Libra - Don Delillo [117]
“Do I want to know what it is?”
“A Soviet surveying team has found a major oil field. And it’s precisely the area where I’d arranged drilling contracts. I saw the photos last week and they were so detailed I could recognize the terrain. I was there. I stood right there. I visited the fields. We did mineral surveys. There was serious money behind us.”
“Your oil. Your field.”
“Ours. And better ours than the goddamn Russians. You know what they’ll do to that island. Drain the living blood out of it.”
“I don’t doubt it. But it’s hard sometimes to live with a man who never, never, never lets go.”
“This is damn right I don’t let go.”
They let it drop for a while. She got up and turned over the record. It was raining hard and she caught a glimpse of someone running in the street.
“Let me explain about obsessions,” he said.
“Oh yes please.”
“I take a sweeping view of the subject.”
“God yes.”
“It’s the job of an intelligence service to resolve a nation’s obsessions. Cuba is a fixed idea. It is prickly in a way Russia is not. More unresolved. More damaging to the psyche. And this is our job, to remove the psychic threat, to learn so much about Castro, decipher his intentions, undermine his institutions to such a degree that he loses the power to shape the way we think, to shape the way we sleep at night.”
“Maybe what I don’t understand is why Cuba. Do I know the first thing about this island? Is it West Indian, is it Spanish, is it white, is it black, is it mulatto, is it Latin American, is it Creole, is it Chinese? Why do we think it belongs to us?”
“It’s not a question of belongs to us. It’s a question of something working beautifully, of private investment being given the chance to help a country rise in the world, and Cuba was rising in distribution, manufacturing, literacy, social services, and any high-school student can make a solid case that the flaws and excesses of the Batista regime could have been contained without a revolution and certainly without a march into the communist camp.”
They fell silent again. The power of his feelings made her want to pause. There weren’t many things he believed in strongly. She felt a shrinking in herself, the old pathetic readiness to give in quietly. But what was there to fight about? She didn’t know the subject. She saw the world in news clippings and picture captions, the world becoming bizarre, the world it is best to see in one-column strips that you send to friends. Refuge only in irony. If her aim was to go unnoticed, then why fight?
“Things are looking better in some areas,” he said. “There are things I’m not unhappy about at all. I am making something of a professional comeback. There is talk of moving me to the Office of Finance. There is a field unit in Buenos Aires. This is not to be discussed, of course. I’ll work in money markets, making sure we have foreign currencies on hand for certain operations.”
“Is this a plum, Buenos Aires?”
“I don’t know where it stands in the fruit-and-vegetable kingdom. It is just goddamn good of them to give me this chance. The Agency understands. It’s amazing really how deeply they understand. This is why some of us see the Agency in a way that has nothing to do with jobs or institutions or governments. We are goddamn grateful for their understanding and trust. The Agency is always willing to consider a man in a new light. This is the nature of the business. There are shadows, there are new lights. The deeper the ambiguity, the more we believe, the more we trust, the more we band together.”
It was remarkable how often he talked to her about these things. The Agency was the one subject in his life that could never be exhausted. Central Intelligence. Beryl saw it as the best organized church in the Christian world, a mission to collect and store everything that everyone has ever said and then reduce it to a microdot and call it God. She needed to live in small dusty rooms, layered safely in, out of the reach of dizzying things, of heat and light and strange spaces, and Larry needed the great sheltering nave of