David Duffy - In for a Ruble

“He’s aware of that. Hence limited access for Feds.”

“You are both socialists.”

“Guilty, but I can only speak for myself. What’s the case?”

She shook her head. “I’ve got institutional constraints, which is too bad, not least because I think you could offer some insight into the guys we’re going after.”

“Is that a compliment?”

“I meant it that way. But we might as well face it. We both have misspent youths. And you…”

“Haven’t rehabilitated myself?”

“You’re the one who said it.”

“If you’re afraid of wolves…”

“Don’t go into the forest. You told me that once before. One of your proverbs.”

She sat on my lap facing me, legs straddling mine, her face a few inches away. “I have to tell you, shug, I’m here in the middle of the forest and I’m happy about it—over the moon, to be honest—although the why of it is still a total mystery.”

“‘Love’s like the measles. The older you get it, the worse the attack.’”

“Another proverb?”

“Bohemian poet, early twentieth century. Rilke was his name.”

“His humor is on a par with yours.”

“Don’t be too quick to judge. He also said that for one person to love another is the most difficult task there is, the one for which all others are just preparation—or words to that effect.”

That got a thoughtful look from the green eyes. “According to Kris Kristofferson, love’s the easiest thing there is, if you pick the right woman—or man.”

“Dueling poets. Their job is helping us see ourselves. Doesn’t mean they always agree.”

“Tell me this, you and your Bohemian know-it-all—why is it the things I love about you are the same things that scare me to death?”

“Rilke knew all about that. He said, ‘Our fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasures.’”

“You making this up?”

“Uh-uh. Think about it. You said this morning that you’re scared to death something will happen to me. I’m frightened that I won’t be able to fix things with Aleksei, and I’m terrified I’ll do something to drive you away again. Sound like dragons and treasures to me.”

She put her hands around the back of my head and kissed my lips. “I think I like that, but I need to think more about it. Since you just upgraded yourself to treasure, though, you can buy me lunch.”

“I’d love to, but I have to meet a screaming queen on Houston Street at noon.”

“Excuse me?”

“Leitz’s brother. His description, not mine. How about we reconvene at a place I know in Chinatown at two. Best dim sum in New York.”

“All right, but what am I supposed to do with my dragons between now and then?”

Thomas Leitz didn’t exaggerate.

A scattered assortment of people mingled outside P.S. 146. One man stood out. He would have stood out in a circus. About five-ten with a platinum Mohawk that added three inches at its peak. Blue and white silk pants that hugged his skinny frame from hips to ankles. Purple leather ankle-high boots with pointed toes. A bright purple collar flopped over an equally bright orange cashmere sweater. He hadn’t bought any of it on a teacher’s salary. His face was pointed and could have been okay looking if God hadn’t forgotten his chin. His Adam’s apple bobbed below his lower lip. Even in New York City, I would have bet the dacha on his having tenure.

I’d left Victoria with a hug and a kiss outside my office building and walked north, mildly annoyed at Leitz and his family for intruding on our reunion. No getting around the fact, though, that Thomas Leitz had something on his brother-in-law and needed interrogating on that and other subjects. I walked at a leisurely pace, thinking about Victoria and dragons and treasures—and attraction. Beauty is only skin deep, or so they say. I’m not so sure, but I’ll cede the point. While there was no question her looks worked a kind of black magic on me, it was unlikely that my shaved head and stocky physique had the same enchanting effect on her. We did have several things in common. She was tough and strong minded, with every reason to be so. I can be tough minded too. She was self-made in every respect, as I was. Neither of us had a family life to speak of. We were in the same line of work (sort of, and sometimes on opposite sides), lived alone and didn’t mind it, until recently. We were both loners, without intending to be so.

Her childhood, like mine, taught self-reliance at an early age. Her father took off when she was a kid, and her stepfather almost killed her mother in a drunk-driving accident. Mom got hooked on painkillers. Stepdad chased Victoria with lecherous intent whenever he wasn’t too drunk. He caught her one night, but she laid him out cold with a cast-iron frying pan and took off, stealing his car to make her getaway, which is what landed her in the juvenile detention center. She was smart enough to realize where her life was headed if she didn’t take a different path. Reaching that kind of turning point, and recognizing where you are when you get there, was something else we shared.

She enrolled in junior college, then the University of Miami on ROTC and spent four years in the Air Force. She went to law school at Miami too, on Uncle Sam. She got a job at a Miami firm and thought she was on her way professionally until she found that every man she met, including bosses and clients, were more or less like her stepfather—only interested in one thing.

She got fired for refusing to put out, as she put it, got even, one more thing I admired, and got a new job with the Miami DA. They left her alone, and she built an impressive record jailing the same kind of SOBs who’d made her life miserable. Their lowlife intentions weren’t limited to trying to get laid—fraud, embezzlement, perjury, and theft were as common in the business world as the underworld. She wanted to make some money so she moved into private practice with an Atlanta firm, keeping the same scumbags she’d been prosecuting out of jail. She didn’t like it, but that didn’t cause her to be any less effective. The Atlanta firm got acquired by Hayes & Franklin, a big Wall Street legal outfit, and she put in to move to New York. Wasn’t long before she was a partner and running the combined firm’s white-collar crime practice—an $80 million business. The first time I asked one of her law partners about her, he called her a piranha. Of course, she’d moved on to the U.S. attorney’s office by then and just jailed his biggest client.

Success can be sexy, I suppose, but skin deep too. More often than not, the insecurities that lie beneath the urge to succeed form the foundation of character. I preyed on insecurities in the spy business, they’re what makes people tick. (Had I known that in my twenties, I probably would have passed on proposing to Polina and saved us both a world of heartache.)

One dragon guarding the attraction Victoria and I felt for each other was the fear of doing something to screw it up and drive the other away, as I’d told her. I was afraid I’d make another mistake, as I had with Polina and Aleksei—and with her almost six months before. It didn’t have to be my fault. Fate could—and probably would, since I was Russian—intervene. I just had to screw up one more time, and I knew how easy that was to do.

Her dragon took a different form. We’d traded life stories the first time we had dinner. Somewhere in the recounting, I recognized beneath the tough-gal veneer a brittleness as fine as my own. Takes one to know one, perhaps. She did her best to cover it, but self-doubt was part of her makeup—doubt about her judgment, doubt about her own attractiveness, doubt about whether she could make something like this work. And fear about how she would feel if she failed. I hadn’t had the chance to ask too much during our first round of romance, but I was pretty sure her stepfather and his successors had taken their toll. Despite her looks, smarts, and success, she doubted what she brought to the table of a relationship. As a result, I was willing to wager, she hadn’t had many that were serious. Faced with the prospect of one now, she was scared of fucking it up, just like I was. The reasons were different, but that made the fear no less real. And when I went off on my own, or declined to talk about what I was working on, as I had about Aleksei, I put those insecure dragons on high alert.