Ministers of Fire. Mark Harril Saunders
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A spine of dry, trackless hills hunched up before them, and the pilot nodded, taking a drink from a flask and offering it to Burling, who politely refused it.
“Is this where the ones who killed Godwin went?” April asked.
Abdul Hadi turned to look at her. He was uncomfortable with her presence, and Burling felt it as a judgment on him. The Afghan might be on his payroll, but where Abdul’s ultimate loyalties lay—to the Americans, Taraki, or his clan—was definitely a matter of concern. “She’s merely cover,” Burling had told him. “When we get to Samarkand, she’ll be my wife.”
“Hey, Lucius,” said the pilot, cocking his head to one side. They looked down at the pocked, ochre dirt.
“Mines,” said Burling, nodding. The plane’s feathery shadow blew across the expanse. “That’s the Soviet border down there.”
in samarkand, the minarets were silent. the madrassah with its symmetrical blue-tiled façade was empty of life. In the center of town, an old hotel faced a large, shaded square. Its lobby had the stale, dour feeling of a place for English travelers on the Continent; the old British ladies who played bridge in the cool dusty corner by the stairs seemed right at home. On the roof was a terrace strung with multicolored lights, and on the night following their arrival, Burling boarded the creaky old lift with April, to eat “en plein air,” as he said. He had dressed in khakis and his white linen shirt, as if playing the part of a colonial in a play. His hand spread gently across April’s back as he helped her to her chair.
Children ran through the tables while their parents sat smoking over the wreck of their meals. The night air was blue with their fetid tobacco, which smelled as strong as Jack’s dope, and the savor of herbs and roasted meat. In one corner of the roof a raggedy band sat on the edges of folding chairs, war medals flapping on their chests in time with the swing.
“Dance?” Burling said.
On the floor, the touch of their hands seemed quite harmless, refined.
“I’ve never been asked like that,” she told him when her cheek was close to his. He could feel the slight tremble returning, and he didn’t answer her for fear he would stutter, something he had struggled with as a child. “In southwest Virginia the boys don’t typically ask, they just take you.”
No one else joined them, and the old English ladies nodded their approval; their milky blue eyes tacked from April to Burling as the couple drew more closely together beneath the star-strewn globe of the sky. The ladies said they hadn’t seen a man dance like that since the Blitz, and they fixed April with watery stares that were fond and regretful. The music was flat, an uneasy rendering of the big bands that Burling used to play in the living room at home—his Washington home—in a time that seemed long ago now. The music felt wrong in this dry, spicy air. No scratch of cicadas with their manic crescendo, no scent of honeysuckle sweetening the night. So far from Amelia advancing through the soft, firefly dusk toward the picnic table, flowered apron tied loosely across her hips, leaning over to pick up plates. No Glenn Miller from the open kitchen window behind her. The arid Soviet night had an electric taste of betrayal and he and April glided through it with ease while the people talked about them in Russian and English and the keening of Dari.
“Why did you really bring me up here, Lucius Burling?”
Across the tables, the lift opened and a young Chinese man emerged. Burling knew from the sharp concentration of her eyes that April had seen him. Her body stiffened, which improved their dancing, as if she had taken the lead. Behind the younger Chinese came a short, fat man about Burling’s age, his thin hair combed across his scalp. The thought ran through Burling’s mind that he wanted to spoil this now, to save himself. Bringing the Chinese in complicated the whole thing beyond what he was able to predict.
“I’m serious,” said April. “If you brought me up here just to fuck me, that I can understand. And Jack can’t seem to do that anymore, in case you didn’t know, so I might just be up for it. But if you pretend there’s something else, if you’re just putting on a show . . .”
“I don’t know how to do this properly,” Burling told her, watching the Chinese colonel take his seat. “Even those ladies over there, watching our every move, I don’t know how people think about things like this.”
“I think you do but you like to think otherwise.”
He furrowed his brows to signal that he didn’t understand.
“I think that people like you like to tell yourselves that you don’t understand what people think about in the darkness of their minds, what they do with each other. That way you’re protected from the consequences.”
“People like me?”
“Powerful ones. You can screw up people’s lives and hide behind your ‘properly,’ your discretion.”
“You have me all wrong,” Burling told her. “I couldn’t do this without you.”
Her laugh was thrilling, and warm. “No shit, Chief.”
after dinner, he and april rode the lift to the lobby, agreeing without a word that they would not go to bed, not just yet, if that’s what they were going to do. The old elevator jerked downward, and the drop in Burling’s stomach disoriented him: along with the possibility that he would sleep with April tonight came the thought that his rush to fulfill one desire might be a willed distraction from the enormity of what he was about to set in motion with the Chinese. Working with them to arm the mujahedin against the Russians was a line of attack that had only glancing support at the Agency, if it had any support at all. If Amelia found out about April, or if the deputy director hung him out to dry when the operation backfired, he would be in the wilderness for a very long time.
He and April sat close, her hip touching his thigh, on a hard wooden bench in the square, framed by short, dusty trees. A public security car trolled the streets around for black marketeers. Up the crumbling steps from the bare little park they could see the brown, implacable face of the hotel, its roof bleeding color and music into the sky.
“I wasn’t making it up, when we were dancing,” Burling said. “I don’t think you understand.”
Between her thumbs April broke a pink grapefruit she had taken from the table. The fruit smelled ripe, a bit funky, and her face was sly but reluctant in the shadows. Explain yourself, she seemed to be saying. If you can.
“The first time I saw a Viet Cong dead,” Burling told her, “it was early in the war, before the marines even landed at Da Nang.”
“Where Jack got his ‘million dollar wound,’” April said with fond sarcasm, tearing the peel.
“That was Tet. This was long before that, in the fall of ’62. We were there in an advisory capacity, helicopter support. The ARVN had killed this VC in a village outside Soc Trang, and we went up to look at him, because we’d never seen one before.”
“Like killing a cougar,” April said. She handed him a section of grapefruit, the strands of pink flesh sticking to her fingernails. “When I was a little girl all the cougars, the mountain lions, were supposed to be gone from the hills behind my father’s house, but he and my brothers swore they were there. They wanted to kill one to prove they existed.”
“Did they ever get one?”
“They never did, but that didn’t stop them from believing it. If they ever had killed one, I don’t know what they’d have done.”
The security car moved soundlessly behind the trees, a cigarette glowing inside, showing dark figures slumped against the seats. The Chinese colonel, with whom Burling was to meet next morning, came down the steps and looked this way and that.
“When Wes was murdered,” Burling ventured, “the first thing I remembered was that Viet Cong. Two of the men dressed up as police, or maybe they were police, we don’t know; anyway, they were dead, too, one of them lying there on the ground beside the car. No one had closed his eyes yet. I looked at him, and