Purple Dots - Rilegato

This is Jim Lehrer's eleventh novel. He has also written two books of nonfiction and three plays. He is the executive editor and anchor of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. He lives in Washington, D.C.

CHARLIE

October

Charlie had not been enjoying The Washington Post much lately. The screwups of the new president and his administration had made for either embarrassing or infuriating reading. But, finally, there in the top left-hand corner of the front page, was some really good news. It came with the two-column headline:

Bennett Picked To Head CIA Aimed At Jackson Damage Control

A presidential crony and Wall Street millionaire, Joe Phillip Jackson, had been nominated for director of Central Intelligence. He withdrew after taking many hits about his obvious lack of qualifications to run the largest and most important intelligence agency in the world. Charlie had seen Jackson's nomination as some idiots' idea for dealing with the fallout from the Aldrich Ames treachery: What about having a director who not only knows nothing about the Agency or intelligence but also knows nothing about anything else except making money?

But now the idiots had come to their senses. Joshua Eugene Bennett was the current deputy director of Central Intelligence and a friend of Charlie's. They had shared many hairy and satisfying moments in the Agency and had remained friends since Charlie's retirement. Josh, fifteen years younger than Charlie, had continued to rise through the ranks because he was one of the few good ones who had managed to escape damage from both the Iran-Contra and the Ames debacles.

Charlie--Charles Avenue Henderson--was sitting at the breakfast table at Hillmont, the eighteenth-century West Virginia manse he and his wife, Mary Jane, operated as an upscale bed-and-breakfast. He was reading the Post as slowly and deliberately as he pleased, which was one of the daily joys of his retirement.

Another was acting silly whenever the spirit so moved him. That spirit was about to so move him again.

Charlie and Mary Jane Henderson may have had birth dates that proclaimed them to be in their late sixties but nothing else about them did. Both maintained a spring in their steps and voices and states of mind--they could pass for early fifties, maybe even younger. Mary Jane, five feet five, with a compact figure and short gray hair, was in trim, in motion and always at the ready. Charlie, who was six feet tall, generated the same let's-go feeling. He had no paunch and no extra chins; only the thinness of his graying brown hair showed any signs of his proper age.

Charlie, also, was a Po Chü-i believer. The ninth-century Chinese poet had written some words, passed on to Charlie on his sixtieth birthday, that had become the creed for his retirement life. Po said in his poem that during a man's thirties and forties he is distracted by various lusts, and between seventy and eighty there come the ailments and ills. He ignored the fifties altogether and thus declared the good time to be between sixty and seventy.

Wrote the poet: "I have put behind me Love and Greed. I have done with Profit and Fame. I am still short of illness and decay and far from decrepit age. Strength of limb I still possess to see the rivers and hills. Still my heart has spirit enough to listen to flutes and strings. At leisure I open new wine and taste several cups; drunken I recall old poems and sing a whole volume."

Mary Jane sometimes saw Charlie's fondness for the words less as belief in a poetic creed than as proof that he had simply moved into his second childhood. Charlie claimed he had been lucky enough never to have had to end his first, having gone directly from high school to college to the U.S. Navy and then to the Central Intelligence Agency without missing a beat or being forced to do anything other than little-boy work.

"This is little-boy work, you know," he had said, for instance, to Josh Bennett one sunny day in Nice, France. They were sitting in an old town street café, posing as two American insurance salesmen attending a real event, New York Life's Salesmen-of-the-Year Week on the Riviera. There were two major international meetings going on in Nice then, and Langley had given them a choice of which one they wanted as cover. The other was a meeting of charismatic Catholics. No thanks to that, said Charlie and Josh. They chose the insurance group even though it meant wearing plastic name tags pinned on their loud sports shirts. Josh added his own touch by wearing a blue baseball cap with the red-and-white letter B of the Boston Red Sox on it.

"Hush," said Josh. "Our lives may be in danger."
"That is my point, little boy."
They were watching a man at the outdoor café next door, who had been identified by French intelligence as Vladimir Aronsky, a KGB dirty-works man. There was fear at Langley that Aronsky had come to Nice, where there was a large Russian émigré colony, to do harm to an elderly Russian woman who was working the émigré side of the street for the CIA.
"Look!" Charlie said to Josh.
"What should we do?"
"Nothing."
So they watched while a husky man with a beard and the dress of a dockworker inserted and removed the thin blade of a knife from Aronsky's back and then disappeared into the crowd on the street.

The Russian woman had apparently seen to her own protection. Or so it seemed.
But it was in fact something very different. It turned out Aronsky had wanted to defect to the West. A French intelligence officer in Moscow, intentionally or otherwise, got Aronsky's defection offer all screwed up and the result was a KGB setup in that Nice café. Aronsky, who thought he had been sent to Nice on a routine KGB courier mission, was waiting for somebody French who would speed him on his way to freedom and a new life. Instead, he got a knife in the back from one of his own. The old woman had nothing to do with it.

Charlie and Josh were held officially blameless and they went on quickly to other assignments for what was then called the Soviet Russia Division of the Agency. But neither ever forgot bearing joint witness to the assassination in broad daylight of a man who wanted to come over to their side.  Charlie in particular never forgot. He was the senior man present, he was the one who said, "Nothing." They should do nothing but watch.

All of this serious stuff was right there in his head twenty-five years later as he drove the two miles into town. He parked the Wagoneer at a meter on Washington Street, the main street of Charles Town, West Virginia, which was also Charlie's town. It was an unpretentious place of thirty-two hundred people, with a low-key race track and much John Brown history; Charlie felt comfortable and at home there. Today he had to pick up a new bicycle pump at Western Auto, only a block from the old courthouse where in 1859 John Brown was sentenced to hang for leading his unsuccessful antislavery insurrection at nearby Harpers Ferry. Two of the guests coming this weekend had said they wanted to ride bicycles over by the C&O Canal. The old pump had had it.
Something else that happened on that Nice assignment had also popped into his mind. Something not so serious that happened at the Nice airport as they were on their way out of town.

A bald-headed elderly woman in blue jeans and a white T-shirt with "Jesus Was a Freak, Too" written across the front in red had come running toward Charlie and Josh.
"Jesus! Jesus!" she screamed at Josh. "You said you would come again, and you did!"
She flung herself down at Josh's feet. "Praise God! Praise God! You came again! Here you are!"
Charlie moved aside to watch his friend, his fellow well-trained undercover agent for the intelligence service of the United States of America, deal with what they called in training an "unexpected event."
The woman wrapped her arms around Josh's right leg. "I came from Milwaukee! I came to find Jesus! I did! I did!"
Josh looked over at Charlie. Help me, you bastard! screamed his eyes.
Charlie shrugged. And tried his best to keep from laughing.
"I have a plane to catch," Josh said to the woman. "Please, now. I have to go."
Charlie wasn't the only one looking on. A circle of people, some fifteen or twenty travelers, taxi drivers, porters and others, had gathered for the show.

"No! No! Now I have you! I can't let you go! Jesus! Jesus! I love you, Jesus!"
Josh, a big man in good physical condition, took a large step with his left foot and attempted to pull his right foot free from the woman's tight grasp. All he managed to do was drag her a couple of feet.
"Give me something! Give me something of yours! Something sacred!"
Josh grabbed the Boston Red Sox cap off his head. He kissed the B-for-Boston and stuck the cap down firmly on the woman's bald head.
"Here, my daughter," he said in a voice worthy of a Vatican chapel. "Take this in my name. Wear it proudly."
The woman leaped to her feet, grabbed her head and the hat with both hands and ran away screaming, "Jesus gave me his hat! Look at me! Jesus gave me his hat! Praise God, praise God. Jesus gave me his hat!"
Josh and Charlie trotted ever so quickly to the Air France gate for their flight to Paris.
"We should have done the charismatic Catholics instead of the insurance thing," Charlie said ever so quietly to Josh as they boarded the plane. "You're a natural charismatic."
"You are a natural bastard," said Josh.

Charlie was given a special kick to remember this additional story on that Charles Town sidewalk twenty-five years later because he had to pass Messages from the Messiah, the local Bible-and-Christian-equipment store, on the way to Western Auto. He had walked by it hundreds of times before without giving it or the merchandise displayed in its windows even a glance. But this time a baseball cap caught his eye.

It was a white baseball cap with the red-and-blue waving-ribbon emblem of the Pepsi-Cola Company embroidered like...