Robert Wilson - Axis

"What do you mean, DGS people?"

"DGS people, right, but very senior, people working out of levels of the department light-years above what we do here. People who are deeply interested in finding the woman in the picture. People interested enough to sail out of Djakarta and knock on my door."

Lise sat back in her chair and tried to absorb all this.

After a long moment she said, "My mother showed the same snapshot to DGS back when my father disappeared. Nobody made a fuss about it then."

"That was a decade ago. Other information has turned up since. The same face in a different context. More than that I can't say."

"I'd like to talk to these people. If they know anything about Sulean Moi—"

"Nothing that would help you find out what happened to your father."

"How can you be sure of that?"

"Try to put it in perspective, Lise. These people are doing an important job. They mean business. I went out of my way to convince these guys not to talk to you."

"But you gave them my name?"

"I told them everything I know about you, because otherwise they might think you're involved in—well, what they're investigating. Which would be a waste of their time and a hardship for you. Honestly, Lise. You have to keep a low profile on this one."

"They're watching me. Is that what you're trying to say? They're watching me and they know I was with Turk."

He winced at the name, but nodded. "They know those things. Yes."

"Jesus, Brian!"

He raised his hands in a gesture that looked like surrender. "All I'm saying is, when I stand back from all this—from what our relationship is and what I would like it to be—when I ask myself what would really be best for you—my advice is to let this go. Stop asking questions. Maybe even think about heading back home, back to California."

"I don't want to go home."

"Think about it, is all I'm saying. There's only so much I can do to protect you."

"I never asked you to protect me."

"Maybe we can talk about this again when you've given it some consideration."

She stood up. "Or maybe not."

"And maybe we can talk about Turk Findley and what's going on in that department."

In that department . Poor Brian, unfailingly prim, even when he was rebuking her.

She thought about defending herself. She could say, We were having dinner when the ash fell . She could say, Of course he came home with me, what was he supposed to do, sleep in his car ? She could lie and say, We're just friends . Or she could say, I went to bed with him because he's unafraid and unpredictable and his fingernails aren't impeccably clean and he doesn't work for the fucking DGS .

She was angry, humiliated, not a little guilt-stricken. "It's not your business anymore. You need to figure that out, Brian."

And turned, and left.

Turk went home to fix himself dinner, some shiftless meal appropriate to his mood. He lived in a two-room bungalow set among similar cabins on a barely-paved road near Arundji's airfield, on a bluff overlooking the sea. Maybe someday this would be expensive real estate. Currently it was off-grid. The toilet fed a cesspool and his electricity came from sunlight and a generator in a back shed. Every summer he repaired his shingles, and every winter they leaked from a new angle.

The sun was setting over the foothills west of him, and to the east the sea had turned an inky shade of blue. A few fishing boats straggled toward the harbor to the north. The air was cool and there was a breeze to carry off the remnant stink of the ash.

The ash had settled in windrows around the foundations of the cabin, but the roof seemed to have borne up under the strain. His shelter was intact. There wasn't much food in the kitchen cupboards, however. Less than he remembered. It was canned beans or go out for groceries. Or spend money he didn't have in some restaurant he couldn't afford.

Lost my plane, he thought. But no, not really, not yet; the plane was only embargoed, not yet sold. But there was nothing in his bank account to offer a convincing counter-argument. So that little mantra had been running through his head since he left Mike Arundji's office: Lost my plane.

He wanted to talk to Lise. But he didn't want to dump his problems on her. It still seemed unlikely that he had hooked up with her at all. His relationship with Lise was something fortune had dropped in his lap. Fortune had done him few favors in the past, and he wasn't sure he trusted it.

Cornmeal, coffee, beer…

He decided to give Tomas another call. Maybe he hadn't explained too well what it was he wanted. There was only one real favor he could do Lise, and that was to help her understand why her father had gone Fourth—which Turk assumed was what had happened. And if anyone could explain that to her or put it in a sane perspective it might be Tomas and, if Tomas would put in a word for him, Ibu Diane, the Fourth nurse who lived with the Minang upcoast.

He ticked Tomas's number into his phone.

But there was no answer, nor was the call dumped to voice mail. Which was odd because Tomas carried his phone everywhere. It was probably his most valuable possession.

Turk thought about what to do next. He could go over his accounts and try to rig up some accommodation with Mike Arundji. Or he could drive back into town, maybe see Lise, if she wasn't sick of him—maybe check up on Tomas on the way. The sensible thing, he guessed, would be to stay home and take care of business.

If he had any real business to take care of.

He turned off the lights as he left.

Lise drove away from the consulate feeling scalded. That was the word precisely. Scalded, dipped in hot water, burned raw. She drove aimlessly for more than an hour until the car registered the sunset and switched on its lights. The sky had gone red, one of those long Equatorian sunsets, made gaudier by the fine ash still lingering in the air. She drove through the Arab district, past souks and coffee shops under piebald awnings and strings of colored lights, the crowds dense this evening, making up for time lost during the ashfall; then up into the foothills, the pricey neighborhoods where wealthy men and women from Beijing or Tokyo or London or New York built faux-Mediterranean palaces in pastel shades. Belatedly, she realized she was driving down the street where she had lived with her parents during her four adolescent years in this city.

And here was the house where she had lived when her family was still whole. She slowed the car as she passed. The house was smaller than she remembered and noticeably smaller than the would-be palaces that had grown up around it, a cloth coat among minks. She dreaded to think what it must rent for nowadays. The white-painted veranda was drenched in evening shadow, and had been furnished by strangers.

"This is where we'll be living for the next little while," her mother had told her when they moved here from California. But to Lise it was never "my house," even when she was talking to friends at the American school. It was "where we're staying," her mother's preferred formulation. At thirteen Lise had been a little frightened of the foreign places she had seen on television, and Port Magellan was all those foreign places jumbled together in a single overbrimming gumbo. At least at first, she had longed for lost California.

Now she longed for—what?

Truth. Memory. The extraction of truth from memory.

The roof of the house was dark with ash. Lise could not help picturing herself on the veranda in the old days, sitting with her father. She wished she could sit there with him now, not to discuss Brian or her problems but to speculate about the ashfall, to talk about what Robert Adams had liked to call (inevitably smiling as he said it) the Very Large Subjects, the mysteries that lay beyond the boundary of the respectable world.