Eden in Winter (19 page)

The room was as Adam remembered it, windowless and sterile, like a command post in the bowels of a bunker. Though in his early forties, Hollis looked older and wearier than when Adam last had seen him, and the first sign of a belly showed over his khaki pants. The way he ran his fingers through his thinning brown hair struck Adam as a sign of nervousness, not distraction; the sombre, speculative look he gave Adam was too focused for that. ‘Keeping fit, I can see. That’s one of us.’

Adam shrugged. ‘The compound has treadmills and stationary bikes, so I don’t have to jog among the natives. What a joke of a death that would be.’

To Adam’s surprise, the casual remark induced a brief silence. Hollis regarded him with a studied lack of expression. Then he said, ‘You’ve been given an assignment from on high. “A mission for your sins”, to quote
Apocalypse Now
.’

Adam felt a tug of apprehension. As statement, not question, he said, ‘They’ve planned a rescue mission. Inside Pakistan.’

‘Yep. One the Pakistanis know nothing about. You know how much we trust their security services. There’s something about harbouring bin Laden which makes our overlords hold a grudge.’ Hollis paused for questions, then saw that Adam would ask none. ‘Among the other things the Pakistanis aren’t supposed to know is that we have a forward operating base near where they’re supposedly holding our P.O.W. A targeting team, made up of specialists with spectrum scanners to transmit signals and voices back to N.S.A., plus special ops guys to call in a drone or go out and kill any Taliban or Al Qaeda we identify. Whatever works best. With the right preparation, they’ll go in and snatch Bowe Bergdahl.’

‘Risky. And once you send them out, your forward operating post is blown.’

Hollis grimaced. ‘You know the reasons. We place a high priority on P.O.W.s – no leaving our boys behind, and all of that. By bringing this guy back alive, we prove our loyalty, show the bad guys that we’re better than they are, boost the morale of the American public, and, not coincidentally, bolster our own reputation. Killing bin Laden did a lot for us, and this would polish that particular apple.’ Studying Adam’s expression, his case officer added, ‘We’re all aware of the trade-offs, Adam. We risk losing a lot of brave and highly trained guys to free a single Army grunt. We’re not even sure how he got his ass captured. But once he did, he took on a value all his own.’

Hollis, Adam realized, was talking more than usual. Bluntly, he said, ‘You didn’t call me in to explain the moral
peculiarities of this particular trade-off. Let alone to tell me secrets I don’t need to know. So what’s my job here?’

Briefly, Hollis puffed his cheeks. ‘They’ll go in after him at night. Your job is to facilitate the assault.’

Adam willed himself to feel nothing. ‘How, exactly?’

‘Two nights from now, you and a guy from Seal Team Six will cross the Pakistani border. Using a G.P.S., you’ll drive up into the mountains through some pretty bad terrain and locate the forward operating base. They’re holding a special piece of equipment – another “rock”, this one about the size of a hockey puck. Concealed inside is an infrared beacon that transmits signals to the special ops people, pinpointing its precise location – essential equipment to a night raid in hostile territory the Taliban and Al Qaeda know better than we do.’

Here, Hollis paused again, as though hoping for another question. Through an act of will, Adam asked none. He tried to feel as little emotion as he showed.

‘Using night observation equipment,’ Hollis went on, ‘you’ll move down into the village. You’ll dress in local clothing to create a silhouette that appears innocuous to anyone who notices you, adopting the posture, gait, and mannerisms of local people – maybe carry a walking stick to suggest you’re a shepherd or an old man. Concealed beneath your shirt will be the beacon, a multi-band radio attached to an ear- and mouthpiece and, of course, body armour and a weapon.

‘Once you’re there, you’re to find the target house without being seen by the guards, and plant the infrared beacon beneath a window. The targeting team will provide overwatch, monitoring you through its own night observation devices, ready to respond with sniper fire if you report trouble through
the radio. But they won’t expose themselves unless you call them in.’ Hollis’s tone became confident and reassuring. ‘If all goes well, you’ll get in and out. The next night, our team goes in and gets our P.O.W. out of there – followed by kudos for all. Questions?’

‘None worth asking.’

His case officer’s chest moved in what might have been an inaudible sigh. ‘No choice but to do this, and you’re right for the job. We can’t trust an Afghan or Pakistani – they might give up the equipment, or sell out the forward operating base. Fuck this up, and we lose the beacon, our base, an entire Delta Force assault team, and, more’s the pity, the humble soldier we’re trying to bring home to Mom and Dad. You’re fluent in the language, and you’ve got the combat and navigational skills to pull this off.’ Hollis leaned forward, his voice soft and flat. ‘Bottom line, people at the highest level – meaning the President – are watching. We can’t screw this up by sending the wrong guy.’

Better to get the right guy killed, Adam thought but did not say. Then he realized that the right guy – the man he had become before meeting Carla Pacelli – might not have thought this at all. ‘It’s what I signed up for,’ he replied. ‘But why call in Hamid if you’re worried about Afghans? He’s got a wife and kids.’

The latent fatalism of the enquiry caused Hollis to give an arid smile. ‘Odds are they’ll be seeing him again. We’re not telling him a lot, and he’ll be dropping out before you get to Pakistan. And the guy who’s crossing with you enjoys this kind of thing.’

Sitting down at her computer, Carla felt awkward; her centre of gravity had relocated to her belly and her body, swollen by water weight, seemed to have been taken over by some alien force. But that force was her son, and this morning she had felt him stir inside her. Once her profession had made her near-obsessive in her pursuit of fitness and litheness of movement. Now she could smile at herself, this awkward creature, happy at any sign of her baby’s health. To become a mother was by far the most important supporting role of her all too self-focused life.

But it was that life about which Adam Blaine was curious. ‘I know you were drawn to acting,’ he had written. ‘In some ways, all of us are actors. To my detriment, I’ve spent the last decade playing different parts, often within minutes of each other. But few of us become famous for it.’

So he was willing to acknowledge this, Carla thought – at least in a letter. To the extent she could trust herself, every instinct she possessed told her that at heart Adam was a
good and compassionate man. But she wondered whether his layers of self-protection, all the scar tissue she did not fully understand, were so deep that he could never peel them away.

Still, his last email suggested depths of feeling that he wanted to express, at least at a safe distance. Safe for her, as well – with painful honesty, she acknowledged that she was writing to a man she might never see again. ‘So tell me about your career,’ he had requested. ‘The parts they left out of
People
magazine.’ For both their sakes, she would try to do that.

‘Let me start with the obvious,’ she typed. ‘I craved acting so deeply because it allowed me to escape. The roles I loved most were the furthest from my own reality. For a couple of hours, I was in another place – there, not here – every part of me vibrating with this imaginary person who inhabited me completely. The Carla Pacelli people responded to was a vessel who allowed the real Carla to forget herself – until the only self I knew was the woman hell-bent on gobbling up chances to become someone else.

‘I got a scholarship to U.C.L.A. to study theatre. No one in my class worked harder – as I think about it now, I was running for my life. Even my minor, psychology, was – or so I told myself – another way of understanding why imaginary people were the way they were, another tool that allowed me to escape the fears of the child on the nights I woke up believing I still heard my mother’s cries as my father’s hand cracked against her face.’

Carla stopped here, remembering Ben’s description of his own father’s brutality to his mother. With surprising gentleness, he had told her, ‘At least when I turned sixteen, I was
able to beat him to a pulp. All you could do was get away, any way you could. And now you feel bad about it. In Vietnam, we called that survivor’s guilt.’

This was true, Carla had realized. The nights she described to Adam had left a residue of shame; the beatings were still real, she knew, and all Carla had accomplished was to leave her mother behind. But she could not explain to Adam that Ben, whom he hated, had allowed her, at least partially, to forgive herself.

Instead, she wrote, ‘I’m sure this sounds melodramatic. It probably is. But the isolation of an only child, taught to hide her family’s shame, increased my sense of being alone. With other people, I was able to conceal that by becoming what I might’ve described as a “vivacious social drinker”. An incipient drunk, in other words, who also dabbled in cocaine. But my driving need for theatre kept me from going over the edge.

‘When I graduated from college, I moved as far away from San Francisco as I could – to New York, a magnet for any would-be stage actor. I was a walking cliché: I lived in walkups with people I barely knew, did temp work or waited tables and, believe it or not, filled in as a singing waitress while a room-mate with a better voice worked off-Broadway. So glad you weren’t there.’ Carla smiled at this – in retrospect, she had been truly awful. ‘But my basic routine was to get up at five a.m.; hang out in the Equity line at Times Square in whatever crummy weather, waiting to sign up for auditions; race off for a morning’s worth of secretarial work; come back for a one- or two-minute audition; then pray for a callback while I ran off to hustle tips as a cocktail waitress.

‘I had no agent, of course. Still, I landed a few roles in new plays way, way off-Broadway. All that did was feed my hunger and desperation. “Why not me?” the inner Carla kept crying out. No one seemed to hear me. And another voice kept telling me that I lacked that resonance that would leave casting directors as slack-jawed as I needed them to be.’

This account of her inner voice, Carla well knew, was less than fully honest. But recalling the real turning point still made her burn with shame.

Among her means of scraping together cash had been modelling. She refused to do lingerie ads, having heard from other young women stories of scarifying indignities. Instead, she showed up at a catalogue company that also featured sportswear. The man in charge of selecting models – a slick, slender Italian with the face of a handsome ferret – told her to change into some swimsuits in a large, bare room with a black square she quickly realized was a one-way window. But the job paid a thousand dollars if the guy chose her, and her rent was due next week.

The man appeared again – to her further shame, she no longer recalled his name – while a photographer took pictures. Then he praised her ‘energy of beauty’, and asked her out to lunch.

Carla had a callback for a bit part in two hours, and part of her knew better than to accept the lunch invite. But she smiled and said yes – after all, she might charm this guy into giving her the job. And lunch turned out to be surprisingly pleasant. The man was easy, yet authoritative, possessed of a certain practised charm, asking questions about her life with seeming interest, smiling or laughing at her clever and utterly inauthentic answers. They drank two bottles of wine.

After lunch, he invited her back to his office – to sign a contract, she tried imagining. Instead, he offered her cocaine. Both high and dazed, Carla bent over his desk to snort a second line of powder. As she did, she felt the man reaching beneath her dress. Stunned, she realized that his finger was inside her, then his avid hands were pulling down her panties. In a tight voice, he said, ‘You want this, don’t you?’

In something like a fever dream, she remembered glimpsing her mother after a beating, tears staining her face as Carl Pacelli pushed her against the kitchen wall and entered her from behind. Neither parent knew what she had seen. But now, as a stranger pushed inside her, she realized he evoked her father, and heard herself whisper, ‘Yes.’

He came swiftly, then watched in silence as she arranged herself, unable to meet his eyes. ‘I’ve hired someone else,’ he said. It was all she could do to raise her head and walk out the door, a pathetic pantomime of pride.

Afterwards, filled with nausea and self-disgust, Carla had recoiled from the memory of her mother’s face as her tormentor took her from behind, a shattered yet stoic mask, and wondered whether she had sought her own humiliation at the hands of this Italian stranger. But the next day, and for a time after, she stopped using alcohol or drugs. Within a month, she had applied to the master in fine arts programme at N.Y.U.

To Adam, she wrote simply, ‘So I applied to graduate school.’

The rest was nothing for a letter. The story, if she ever told it, would require more love and trust than she had ever felt with anyone.

‘To my surprise,’ she continued, ‘I was awarded a full scholarship at N.Y.U. It was like an answer to the prayers I no longer said. I could live and breathe theatre, part of a golden group of men and women whose talent uplifted and inspired me. For the first time, I felt close to other people, a group whose ambitions I hoped would be realized with my own. I started liking myself better. And I became good – really good.’

Carla found herself typing faster, spurred by remembered energy. ‘N.Y.U. was a great school, with a buoyant and brilliant faculty that turned out serious actors. I did summer theatre, got my best reviews anywhere, and won a good part in
Equus
. I found an agent – not a big name, but a hardworking woman who believed in me. She pushed me to stick out my three years of school – I was not only beautiful, she assured me, but I could have a real career, on stage as well as in film. “I only make money if you do,” she told me. “The day our business takes me seriously is the day you become a major star. We’re each other’s get-out-of-jail card.” And pretty soon she’d found a first-rate casting director who started paying attention to me.