David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“It’s a cabal,” said Leo.

“Yeah, a cabal, I guess.”

“A shadow government.”

“Well, if they’re not that yet, that’s what they aim to become.”

Whipsawed. That’s how he felt. Where was the flatline? How he longed for a quiet brain, trusty, like a pony. He would need days with this Lola Montes stuff. To let it sink in, to untangle the real from the imagined. But she was clearly in a hurry. And even bipolars receive startling emotional news, right?

Leo tried to channel James Dean the way James had been when he helped Leo work through the plot the other night. Leo turned his attention from the passionate emotions to the reasoning faculties. Follow the plot, don’t drive it .

“But there’s lots of law enforcement monitoring all that, and there are spies sitting in office parks in Virginia looking at screens, aren’t there? Isn’t their main job now to keep North Korea or al-Qaeda or whoever from crippling anything? Or there’s, like, investigative journalists and honest public servants. Someone would have seen this and blown the whistle on it.”

“Well, as far as the Committee getting caught by crusading journalists or whatever, that ship has sailed,” said Lola. “And a lot of the guys sitting in office parks in Virginia are the Committee.”

The mailman finished his sandwich, started the minivan, and pulled away.

“And you were right about your old friend Deveraux,” said Lola. “He’s a way to Straw, to SineCo. That’s why we want to know about your incriminating evidence.

“Leo?”

“What? Sorry. I guess I was considering something else.”

“What were you considering?”

“Whether or not you’re real.”

She turned in her seat, took his hand, put his palm on her chest, and pressed it firmly against her breastbone. There was no sex in the gesture, but it whisked them both somewhere farther along the line of their story. He could feel her heart beat and smell a mild funk from her.

“I am real,” she said.

And he knew that she was. No figment would have done that. She let go of his hand. “But I am also in a hurry,” she said.

Yeah. She sure was. It was chop-fucking-chop with this girl. “And I want to help you,” he said. “Problem is…”

She waited a few seconds. “What’s the problem, Leo?”

“The incriminating thing I have on Mark Deveraux…”

“You don’t have it? You made that part up?”

He could tell her he’d made it up, that he didn’t have it. But those lies would only confuse a confusing situation. The world sends you a Lola Montes at a critical juncture, you do not shy away from truth-telling. You take one careful true step at a time.

“No. I have it,” he said.

But how was he to say this? Straight out, the way she was talking to him. “But it’s a piece of film, Lola. A silent movie. Super-Eight. From college. It’s Mark beating off while pretending to be crazy and retarded,” he said. “It’s not really a movie. It’s one shot. Three minutes long. But it is a long three minutes.”

He could see her take this in.

“Is that really what you people do?” he asked her. “This kind of blackmail? Isn’t that the other guys?”

D amn, thought Leila, that wasn’t at all the kind of incriminating she had been anticipating. The look he gave her was right on: this did change the landscape. Every time the word blackmail had crossed her thoughts as she was crossing an ocean and a continent, she’d managed to brush it aside. This was a pitched battle, after all, everything at stake. Besides, Leo’s broadside had made it sound like what he had on Deveraux was incriminating because it would expose the Committee somehow, like it was evidence of a crime. This was different. This was a guy beating off twenty years ago.

“Let’s go inside,” Leo said. “The mailman’s gone.”

She needed to pee, and she needed to devise a next step. She’d come all the way here and boosted this strange man from a rehab facility or something worse. The incriminating film did sound unusable. But was she supposed to just leave? Or get new instructions from Dear Diary? Or get the film from Leo and take it back to Dear Diary and let them make the call? Her little Nokia hadn’t issued her any instructions since she’d landed this morning, when it had directed her to Quivering Pines. What about Leo Crane? Had their escape put him in danger? If he wouldn’t give up the film, was she supposed to just leave? Let him in on a secret and then take off?

He had her pull around the block and go down the narrow, green-bursting alley behind his house. She nosed the front half of the Toyota beneath a tumble of blackberry vines so they both had to get out on the driver’s side. They hopped a fallen cedar fence into his overgrown backyard. At his back door, he took a spare key from the mouth of a little metal frog and let them into his kitchen.

She went to pee. Walking through his house, she thought Leo must be rich, or comfortable, anyway. He was a single man with lots of furniture. There was well-matted art on the walls. And there was expensive product in his bathroom — German skin tonics and organic soaps and a wooden toothbrush. If he was rich, Leo might not be well disposed to Dear Diary politics. Then again, it wasn’t like Dear Diary wanted to take away his German skin tonics, was it? For that matter, Leila was a big fat Western consumer herself, and if it was that kind of revolution coming, she’d be in trouble pretty soon after Leo.

Sitting on the toilet, she took her little Nokia from her pocket and composed a text to Sarah. Had to boost Crane from the facility you sent me to. Incriminating thing he has on Deveraux not really incriminating, just embarrassing. Pls advise. Lola

When she came back into the kitchen, Leo was arranging cookies on a plate. There was coffee burbling in a moka pot on the stove.

“You like apple?” he asked her.

She did like apple.

He cored and sectioned an apple and then pulled a jar of almond butter from the fridge. He added the apple boats to the cookie plate, put a schmear of almond butter beside them, and placed a little spreading knife beside the schmear. He was swift at his kitchen counters. In her family, the men were lost in the kitchen. Certainly her dad, who had some generational excuse, but also her brother, Dylan, who did not.

Leo took the moka pot from the stove, then racked a plastic tray of ice cubes into a heavy Pyrex pitcher and poured the hot coffee over the cubes, which cracked and popped dramatically.

“Listen,” he said. “About that movie I mentioned. I wanted to explain. I mean, about why I even have it still.”

“That’s none of my business,” she told him.

“Yeah, but I mean, I don’t want you to think that I still have it for any repressed homosexual reasons.”

Oh, great, she thought. That’s what he’s worried about . “I don’t care why you have it,” she said. But that came out too sharp. And he had made her this nice snack, and, yeah, it was a rather volatile thing to have and to keep — footage like that, of an old friend.

“So why do you have it?” she asked him, snapping a cookie in half.

He poured their iced coffees. “Milk?” he asked her.

“Not when it’s iced, no,” she said.

“That’s how I do it too!” he said, apparently pleased with this small commonality.

He sat down across from her at the kitchen table and started talking.

“When we were in college, Mark signed up with one of those sperm-donor agencies — it was called Cryogenetics or something — that trawled the Ivies for semen with good SAT scores. I always thought the idea was weird. It seemed to me unfair and unwise to scatter your seed far and wide. Men are supposed to want that, you know? Men are supposed to take pride in their genes. Like: Lucky you, world, here’s more of me. But I didn’t have that. I still don’t. Sometimes, I’ve even arrived at the opposite conclusion: that maybe my line is best stamped out. I thought Mark might feel the same way, and I asked him about it once. We didn’t really disagree about much back in those days. I asked him if he was bothered by the idea of being father to a child he would never see. And he said, ‘No, on the contrary, it seems to me like a good deal.’