Free Blood Makes Noise by Gregory Widen Page A

mission.
    “Where’s Short Eyes?” He was hammered and probably said it too loud. Barbara smiled.
    “Oh, he’s around. Probably on his knees in the stable boy’s quarters by now.”
    Short Eyes was her boss, the Dutch mission’s economic attaché. Notorious for his fixation with dark-haired boys, Barbara was his beard, someone over fourteen to have on his arm at social functions.
    Barbara drank from her glass. A rivulet of melted frost rolled over the back of her hand.
    “I’ve been checking the BA obits for a month now to see if you were killed in a car accident or something.”
    “What?” His face was stupid, and it annoyed her.
    “It’s a joke, Mike. You haven’t called.”
    “Oh. Yeah. It’s been, y’know, sorta crazy lately with—”
    “It’s a
joke
, Mike.”
    Last year, with work sinking to new lows and Karen’s morale beginning its ruined turn, Barbara had asked him to lunch. She didn’t eat meat—a weird, lonely practice in cow-crazy Argentina—and they ended up at probably South America’s only beat café. There, surrounded by Latin hepcats, she had ignored him, taunted him, then taken him home.
    She was thin, and it amazed him how breasts so large belonged to shoulders so narrow. When they got to her place nobody spoke, and before it was over he was already gone, reading the little paper notes around her phone as she gulped breaths in his ear. He thought how weird it was; how you spend most of your life thinking about sex, except during it, when your mind wanders.
    It was a rotten time for him, before the resignation set in. He hated his work and he hated going home, so he concentrated on the empty peripheries of his days: the wiretaps, the late-night interviews, Barbara. They met all that summer in her small flat, lay sweaty on a mattress, listened to the squeak of a fan shoveling leaden air from one side of the room to the other. Just like Russians…
    Sometimes he told her stories. But Barbara liked to talk, so they talked mostly of her: old lovers, home, life in the Dutchembassy. It was during a story about an argument between her boss and the ambassador that she stopped suddenly and drew away from him.
    “You’re working me, aren’t you?”
    They’d been making love that afternoon on her floor. She’d scooted against the wall.
    “What?”
    It was a kind of admiration worn on her clenched, half smile. “Sitting there listening about the ambassador and Short Eyes. You’re working me.”
    Michael understood finally and collapsed on his back in frustration. “Aw, c’mon, Barb. You know I’m not.”
    Her face changed. The weak smile disappeared as she studied him. “No, you’re not, I suppose.” A sigh, then as she pushed a damp strand of hair from her eye, “When I first met you, I used to think you were a spy by accident. You were too open, too boyish to be a real spook. But I was wrong. All those silly stories you tell, the innocence, you know it makes people feel intimate with you. But it’s all a lie, isn’t it?”
    “They’re real stories, Barb.”
    “But they’re nothing to do with the real you. They
feel
intimate, but they’re just a screen. By the time people figure that out, they’ve spilled their life to you. The sickest part is that you don’t even do it consciously. It’s just who you are.” She laughed then, hollow. “Dulles got a bargain when he hired you. The boyish cherub who’s really a cunning, ambitious little fuck and doesn’t even know it.”
    They didn’t talk much after that, and somewhere along the line he just stopped coming. Since then Barbara was ironic when she saw him. Not because he had worked her, but because he had worked her without noticing it.
    Her look fell from the party back to him. “So I was just a summer’s distraction.”
    “Jesus Christ, Barb, do we have to talk about it now?”
    “We
never
talked about it.”
    There was something dangerous about her today Michael didn’t want to provoke. So he did what he always