Shift: A Novel (51 page)

Naz’s blood went as cold as the drink in her hands. The drink. She looked at it a moment, then drained it in a gulp.

“Easy there, Miss Haverman. I’d rather not have to carry you out of here.”

“Pardon me, but I think there’s some kind of mistake. My name is Joan.”

“Really? Joan what?”

Naz’s eyes darted around the bar. No one ever asked for a last name. She caught a glimpse of her panicked face in the mirror over the bar. “Mir-ren,” she stuttered. “Joan Mirren.”

The boy looked at the mirror a moment, then back at her. “Nice save, Miss Haverman. Now,” he went on, “I can show you my identification in here, or I can save you the embarrassment and you can walk outside with me.”

Naz realized she was still clutching her glass like a lifeline. She thought of throwing it at him, running, but knew she wouldn’t get anywhere. Not in these shoes, this skirt. Not after two gin and tonics. And there was still no sense of malice coming from the boy, nor the kind of contempt she’d encountered during her one or two run-ins with Vice. Indeed, she almost thought she sensed compassion.

Straightening her back, she offered him her widest smile. She would snatch what victory she could from this disaster. “Put your hand on the small of my back as we walk out,” she said. “So it looks convincing.”

As the boy followed her out, he said, “If I wanted to be convincing, my hand wouldn’t stop at the small of your back.”

“If you want to keep your fingers,” she said, “they won’t go any lower.”

Once they were outside, she quickened her step a half pace to dislodge his hand from her body. They walked a block in silence to the edge of a small park. The air was brisk and cleared her head a bit, even as the alcohol calmed her nerves and dulled her senses. I can handle this child, she told herself. Everything will be just fine.

The boy motioned through the gates. The gesture was diffident, almost abashed, and part of her wondered if he’d ever been unchaperoned in the company of a female.

She shook her head. “Let’s see that ID.”

The boy grinned again, reached inside his jacket. Naz saw the Henry Poole label and congratulated herself for guessing his suit’s origins, then chided herself for losing focus. He brought out a slim wallet and flicked it open. Instead of a badge, she saw a simple white identification card. His employer’s name had been printed in full, and she had to squint to read the tiny letters in the faint light.

She looked up at him. “Do you really expect me to believe this?”

The boy shrugged, as if acknowledging the incongruity of someone as young and innocent looking as him belonging to such an organization. As he slipped his wallet back inside his suit, he said, “Do you remember a man by the name of Kermit Roosevelt?”

Naz’s eyebrows rose. Uncle Kermit had been one of her father’s closest friends and business associates in Tehran, had dined with the family at least once a month.

“Mr. Roosevelt was, as they say, our man in Tehran, and your father, owing to his lifelong residence in Persia, was one of his most valuable assets.”

Naz smirked, but it was an act. This boy wasn’t lying. She could tell by the awe in his voice, as much as any sense of his emotions.

“My father was a British citizen. Why would he work for the Central, the Central …” She couldn’t bring herself to say it aloud; the idea of her father as a spy was just too absurd. “Why would he work for the United States rather than the English?”

“Like many British nationals living abroad, your father admired everything about his fellow tribesmen save their country itself. As proof,” he said in a slightly louder voice, “I offer the simple fact that he sent you here when the fighting broke out, when it would have been just as easy to send you to England.”

Naz was silent a moment. Then, almost against her will: “Have you … do you know what happened to him? Or to my …” Her voice broke off.

She felt a wave of compassion from the boy, but it was detached, almost intellectual: he kept his hands in his pockets rather than putting one on her shoulder.

“I was still in prep school when the counterrevolution occurred.”

“So was I.”

The boy winced. “I know that your time in this country hasn’t been easy, Miss Haverman. Your adolescence was plagued by emotional problems. Depression, anger, and, ah, sexual precocity.”

A fresh wave of emotions washed over Naz, but they were all her own. Sadness, self-loathing, utter horror, not just at what she had done, but that it was known by others. By this boy, and his intrusive employer, which was famous for rooting out the shameful secrets in people’s lives and holding them over their heads like the sword of Damocles. Which beggared the question: what did he want with her?

When she could speak again, she said, “It’s a little rich having my adolescence referred to by someone who looks like he only started shaving a few years ago. Okay, then. You’ve established your bona fides. Isn’t that how they put it? So tell me, Agent …”

The boy had to reach for a last name just as she had in the bar.

“Morganthau.”

“Tell me, Agent
Morganthau
: what exciting service can I perform for the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America?”

The boy paused a moment, jaws slightly parted, eyes wide. Naz was reminded of a phrase her father had often used, always citing Henry James when he did so: hang fire. Technically speaking, it meant simply a pause, but it had originated as a munitions term, referred specifically to a delay between the moment you pulled the trigger and the time it took the powder to spark the bullet and propel it from the barrel. Whenever her father said someone hung fire, Naz always had an image of that person holding a gun to her father’s head. But now it was pressed against hers. The trigger had been pulled; she was merely waiting for the bullet to strike home.

“Let’s start at the beginning,” he said finally. “Have you ever heard of LSD?”

He took her to a small restaurant just off Newbury Street. Roses in the wallpaper, crisp white tablecloths free of stains or cigarette holes, golden sconces with beveled glass refracting soft light over the patrons. A far cry from the Firelight, to say the least—although the pairings were still the same, Naz noted. Older men, younger women, the latter leaning slightly forward to show off their cleavage. Services paid for in kind, of course: jewelry, furs, second homes in Newport or Miami. Give her the cleanness of cash any day.

Morganthau held out her chair for her, then sat down opposite, his frat-boy grin bookended by a pair of impishly proud dimples.

“Well, this is a little nicer than that other place, isn’t it?”

Naz stared at him flatly. “This isn’t a date, Agent Morganthau. Settle down.”

A waiter set menus in front of them. “A cocktail before dinner, perhaps?”

“I think we’re fi- …”

“Hendrick’s and tonic,” Naz said over Morganthau. “Make it a double. And bring me an ashtray, please.”

“I wasn’t aware you smoked,” Morganthau said after the waiter had left the table.

“Well, that’s one thing you don’t know about me.”

Morganthau blushed. “Yes, well. I
did
want to ask you about something.”

“Didn’t you read it all in Dr. Calloway’s files? God knows I told him enough times. I ‘overempathize.’ I’m ‘unable to mediate’ my or others’ feelings. As a consequence, I form undue attachments or aversions as soon as I meet someone. Humiliating crushes or inexplicable disgust, both of which have the effect of leaving me isolated in a fantasy world where—how did Calloway like to put it? Oh yes: ‘where fact is washed away in a tidal wave of feeling.’ He thinks it’s because I lost both my parents and my country when I was so young. Everyone I encounter is a potential savior or murderer.”

“I hope you don’t think I’m going to kill you.”

“Well, I certainly don’t think you’re going to save me. So,” Naz spoke over his protest, “to flesh out your skeletal tale of my life: my first suicide attempt came at ten. Pills; something Mrs. Cox, my guardian’s wife, took to get her through the long days when he was at work. I lost my virginity at eleven. Mr. Cox; something he did to get through the long nights when Mrs. Cox was too numb from pills to notice him. I also seduced two of my teachers when I was twelve—one of whom was female, I might add—and I tried to kill myself for the second time the same year when we were caught by the school secretary. Running car this time, closed garage door; alas, the gardener needed a pair of pruning shears for Mrs. Cox’s damask roses. I changed schools six times over the course of the next three years, had sexual relations with nine different partners ranging in age from twelve to forty-seven, and sliced my wrists with Mr. Cox’s razor when I was sixteen. The following fifteen months on Thorazine were by far the most peaceful of my life. Alas, I turned eighteen, and Mrs. Cox, seeing her husband’s legal obligation discharged and unwilling to spend $25,000 a year to maintain the daughter of a long-dead ‘business acquaintance’—apparently she was as blind to her family’s relationship to the CIA as I was—I was summarily discharged. I was given an allowance of $5,000 a year, the proceeds of a small trust my father had set up for me before he … before he …”

She couldn’t bring herself to say it. She had never said it, but now Morganthau said it for her.

“He died.”

Naz was silent a moment. She reached for the fizzy highball the waiter had just set in front of her. “Yes. Well. My preferred medication is rather more expensive than that, so I supplement my income with the generosity of men looking to relieve their loneliness for an hour or an evening.” She drank from her glass as though as it were water and she’d just wandered in from the desert. When only the ice and lime remained, she set it back down on the table and signaled to the waiter for another. “Did I leave anything out?”

Morganthau was silent. Naz couldn’t tell how much of this he’d already known, but she could feel the effect her rendering had had on him. His grin faded, his eyes softened, and he’d begun compulsively straightening his silverware like a drill sergeant worrying a troop of raw recruits. Pity exuded from him like cheap cologne. A tepid feeling to be sure, but Naz knew how quickly its warmth could grow into a full-fledged fire. And, try as she might to resist this warmth, she could already feel the heat in her own body, the need to validate this man’s compassion, to be worthy of it. She thought about driving her knife into her chest but couldn’t, because she knew how much it would hurt the boy sitting across from her, and because the white silk blouse she was wearing was her last clean shirt.

“Actually,” Agent Morganthau said finally, “I wanted to talk to you about MIT.”

Naz squinted. “MIT?”

“You participated in a pair of studies …”

“I know what I did at MIT. What I want to know is why
you
care what I did at MIT.”

Morganthau recoiled from the tone of Naz’s voice.

“Perhaps I should step back a moment. I’m not here to hurt you, or punish you, or anything like that. To the contrary. I was assigned to look after you. Your father performed a valuable service for the Company, and it is my duty—my honor, I should say—to see that that debt is repaid.”

Only someone as young and naive as the boy across from her could have made such a speech, and it was precisely that youth and naivete that made it ridiculous.

“I can look after myself very well, thank you.”

“Pardon me for being blunt, Miss Haverman, but you’re an alcoholic and a prostitute. If that’s what you call looking after yourself, I’d hate to see what you call neglect.”

In answer, Naz turned her wrists upward, nudged the watch on the left and the bracelet on the right to reveal the thin pale scars beneath. She held them in the light for a moment, then turned them down again.

“By my own standards,” she said quietly, “I’m doing great.”

She saw his fingers tremble, felt him fight the urge to take her hand. It was too easy to imagine him sweeping her up in his arms, pressing her cheek against his hard flat chest and wrapping his strong arms around her. She could feel herself wanting this to happen, yet knew that in an hour or six, when she had given him more than he’d have ever dreamed of asking for, the urge to protect her would fade away, replaced by disgust.

But right now there was just the heat.

“I’m just curious,” Morganthau said huskily. “You seem to hate psychologists and hospitals and every other institution devoted to emotional and physical caretaking. So what made you volunteer for three different studies testing—what was the term? ‘psychic aptitude’?—over the course of six months?”

Naz shrugged. “They paid.”

“Ten dollars for a full day’s work. I would think a woman of your beauty makes more than that on a single date.”

Now it was Naz’s turn to blush. “I have no doubt you know exactly how much I charge. You seem to know everything else about me.”

“Actually, I don’t. And”—Morganthau raised his voice to speak over her—“I’d rather not. I find it tragic that any woman should have to resort to those means to support herself, but for a lady of your character, it’s maddening. I want to find every man who ever took advantage of you and cut his heart out.”

They didn’t take advantage of me, Naz thought. I took advantage of them. Or I took advantage of myself—it amounts to the same thing. But she didn’t say it aloud.

“I was curious,” she said instead, aware that it was the same word he’d used. “Dr. Calloway told me it was all in my head. My empathy. My inability to screen out others’ feelings. He meant that I was making it up, but I found myself wondering: what if it
is
in my head? Not in the way Calloway meant. What if there’s a biological or genetic or, I don’t know,
magical
cause for this torture I’ve had to endure every minute of every day of my whole life? These waves of emotion washing over me every time I come within ten feet of someone—love and hate, fear, anger, lust, greed, all pressing down on me the way raindrops fall on other people. At least then I’d have an explanation for what I’ve done, what I’ve felt. And, who knows, maybe a cure, as well.”

“But the studies you participated in were testing for a different kind of psychic ability, weren’t they? Telepathy, prognostication, and remote viewing. None of these is exactly the condition you describe. Anyone can see that you’re special, Naz. Anyone.”