He reached over to the night table, got himself a cigarette, and lit it before he answered. “Just coffee, Mati. It’s all I can stand.”
He could hear her laughing. It was a musical sound.
She appeared in the doorway with a cup of coffee in hand, a big grin on her face. Her hair was pinned up, and she had changed out of her jogging suit into a thick robe.
“You were a real shit last night, you know,” she said.
“I know,” he said, turning away. It was hard to face her. He had drunk too much, and this morning he had a splitting headache. So why couldn’t he tell her he was sorry?
Her grin faded and she came the rest of the way into the bedroom, setting the coffee down and perching on the edge of the bed. She reached out and touched his knee beneath the covers. “What is it, Kirk?”
“Nothing,” he mumbled.
“It worries me when you get like this,” she said. “Do you want me to talk to Liese?”
McGarvey laughed, though there was no pleasure in it. “It’s not that.”
She studied his face. “What then, boredom?”
“Yes, that.”
“You’re forty-four and your life is passing you by. You’re no longer in the fray, is that it?”
McGarvey said nothing. It seemed like years since his life had even had a semblance of real purpose. Yet in the seventies when he worked for the Company he had been just as frustrated: only it was in a different way. The Carter administration had ended it for him. A dozen places, a hundred faces all passed through his mind’s eye with the speed of light. Santiago, Chile, had been the end. Afterward he had been recalled, and within six months he had been dumped. Overexuberance. Taking matters into his own hands. Operating outside his sanctions. Failure to keep a grasp on the world political climate.
“I talk in my sleep. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“All the time,” she said.
“Do you write it all down, Mati? Have you got a little black book?”
She started to rise, but he sat forward and grabbed her arm.
“I want to know.”
“Why are you doing this, Kirk? Haven’t you had enough? Do you forget what you were like when you got here? You were a wreck.”
“And you were Joan of Arc riding in on your white charger, your armor all polished, your sword sharp, raised to do battle. Are you telling me that, Mati?”
Her nostrils flared and there was a momentary spark in her eyes, but her control was marvelous, and she ended her little battle by merely shaking her head. “We can’t go on. Not like this.”
McGarvey released her arm and lay back on the bed. Christ, he felt rotten. Marta was almost certainly a watchdog of the Swiss federal police, sent to his side so that they could keep track of him. Former Central Intelligence Agency operatives made a lot of people nervous, especially the Swiss, who valued their clandestine CIA banking operations above all personal considerations.
Was she his watchdog? Or was it love he saw in her eyes?
“No, we can’t,” he said.
She got up from the edge of the bed and went back into the kitchen.
He sometimes thought of that part of his past as the glory days. And they were that, weren’t they? he asked himself. Ruefully he had to admit a certain nostalgia, even though he understood that the reality wasn’t anywhere near as exciting or interesting as his memory of it.
Why did he get out in the first place? The end was coming long before they kicked him out. He could have changed things to prevent it. Only he was too blind, too stupid, to see it. Stewart had made a great show of fighting for him. Yet, later, after Alvin had bought it in Geneva, McGarvey had heard that Stewart had bad-mouthed him all over the agency. It was Washington. It was the power that had corrupted them all. The ends justified the means, didn’t they? By then Phillipi was out, Mason had been killed short of the runway at Andrews, and like the meek inheriting the earth, the quiet but sly Danielle had been bounced upstairs.
McGarvey threw back the covers, got out of bed, and padded into the bathroom, where he looked at himself in the mirror. Already there was a lot of gray creeping into his hair, flecks of it throughout his beard. There were bags under his bloodshot eyes, and the beginnings of a paunch were showing, though his legs and arms still had something left to them.
It occurred to him that his life had happened in three quantum jumps, each more debilitating to him than the last. The first stage was his childhood and youth, which ended with the death of his parents in a car crash. His sister was given their cash, their stocks, and their bonds, but he was given the ranch in western Kansas which he sold for something under three quarters of a million dollars. Living on the interest, he had enjoyed a certain financial independence from that moment on, but the loss of his parents and the harsh disapproval of his sister, who had wanted the ranch kept in the family, had left him out in a spiritual wasteland. The second devastation had come with his dismissal from the Central Intelligence Agency because he had killed a tinpot general in Santiago on orders that had changed, unbeknownst to him, in midstream. Now this, his retirement to ostensibly the most neutral place in the world, was the third stage. He had the feeling it was also coming to an end, and when the finish came the results would be catastrophic for him, as had the ends of the first two stages of his life.
Marta came to the doorway. “I can’t help if you close up on me,” she said softly.
He looked at her reflection beyond his in the mirror. He was afraid of her. Afraid that after all she was nothing more than a Swiss police watchdog sent to keep track of him. And even more afraid that she was not pretending that she loved him.
His sister said he could not understand what a commitment was … what it meant. “Do us all a favor, Kirk, and grow up.”
“Like you and Al?”
“Why do you think the ranch was left to you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Mom and Dad hoped it would change you. Settle you down.”
McGarvey focused on Marta. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
3
“Boredom.” He spoke the word aloud as he turned the corner in the rain and trudged down the stairs below his apartment block. Perhaps Marta was right. Or perhaps he missed the States. It had been five years since he’d been back. Not the McDonald’s, or the Three’s Company, or the jostling machinations of an upwardly mobile population — those weren’t things to be missed — rather it was the feel of the country, of her cities. Telephone operators who honestly understood English, little things like that. A decent martini. Supermarkets. Sears. Penney’s.
Two young girls sharing an umbrella came up the stairs. McGarvey had to step aside to let them pass. He turned up his coat collar and at the bottom hesitated a moment to look down at the lake before he continued. Before too long it would be summer.
He and Marta had a small sailboat. Perhaps they’d take a trip across the lake to Evian on the French side. Last summer had gotten away from them, as had the summer before and the winters in between.
He stopped short. That was it. Time was passing like a wide, slow-moving river, deceiving in its flow. You never realized the volume of time that was going by until moments such as these when you suddenly awoke, face to face with your own mortality.
A trip back to the States was certainly possible. Füelm was capable of running the shop. It would get him away from Liese’s games (which he actually found flattering when he would admit it to himself). It would be a book-buying trip. It was time he saw his sister and his nephews in Salt Lake City. On the way out he would stop by and see the ranch. Visit his parents’ graves. And then there was this business with Kathleen and her attorney friend. He smiled inwardly. It would give him a certain perverse pleasure to show up on their doorstep, tell her in no uncertain terms what he thought, and then kick the attorney’s ass up around his shoulders. His daughter was a teenager now; young, delicate. How much like her mother had she become? It was something he needed to know. It was time, he decided, that Elizabeth found out her father wasn’t some ogre, some hippie living in a commune in Europe. It made him angry to think of the things Kathleen would be teaching her.