Bloodmoney (25 page)

Perkins knew the menu, and he ordered everything he thought she would like: roasted yellow peppers; bruschetta with wild oregano; risotto with white peach; and grilled fishes whose Italian names,
spiedino
and
branzino
, made them sound much tastier than monkfish and sea bass. He couldn’t resist ordering another lovely bottle, this one from the Alto Adige. It wasn’t like Sophie to allow herself to be spoiled, but she acceded quite happily in this case, and devoured what was put before her.

“Tell me about Sophie Marx, if that’s permitted,” said Perkins. “I don’t know anything about you, except that you seem awfully good at your job.”

“‘The CIA—we make a world of difference.’ That’s the slogan the recruiters use.”

“And does it? Make a difference, I mean.”

“Enough to keep me interested. I’m sort of an action junkie. And I like keeping secrets. I’ve had lots of practice.”

“You still haven’t told me anything. Where did you grow up? Let’s start there. That’s not classified, is it?”

“In Florida, mostly. And then in St. Croix for a while. And then I ran away from home. Just your normal childhood.”

“I think you’re going to have to explain yourself, madam.”

“I
never
explain myself.”

But then she did. In the flush of that summer evening, she told him the story that she never told anyone outside work. She trusted him, for reasons she only half understood. She sensed that he was caught, like her, in a world in which he was successful but not entirely happy. He was chasing a glowing filament that receded even as he advanced. Perkins was a good listener, and he let her tell the tale.

“My parents were hippies, sort of,” she began. “They were on the run. I was never sure who from, the cops or the FBI, or just from normal people. And they pulled me along with them. We had a lot of things we couldn’t talk about with anybody. I guess that’s how I got started with the secrecy thing.”

“What was your mother like? She wasn’t a spy, I take it.”

“Do you really want to know? This is private, and it’s sort of embarrassing.”

“Yes, I really want to know. I want to understand what makes a woman turn out like you.”

“My mother was a rebel. She looked like those sixties pictures you see of beautiful girls at Woodstock, or Joni Mitchell album covers. And she was a daredevil. If you told her she couldn’t do something, then she had to do it. Unfortunately, she had a habit of wandering off. I thought she wanted to get away from me and my father, but she said she was just a free spirit. When she was having a good time, she forgot about going home.”

“Would she come back?”

“Usually, but sometimes it took a while. I had to take care of things while she was gone. Cook, and do the shopping, and pay the bills. And take care of my dad when he was blue. I was like Junior Mom. No wonder I’m weird, right?”

“You’re not weird in the slightest. I’m sorry to break that to you. What was he like, your father?”

“He was a dreamer. A romantic, I guess. He was very handsome, sort of impulsive. He did his share of bed-hopping, too. His big problem was that he wasn’t very well organized. He had gotten busted for selling LSD in New York when he was still at Columbia, and then he violated his parole, so we had to move a lot, and sometimes he used false names, and it was a big mess every fall when I had to go to school and we had to fill out all the forms.”

“Where did you live?”

“We started on the Gulf Coast, in Naples, then in Daytona Beach on the Atlantic side, and then in Key West. In the summers I would sometimes go up north to stay with relatives. But the school thing was a problem every September. That’s why we moved to Christiansted in the islands. Some of my parents’ screwy friends were setting up a private school there, so that their children could be freethinkers and not have to study reactionary subjects like spelling and grammar. We lived on a houseboat in Christiansted Harbor. It was the only thing they could afford. I hated it. Every day was like the cast party for
Hair
.”

“How did you end up so normal, Sophie? I don’t get it. With a childhood like that, you should be in a mental hospital.”

“I have a nonstick coating. What saved me was that I ran away. I knew I couldn’t live like that anymore, and my parents weren’t going to change, so finally I just left. I was fifteen. I had a rich aunt, my father’s sister, who lived in Chicago. She took me in.”

“Is that where the Marx family came from? Chicago?”

“Not exactly. Marx wasn’t our real name. My father changed it to that when he was on the run. The family name was Devereux. My aunt wanted me to change it back when I came to live with her, but I said no. The next year she arranged for me to go to a boarding school in New Hampshire. That’s where I learned how to act normal. But believe me, I’m not.”

“You could have fooled me. From the moment you walked into Edward’s, I thought you were Greta Garbo.”

“I’m a good pretender. That’s one of the survival skills I learned. And having lived that crazy life, I knew things the other kids didn’t, so I was popular. And I did well at Exeter, too. Somehow, all those years of bad schools and listening to my parents’ dopey ideas hadn’t made me stupid. So I was a ‘success.’”

“I still don’t get the CIA part. How did you end up there? With that crazy childhood, I would think you’d want to do something utterly ordinary—work in a bank, or an insurance company.”

Her eyes were alight. She was getting tipsy, on the wine and the company.

“Isn’t it obvious? The CIA was the only place where people understood me. I found a whole government agency full of people who lived on the run, and had secrets they couldn’t tell anyone, and were always pretending. It was a building full of weirdos like me. I told the agency recruiters everything about myself. I had to. It was the first time I had told anyone the whole story. And do you know what? They loved it.”

“Come, now, Miss Devereux. Are you
always
pretending? Like now, for example.”

“Every minute, and especially now. I’m always afraid someone will expose me as a fraud. I have dreams about it. And my name is Marx.”

Perkins took her hand. It was an unusual thing to do, even in the midst of this intimate conversation.

“You probably won’t believe this, but I have the same anxiety. I think I’m going to be found out. The world I’ve built is going to come crashing down, and I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to pick up the pieces. I’m scared, all the time.”

“You? That’s ridiculous. What do
you
have to be afraid of?”

“Failure, collapse, bankruptcy. When you’re playing with so much money, it’s easy to get in trouble. That’s why I agreed to help the agency. I tried to explain this to you. At the time we got seriously connected, I was on the ropes. My investors didn’t know it, and the Street didn’t know it. But your friends did. They understood that I was vulnerable. That made me a perfect recruit. Isn’t that what you people say?”

“Yes, that’s what we say.”

She looked at Perkins across the table. He wanted to explain, and she was truly the only one he could tell.

“How did it happen?” she asked. “How did we recruit you?”

So he told her the story. It was a peculiar play, where the audience seemed to understand the story as well as the actor.

“You know Anthony Cronin, the man who introduced us?” he began.

She nodded. Yes, she knew him. That was all she wanted to say, for now.

“I first met Cronin in New York five or six years ago, I can’t remember. That was the easy part, before the squeeze began. The meeting had been arranged by a hedge fund manager I knew. It was obvious that he had intelligence connections but he never explained them.”

“He was the spotter,” Marx said with a wink. “That’s what we call them.”

“Okay, so he called one day and said he had a friend in the government named Cronin who was a big deal, and that we should meet the next time I was in the States. And I thought, sure, great. A lot of people in finance were helping out after 9/11 and I thought I should, too. So I telephoned the number he gave me for Cronin and left a message saying that I would be in New York in a week. Cronin called back the next day. He suggested we meet at the Athenian Club, where I guess he was a member.”

Marx smiled at the thought of such a rendezvous. She had visited the club herself, with one of her professors, when she was an undergraduate at Princeton. It was a handsome beaux arts front on West Forty-Third Street, with a white marble façade, elaborate carvings and moldings and a club flag flapping in the breeze next to Old Glory.

“A perfect place to take an ex-professor like you,” she said. “Old paintings on the wall, books in the library shelves, rooms with bathtubs and no showers: old school. Nothing bad could happen there.”

“Cronin was waiting upstairs, sitting in a leather chair and sipping a martini as if he owned the place. He rose as soon as I entered the room. He obviously had a picture of what I looked like. The waiter arrived, and I thought, what the hell, do the James Bond thing, so I ordered a martini, too. I took a sip, we talked for a while. He told me about how some famous names in finance were helping: This man got them a new building on Fifth Avenue, pronto, after the New York station went down on 9/11. That one used his company as a front to catch a terrorist from Pakistan. All very impressive.”

“So the hook was in.”

“Definitely. After a while, he popped the question: ‘How would you like to help your country in a time of need?’”

“We call that ‘the pitch.’ What did you say?”

“I told him of course I would. I had decided that I would say yes on the flight over. I asked him what it would involve, and he said little things, until we got to know each other better. And that’s all it was, the first few years. Little things: Can you tell us about your foreign contacts? Can you help us facilitate a payment overseas? Can we use one of your houses as a meeting place? Easy stuff.”

“That’s ‘development,’ by the way, the part where we watch you and see how you’re doing. When did it get nasty?”

Perkins looked down at his plate. As much as he had wanted to tell the story, it got harder at this point.

“They caught me cheating. That was the start. I had a man inside the Bank of England. He was giving me information about the Monetary Policy Committee. I was paying him five hundred thousand dollars a year, to a bank in the Cayman Islands, and making twenty times that off his information. But the transfers got picked up by the U.S. money-laundering snoops, and my guy panicked. He thought he had been caught by the Inland Revenue for tax evasion.”

“So you asked for help?”

“Exactly. I told Cronin about it. I didn’t exactly ask him to fix it, but he knew that’s what I wanted. Case went away. Poof. No more questions.”

“And you were relieved. And you thought, these intelligence friends of mine are pretty helpful.”

“Just so. But then it turned. The markets began to go screwy, and I was in trouble. Like a lot of people, I had bought fistfuls of credit swaps that I thought could never go bad, I mean, how’s Morgan Stanley ever going to go bust, right? But everything turned to shit in a couple of weeks, and I was desperate to raise cash.”

“And you got a call from Cronin?”

“You know the script. Cronin called and said he had a great idea. He’d heard I was in a little trouble and he knew the perfect way out. We should do what I had been doing with my guy in the Bank of England, but on a global scale. He would supply the inside information, I would trade on it and we would split the profits.”

“‘The system.’”

Perkins nodded. “And now you’re part of it. That’s my fault.”

Marx shook her head. “I’m a big girl. I know what I’m doing. And this guy Anthony Cronin isn’t ten feet tall. Believe me. If you really want a way out, you’ll find one.”

Perkins wanted to order cheese, but she said no, at the end of so much heavy talk she wanted something sweet.
Dolce
, she said, but not
dolcissime
. He ordered
panna cotta
, a delicate dessert of cooked cream, served with grappa and baked
nespole
, an Italian fruit that looked like an apricot and had a taste between sweet and tart.

“Tell me about Beirut,” he said, as they were drinking the last of the dessert wine. “You said that you worked there, but you didn’t tell me what you did.”

“Of course I didn’t. Don’t be silly. That’s a no-no.”

“I don’t mean the details, just generically, sort of. Make it up, as if it were a spy novel.”

“Okay. Imagine an international civil servant. She works for UNESCO in Paris, at least that’s what her card says. She travels regularly to Beirut. She stays at the Phoenicia, on the corniche. She spends her days at UNESCO’s office out near the airport, but she has free time at night and on the weekends. She goes to restaurants. She has a chalet at the beach. She’s always meeting people. Sometimes they’re her agents. Sometimes they work for Lebanese intelligence, or for the Syrians, or the Iranians. Sometimes they exchange information for money. One of them tells her a big secret about how Hezbollah communicates with its operatives. They have a private telephone system. He tells her where the cables are buried.”

“Is she in danger, this woman?”

“Not usually, if she does it right. It may sound like she’s taking big risks, but she knows how to operate, she’s just another pretty girl in Beirut. But then people worry her cover is too thin, and she has to get out of Lebanon in a hurry. And then a bad thing happens to her, in Addis Ababa, and it’s obvious she has been burned. They make her go home. She gets a fancy job, but she’s bored stiff. She hates success.”

“You see! That’s why I like you so much. We’re the same person.”

“But I escaped success, Tom. I went back in the trenches. You’re still a billionaire.”

He shook his head. He loved her story, but it couldn’t be that easy, even for a woman who had mastered the covert life as a young girl, for whom lying was part of survival.

“Is that true, what you told me, more or less?”