9

“It’s one thing for Sami to criticize the”—Wynne lowered her voice to a whisper as if the small East Village art gallery had state-of-the-art audio surveillance—“FBI. Though you do it, too! You went from pride in your shield or badge thing to calling the bureau the dumbest fucks in government.”

“I never called them the dumbest,” I said. “That’s a tie between the postal inspectors and the Secret Service. No, most of my problems with the bureau were about its inflexibility.” I spoke in a normal voice since there was only one other person in the gallery, a twentysomething at the front desk. Clearly she’d recognized Wynne when we’d come in, but now we were at a more than safe distance. Also, she was now engrossed in cleaning under her fingernails with her lower left canine tooth.

I stared at the young woman, intrigued, but Wynne wasn’t mesmerized by her grooming. Her eyes stayed on me, narrowed, as if she had to squint to better perceive my flaws. Something was on her agenda. Sure enough, she made a tsk right before she spoke, that single click of tongue on hard palate, a Brooklyn-Queens sound that translates to I really hate having to say this. “For God’s sakes, what possessed you to call Sami?”

“I was getting nowhere fast. I needed someone who’d be willing to bend a few rules and do some background on Pete Delaney. Not that bureau agents don’t bend rules, but they do it mainly for their own careers. Or revenge. Sami’s more generous. He’d fuck over authority for any of his friends in the law enforcement community.”

I was trying to keep my eyes on a picture from the gallery’s exhibition. It was a mosaic comprised of marsupial, human, and insect faces, each less than an inch across. They were slightly convex, cut from some pliable metal, and painted. It was hard to overcome the urge to push in a face and see if it made that satisfying, tinny pop-out sound. However, when you stood back, the faces disappeared; what you saw was a patchwork of harmonious colors. At least, I supposed they were harmonious. Anyway, colors that looked good together.

“Those little human faces look like individuals. And I love the juxtaposition of, like, a praying mantis face and a koala bear, even though I don’t understand why the artist picked marsupials and insects. Do you?”

“No.” She was wearing a short dress the color of undyed Play-Doh. It was fitted on top, flaring below the waist. She tugged at the hem on each side for reasons I couldn’t fathom because it was perfectly even. “But while we’re talking juxtaposition,” she went on, “how about Muslim and Jew?”

“How about it?”

“I’m not talking prejudice. I’m talking that you are married. And not to him, because religion turned out to be an issue.”

“I know I’m married. And marriage was never on the table with Sami and me. Religion was the least of it. All right, not the least, but it was not the deciding factor. There was no decision to make. He chose to live a life that ruled out marriage. Service: like a priest, except to the United States instead of the Church. And without the celibacy, of course. I couldn’t have a husband who’d be saying, ‘I’m leaving tomorrow,’ so even if you’re working with him and know where he’s going, you have no idea how long he’ll be gone. It could be a long weekend or five months. Not for me. All my life I wanted a family. Including the husband part. I wanted precisely what I’ve got now.”

“Then why see Sami again? I’m not only reeling about your actually seeing him again, but that you initiated it.”

“What’s to reel about? I saw him, visually. I’m not seeing him, like going to an Indian restaurant and discovering we both love the cauliflower and potato thing.”

“Aloo gobi.”

My phone started vibrating. During my bureau days, I had kept it tucked in the side of my bra, under my arm, which precluded a clingy shirt but ensured I wouldn’t be interrupted by the cutesy ringtones that I tended to favor or, more important, wouldn’t miss a call. I kept it up when I first became a mother and Eliza was calling me four or five times a day. I understood she was checking if I was still alive, so I kept her as close to my heart as possible.

By now she was reassured, but the phone placement habit stuck. I pulled it out: Sami. “’Scuse,” I mumbled to Wynne, though I was halfway to the door. I walked outside. The street outside the gallery area had been partly gentrified, so when I said hi to him, I was on a narrow area of polished paving stones in front of another gallery. Its windows displayed things that looked like small meteors—the kind that might hurtle to earth and crush an Alfa Romeo yet not obliterate civilization. Right beside it, set back from the crumbling sidewalk, was an old-fashioned pharmacy whose sign said KAPLAN’S DRUGS.

“So I did your bidding,” Sami said.

I laughed and said, “That’s so like you, the obsequiousness.”

“I live to serve. You know, your Pete really is boring. But not the kind of boring that makes you think ‘cover-up.’”

I could feel the air going out of me. “So you think he’s okay?”

“Corie.” He always said my name as if it were a separate sentence. “You didn’t say, ‘Clear him or put him on a shit list.’ How the hell do I know if he is okay? Do you want to know what I found?”

“Please, go ahead.”

“No criminal record. No record of any court action, including bankruptcy. Birth certificate, of course.” Birth certificates meant nothing, which we both knew. They could be found or bought, the best ones being those of people who died in early childhood, in a different venue from the one in which they’d actually been born—ideally a place where record keeping was lax. Still, unless Pete had been planning a criminal career sometime between kindergarten and when he worked for the ad agency, chances were his name truly was Peter Delaney. “Born in Fort Wayne City Hospital, October 19, 1969.”

I’d switched screens and was typing in his information. “Parents’ names?”

“Joseph Delaney and Margaret Spencer Delaney.”

Sami spent his first ten years in Brasília; his grandparents had emigrated to South America from Egypt. Years later, his chemist father was offered a job in New Jersey, and the entire family—grandparents included—wound up in New Brunswick. Though Sami’s speech was accentless, I sometimes heard the music of Portuguese more than the words. “Joseph Delaney and Margaret Spencer Delaney” sounded a little like a dance song, though admittedly not a samba.

“Okay,” I said brightly, not that I felt it. “Thanks for doing this.”

“Two more things,” Sami said. It was so easy to picture him talking. His upper and lower lips were of nearly equal size and shape; with his mouth closed, they looked like an ellipse with a fold down the middle. “One: you didn’t ask, but I checked and he’s not in any witness protection program I could access. Listen, he could be ex-CIA who’s gone to ground, but I also looked into the packaging designer thing, whether he’d worked for an ad agency. There is a record of him at JWT, which used to be J. Walter Thompson.”

“Yes! I knew he worked at a big place, but I totally forgot the name. Thank you. This is super helpful.”

“I’m not done being helpful,” he said. “I got a photo placing him at JWT. I’m emailing it to you. Are you using the same address for your bureau-related email?”

I gave him my new alternative email address I used for contract work. As I talked, I noticed Wynne standing in front of the door of the gallery we’d been in, too far away to eavesdrop but still able to witness my überfemme stance, which she was kind enough to mimic. By the time I realized I had been smiling as I spoke to Sami, it was too late to change my expression.

“Am I off the hook now?” he asked.

“Yes, totally. I’m so grateful. Just one more thing.”

“Hey, I’ve got a job.”

“I know. It’s not a huge favor. Well it is, but not timewise. Can you see if you can find a birth certificate for Pete’s brother, Brad or Bradley Delaney?”

By the time I opened Sami’s email displaying a picture of a woman and three men, Wynne was hovering overly close to me. I could smell the flower scent of the pomade she used so no wayward strand could detract from her ponytail; every hair was in place and shiny. The pomade was from England and had a sweet but subtle bluebell scent.

“Who are they?” she asked, looking at the picture on my phone.

“It’s from some advertising industry magazine.” I spread out the photo so that the man second from the left took up most of my device screen. “That’s Pete Delaney.”

“Looks …” Wynne paused for a second. “Late nineties. That other guy in the red-and-black-striped sweater. So Kurt Cobain. Ugh, that girl in the culottes. Dreadful! You cannot name one person who was ever enhanced by culottes.”

I brought the photo back to size so we could read a couple of lines beneath the pic: THE TEAM THAT CREATED COOKIE CRUMBLES: L TO R, ELWYN PORTER, PETER DELANEY, JESSICA SCHWARTZ, NICK FALCONE.

Wynne took my phone, again enlarged Pete, and shrugged. “The faces are kind of fuzzy, but you can tell he’s not a looker. Though you wouldn’t pass him on the street and vomit,” she said. Pete had had much more hair then, light brown, and it was combed back and full, as if his entire head were one large pompadour. I didn’t know enough to deem his clothes late nineties or really put them in any decade. Gray pants, not tight but definitely not the old-guy baggy ones he now wore. White shirt in the style of a conservative business shirt but made of some more relaxed fabric like linen. “What’s the point of the picture?” she asked.

“It verifies his identity. Like you see in all those cop shows, how some perp gets hold of a birth certificate, almost always of someone who died young, and then bases his entire bio on a fiction created around the name on the certificate.” She nodded and tilted her head, waiting. “This photo of Pete means something. People with nonglam jobs often don’t have pictures of themselves in magazines. Well, now they do, or they have the equivalent on social media. But this places Pete Delaney in the job he claims to have had: an employee of a big advertising firm. Honestly? It’s disappointing. He isn’t using some newish fake identity. It’s either his actual name or a false one he’s been using for years and years. He was a packaging designer …”

I let out a big, silent sigh, so Wynne finished my sentence: “Who’s still a packaging designer. So you’re what? Discouraged that he is what he says he is, and was?”

“Yes, though come to think of it, that’s really not the hugest deal. Whatever is wrong with him, I don’t see it as an offshoot of packaging design. He’s not creating darling little zip bags for methamphetamines.”

“But you did say ‘meth.’ In your mind, is whatever he’s doing criminal?”

“Well, I know enough from my blessed human resources person and from Sami that I can be ninety-nine percent sure Pete had no government connection. Not like a perv, but yeah, criminal. There was something wrong about him that made me leery.”

“Well, you are a trained investigator, so that’s something.” I felt relieved that Wynne now seemed to be taking me more seriously after having been dismissive.

We walked back to the gallery and sat on a metal bench in front of another of the artist’s mosaics. We were too far from the work for me to see what the individual pieces were, if they had changed from marsupials to cats. From this distance, the tones of the pieces of this mosaic created tall and short rectangles. Almost a city. Not a big one. More like Fort Wayne. “Trained investigator or not,” I went on. “Am I back at the beginning? Still asking myself how to distinguish between a gut feeling and my personal conspiracy theory?”

Wynne put her palms together and rested the area between her brows on top of her index fingers, that devout gesture you see in the Christian section of bookstores. It was one of her deep-in-thought postures, like when she was agonizing between Frette and Porthault bedsheets for a client. “At first I thought you’re doing this because you need some excitement.”

“But you don’t think that anymore?” I asked hopefully. An insight was just around the corner.

“No, I still do, but I also think there’s more. I’ve pretty much stuck to one thing all my life. Call what I do aesthetics, call it design. Aesthetic assessments change, and certainly design preferences do. But I’ve stuck with my passion through a million different permutations. I wound up making a business out of it. But you were never like that. Don’t give me that sideways look, Corie. It’s not a criticism. It’s an observation. You just change interests. And with the change, you view yourself as a whole new person. You went from actor, lawyer, political strategist, Middle Eastern scholar. And that was just in college.”

“But one thing was always consistent: to settle down and have a family.”

Wynne stood and walked over to one of the smaller collages. Unlike me, she wasn’t a sitter in galleries and museums. She was so visually acute she could take in an artwork in less than a minute. I got up and joined her. “I know you always wanted a picket fence life, though you certainly never seemed unhappy being single,” she said.

“What about you?” I asked.

“We’re not talking about me. You. You took Arabic because registration for Chinese 101—”

“Russian.”

“—whatever you wanted had closed. And you hated it. You said it was incredibly hard. Then all of a sudden you fell in love with it.” She hugged herself on “love.” To outsiders it might seem a mean gesture, but it had been one of our shticks since middle school. “You’d be a diplomat in the Mideast and peace would reign. After that, it was no, not a diplomat, which was astute because your diplomacy quotient is close to nonexistent.”

“And you’re secretary of state?” I demanded.

“No. The only way I could be diplomatic would be to take a lifetime vow of silence.”

I went back to the metal bench and sat more gingerly than I had the first time. Finally, Wynne joined me. “But 9/11 changed everything,” I told her. “You know that. I applied to the bureau right after winter break of my senior year. I wanted to serve my country. So what if I tried on lots of future selves before that? Most people do it when they’re twelve or even twenty because they have no one clear vision of who they are. They’re just a bundle of interests. All I know is that when I joined the FBI, I had no idea what I was getting into. It wasn’t naïveté as much as the world had changed. I came to be passionate about the work, but there was hardly a night I didn’t feel sick with exhaustion.”

“Except now you’re out of that loop, living the life you supposedly dreamed of. But you seem to be searching out a high level of pressure. That’s what I’m having trouble understanding. Maybe I do, because you’re way understimulated. Except for Eliza, and Josh on occasion, you don’t love your life. Not the way I do or your mom does or your dad used to. Sometimes you look so not there, like you’re in cardiac arrest. You need a jolt to keep going.”

I shook my head slowly. “I’m not looking to go back. There were things I saw that will always haunt me.” Wynne jerked back her head. She looked startled. “And no, I won’t talk about them even now, even to you, and not only because they’re classified. There are things I did, too.”

“Like what?” she asked quietly. Her tone was placating, as if the tiniest bit more pressure could send me over the edge and I’d never come back. “You, personally, did something?”

“Not killing or torturing or anything like that. But it’s not like I long for the old days. It’s more complicated than that. I’m not really at home in either world, to be honest.” I stepped forward to take a closer look at a bluish-green mosaic. “I mean, it is true that Josh can be less than a thrill a minute. Sometimes less than a thrill a day.”

I’d heard how legions of women were after Josh starting after Dawn’s funeral, bringing him brisket, homemade cookies/brownies/madeleines, notes of solace, sympathy poems, and, several weeks later, erotica. Women pursued him for months, years. I’d met some of them around Shorehaven, at the courthouse, at legal events in Manhattan and Brooklyn; a fair number were both prettier and smarter than I was.

Yet I got him. I still wasn’t sure why. I gathered he viewed my work for the bureau as exotic. He was definitely hot for me. Now and then he even called me Nike, as in the Winged Victory statue, with her sinewy legs and powerful torso. Many nights, more asleep than not, he’d run a hand over my quads or hamstrings. Hot for me though I quickly realized I wasn’t his usual type. Sometimes I had worries—not exactly fleeting—that he’d revert to pattern and fall for someone who was not only excessively svelte, but in his estimation substantive: an expert on aleatoric music who was also teaching herself Sumerian. Yet, I was pretty sure that he’d been faithful to Dawn, and he seemed congenitally monogamous. On the other hand, she’d been a five-foot-ten size 2.

I continued: “Josh is everything I’ve always wanted.”

“I get paid extra for agreeing with your self-deception.” She paused. “Okay, that was too direct. Except you’ve told me that he’s not perpetually scintillating.”

“I know. And more and more, he doesn’t take time to have fun with us, or me, anymore. I thought he was happy where he was. But now he’s trying to get on the court of appeals. Which would be a huge honor, but …”

Wynne nodded with understanding. “It’s so important to him to be taken seriously,” she said.

“Right. It was easier to prove himself in a law firm, because the cases you brought in and how you performed were objective measures. It’s different when you’re a judge, and even when you’re great, how many people really care? Other judges and a few academics?”

“It seems to me Josh needs to be admired and not just by you,” Wynne said. “I don’t mean that in a sexual way or anything. Don’t you think he wants his wonderfulness announced, like: ‘Hey, the court of appeals thinks I’m boring enough to get a seat’?”

“I think so.”

“Is that it?”

“No. And I probably am sick of reading so much Arabic literature, and some of it really sucks, that most of the time all I want to do is sit in front of a huge screen and watch three episodes in a row of some second-rate British mystery series. And never again look at a book in any language.”

We went to the gallery next door to check out the meteor things. Wynne called them turds of the gods. I pointed out that several had red SOLD stickers on their bases. Wynne checked, and even she was shocked that they cost between forty-five and seventy thousand dollars per turd.

After two more days, I caught myself fondling my cell phone and realized I was like Aladdin’s mother rubbing the lamp he’d brought home. A jinn would appear. I’d be so startled I’d waste a wish asking for a call from Sami, who’d give me new and startling information.

Or maybe it wasn’t the information that I was wishing for. Maybe it was Sami.