Authors: James Whorton
The Simbas, as I recall them, were a frightening mob of orphans high on cannabis and beer. They dressed in animal skins, ladies' wigs,
and secondhand military clothing, and they armed themselves with spears and stolen rifles. Their witch doctors worked a kind of magic that was said to transform bullets into water. Soon a pack of these sad killers searched the warehouse and found me. One of them had lipstick on his eyelids. Perhaps you can imagine my terror after what I had seen them do to my family. But Ray was there in an instant. He told them I was a drowned girl who had come back to life, and if any man touched me his body would dry up like a husk. He sent the boys away with a truckload of Sheffield ale.
I remember those weeks at the warehouse in pieces. There was chacha music on the radio, in between the death sentences that were announced several times every day. Once I cut my hand while trying to open a can of sardines, and I shrieked my lungs out while Ray poured alcohol over the wound and wrapped it. “Easy, Jumbo,” he said. Another time, I was sitting in the yard in some white sunlight when we heard trucks. Ray scooped me up off the ground and ran to put me inside. I felt both frightened and protected.
In November 1964, Belgian paratroopers retook Stanleyville. The Simba retreat was chaotic and bloody. The government in Leopoldville, unable to rely on its own army, had sent a column of white mercenaries to rescue all the Europeans and put them on planes. A pair of these mercenaries came to the warehouse, and Ray lifted me into the back of their truck. There was a nun back there with her ankle taped up. I thought Ray was coming in after me, but then he didn't. I screamed when the truck pulled away without him.
The nun began to sing “Amazing Grace.” I don't quite remember assaulting her, but evidently I did. She was bitten in places where she could not have bitten herself. I guess I did it. They turned the truck around.
I jumped down from the truck and ran calling for Ray. There was an office in the warehouse and that was where I found him, playing a record on his portable phonograph and holding a long, skinny pistol on his knee. He appeared confused to see me again. Hadn't he just sent me away? Something was happening inside him that was too quiet for a seven-year-old girl to understand. I had interrupted something, but I could not guess what.
It didn't matter. I grabbed him, and this time I wasn't letting go.
The men with the truck had followed me in. “She will have to be hog-tied,” one of them said.
“It's either that or leave her with you,” the other one said to Ray. “And then you will
both
have your livers eaten.”
I crawled up onto Ray's lap, sniveling into his neck, begging him to come with me.
Whatever Ray's plan had beenâwhatever it was he'd intended to do when the record finished playingâhe set it aside. He took two passports from a locked drawer of the desk, and he carried me to the truck. This time he climbed in with me.
“I am sorry for my daughter's behavior,” he said to the nun.
I can never express the gratitude and love I felt then and continue to feel.
“I have seen friends killed by children,” the nun said, “but I hadn't expected to die at the hands of a
white
child.”
“Her name is Angela,” Ray said, and it has been ever since.
I
was very lucky to have found Ray. Who else could have tolerated such a strange, dry girl with suspicious hand carriage and a flat eye line? Maybe I was normal once. I wonder. Anyway, I clearly wasn't normal anymore. Bad things had happened. I had tasted nun.
I stuck to Ray like a strap. He was a solid man, five-foot-eleven-and-a-half, with a face that was creased and tanned because he never wore a hat. His hands were dark and somewhat knobby. He had an exceedingly normal hand carriageâcalm and steady. The nails of the first fingers of his right hand were yellow from nicotine. His eye line was straightforward. He could look at you for a long time without seeming to stare. He would just look at anything, watching.
We never went back to Stanleyville. The Sheffield Beer Distributing Company went on with another Agency man at the desk. Ray took me with him to Camp Peary, or “the Farm,” where he became a highly valued instructor.
I loved the Farm. I attended boarding school in Williamsburg, but I would have stayed at the Farm year-round if I could have, feeding the feral cats behind the cafeteria and observing the Venus flytraps in the swamp by the overflow parking lot. It was an excellent environment for me.
I was considered by all to be Ray's daughter. I still had the old passport that Ray had brought from his desk at the warehouse, which described me as an American born in the Congo. The passport bore the photo of a nondescript white baby. It must have occurred to me many times, I am sure, to wonder who she was. Of course I wondered about her. But I never brought it up with Ray. Why delve into something like that?
Breaks from school were spent at the Farm, where I learned to keep out of the way. When I try, I'm pretty good at not being noticed.
I can sit on the edge of a stool like a gargoyle for one hour, and people don't seem to see me. It helps if you are a little bit homely.
And yet I did manage to make a few friends at the Farm. The women in the cafeteria will remember me, and Miss Evans let me use the library in return for helping her out with shelving books and so on. Not that she needed much help. She gets by very well with one arm. I passed long afternoons in a soft chair in her office, reading about the Berlin tunnel, the Jedburgh teams who jumped from planes into occupied France, and many less famous exploits of the old OSS. History was my preferred subject, though I can read just about anything as long as it has a clear prose style and a basis in reality. For example, the novel
Black Beauty
by Anna Sewell has a wealth of information about horse care in it. That one was not a part of the Farm library. Miss Evans brought it to me from her home shelf.
In January of 1972, a distinguished career came to its end when Raymond W. Sloan retired from the Central Intelligence Agency. We said goodbye to the Farm and to the town of Williamsburg, where I had ridden along with Ray on many surveillance and surveillance detection drills. We moved to D.C. and took a furnished rental on I Street in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood. The landlady was a widow named Edel. She lived next door. Often she would pop in with a dish of spaghetti or salmon croquettes, lingering to see us eat or to give me a lesson on the Chickering piano that took up most of the front room, along with an antique sofa that was covered in scratchy maroon velvet. At the window there was a sprawling, long-trunked dieffenbachia plant.
Those are some of the details of our life. I enrolled in public school and attended, mostly. I can't say that I loved my ninth-grade experience in Washington, D.C. One day smoke came out of the ceiling and we all ran down the hall. That was one of the better days.
Ray took long walks, and in homeroom I kept my sunflower knapsack on a counter by the window so that he would know which room I was in, should he happen to pass. I saw him go by once or twice. Because of an old injury, Ray kicked his left leg a little high and to the side when he walked. You could notice it more from a distance than up close.
Let me tell about Ray some more. He was a gentle-natured man who almost never raised his voice. I can only think of one time when he did
it. He usually wore a permanent-press shirt with a light blue windbreaker jacket, tan poplin slacks, and hard shoes with a polish. He grew up in Oklahoma, and though he'd worked hard to have no accent, he still said “maysure” instead of “measure.” I don't think he heard the difference. He passed on to me his values of toughness, stoicism, and keeping a low overhead. He also showed me something about the practice of a craft.
In our new life in D.C., one thing we both missed badly was the Farm cafeteria. We ate at the Peoples Drug Store or a couple other places that had the kind of food we liked. At night Ray settled in at the kitchen table. We kept the television there, since Mrs. Edel forbade smoking in the room where her couch, piano, and draperies were. He'd have a drink while we watched the news together, and after I went upstairs he'd have many more. I knew he drank too much. I never kept track of bottles, but he'd go through several trays of ice each night. Sometimes I'd hear him getting sick. However, the thing about “too much” is this: how much too much is too much? A person can eat too much every day of his life and still die old. Some people talk too much yet never pay a price for it. Some people think too much. For Ray and me, I saw no reason why things could not go on as they were.
Upstairs I had a bedroom of my own. That was a welcome change from boarding school. It was quite a luxury to get up there and sit at my desk without a half dozen inquisitive girls on every side of me. I would read
The Scarlet Letter
or construct a polygon in my notebook using a compass and a straightedge. As much as I disliked ninth grade, I did my homework conscientiously, not wanting to screw things up and find myself back in boarding school. Ray needed me with him, and with him was where I wanted to stay.
O
ne bad habit that I did have was that I sometimes slipped out of school early. But on Wednesday, May third, I stayed to the bell. I walked home and found Ray in the kitchen with his head on the table. He sat up abruptly, blinking.
“Where have you been?” he said.
I told him about staying to the bell.
“Good move, Jumbo,” he said. He snapped his fingers. “I'm also trying to better myself today.”
“How?”
He wouldn't say, but later I found a half-full pint of bourbon in the kitchen wastebasket.
We watched some of
Let's Make a Deal,
and then we played Scrabble with an old set of Mrs. Edel's that was in a brown box. Ray's hand twitched, brushing some tiles onto the floor.
“Are you out of cigarettes?” I said.
“Yes. But I don't have to rush out the moment the cigarettes are gone.”
“Okay.”
His knee was bobbing, and he was squinting at the ceiling.
“Let's go get some cigarettes,” I said.
He popped out of his chair and hit the front steps at a jog. We crossed Virginia Avenue, and Ray got two orange and gold packs of Raleighs at the grocery under the Watergate. He lit a cigarette in the plaza.
There is a sharp smell that issues from a newly lit cigarette which I have always enjoyed. I don't know why it smells different at first. Ray grimaced as he drew the smoke in, and a change came over him. The edginess lifted away. He smiled at his mistake. “I shouldn't try to do two things at once,” he said.
He meant giving up the two habits. He was right, I thought.
I was holding a bag with two cans of SpaghettiO's in it, but we decided not to dirty up the kitchen. We crossed Virginia Avenue again and had taken our usual booth at the Howard Johnson's when a man came in, a person of medium height or a little less, dressed in a business suit. I had not seen him before. He sat at the counter, and I saw him peering around the restaurant, scrutinizing faces. The waitress pulled a chrome knob to fill a glass with milk for him. Because we were regulars there I can tell you the waitress's name: Audrey. Any of these details can easily be checked with her.
The man in the suit stared at Ray for a long while. Finally Ray gave him a tiny nod. This was the man we would later refer to as
HORSEFLY
.
HORSEFLY
approached our table and requested in a loud voice to borrow some butter pats. Quietly he added, “Watch me, Ray.” He went away into the men's room and came out with a sore grin on his mouth. He limped past our table with his head stuck down. The collar of his shirt stood away from the crinkly white backside of his neck.
He made a loop in the Howard Johnson's dining room. His limp had a store-bought look to it. It seemed fake and self-inflicted.
“See how I'm walking,” he hissed when he passed close to us again.
We ate our meal. For Ray, it was chicken salad and soup. For me, a hamburger with mayonnaise. The man lingered over his milk until some customers had left, and then he sat beside me on the booth seat. “I am wearing a gait-altering device which I donned just now in the men's room,” he said.
“No kidding,” Ray said.
“It's in my shoe. It came from
the place.
You know what place I'm talking about.”
HORSEFLY
swept his gaze across the restaurant again.
I ought to have mentioned his age before now. He was Ray's age, late fifties. Another retired Agency man.
I pretended to be absorbed in a connect-the-dots puzzle on the back of the paper place mat.
HORSEFLY
advised Ray that he was setting up a small shop in town for the purpose of handling sensitive domestic matters. “I need a man with operational experience and a boatload of discretion. Someone like yourself. What do you say?”
“Thanks, but I've retired,” Ray said.
In my mind I approved of that answer. There was something I didn't like about this man.
HORSEFLY
looked at me and nodded hello, as though he had just now noticed that yellow-haired gargoyle on the far end of the booth seat. He wrote out a number on the corner of my place mat and tore it off. “If you change your mind, you can reach me on my secure phone at the
Ite-whay Ouse-hay.
You heard me right.”
HORSEFLY
limped back to the men's room to remove his painful gait-altering device. Later without a glance at us he glided out the door.
R
ay pushed the scrap of paper into his windbreaker pocket. He scarcely blinked as he smoked one cigarette, then another down to the filter. We walked home under a drizzle.
In the kitchen Ray cracked a tray of ice on the counter and asked me to put the Scrabble set away. When I came back he was standing in front of the television with the cold bottom edge of a glass of bourbon pressed against his eyelid. He'd sent me out of the room so I wouldn't see him take the bottle out of the wastebasket.