“No offense, Colin, but your dad was a bully and a drunk.”
“Yes, I guess he was. Anyway, one thing you never knew, I never told you, was how Harry Hopkins could talk . . . the sound of his voice . . . raspy but soft, never hectoring, always patient, a sweeping sense of history, a vision of what America
could
be . . . What a waste, Deke.”
A silence.
“Colin,” said Cather after a while, “we were together in the war—we saw what the North was doing, the Vietcong—how could you help bring those . . .
creatures
. . . down on the people of the South?”
Dale’s face tightened as he looked back through the years.
“I guess by then they
had
me, didn’t they? Owned me, the Soviets. I’d already sent them whatever I could, and once you do that, well, there’s no going back, is there? And I really did think that the North Vietnamese would make Vietnam a better place. I mean, there we were, working with Diem, those criminals, and look at some of our own people, in MAC-SOG and Phoenix, the things we did . . . the guns, the heroin, the women—”
“I don’t regret the women,” said Cather.
“The guns were great fun too,” said Dale.
“Small-unit action,” said Cather with a smile.
“Oh yes, that above all. Here’s to humans, Deke. The best hunting there is,” said Dale, lifting his glass.
Both men laughed out loud then, their harsh, crowing bray frightening a roost of sandpipers who had settled down for the evening on a dune a few yards away, taking off into the dark sounding like sheets fluttering in the wind, beeping thinly. The men watched them go. Cather pulled his coat around him, shivered a bit. Dale handed him a beach towel for his knees, and they fell into silence again.
Down along the coast, far to the east, they could see a solitary figure walking slowly toward them along the shoreline, a woman, tall, willowy, wearing a wide-brimmed sun hat, her shapely figure a flickering flame against the glowing sea, against the broad curve of lights, like the edge of a scimitar, that ran back along the shore behind her, stretching away southward into the night, a glittering necklace of light. Cather sighed heavily, set his glass down on the broad, flat arm of the Adirondack chair, leaned forward, looking out at the Gulf, his hands on his knees.
“Colin, why don’t you take a walk? Do you some good.”
Dale smiled grimly at that, pulled on his cigar, leaned down, and stubbed it out in the sand at his feet.
“You think so, Deke?”
“I do.”
“Which way should I go?”
“You should go east,” said Cather, rising to his feet with some difficulty. The cold was seeping into his bones, and he was suddenly very tired. They stood there for a moment, looking at each other across a great gulf. Cather took Dale’s dry, bony hand in a tight grip, pulled him in, and gave him a hug, a couple of solid smacks on the back, as men do, and then Colin Dale turned away and walked off down the beach, his head up, shoulders straight, his stride long and easy.
A little way down the shore, Dale stopped and turned back to Cather.
“By the way, Deke, something you should think about . . . You know Yitzak Kirensky came in, don’t you?”
“Yes. In Athens, I think. They put him on the
Orpheus.
Haven’t gotten around to him yet, have they? What with all the excitement about the mole.”
“Yes, I know. The mole. Well, a word in your ear, Deke, for old times’ sake. Yitzak Kirensky never needed a pacemaker.”
Dale stood there for a moment, his long hair fluttering in a wind off the sea, and then he turned away again. In a little while, he was a long black stick figure, standing out sharply against the coming night. Cather watched him go for a time, and then he turned away and walked slowly across the sugary sands, heading for the staircase that led up into the barrier dune.
His car was behind the dune, a military driver leaning against it smoking a cigarette. Cather reached the first stair, put a bony hand out for the railing, and heard a single sharp crack, muffled but with some weight in it, coming from down the shoreline in the east.
He looked back, waited there for a moment, thinking about Colin Dale, but he could no longer be seen, and there was only the slender black figure of the elegant woman in the broad-brimmed sun hat, a woman who looked very much like Mandy Pownall, walking toward him along the shore, her shapely body a curved shadow inside a gauzy sundress.
She moved quietly by him, raised a slender, long-fingered hand in a parting gesture without looking at him, without speaking a word, passing by him now, and going softly away into the west with the dying light.
GARRISON
THE STONE HOUSE
Spring was coming to Garrison, with a softer warmth in the afternoon and the light in the trees showing a pale green tint, almost a mist, as the buds began to break out. There was snow still piled up in the deep crevices between the rocks and the roots, the stony ground was hard underfoot, and the evenings could still be biting, but the mountains across the river floated in a mist of light, and the air had new life in it, the earthy scent of growing things.
Hank Brocius sat near the open glass doors of the great room and looked out across the river valley, breathing it in, a glass of wine in his hand, Briony Keating in a lawn chair beside him, wrapped in a red fox fur, her pale face and drawn cheeks showing a tint of rose as the spring light lay on it. Sadness was deep inside her, Brocius knew, and she would never be the woman she was. Her fires had gone out or were burning very low.
But she was alive and safe, and here.
They sat for a time in silence, happy to be friends together, Briony aware of his concern but still wrapped inside her pain like a crystal glass wrapped in cotton. She sipped at the claret, shivered a bit.
“We never caught him,” he said, his voice heavy with regret.
“I know,” said Briony, her face still and her eyes empty.
“I still don’t understand it,” he said, shaking his head. “He had no resources, no papers. How the hell did he do it?”
“I don’t know,” said Briony, “and I don’t care. I just want to let it go. Forget all about him.”
Brocius was quiet for a while.
“You heard about the hospital ship, I guess?”
“You mean the
Orpheus
?”
“Yeah. I think everybody knows all about it by now.”
“No secrets endure, Hank. How did the
Times
find out about it?”
“Looks like the Russians did them in. They got a guy onto the ship, supposed to be a defector—”
“Yitzak Kirensky?”
“Yes. Said he had a pacemaker. And he did. But inside the pacemaker, the KGB had hidden a GPS thing. Once they got a fix on it, somebody in Moscow called the
New York Times
—”
“I’m sure Moscow has the
New York Times
on speed dial—”
Brocius smiled at that.
“Anyway, huge scandal now. Floating CIA prison ship. The
Times
called it the USS
Guantánamo
. Heads will roll.”
They both sipped some wine, and were quiet again.
“Your husband’s going to prison,” he said finally. “I guess you know?”
“I heard he was appealing it.”
“Yes. It went to Appellate yesterday. He lost.”
Briony shook her head, her long silver hair shining in the afternoon light, her skin pale as milk, her gray eyes hooded.
“Where will they send him?”
Brocius sighed.
“Leavenworth, is my bet.”
“Poor Dylan. I hope he dies in there.”
“Yes, so do I. And he probably will, one way or another.”
He looked down at his glass.
Somehow or other, he had drained it.
“I’m putting this away like water. Would you like another?”
“I would,” said Briony, handing him her glass with a pale smile.
He was gone for a while—she could hear him clattering around in the kitchen, opening cupboards and drawers—and then he was back with the bottle and two clean glasses. He poured some wine, settled back into the chair, his fingertips brushing over his scarred face as he always did when he was thinking about something in an absent-minded way.
“Briony, there’s something wrong with your drains, I think.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Have you checked them lately?”
“I always do, in the spring. It’s early yet.”
“I guess. Oddest thing, though. You know that old speaking tube you’ve got in the kitchen there?”
“Yes?”
“It’s making . . . noises.”
“Noises? What sort of noises?”
“I guess it’s the wind, or something. Like a kind of moaning, sighing, crying sound. You ever hear that?”
“I used to,” said Briony. “In February, I heard it a lot. But lately, not really anything. What do you think it could be?”
Brocius gave the matter some thought.
“I hate to say this, but you might have rats or mice down in that old tunnel. You ever check it out?”
Briony shuddered, pulled the wrap around her.
“God no, Hank. I don’t do drains. Once the far end caved in back in 1997, I just let the thing go. Now it’s too expensive to dig it all out again. The roof can fall in, for all I care. I hate the place.”
“Do you want me to go down there? If you’ve got rats . . .”
“What if I do? Won’t they just starve?”
Brocius looked at her with affection.
“No, they won’t. There’s water, I think, a little stream that runs along the middle. They can live a long time on just water.”
“Don’t they need food?”
“I hate to say this, Briony, but rats, if they get hungry enough, they’ll eat anything. And I mean
anything
.”
Briony looked over at him, her expression unreadable.
“What? You mean, like each other?”
“Yes, if they get hungry enough.”
“Really?” said Briony, looking out across the river. “How terrible.”