“She’s right. On the other hand, I love you like a sister, but I don’t know how much longer that’s going to last.”
“Whatever you say. Clementine put the chaps on Adam. He’s not who he says he is.”
“What man ever is?”
“Listen,” Melissa said. “This isn’t a run-of-the-mill impersonation by a guy who wanted to get laid. His real name is James J. Morrison— J. J. to his friends. He didn’t go to Syracuse. He didn’t play lacrosse. The real Adam did do all those things before he was killed in an automobile accident in Los Angeles ten years ago at age twenty-two.”
“The ‘real Adam’?”
“Your Adam, the imposter, took over the dead man’s identity. According to Clementine, spooks steal the names of the dead all the time. They prefer the ones who die young. The system doesn’t know they’re dead, so the spooks get all the documentation—birth certificate, Social Security number, passport, diplomas, everything. Your guy is not a lawyer, but the good news is, he’s married to one, and she apparently understands that he sometimes has to do distasteful things for his country, like screw other women cross-eyed. They have two kids.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said.
“Which part?” Melissa asked.
“That any wife would share Adam with anybody.”
“J. J.”
“He may be J. J. to her. He’s Adam to me.”
I said, “So what are you telling me? Adam was CIA?”
“Apparently not,” Melissa replied. “Clementine’s friends in Langley assured her he’s not one of theirs.”
“Wouldn’t they look her in the eye and say that even if he was? Especially if he was.”
“They might. But Clementine doesn’t think so.”
“So who does Adam work for?”
“Clementine’s not sure. Most likely it’s the FBI, but not necessarily. The possibilities are almost infinite. The Department of Homeland Security has more spooks than it knows what to do with. Result, they’re always looking for something to do.”
Melissa was here to give me the facts, not offer me comfort. Nor did she volunteer an explanation. Whoever sicced Adam on me was trying to get to Henry.
I said, “Wait a minute. Adam never asked me a single question about Henry until the story broke in the media. Then he broke up with me. So in what way does the theory that he was after Henry make sense?”
“It was Adam’s handlers who fed the pulp fiction about you and Henry to the tabloids,” Melissa said.
“How do we know that?”
“Clementine hands out very impressive bribes.”
“She bribed the CIA?”
“No, dear. She bribed people at the tabloids. It was Adam’s friends who took that photo of you and Adam.”
“They did? They exposed their own agent? That’s so weird it doesn’t even happen in books.”
“I’m quoting Clementine,” Melissa said. “Maybe spooks are even stranger than we think. Maybe they’re stupid. Maybe they don’t know what they’re doing, just like everybody else. Who knows?”
“Does that include Clementine?”
“You’re entitled to your opinion of Clementine. But don’t let it fog your judgment.”
“I’m not the one with the foggy mind,” I said. “Maybe Adam does work for the CIA or something worse. Maybe the weirdos he works for ordered him to do what he did to a lonely little writer living in New York. But the idea that they’d then put his picture in the paper and show him to the world while he was carrying out his secret mission is preposterous and you know it, Melissa.”
Melissa gave me a lingering, lawyerly look, but no spoken answer: I was a sad case. She knew the facts. If I wouldn’t accept them, she understood. I was besotted by Adam, a woman in lust. I was beyond reason. After giving me this moment to cool off, she drew breath to go on with her report.
Before she could speak, I said, “I think there’s a far simpler explanation. I think the chaps took the pictures and Clementine gave them to the tabloid. Clementine wanted to bust up the operation before Adam and his employers got any closer to Henry. I think Adam’s wife saw the pictures in the rag like everybody else, and gave him an ultimatum—get rid of the home wrecker or get divorced. He chose her and the kids over giving her every cent he owned and living in an efficiency apartment on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the rest of his life.”
“According to Clementine, the wife knew exactly what he did for a living.”
“Come on. I saw how he behaved when he dumped me. The pictures were the reason. I know how he behaved at the last and how he behaved before that. If ever I saw a man doing something he didn’t want to do, it was Adam walking out on me. He was under duress.”
“So what are you saying, that he loved you?”
“I never thought so for a moment. But there were things we liked about each other.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Melissa said. She shrugged. “Suppose you’re right?” she asked. “Whether his wife or his boss gave the orders, his cover was blown and he got out of town.”
My throat was dry. I cleared it and said, “Does Henry know all this?”
“Clementine briefed him this morning. He was not pleased.”
“Why?”
“Because, sweetie-pie, you’re the apple of Henry’s eye even if you were too wound around James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree to notice. That’s why.”
Melissa looked at me as though it was time for me to get a grip on myself and breathe a sigh of relief on hearing the whole truth about the confidence trick that had made me, briefly, the least frustrated woman in New York. Frankly, I would just as soon have gone on living in ignorance.
I said, “If you knew all this, why were you playing that game with me in the restaurant, talking about Adam as if you didn’t have a clue?”
“Sorry about that,” Melissa said. “Those thugs at the next table were probably Adam’s buddies.”
“Who told you that?”
“The chaps. They called me on my cell and warned me I was being followed while I was walking to the restaurant.”
“Then why didn’t you warn me? We could have gone to the ladies’ room if you were afraid they were going to read your lips.”
“Gosh,” said Melissa, “why didn’t I think of that?”
“That does it,” I said, and left.
Alone in the elevator, I imagined what Adam’s life must have been like when he was J. J.: the nice brick house in a Virginia suburb with a tree in the front yard that got a little bigger every year, just like the children; the refrigerator with the kids’ drawings and photos stuck to it by magnets; the two green cars that ran on electricity generated by coal-fired plants; the freshly shampooed wife dashing off to work in her lawyer’s togs; the blond noisy kids spilling out the front door; dad loading them into the car and telling them to fasten their seatbelts and stop fighting. He’d have one of those inner-sanctum Washington photo IDs hung around his neck on a chain of steel BBs.
Across the Potomac, as he approached the capital in traffic that barely moved, he’d see the sound stage for a Cecil B. DeMille epic that was the federal city. He’d do this every day, except on weekends when he coached soccer and the days when he was ordered to New York to commit the unspeakable acts I remembered so fondly.
~ * ~
3
I TOOK THE SUBWAY TO
Chelsea. My idea was to count my memories as a way of purging them from my mind. It was three days before Christmas. The sun was bright, the weather was cold. Though it hadn’t yet snowed in the city, the air smelled of snow. As I walked to the station, the sidewalk shook. Everyone knew at once that it wasn’t a train. They stopped in unison, as if choreographed, and looked downward at the pavement. After a beat or two, the concrete shook again, harder. Then it stopped. The crowd waited attentively for another sign that something was awakening deep in the earth, and when nothing further happened, walked on. Was this just another aftershock, or had fifty thousand people been buried alive in Turkey? No one seemed to care one way or the other.
In the gallery where Adam and I first met, the big paintings of galaxies had been taken down and replaced by sweet little water-colors. Most were awful. I wasn’t really looking at the pictures, just walking by them in a daze and glancing at them for something to do. One of them caught my eye. I didn’t realize what I had seen until I was three or four paintings beyond it. I spun around and went back to it. And there it was, the O. Laster watercolor.
I felt a surge of anger. The bastard had sold it! He really was as bad as Melissa said. Was anything about him as it should have been? Had he read my novels and read up on paintings as part of his cover? What other evidence of his perfidy still awaited discovery? But wait a minute. What else could he have done, poor guy? How could he have explained the picture to his angry wife? He had no choice but to get rid of it. Maybe he had spent the proceeds at Costco on a ring to give her as a peace offering at a candlelit dinner.
I asked the price. The clerk said, “You do understand that it’s an original O. Laster.” I just stared at him. This caused him to dislike me. He looked up the price and when I told him to wrap it up, said, “If you want the frame, that’s fifty dollars more.”
I paid with a credit card, thus purposely leaving a record of the transaction that Adam’s handlers could easily retrieve. From my Visa bill, I hoped, they would be able to deduce that I knew all about J. J. Would they let me live in possession of this classified information? Would I be hit by a car as soon as I went outside, or would the end come more suddenly—a poison pinprick as I ran around the Reservoir, a bullet behind the ear in a check-out line?
Back in the apartment, I hung up the watercolor in its old spot on the office wall. If Clementine ever came again for tea, there it would be, and there would I be, sadder but wiser.
~ * ~
EIGHT
~ * ~
1
AS HENRY ATTEMPTED TO EAT
his sliver of fruitcake at Christmas dinner, he answered Clementine’s questions about earthquakes. She and I had been invited to the glass house in the Grenadines for the holidays. Doors and windows were open, admitting the sea breeze. Brilliant sunlight flooded the dining room.
Millions of earthquakes occur each year, Henry said, though only a million and a half or so are recorded. Those registering from 8 to 8.9 on the Richter scale, called great earthquakes, had in the past occurred at a rate of one a year. Every twenty years or so, a great quake measuring between 9 and 9.9 was detected by seismographs. No quake as strong as 10 on the Richter scale had ever been recorded.
“So what is your estimate of the force of the ultimate earthquake you predict, should it actually occur?” Clementine asked.
Her eyes shone. She was an interrogator by nature and training, and therefore she loved questioning Henry, who came as close to having all the answers as anyone since Euclid.
“Conceivably, 20 or more on the Richter scale,” Henry replied.
“And what does that mean in comparative terms to your 8 to 10 on the Richter scale category of earthquakes?”