Fall apart when you’re finished. If you fall apart now you are finished.
Not me. Not now. Not yet.
Fuck them. Fuck that.
Oh, but oh she was so tired. So heavy with the vest, with the weight of two guns waiting on the glass coffee table beside where she lay on this black leather couch, with the weight of a man crucified over a fireplace, a man getting smashed by a train, a man crumpling to the red tiles of a subway platform beyond the smoke from her pistol.
She imagined floating up from the couch, the ballistic vest falling away from her. And the exhaustion and pain and soreness and seared memories … floated away, gone.
Faye saw herself naked.
The scar erased from her stomach.
Standing in this apartment. Facing the curtains drawn open from the floor-to-ceiling sliding windows. Standing there naked with no musts, no shoulds, no cans, no who will die consequences, no Mission no Op no Duty. With dreams she could believe. Standing in front of a transparent plane as she spreads her arms wide, her chest and heart uncovered as she smiles at the glass that won’t shatter from a sniper’s bullet.
Or if it does, it won’t be her finger on the killing trigger.
Won’t be a squeezed betrayal from her us.
She stands there, arms spread wide, naked in front of the night.
Waiting for the sound of busting glass.
19
The time to hesitate.
—The Doors, “Light My Fire”
From beside you in the dark bed, she says: “You’re awake.”
Condor exhaled the sigh he’d been holding back. She was already awake. His disturbing motion wouldn’t matter now.
He told her: “Yes, but you can go back to sleep.”
“It’s almost dawn. You got up in the night—bathroom, I know, it’s all right. Sometimes it’s nice to hear you’re not alone. Are you okay?”
“Are you kidding?”
The bed trembled with their quiet laughter.
“You have to go again.” Not a question from her. Matter of fact.
He slid from the sheets without looking back. Inside the bathroom, door closed, light blasted on, he did what he did, washed his hands.
Looked in the mirror.
You’re here. This is real.
Snapped out the light.
Opened the bathroom door to find she’d snapped on a nightlight.
“You look better than before,” she told him.
“Better than before isn’t much. He shrugged. “Six hours’ sleep in a real bed.”
What should you do?
He got back in bed. Under the covers. Lay on his right side. Facing her.
She’d propped herself up on two pillows, lay on her left side, facing him. Her shoulders in the blue sweatshirt were out from under the sheet.
“This could be my last good sleep,” she said. “Today all your this could kill me.”
“Today can always kill you.”
She tossed her head to get strands of long hair off her face. “Are you scared?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Of dying?”
“Sure, but … I’m more scared of you dying. Of not doing what I can right.”
“How’s ‘doing what you can’ working for you so far?”
“Evidently not so good, I ended up here—I mean: putting you here.”
“So I noticed.” Her smile lacked joy. “Though I get some of the blame.”
“Why blame?”
“What I coulda shoulda to not be here. Where I could have ended up.”
“Where’s that?”
“Not stuck in all this alone, waiting for trouble to knock on my door.”
“Why are you alone?”
She stared at him.
“That was one thing I couldn’t figure when…”
“When you were stalking me.”
“No malice, but … okay, I hacked your employment cover sheet. You checked SINGLE. No children. Not married, widowed, divorced. I don’t understand why.”
“Why what?”
“No woman as … great—”
She laughed.
“… like you should be single.”
“I know a dozen women my age and younger who are smarter and more accomplished and way way prettier and believe me: far, far nicer, but who are walking around with only their shadows. Like me.”
“But why you?”
“You want to know,” she said. Not a question.
“You want to tell me,” he said. Not a question.
“Maybe I don’t want to ruin my image in your eyes,” she said. “Could be risky.”
“I want to see the real you.”
“Your real is crazy.”
Oh so slightly came a smile to his lips.
“I’m a member of the jilted mistresses club,” said Merle.
“Do you want to know who?” she said.
Condor shrugged. “If he’s gone, who cares.”
“Who he is makes the story.”
And he guessed. Said: “You mean what he is.”
“Oh, he’s an asshole, but made for this town.
“I was twenty-four, nowhere near as smart as I thought. I was born when JFK got elected, thought that was somehow … magical. I got here in 1984 when Reagan ruled and things were going to be right, based on principles, an America for everybody.
“He was a freshman Republican Congressman from one state over. Young enough to be cool, old enough to feel like he was more substantive than me. I knew his district, parlayed an internship with my own Senator into working for—for David.”
She told Condor—told Vin—the man’s last name.
Meant little to Condor, to Vin: another cosmetic face on TV.
“His daddy had medium money, the country-club set. David mastered the sincere look, rumpled Ivy League polish. Knew where to stand to catch the light. Great hair. Could make you feel like you were the one in the crowded room he was talking to.
“In college, he knocked up a hometown princess. Her folks had money, too, so they had a white wedding extravagance, a merger, a kid, big fish in a small city, but he …
“He didn’t have a spy war, an operation, a mission, a whatever you’re stuck in. He had big ideas. Or so I thought. Nobody knows how to work a sound byte better than David, whether he’s talking to TV cameras or across a pillow.”
Vin’s cheek burned on the pillow that held him.
“He was crusading, that was why he couldn’t leave his wife. A divorce would wreck his reelection. He couldn’t jeopardize his chance to serve. How dare I be selfish. Then it was the first Senate race. Then the second Senate race, the one that would set him up to really do what had to be done even if by then I wondered what that meant. But I hung in there—Yeah, don’t tell me: apt image. On camera, he was a no-divorce religion, no abortion, though he didn’t blink when it came to paying cash for…”
She looked away.
“I’d go to movies alone to be not waiting by the phone or the clock.
“He had great timing,” she said. “I’d finally admitted he was one of the herd who come here to be rather than do, that he only followed the big bucks and floodlights and the right kind of people. But for ‘us,’ I was going to give him one more chance, one …
“One day. That’s all it took to end thirteen years. One conversation in a fucking underground parking garage where nobody could see if I made a scene. ‘These things happen.’ And by the way, best for me if I left his Senate staff, left Congressional staffing, the only work I knew. ‘You like movies, right?’ He’d engineered an archivist post in the Library of Congress. Where I could even earn a pension. As long as he protected my job at the budget table. He made that sound like kindness.
“Two months later, suddenly divorce became okay. Weeks after his, he married a divorcee. They’d been fucking long before either his first wife or I were gone. The bitch’s first husband was an Internet genius from the defense contractors’ sprawl out by Dulles Airport who th
ought life’s reward for his hard work was a willowy model nine years younger than me. She walked with his millions all the way to queen for the now-distinguished white-haired Senator I’d paid my youth to.”
She sighed. “Still think I’m worth looking at?”
“You’re worth a lot of seeing.”
Condor swore she blushed in the soft light as she said: “What about your exes?”
Flashes.
“Whoever they were, they got me here.”
“In trouble. On the run.”
She closed, then opened her eyes. “Can I get out of this okay?”
“If we’re all lucky.”
“You just got to find the best deal—right?”
“We’re meat on some table. I don’t know if there’s any deal.”
“This is Washington,” she said. “There’s always a deal. If you’ve got clout.”
“Me, Faye out there: What you see is what we’ve got.”
“Then maybe you don’t know how to look. Or who you have on your side.”
“Besides her?” said Condor.
“Guess that’s where we start.”
“We?”
“You don’t give a girl much choice.”
He said: “Why did you stay in D.C.? You had experience, education—probably a little clout you could have leveraged from David. You could have gone to…”
Condor blinked. “I think I always wanted to live in San Francisco.”
“L.A.,” she said. “Warm. No fog. You drive away from what goes wrong. And in L.A., people are honest about pretending to be somebody else.”
“Why didn’t you go?”
“The falling-apart years,” she said.
“I know about them,” said Condor.
Merle gave him a smile. “So you said.
“Me,” she continued, “I might not have been wicked smart, but I was savvy functional when I was with David. Afterwards … Depression. Self-pity. Feeling stupid. If you cop to that, you’re guilty of it. Inertia and kind bosses kept me in paychecks.
“Just as I was coming out of my cage of mirrors, Mom got everything that steals your last years. All she had was social security and what I could send back to Pennsylvania. I would go up and see her whimpering in a county nursing home that was all we could afford. Red Jell-O and the sound of scampering rats.
“The echo of dirt hitting her coffin was still in the air when I got lucky cancer.”
“There’s no such thing as—”
“Yeah there is. It’s the kind you survive without too much damage and only a small mountain of medical bills, thanks to health insurance from the job you gotta keep to keep the insurance. Nothing special, only about ten million of us like that.
“So,” she said straight into his stare, “here I am. With all my reasons why. No magic. No second chances. Men look past me for younger women. Women who didn’t lose their chance to have babies. But I have a job I don’t hate, a life I’m doing. All on my own. And until last night, all I had to fear was the real world.”
“Then I showed up.”
“Knock-knock,” she said.
Sheets rustled. He felt her legs shift somewhere in the bed.
“Let’s say you win,” said Merle. “Then what?”
“Then I’m done being a target getting shot at by whoever, however, why-ever. Then maybe my life gets a new freedom. Depending on what I remember.”
“And what you forget.”
She sat up in the bed. The sheets fell to her lap. Merle turned so he saw the tumble of her gray-and-blond hair on the back of her blue sweatshirt. When she faced him again, she was unscrewing an aluminum water bottle. Held the lid in one hand while she drank, lowered the hard bottle from her lips, her now wet lips, handed a drink to him.
He drank without thought: fortified lemonade.
Passed the hard bottle back to her. Watched her drink again.
“Now we taste the same,” said Merle as she screwed the top back on.
She put the shiny metal bottle back on the bedstand, turned so she sat facing him. Her crossed yoga pants legs were mostly out of the bedcovers.
“If you lose, I’m fucked, right?” she said. “You made our interests coincide.
“But if you win and get out of this,” she said, “then what about me?”
“Then I’ll do everything I can for you.”
“‘Everything’ is a whole lot of ransom for a first kidnapping.”
He felt himself smile with her. Felt his heart pounding his ribs. Felt …
Merle said: “Was I really the only place you could go?”
“Yes.”
“Truth?”
“Yes, but … You were the only place I wanted to go.”
“I’ve never been somebody’s only.”
Breathe. Just breathe.
The dark night outside her bedroom window faded toward morning gray.
Last time I saw that, I was in the garden of the dead.
Like a beautiful Buddha, Merle sat cross-legged and tangled up in the sheets on the bed in front of him. The ends of the drawstring securing her yoga pants dangled to her lap below the edge of her blue sweatshirt that covered trembling roundness he made his eyes leave, look up, see her tousled thick morning gray-and-sunshine hair. Her lemonade lips parted for soft, shallow breaths. He saw her face full on toward his as he sat across the bed from her, only an arm’s length away, only that far from his touch. He felt all of him weighed by her cobalt blue eyes.
Her arms crossed and pulled off the blue sweatshirt, let it butterfly away.
She shook her head to settle her long hair. “You want to see the rest of my real.”
A truth, a question, a dare, a plea, an offer, everything.
Her breasts were tears full with time and gravity oh yes swollen top-hatted pink.
She whispered: “Good thing we’ve got all the right drugs.”
Like a laugh as she unfolded toward him, yoga graceful, sitting again but now right in front of him, between his accommodating open legs, her arm holding her weight through her palm splayed on the bed a breath away from his aching groin as she took his right hand in her heart-side fingers, floated it to her warm breast to fill his grasp.
The lemonade fire of that first real kiss.
20
Maybe together we can get somewhere.
—Tracy Chapman, “Fast Car”
Knocking.
On the bedroom door.
Faye turned off the faucets on the sink in the bathroom across from the bedroom. She’d kept that bathroom door open. Refused to be trapped blind in there. Morning light filled this commandeered apartment. Condor’s .45 lay on the bathroom sink. Her Glock rode in its holster on her hip. She wore the ballistic vest and pants from yesterday.
Yesterday, that was only yesterday.
She dried her palms on her pant legs.
Tucked Condor’s pistol into the belt over her spine.
Stepped out of the bathroom without looking in its mirror so she could better ignore the best chance for Condor and her to escape, survive, and perhaps even triumph.
Knocking.
“Just a minute.”
Faye stepped to the kitchen counter where a water glass stood tethered to the bedroom door. Lifted the glass free of its tether, a strand of dental floss that then fell like a fishing line to the kitchen floor and along the bedroom’s white door.
“Okay.” Faye stood back to avoid a charge-out. Her gun hand hung empty.
The bedroom door eased open and out came Merle wearing a clean blue blouse and fresh jeans. Her curly blond-gray hair looked damp, her arms cradled …
“Those are Condor’s clothes,” said Faye.
“Yes.”
Merle pulled the bedroom door shut before Faye could see much in that room. Her eyes dodged Faye’s. The older woman walked with nervous courage to the stainless-steel washer-dryer unit built into her kitchen island. She kept her back to Faye as she loaded the washer-dryer—a tub Faye had already checked for
stashed weapons.
“Who told you to knock?” said Faye.
“We thought it would be smart. A good idea.”
We, noted Faye.
“And now you’re washing his clothes.”
“They needed it. I can do yours next. I’m making coffee. Want some?”
“What’s he doing in there?” Faye nodded to the closed bedroom door while her hostage poured coffee beans into a grinder, found a brown paper filter for a drip glass pot.
The grinder whined for thirty seconds. Anyone would have known better than to try to speak above that noise. Faye watched Merle’s face brew answers for thirty seconds.
Merle shook the ground coffee into the filter-lined, cone-shaped dripper on top of the empty glass coffeepot and thus logically kept her eyes on what she was doing as she answered Faye: “You told me to see if I had clothes for him.”
Merle watched herself fill a white teakettle with water from the steel sink faucet.
“What else did you see?” asked the woman with the gun.
Merle swung the teakettle from the shut-off sink to the stove, set the white kettle on a black burner, turned its stove knob to birth a whump of blue flame.
Merle met the younger woman’s eyes. “What do you want to ask?”
“I heard him cry out in there. Twice.”
“And yet you didn’t come running to save your partner.” The older woman’s shrug raised her lips in a smile. “Twice, huh. Maybe he’s having a good day.”
“Twice is two truths that you better remember,” said Faye. “His day will be a hell of a long way from good. And your day is going to be no better than his.”
“Or yours.”
“We’re in this together,” said Faye.
“Can we sit while the water boils? You look almost as bad as I feel.”
Faye let the older woman choose her chair in the living room. Sat on the couch where she could watch the nervous archivist, the apartment entrance, and that white, still closed bedroom door.
The woman old enough to be Faye’s mother said: “Did you get any sleep?”
“Enough,” lied Faye.
Damp blond-and-gray hair nodded toward the closed bedroom door. “He got six hours. He could use six days.”
“Couldn’t we all.”
Faye said: “When I was a kid, they told me it took six days to make this world.”