Babayaga

“Suit yourself,” said Will.

“He’ll probably want to come here and talk to you.”

“That’s fine.”

“He’s not going to be happy. He’s got another project right now that needs his full attention. We’re supposed to take care of this for him.”

“Well, do what you gotta do. But I’m not giving you those files.”

Will realized that there was not much they could do. There was no one they could appeal to; no one else in the entire building knew about the agency’s relationship with the CIA. Will was their only guy, and if he refused to play along, the only thing they could possibly do was fire him, which they had actually already done a few days before when Brandon had come by for his visit.

Mitchell dialed the phone while White worked on giving Will a hard, mean stare. Will could tell the guy wanted to look like a killer, but he didn’t. He looked like an overfed Boy Scout, fresh-faced and cocky in his sense of righteous justice. Will did not care, he was not afraid of these two, he was experiencing his own sense of certainty, one that was coming together to make perfect sense of the present moment.

Will was reminded of the Hollywood writers he’d seen in the papers who had been called before various committees to rat out their fellow members in the Communist Party. A few of them had refused, even when they were threatened with jail. Will didn’t know if they were really Communists or not, but he knew it took some character not to talk. Whatever their ideology, their resistance had shown a rare kind of integrity. Will thought about all the other people who had, over the ages, gone the other way, turning in people they actually knew were innocent: the ones who dodged suspicion by passing it on. The Nazis and Stalin were the most recent examples, interrogating and torturing innocent citizens until, finally, desperate to mollify their tormentors, the accused denounced their equally innocent neighbors. In the end, how many scapegoats were herded up? And when did this nightmare of evil arithmetic stop? Crystalizing within Will was the realization that what he was being asked to participate in now was in a way no different, it was the awful conveyor belt of history, a butcher’s carnival where ultimately no one innocent escaped, they lost their jobs and homes, or their throats were cut and they were dumped in bloody piles. The only ones who ever seemed to get away were the guilty.

At that moment, as if punctuating his resolution, there was the loud cheerful ping of the elevator arriving and around the corner came Guizot, with outstretched arms and tears rolling down his cheeks. “Will! Will!” he cried out, oblivious to the stares of Mitchell, White, and the other employees in the office. “We are the destroyers of the world!” Guizot cried out. Will almost had to smile.

“You’ll have to excuse me for a moment,” he said, getting up and leaving the two men there.

A half hour later, Will was still sitting with his inconsolable client. Between sobbing and loudly blowing his nose, Guizot told him his saga, about how, after the terrible argument over the Surrealist painting, his wife had packed her bags (“So many shoes, Will, when did she buy them all!”) and stormed out of their flat, leaving him shocked, appalled, galled, and completely brokenhearted. After a few days of suffering from inconsolable grief, he had rushed out to her art dealer and purchased every Surrealist painting he could lay his hands on, de Chiricos and Ernsts, Klees, and Mirós, along with countless others that the dealer, sensing a vulnerable moment, pawned off on him. Then he drove to the hotel suite where his wife was staying and begged her to come home.

“I was on my knees,” Guizot said. “I pleaded. ‘You are the most important person to me!’ I groveled. ‘You are the best part of my soul!’ I kissed her ankles over and over like a desperate supplicant at the feet of a great princess, crying, ‘You are the first woman, the only woman, I have ever loved in this way!’ And you know what she did, Will? She looked down at me—oh, those eyes, so cold they could turn a mountain into ice, and she sneered at me, Will, she sneered. ‘Oh, Guizot, listen to yourself, “most,” “best,” “first,” how pathetic, you sound like one of your cheap little advertisements.’ I am telling you, I crawled out of there a destroyed man.”