Джозеф Файндер - Extraordinary Powers

Although I felt as if my insides had turned to scar tissue in the last two hellish months, I found myself laughing, felt the tension ebbing, if only for the moment. We talked a bit about Molly. She was living in Boston after two years with the Peace Corps in Nigeria. She’d broken up with her college boyfriend — the lunk, as she referred to him.

She wanted me to give her a call when I felt I was ready to see people, Sinclair added. I said I would.

He told me that Ed Moore, the chief of the Europe Division, had decided I had to leave the CIA, that my career would always be clouded by questions. That although I was no doubt innocent, there would always be suspicions. The best thing for me to do was to leave. Moore, he said, was quite adamant.

I was hardly going to argue. I wanted nothing more than to curl up in a ball somewhere and sleep for days and then awake to find it was all a bad dream.

“Ed thinks you should go to law school,” Hal said.

I listened passively. What interest in law did I have? The answer, I later discovered, was not much, but what difference did that make? You can do something well that you don’t care much for.

I wanted to talk to Hal about what happened, but he wasn’t interested. He had a full schedule; he thought it best to maintain neutrality; he didn’t want to rake over the past.

You’ll be a great lawyer, he said.

He told a very funny, very dirty joke about lawyers.

We both laughed. That day I left CIA headquarters — for what I thought was the last time.

But I was to be haunted by the nightmare of Paris for the rest of my life.

Alex Truslow’s weekend house in southern New Hampshire was less than an hour’s drive from Boston. Molly, miraculously enough, was able to free up enough time to join me. I think she wanted to reassure herself that Truslow was all right, that I was not making a colossal error by agreeing to work for the Corporation.

The house, a rambling old beauty perched on a bluff above its own lake, was much larger than we had expected. White clapboard with black shutters, it was at once cozy and elegant. It looked as if it had begun as a humble two-room farmhouse a hundred years ago, and had gradually and steadily been added to until it sprawled, ungainly and serpentine, along the undulating crest. Here and there the paint was peeling.

Truslow was outside, tending the fire as we drove up. He was in casual attire: a plaid woolen shirt, bulky moss-green wide-wale corduroy pants, white socks, and boat shoes. He kissed Molly on the cheek, clapped me on the back, and pushed vodka martinis at us. I realized for the first time, consciously, what it was about Alexander Truslow that intrigued me. In certain striking ways — the mournful cast of the brow, the dogged honesty — he reminded me of my own father, who died of a stroke when I was seventeen, the summer before I went off to college.

His wife, Margaret, a slender, dark-haired woman of around sixty, came out of the house, wiping her hands on a bright red apron, the screen door clattering behind her.

“I’m sorry about your father,” she said to Molly. “We miss him so much. So many people miss him.”

Molly smiled and thanked her. “This is a wonderful place,” she said.

“Oh,” Margaret Truslow said, approaching her husband and touching his cheek fondly with the back of her hand, “I hate it out here. Ever since Alex retired from CIA he’s made me spend practically every weekend and every summer out here. I put up with it because I have no choice.” Her expression, doting and wearily amused, was the sort you might use on an errant but beloved child.

“Margaret much prefers Louisburg Square,” Truslow said. Louisburg Square was a small, exclusive enclave atop Beacon Hill, where Alexander Truslow owned a town house. “You two live in the city, don’t you?”

“Back Bay,” Molly said. “You might have seen the Men at Work signs and the trash heaps. That’s us.”

Truslow chuckled. “Renovation, I take it?”

Before we could reply, two small children came tearing out of the house, a little girl of about three, bawling, being chased by a somewhat older boy.

“Elias!” Mrs. Truslow called out.

“Now, cut it out,” Alex said, scooping the girl up into his arms. “Elias, don’t torment your sister. Zoë, I want you to meet Ben and Molly.”

The little girl looked at us warily with a tearstained face. She then buried her head against Truslow’s chest.

“She’s shy,” Truslow explained. “Elias, shake hands with Ben Ellison and Molly Sinclair.” The boy, towheaded and pudgy, thrust a small fat hand at each of us in turn, before he ran off.

“My daughter...” Margaret Truslow began to say.

“My deadbeat daughter,” Truslow put in dryly, “and her workaholic husband are at the symphony. Which means their poor kids have to have supper with their boring old grandparents. Right, Zoë?” He tickled the girl with one hand, holding her up with the other. She giggled, almost reluctantly, and then resumed crying.

“Our little Zoë seems to have an earache,” Margaret said. “She’s been crying since she got here.”

“Let me take a look,” Molly said. “You probably don’t have any amoxicillin around, do you?”

“Amoxi-what?” Margaret said.

“That’s all right. I think I’ve got a 150cc bottle in the car.”

“An honest-to-goodness house call!” Margaret Truslow exclaimed.

“And no charge either,” Molly said.

Dinner was prime Americana — barbecued chicken, baked potatoes, and a salad. The chicken was delicious; Truslow proudly gave us his recipe.

“You know what they say,” he said as we tucked into our dishes of ice cream. “By the time the youngest children have learned to keep the house tidy, the oldest grandchildren are on hand to tear it to pieces. Right, Elias?”

“Wrong,” Elias replied.

“Do you have children?” Margaret Truslow asked.

“Not yet,” I said.

“I believe that children should neither be seen nor heard from,” Molly said. “Ever again.”

Margaret looked momentarily scandalized, until she realized that Molly was kidding. “And that from a pediatrician!” she mock-scolded.

“Having kids was the greatest thing I ever did,” Truslow said.

“Isn’t there some book,” Margaret said, “called Grandchildren Are So Much Fun, I Should Have Had Them First ?”

Both Truslows chuckled. “There’s some truth to that,” Alex said.

“You’ll have to give all this up if you go back to Washington,” Molly said.

“I know. Don’t think it hasn’t been weighing on me.”

“You haven’t even been asked yet, Alex,” his wife said.

“Quite right,” Truslow said. “And to be honest, replacing your father is a rather daunting prospect.”

Molly nodded.

“Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example,” I put in.

“And now,” Truslow announced, “I hope you lovely women don’t mind if Ben and I wander off somewhere and talk shop.”

“Fine with us,” his wife said with asperity. “Molly can help me get the kids down. If she can bear to be around kids, I mean.”

“A few weeks ago,” Truslow said, “the Agency apprehended a would-be assassin. A Romanian. Securitate.” We sat in a stone-floored room that he seemed to use as his study, both of us at a large ashwood table. The furniture in the room was old and worn; the only discordant note was the modern black telephone-and-scrambler unit on the desk.

“He was interrogated. He was tough.”

I didn’t know what he was getting at, so I waited in silence, tensely.

“After several difficult interrogation sessions, he finally broke. But even then, he knew very little. A very professional job of compartmentalization. He said he had something to offer us. Something about Harrison Sinclair’s murder...” His voice trailed off.