The Cutout (17 page)

Jackie freezes where she stands, outlined against the waving artichokes, the van at her back. Caroline watches the anger drain from her face, sees her eyes close in bitterness.

“It’s time to go,” Grandpa says quietly. “You go on, girl, and get in that van.”

The blond hair writhes as she turns. She gives him the finger. But she goes.

When the minibus stops for an instant at the end of the dirt drive and hesitates, then lumbers with the pain of hard old age in the direction of Santa Cruz, Caroline rises from the ground. She is suddenly sobbing. She has wet her pants. Her mother is gone, as she has gone every year of Caroline’s life. But Grandpa is sauntering slowly through the field, the shotgun barrel broken over his forearm. He is whistling a tuneless little song that might be “Happy Birthday.” He knows exactly where Caroline is; he has found her there before. In his other hand is a present tied in blue ribbon.

They do not hear from Jackie for another three years.

Caroline stirs in the airless dark of a hurtling plane. The gin has left her cotton-mouthed. She is flying toward Eric, who fell off her radar like vanished Bill Bisby— only this time the hero came sliding back down the
chimney. It is Christmas in midair, and Caroline is supposed to believe in miracles now, however improvident. What would her grandfather say to all this? What would he think of Caroline’s Eric?

He would wonder how she came to be so far from Salinas.

“My condolences, Mrs. Bisby,” says the man at the edge of the cemetery as the rain spatters down around them and their pumps sink into the mud. “Your husband was a good man. He died too young.”

Grandma weeps into her handkerchief. Caroline grips her elbow with one hand and an umbrella with the other. It is February, and Caroline is barely eleven years old—February, and whole sections of the coastline are falling into the sea, Highway 1 is closed. The artichoke fields and the expanse of garlic are drowned in mud. She tries not to stare at the crumbling edge of her grandfather’s grave, the way the loamy earth is sliding downward. She tries not to think of him at all.

The rain swept over Caroline’s grandfather while he drove south from San Jose in the dark; it dogged him down the curves of the Santa Cruz mountains; it filled his headlights and obliterated his windshield. He steered blindly into the grille of another truck, arms flung up before his face—and so he ended, the hero’s father, still believing his boy was coming home.

The silver-haired man standing before them in the Salinas cemetery pries the umbrella from Caroline’s hand. He clasps her chilled fingers in his enormous palm. She sighs deeply and, without thinking about it much, buries her face in his black raincoat. He strokes her hair while Grandma weeps.

“I’m Hank Armstrong,” he says. “Jackie’s uncle. I’ve come to take you home, Caroline.”

“Home” turned out to be a duplex on Park Avenue, a house on Long Island, a woman named Mrs. Marsalis who presided over the kitchen in a starched uniform. Home was home for only a few months of the year, because Hank was wise and would never make Grandma an enemy; Caroline’s real life was in Salinas, he knew, among the sodden fields. Hank sent Grandma money that year, “to help out with Caroline’s upkeep,” and took the child to Paris. He made plans for the following summer; he told Mrs. Marsalis to redecorate a bedroom in Southampton. He rejoiced in this gift of a child to light the winter of his life. He altered his will.

For the first time, Caroline flew in a jet plane and tried not to think of falling.

Grandma sold off the fields of artichoke and garlic; she took a pittance for the house her husband had built. She moved north to the city and accepted elevators. She stood over her sink, where there was no longer a window, and stared unseeing at the wall.

Caroline returned from her travels with Hank. She talked of Manhattan and of the Eiffel Tower. She practiced French. Large boxes of books arrived from New York each week, and Caroline read them aloud to her grandmother in the evenings. She read in bed long after the rest of the lights were doused. Hank paid for her private schooling. She wore a plaid jumper, a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar, a navy blue tie. Hank wrote to her on thick, cream-colored paper, in an elegant blue hand—or perhaps he dictated, and the hand was Mrs. Marsalis’s. The news from Park Avenue.
Nothing unfit for Grandma’s ears. But Caroline did not read his letters aloud. She tied them with ribbon and buried them in drawers.

He was a quiet man, Hank Armstrong, who marshaled his thoughts and chose his words with precision. He loved Caroline without understanding the point of expressing it. When she cried for her grandmother or fell into moping silence on days of relentless rain, Hank invariably offered her a book. It was the only comfort he knew.

He had married and been abandoned by at least three wives. He had no children of his own—just Jackie, his sister’s girl, who only called when she was broke.

It was on one of those occasions that Jackie had offered up Caroline, the prize chip in her floating crap game. And Hank had taken the gamble.

“I never understood your mother,” Hank told Caroline once, under the influence of gin and the Hamptons sunset. “But then, I never tried.”

She was supposed to go to law school and join Hank’s firm. That was always the plan, from the time she was fifteen—
Caroline will go to law school
, Hank said, and make him proud. Her intelligence should not be wasted. Her flashes of brilliance, her cunning with words, her shy smile above the private-school uniform—all offerings on the altar of good fortune.

What Hank wanted, Caroline knew, was
safety.
He wanted her life to be free from violence—the rage of feeling, the tragedy of wandering, the upheaval of passion and loss. And for the most part Caroline agreed. After all, emotion had never done much for Jackie. But in the end she turned her back on Harvard Law and chose Langley instead.

Hank toured the CIA campus on Family Day. He boned up on foreign policy. He talked of law school as something she had merely deferred. Until Eric Carmichael burst out of the Tidewater and confounded them both completely.

“Caroline is no trouble,” Hank had said proudly when she was seventeen; “Caroline follows her head, not her heart.” It was inevitable, she thought as her plane descended into German airspace, that the rebellion would come when Hank least expected it. There was something in her blood that was wholly un-Armstrong—a hint of Bill Bisby and his wild contrail, a fascination for free fall.

What if she were to call Hank now, to pick up the cabin phone and say,
Hank, I need you, I’m scared and I’m lost?

People had a way of betraying you. They died; they dropped off the face of the earth. Or worse, they traded their souls and came back down the chimney like vicious Christmas elves: a familiar face, a stranger’s heart, and a load of baggage on his back.

The trick was not to let them see you still cared.

FOUR
Berlin, 8:30
A.M.

G
RETA OPPENHEIMER DID NOT LOOK LIKE
the sort of person who should be manning the phones in a stylish front office. Greta wore heavy shoes with thick soles and the sort of stockings that were intended to suggest a glossy tan but merely cast a brown pall over instep and leg. Her face was crinkled. She applied a heavy concealer to the dark circles under her eyes each morning, but by ten A.M. the camouflage had worn off, and the smudged sockets peered out at the world with undisguised exhaustion. Greta’s clothes were sage green or charcoal gray. They conformed to the fashion of ten years previous, and might even have dated from that ancient period. Her dull blond hair was shot through with silver, unkempt, like a bird’s nest abandoned high in a leafless tree. She was a woman formed by hardship; she expected to disappoint. Greta lived alone, and festered in her loneliness. She was thirty-four years old.

Fred Leicester, who worked in the new U.S. embassy on Pariser Platz and contrived to ride the number 8 U-Bahn from Wittenau every morning, although he really lived
clear across the city in Dahlem, had a pretty good sense of who Greta Oppenheimer was. He knew that her parents had been poorly educated, that she had grown up in a small village in Thuringia and reported to the local factory at seventeen. He knew that her parents had died playing chicken on a single-lane highway when she was almost twenty and that she had married and divorced before she was twenty-four. He thought she might be religious, in a private and stricken way. In another era she might have turned ecstatic and raised stigmatized hands in praise of a punishing Lord. But the latest millennium preferred the prosaic. Greta forgot to speak in tongues. She turned receptionist instead.

The convulsive end of the German Democratic Republic in 1989 had carried Greta along like a Popsicle stick in a storm drain; history bewildered and drowned her. Ten years in unified Berlin had failed to improve her lot. Greta lived with one foot on the threshold of the present and her entire body leaning back into the past; she lived in ignorance and suspicion and a moral rectitude as lifeless as dust. She scrupulously saved every spare pfennig, without the slightest notion of what she would ever spend it on.