“Fair enough,” Dale said. “Canoe paddle, birch bark, and silence to the grave. All points nonnegotiable.”
The tattoo itself was fast and spectacularly painful. It turned out that Conrad was the acknowledged expert, and none of them spoke while he made seven small dots on Catta’s upper left arm with what looked like a small sewing needle that he put in the fire after dipping it in ink and before each impression. Dale poured alcohol over the marks. Smock laughed when he cried out. When it was done, Conrad handed him a blanket with holes in it. Catta stood up to leave, and none of them said anything. He walked over the rise in silence, with the threadbare wool blanket over his neck.
On the shallow path back to Baffin, the water ran all the way up to his chest now. He could feel the tide building, slowly pushing him off the high road and into the deep trenches. His arm stung where the tattoo was, but Cyrus said salt water healed everything. Looking back at North, there was no sign of the men or their fire. Even the glow was invisible.
63
George built a sort of nest in the hayloft, and he hoped from the outside it would look like hay bales thrown haphazardly into the loft. There was an old blanket hanging on a nail, which he put at the center and then made a small opening on the other side, for ventilation. Penny was sure that even if James and the smaller boys came back they would never find them, even if they had flashlights.
Once the boys had finished with George, they moved in a body back down the hill to the Cottage. There was no way he would sleep in that house tonight, among those cowards. George had lashed out and hit a few of them, although it was dark and he couldn’t see which ones he got or where he got them. He hoped they had bruises, so he could tell later who they were. He hoped one of them was James.
“Did it hurt much?” Penny had said.
“No,” George had said.
Penny climbed into the tiny space that smelled like dust and grass and horses, like the rough edges of a summer. George crawled in after her and lay down on the scratchy wool blanket and found an angle they both could tolerate.
64
Catta woke with the sun. He lay on a small patch of moss just off Baffin’s rocky beach, next to the channel separating him from Seven. He had recrossed Baffin along the dry creek bed in the dark, and it was hard: the path ended at the base of the ravine, where the machine was, and after that the creek-bed was overgrown and sometimes ambiguous. Several times he had to kneel down to feel with his hands for the small differences in grade between the surrounding forest and the path. Then it had stopped altogether. Soon he’d heard water on stones and then fought through the last dense, overlapping waves of pines to the rocky shore opposite Seven Island. Penny’s fire was out. It was not even smoking anymore. He heard an engine in the distance—it must be a lobsterman, he thought, which made him think of the Migration. All the sheep would run down the hill sometime after sunrise. He wondered if he would hear the gun.
Now he owed a debt: a canoe paddle and birch bark, to be delivered at the end of the Starks Cove dock on Seven proper. Meanwhile, his father had said he would reappear at three seventeen P.M. on the Baffin beach where they had left him. Yesterday seemed like years ago. He had two options: to leave, pay his debt, and keep moving, or stay on Baffin and let his father shake his hand and say How was it? or You’re late or even Well done. Even the idea of it was ridiculous.
Catta shouted to a cormorant flying through the channel, and the cormorant turned its head and answered back. His luck would never get better than that.
65
May 1964
Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
The end began with a lunch invitation. Hillsinger was summoned to the house of Michael Forrest for lunch on a Saturday, which was not sinister in itself. Forrest had been Chief of Station in Warsaw when Hillsinger was posted there. They were still closely in touch, and the summons had come with enough lead time to be plausibly social. Forrest’s wife had opened the door and offered him Scotch on a silver tray. She was Japanese and distantly related to Emperor Hirohito, which had apparently caused clearance problems when Forrest married her.
Forrest sat on the back porch at a table elegantly set for two. A tube in his nose was attached to an oxygen tank on wheels, and he was smoking an unfiltered cigarette. After a long career that had included several important posts overseas, Forrest had been, for a short time, the Deputy Director of Plans, the top operational job at the CIA. He resigned less than a year into it due to advanced emphysema. It was unusual for anyone to leave that particular job both alive and without controversy, but his medical condition was a special circumstance. Forrest continued to be well-informed, since the Director found it convenient to use him as a back channel to less savory elements in the global intelligence community. As Forrest himself put it, that was a smart strategy on the Director’s part. The messenger would be dead inside of a year.
Perfect day, Forrest said.
Paradise, Hillsinger said.
Did you bring that champagne I mentioned? Forrest said.
Hillsinger paused to make sure he had heard correctly.
Akiko put it in the freezer, Hillsinger said. I’m afraid it got warm on the way over.
I’ll remind her, Forrest said.
In Poland, he and Forrest had agreed that any extracontextual use of the term champagne would be code for present danger: surveillance, deception, imminent enemy action.
Forrest spoke to his wife in Japanese. A moment later, the sound of very loud opera floated out of the living room windows.
Is it that bad? Hillsinger said.
It’s worse, Forrest said. He lit another cigarette.
Are they here in the bushes? Hillsinger said.
Forgive me for being short, Forrest said. We have limited time, so let’s make sure their basic facts are correct.
Who is they? Hillsinger said.
The people neither of us want them to be.
Are we on the record here?
Of course not.
Are you officially sanctioned?
Do I look official to you?
Are you wired?
No. That’s why we’re using Puccini to defeat your surveillance.
My surveillance? Hillsinger said.
Wake up, Forrest said. I will ask, and you will answer. Were you or were you not recruited this year for an intradepartmental Wise Men panel on the Subotin defection?
Hillsinger did not speak. He was not worried yet, although he had to assume, despite assurances, that Forrest was recording this conversation and that anything he said would be admissible either in court or as part of an internal tribunal. He had been part of those. He had seen it done.