7
Nathaniel’s only two sips into his first cup of coffee when Patrick, newspaper in his hand, says, “Shit.”
Nathaniel doesn’t pay much attention, because every day the newspaper provides a multitude of opportunities for any reasonable person to swear. But then Patrick clears his throat and says, “Martin Luther King’s been killed.”
“Who did it?” Nathaniel asks.
Patrick raises his eyebrows. “Some asshole? I mean, who do you think?”
Well, specifically, Nathaniel is taking a professional interest in whether Dr. King’s murderer was some asshole employed by the U.S. government or some asshole operating on his own. After Kennedy, he’d thought that was the first question everybody knew to ask.
The newspaper coverage is useless, except for making it clear that the man’s death was indeed an assassination.
Nobody tried to make it look like suicide or an accident, which is interesting in itself.
Nathaniel and some of his more realistic colleagues feared Dr. King would meet an untimely end due to faulty brakes or a gas leak, something mundane and unheroic.
From what Nathaniel can tell, the assassin likely wasn’t a government operative—either American or otherwise—which isn’t precisely comforting, but at least it isn’t compounding Nathaniel’s paranoia.
Obviously, he tells none of this to Patrick. Instead he says, “My parents would have been secretly delighted,” after he’s thrown on some clothes and joined Patrick downstairs in the kitchen.
Patrick scoops some ground coffee into the filter. “Your parents sound like jerks.”
“Quite.” It’s a bit of a thrill to be able to talk like this.
During his time with the agency, he’d gotten used to being a cog in the machine, interchangeable with the other expensively educated men in adequately tailored suits, all with the same side part and country club background.
If there was something about you that wasn’t perfectly interchangeable, then you took pains to hide it away.
If Nathaniel were to assemble an intelligence service designed to actually gather information—which is perhaps the task he’ll be assigned in hell, if he’s judged appropriately—he might not use “he went to Groton and can handle himself at a cocktail party” as the screening criteria.
“You never talk about your family.” Patrick says this with no weight to it. It isn’t a question. Patrick doesn’t really ask questions, and Nathaniel can’t tell if this is because he can sense just how much Nathaniel can’t say, or if he’s like this with everyone.
Still, at Patrick’s words, Nathaniel’s thoughts make a break for the abyss until he realizes Patrick’s only talking about Nathaniel’s parents.
“Talking about them would involve thinking about them,” Nathaniel says.
“And I’d rather not.” He pours himself another cup of coffee and downs half of it while it’s too hot, letting the heat cauterize whatever the hell is going on in his mind. “They’re dead now, anyway.”
Patrick holds up his coffee mug. “Good riddance to shitty relatives.”
Nathaniel clinks his mug into Patrick’s.
“There might be riots,” Patrick says a minute later. “Just so you know.”
Nathaniel bites back a hysterical laugh. “Yes, quite.”
“Last summer there were riots—protests, I guess—all over the country. Here, they started when a cop shot a Puerto Rican kid.”
Patrick sometimes explains things to Nathaniel like perhaps he suffered a head injury or recently immigrated here from another planet.
Which, come to think, isn’t inaccurate, except the head injury is more of a psychological one, and the other planet is the Central Intelligence Agency.
At first, Nathaniel thought Patrick was talking down to him, but soon realized Patrick is simply delivering background information that he thinks Nathaniel might need, and doing so as succinctly and neutrally as possible.
One imagines the vagabonds and mental cases he and Mrs. Kaplan take in—Nathaniel very much included in that description—might from time to time need a refresher course in reality.
“Iris told me about that,” Nathaniel says, very casual, as if he didn’t once have a report cross his desk positing that the Soviets must be the ones fomenting last summer’s race riots, because what other reason could there be for people to be so upset?
“She said it wasn’t even one shooting. She said it happens all the time. ”
Patrick pours out a cup of coffee and hands it to Nathaniel. “It’s common enough that it isn’t always first page news.”
Nathaniel grimaces. “If this were a country with leaders we don’t care for—someplace in Eastern Europe or Latin America or Southeast Asia—we’d call it an uprising instead of a riot.
” How very liberating to say something like that aloud.
This is how the radicals lure you in. The marijuana and comfortable clothes are merely the thin end of the wedge; the next thing you know, you’ve condensed the last twenty years of American foreign policy and the entirety of your career into a few damning syllables.
Before he can drop some acid and burn the flag, Nathaniel heads into the shop and dusts the shelves angrily, alphabetizes angrily, and sweeps angrily, all the while refusing to pinpoint precisely what he’s angry about.
The loss of a good man? The setback this means to the movement?
The worry that he might be complicit, in a literal sense, rather than a demographic one?
It’s a chilly April morning, but when Patrick flips the sign to Open, Nathaniel props the door with volumes S and T of an outdated Encyclopedia Britannica . Then he drags the table to the front of the store, followed by the coffee maker and some mugs and a half empty box of Chips Ahoy.
Patrick watches all this silently, but instead of shutting the door and asking Nathaniel if he’s gone nuts—which, yes, thanks, several months ago, no sign of it letting up any time soon—Patrick puts on a sweater and gives his spare cardigan to Nathaniel.
* * *
All things considered, Nathaniel might have found somewhere better to lie low than a building inhabited largely by political subversives.
He thought a sleepy little side street bookshop owned by an old lady and attracting practically no foot traffic would be a perfect place to get his act together.
For a man who spent over fifteen years in the business of amassing intelligence, it turns out he’s an utter dud. Well, that’s the CIA for you.
Patrick is a flagrant homosexual paying an employee under the table and running a business that likely receives as many stolen goods as any pawn shop.
The sheer number of sexual deviants entering this store would be enough to merit a police raid.
Men who say darling and wear scarves for decorative purposes.
Women whose clothing was never bought in any ladies’ shop.
Even the Valdezes are on the radical fringe.
Mr. Valdez mentions his union alarmingly often.
Iris will have an FBI file before she’s twenty.
Hector has mentioned Che Guevara in favorable terms more than once, even if one of those times was to point out that he was handsome; whether Hector is correct is beside the point.
Maria seems normal but she can’t possibly be, not if she’s responsible for two children turning out like that.
And Susan—Susan is the worst of the lot.
Before coming here, Susan Larkin had been a name typed on a file label, alphabetically between a Beat poet and a civil rights leader.
There had been hundreds of names, telephone records, travel itineraries, photographs, lists of known associates.
Nathaniel had been meant to look at each of those pieces of information as a data point and find a pattern of subversion.
Instead the only pattern he could make himself see was that the CIA was illegally spying on Americans, which meant Nathaniel was effectively employed by the secret police.
He quietly photocopied as many of the files as he could fit into the inside pocket of his suit coat, quit his job, left town, and wrecked his life.
Four months later, his shock seems painfully naive.
Had he really thought the underhandedness was confined to foreign soil?
There should be a stronger word than naiveté.
Those photocopied files are now at the back of Patrick’s safe, stashed in an ordinary manila envelope and shoved behind some first editions that Patrick is saving for a rainy day.
If Nathaniel’s learned anything about Patrick over the past two months, it’s that he’s effectively blind when it comes to anything that might be paperwork.
Far and away the worst part is that Nathaniel likes all these radicals. The Valdez twins are brilliant. Susan has the kind of charisma that penetrates the cloud of misery engulfing her; he’s slightly terrified to discover what she’ll be like when that cloud dissipates a little. And Patrick is—
Patrick is a twenty-seven-year-old man who reads books approximately eight hours a day yet has the muscles of a stevedore.
He has a deranged penchant for feeding the hungry and has, by all appearances, had sexual relations with the entire homosexual male population of the neighborhood, or at least those literate enough to set foot in a bookstore.
He’s utterly unbothered by the fact that Nathaniel can’t leave the building without an emotional crisis.
At that, Nathaniel’s psyche goes into free fall, as per usual.
For the love of god, it’s been months. He has got to snap out of it.
That trip to the guitar store had felt like the Charge of the Light Brigade, and he can’t even take the garbage out without his hands getting clammy and his heart thundering in his chest.