Purity

  “Willow’s by no means the worst,” Colleen said. “Did she tell you one of her brothers was killed three years ago?”

  “God, no.”

  “Snowboarding accident. She’s still on major meds. And of course this is known to the Wolf. The Wolf can always spot the weak lamb in the flock.”

  Pip was impressed, almost confounded, that Willow hadn’t played the dead-brother card with her. Had simply sat there under the tree and taken her punishment. It spoke to the intensity of whatever Andreas had said to her.

  “I’m understanding a little better how you’re stuck here,” she said.

  “Yeah, well. From what you’re telling me, I suspect my days have been numbered since you got here.”

  “Colleen. You know I’d rather be your friend than his.”

  “You say that now. But he’s only been back for one day.”

  “I don’t want to be here if you’re not here.”

  “Really? If what you need is time away from your mother, you should try to hold out longer than two weeks.”

  “I don’t have to go back to California. Maybe we could both go somewhere else.”

  “I thought you had a missing parent to find.”

  “Maybe Flor can give me a hundred and thirty thousand dollars, and then I won’t have to.”

  “You’ve got a lot to learn about rich people,” Colleen said. “Flor won’t even share her dental floss.”

  When Pip went to the barn the next morning, after her early hike, Willow was outwardly unchanged and yet seemed like a different person, a fragile person on antidepressants, a guilty survivor of her little brother’s death. This time it was Pip who initiated the hug. She couldn’t tell whether it was good that she’d overcome some of her hostility or sordid that she was now on hugging terms with a member of the in crowd; whether she was evolving or being corrupted. But Willow’s research chops were awesome. She typed and moused and clicked so rapidly, bouncing among so many windows at once—Australian property transfers, rosters of Australian corporate directorships, Australian business-news archives, dark-Web Australian government databases—that Pip could see it would be weeks before she could follow what Willow was doing in real time.

  Andreas didn’t speak to her privately that day, nor the next day, nor for ten days after that. He was constantly conducting hushed powwows with the other girls, coming and going between the barn and the tech building, and having long informational conversations with Willow while Pip sat beginnerishly in a chair beside her. That he ignored only her, as if to emphasize that she was the only intern not contributing materially to the Project, was obviously deliberate. He was obviously trying to sharpen her appetite for further personal contact, further moments of intoxicating honesty. But she couldn’t bring herself either to confront him or to resent him. He’d got inside her head with a wooden spoon. She wanted more of what he was withholding. Not a whole lot more, she told herself. Just another taste, to be reminded of how it felt—to see if he could have that effect on her a second time.

  And then one night he was gone again.

  “Toni Field came to town,” Colleen explained after dinner.

  “Really? To Santa Cruz? Why didn’t she just come here?”

  “It’s part of his firewall between business and recreation. And apparently Toni needs special handling. She’s a little too into him. Doesn’t seem to understand who gets to set the rules. She way overstepped them by following him to Bolivia. He’s probably terminating their relationship as we speak. In the nicest way imaginable, of course.”

  “He told you that?”

  “He tells me a lot, sister. I’m still first among nobodies. Don’t you be forgetting that.”

  “I hate you.”

  “You’re kind of breaking my heart here, Pip. I gave you fair warning about him. And now you say a thing like that.”

  Two mornings later, returning from her hike, Pip found Pedro waiting for her with the Land Cruiser on the grass in front of the main building. She still couldn’t understand every word Pedro said, but she gathered that El Ingeniero (as he called Andreas) wanted her to join him in Santa Cruz right away.

  “¿Yo? ¿Está seguro?”

  “Sí, claro. Pip Tyler. Va a necesitar su pasaporte.”

  Pedro was impatient to leave, but she begged permission to take a shower and put on fresh clothes. She was so out of her head that she found herself shampooing her hair a second time without intending to. She couldn’t even frame the question of why she’d been summoned. Her thoughts were jostling fragments. Too late to ask Colleen if interns ever traveled with Andreas. Too late to ask Pedro if she was supposed to bring anything but her passport, or what she should wear. She looked down at her left palm and saw that she’d filled it with shampoo a third time.

  The inbound drive felt less epically long than the outbound had. Civilization reassembled itself in the form of dusty roadwork, cheap loudspeakers blasting música valluna, billboard ads for mobile devices, posses of kids in school uniforms, a deepening particulate pall. Not until they were into Santa Cruz’s ringed boulevards, passing stores that were simply small warehouses with the front wall removed, did Pip hazard to ask Pedro why he supposed El Ingeniero wanted her in town.

  Pedro shrugged. “Negocios. Él siempre tiene algún ‘negocito’ que atender.”

  In a less raw and more shaded neighborhood was a low-rise hotel called the Cortez. Pedro helped her register and instructed her to wait in her room for a call from El Ingeniero. She searched Pedro’s face for evidence of custodial worry, but he just smiled and told her to enjoy the city.

  She’d never stayed in a hotel. Wandering through the lobby and bar, her knapsack on her shoulder, she heard conversations in English and possibly Russian. Out in the courtyard were jacaranda trees and a large fiberglass stork whose belly was a pay phone. She thought she saw Andreas at a table by the swimming pool, but it wasn’t him.

  Having her own hotel room, cleaned expressly for her, was possibly the happiest-making gift she’d ever been given. There was a desinfectado-certifying strip of paper across the toilet seat, crisp paper wrappings on the drinking glasses, a TV, a built-in air conditioner, a minibar, total luxury. She remembered her high-school friends’ descriptions of Hawaiian resorts, her college friends’ raptures about room service, and how deprived she’d felt listening to them. Even poor people sometimes stayed at Motel 6. But her mother wouldn’t travel, and while her friends were taking spring-break road trips she’d always dutifully gone home to Felton.

  She kicked off her shoes and rolled around on the bed, luxuriating in the cleanness of the pillowcases. She closed her eyes and saw a tropical highway with rompemuelles. She expected the phone to ring soon, but it didn’t, and so she lay for a while and listened to Aretha. She tried to watch soap operas that her Spanish wasn’t quite up to. She drank a beer from the minibar and finally cracked the Barbara Kingsolver novel that Willow had pressed on her. The sunlight in her window was mellowing to apricot by the time Andreas called.

  “Good, you’re there.”

  “Yah,” Pip said. Her voice sounded sultry from hours in a hotel-room bed. There was a bit of the wooden spoon simply in his having made her stay in bed all day.

  “I had a very long meeting with an assistant defense minister.”

  “That’s impressive. What about?”

  “I’ll be in the bar. Come down when you can.”

  When she hung up the phone, her hands were shaking, her whole arms, really, from the shoulders down. Again the sensation of having no idea where she was. She could almost see the thing her mother had claimed to see, the not-right thing about Andreas’s interest in her. The swiftness with which she’d arrived at this moment, the straightness of the line from Annagret’s questionnaire to a room at the Hotel Cortez, definitely gave her a feeling of no-control. And yet she’d emailed Andreas of her own free will. She’d come to Bolivia for good reasons of her own, and there was honestly nothing so outstanding or attractive about her. Was it s
imply that she was proving to be the weakest lamb?

  Andreas was at a table in a corner of the bar, typing on a tablet. As Pip crossed the room, she heard the words Toni Field from a table of three American businessmen. They were looking at Andreas, and it compounded her disorientation to be the person plunking her unfamous self down by him. He typed a little more before he turned off the tablet and smiled at her. “So,” he said.

  “Yeah, so,” she said. “This is fully weird.”

  “Do you want a drink?”

  “Can we stay here if I don’t?”

  “Certainly.”

  She crossed her arms to suppress their shaking, but this only transferred the shaking to her jaw. She felt quite miserable.

  “You look terrified,” Andreas said. “Please don’t be. I know this seems strange to you, but I brought you here for business only. I needed to talk to you, and I can’t do it at home. I’ve created a beehive of surveillance there.”

  “There’s always the woods,” Pip said. “I seem to be the only one who walks in them.”

  “Trust me. This is better.”

  “Trust is kind of the opposite of what I’m feeling now.”

  “I’m telling you: this is business. How are you liking working with Willow?”

  “Willow?” She glanced over her shoulder at the American men. One of them was still looking at Andreas. “It’s just like you promised. She likes me. Although I do wonder if she’ll still like me after I’ve been in a hotel with you. I know Colleen won’t. I’m already pretty well compromised just by being here.”

  Andreas looked at the Americans and gave them a little wave. “There’s a nice churrasquería around the corner. It will be empty at this hour. Are you hungry?”

  “Yes and no.”

  Walking with the Bringer of Sunlight on the city streets, carrying her dumb knapsack, she felt like a true San Lorenzo Valley yokel. A flock of green-and-orange parrots wheeled overhead, screeching louder than the buses and scooters. She wished that she could join their flock. At the churrasquería, in a secluded corner booth, Andreas ordered a bottle of wine. She knew she shouldn’t drink, but she couldn’t resist.

  “Honestly?” she said when the wine was poured. “I don’t know why I’m here, but I wish I wasn’t.”

  “It was your choice,” he said. “You didn’t have to get in the Land Cruiser.”

  “How was that my choice? You’re the boss, you’re making my loan payments. You have all the power. You’ve got everything, I’ve got nothing. But it still doesn’t mean I want to be your special girl.”

  He watched her drink without drinking from his own glass. “Is it so bad to be special?”

  “Have you seen any kids’ movies lately?”

  “I sat through Frozen with a woman I was seeing.”

  “They’re all about being the special one, the chosen one. ‘Only you can save the world from Evil.’ That kind of thing. And never mind that specialness stops meaning anything when every kid is special. I remember watching those movies and thinking about all the unspecial characters in the chorus or whatever. The people just doing the hard work of belonging to society. They’re the ones my heart really goes out to. The movie should be about them.”

  He smiled. “You should have grown up in East Germany.”

  “Maybe!”

  “But what if ordinariness is an unrealistic ambition for you?”

  “I’m telling you what you can do to help me, if you really want to help me. Just leave me alone. Don’t make me sit around in a hotel room all afternoon, waiting for you. I’d rather be part of the hive.”

  “That’s unfortunate,” he said. “I do understand what you’re saying. But I need your help, too.”

  Pip refilled her glass. “OK. I guess we’re on to plan B.”

  “I’m going to tell you something that I’ve only told one other person, ever. After you hear it, I want you to think about which one of us has the real power over the other. I’m going to give you the power you say you don’t have. Do you want it?”

  “Oh boy. More truth?”

  “Yes, more truth.” He looked around the empty restaurant. The waiter was polishing glasses, and dusk had fallen on the street. “Can I trust you?”

  “I haven’t told anyone about you and your mom’s vagina.”

  “That was nothing. This is something.”

  He picked up his wineglass, held it in front of his eyes, and drained it.

  “I killed a person,” he said. “When I was twenty-seven. I killed a man with a shovel. I planned it carefully and did it in cold blood.”

  The wooden spoon was in her head again, and this time it was worse, because this time it felt as if the disturbance were emanating from his own head. There was torment in his face.

  “I’ve lived with it half a lifetime,” he said. “It never goes away.”

  He looked so anguished, so much like a person, so little like a famous figure, that she reached across the table and squeezed his hand.

  “The victim was Annagret’s stepfather,” he said. “She was fifteen, he was sexually abusing her. He worked for the Stasi, and she had no recourse. She came to the church where I worked. I murdered him to protect her.”

  What he was saying couldn’t possibly be true, but Pip suddenly didn’t want to be touching him. She withdrew her hand from his and put it on her lap. One day when she was in high school, an ex-convict had come to talk to her civics class about conditions in California’s prison system. He was a well-spoken middle-class white guy who happened to have served fifteen years for shooting his stepfather in the heat of an argument. When he described the trouble he now had with women, the question of whether to cop to being an ex-con and a murderer before a first date, Pip’s skin had crawled at the thought of dating him. Once a killer, always a killer.

  “What are you thinking?” he said.

  “This is very disturbing,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Am I really the only person you’ve ever told about this?”

  “With one terrible exception, yes.”

  “It’s not, like, some initiation thing you do with everyone who works for you?”

  “No, Pip. It’s not.”

  She was remembering that after the ex-con had made her skin crawl she’d felt guilty and compassionate for him. How hard it must have been to carry around forever a thing he’d done once on an impulse. She did things on impulse all the time.

  “So,” she said. “This must be the real reason you trust Annagret.”

  “That’s right. I didn’t tell you everything about us.”

  “Annagret knows what you did.”

  “Indeed. She helped me do it.”

  “Criminy.”

  He refilled their wineglasses. “We got away with it,” he said. “The Stasi had suspicions, but my parents protected me. I eventually got the case files, and the case went away. But there was a problem. I made a horrible mistake, after the Wall came down. I met a guy in a bar and told him what I’d done. An American…” He covered his face with his hands. “Horrible mistake.”

  “Why’d you tell him?”

  “Because I liked him. I trusted him. I also needed his help.”

  “And why was it a mistake?”

  Andreas lowered his hands. His expression had hardened. “Because now, all these years later, I have reason to think he intends to destroy the Project with his information. He’s already made one rather pointed threat. Are you starting to see why I need an intern I can trust?”

  “I sure don’t see why it’s me.”

  “I can take you to the airport right now. We’ll send your bag after you. I’ll understand if you want to leave now and never have anything to do with me again. Would you like that?”

  Something was very wrong, but Pip didn’t know what. It didn’t seem possible that Andreas had killed a man with a shovel, but it also didn’t seem possible that he would just make up the story. Whether the story was true or not, she sensed that he was trying
to do something to her by telling it. Something not right.

  “The questionnaire,” she said. “You didn’t really ever use it with anybody else. It was just for me.”

  He smiled. “You were a special case.”

  “Nobody else had to take it.”

  “I can’t tell you how happy I am that you came here.”

  “But why me? Wouldn’t you rather have a true believer?”

  “Precisely not. We’ve had some anomalies in our internal network. Little things missing, transmission log discrepancies. This is going to sound extremely paranoid, but it’s really only moderately paranoid. I have some reason to worry that we have a journalist embedded with us.”

  “No, that’s fairly high-grade paranoia.”

  “Think about it. Somebody who wants to come and spy on us would pretend to be the truest of believers. That’s how they’d get in. And all I have is true believers.”

  “What about Colleen?”

  “She came as a true believer. I almost completely trust her. But not quite.”

  “Jesus. You really are paranoid.”

  “Sure.” Andreas smiled again, more broadly. “I’m out of my fucking mind. But this guy who I confessed to in Berlin—who got me to confess—he was a journalist. And do you know what he does now? He runs an investigative-journalism nonprofit.”

  “Which one?”

  “It’s better if you don’t know, at least for a while.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I just want to you to listen. Keep your ears open, without preconceptions. Tell me your sense of what’s going on. I already know you have very good sense.”

  “So basically be a horrid spy.”

  “Maybe. If you want to use that word. But my spy. The person I can talk to and trust. Would you do that for me? You can keep learning from Willow. We’ll still help you try to find your father.”

  She thought of good old mentally ill Dreyfuss—There was something not right about those Germans. She said, “You didn’t actually kill anyone, did you.”

  “No, I did, Pip. I did.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “It’s really not a matter of opinion.”

  “Hmm. And you say Annagret helped you?”