Angela Sloan (17 page)

“I can't explain,” I said.

“I don't ask you to explain.”

I went into the shower. When I came out I found her staring into the Gideon Bible. She had discovered the pages reproducing various languages of the world, including her own, I suppose.

“I do not understand Jesus,” she said.

“That's because you're a Communist.”

This room was a good deal nicer than the one at the King's Way with bedbugs. The bed was a double, and there were two chairs. I sat down on the one facing Betty and asked where she had spent the night.

“In truck.”

“I thought you ran off after Skeet touched you.”

“Different truck. Forget it.”

I didn't forget it, but I put it aside. “I have to tell you something about Marilyn,” I said.

“Tell.”

I told her that Marilyn was my secret aunt—an aunt on my father's side that my mother didn't know about. “That should explain why we have to meet in private like this.”

“Unusual story.”

“It's not really that my mother doesn't
know
about her. My mother hates her, you see, and we are forbidden to visit. It all goes back to a boy they fought over, many years ago.”

“The fought over your father?”

“No. Never mind.” I could never tell what Betty believed or didn't.

“Your aunt is not very happy or relax,” Betty said.

“These secretive meetings make her nervous.”

“Way she smoke and eat, seem like she hate herself.”

“I don't know how you could tell something like that after eating breakfast with her one time.”

“Easy to tell. Way she smoke cigarette, way she sit, don't eat much, pinch her arm. Not happy. I got a aunt just like her.”

“Her work is stressful,” I said.

“What work?”

“She's studying to be a park ranger.”

“Not stressful.” Betty went to the sink and loudly rinsed her mouth out. She came back to the bed.

“So Betty has an aunt,” I said. “That's the first you have mentioned of any relatives.”

“Everybody has got some relatives.”

“Do you miss this aunt?”

“Only miss my old parents,” she said.

Suddenly she had a small paper packet in her fingers. She tore it open and sprinkled black pepper into her palm, and she began eating the pepper with the point of her tongue.

T
he hot day crept by, broken only by a walk along U.S. 11, the highlight of which was when Betty saw two garter snakes lying together and jumped sideways over a ditch. It was a wide ditch and she landed running. If I had known she was afraid of snakes I would not have pointed them out to her. Now it was evening, and Betty was lying down in our room. Marilyn went off alone to visit another pay phone, then asked me into her room to talk.

“Do you think Ding accepts the Aunt Marilyn story?” Marilyn asked.

“She's practical-minded,” I said. “She'll go along with it until she has a reason not to.”

“All right. I need you to do something, Angela.”

“What's that?”

“I need you to signal Ray. Call him in.”

“Why don't
you
call him in?”

“He's not responding. You have a way to signal him, right?”

I didn't answer.

She sat on the edge of the dresser. Two lamps were on, and the curtains were pulled. From her large purse she unfolded a copy of the
World News Digest.
“I tried the crossword,” she said. “It's too easy. There is an interesting set of personal ads in the back, however. Here's one signed
Boney Maroney.
”

“I'm not Boney Maroney.”

“I know, I already talked to her. She's a high school band director in Indianapolis. And she's a man.”

Marilyn poured herself a cup of gin.

“You are going to have to trust me, Angela.”

“I have trusted you,” I said. “I'm here, aren't I? I could have left at any time.”

“No. If you leave I will quickly find you again. The reason is,
I don't work alone.
Nobody does in this trade. We're a machine, and we have to trust each other. Working alone is how you ball things up. It's poor tradecraft. Believe me on this, because I know.”

She began to pace and lecture me. I was risking my life and Ray's by not cooperating fully, she claimed. I thought I knew everything because I had partly grown up at the Farm, but in fact I was only a precocious child who had read a few spy books. I did not understand the real methods of clandestine work as it is practiced in the field, she said. “You're
fourteen
! You're driving through mountains without sleep in a car registered to Ray Sloan, and you're not even a legal driver. And Betty!”

Our eyes met and she looked away from me.

“I'm sorry to be rough, Angela. It amazes me you've gotten this far. People always seem to be looking past you.”

“People look past me because I have no value to them.”

“But now you do have value. You're Ray's vulnerability.”

ME:
How do you figure that?

MARILYN:
I don't need to spell it out, do I?

ME:
Yes.

MARILYN:
Maybe I should start by explaining to you how an Agency cover works.

ME:
I think I know, but go ahead.

MARILYN:
First of all, an Agency cover is known to a number of people. Your supervisor knows, and so does his supervisor. It's all written down. Some friends in the Agency will know about it, too. An Agency cover is not a secret that is kept only in your bosom. If you have secrets that are only known to you and Ray, then those are not Agency secrets, Angela. They're just secrets. They might even be secrets
from
the Agency. Do you understand?

ME:
No.

MARILYN:
Second. We might live an elaborate cover overseas, but not at home. We don't run around D.C. using false names and false passports. The Agency would not send a girl to public school with a false birth certificate.

ME:
Come to the point.

MARILYN:
The point is that Ray has been hiding something.

ME:
What?

She handed me a stiff, glossy snapshot. At first I did not recognize anyone in it. The woman's hair was covered with a scarf, and she was laughing. Her teeth were a bright blur. She looked happy and rather glamorous. The man wore a light suit and sunglasses and held a baby.

MARILYN:
Who are those people?

ME:
I don't know. You tell me.

MARILYN:
Well, there's Ray Sloan, looking quite a bit younger and more dashing than the Ray we know. And according to the file, he's with his late wife, Celeste, and their daughter Angela. Which would be you, correct?

ME:
Babies all look the same to me.

MARILYN:
You'd recognize your own mother, though.

ME:
She died a long time ago.

MARILYN:
How old were you?

ME:
I forget.

MARILYN:
That's a lie. You can't have forgotten how old you were when your mother died.

ME:
I was seven.

MARILYN:
The girl in this picture was four years old when her mother was killed. She would be twelve now. You're fourteen, right? About to turn fifteen?

ME:
A lot of people were killed in Stanleyville. Some of them don't have files.

MARILYN:
What are you talking about?

ME:
I'm saying not everyone in the universe has a file somewhere. Some people are born and live and their names are never typed onto a form.

MARILYN:
Has Ray been decent with you?

ME:
Of course he's been decent with me.

MARILYN:
Not “of course.” He has or he hasn't, but it could be either way.

ME:
He took me in after my family was murdered.

MARILYN:
Has he ever used you like a girlfriend?

ME:
No. You're disgusting.

MARILYN:
It's an unusual arrangement that you two have. He told his chief of station that you were his daughter. Lying to the C.O.S. is not considered good. Why would he do that?

ME:
Maybe it was the only way he could keep me.

MARILYN:
It's true, the Agency doesn't encourage its officers to adopt foreign orphans.

ME:
There's your explanation, then.

MARILYN:
But why would he want to keep you?

ME:
I don't know.

MARILYN:
Is there something Ray feels guilty about?

ME:
Like what?

MARILYN:
Are you aware how his wife died?

ME:
No.

MARILYN:
The Simbas made a spectacle of it. They were—

ME:
I don't need to hear it.

MARILYN:
We think the child died in a similar way. What about your parents?

ME:
What about them?

MARILYN:
What
happened
to them?

ME:
Simbas killed them.

MARILYN:
What's your real name?

ME:
Stop it!

MARILYN:
You probably have relatives somewhere.

ME:
Everybody has got some relatives somewhere.

MARILYN:
There is no need for all of this to be buried, Angela. This is extraordinary. It isn't normal.

ME:
Ray is my family. He's the one who took me in.

MARILYN:
Did Ray have something to do with what happened to your parents?

ME:
Of course not. What do you mean?

MARILYN:
I'm asking whether your parents were involved with Ray. Were they part of his network?

ME:
I was seven!

MARILYN:
Okay. You wouldn't know.

ME:
You have got everything backwards and inside out.

MARILYN:
Maybe so. It was a rocky operation in Stanleyville—no local contacts, and most of it was off the books. Ray's network is something of a legend, though. He had these beer trucks traveling all over rebel-held territory. The Simbas were devoted to beer, so the trucks always got through. That's how we found Che Guevara there. One of Ray's drivers heard about a white man training rebels in the bush. Che was trying to teach them French, apparently. So they could be
politicized.
What a plan. I'll tell you this: Ray Sloan was a first-rate operator in his
day. I guess he just lost it when they killed his family. Understandable. He certainly earned his downtime at Camp Peary.

ME:
He was a valued instructor there.

MARILYN:
Right.

ME:
Are you implying that he was put out to pasture?

MARILYN:
Did you ever wonder why they call it the Farm? Anyway, call him in. We'll get it straightened out. We'll get you set up, too, Angela. I've seen the birth certificate you gave the D.C. school system. What did you do, make it yourself?

ME:
It worked.

MARILYN:
But it won't work your whole life. Suppose you want to get married someday.

ME:
Give me a break.

MARILYN:
Suppose you want to work for the post office. You're going to need a sure enough birth certificate. Can you call Ray tonight?

ME:
No. It'll take a few days.

MARILYN:
You should not have chosen a weekly paper for your method of communicating.

ME:
I'll make the call in the morning, at nine.

MARILYN:
Nine it is. Where's Ding?

ME:
I think she's sleeping.

MARILYN:
You should do the same. We'll talk tomorrow. Go to bed.

She turned her back to me, refilling her cup.

I
don't know why I hadn't expected Ray's wife to be so beautiful. She had dark eyes and that gorgeous, careless smile. Ray wore the smallest grin on his mouth, as though he were trying to contain it. He held the baby tightly in both arms.

I was sitting on the curb outside Marilyn's room. I studied the picture, which she had neglected to take back from me.

Why did it surprise me that Celeste was so attractive? Ray was a nice-looking man. It was hard to imagine him keeping a glamorous woman entertained, though. The Ray I knew was not a conversation-alist, and he didn't attend parties. He wore the same shirt two days in a row. He would wear a pair of pants until something got on them.

It never had occurred to me before this moment that I had not known Ray at his best. What a disappointment it must have been to him, to lose this wife and the child who would have resembled her in many ways.
Disappointment
is not an adequate word, but I don't know what other word to use. The disappointed Ray was the only Ray I'd ever known.

Why had he wanted to keep me? At such great risk? I couldn't imagine why. I was no beauty. My personality was something less than scintillating. Maybe he'd kept me just because I insisted. After losing everything, I clung to him.

I remembered my own mother well. I had a stock of memories and went through them often enough. My mother was sturdy, not glamorous. She had brown hair and only sometimes trimmed the very ends. She wore it up, but I remember her bathing me with her hair down and color in her face from the heat. Each memory was something trivial, yet they glowed for me in a strange way. I remembered my father shouting at her in the kitchen; my mother crying; my mother with a pencil behind her ear; my father running into a storm to grab a
goat that was loose from its pen. He did that for me, because I was afraid the goat would be struck by lightning. My father was good, though he did shout sometimes.