Ministers of Fire. Mark Harril Saunders

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СКАЧАТЬ with what kind of woman he would marry, what she would say while the dances and exaggerated talk swirled about them, and what she allowed him after, were enough to promise that their life together would take them on an exotic sort of mission, filled with intellect, purpose, and, certainly, sex.

      It was agreed among their set that Lucius and Amelia would leave Philadelphia, destined for foreign capitals, Europe, or India. Amelia was a “live wire,” as her friends had it, and “easy to know,” as Burling’s mother said, which was not necessarily a compliment. Already, at seventeen, she had spent a month “away,” under a doctor’s care, and already, like her vastly successful Irish father, she liked to drink, harbingers of things to come. Her love of literature was more therapeutic than intellectual, but he was never very discerning when it came to psychology, any more than he had much taste for alcohol. Still, he liked to be around it, as he liked the clubs she took him to on South Street, downstairs places filled with smoke and trumpets and the steady war beat of traps, and actual blacks. Sometimes Amelia had pills in her handbag, but Burling demurred. He found that being the sober one gave him a reputation for character that people admired, even if they didn’t always seem to like him very much. It was there that he established his demeanor in the presence of alien cultures, and also, gradually, where he understood that he would not play professional basketball. Amelia, who knew nothing of sports, pointed it out to him. His realization that she was right led directly to a proposal, her recognition of his deficiency sealing the deal.

      They were married three years later, following his military service, at the church on Germantown Avenue where both their mothers belonged, although the families came from different hemispheres of the same social world, faded blue blood on his side, new money on hers. Amelia’s father, the self-made Irish Catholic from a north Philly family of seven boys, of which he was the only alcoholic functioning enough to offer nominal employment to the other six, put on a reception that caused the mostly Protestant members of the club to mutter as they ate his food and drank more than their fill. He died two years later in the nineteenth hole, telling his foursome about the big house he had bought the couple on Macomb Street in northwest DC, and about his son-in-law’s job in the Kennedy administration, of which he was ignorant but exceedingly proud.

      His only daughter took her father’s death to heart. His absence, like the demise of a benevolent despot, exposed the tensions that had always existed between the factions represented by Amelia and her mother, who was scornful and envious of the girl’s wild nature, her freedom, which the father had encouraged, and likely her beauty and sexual charms, of which he was also uncomfortably fond. Outwardly, the daughter railed against her mother’s false piety and weak manipulations, while at the same time she set about decorating the house in Cleveland Park with a near-curatorial fervor and making a baby with her husband, more than one if possible, to outdo the fragile older woman. It might have all worked itself out. The babies came, Elizabeth in 1963 and Lucius III in ’66, but Burling was barely at home anymore. What happened? If you compared the summer of 1956, when the Soviets rolled into Budapest, to 1979, when the same, slightly updated, tanks invaded Afghanistan, what came between was Vietnam.

      “You want to make this a history lesson,” Amelia said, when he’d returned to take up residence in the guest room of the cavernous shingle-style house. Two months had passed since rebel soldiers—whether or not they were the tribe who had executed Breeden on the border, or the ones who had killed Wes Godwin before his eyes, no one at the Agency seemed able, or willing, to tell—moved dangerously close to the airport that lay on the plain north of Kabul. Burling himself was forced to go, leaving April, or the rumors of her, behind. “This is not about a war or a revolution. I don’t care about those things.”

      “You used to,” he said with genuine remorse, for everything. “I realize I’m not entitled to sympathy.”

      “I never cared about history, Lucius, or politics, either. You forget.”

      “You cared about books. We used to talk about novels all the time. You loved Madame Bovary.”

      “You’re sad,” Amelia said. She was sitting in the corner of their former bedroom, under a standing lamp, her delicate ankles crossed, bare legs folded against the flowery skirt of the slipper chair. “Besides, I can’t read novels anymore. They require a certain level of trust, certain assumptions about people.”

      “That’s what I’m talking about,” he said, warming to his idea. “Comparing 1956 to now is like comparing . . . Flaubert to Joyce, or Jane Austen to Faulkner.”

      “Nice try, buster,” she said, twisting her mouth in a distorted smile, but in her eyes he saw encouragement. Perhaps his eloquence, which he was aware had mostly to do with the depth of his voice and the scale of his bearing, could save him. That morning his newspaper likeness had appeared above the fold of the Washington Post, with the caption THE NEW FACE OF COVERT OPERATIONS? and a long investigative piece about April’s disappearance, continued deep into the front section. Every story the Post got ahold of was going to be their sequel to Watergate. The next day he had to go up to the Hill to twist at the pleasure of the Agency director in the whipping of partisan winds. While Gordon MacAllister was secretly, triumphantly expanding the operation that Burling had begun, the architect himself had been thrown off scaffolding of his own design.

      “It’s like a funhouse mirror,” he said, feeling weirder and more desperate by the minute.

      “Only not so fun,” Amelia said. “Why don’t you go downstairs and have a drink? I don’t feel like talking right now. I want to read my stupid magazine.”

      “I guess I will,” said Burling. He’d been standing in her doorway and he turned to go, forgetting the narrowness of the landing and nearly falling down the stairs. The house was an empty-feeling ship of a place, with hidden porches and deep, damp verandas, and yet it seemed too small. The stairway turned at two landings, each set with a leaded glass window of craftsman design. At the back of the dark, narrow kitchen between high oak cabinets, he was startled to find Simon Bell, lately tenant of the renovated story of their carriage house, furtively pouring himself a straight scotch from the dresser that served as a bar.

      “Join me?”

      The reddish hair on Simon’s fat, freckled forearms and the several large rings on his fingers were reflected in the flaking, beveled mirror behind the bottles. Bell had once been a brilliant China hand with MI-6, but in the middle 1970s his superiors had pulled him away from the desk and sent him to Burma. SLORC, the onomatopoeically monikered secret police, had caught him up near the border with China and subjected him to a brutal interrogation, during which a gun had been discharged, grazing his forehead. The groove it left gave him a perpetually thoughtful expression that drew you to his sad-dog eyes, sagging, stippled cheeks and sunburned neck. The purpose of his mission had been disinformation, but in order for Bell to be convincing this fact had been withheld from him. As the interrogation went forward, certain things had not made sense; Bell understood what had happened, and he told his captors so. To show they weren’t stupid, the Burmese let him go, but not before beating him again rather badly, on principle, which had made him, as Simon liked to say, “a bit mental.” After Burma he’d been posted to a Washington desk job, his wife in London awaiting divorce. That’s when Burling had taken him in, to watch over his house. Since Amelia’s return from Afghanistan, Bell had begun to feel he was needed, a slightly dangerous condition for him.

      “Is there ice?”

      “I don’t use it,” Bell said, carefully shutting the glass door above the bar. He was wearing only boxer shorts and flip-flops. A tiny silver ball suspended by bearings in the jamb snicked shut, and the glassware inside trembled musically. There was already another glass beside his, and next to that, on the gray marble top, a Pelican edition of Shakespeare. “Foreign office chap shouldn’t take ice in his drink. You never know what’s in it.”

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