“Anything good?” Ed Foley asked, again, just to bedevil his wife.
“Not unless you’re into child abuse. Some of the subjects for this site are too young to vote. If you downloaded it over here, the FBI might come knocking on your door.”
“Capitalism really has broken out over there, eh?”
“Some of the senior Party officials seem to like this sort of thing. I guess when you’re pushing eighty, you need something special to help jump-start the motor.” Mary Pat had seen some of the photographs, and once had been plenty. She was a mother, and all of those photographic subjects had been infants once, strange though that might seem to a subscriber to that Web site. The abusers of girls must have thought that they all sprang into life with their legs spread and a welcoming look in their doll-child faces. Not quite, the DDO thought, but her job wasn’t to be a clergyman. Sometimes you had to do business with such perverts, because they had information which her country needed. If you were lucky, and the information was really useful, then you often arranged for them to defect, to live in the United States, where they could live and enjoy their perversions to some greater or lesser degree, after being briefed on the law, and the consequences of breaking it. Afterward there was always a bathroom and soap to wash your hands. It was a need of which she’d availed herself more than once. One of the problems with espionage was that you didn’t always do business with the sort of people whom you’d willingly invite into your home. But it wasn’t about Miss Manners. It was about getting information that your country needed to guard its strategic interests, and even to prevail in war, if it came to that. Lives were often at stake, either directly or indirectly. And so, you did business with anyone who had such information, even if he or she wasn’t exactly a member of the clergy.
“Okay, babe. Keep me posted,” Foley told his wife.
“Will do, honey-bunny.” The DDO headed back to her own office. There she drew up her reply to Nomuri: MESSAGE RECEIVED. KEEP US POSTED ON YOUR PROGRESS. MP. ENDS.
The reply came as a relief to Nomuri when he woke and checked his e-mail. It was a disappointment that he didn’t wake up with company, but to expect that would have been unrealistic. Ming would have been ill-advised to spend the night anywhere but in her own bed. Nomuri couldn’t even drive her back. She’d just left, carrying her presents— well, wearing some of them— for the walk back to her own shared flat where, Nomuri fervently hoped, she wouldn’t discuss her evening’s adventures with her roommates. You never knew about women and how they talked. It wasn’t all that dissimilar with some men, Nomuri remembered from college, where some of his chums had talked at length about their conquests, as though they’d slain a dragon with a Popsicle stick. Nomuri had never indulged in this aural spectator sport. Either he’d had a spy’s mentality even then, or he’d been somehow imbued with the dictum that a gentleman didn’t kiss and tell. But did women? That was a mystery to him, like why it was that women seemed to go to the bathroom in pairs— he’d occasionally joked that that was when they’d held their “union meetings.” Anyway, women talked more than men did. He was sure of that. And while they kept many secrets from men, how many did they keep from other women? Jesus, all that had to happen was for her to tell a roomie that she’d had her brains fucked out by a Japanese salaryman, and if that roomie was an informant to the MSS, Ming would get a visit from a security officer, who at the very least would counsel her never to see Nomuri again. More likely, the counseling would involve a demand to send that degenerate American bourgeois trash (the Victoria’s Secret underthings) back to him, plus a threat to lose her ministry job if she ever appeared on the same street with him again. And that also meant that he’d be tailed and observed and investigated by the MSS, and that was something he had to take seriously. They didn’t have to catch him committing espionage. This was a communist country, where due process of law was a bourgeois concept unworthy of serious consideration, and civil rights were limited to doing what one was told. As a foreigner doing business in the PRC, he might get some easiness of treatment, but not all that much.
So, he hadn’t just gotten his rocks off, Nomuri told himself, past the delightful memories of a passionate evening. He’d crossed a wide red line in the street, and his safety depended entirely upon on how discreet Ming was. He hadn’t— could not have— warned her to keep her mouth shut about their time together. Such things weren’t said, because they added a level of gravity to what was supposed to have been a time of joy and friendship… or even something potentially bigger than friendship. Women thought in such terms, Chester reminded himself, and for that reason he might see a pointed nose and whiskers the next time he looked in the mirror, but this was business, not personal, he told himself as he shut down his computer.
Except for one small thing. He’d had sexual relations with an intelligent and not entirely unattractive young female human being, and the problem was that when you gave a little bit of your heart away, you never really got it back. And his heart, Nomuri belatedly realized, was distantly connected to his dick. He wasn’t James Bond. He could not embrace a woman as a paid whore embraced a man. It just wasn’t in him to be that sort of heartless swine. The good news was that for this reason he could stand to look in a mirror for the time being. The bad news was that this ability might be short-lived, if he treated Ming as a thing and not a person.
Nomuri needed advice on how to feel about this operation, and he didn’t have a place to get it. It wasn’t the sort of thing to e-mail to Mary Pat or to one of the pshrinks the Agency employed for counseling DO people who needed a little guidance with their work. This sort of thing had to be handled face-to-face with a real person, whose body language you could read and whose tone of voice would deliver its own content. No, email wasn’t the medium he needed right now. He needed to fly to Tokyo and meet a senior officer of the Directorate of Operations who could counsel him on how to handle things. But if the guy told him to cut himself off from intimate contact with Ming, then what would he do? Nomuri asked himself. It wasn’t as though he had a girlfriend of any kind, and he had his needs for intimacy, too— and besides, if he cut her off, what effect would that have on his potential, prospective agent? You didn’t check your humanity by the door when you joined up with the Agency, despite what all the books said and the public expectations were. All the chuckles over beer during the nights after training sessions seemed a distant thing now, and all the expectations he and his colleagues had had back then. They’d been so far off the mark, in spite of what their training officers had told them. He’d been a child then, and to some extent even in Japan, but suddenly he was a man, alone in a country that was at best suspicious, and at worst hostile to him and his country. Well, it was in her hands now, and that was something he couldn’t change.
Her co-workers noted a slight difference in their colleague. She smiled a little more, and in a somewhat different way. Something good must have happened to her, some of them thought, and for this they rejoiced, albeit in a reserved and private way. If Ming wished to share the experience with them, all well and good, and if not, that, too, was okay with them, because some things were private, even among a group of women who shared virtually everything, including stories of their minister and his fumbling, lengthy, and occasionally futile efforts at lovemaking. He was a wise man, and usually a gentle one, though as a boss he had his bad points. But Ming would notice none of those today. Her smile was sweeter than ever, and her eyes twinkled like little diamonds, the rest of the admin/secretarial staff all thought. They’d all seen it before, though not with Ming, whose love life had been an abbreviated one, and whom the minister liked a little too much, but whom he serviced imperfectly and too seldom. She sat at her computer to do her correspondence and translations of Western news articles that might be of interest to the Minister. Ming had the best English skills of anyone in this corner of the building, and the new computer system worked superbly. The next step, so the story went, was a computer into which you’d just speak, making the characters appear by voice command, sure to become the curse of every executive secretary in the world, because it would largely make them obsolete. Or maybe not. The boss couldn’t fuck a computer, could he? Not that Minister Fang was all that intrusive in his demands. And the perks he delivered in return weren’t bad at all.