22
“I always forget how quickly the town empties out in August,” Patrick says when a sunny Friday comes and goes with only a handful of customers.
Nathaniel could tell him that something similar happens in every city, with people decamping for long weekends at their second homes or those of their richer friends.
But New York in August is uniquely revolting.
When the city permanently smells like garbage and the sidewalks never cool down, when the subways are unbearable and the lights flicker from too many air conditioners running at once, anyone who can find an excuse to get out of this city grabs it and flees.
The number of customers dwindles to a trickle. The Valdezes are in Puerto Rico, so the building is quiet, and will only get quieter when Susan takes Eleanor to visit her parents on Long Island.
Nathaniel goes upstairs to help Susan pack. She’s staring with grim determination at a suitcase that’s open on her bed. It’s the same one she arrived with in February, a tan leather Samsonite thoroughly defaced with travel stickers.
“You don’t have to go,” Nathaniel says, folding one of Eleanor’s little dresses and laying it in the suitcase.
“She’s their grandchild.”
“You still don’t have to.” Nathaniel doesn’t add that he doesn’t want them to go, because that’s selfish and also embarrassing, even though he’s sure Patrick feels the same way.
“They aren’t bad people and I’m not doing Eleanor out of a chance to have grandparents. There’s nothing they can say to me that I’m not ready for.”
“What does that mean?”
“Oh, you know. I’ll find someone new someday, I’m still young, at least I have Eleanor, et cetera.”
“Ah.”
“She means well. If she needs to spend the next week trying to reassure me that I’ll meet someone new, I can ignore her.” She picks up some rolling papers, sighs, and puts them back into her nightstand drawer.
He and Patrick wave goodbye from the curb when Susan and Eleanor ride off in the back of a cab.
“I’m going to miss them too,” Patrick says. He holds the door open and they both return to the too-empty shop.
“What if she forgets us?”
“Do babies forget people after two weeks? Parents travel all the time and you don’t hear about it ruining their kids’ psyches.”
“I don’t know,” Nathaniel says.
Patrick puts his arm around Nathaniel. “Even if she does forget us, she’ll remember us soon enough.”
The weight of Patrick’s arm and the gentleness of his voice are a disaster. Nathaniel blinks a few times. “All right,” he says, aiming for brisk and falling a mile short. “I’m going to take Walt on a walk now.”
He expects the walk to go poorly, that he’ll revert to the way things were in February, but his heart only gives a perfunctory flutter.
He stops at the deli around the corner and brings home a pair of corned beef sandwiches for lunch.
Patrick’s by the door when he gets back, trying to look like he wasn’t waiting for him.
For the rest of the day, it’s just the two of them, with a mostly comatose Walt napping wherever they happen to be.
The city is barreling toward a heat wave.
In two windows, Patrick has air conditioners, which he says he purchased a few years back when he realized that sauna levels of heat and humidity can’t be good for books, so the shop is bearable, at least.
That night, Nathaniel finds Patrick on the sofa, reading a pulpy-looking science fiction paperback. When he sees Nathaniel approach, he slides over a few millimeters—an invitation not just to sit, but to sit nearby.
“Let me get a book,” Nathaniel says. He’s read all the books Patrick lent him except the spy thriller, which he abandoned after the first few pages.
But Nathaniel’s never been able to leave a job half done, so he gets The Spy Who Came in from the Cold from his old bedroom.
When he sits on the couch, he twists around so his legs are in Patrick’s lap.
He’s expecting this book to be something along the lines of James Bond: glamour and intrigue, good triumphing over evil.
Instead, it’s the story of an already disillusioned agent getting two hundred pages of brutal evidence that intelligence systems can only function when they stop caring about anything resembling good and evil or right and wrong, stop caring about people as anything other than pieces on a game board.
It has more in common with Dashiell Hammett than it does with Ian Fleming.
It shouldn’t feel like anything groundbreaking. “Spies are up to no good” is hardly a new thought. But he’s never really considered that there must be people around the world who’ve been caught up in a rotten system, for good reasons and bad reasons and reasons that made sense at the time.
“You read fast,” Patrick says.
“It’s my only party trick,” Nathaniel says. “Give me ten minutes so I can see how badly this poor man gets screwed.”
“Why did you give me this book?” Nathaniel asks as he closes the cover and straightens the dust jacket. He doubts Patrick thought it had any special relevance to Nathaniel, but there must have been some reason.
Patrick shrugs. “I enjoyed it.”
Of course. Patrick took a look at Nathaniel—miserable, panicked, barely functioning—and decided to let him have things to enjoy .
Nathaniel’s hand strays to the notebook in his trouser pocket, but isn’t there.
He must have left it somewhere. He hasn’t written Patrick’s name in it—what if it fell into the wrong hands?
—but his name is the secret code woven into all the other items. He’s the precipitating factor.
The dividend. He’s the key the music is written in.
“Did you like it?” Patrick asks.
Absolutely not, Nathaniel wants to say. But there’s a moment in the book where the jaded spy tells his girlfriend that spies aren’t good ; they’re horrible people doing horrible things to keep ordinary civilians safe.
And that’s more or less what Nathaniel told himself for his entire career.
It’s for a good cause. It’s keeping people safe.
You can’t be decent when your enemies are ruthless.
Maybe that’s true. Nathaniel doesn’t know anymore. But that’s what police say when they’re shooting teenagers. It’s what the president says when he drafts more soldiers and bombs more civilians.
“I need to tell you something,” Nathaniel says.
“Can it wait?”
“Why,” Nathaniel asks, incredulous, “are you busy?” Nobody has ever looked less busy than Patrick does right now, his head tipped against the back of the sofa, his book open face down on his thigh.
“I mean, I could be,” Patrick says with a glance at Nathaniel’s mouth, a leer he might have been able to pull off if he didn’t look so shifty. “But you seem unhappy, like maybe you don’t want to talk about whatever this is.”
Patrick knows that he isn’t going to like whatever Nathaniel has to say. This might be the first time Nathaniel’s ever seen Patrick do something selfish. “All right,” Nathaniel says. “Tomorrow, then.”
When Patrick’s hand slides up Nathaniel’s thigh in a blatant attempt to change the topic, Nathaniel goes along with it. More than goes along with it, because he, too, wants this more than he wants that terrible conversation. If he gets one more night of being able to pretend, then he’ll take it.
* * *
At nine o’clock in the morning, Susan calls to wish Nathaniel a happy birthday.
“The phone is right next to Patrick’s bed,” she says. “It sure didn’t take long for him to hand it to you.”
“My god,” Nathaniel says, still mostly asleep, “you’re a regular detective.” It’s a terrible connection, like she’s calling from much further away than Long Island. “What’s the matter with your phone?”
“It’s on your end. I just got off the phone with my manager and the connection was fine.” He can barely hear her, what with all the static and clicking.
“How’s Eleanor?” Nathaniel asks.
“Spoiled rotten,” Susan says, as if the three of them don’t spoil that child at every opportunity.
It’s just a bad connection. But there’s a voice at the back of Nathaniel’s head insisting that it’s a wiretap. Nathaniel doesn’t even know what a wiretap sounds like. He knows his thoughts are driven by paranoia, not evidence. It’s the same as when he thought the burglary was suspicious.
Will it always be like this? Will he always be afraid that every bump in the night is his past catching up with him, his guilty secrets threatening to come out?
“Where do you want to go for dinner?” Patrick asks when Nathaniel reaches over him to put the receiver back in its cradle. “It’s your birthday, you can pick.”
The sheet slipped to their waists, but it’s already warm enough that Nathaniel doesn’t bother pulling it up. This conversation will contaminate the bed, but there isn’t anyplace it won’t contaminate, and Nathaniel doesn’t think he can stand another minute.
He rolls over to face Patrick, not wanting to take the coward’s way out by addressing his words to the ceiling. “I need to talk to you about what I used to do.”
“If you want,” Patrick says. He rolls onto his back.
“I worked for the CIA.”
Nathaniel makes himself watch as Patrick flinches. “Were you a spy?” Patrick asks after a minute.
“Not in the sense you mean. I had a desk job.” He wants to say that he had nothing to do with Vietnam, nothing to do with Southeast Asia in general, but he promised himself he wouldn’t say anything that’s even in the neighborhood of an excuse.
“I worked in signals intelligence,” he says, “specifically traffic analysis.”
Patrick furrows his brow, because of course none of those words mean the same thing to him as they do to Nathaniel. “Traffic?”
“Looking for patterns in how and when communications are being made. You can learn something even if the communications are encrypted. Helen’s a cryptanalyst,” he adds, even though that fact can’t possibly interest Patrick. “That’s how we met.”
“I thought you did math.”