Purity (43 page)

“Think about it. Somebody who wants to come and spy on us would pretend to be the truest of believers. That's how they'd get in. And all I have is true believers.”

“What about Colleen?”

“She came as a true believer. I almost completely trust her. But not quite.”

“Jesus. You really are paranoid.”

“Sure.” Andreas smiled again, more broadly. “I'm out of my fucking mind. But this guy who I confessed to in Berlin—who
got
me to confess—he was a journalist. And do you know what he does now? He runs an investigative-journalism nonprofit.”

“Which one?”

“It's better if you don't know, at least for a while.”

“Why not?”

“Because I just want to you to listen. Keep your ears open, without preconceptions. Tell me your sense of what's going on. I already know you have very good sense.”

“So basically be a horrid spy.”

“Maybe. If you want to use that word. But
my
spy. The person I can talk to and trust. Would you do that for me? You can keep learning from Willow. We'll still help you try to find your father.”

She thought of good old mentally ill Dreyfuss—
There was something not right about those Germans.
She said, “You didn't actually kill anyone, did you.”

“No, I did, Pip. I did.”

“No, you didn't.”

“It's really not a matter of opinion.”

“Hmm. And you say Annagret helped you?”

“It was terrible. But yes. She did. Her mother had married a very evil person. I have to live with what I did, but part of me doesn't regret it.”

“And if the story comes out, that's the end of Mr. Clean.”

“It destroys the Project, yes.”

“And the Project is you. You're the product.”

“So you say.”

Something in Pip's chest spasmed, almost retched. “I don't like you,” she said involuntarily. She was having an outburst with no advance warning. She scrambled out of the booth, reached back into it for her knapsack, and ran to the door of the restaurant and out onto the sidewalk. Was she sick to her stomach? Yes, she was. She dropped to her knees beneath a streetlight and spat up a dark rope of liquid.

She was still on her hands and knees when Andreas crouched beside her and put his hands on her shoulders. For a while he didn't say anything, just gently massaged her shoulders.

“We should get some food in you,” he said finally. “I think it would help.”

She nodded. She was at his mercy—it wasn't like there was anywhere else she could go. And the way he was rubbing her shoulders was undeniably tender. No man old enough to be her father had ever touched her like that. She allowed herself to be led back to the booth, where he ordered her an omelet and french fries.

After she'd eaten part of the omelet, she started drinking again, really putting it away. In the haziness that ensued, there were the actual words he spoke, many more words about his crime, about Annagret, about East Germany, about the Internet, about his mother and his father, about honesty and dishonesty, about his breakup with Toni Field, and then there was the deeper nonverbal language of intention and symbol which constituted the wooden spoon. The working over her brain was getting now was far more prolonged and thorough than the first one. Each of the two languages, the verbal and the nonverbal, kept distracting her from the other, and she was in any case increasingly drunk, and so it was hard to follow what was being said in either language. But when a second bottle of wine had been emptied, and Andreas had paid the waiter, and they'd walked back to the Hotel Cortez, where Pedro was waiting with the Land Cruiser, she found that it didn't matter whether or not she liked Andreas.

“You'll be home by midnight,” he was saying. “You can make up whatever story you like. A broken tooth, emergency dental work—whatever you like. Colleen will still be your friend.”

Pedro was holding open the door of the Land Cruiser.

“Wait,” Pip said. “Can I go to my room and lie down first? Just for an hour. My head's a little spinny.”

Andreas looked at his watch. It was clear that he wished she would leave now.

“Just for an hour,” she said. “I don't want to be sick on the highway.”

He nodded reluctantly. “One hour.”

As soon as she was in her room, she felt sick again and threw up. Then she drank a Coke from the minibar and felt much better. But instead of going downstairs, she sat on the bed and waited for some time to pass. Making Andreas impatient seemed to her the only form of resistance available, the only way to assert herself against the spoon. But was resisting what she even wanted? The longer she waited, the more erotic the suspense felt. The mere fact of waiting in a hotel room implied sex—what else was a hotel room for?

When the phone rang, she ignored it. It rang fifteen times before it stopped. A minute later, there was a knock on the door. Pip stood up and opened it, afraid it would be Pedro, but it was Andreas. He was pale, tight-lipped, furious.

“You've been here an hour and a half,” he said. “You didn't hear the phone ring?”

“Come in for a second.”

He looked up and down the hallway and came in. “I need to be able to trust you,” he said, locking the door. “This is not a good start.”

“Maybe you just won't be able to trust me.”

“That's not acceptable.”

“I have poor impulse control. This is a known fact about me. You knew what you were getting into.”

Still pale, still angry, he moved toward her, backing her into the corner behind the TV. He grasped her arms. Her skin felt alive to his, but she didn't dare be the one to make the move.

“What are you going to do?” she said. “Strangle me?”

He could have found this funny, but he didn't. “What do you want?” he said.

“What does every girl want from you?”

This did seem to amuse him. He let go of her arms and smiled wistfully. “They want to tell me their secrets.”

“Really. I find that hard to relate to, not having any myself.”

“You're an open book.”

“Pretty much.”

He walked away and sat down on the bed. “You know,” he said, “it's difficult to trust a person with no secrets.”

“I find it hard to trust people, period.”

“I'm not happy that Pedro knows I'm up here with you. But now that I'm here, we're not leaving until I know I can trust you.”

“Then we could be here quite a while.”

“Do you want to hear my theory of secrets?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“My theory is that identity consists of two contradictory imperatives.”

“OK.”

“There's the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do you know that you're a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself. You guard them inside you, because, if you don't, there's no distinction between inside and outside. Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside. A radical exhibitionist is a person who has forfeited his identity. But identity in a vacuum is also meaningless. Sooner or later, the inside of you needs a witness. Otherwise you're just a cow, a cat, a stone, a thing in the world, trapped in your thingness. To have an identity, you have to believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets. Colleen knows what you secretly think of Willow. You know what Colleen secretly thinks of Flor. Your identity exists at the intersection of these lines of trust. Am I making any sense?”

“Sort of,” Pip said. “But it's a pretty weird theory for a person who exposes people's secrets for a living.”

“Were you not listening in the restaurant? I got trapped into this job. I hate the Internet as much as I hated my motherland.”

“I guess you did say that.”

“Were you not even listening to yourself? I'm not doing this job because I still believe in it. It's all about me now. It's
my
identity.”

He made a gesture of self-disgust.

“I don't know what to say to you,” Pip said. “I already told you my secret. I told you my real name.”

“Your name is nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I also went through a shoplifting phase in middle school. I had quite a masturbation thing going when I was ten.”

“Didn't everyone?”

“OK, so there's nothing. I'm boring and ordinary. Like I said, you knew what you were getting into.”

Suddenly, without her quite knowing how he'd traversed the distance between them, he was pressing her into the corner again. He had his mouth to her ear and his hand wedged between her legs. There was a weird suspenseful moment of adjustment. She couldn't breathe, but she could hear him breathing heavily. Then his hand moved up to her belly and down again into her jeans and underpants.

“What about this,” he murmured in her ear. “Is this not a private thing of yours?”

“Fairly private, yes,” she said, heart pounding.

“This is the reason I trust you?”

She couldn't believe what was happening. He was putting a fingertip inside her, and her body wasn't exactly saying no to it.

“I don't know,” she whispered. “Maybe.”

“Do I have your permission for this?”

“Um…”

“Just tell me what you want.”

She didn't know what to say, but she probably should have said something, because, in the absence of a response, he was unzipping her jeans with his free hand.

“I know I was asking for it,” she whispered. “But…”

He drew his head back. There was an avid gleam in his eyes. “But what?”

“Well,” she said, squirming a little, “isn't it kind of customary to kiss a person before you stick your finger in her?”

“That's what you want? A kiss?”

“Well, I guess, between the two things, right at this moment, yes.”

He brought his hands up to her face and cupped her cheeks. She could smell her own private scent as well as his male body smell, a European smell, not unpleasant. She closed her eyes to receive his kiss. But when it came, she didn't respond to it. Somehow it wasn't what she wanted. Her eyes opened and found his looking into them.

“You have to believe this wasn't why I brought you here,” he said.

“Are you sure it's what you want even now?”

“In strict honesty? Not as much as I want to kiss a different part of you.”

“Whoa.”

“I think you'd like it. And then you could leave, and I could trust you.”

“Is this the way you always are with women? Was this how things went with Toni Field?”

He shook his head. “I told you. I'm not myself in transactions like that. I'm showing my true self to you because I want us to trust each other.”

“OK, but, I'm sorry—how does this make you trust
me
?”

“You said it yourself. If Colleen finds out about this, she won't forgive you. None of the interns will. I want you to have a secret that only I know.”

She frowned, trying to understand the logic.

“Will you give me that secret?” He put his hands on her cheeks again. “Come lie down with me.”

“Maybe it's better if I just go back.”

“You're the one who wanted to go to your room. You're the one who made me come up here.”

“You're right. I did.”

“So come lie down. The person I honestly am is a person who wants his tongue in you. Will you let me do that? Please let me do that.”

Why did she follow him to the bed? To be brave. To submit to the fact of the hotel room. To have her revenge on the indifferent men she'd left behind in Oakland. To do the very thing her mother had been afraid would happen. To punish Colleen for caring more about Andreas than about her. To be the person who'd come to South America and landed the famous, powerful man. She had any number of dubious reasons, and for a while, on the bed, as he slowed down the action, kissing her eyes and stroking her hair, kissing her neck, unbuttoning her shirt, helping her out of her bra, touching her breasts with his gaze and his hands and his mouth, tenderly easing down her jeans, even more tenderly peeling off her underpants, her reasons were all in harmony. She could feel his hands trembling on her hips, feel his own excitement, and this was something—it was a lot. He seemed honestly to want her private thing. It was really this knowledge, more than the
negocitos
he was expertly transacting with his mouth, that caused her to come with such violent alacrity.

But after it was over, the sensation of not liking him returned. She felt embarrassed and dirty. He was kissing her cheeks and her neck, thanking her. She knew what the polite thing to do was, and she could tell, from his unabated urgency, that he wanted it. Not to deliver would be selfish and perverse of her. But she couldn't help it: she didn't feel like fucking what she didn't like.

“I'm sorry,” she said, gently pushing him away.

“Don't be sorry.” He pursued her and climbed onto her, moving his clothed legs between her bare ones. “You're remarkable. You're everything I could have hoped for.”

“No, that was definitely great. That felt really nice. I don't think I've ever come so fast or so hard. It was like, wowee-zowee.”

“Oh God,” he said, shutting his eyes. He took her head in his hands and humped her a little with the hardness in his pants. “God, Pip. God.”

“But, um.” Again she tried to push him away. “Maybe I should go back now. You said I could go back after you did that.”

“Pedro and I worked out a story about a broken truck axle. We have hours if you want them.”

“I'm trying to be honest. Isn't that the point here?”

He must have tried to hide the look that appeared on his face then, because it was gone again immediately, replaced by that smile of his. For a moment, though, she'd seen that he was crazy. As if in a bad dream, a dream in which some guilty fact is forgotten and then suddenly remembered, it occurred to her that he had actually once murdered someone; that this was real.