Owen lighted a cigarette thoughtfully.
“We’ve sort of been pitched together – a couple of lame dogs ---“
“There’s nothing of the lame dog about me,” the girl retorted. “Maybe I’ve struck a rough patch, but I’m neither down nor out.”
“Hard-boiled, aren’t you?”
“The hardest.”
Henry Holt, The Sinister Shadow. (14, 15)
Are you surrounded by things we cannot penetrate?
Is the cage you love the home you also hate?
Your fear of death attracts such strange objects
Smothering you, hiding you, don't let it spoil you
Show yourself so the others may see you
So the others may feed you
They want to be near you
Coil “Where Are You?”
The Diamond Man, the Glimmer Man
We approached the refinery on a mess of a boat. The waves kicked at the sides of the ship as if our vessel were a deflating ball on a ghetto playground. As if the lurching of the motor alone weren’t enough to make my insides fell as if they were being jerked about on the end of a line. I could see the refinery growing larger as we approached it. In the distance the lights glittered like broken glass on pavement, but the walls of the building were dark as ash. The building was massive, black, and sinister.
The Indian Ocean at night is not the most welcoming destination on earth. During the day its waters are mild, tepid, a beautiful shade of blue. The sort of color one associates with beach scenes on postcards, lush aquatic life, and tropical skies. Night offers us a completely different landscape. It is like an abandoned city here on the water. The moon offers us its lonely headlight and the sea pushes on and out. It resists us and seems to kick us out of its bed like an angry lover.
My cover: we are supposed to be a charter boat leased by an eccentric professorial type. Played by me in this particular scenario, though why an anthropologist would expose himself to the absurdity of charting a boat to a derelict oil refinery at three in the morning is beyond my comprehension. I don’t write the stories, I merely play in them. So that is my cover. My name is Talinn, it is not really but that is the name that I will be known by and the only name I can give.
I walked into my room, a modest double in an Autahyya vacation resort. My kit was there in the room, set out for me. It was only a matter of verifying my reservation and taking the key. I took the pill with a glug of tap water and from that moment on I was Dr. Kilroy, anthropologist on a field study in southeast Asia.
I hadn’t expected the woman at the bar. Maybe she was tangled up in a local syndicate, some wandering graduate student temping an accounting gig for the local resort mafioso. “Hey, mister, give my cigarette a light.” She turned and said to me confidently. Maybe she had identified me as a white European and I simply affirmed her worst suspicions. Her English perfectly Midwestern American, but her was hair long and black, and her skin as brown-golden as the locals’. She looked at me. She was young, beautiful, a little too stylish for the guests at this hidden local second rate gem, and unaccompanied.
“Umm, yes. One moment miss,” I said, stumbling in the way that I imagined older academic types do. I liked to play my roles a little thick, better to be safe that way. Her large eyes regarded me then without surprise, but with a knowing, the same knowing that I had of her. Our thoughts twinned each other: Who the hell are you? Are you after me, have I been found out? Who are you working for? Are you working for us or someone else? We were both silent then, our internal motivations disguised by practiced cool demeanors. She nodded and glanced up, then took her drink from the bar and walked back to her room slowly without looking back, though you could be sure I was watching her.
Meanwhile the original Dr. Kilroy was being held in an outback hut somewhere in the jungle being pumped full of relaxants and hallucinogens. He’ll be woken up in his room in a day or two in his hotel bed attended by a very pretty local nurse, and told all about his nightmares. Dr. Kilroy will see the bottles of local liquor piled in his room. The very pretty young nurse will tell him about his drunken behavior in the most convincing heavily accented English, such that the good doctor feel ashamed of the distress he caused to the staff and her in particular.
I was on the boat now, thinking of the small errand at hand and then the next nights activities. Really I was trying to push the event that had passed a week ago in my mobile unit in Black Mountain. Tonight, all I had to do was climb up the side of the refinery and receive a package which would then be delivered to an elderly woman in Uttardit, some two hundred miles north, four and a half hours by train by myself.
II.
I had been reading a novel, seated in the middle of a forest glen seemingly isolated. I had heard a twig snap behind me. I turned immediately and Skopje was standing behind me.
“Talinn, don’t worry. We’re safe here and you know it.”
“Sorry, I can’t simply turn of my response. You know.”
“I understand,” Skopje said. “I’m the same way.” She sat down next to me. I had met Skopje during an operation in Vienna. It was a medical convention. We were sent as the support team, information and research division. We would feed character and miscellaneous information into the ear peace of an actor in a high security situation, providing anecdotes pertinent and consistent to that character. If a diplomat had been seen back packing in upstate New York we would feed his actor stories rooted in time, place and weather to that moment. A hobbyist in question? We would feed recipes in to the actor, lines about a particular vintage and varietals, information about the native foods and drink of a region. Whatever a politic and rarified conversation demanded, we could construct and deliver all of the necessary facts.
Skopje was on the ball. Brilliant, a memory for key facts and articles. She could find the exact digital image to deliver to the actor’s renal index at a moment’s notice. Her mind was a catalog swift as a steel trap.
The second time we met we were paired as a foreign diplomat and young lover. We were seen walking down the street in Luxembourg; a paparrazi snapped photos of us, blurry and from a distance exiting a candy shop kissing. Our role had been merely to place them at one scene at a particular time. It was an unexpected vacation almost. Our role had been to play a happy couple meeting secretly. We watched a lot of DVD’s, had a lot of expensive food, and drank and made a mess like children. It was a thrilling role to play with her, and though we never touched I found her smell thrilling. It was the smell of her, of women, which I had gone a long time without. I kept a tangle of her chestnut brown hair in my wallet, even as I transferred to separate tasks, keeping that small piece of her by me.
“Talinn, I came here to collect your information. I know that I shouldn’t tell you, but they had to do it eventually and thought to send me.”
“Information?”
“Genetic.”
“They could just take it with a cheek swab, or a blood sample.”
“Yes, well this would be for something else.”
“For active or for the archive?”
“For the archive. They acted like it was for the archive.” I looked at her face. She was a little nervous, but her look was honest and sincere. She was excited to be with me. I was too: having a moment of intimacy was a rare delight.
“I’m not going to do it. I’ll hope you understand.” I said.
“You mean make love to me?” she said quizzically. It wasn’t as if she weren’t beautiful. I found her incredibly attractive and truthfully I loved her. I was closest to her among all that I was close to.
“Yes.”
“I have my own reasons for not wanting to but I’m interested in hearing yours.”
“I don’t want you to get pregnant, not by me. Can you think of the sort of life that child would have? Some sort of pedigree operative. I don’t want you to be little more than a vessel for my information. Actually I don’t know what I want anymore at all. I half imagine that I might settle down from this life, move somewhere far away, if that sort of thing is possible. We are unfree, for better and worse of it Skopje. There are certain things in your life that you want to belong only to you.”
“I understand.”
“How do you feel?”
“It’s not something I want to talk about very much. It’s complicated and all completely insincere. You wonder why life deals you the hand you’ve got.” She abruptly changed the topic while nervously passing her hand through the young grass. “What book are you reading?”
“Dickens. Great Expectations.”
III.
The climate control in the shopping mall made me feel as if my hands were made of ice. Where was he? I couldn’t find my contact. He wasn’t where he was supposed to have been. A half hour had passed already and I was beginning to think that something had gone wrong. Possibly terribly wrong.
The entire shopping mall was too new. The glass and chrome was gleaming as if it had just been polished. I was surrounded by shoppers. They were wondering around, as if intent to distract me, bumping into me and each other. I was beginning to feel crowded, claustrophobic and frustrated. Where was he?
I had to pick up the gems. It wasn’t so much for their value as stones, but rather the information etched into their side. The unique serial number inscribed on the stone and the accompanying “personalized” messages were of more value than the rather large stones that they were etched onto. The inscription would be polished off at a later point and the diamonds would be sold on the black market.
It had been almost an hour since I’d been scheduled to meet him. The plans had been totally botched. It was supposed to be a very simple exchange. My trigger words were “The diamond man, the glimmer man.” I would have identified him by an article of orange clothing, asked him for the time (three o’clock) and said the trigger words. He was missing. We’d have to do a lot of work to fix the situation, in terms of investigation and planning. In the end it meant a lot of work for me, not being able to get the gems now; a lot of future complications for my research and support team because of one failed brief and otherwise uncomplicated exchange.
I was walking around the mall aimlessly, deciding whether or not I should abandon any chance of meeting or stick it out a while longer. I saw her on the escalator in front of me. She looked not quite right: nervous, slightly panicky. The girl with the orange bob kept looking behind her and biting on her lip anxiously. Looking at her I could read her like a book. She was someone’s pony; somebody’s girl or a junky who’d run any desperate favor if promised another fix. Either way it looked as if she was coming down off of whatever nasty street drugs she’d taken to ensure the swap, beads of sweat were dripping off the back of her neck and her hands were fluttering everywhere. She’d probably intercepted my man before me, or gotten the gems off of him through trickery. It didn’t matter, really, since I was on to her and it would take me a matter of minutes to get the gems off of her. It was too crowded for me to pick her pocket or slice out the bottom of her purse. I’d have to find somewhere isolated to corner her. The girl with the orange bob was sweating through the back of her white mini-dress-- who knew how she’d react in pursuit?
As if my thought were a cue she turned and looked up toward me on the escalator, glanced at me for a moment then bolted. Her run was cartoonish and clumsy. I ran after her, down the escalator, pushing through shoulders and stepping on a few feet. She’d managed to run off the escalator and her shoes were pounding rhythms on the tiled floor. I ran after her, trying not to lose sight of her, having given up the notion of a subtle and straightforward exchange. Speed and efficiency were my priority. Spectators’ questions would be answered later.
I began to gain on her when she fell. Her white-sneakered feet slipped out from under her. The white purse she was holding slid on the tile, opening up, expelling its contents. Among the lipstick and change the gems shined out in the scattered rubbish. She clambered for the purse, but I could see the gems exactly on the tile and ran toward them. The girl was quick, still wired, but sloppy. I slid for them, hitting the mall floor with a thump while grabbing for the purse. She wrestled for the purse, trying to wrest it out of my hands. Chiefly I grabbed it for distraction as I slid the gems in my pocket, but any information it contained would be useful in the future. She would not give up on the purse, so I let it go and fled, discretely. She bolted in an opposite direction. I found a door and slipped into one of the mall’s storage hallways unnoticed.
IV.
I was early. I’d walked down the residential street with my tennis racket in hand. The set-up was ridiculously simple but non-sensical. I was disguised as a well-to-do tennis hobbyist, a woman in her mid-thirties, possibly older. The wig had begun sticking to my face and my press-on nails were coming unglued in the afternoon heat. He was sitting underneath a tree, presumably on lunch break. My contact was a construction worker, Chicano, mustachioed, wearing sunglasses and a hard hat. He would be eating lunch with two lunchboxes. I was to take only the one on the right. It wasn’t difficult, the exchange. I suppose that’s why I’d been sent in to disrupt it.
“Do you know the time?” The setup was so transparent. I was the one wearing a wristwatch, not him. He was to answer three-thirty though it was shortly after one. I would take the box and return to the car waiting for me up the block.
“It’s three-thirty m’am.”
“Great.” He handed me the lunch pail. The whole scenario was so poorly written. It struck me as both magnificent and farcical. I could barely contain my giggles.
“Thanks a lot mister.” I walked down the block. It was disturbingly easy dangerous stuff. The scrap of fading newspaper and articles would prove exceedingly valuable to our research department. Really the job was only a matter of timing. I’d worn the proper disguise and said the right words; it was almost as if I’d taken a walk-on role in an afternoon sitcom. The construction worker’s real contact had been delayed by my partner. I’d only had to step in and quickly replace whoever he was scheduled to meet. Their agency was hopelessly primitive and underdeveloped compared to ours. By some fluke they’d stumbled upon the documents we’d needed.
It didn’t take long for my thoughts to return to Talinn again. Bucharest told me that I should be careful on assignments with him. Someone had put a contract on him. He probably already knew about it, knowing him he wouldn’t care. Talinn would more or less forget about those sorts of things or shrug them off. He was buried in his work. Or so I thought. When he told me at Black Mountain that there were some things that only belonged to you, I thought I had understood. But later when I had thought about it again I realized that the only things that were truly mine, truly intact inside of me, were those times with him.
He had an eye for the job. I wonder if he thought of me, if he was thinking of me, on whatever mission he was on now. It was silly to think such things, since I had no way of ever knowing and the answer was, realistically, no. I kept my head on work. The missions had a definite beginning and end. The task could be completed and finished, and there is no joy like a task completed. I had the feeling that Talinn was obliterating some aspect of his personality in his work. Maybe it was the pills we took, the drug made me sensitive to his motivations and gave me an ability to read them on his face. In work he was obliterating some darkness, pushing out a part of himself that he didn’t want to acknowledge. That part, I could not see and spent nights trying to untangle.
We were professionals. It didn’t suit me to engage the thoughts playing about in my head, but I had to do so. I couldn’t put them to rest. In the end, I’d like to say that it was not because he rejected me. I would like to think that I could put emotions like jealousy and anger aside and continue with the job that I had been brought up to do. His response was tactful and forthright. It had very little to do with me. Really who knew what he felt about me. He was older and I had no insight as to how he had raised himself within the agency’s hierarchy. Intimacy was such a dear thing. I suppose that I wanted it, wanted him to say yes or to at least say something else in that glen then. It would have recognized a shared understanding between us. But he hadn’t and I hadn’t, so objects would remain obscure. My greatest fear was that there was nothing to uncover.
I opened the door with no doubts that the driver would quickly deliver me and the information I carried to our destination.
