Woke Up Lonely A Novel - By Fiona Maazel Page 0,11
alive. Only difference was that a real NOC was affiliated with a parent organization that had an interest in getting her out despite the blowback. Esme did not have this luxury. Her burden was to go unacknowledged but also untethered. In the unofficial parlance, she was a freelancer. Hired by the government, case by case. Some more harrowing than others.
During her tenure, she had done many of the absurd things that an officer does but that don’t seem absurd when the plans you’ve come to wrest from a sham curl of dog shit are for India’s fast breeder test reactor. But mostly this was adjunct work. Assignments to divert her self-regard from evidence that she’d devoted her career to the study and pursuit of Thurlow Dan. Had they really been married once? It seemed like another lifetime.
Martin fit her wig over a Styrofoam head and combed out a snag.
“The morgue called,” he said.
“What’d you tell them?”
“Same as always. You’ll call them back.”
“They say anything new?”
“Your parents are fine.”
She smiled despite herself. Her parents were dead. How else would they be?
He checked his BlackBerry. “When will you be needing me again?”
She’d put on a terry cloth robe and slippers, which she kicked off from bed. “Not until tomorrow,” she said glumly, before pilling what makeup and glue were left hewn to her chin with her fingertips.
“And now?”
“Reading files. Go on, have fun.”
Sometimes Martin forgot who he was—butler or F/X man—so he backed out of the room and bowed at the waist. Other times, he did not forget, and bowed just the same. Esme Haas was one scary woman.
She watched him go. Sad. Martin had a life outside the one he experienced in her charge. She wished she had that life, too. But no. Her house was sized for God; it was cold and quiet and quarantining of intimacies that inhered between people.
On a console of TVs set into her wall: footage from every room in the house. Her daughter was asleep. Everyone else was out. If she killed the radio, it would be deadly. On the topic of isolation, she liked to blame her work: This isn’t my fault. Only it was her fault. Her character. Type A shy: gregarious, lively, protected. Prized qualities in a sleuthing mercenary, less so for the woman inside. But never mind—she was her job 95 percent of the time.
And so: manila envelopes on the table. She opened them one by one. Looked at photos, résumés, stats. It wasn’t like she was unprepared to do Jim’s bidding. She was always plugging people into the system she might need later. People she paid for small jobs here and there. People who were willing to do something odd for reasons she would divine first and exploit later. For this gig, she chose four who seemed perfect: Ned Hammerstein, Anne-Janet Tabetha Riggs, Olgo Panjabi, Bruce Bollinger. She’d wooed them to the Department of the Interior a few weeks ago, them and fifty like them, because who kept track of what went on at the Department of the Interior? Most everyone there was astonishingly without job description. She’d once caught a guy arranging the envelopes in the mail room by size, and when she returned three hours later, he was still doing it.
At the bottom of her files was a letter she didn’t want to see, which was why it was on the bottom. A note from her daughter’s boarding school, a report card plus blurb from each teacher re: the emotional stylings of Ida Haas midway through fourth grade. She was, they said, good with the other kids. Played nice. Appeared to compensate for surplus rage with martyring gestures that won her many friends, though perhaps this way of things would not go over as well in the real world, be advised.
Esme skimmed the rest. She did not enjoy having to get news of who her child was, though it was probably better to have something to go on next time Ida showed, which was now. She could feel it, her daughter’s gaze scalding the back of her neck. She did not even have to turn around.
“What’s the matter, tulip? I thought you were asleep.”
“Ma and Pop let me stay up till whenever.”
Esme considered all the other ways her parents might have let her child grow up unbridled and decided this was okay. Besides, who was she to have an opinion? She didn’t know if she’d done wrong today, but no matter: yesterday’s guilt imported fine.