Blow the House Down by Robert Baer Page A

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for advancement in the Agency. I learned all this in the first half hour I’d ever known him, sitting in what passed for a living room, in what passed for a chief of station residence, in what passed for a capital city in yet another people’s paradise of the ever-Darkening Continent. Frank was shit-faced when I arrived: warm gin. He kept drinking it, kept talking—he and Jill had met in Paris the March before when she was tracking Françoise Sagan’s youth through the Place Pigalle—but he seemed to have leveled off at whatever level of drunkenness he had aimed for, or arrived at.
    As for Jill, the story of their chance encounter and whirlwind romance seemed to hit a sour spot, or maybe it was the climate, or being stuck inside. The French chef had proved a more-than-cautionary tale for her. She had no intention of leaving the house except under armed guard, Frank informed me, and maybe not then.
    â€œC’est pas vrai?”
I asked. She nodded tartly.
    The house was—and here I’m being charitable—a fucking dump. The Agency had given them a furniture allowance, almost a generous one, but by the looks of things, Frank must have used it to offset the ruinous expense of exiting his last marriage. The dining room table was a few planks nailed together and balanced on a pair of sawhorses. Jill’s books—Gide, Moliere, de Maupassant, Sagan—formed a precarious tower on top of the only piece that looked as if it might have been up to the standards of her former life. Otherwise, the whole house, or what I could see of it, was done up with local crap, including the painting over the sofa: a Negress on lurid felt, washing laundry in the Congo River. I didn’t know Frank nearly well enough then to ask him if it was a joke.
    All that, though, was more than two decades ago, in a Cold War no longer being fought, in a part of the world now so ravaged by AIDS and civil unrest that it seemed to be sliding backward off the face of existence. When I ran across Frank a little more than six years later—coming out of the Beau Rivage in Geneva—he told me that the Negress was gone, along with Jill.
    â€œShe split,” he said. “Homesick, Jill told me. We had a daughter: India. Beautiful, like her name. I almost never get to see her.”
    If I had been smarter, I would have seen it as a premonition of my own marriage. Like Jill and Frank, Marissa was a half generation younger than me—nineteen to my early thirties, a talented poet, a bright light at the American University in Beirut. We’d met when we were both rock climbing in the Dolomites. She was like a black-haired, olive-skinned spider. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. Nothing daunted Marissa. Not even me, as it turned out. If she hadn’t been three months pregnant, I doubt we would have married, but out of it all came Rikki, good from not-so. That, too, Frank and I had in common.
    I nodded my condolences over his lost wife and missing child, and asked Frank to talk on. Our colleagues in Southern Air Transport had just been “tasked,” as they say in Washington circles, to deliver a thousand TOW missiles from U.S. Army stocks to Tel Aviv for trans-shipment to Iran. Against such madness, Frank’s domestic life seemed the picture of normality.
    Soon after they were reassigned to New Delhi, Frank said, Jill had talked him into signing a power of attorney so she could buy a small cottage for them back near Saratoga Springs, scene of her undergraduate triumphs. They had been in Brazzaville more than three years by then. With the differential and hardship pay, they’d managed to save a little money, and Jill had never adapted well to a place where the highest form of entertainment was watching geckos crawl across the ceiling. New Delhi wasn’t going to be much better. Why not throw her a little bone? There was the daughter, India, too. Better she should be schooled back in the