Libra - Don Delillo [53]
That evening he sat alone at the Queen Bee, thinking he’d approached the main business too quickly. She did not seem happy to hear the news and she countered it with news of her own. His unit was shipping out for the latest hot spot, Formosa, in a couple of weeks. What she wanted him to do, for now, was put aside any thought of defecting and concentrate on getting access to classified documents and photographs. She spent some time discussing this. She talked about his job, not his life. She wanted tactical call signs, authentication codes, radio frequencies. She wanted spotter photos of U-2s.
There would be money for this, although she realized money was not his motive. She talked about a second meeting in Yamato, near the base, and gave him detailed directions. She spoke in a practiced way about procedures and craft, about the need for discipline, possibly referring to his rumpled street clothes and day-old stubble. She said she admired the Japanese because a man might spend a lifetime getting one thing right.
She had a full mouth and pudgy hands. There was a mock girlishness about her, several levels of something tricky and derisive. He told her he was serious about learning Russian.
At the Queen Bee he waited for Tammy to finish work and he spent the night with her in the flat she shared with two of her sisters. They had sex, more or less furtively, as the sisters watched TV. Curled in a comer of the room, unable to sleep, his head in the crook of his lover’s arm, he thought of a number of things Dr. Braunfels didn’t know. She didn’t know he’d been on mess duty since the first court-martial. Mess duty, guard duty, a series of shit details—everything but gazing into radarscopes. She didn’t know he’d lost his security clearance after the second court-martial. She didn’t know there was a second court-martial, or a first for that matter, and she didn’t know about the incidents that brought them about. One last thing she didn’t know, and that was how far out on a limb he would have to go to snatch documents from a restricted area without clearance.
Seeing her smooth round face, doing her accented voice, he said to himself in the dark, What kind of foul-up do we have here, Oswald Lee?
Back in Atsugi he went on a movie binge. He saw every movie twice, kept to himself, spent serious time at the base library, learning Russian verbs.
Ozzie thought, What if she’s only interested in twisting me dry?
He met her in a flat above a bicycle shop. There was an open umbrella drying in the hall. She wore Western clothes, a raincoat over her shoulders. They shook hands like hospital roommates. She had that cropped uneven hair that was way too young and made him think she was undependable, a person who could not survive without double meanings, or saying one thing to mean the opposite.
“You are much greater value,” she said, “going on with your duties, reporting to me at regular times. Go where they send you. Why not? We wish you to get ahead. You get ahead here, not in Moscow or Leningrad.”
“What if I’m determined to go?”
“This is not the time for you.”
“Couldn’t they train me there, then send me back?”
“You are already back.”
A little joke. He told her he had no documents. Documents would come, possibly, in the near future. It all depended. In the meantime he