Ministers of Fire. Mark Harril Saunders
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smell of licorice rose from the glasses.
“My father raised vegetables,” she told him. “He would make them come up out of the ground like a sorcerer. Rocky ground it was, too, but fertile just the same.”
“Did you and Jack have a garden in Berkeley?”
She laughed, somewhat ruefully, and handed him a glass. “Jack is more like one of those bitter weeds that grow out of the cracks in a sidewalk. You have to respect his kind of strength. Hack him down, he just keeps growing back.”
“How did you meet?”
April sighed and lowered herself on the long leather couch, and Burling stood above her, tentatively drinking. “When I entered the program at Cal, I felt very detached. All the other kids were privileged, very stoned and theoretical. I went down to a gym in Oakland to see if I could teach the girls from the neighborhood basketball. And there was Jack, just back from his first tour. His grandfather’s mission had funded the gym.”
“I just realized,” Burling said, feeling his height and sitting down on an ottoman. Their knees were almost touching.
“What did you realize?”
“That I don’t want to talk about Jack.”
April smiled, which narrowed her eyes. “We’re not going to make it here, you know,” she said, watching for his reaction over the rim of the glass, “in Godwin’s office.”
“Was that supposed to be on the agenda tonight?”
“I’m probably not even your type,” she said, bringing the glass again to her lips. They were plump, of a rare shade of pink, defined by clean lines against her pale skin. He thought again how they had felt against his, the slight pressure receiving him, and the hardness of her teeth inside.
He had to take in breath to gather himself. “Why do women always say that to me?”
“That we’re not your type?”
“Yes, but why?”
“Because under most circumstances, you wouldn’t even look at a girl like me.”
“I would find it impossible not to.”
“That’s sweet, and I know you’re not lying, right this minute, but if I had come to your office, the summer I interned at State, you wouldn’t have been any more than polite.”
Burling took a quick gulp of the arak to steady himself. She wouldn’t have found him at the Department of State, of course, but she would certainly be aware of that. Jack would not have been reticent on that score. “Why do you think so?”
“Because you’re a sophisticated man. Worldly. Handsome, but not so good looking that people wonder.”
“No?”
She smiled to acknowledge his feigned disappointment. “You move like you played a sport, football or basketball, maybe had an injury or two, but you’re careful so as not to hurt anyone smaller than you. You went to private schools, and you’re probably rich, or at least well off compared to most people, and now you’re being groomed for one of the top political appointments—deputy national security advisor, or number two at CIA.”
“Shhh,” said Burling, pointing at the ceiling where the microphones would be. Taraki’s government had the benefit of Soviet security expertise. “Who says that?”
“Jack. Besides, you married a debutante.”
“Not quite,” Burling said. “When I met her, Amelia was rebelling against being a society girl. Drinking and going to jazz concerts with men. It’s her money, by the way. My family lost ours long ago.”
“What luxury!” said April. “To reject what others want more than anything.”
“What do people want? Amelia and I are about as conventional as can be. The problem is what goes on in my head. I tend to disappoint people.”
“Are you going to disappoint me?” April asked, pointing to his nearly empty glass.
“I’ll have one more, if that’s what you mean,” he said, draining it.
April got up. She seemed somewhat hardened now, yet still he couldn’t help feeling encouraged. When he envisioned the journey up north, she was already with him in his mind. Up to Samarkand, over the Pass. Translating Dari and Pashto and whatever else they ran across. It was probably a very bad idea to take a woman, but he was making up reasons that it had to be done for the sake of the mission, and he had already begun to believe them.
“I need you to stay with me,” he said.
She looked at him over her shoulder, half-angrily, half-wanting. At least that was what he hoped. “I already told you, I can’t do that.” She said it softly, as if to the glasses she was filling.
“That’s not what I meant,” Burling said, accepting the fresh drink. They stood close, their glasses resting against each other in salute. “When the charter flight leaves tomorrow, I need you to stay. Come over here.”
“Be careful,” she warned. “Jack is probably out in the garden right now. He’s getting high again, and when he does that he likes to talk to the marines.”
“That’s why I can’t take him with me,” he said, setting down his glass on the corner of the desk, “even though he knows the terrain.” On a yellow legal pad, he wrote, I have to go up North, to Mazar-i-Sharif, to talk to the mujahedin. “Things are happening faster than I thought, and I need someone with languages.”
“I came out here to help with girls’ education,” she said, sounding slightly desperate now. “Just because I speak Dari doesn’t mean I understand what these men are up to. And I don’t care what Jack says, killing Godwin didn’t make any sense.”
“Oh, yes, it did,” Burling said, sampling the new, stronger, mixture. “Ever heard of Franz Ferdinand?”
“That’s another problem. I’m not as smart as you are.”
“Now you’re patronizing me,” Burling said. “You know what I think?”
April raised her eyebrows. “I wish I did.”
“You’re perfect for this.”
sunday morning, burling’s family left, boarding the DC-3. Only Luke, young and game enough still for the flight on an airplane to excite him, looked back across his shoulder at his father. Amelia stared resolutely at the seatback in front of her, and their daughter Elizabeth already had her nose in a book about Emily Dickinson. Jack Lindstrom sat in front of them, “headed for an epic druggie meltdown in the States,” as April put it.
As the plane took off, leaving a trail of oddly black exhaust, and tilted across the mountains to the east, Burling thought about his children. Another secret thing he cherished was a potent love for Betsy and Luke, but he had probably lost them, too, if he had ever really had them. They were beautiful, but he had thrown off the delicate balance of that beauty through his failure with their mother. It made what he was about to do all the more important, so that someday they would understand, and the pieces could be put back together into a larger, more beautiful whole.
That afternoon he took April on a different kind of plane, a light Cessna of the type they had used in Vietnam. Its spartan cabin shook as the engines choked to life. In the front seats rode the pilot and a young Afghan man named Abdul Hadi who worked as a liaison to the government, but was run as an asset by Burling. In the narrow seats aft, pushed together by the tapering fuselage, sat April and Burling. As the Cessna climbed above the mountains to the north, April smiled at him quickly from behind her shining hair. She wanted to be a part of his world, but what did he want from her? In his office, sharing the arak, he hadn’t kissed her again, but the possibility had hung between them like a strong magnetic field. It crackled there now, at the margins. The hard stuff—as Godwin had called it—excited her. He knew that he was taking advantage of that, and yet he didn’t, couldn’t