“I’ll pop a bitch.” That was Miranda. Tawny skin, wavy hair, with a saucy sailor’s tongue who always seemed on the verge of going rogue or blowing up some building in protest. She was sharp, incisive and, based on my short friendship with her, passionate with a whiff of danger. But nothing was ever as it seemed in this world, this country – a Latin American country culturally crowded with anger, recklessness, and greed – a country I call El Dorado (the actual name I’m hesitant to reveal for reasons all leading to danger); not its real name, but appropriate since the mythical city of gold, riches and mystery, was like this country, except instead of gold it was paved with cocaine, padded with U.S. dollars, and built on the rough soil of violence.
Miranda was a CIA case officer like me. Dan didn’t trust her. I don’t think Dan trusted me. Sometimes I didn’t trust Dan. He was the Station Chief in El Dorado and, from what I know, was commanding and curt. He was stingy with words and attention and seemed tantalizingly mean, which was like feral musk because I was sure his heart would soften and eventually open for me.
We were all on edge about MS-13, the 18th Street Gang, the other potpourri of political groups, and the increasing combustibility of world politics. Every day it seemed like a divide was being dug deeper and deeper between two sides; sides that hovered in shadows and shade, gathering strength to strike like thunder at some precise moment.
The U.S. embassy in San Negro (also not the real name of the capital), El Dorado sprawls like a lumbering beast on a high proud hill, the largest hill in the city, and is surrounded by palm, balsam and other native trees. In the rainy season the foliage around the embassy grounds swells and hangs heavily like a milk filled breast, while flying bugs, some as long as a finger, zip and feed on the green succor of the plants. In the dry season, which was brief, tiny bizarrely thorny flowers studded the ground and attracted plump, somnolent lizards.
The embassy juts upward, stately and impressive, and is painted cream with terracotta tiling on the roofs. It is one of the largest U.S. embassies in the world, and nearly all the personnel live on the premises: the city was even more dangerous and unpredictable than the rest of the country. It was a rather pretty embassy, of course this seemed inconsequential, even trivial, as the building, like the country it belongs to, was overwhelming heavy with power and in the early morning when people, desperate and somehow glossed with dim hope, stood in a line that snaked around the enormous walls and armored chancery, it seemed forbidding, unloving. And it was unloving. The bosom of America was deflated and stingy; there was no warmth, not even a courteous welcome. The U.S. embassy was unlike any other embassy in the city. It dominated the landscape of San Negro and even the outlying cities cradled in the immense valley where orange and lemon trees briefly flowered and then wilted in the unforgiving and unabating heat. The embassy was like an anemic, judgmental eye chastising the terribly poor and the haunting homeless hoards that engulfed the city and paraded down the boulevards in rags, begging for corn cakes and cheesy corn sold by vendors that feared them.
Within the embassy, inside the massive walls, was a haven of trim gardens, putting greens, and tiled paths leading to the brackish lake, the cold pool, and the many buildings, some squat and some stately, that housed a population of three-hundred and twenty-three American souls that mostly seemed bored and directionless; and ignorant of the brutish disease of unrest and division strangling the country. Perhaps I was projecting.
Miranda and I had lived in adjacent studios with beige walls, lazy ceiling fans, and brown, ordinary, boring furniture designed to give us a hint of being in the States because our living quarters, sad but adequate, seemed like rooms you would find at a second rate motel off a highway in Nebraska. It was home and it was not home. I had so few things – most of my belongings were in a storage facility in Maryland. If I got a transfer I could pack up quickly; one suitcase and a valise I got from a leather store in Cannes after I helped nab a German arms dealer.
The four walls of my studio, my home, unsettled me. It: it was like a rodent was methodically nibbling on my brain, slowly consuming my sanity. My mind is still caged and paranoid; brutality impairs it and drives it. There is no room for the self to take root and blossom; there is no possibility for the self to individuate and balance a world stricken by the illness of politics.
We were in the Control Room, a sizable conference room with multiple, shiny computer screens mounted to the pale, availing walls, a line of laptops opened like skinny clams on a lengthy and narrow table, as well as burnished silver desks with desktop computers, a long, black conference table that seemed to engulf the room like a gleaming onyx island, and swivel chairs the color of crimson. It was where the Ambassador, Kevin Miller, was daily briefed in a brief manner. He seemed to be only interested in fielding calls from President Dreiser, his wife in Hong Kong who was a millionaire fund manager, and playing on the midget golf course.
Miranda was sitting, filing her nails and mumbling in Spanish. She could speak Spanish in six different accents, according to her declaration. Her parents were Colombian born, lived in Tampa, Florida in an old folks place, polished and cute, next to a swampy field that morphed into a sand dune and led to the beach. They seemed to be having a good time according to Miranda’s reports. Her parents were in good health, except her mom was forgetting things. They had six grandkids and doled out hundred dollar bills as little gifts to those spoiled children. Her father had owned a car dealership and her mom worked for Social Security. They had invested wisely, built a substantial 401(K), and there was the sweet government pension. Miranda had shared all of this the day I first met her, which I found odd but I welcomed it as I had no friends, no intimacy with another person. I did not reciprocate her wealth of information, but greedily consumed her words like sweet ambrosia.
Miranda was their quirky girl. She told them she worked for the State Department in Los Angeles and that she was an assistant or something like that. They figured her Dartmouth political science degree was a waste. It kind of was. She was thirty-five, unwed and childless, lacking in an intimate partner, quiet, when not teasing me, consumed by work, and a reader of myth and legend. She was exactly like me, except I was partial to Victorian novels: I read Dickens on breaks from interrogating. No one really knew we gave our lives to the Agency; only the many Station Chiefs we had worked for and the agents and case officers we worked alongside. We gave our lives, our whole damn soul, to black and white. At the university, everything was gray. Every word was sopping in gray muck, particularly when I attended law school. Ask a lawyer a question, chances are they will say “it depends”. Not at the Agency. You got an order and you didn’t question it, you just did your fucking job. They gave you very little information. Sometimes you knew you were taking down a real bad guy. That was rare. The German arms dealer – he was bad. I could smell the stench of wickedness on him, like one of those Nazi doctors the Israelis went after when the war ended.
“I want Alvarez,” I told Miranda. Dan was standing in the doorway of the conference room. He was tallish, muscular, but not overly so, he looked lithe, not bulky, there was some balding of his blonde hair, and a confident air that could quickly turn arrogant. There was a slight cragginess to his face that looked like it could be resolved by a long sleep. He was in his early fifties. His eyes were gray; murky like bog water. I knew those eyes caught every detail. He was a Harvard man with a PhD in Latin American studies or so he said. He grew up in LA, like me, and his Mexican nanny imbibed his high school accent. He tried to be like Miranda, but his accent didn’t budge from being Northern Mexican. Chihuahua. Careful where you get your nannies from.
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