I’m old and decrepit: I was hot. And I was wearing this thigh-high skirt and these boots…. My mother had a lot on her mind or she never would have let me out of the house.”

“You’re not old, Jenny.”

“Too kind. So, anyway, I catch the BART to Oakland, ’cause I’m not even legal to drive, remember. And I start walking around this kind of crummy neighborhood, because this is before every square foot in the Bay Area is worth a million dollars, and I’m starting to get nervous, and then I find it. And it’s loud, amped up, a big party in a big run-down house. There were some Berkeley students, but there were grad students too, and some guys from the neighborhood who’d come by and even some bikers, because that’s what Oakland was then. If you were having a party you’d better invite the locals. The girls were a little younger, but they were all in college at least. And I grab myself a beer and take a couple bong hits from this bong that must have been about four feet long. And I start looking for Mr. Right.”