When she left the city, Ariel deliberately ditched those attributes she’d long considered assets; they had become impediments. She gave up her city habits, her city attitude, her city style, including all that hair, all the shampooing and conditioning and drying, the coloring and styling and blowouts, all that time and money that she no longer had. Now she gets her hair cut by Deb, who operates a single chair from the front room of a run-down Victorian at the seedier end of Main.
“That’s what you want?” Deb asked, looking at the magazine picture Ariel had dog-eared. “You sure?”
Ariel nodded. She was the single parent of an infant, barely time to shower, much less deal with long hair.
“You know what I call that cut?”
“What?”
“The Commando.”
Ariel had already given up manicures and pedicures and facials, the relentless exercise and constant starvation and continuous hydration, the makeup and the jewelry, the form-fitting jeans and short skirts and shorter shorts, the low-cut blouses and side-boob dresses, the complex time-consuming enterprise of constantly maximizing her physical attractiveness, her sexiness, the incessant effort of attracting attention—look at me, please, please look at me.
“Yes,” Ariel said, “the Commando is exactly what I want.”
It’s not that she no longer wants to be attractive; she does. But mostly she wants to be attractive to herself, not to every stray lecher who honks his truck horn at her, ogles her at the supermarket checkout, propositions her from a secluded corner of a dark street, every catcall a blatant reminder of how vulnerable she is.
*
“Let’s listen to that part again. The last thirty seconds.”
“Sure.” Kayla slides the cursor, hits the triangle. Griffiths closes her eyes, sharpens her hearing.
“You don’t think I’m calling without any leverage, do you? You don’t for one minute think—”
“Stop talking.”
“—that with the paternity records, and the Hamptons police report, and—”
“Goddamn it! Stop. Talking. Go to the embassy.”
“I was already at the embassy. Twice. And now it’s the middle of the night. It’s closed.”
“Someone will open it.”
“When?”
“I guess right now … Go now.”
Griffiths opens her eyes. “That voice sounds so familiar. Doesn’t it?” Voices, out of all context, can be tough to recognize. But sometimes all you need is a little hint.
Jefferson doesn’t respond. This is something that Griffiths respects about the young woman: If she doesn’t know the answer, she doesn’t fill the void with empty words and wild guesses.
“Okay,” Griffiths says, “there are a lot of clues to this guy’s identity in this conversation. Get started.”
“Sure thing. May I ask a question?”
“Shoot.”
“Why do we care about the identity of the man who might or might not be providing the ransom money?”
“That conversation sounds a lot like extortion, doesn’t it?”
“No doubt about it. But extortion is a crime for the Bureau to investigate, not a matter of national intelligence.”
“Unless it is. That depends on who it is who’s getting extorted. This guy definitely sounds sketchy to me—paternity records, police, millions of dollars. And most important of all: He’s extortable. That in and of itself raises red flags.”
Jefferson nods vigorously. She has that look of young people who are ready to work.
“Speaking of sketchy men: Where’s Guido?”
Jefferson doesn’t miss a beat. “He needed to run an errand this morning.”
“Oh yeah? What was that?”
Jefferson shrugs.
“Maybe to get some stitches?”
The young woman’s suppressed smile is all the answer Griffiths needs.
“What about Saxby Barnes?” Jefferson asks. “Shouldn’t we read him in at this point?”
Griffiths is worried about where this investigation will lead. Until she knows more, she doesn’t want the circle to include anyone who might have conflicting motives. Griffiths doesn’t know what motivates Barnes, where his loyalties lie, his ambitions.
“No,” she says. “I don’t think so. In fact I should go gag him, right now. Could you come with me, please?”
“Of course. Why?”
“I want to be extra-sure that there are no future misunderstandings about what Barnes was told, and by whom, and when.”
*
Ariel checks the burner: nothing. Her own cell too, more nothing, just some work irrelevancies, some spam, an invite to a midsummer-break school potluck, one of those opportunities for the alpha moms to bake Instagrammable cakes. For these sorts of events Ariel buys a box of supermarket cookies, plunks it down on the table in its commercial packaging. She doesn’t have time to bake on a weekday, and she’s not going to pretend otherwise. In fact she’s proud of it.
Plus she would never social-share a cake. The bookshop has a few of the obligatory accounts, and Ariel does some lurking. But her name doesn’t appear anywhere, and she doesn’t do the posting. All of that is handled by Persephone. If there’s one thing that girl’s generation knows how to do, it’s share on social media, and overshare, the type of behavior that not long ago was considered shameful—the insecurity, the hunger for validation, the naked self-promotion, even the explicit sex-tape—but is now accepted, rewarded, celebrated, required.
Ariel does snap the occasional photo—mostly of her child, her dogs, her new goat—and every December she orders glossy prints of the year’s best shots, organizes them into a leather-bound album, slid onto the bookshelf next to last year’s. A Christmas present to herself, for the future: her past.
Will this year’s album include anything from this trip? Maybe the couples selfie with John, the one she showed to the chambermaids. She hopes so. She hopes that one day this will be a story that she’ll be able to tell, when the whole thing has become ancient history. But she doubts it.
*
Breakfast service is coming to an end. Ariel is now the only guest in the big room, sitting at the same table for the fourth morning in a row. Tomorrow was supposed to be their final morning here, before driving out to the coast for a couple of nights at a beach resort.
The television behind the bar is again tuned to English-language international news, a recycled puff piece about the VP nominee, a hagiography of the Ivy League education and the Little League coaching, the charitable giving and service in the National Guard. The point is clear: This is a man willing to sacrifice his time, to donate his money, to risk life and limb, all for the safety and integrity of his community. This man is a patriot.
But what does that mean? The same can be said of the men in Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, of ISIS and the Ku Klux Klan, of the Nazis and the Spanish Inquisition and Attila the Fucking Hun. All held their convictions passionately. All devoted themselves to protecting their communities against invaders or conquerors or infiltrators or infidels, or at least used that rationale as a justification to gain power, to retain it, to profit from it. To subjugate and exclude and exploit.