“It was years that she knew him… all those places we lived. She never suspected?”
Arthur Carr sighs and turns to the window again. The crow draws a strand of gut from the dusty carcass. His beak is glossy, and so black it’s nearly blue. It’s an eternity before Arthur Carr speaks, and when he does, his voice is like dry leaves. “That’s what the record says.”
Carr turns in his seat. “What does that mean?”
Carr’s father runs a forefinger down his long nose, to his mouth, and to his chin, which has begun to quiver. “She wasn’t stupid. Your mother had her flaws, but that wasn’t one of them.”
The rushing grows louder in Carr’s ears. “You’re saying she knew she was being played? The whole time?”
“She sussed it out early on.”
“She knew? She told you that?”
Arthur Carr studies the crow, hopping around the squirrel. After a while, he nods.
Carr can’t seem to fill his lungs, and he throws open the door of the rental car and stumbles out into the road. The driver of a passing truck leans on his horn and yells, and leaves a cloud of dust in his wake. The crow flies off. Carr walks slowly to the edge of the woods, and slowly back, the whole way watching the ground. When he returns, his father has the passenger door open and is sideways in his seat.
Carr looks at him. “She knew, but she let it happen-she participated in it. She… she was a traitor.” The word sounds strange in his ears-something foreign or archaic.
Arthur Carr makes a tiny, rueful smile. “Well, yes,” he says.
“Why?”
“Why do you think?” his father says. “She loved that son of a bitch, and she thought that he loved her. Who knows, maybe he did.”
Carr gazes at the treetops, the orange clouds, the coming twilight. “But that’s not in the record, you said. That’s not the official story.”
“No.”
“Why not? Why didn’t the Agency come after her? Why didn’t they prosecute? Put her in jail? Jesus Christ- why did they ever let me in the door?”
“The counterespionage people wanted to come after her. They were embarrassed and angry, and they wanted a full investigation and someone they could burn at the stake.”
“What stopped them?”
Arthur Carr stretches his legs in front of him. He massages his right knee. “I did,” he says softly. “I vouched for her. I pulled what strings I had left at State. Finally I threatened to go public if they didn’t let her be. It wound up costing me every chit I’d ever collected over twenty-plus years, and my pension too, but eventually they decided to call it incompetence rather than treason. So that’s how the record reads.” He flexes his knee and looks up at his son. “The only thing the Agency hates worse than being embarrassed by the opposition is being embarrassed by them in public. You’d think they’d be used to it by now.”
Carr watches him rub his bony thighs and flex his aching fingers. He looks thin and brittle-like a leaf the wind might carry off. Another truck passes, another dust cloud settles. The crow returns and curses at them.
It is six a.m., and Carr is in Terminal A at Logan, waiting for his Miami flight, still waiting for the spinning to stop. He’s at the gate, watching but not following the highlights of a baseball game on the wall-mounted TV, when someone steps into his view. She’s wearing a black dress and dark glasses, and her bare arms are paper white. Her lips barely move when she speaks, and her voice is flat.
“He wants to talk to you,” Tina says. “He wants to know if there’s some reason you don’t answer your phone.” She takes off her glasses and makes a tiny flick of her eyes. Carr looks over her shoulder, down the long row of gates. Even at a distance, Mr. Boyce looms like a cliff.
39
They’ve gone over it once. They’ve gone over it twice. Now, as darkness settles on the workhouse and wind sweeps through the palms in the front yard and bumps the boats against the metal dock out back, they go over it a sixth time. Carr makes Bobby walk it through: the sequence, the timing, the signals, the routes in and out, the alternate routes, the rendezvous, the alternate rendezvous, and the contingency plans-meager though they are.
“And the minimum window is?” Carr asks when Bobby pauses.
“Five minutes. Five fucking minutes. How many times do I have to repeat it?”
“No less than five between the opening and the finale. Longer if you’ve got a receptive audience, but no less than five.”
Latin Mike snorts from the sofa. “You don’t know how many guys they’re gonna have in the house, for chrissakes. You don’t know if this is gonna distract them.”
Carr answers without looking at him. “Loud noises get attention.” Mike snorts again, and Carr ignores him. He turns to Dennis. “What’s the weather forecast?” he asks.
Dennis is pale and skittish behind his laptop. He glances at the screen. “Mostly sunny and breezy tomorrow, with heavy surf from the storm. Weather service says it should hold off until after ten tomorrow night, and even then we should only get the edge of it.”
“They downgraded it?” Carr asks.
Dennis nods. “Tropical storm Cara now.”
“Is it gonna fuck things up at the airport?” Bobby asks.
“We get out before ten we should be okay,” Dennis says.
“So let’s get out before ten,” Mike says, lighting a cigarette.
“That’s the plan,” Carr says. Mike snorts again. Carr looks at Bobby. “The surf’s going to be rough. You okay with that?”
“We’re good.”
“Good,” Carr says. “Let’s go over it again.”
It’s eleven when they stop. Dennis buries his head in a computer. Mike grabs a whiskey bottle, plugs a cigarette into his mouth, and goes outside.
Bobby stretches and yawns. “Howie still sober?” he asks Carr.
“He was when I left him this afternoon. You were good with him.”
Bobby shrugs. “Babysitting gave me something to do. He was jumpy without you.”
Carr rubs his grit-filled eyes. “Nice to feel wanted.”
Bobby looks at him, laughs ruefully, and shakes his head. “Fuckin’ Carr,” he mutters.
Mike is sitting on the front steps, drinking from the bottle, blowing smoke, looking at the sky. Carr walks around him.
“Guess you’ve given up tryin’ to be like Deke,” Mike says. “No pregame party tonight, right? So I got to make my own.”
“Make it a small one. It’s an early day tomorrow.”
“I’ll try to fit you in-unless something else comes up. Maybe I got to get my teeth cleaned or something.”
“Give it a rest, Mike. I was gone for, what, a few hours?”
“It was more than a day.”
“And now I’m back, so spare me.”
Mike is fast-up and at Carr almost before the whiskey bottle hits the dirt. One hand goes to Carr’s neck, his thumb in the hollow of Carr’s throat. The other hand holds a knife. “If I didn’t need you whole, pendejo, you wouldn’t be,” he says. “?Esta claro? ”
“Very clear,” Carr says quietly. “You feel better now that you got that off your chest?”
Bobby calls from the steps. “It’s nice you boys are so glad to see each other.”
“Piss off, cabron,” Mike says, but there’s not much to it. He doesn’t resist when Bobby hooks his arm and hauls him away.
