Rita sat for a moment staring at something in her path of memory. Now she chose to look away.
“After this? What do you do after this?”
“After my vacation? I don’t know. I wanted to spend some time in Washington, get back to my roots.” He smiled quickly again. “You must see how desperate I am for a little American living to think of Washington as a place to have roots.”
“Where do you live?”
“I own a little house in Virginia. On a mountain. Do you know where Front Royal is?”
“At Skyline Drive you mean? In the Shenandoah Valley. I was there last summer—”
“I have a house there. Up the mountain.” He thought of it now. “You should come see it someday.” But as soon as he said it, he knew that was a lie, too; that after he had used her and she discovered it, he would never be able to see her again.
She drank the last of the wine. “Yes. That would be nice. But why come down here? It must be lovely in the mountains in the fall. All the color in the leaves—”
“I was cold.” The words were flat and he realized they were true, more truth than he intended to speak. “I was cold in Washington. I came down for sun.”
But it wasn’t that coldness that drove him.
“Are you going to stay here long?” She blushed; it was too naked a question.
“I don’t know. I have time coming, I have my money and when that runs out, I have the little green card you should not leave home without.” He smiled. “I suppose I might have gone back if I hadn’t met you today. No. Don’t say anything.”
He touched her hand.
She looked frightened.
“Friends, Rita,” he said. “I was just saying that as a friend. I can be friends without being lovers. No line involved. Or at least I don’t think so.” He let her hand go and sank back in the wooden chair. “I wanted to talk to someone. Share a meal. I guess I came back for more than white bread.”
“It was a good dinner. Thank you.”
“Brandy,” he said. The waitress came and they ordered it. In a moment, she brought them two glasses filled with amber liquid that tasted like smoke.
“I might get drunk,” Rita said.
“There are worse things.”
“But I can’t. I have to be a good girl. Got to go to Mass in the morning.”
“To see Leo Tunney,” Devereaux said.
She smiled as though looking for a bond. “Are you a Catholic?”
“You say it like a Catholic.”
“Yes. I suppose I do.”
“I was a Catholic. When I was a boy. Or you’re always a Catholic, isn’t that it? Even if you choose not to be?” His smile was not pleasant; his face had become cold again.
“Yes. Catch-22 situation. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be nosy.” She said it quickly, as though she had said the apology a thousand times before, after a thousand awkward questions. She touched his hand on the tablecloth. “I suppose I was including you. In my little story. I need company, too.” His hand was large and broad, the fingers flat and not very long. Her own was as delicate and strong as a piano player’s, quick and certain in gesture.
She told him a little about trying to reach Tunney at the motherhouse. And about realizing that Foley had been sent from the Vatican.
“I wanted to know if you were a Catholic because of the Mass. Tunney was in the jungle twenty years, he missed all the reforms in the Mass. He says the Latin Mass. There’s a man at the house from the Vatican. You’d think he’d step on Tunney, tell him to get his act together.”
Devereaux did not speak but he thought of her last words. Yes. Why didn’t the man from Rome make him toe the line? Because he didn’t want to force him?
Because he was waiting for something from Tunney?
“I got a note to Tunney twice in the chapel. He knows I’m here but he’s so distracted.… He looks lost, a little harassed. I don’t know what I’m going to do but I’m going to keep after him.”
“Maybe you should be after the man from Rome,” Devereaux said slowly.
“Why? I mean, he’d just shut me off—”
“Force him to shut you off, to lie to you—”
“Why?”
“To find out he tells lies.”
She stared at him.
“That’s a funny thing to say.”
“You think Tunney has some secret? Maybe this man from Rome thinks he has some secret, too.”
“Involving what?”
“Yes. What?”
They both were silent now, each furiously combing through their thoughts.
“The CIA. And the Vatican? What could interest them both?”
“In Asia,” Devereaux said.
“I never made the connection.”
“Perhaps none exists.”
“Are you sure you aren’t here on this story?”
He laughed then. “No. Not at all. I can’t help probing conspiracies. They’re like the Sunday Times crossword puzzle.”
“I’m glad then. It’s only a game to you,” she said.
“Yes.” A game.
“This has been very nice,” she said with intentional softness. “Sometimes it’s easier to talk to strangers than friends.”
“Kaiser was your friend,” he said, probing again at her secrets.
“A friend.”
“This was nice.” He relieved the pressure. “Can we meet tomorrow? I know I’m pressing.” He glanced down at the coffee cup and fingered the handle. “For long periods, I go without company at all. In the mountains, my place there. I like it that way, like the stillness in the woods.” All of which was true; there was just enough of the truth in the lie to make it work.
“And then, sometimes,” he continued, “I have to talk. I want your company.”
Her green eyes shone darkly. “Yes,” she said at last, as though she had decided something. He touched her hand and he felt the warmth of it yielding to him.
There was nothing more to say. Complexities beyond words were at work. He had constructed a logical lie and laid a trap for her so that he could use her to probe Tunney. But in the end, she could reject it all.
Trust me, he thought.
“Yes,” she said. “Tomorrow. That would be nice. I’d like that but you don’t have to buy me dinner. We could meet.”
“All right,” he said.
“We can tell each other lies tomorrow,” she said.
He was startled but his face registered no emotion. Did she see the lies? Or did she ignore them because of some stronger feeling in her?
Devereaux, not for the first time, felt uncertain with her. He had set the game and drawn the rules but now he felt as trapped in the rules as he wanted her to be.
They left the restaurant together and walked along Gulf View to the open beachfront. They walked on the hard sand by the waterline, feeling the salty wind at their back. They were wrapped in the silence, held together by it. Words would have broken them apart.
When they parted, they did not touch or kiss.
Before he finally fell asleep, after midnight, after more vodka and memories, he remembered her face as it had been in the soft light of the restaurant, staring at him across the table, and smiling as though she understood games and rules and lies behind them.
Perhaps she did.
14
She was still a young woman but it was not apparent at first because of her hideous deformities: She might have been of great age or no age at all. She walked painfully along the sidewalk, aided by two aluminum canes strapped to her arms. She pushed her body forward in lurching steps that seemed to throw her off balance with each effort. She was an instant object of pity. Some turned away rather than look at her.