10

The Weeder sat on the edge of the tub in the upstairs bathroom, holding out his hands, palms up. He turned his head away as Snow, wrapped in a terrycloth robe, dabbed antiseptic on the wounds. She unscrewed the cap from a tube of homeopathic cream and squeezed a gob of it onto each palm. Soaking in a hot bath had calmed her down, though from time to time her lips trembled, her voice cracked, as if she were suddenly remembering, suddenly reliving. “You can start by rubbing your palms together,” she instructed him. “And by telling me what’s going on. Who were those people? And why did they want your money and your life?”

The Weeder rubbed his hands together and inspected them. A raw burn mark slanted diagonally across each palm.

“You haven’t answered my question,” Snow reminded him.

He raised his eyes and looked directly into hers. She turned away and walked across the bathroom—her limp was more pronounced now, probably because she was exhausted—and leaned tiredly against a tiled wall. The white of her bathrobe blended with the white of the tiles, so that all that seemed left of her was her deathly pale hands and face. “If you’re right about what you said before,” she ventured, “they tried to kill me along with you because they assumed you had already told me what you won’t tell me now.” She could see he was wavering. “Just before Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in a river, she wrote something about having gone too far to come back again. Me too—” Snow’s voice faltered. “—I’ve gone too far. If you are offended by invasions of privacy, think of those balls crashing through the walls of that building.”

He had thought about little else—while they were cringing in the pitch darkness of a windowless basement laundry room listening to the teardrops eating away at the sixth floor; when they tunneled out of the building at nightfall, Snow shaking like a leaf, and cleared the snow off the window of his rented car; when they drove through the silent streets without exchanging a word, the outside sounds muffled, Snow’s teeth chattering from fear, the Weeder’s eyes glued to his rearview mirror.

Snow emitted a nervous laugh. “In view of what we’ve been through, I invite you to call me what everyone else calls me, which is Snow.”

The Weeder said, “You’re not going to believe what I tell you. You’ll think I’m making it all up.”

She smiled one of those smiles she used to hold back the tears. “Try me.”

And so he told her: about the organization in the government he actually worked for; about Wanamaker and Operations Subgroup Charlie and Stufftingle; about Kabir College and vicious circles of uranium imploding, forming a critical mass, starting an uncontrolled chain reaction, otherwise known as an atomic explosion; about how he had stumbled across it all while trying to settle an old score with Wanamaker; about how he had tried to head off the atrocity by threatening to expose it; how Wanamaker had called in a retired admiral named Toothacher to walk back the cat and plug the leak. Once the Weeder started talking he found it difficult to stop. The emotional strain of the last few days put pressure on the language he used to describe his experiences. Words, phrases spilled from his lips. He sidetracked, backtracked, skipped ahead, drew conclusions and provided the evidence in bits and pieces afterward. “Wanamaker was responsible for her death. If he had shown the slightest remorse, given the faintest indication he was sorry. But he didn’t, did he? And I had to wipe the smug smile off his face. So I invaded his space, his privacy, and found out about Stufftingle. And now he’s trying to invade mine.”

“Ours.”

He nodded. “Life is arranged in vicious circles too,” he plunged on. “I knew Wanamaker was on to me, was trying to eliminate me, because I recognized the burly guy in the parking lot, the one who tried to incinerate me—he used to be the Admiral’s driver. I remembered him from when the Admiral came down to lecture at the Farm. His name was something like Hukstep. That’s it. Huxstep, with an x. He used to do arithmetic tricks—he could multiply numbers in his head faster than you could work out the problem on paper. I remember we were all taking a course, it was called Tradecraft, Introduction to. It was a requirement, even for historians, even for future weeders of trivia. They would blindfold us and drop us off at night in a cornfield in the middle of nowhere and tell us to find our way back to the Farm before dawn. I was brought in by state troopers thirty-six hours later. They told us to sneak into a factory producing jet fighter planes and steal anything we could get our hands on. I was arrested by the security people as soon as I put a foot in the door. One thing I did right, though. They told us to follow someone—anyone—who worked on the Farm and report back on where he went, what he did. To this day I don’t know why I picked the Admiral. I followed him two nights running. Two nights running Huxstep drove him to a roadside bar out in the boondocks. It was a pretty seedy place. The Admiral was burning the candle at both ends, so to speak. So I wrote it all up in my report and handed it in to my instructor. The next day the director of the school called me down to the front office. He was reading my report when I walked in. It was two pages long. Succinct. The punctuation was correct. I am very interested in punctuation, which tells you how things are related. You’re not to talk about this report to anyone, the director said. Ever. The Company doesn’t make a habit of washing its dirty linen in public, the director said. The Admiral’s retirement was announced in the newspapers a week later.”

The Weeder rambled on, chopping the air with his rope-burned hands, talking about how the Company had lost its moral compass; had adopted the tactics of the enemy; had become the enemy. Historians were painfully familiar with the precedents, he said. This was what had happened to the Bolsheviks after their revolution: to fight White terror they invented Red terror. And when Red terror triumphed it became institutionalized. It was no longer a matter of persuading people who disagreed with the Bolshevik point of view but of terrorizing them. Wanamaker’s Operation Stufftingle had to be seen as Company terror, institutionalized. My man Nate, the Weeder said, would turn over in his unmarked grave if he knew about this. It was not what he had put his life on the line for. Was Snow—without thinking he used her name for the first time—was she familiar with the instructions issued by the Provincial Congress for raising an army? No? The Weeder happened to know the passage by heart, had even used it as an epigraph to his dossier on Nate. And he lifted his eyes and recited: “Let our manners distinguish us from our enemies, as much as the cause we are engaged in.” Manners, of course, was to be understood in the old sense of the word, that is, as a reference to the moral aspects of conduct. Socrates, who had a tendency to reduce all philosophy to manners, argued that the greatest wisdom, the best manners, allowed you to differentiate between good and evil. In our day, in our society, manners refer to the way you hold your fork, and the Company, through the good offices of its obedient servant Wanamaker, was able to convince itself that our national interests would be advanced by the seemingly accidental explosion of an atomic bomb in the heart of Tehran.

The Weeder would have continued if Snow’s great-aunt hadn’t called upstairs, in a voice musical with age, that the soup was as hot as it was going to get. Snow ducked into a bedroom and threw on some clothes and came back to take the Weeder down. “The good part about what happened,” she told him, “is that they must think we’re buried in the rubble of that building, which means we’re safe for a while. It could be weeks before they find out otherwise.”

“The Ides of March is a week from Tuesday,” the Weeder noted.

“What has that got to do with anything?” Snow asked.

“That’s when the bomb is supposed to explode in Tehran.”

Snow understood what he was driving at. “Unless—”

“Unless they know I’m alive and will blow the whistle on them if the bomb goes off.”

“You’re not—”

The Weeder said, “I don’t see that I have much choice.” And he added with a twisted, abashed smile, “I have my man Nate to think about.”