fic: circumlocutory (bourne)
circumlocutory
the bourne ultimatum. neither has ever understood the carrot; they both rule with a stick. pamela landy, noah vosen/pamela landy. rated r. 7259 words.
notes: for oregonblondie! and, yo. i don't even know what happened here: somehow this thing took on a mind of it's own? idk. um, spoilers for the trilogy?
the world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.
(the power and the glory, graham greene)
1. NEW YORK CITY - 2006
She has always been going places. The ladder leads up but you can still fall down.
She slips her jacket off and steps through the metal detector then spreads her arms as they scan her and pat her down.
The first time she saw him it had rained that day and her white blouse was limp with it. Her palms had been clammy. When she first met him, her palms had been damp with sweat. She took a deep breath before she sat down across from him at the small table - corner seat, a back exit next to him, an exit that opened on an alley, a clear shot of the front door and the passage of customers in and out.
Noah Vosen was nothing if not through.
Pam Landy did not know that, not yet.
(In these stories that run in circles it is at times helpful to know where we are going. Here is where we are going: Pamela Landy will learn, but she won’t learn everything.
No one is capable of that, least of all her).
(Another thing worth noting: this file is a thick one. This story goes back a long time).
She thinks this will be the last time she sees him. The guard hands her back her purse and she nods an acknowledgement, shoulders the leather straps and steps forward.
-
2. NEW YORK CITY - 2004
“We both want the same thing.”
“We both go about it in two very different ways.”
“Past is past, Pam. Alright?”
And then he paused.
-
3. NEW YORK CITY - 2005
Noah Vosen is interviewed multiple times, both before and during prison. We can’t look to the after prison chapter of this story. We are unsure it will even exist. If you ask sociologists and you ask criminologists, they will tell you there is no after prison chapter to tell. A man’s story ends with prison. Look at the numbers. Graph the statistics. The answer is there. The ending is there. Don’t round up.
The interviews are of the same vein the books written about Cheney and Rove and Bush (both I and II) and every other neo-con with a buzz-worthy name once 2009 hit. The questions asked are leading, all beating around the same bush of what went wrong?
He never once mentions her.
He never says: “Wars aren’t won without a little sacrifice.”
Instead he says: “Cruelty in the name of liberty.” He looks good on camera.
He never mentions her.
-
4.
They met a long time ago. All stories in this business operate the same: the two parties have known each other for a long time, they have distrusted each other for a long time, and they have known how this would end for a very long time.
(They met for the first time in Munich and again during a meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev in the States.
He was a company man, even then, and she was the last in a dwindling line of idealists).
-
5. WASHINGTON DC - 1993
“Sooner or later, Pam,” he said, “you have to choose a side.”
“I’m so tired of people saying that,” she spat. “That doesn’t mean anything.”
The pinot noir she drank was too dark and too bitter but she finished her glass. Noah only shook his head and reached for his tumbler of scotch.
“Pam,” he said, and then he paused.
-
6.
They were never spies. Remember that. Spies get the glamour and they get the love and they get the guns -
Wait. That last part is untrue. The two of them had guns, they got guns, he fired a gun. Noah Vosen was a child of cowboy heroes and virile worship; he spoke like a congressman when she first met him and although this initial impression would prove anything but prophetic he was still a man who tried to wear America on his lapel but lethally manipulated its impossible, unreal weight.
The job was strange, a sticky mess of blood and paperwork. At first Pam did not know exactly what to do with either, how you fit this into a day to day existence. Files filled with photographs of bombed out hotels in Beirut and buses with the dead for passengers in Jerusalem, the sacrificed, the martyred, the unfortunate and wasted - she did not know what you did with that.
Like everything else, you learn. She’s been at this game for twenty years and sooner or later the strange becomes the ordinary and the unexpected, the mundane.
Pam thinks she is beginning to understand the meaning of the word “sacrifice.” Noah would argue and say he has always known what it means.
Noah is a liar.
-
7.
When they met in Munich she had a book clutched to her chest. It had been spring, gray and raining, and the bottom of her trousers was damp with city filth. Looking back, she thinks she could safely say that she loved Munich, but that is only half a truth: there is nothing safe we can say about history, especially our own. The threat of misrepresentation pervades, but Pam thinks she loved Munich. She can remember the exhilarated thrill the city left her with, the head-on enthusiasm she met it with, adrenaline and lust all too alive in her.
These things do matter. The way she used to drink her coffee - milk and two sugars - matters. It is important that while in Munich Pam relied on public transportation and hauled paperback novels with her to keep company over her crowded commute, leather briefcase locked at her feet.
These things do matter, if only all the more because they are extinct. The Pamela Landy of the past would neither know nor understand the Pamela Landy of the present. The woman this story starts with was less woman and more girl, all focus and political science, game theory, I pledge allegiance to a flag -
Age does that - time, experience. Tamps down the vital more colorful parts, and it makes sense. It had been rainy and gray in Munich, and this is as good a place to start as any as it is a gray world they occupy, lest anyone try to convince you otherwise.
-
8.
“You’ll find there’s ambiguity about everything you do when you leave here,” he said.
Pam went to training at Langley. They never gave her a gun and she never had to run a field course. She learned code, she learned protocol. Assets and liabilities. Et cetera. Repeat. Et cetera.
Assets and liabilities, you learn the trade. The first rule is the more important rule, is the unspoken rule:
There is no one to trust, not even yourself.
They all leave Langley. No one ever remembers this rule.
-
9.
(To bare your back to a man you don’t trust, to have that expanse of pale skin, two crooked shoulder blades, the bumps of vertebrae that meander down in a straight line, it is foolish.
She did it anyway, the first time, a long time ago. She was not as young as she likes to imagine she was).
-
10. LOS ANGELES - 1996
“When did you go so soft, Pamela,” he said, sibilant and cold.
“I hadn’t thought I had.”
-
11. NEW YORK CITY - 2005
Her new place has a doorman but they let him up. He knocks at her door just before midnight and she pauses, a hand raised to the doorknob, for a beat too long.
“Noah,” she says when she opens the door. She ties her already belted robe once more.
“Can I…?”
He doesn’t finish the question and she doesn’t answer. She steps aside and opens the door wider.
“You weren’t sleeping,” he says, more observation than inquiry. She doesn’t comment on it. The scene speaks for itself: the television on, a black and white Hitchcock film on mute (Strangers on a Train), an abandoned bottle of red wine on the coffee table next to an open laptop, default screen bright and blue.
“What can I,” she starts then stops. “Can I get you anything?” she asks. He shakes his head. Pam resists the urge to disguise that she is staring at him and eyes him warily. She has not seen him since Bourne, David Webb, whatever name he goes by these days, disappeared.
“Out on bail,” he says unprompted. He raises his chin as he says, like there’s some pride to be found in that. Pam slips her hands into the pockets of her robe.
“I had heard,” she says. She also had heard his sentencing is to happen next Wednesday but she does not tell him that.
They never did do small talk. It seems strange to start now.
“What are you doing here, Noah,” she says. There’s no energy to the question, no uptick of infliction as she says his name, Noah; it sounds tired, unused yet worn and familiar all at once, the way you retry on old memories and old personas, old iterations of who you used to be. She has known him for the bulk of her professional career, and the likewise holds true for him. It makes sense for her to see him before he is sentenced, it makes sense for him to come to her.
His gaze drifts over to the television set. “I always liked that one,” he says. Pam doesn’t say anything. The kitchen table remains a temporary buffer between the two of them and Noah turns his attention back to her.
“I thought I’d hate you more,” he says, nonchalant and almost casual.
“Yeah,” she says.
“Yeah,” he says.
Pam sighs. “You come here to tell me that?”
He takes a step forward and rests a hand low on her hip. She can feel his fingers flex against the cotton and she looks down at her feet.
Noah leans in, his cheek brushes against hers.
“Noah,” she says quietly. He does not move; she can feel him swallow against her. He takes a step back.
“Get some rest,” he says and shuts the door behind him. Behind her the credits have begun to roll, white overlaid atop of black.
-
12. NEW YORK CITY - 2004
The last page of the file was faxed.
“You’d better get yourself a good lawyer,” she said.
-
13. PARIS - 1986
On the flight back from Paris she tried to sleep. Over the Atlantic, Noah sat down next to her. She heard him sigh and settle into the aisle seat beside her, his forearm bumping hers - both their shirt sleeves rolled, bare skin meeting bare skin. Pam cracked one eye open and he had his chin tucked to his shoulder and he looked over and down at her, face unreadable.
“Look,” he started, voice almost a whisper, low and dirty if only for the prior context she remembered it, remembered him.
Pam held up a hand. “Don’t,” she said, quiet but firm. “Just. Do not. Do not ever. This is not a conversation we need to have.” She leaned her head back and stared at the stowed tray table in front of her. “I get it,” she said.
He sighed again, his arm still flush with hers and his skin was warm.
“All I wanted to be sure of,” he mumbled, but he did not leave. Pam did not sleep, though she kept her eyes closed.
-
14.
She had wondered what he would be like in bed in an idle, mindless sort of way. He was an attractive man; it was a natural extension of thought to be curious. Her suspicions (namely: controlling, dominant, talkative, rough) all proved to be warranted.
(He braced her hands over her head and it hurt, she could feel the small bones of her wrist grinding beneath his grip, but she did not ask him to let go. Instead she writhed under him, her back bowing up, her skinny frame one with his as he held her down. His breath was hot against her face, the sharp cut of her jaw and when he buried his face in the crook of her neck the stubble of his five o’clock shadow burned.
“Tell me you don’t want this,” he had said.
Pamela had not said a word but his name).
(That was the first time, and it was the only time for a long time).
(For her, that was Paris for a very, very long time).
-
15.
Noah had a place over by the Watergate. His top floor apartment overlooked the Potomac, flat and dead to the eye, water stalled out under the bridge.
(Her apartment, then the early 1990s, and Monica had yet to blow Bill, the US had yet to blow the Gulf, was smaller, warmer, a block from Rock Creek Park, trees shaded the front door to the building. It was her favorite place she had ever lived for no real particular reason other than the trees, the park, the small cramped bedroom with the large window and the cool wooden floorboards that creaked under her weight and spoke of the path her pacing wore between those four walls.
Noah - and, yes, she called him Noah then, and he called her Landy and he calls her Pam now, calls her Pam the same way you try and hold something over someone’s head, and maybe it goes to show you can teach an old dog new tricks, that a woman can learn, because she calls him Vosen now, not just Noah - never once saw the inside of that apartment. It was a decision never actually made by her, at least not consciously, but the closest they ever came to her front door was the Marriott Hotel on the corner two blocks away. Pam had not told him this. A part of her wishes she had; the accompanying grin that would have crested on his face is all too clear.
-
16. WASHINGTON DC - 1993
He took a step forward, a crooked grin on his face. His suit jacket brushed against hers, and he took another step still. He exhaled and she could feel it, smell his breath, acrid and thick with nicotine, something stronger.
Noah raised his hands to her shoulders and rested them there first, heat seeping through the thick fabric. His fingers pulled at the seams as though straightening her jacket and then fell to his sides, her sides, too close to her hip.
“You think you’re so damn smart,” he said, amused, near tender. His chin brushed against her forehead and slight stubble scraped her skin.
To her credit her face did not crack. When he finally walked away (one scarcely surreptitious slip of his hand against her thigh first) there were four tiny half-moon indents in the palm of her hand.
(“I’ll take a cab home,” she had told him, “your ego doesn’t travel well with me,” and he left her standing there on Indiana Avenue next to an idling taxi).
-
17. WASHINGTON DC - 1989
The Berlin Wall fell. The DC office was a mess.
Pam found him by accident, an empty corridor and an elevator bank - the down button pressed and lit.
Pam at first had not said anything. Noah smiled, the stretch of lip and teeth grim and vaguely inappropriate.
“Party had to end sometime,” he shrugged.
“What?” she said dumbly.
The elevator behind him dinged and opened. Noah stepped in. As he turned to face her he said, “You never did get it.”
The doors slid shut.
-
18.
The second time, it was New York. Then, it had been slow, near methodical. His mouth tasted dark and expensive, like the cognac he had been sipping at the bar when she walked into the hotel. He only kissed her once; she was the first to pull away, her eyes slipping to the locked door and the map of the emergency exits tacked onto it.
She laid there naked and he kneeled over her, still clad in his suit, only the tie removed, top button undone. He pressed a hand to the flat of her stomach, and maybe she shivered.
He watched her face, he studied her body, something clinical in the way his fingers traced the bottom curve of her breast and the taut pink flesh of a nipple.
He liked the involuntary judder of her hips, the twitch to the muscles of her thighs; she knows this, if only for the way his grip tightened against her, dull fingernails that threatened to break the skin, the way he pushed her thighs wider to fit closer in between her legs.
-
19. NEW YORK - 1988
“I’ll meet you in twenty,” she said quietly into the phone.
He hung up first and Pam crossed her legs, bit her bottom lip, hard.
-
20. LOS ANGELES - 1996
There was a Christmas in Los Angeles where they sat in the lounge of a Hilton while Debussy songs were played on a black baby grand.
“You blame me,” Noah said. “You blame me for what happened.” It wasn’t a question and Pam turned her head towards the window at their right, long pale neck disappearing into the crisp white collar of her shirt. She turned back to him and her face was tired and blank.
“Yes,” she said. She paused and turned the empty plate in front of her a couple of degrees. She looked back up at him and his eyes immediately followed from her hands to her mouth. “I’d like another drink,” she said.
(That night she drank too much, and so did he, but he was always better at holding his liquor. She sucked him off in a dark phonebooth in an alcove off of the lobby of their hotel. He pulled too hard at her hair and her eyes leaked and watered. It was the closest she ever heard him to pathetic as he begged her, as he said, “Pam, Pam, Pam,” and somewhere along the way, between the first lick of her tongue and the pound of his fist against the wall as he came, her name lost meaning and became something new and terrible.
“Pam” became “please,” because awful and frightening. She found no pride in making him beg but that did not make her stop.
After, he ripped her panties, fists grabbing under her skirt. He bent her into a corner, legs splayed open and when he came down to his knees, she was almost surprised).
-
21. BEIRUT - 1994
Beirut had been a disaster. Beirut had been the nineties and she wore her hair shorter then, a chin-length bob. Noah told her, none too kindly, it made her look European.
“I’m choosing to take that as a compliment,” she said.
Shit went sideways in Beirut, the team liked to say. Shit went sideways, went sour, went really fucking bad. On the record, it states that an undercover asset was sacrificed in a hostage situation that escalated out of control. Off the record, Noah had tried to smoke the insurgents out, he tried to bluff them first, the hostages came next, then, BOOM. Off the record Pam had said no, Pam had insisted no, “Noah, no,” she said, “Noah, we don’t do this,” she said, “Noah.”
What Pam remembers of Beirut and the bomb does not add up to a full experience. She remembers that before the blast, they sat at an outdoor café across the street from the insurgents and the asset and the hostages. Noah had said, “fuck,” and then it happened. At first she had not understood what she was seeing; she stared straight ahead and it was not until it was too late, when her chair had flipped and she fell out of it, a rush of dust and smoke and small bits of debris.
She bit the inside of her bottom lip and her mouth tasted metallic and bitter. The side of her face felt wet, sticky, and she knew it was blood, but it was still a shock when she pulled her hand away from her cheek and it was covered in red.
She murmured, “oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,” under her breath over and over again, and it was not until she felt a hand at her back that she stopped speaking. At first he said her name. Noah said, “Pam,” just the once, and she had nodded her head, her back to him, his hand warm against her dusty jacket.
He said her name again, but she would not look at him. His hand slipped up her back and stopped at the nape of her neck, and he held her like that as he said her name, he kept saying her name. He said, “Pam, Pam, Pam,” and that had scared her too.
Noah didn’t have a scratch on him.
-
22.
In the lobby the next morning his shirt was pressed and neat as were his slacks. The side of her head ached.
“Wheels up in forty,” he said.
She knew in that moment she hated him, the thought shaping in her mind as bright as the morning filtering into the hotel lobby. She hated him.
She did not speak to him on the plane, and when he sat down silent next to her she could have laughed. She arranged paperwork in front of her, pen gripped tight in her hand, and tried hard not to think of Paris.
-
23. WASHINGTON DC - 1995
In Chechnya there was a possible terrorist plot. Pam went against Noah in front of the team and she watched first the color drain from his face and fill in as anger took over.
“We do this right this time,” she said.
-
“This has nothing to do with you,” she told him in the emptied conference room. The photograph of the Chechen was still projected onto the wall and the light caught Noah’s face strangely. He nearly looked grotesque, tired and old and abused. His face twisted and Pam watched him, thick file clenched white-knuckled in her hand. Any other man and she would have called him disappointed.
He glared back at her and then finally spoke.
“That was the most offensive fucking thing you could have said to me,” he said, tone bleak.
She stared at him and he had stared back. Denial is not the same as ignorance, she had always known that. Still, she thought, both afford their own kind of expensive bliss.
Her own face hardened. “You think I am pursuing this out of some sort of jealous vendetta against you? Fuck you.”
“That’s exactly what I think. I think you’re trying to undermine my authority - ”
“Stop right there,” Pam interrupted. She slammed the file down on the table. “I don’t work for you, Vosen. You best remember that.”
In the end, they used force, they followed Noah’s advice. Noah was right (he is always right, was what she thought later, a cold beer and a hard headache).
“Crisis averted,” he said. Pam left the room.
-
24.
It’s funny how different things look depending on where you sit, right? he said.
-
25.
Ten years later she works for him.
If he remembers that exchange a decade before, he does not reference it. But then again, Noah was never the sort to explicitly lord an achievement of the personal vein over another’s head, least of all hers.
-
26.
The phone call had come as a surprise.
“I want you on Vosen’s team,” Director Kramer said.
“Vosen,” Pam repeated. “Noah Vosen?”
“One and the same.”
I’ll see you at the office. Enjoy your egg whites.
Her associate’s name is Paul.
“You and the boss man don’t really get on, huh?”
“You could say that.”
-
27.
At one point she had known all the little things that made him tick.
Noah was a competitive man. Everything was a race for him. He was always right even when - especially when - he was wrong. He never ate bleu cheese and was not above sending back a salad served with it. He was a terrible driver, a fact everyone seemed aware of save for him. His favorite paper was the Financial Times and he voted straight ticket Republican but claimed it was because he wanted fiscal conservatives in charge and men who understood the meaning of duty and defense. It was always men; women did not exist in this job for him, not even Pam. When they worked she was not a woman, she was a colleague, a distinction she learned better than to call him on more than once or twice.
He used to love to fuck her from behind but he would never finish that way - he always came with her eyes bright and huge staring up at him, staring down on him, her name stuck in his teeth like an oath it hurt to make.
(She never thought she had her own preference, but she probably did. She liked the feel of his weight against her, the heavy press of him, that she could see nothing beyond him, his shoulder blotting out the dim light of their rented room.
He left a thrumming in her blood not entirely foreign. The same bite of adrenaline behind her teeth she felt in the middle of an operation was present and there were times she wondered if it was him she wanted or if it was the job or if, if, somehow the two had become one and the same, interchangeable and equally desirable. Pam hated that thought).
There are the things she will forever associate him with:
Pomegranate seeds (she made sangria, his mouth was dark with it, neck slick with his sweat and her spit. They were in Spain - she cannot remember why they were in Spain, she is beginning to forget these things, one operation that bleeds into the next, but she remembers she was young, she was so young, she wore her hair so it brushed the tops of her shoulders and the palm of his hand was wide enough to cup the back of her skull and and - she cut the fruit into fourths and the pads of her fingertips were coated in red that transferred itself to the small of his back, the bend below the bracket of bone and rib. She can remember slipping the seeds into her mouth and he had kissed her, all teeth and tongue licking the taste out of her, and when he had pulled away his mouth had been stained all the darker, it had looked like blood, and she lunged for him - );
Bush’s election in 1988 (“Told you,” he said into the small of her back, and she grumbled as she rolled, “I voted for him too…”);
Clarence Arthur Montgomery (he had been twenty-eight years old, parents still living in New Orleans, LA; he had been military, Marine Corps., and he had been killed - Noah said, “we go in,” and the next sound was gunfire over the radio and Clarence Arthur Montgomery never came back from Somalia);
Airplanes and car rental desks in crowded airports and a man’s rumpled suit and a small glass of scotch, the stale stench of cigarette smoke that is less seedy and instead indicative of wealth, the stretch of street in Washington DC between the Navy Yard and Capitol Hill, a Munich coffeehouse, her apartment, anything, everything, she had always underestimated this man.
She does not care to wonder if he believes he underestimated her as well.
-
28. NEW YORK CITY - 2002
“There’s a rumor floating around that you’re dead.” There was a pause. “You know me, never been much for rumors, gossip…” he trailed off. “Figured I’d confirm it for myself.”
“How did you get this number?” she asked again out of simple lack of anything else to say.
He almost laughed.
“Well. I’m not dead,” she said. “I’m alive.”
“That’s good,” he said. “That’s really good.”
And then he paused.
-
29. NEW YORK CITY - 1988
“I will not order my life around you,” she hissed into the phone.
“I would never ask you to do that.”
“But you expect it.”
“I expect nothing from you, Pam.” There was silence. Pam wound the cord connected to the receiver around her finger. “You’re there and then you’re not,” he said. “I don’t look to you for something consistent.”
“Fuck you,” she said, quiet and measured.
“I didn’t think that was an insult.”
“No. I imagine you wouldn’t.”
-
30.
Noah married sometime in the late 90s. He was divorced before the millennium hit.
He had married the equivalent of a charity doyenne and Pam learned first about it through The Washington Post. It was a Sunday, she had a cup of coffee, bare feet and her bright kitchen and the society page open before her. There he was. Noah Vosen. She can’t remember the name of his wife, and she knows that’s a lie: she simply chooses not to remember.
She sent him a card the week of the wedding. A simple little thing, plain front and blank inside. Congratulations, she scrawled, and then, her name.
-
31. NEW YORK CITY - 2000
“I never thanked you for your card,” he said darkly.
“Yeah,” Pam said. “You don’t have to thank people for cards.” She took a small sip of her bourbon. “Besides,” she said on a hiss as the liquor worked its way down, “I didn’t get you a gift.”
He snorted.
“I was engaged once,” Pam said after a beat.
“I know,” he said.
“You know?”
“Your file is surprisingly thick, Pam.”
There was a lot Pam could have said to that. Instead she said nothing. She held her glass to her mouth but did not drink from it and kept her eyes on him.
It was late 2000. She had never heard of Jason Bourne.
-
32.
When Pam first saw the photograph of Jason Bourne attached to his file she could have laughed. Save for the hard, dead glint to his eye, he looked a child. A surly boy with too big a responsibility set upon his shoulders, but a boy nonetheless. Pam did not laugh.
For a long time the photograph that accompanied her file was a relic akin to a youthful betrayal. The girl that stared straight ahead with the wide eyes and the thin lips appeared strange to Pam. The photograph is gone, replaced. In the photo now there are still the same wide eyes and thin lips.
It’s not the same.
-
33. BEIRUT - 1994
“It’s easy to kill when it’s not your own gun,” she said. “Is that it?”
“You are so naïve,” he sneered.
“You see the worst in everyone,” she said.
“No, Pam. I see what’s there.”
She ducked her head and collected herself. She suddenly had felt tired and old, weary in a way age had no say for. She looked back up at him.
“I should understand you better,” Pam said. “I know you so well.” It felt false even as she said it. She was unsure in that moment if they even did know each other or if instead for the past odd decade they had merely been residing in the same space, nothing more. The thought left her cold.
-
34. NEW YORK CITY - 1989
“It’s the job,” he said. “You did everything. You followed protocol. This is the job, Pam. This is the shit to expect - ”
She pulled hard on his tie and his hands slammed to the wall behind her, either side of her head.
“Shut up,” she said against his mouth. “Shut up,” she said, and it wasn’t so much that they were kissing, just her mouth moving over and around his, telling him to shut up, and Noah made no move against her.
“Pam,” he finally said, his lips bumping against hers as she took a deep breath in.
“No,” she mumbled. He slipped a hand into her hair and held her head in place, his hips pressing against hers. Urgency was lacking, his movements did not mirror her own; there was no frantic sweep, his fingers her frame, nor desperation - only deliberation.
“Pam,” he said again, so serious, always so serious (and she loved him, she did not love him here, but she loved him, had loved him before, always loved him, she wanted not to love him, she can’t be that kind of woman, the kind that loves a man like him, she denies that she loved him, she denies this ever happened, she has denied him a place and he knows it - ). He ran a hand over the side of her face and Pam had closed her eyes, something too reverential in his gaze. Something they didn’t allow between them. These things slip through though.
They get on the grid. What happens next is you track them. You hunt them. You find them and then - poof. Gone.
These things have a way of slipping through. Their job has always been to catch them.
He kissed her openly. Never again did he tell her she did a good job.
-
35. LOS ANGELES - 1996
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said, throat tight. The curtains were drawn against the morning in her hotel room. “You should leave.”
He did.
-
36.
“You know me,” he had said.
“A figure of speech,” she would say. “Not an honest construction of a relationship between two people.”
The facts still stand.
Noah said to her, “you know me.”
-
37. MUNICH - 1984
When they met, he was too cocksure and she was too scared - eyes bright and almost vacant with fear. They both have hardened over time. Her face no longer betrays her if and when fear threatens to trip, because that is the thing: when you grow older and you grow braver it isn’t that you realize there is less to fear, but rather more. The only difference is that experience now tells you it is possible to conquer it.
But Noah Vosen is that same man she met in a café in Munich, only colder. She should have seen that coming. She had seen him in the past with a loaded gun. She has seen him shoot it. You see that, you’ve seen every bit of potential that man carries. This is another similar theme this business carries.
In a restaurant in New York City, Pam takes a seat at the table across from him, and she is nervous. She wipes her palms on her thighs beneath the table, but she imagines he is aware of it. He does not say anything and either does she.
(In Munich he smiled at her over a small cup of espresso and called her Bambi. It offended her and Pam had blushed and that had offended her even more. “All women are either flight attendants or waitresses, huh?” she snapped.
Noah Vosen (because then, to her, he had two names, then he was a stranger, an unknown colleague, and these strange men, they earn themselves two names until we are such which to call them) had smiled. He leaned back and threw his arm over the empty chair next to him, fingers dangling and arm bracketed around nothing. “Or hookers,” he said with a smirk. His eye contact had not wavered and for the first time in a list of many times to come (for this is a story that goes back a long time, a long, long time) Pam felt trapped by him. She did not blink but rested her palms against the tops of her thighs.
He laughed. “Get yourself a drink, Pamela,” he said. She blinked. “I’m Noah Vosen.”)
In the restaurant in New York, Noah says: “Are you sure? I’m buying.”
-
38.
It would be easier if he was just a villain. Villains are easier to understand in this business, they are easier to generalize, all in possession of a delirious monomania obvious to the eye. The heroes are more difficult. In this job, the heroes kill and they leave blood in their wake; bodies disappear beneath the calm surface of waves and sink same as purpose and ambition sink low and hold in the body that walks away, never clean.
Cruelty in the name of liberty, Noah would say. Except for that he never said it to her. The mind can be just as unreliable as the heart, but Pam doesn’t like to think that. She doesn’t like to think of him as a voice in her head, but just because you don’t wish to think it doesn’t mean you have altered its existence.
(We both want the same thing, he said.
We both go about it in two very different ways, she said).
-
39. NEW YORK CITY - 2006
In her file they refer to him as an indiscretion.
She thinks it a nice way to phrase it, neat in a way she has never been able to quantify herself or others, and maybe that’s the reason she likes it. Maybe she likes the fact someone somewhere, that unidentified they, was able to give him a name that worked.
Pam visits him only once in prison. It’s the first year of his sentence and she goes out of some personal sense of duty. The walls are a dingy painted brick, everything mechanized and cold, and when Noah sits down on the other side of the glass he’s clad in a muted gray; he looks more medical than inmate, and she bites the inside of her cheek.
He stares at the phone before he picks it up. When he does, he speaks first. He says: “You were the last person I expected to see here.” He looks old. Pam doesn’t know how to respond to that so she stares openly. His hair is grayer, and if he was a softer man she would call him sadder, but Noah never did sad. He did rueful, he did jealous, angry and indignant, but never sad.
“How are you?” she asks, mouth firm, lips thin.
He sort of laughs, mouth still closed, half a chuckle, and it’s regretful and more than a little angry.
“How’s the office?”
Pam shrugs. “Good. The same. The world turns on.” She pauses. “I’m thinking of leaving.”
Noah is quiet, drums his fingers on the table. “You’re not going to leave,” he says. “No one leaves of their own volition.” They lull into an unfriendly silence.
She is about to hang up the phone when she hears him say, the voice tinny and distant though he sits right before her: “The Brothers Karamazov,” he says. Pam freezes, the phone held away from her ear and she blinks once; Noah does not.
“What?” she breathes. She knows he cannot hear her, her mouth too far from the receiver but he can see her lips move.
“The Brothers Karamazov,” he repeats. The phone bumps against her ear and she swallows. “You read it in Munich. You were reading it in Munich,” he says. He looks as though he will continue, but he doesn’t.
“Yes,” Pam says. “I was. I did.” He smiles with closed lips and neither says anything. There is the babble of Spanish to Pam’s left and what sound like tears to her right. She is among prison widows, she can recognize that.
“‘The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular,’” he quotes. She smiles despite herself, mirrors his own tight smile, hers more wan than his.
“Truer words…” she murmurs.
“I was never a traitor,” he says.
“No,” she says. She doesn’t explain that there is a flipside to that, an opposing force just as frightening and dangerous. She doesn’t think she needs to. He gets it. “Neither was I,” she says.
Noah smiles and something catches in the back of her throat.
“No,” he whispers.
-
As she crosses the parking lot it has begun to rain. She pulls the collar of her jacket up around her neck and quickens her pace. When she reaches her car she sits for a moment, hands flat against the steering wheel and she takes a deep breath. The rain is coming harder now and she stares at her hands, at the windshield, the sliding, collecting rain, the blurred parking lot beyond it.
She always knew the two of them would add up to more than just a proud boy with a gun and a girl with a book. Pam runs a hand over her mouth and the breath she takes sounds almost like a shudder. Her phone rings, but she does not jump. She closes her eyes and answers it, a sharp, “Pamela Landy,” and then a simple, “I had an errand to run.”
“I’ll be right in,” she says.
She starts the car.
-
40. NEW YORK CITY - 2004
Despite anything else, know this: Pam never liked him. Remember that. At no point in their twisted retelling of modern American history did she ever like him. She could respect him, but that part came begrudgingly, and respect is not the same as affection. She knew they would never be friends, that they barely qualified as lovers. She knew she would never have him in her corner. And what do you do with a man you can’t trust.
Pam still doesn’t know.
They put Noah in cuffs and she watches them lead him away. She thinks Bourne is still alive, but the victory rings empty and hollow. She should have seen that coming, too.
The cop car drives away without sirens and the night is brisk and cold, a strong wind threatening. “I’ll walk,” she hears herself say. “I’ll walk,” she repeats. She wraps her arms around herself and turns on her heel, her pumps loud on the concrete.
Pam thinks she’ll go home. She’s been awake for a very long time.
-
41.
That’s a lie: she liked him in Prague. She never liked him as much as she liked him in Prague.
(If this was in her file, next to this statement it would read: NOTE: The use of the word like here is deliberate, perhaps even a code).
In Prague there was still a Cold War going on, Prague was after Munich but before Paris (and every romance is born and dies in Paris), and they both were responsible for surveillance of the target. The target was a supposed asset gone rogue, a concept that surprised her, even then; it was 1986, summer, hot, they had not slept together yet, Paris had not happened, yet).
In Prague he had mumbled into the bare curve of her shoulder,
“We could take them all.”
He said: “We could kill them all.”
Here is a lie:
She never thought he meant it.
Here is the truth:
She never liked him as much as she liked him in Prague.
She kissed him full on the mouth after he said it.
-
42.
Over the phone Jason Bourne said: “Get some rest, Pam. You look tired.”
She doesn’t think about these men much anymore.
-
43. NEW YORK CITY - 2004
“Past is past, Pam,” he said. “Alright?”
And then he paused.
-
44.
fin.
the bourne ultimatum. neither has ever understood the carrot; they both rule with a stick. pamela landy, noah vosen/pamela landy. rated r. 7259 words.
notes: for oregonblondie! and, yo. i don't even know what happened here: somehow this thing took on a mind of it's own? idk. um, spoilers for the trilogy?
the world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.
(the power and the glory, graham greene)
1. NEW YORK CITY - 2006
She has always been going places. The ladder leads up but you can still fall down.
She slips her jacket off and steps through the metal detector then spreads her arms as they scan her and pat her down.
The first time she saw him it had rained that day and her white blouse was limp with it. Her palms had been clammy. When she first met him, her palms had been damp with sweat. She took a deep breath before she sat down across from him at the small table - corner seat, a back exit next to him, an exit that opened on an alley, a clear shot of the front door and the passage of customers in and out.
Noah Vosen was nothing if not through.
Pam Landy did not know that, not yet.
(In these stories that run in circles it is at times helpful to know where we are going. Here is where we are going: Pamela Landy will learn, but she won’t learn everything.
No one is capable of that, least of all her).
(Another thing worth noting: this file is a thick one. This story goes back a long time).
She thinks this will be the last time she sees him. The guard hands her back her purse and she nods an acknowledgement, shoulders the leather straps and steps forward.
-
2. NEW YORK CITY - 2004
“We both want the same thing.”
“We both go about it in two very different ways.”
“Past is past, Pam. Alright?”
And then he paused.
-
3. NEW YORK CITY - 2005
Noah Vosen is interviewed multiple times, both before and during prison. We can’t look to the after prison chapter of this story. We are unsure it will even exist. If you ask sociologists and you ask criminologists, they will tell you there is no after prison chapter to tell. A man’s story ends with prison. Look at the numbers. Graph the statistics. The answer is there. The ending is there. Don’t round up.
The interviews are of the same vein the books written about Cheney and Rove and Bush (both I and II) and every other neo-con with a buzz-worthy name once 2009 hit. The questions asked are leading, all beating around the same bush of what went wrong?
He never once mentions her.
He never says: “Wars aren’t won without a little sacrifice.”
Instead he says: “Cruelty in the name of liberty.” He looks good on camera.
He never mentions her.
-
4.
They met a long time ago. All stories in this business operate the same: the two parties have known each other for a long time, they have distrusted each other for a long time, and they have known how this would end for a very long time.
(They met for the first time in Munich and again during a meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev in the States.
He was a company man, even then, and she was the last in a dwindling line of idealists).
-
5. WASHINGTON DC - 1993
“Sooner or later, Pam,” he said, “you have to choose a side.”
“I’m so tired of people saying that,” she spat. “That doesn’t mean anything.”
The pinot noir she drank was too dark and too bitter but she finished her glass. Noah only shook his head and reached for his tumbler of scotch.
“Pam,” he said, and then he paused.
-
6.
They were never spies. Remember that. Spies get the glamour and they get the love and they get the guns -
Wait. That last part is untrue. The two of them had guns, they got guns, he fired a gun. Noah Vosen was a child of cowboy heroes and virile worship; he spoke like a congressman when she first met him and although this initial impression would prove anything but prophetic he was still a man who tried to wear America on his lapel but lethally manipulated its impossible, unreal weight.
The job was strange, a sticky mess of blood and paperwork. At first Pam did not know exactly what to do with either, how you fit this into a day to day existence. Files filled with photographs of bombed out hotels in Beirut and buses with the dead for passengers in Jerusalem, the sacrificed, the martyred, the unfortunate and wasted - she did not know what you did with that.
Like everything else, you learn. She’s been at this game for twenty years and sooner or later the strange becomes the ordinary and the unexpected, the mundane.
Pam thinks she is beginning to understand the meaning of the word “sacrifice.” Noah would argue and say he has always known what it means.
Noah is a liar.
-
7.
When they met in Munich she had a book clutched to her chest. It had been spring, gray and raining, and the bottom of her trousers was damp with city filth. Looking back, she thinks she could safely say that she loved Munich, but that is only half a truth: there is nothing safe we can say about history, especially our own. The threat of misrepresentation pervades, but Pam thinks she loved Munich. She can remember the exhilarated thrill the city left her with, the head-on enthusiasm she met it with, adrenaline and lust all too alive in her.
These things do matter. The way she used to drink her coffee - milk and two sugars - matters. It is important that while in Munich Pam relied on public transportation and hauled paperback novels with her to keep company over her crowded commute, leather briefcase locked at her feet.
These things do matter, if only all the more because they are extinct. The Pamela Landy of the past would neither know nor understand the Pamela Landy of the present. The woman this story starts with was less woman and more girl, all focus and political science, game theory, I pledge allegiance to a flag -
Age does that - time, experience. Tamps down the vital more colorful parts, and it makes sense. It had been rainy and gray in Munich, and this is as good a place to start as any as it is a gray world they occupy, lest anyone try to convince you otherwise.
-
8.
“You’ll find there’s ambiguity about everything you do when you leave here,” he said.
Pam went to training at Langley. They never gave her a gun and she never had to run a field course. She learned code, she learned protocol. Assets and liabilities. Et cetera. Repeat. Et cetera.
Assets and liabilities, you learn the trade. The first rule is the more important rule, is the unspoken rule:
There is no one to trust, not even yourself.
They all leave Langley. No one ever remembers this rule.
-
9.
(To bare your back to a man you don’t trust, to have that expanse of pale skin, two crooked shoulder blades, the bumps of vertebrae that meander down in a straight line, it is foolish.
She did it anyway, the first time, a long time ago. She was not as young as she likes to imagine she was).
-
10. LOS ANGELES - 1996
“When did you go so soft, Pamela,” he said, sibilant and cold.
“I hadn’t thought I had.”
-
11. NEW YORK CITY - 2005
Her new place has a doorman but they let him up. He knocks at her door just before midnight and she pauses, a hand raised to the doorknob, for a beat too long.
“Noah,” she says when she opens the door. She ties her already belted robe once more.
“Can I…?”
He doesn’t finish the question and she doesn’t answer. She steps aside and opens the door wider.
“You weren’t sleeping,” he says, more observation than inquiry. She doesn’t comment on it. The scene speaks for itself: the television on, a black and white Hitchcock film on mute (Strangers on a Train), an abandoned bottle of red wine on the coffee table next to an open laptop, default screen bright and blue.
“What can I,” she starts then stops. “Can I get you anything?” she asks. He shakes his head. Pam resists the urge to disguise that she is staring at him and eyes him warily. She has not seen him since Bourne, David Webb, whatever name he goes by these days, disappeared.
“Out on bail,” he says unprompted. He raises his chin as he says, like there’s some pride to be found in that. Pam slips her hands into the pockets of her robe.
“I had heard,” she says. She also had heard his sentencing is to happen next Wednesday but she does not tell him that.
They never did do small talk. It seems strange to start now.
“What are you doing here, Noah,” she says. There’s no energy to the question, no uptick of infliction as she says his name, Noah; it sounds tired, unused yet worn and familiar all at once, the way you retry on old memories and old personas, old iterations of who you used to be. She has known him for the bulk of her professional career, and the likewise holds true for him. It makes sense for her to see him before he is sentenced, it makes sense for him to come to her.
His gaze drifts over to the television set. “I always liked that one,” he says. Pam doesn’t say anything. The kitchen table remains a temporary buffer between the two of them and Noah turns his attention back to her.
“I thought I’d hate you more,” he says, nonchalant and almost casual.
“Yeah,” she says.
“Yeah,” he says.
Pam sighs. “You come here to tell me that?”
He takes a step forward and rests a hand low on her hip. She can feel his fingers flex against the cotton and she looks down at her feet.
Noah leans in, his cheek brushes against hers.
“Noah,” she says quietly. He does not move; she can feel him swallow against her. He takes a step back.
“Get some rest,” he says and shuts the door behind him. Behind her the credits have begun to roll, white overlaid atop of black.
-
12. NEW YORK CITY - 2004
The last page of the file was faxed.
“You’d better get yourself a good lawyer,” she said.
-
13. PARIS - 1986
On the flight back from Paris she tried to sleep. Over the Atlantic, Noah sat down next to her. She heard him sigh and settle into the aisle seat beside her, his forearm bumping hers - both their shirt sleeves rolled, bare skin meeting bare skin. Pam cracked one eye open and he had his chin tucked to his shoulder and he looked over and down at her, face unreadable.
“Look,” he started, voice almost a whisper, low and dirty if only for the prior context she remembered it, remembered him.
Pam held up a hand. “Don’t,” she said, quiet but firm. “Just. Do not. Do not ever. This is not a conversation we need to have.” She leaned her head back and stared at the stowed tray table in front of her. “I get it,” she said.
He sighed again, his arm still flush with hers and his skin was warm.
“All I wanted to be sure of,” he mumbled, but he did not leave. Pam did not sleep, though she kept her eyes closed.
-
14.
She had wondered what he would be like in bed in an idle, mindless sort of way. He was an attractive man; it was a natural extension of thought to be curious. Her suspicions (namely: controlling, dominant, talkative, rough) all proved to be warranted.
(He braced her hands over her head and it hurt, she could feel the small bones of her wrist grinding beneath his grip, but she did not ask him to let go. Instead she writhed under him, her back bowing up, her skinny frame one with his as he held her down. His breath was hot against her face, the sharp cut of her jaw and when he buried his face in the crook of her neck the stubble of his five o’clock shadow burned.
“Tell me you don’t want this,” he had said.
Pamela had not said a word but his name).
(That was the first time, and it was the only time for a long time).
(For her, that was Paris for a very, very long time).
-
15.
Noah had a place over by the Watergate. His top floor apartment overlooked the Potomac, flat and dead to the eye, water stalled out under the bridge.
(Her apartment, then the early 1990s, and Monica had yet to blow Bill, the US had yet to blow the Gulf, was smaller, warmer, a block from Rock Creek Park, trees shaded the front door to the building. It was her favorite place she had ever lived for no real particular reason other than the trees, the park, the small cramped bedroom with the large window and the cool wooden floorboards that creaked under her weight and spoke of the path her pacing wore between those four walls.
Noah - and, yes, she called him Noah then, and he called her Landy and he calls her Pam now, calls her Pam the same way you try and hold something over someone’s head, and maybe it goes to show you can teach an old dog new tricks, that a woman can learn, because she calls him Vosen now, not just Noah - never once saw the inside of that apartment. It was a decision never actually made by her, at least not consciously, but the closest they ever came to her front door was the Marriott Hotel on the corner two blocks away. Pam had not told him this. A part of her wishes she had; the accompanying grin that would have crested on his face is all too clear.
-
16. WASHINGTON DC - 1993
He took a step forward, a crooked grin on his face. His suit jacket brushed against hers, and he took another step still. He exhaled and she could feel it, smell his breath, acrid and thick with nicotine, something stronger.
Noah raised his hands to her shoulders and rested them there first, heat seeping through the thick fabric. His fingers pulled at the seams as though straightening her jacket and then fell to his sides, her sides, too close to her hip.
“You think you’re so damn smart,” he said, amused, near tender. His chin brushed against her forehead and slight stubble scraped her skin.
To her credit her face did not crack. When he finally walked away (one scarcely surreptitious slip of his hand against her thigh first) there were four tiny half-moon indents in the palm of her hand.
(“I’ll take a cab home,” she had told him, “your ego doesn’t travel well with me,” and he left her standing there on Indiana Avenue next to an idling taxi).
-
17. WASHINGTON DC - 1989
The Berlin Wall fell. The DC office was a mess.
Pam found him by accident, an empty corridor and an elevator bank - the down button pressed and lit.
Pam at first had not said anything. Noah smiled, the stretch of lip and teeth grim and vaguely inappropriate.
“Party had to end sometime,” he shrugged.
“What?” she said dumbly.
The elevator behind him dinged and opened. Noah stepped in. As he turned to face her he said, “You never did get it.”
The doors slid shut.
-
18.
The second time, it was New York. Then, it had been slow, near methodical. His mouth tasted dark and expensive, like the cognac he had been sipping at the bar when she walked into the hotel. He only kissed her once; she was the first to pull away, her eyes slipping to the locked door and the map of the emergency exits tacked onto it.
She laid there naked and he kneeled over her, still clad in his suit, only the tie removed, top button undone. He pressed a hand to the flat of her stomach, and maybe she shivered.
He watched her face, he studied her body, something clinical in the way his fingers traced the bottom curve of her breast and the taut pink flesh of a nipple.
He liked the involuntary judder of her hips, the twitch to the muscles of her thighs; she knows this, if only for the way his grip tightened against her, dull fingernails that threatened to break the skin, the way he pushed her thighs wider to fit closer in between her legs.
-
19. NEW YORK - 1988
“I’ll meet you in twenty,” she said quietly into the phone.
He hung up first and Pam crossed her legs, bit her bottom lip, hard.
-
20. LOS ANGELES - 1996
There was a Christmas in Los Angeles where they sat in the lounge of a Hilton while Debussy songs were played on a black baby grand.
“You blame me,” Noah said. “You blame me for what happened.” It wasn’t a question and Pam turned her head towards the window at their right, long pale neck disappearing into the crisp white collar of her shirt. She turned back to him and her face was tired and blank.
“Yes,” she said. She paused and turned the empty plate in front of her a couple of degrees. She looked back up at him and his eyes immediately followed from her hands to her mouth. “I’d like another drink,” she said.
(That night she drank too much, and so did he, but he was always better at holding his liquor. She sucked him off in a dark phonebooth in an alcove off of the lobby of their hotel. He pulled too hard at her hair and her eyes leaked and watered. It was the closest she ever heard him to pathetic as he begged her, as he said, “Pam, Pam, Pam,” and somewhere along the way, between the first lick of her tongue and the pound of his fist against the wall as he came, her name lost meaning and became something new and terrible.
“Pam” became “please,” because awful and frightening. She found no pride in making him beg but that did not make her stop.
After, he ripped her panties, fists grabbing under her skirt. He bent her into a corner, legs splayed open and when he came down to his knees, she was almost surprised).
-
21. BEIRUT - 1994
Beirut had been a disaster. Beirut had been the nineties and she wore her hair shorter then, a chin-length bob. Noah told her, none too kindly, it made her look European.
“I’m choosing to take that as a compliment,” she said.
Shit went sideways in Beirut, the team liked to say. Shit went sideways, went sour, went really fucking bad. On the record, it states that an undercover asset was sacrificed in a hostage situation that escalated out of control. Off the record, Noah had tried to smoke the insurgents out, he tried to bluff them first, the hostages came next, then, BOOM. Off the record Pam had said no, Pam had insisted no, “Noah, no,” she said, “Noah, we don’t do this,” she said, “Noah.”
What Pam remembers of Beirut and the bomb does not add up to a full experience. She remembers that before the blast, they sat at an outdoor café across the street from the insurgents and the asset and the hostages. Noah had said, “fuck,” and then it happened. At first she had not understood what she was seeing; she stared straight ahead and it was not until it was too late, when her chair had flipped and she fell out of it, a rush of dust and smoke and small bits of debris.
She bit the inside of her bottom lip and her mouth tasted metallic and bitter. The side of her face felt wet, sticky, and she knew it was blood, but it was still a shock when she pulled her hand away from her cheek and it was covered in red.
She murmured, “oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,” under her breath over and over again, and it was not until she felt a hand at her back that she stopped speaking. At first he said her name. Noah said, “Pam,” just the once, and she had nodded her head, her back to him, his hand warm against her dusty jacket.
He said her name again, but she would not look at him. His hand slipped up her back and stopped at the nape of her neck, and he held her like that as he said her name, he kept saying her name. He said, “Pam, Pam, Pam,” and that had scared her too.
Noah didn’t have a scratch on him.
-
22.
In the lobby the next morning his shirt was pressed and neat as were his slacks. The side of her head ached.
“Wheels up in forty,” he said.
She knew in that moment she hated him, the thought shaping in her mind as bright as the morning filtering into the hotel lobby. She hated him.
She did not speak to him on the plane, and when he sat down silent next to her she could have laughed. She arranged paperwork in front of her, pen gripped tight in her hand, and tried hard not to think of Paris.
-
23. WASHINGTON DC - 1995
In Chechnya there was a possible terrorist plot. Pam went against Noah in front of the team and she watched first the color drain from his face and fill in as anger took over.
“We do this right this time,” she said.
-
“This has nothing to do with you,” she told him in the emptied conference room. The photograph of the Chechen was still projected onto the wall and the light caught Noah’s face strangely. He nearly looked grotesque, tired and old and abused. His face twisted and Pam watched him, thick file clenched white-knuckled in her hand. Any other man and she would have called him disappointed.
He glared back at her and then finally spoke.
“That was the most offensive fucking thing you could have said to me,” he said, tone bleak.
She stared at him and he had stared back. Denial is not the same as ignorance, she had always known that. Still, she thought, both afford their own kind of expensive bliss.
Her own face hardened. “You think I am pursuing this out of some sort of jealous vendetta against you? Fuck you.”
“That’s exactly what I think. I think you’re trying to undermine my authority - ”
“Stop right there,” Pam interrupted. She slammed the file down on the table. “I don’t work for you, Vosen. You best remember that.”
In the end, they used force, they followed Noah’s advice. Noah was right (he is always right, was what she thought later, a cold beer and a hard headache).
“Crisis averted,” he said. Pam left the room.
-
24.
It’s funny how different things look depending on where you sit, right? he said.
-
25.
Ten years later she works for him.
If he remembers that exchange a decade before, he does not reference it. But then again, Noah was never the sort to explicitly lord an achievement of the personal vein over another’s head, least of all hers.
-
26.
The phone call had come as a surprise.
“I want you on Vosen’s team,” Director Kramer said.
“Vosen,” Pam repeated. “Noah Vosen?”
“One and the same.”
I’ll see you at the office. Enjoy your egg whites.
Her associate’s name is Paul.
“You and the boss man don’t really get on, huh?”
“You could say that.”
-
27.
At one point she had known all the little things that made him tick.
Noah was a competitive man. Everything was a race for him. He was always right even when - especially when - he was wrong. He never ate bleu cheese and was not above sending back a salad served with it. He was a terrible driver, a fact everyone seemed aware of save for him. His favorite paper was the Financial Times and he voted straight ticket Republican but claimed it was because he wanted fiscal conservatives in charge and men who understood the meaning of duty and defense. It was always men; women did not exist in this job for him, not even Pam. When they worked she was not a woman, she was a colleague, a distinction she learned better than to call him on more than once or twice.
He used to love to fuck her from behind but he would never finish that way - he always came with her eyes bright and huge staring up at him, staring down on him, her name stuck in his teeth like an oath it hurt to make.
(She never thought she had her own preference, but she probably did. She liked the feel of his weight against her, the heavy press of him, that she could see nothing beyond him, his shoulder blotting out the dim light of their rented room.
He left a thrumming in her blood not entirely foreign. The same bite of adrenaline behind her teeth she felt in the middle of an operation was present and there were times she wondered if it was him she wanted or if it was the job or if, if, somehow the two had become one and the same, interchangeable and equally desirable. Pam hated that thought).
There are the things she will forever associate him with:
Pomegranate seeds (she made sangria, his mouth was dark with it, neck slick with his sweat and her spit. They were in Spain - she cannot remember why they were in Spain, she is beginning to forget these things, one operation that bleeds into the next, but she remembers she was young, she was so young, she wore her hair so it brushed the tops of her shoulders and the palm of his hand was wide enough to cup the back of her skull and and - she cut the fruit into fourths and the pads of her fingertips were coated in red that transferred itself to the small of his back, the bend below the bracket of bone and rib. She can remember slipping the seeds into her mouth and he had kissed her, all teeth and tongue licking the taste out of her, and when he had pulled away his mouth had been stained all the darker, it had looked like blood, and she lunged for him - );
Bush’s election in 1988 (“Told you,” he said into the small of her back, and she grumbled as she rolled, “I voted for him too…”);
Clarence Arthur Montgomery (he had been twenty-eight years old, parents still living in New Orleans, LA; he had been military, Marine Corps., and he had been killed - Noah said, “we go in,” and the next sound was gunfire over the radio and Clarence Arthur Montgomery never came back from Somalia);
Airplanes and car rental desks in crowded airports and a man’s rumpled suit and a small glass of scotch, the stale stench of cigarette smoke that is less seedy and instead indicative of wealth, the stretch of street in Washington DC between the Navy Yard and Capitol Hill, a Munich coffeehouse, her apartment, anything, everything, she had always underestimated this man.
She does not care to wonder if he believes he underestimated her as well.
-
28. NEW YORK CITY - 2002
“There’s a rumor floating around that you’re dead.” There was a pause. “You know me, never been much for rumors, gossip…” he trailed off. “Figured I’d confirm it for myself.”
“How did you get this number?” she asked again out of simple lack of anything else to say.
He almost laughed.
“Well. I’m not dead,” she said. “I’m alive.”
“That’s good,” he said. “That’s really good.”
And then he paused.
-
29. NEW YORK CITY - 1988
“I will not order my life around you,” she hissed into the phone.
“I would never ask you to do that.”
“But you expect it.”
“I expect nothing from you, Pam.” There was silence. Pam wound the cord connected to the receiver around her finger. “You’re there and then you’re not,” he said. “I don’t look to you for something consistent.”
“Fuck you,” she said, quiet and measured.
“I didn’t think that was an insult.”
“No. I imagine you wouldn’t.”
-
30.
Noah married sometime in the late 90s. He was divorced before the millennium hit.
He had married the equivalent of a charity doyenne and Pam learned first about it through The Washington Post. It was a Sunday, she had a cup of coffee, bare feet and her bright kitchen and the society page open before her. There he was. Noah Vosen. She can’t remember the name of his wife, and she knows that’s a lie: she simply chooses not to remember.
She sent him a card the week of the wedding. A simple little thing, plain front and blank inside. Congratulations, she scrawled, and then, her name.
-
31. NEW YORK CITY - 2000
“I never thanked you for your card,” he said darkly.
“Yeah,” Pam said. “You don’t have to thank people for cards.” She took a small sip of her bourbon. “Besides,” she said on a hiss as the liquor worked its way down, “I didn’t get you a gift.”
He snorted.
“I was engaged once,” Pam said after a beat.
“I know,” he said.
“You know?”
“Your file is surprisingly thick, Pam.”
There was a lot Pam could have said to that. Instead she said nothing. She held her glass to her mouth but did not drink from it and kept her eyes on him.
It was late 2000. She had never heard of Jason Bourne.
-
32.
When Pam first saw the photograph of Jason Bourne attached to his file she could have laughed. Save for the hard, dead glint to his eye, he looked a child. A surly boy with too big a responsibility set upon his shoulders, but a boy nonetheless. Pam did not laugh.
For a long time the photograph that accompanied her file was a relic akin to a youthful betrayal. The girl that stared straight ahead with the wide eyes and the thin lips appeared strange to Pam. The photograph is gone, replaced. In the photo now there are still the same wide eyes and thin lips.
It’s not the same.
-
33. BEIRUT - 1994
“It’s easy to kill when it’s not your own gun,” she said. “Is that it?”
“You are so naïve,” he sneered.
“You see the worst in everyone,” she said.
“No, Pam. I see what’s there.”
She ducked her head and collected herself. She suddenly had felt tired and old, weary in a way age had no say for. She looked back up at him.
“I should understand you better,” Pam said. “I know you so well.” It felt false even as she said it. She was unsure in that moment if they even did know each other or if instead for the past odd decade they had merely been residing in the same space, nothing more. The thought left her cold.
-
34. NEW YORK CITY - 1989
“It’s the job,” he said. “You did everything. You followed protocol. This is the job, Pam. This is the shit to expect - ”
She pulled hard on his tie and his hands slammed to the wall behind her, either side of her head.
“Shut up,” she said against his mouth. “Shut up,” she said, and it wasn’t so much that they were kissing, just her mouth moving over and around his, telling him to shut up, and Noah made no move against her.
“Pam,” he finally said, his lips bumping against hers as she took a deep breath in.
“No,” she mumbled. He slipped a hand into her hair and held her head in place, his hips pressing against hers. Urgency was lacking, his movements did not mirror her own; there was no frantic sweep, his fingers her frame, nor desperation - only deliberation.
“Pam,” he said again, so serious, always so serious (and she loved him, she did not love him here, but she loved him, had loved him before, always loved him, she wanted not to love him, she can’t be that kind of woman, the kind that loves a man like him, she denies that she loved him, she denies this ever happened, she has denied him a place and he knows it - ). He ran a hand over the side of her face and Pam had closed her eyes, something too reverential in his gaze. Something they didn’t allow between them. These things slip through though.
They get on the grid. What happens next is you track them. You hunt them. You find them and then - poof. Gone.
These things have a way of slipping through. Their job has always been to catch them.
He kissed her openly. Never again did he tell her she did a good job.
-
35. LOS ANGELES - 1996
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said, throat tight. The curtains were drawn against the morning in her hotel room. “You should leave.”
He did.
-
36.
“You know me,” he had said.
“A figure of speech,” she would say. “Not an honest construction of a relationship between two people.”
The facts still stand.
Noah said to her, “you know me.”
-
37. MUNICH - 1984
When they met, he was too cocksure and she was too scared - eyes bright and almost vacant with fear. They both have hardened over time. Her face no longer betrays her if and when fear threatens to trip, because that is the thing: when you grow older and you grow braver it isn’t that you realize there is less to fear, but rather more. The only difference is that experience now tells you it is possible to conquer it.
But Noah Vosen is that same man she met in a café in Munich, only colder. She should have seen that coming. She had seen him in the past with a loaded gun. She has seen him shoot it. You see that, you’ve seen every bit of potential that man carries. This is another similar theme this business carries.
In a restaurant in New York City, Pam takes a seat at the table across from him, and she is nervous. She wipes her palms on her thighs beneath the table, but she imagines he is aware of it. He does not say anything and either does she.
(In Munich he smiled at her over a small cup of espresso and called her Bambi. It offended her and Pam had blushed and that had offended her even more. “All women are either flight attendants or waitresses, huh?” she snapped.
Noah Vosen (because then, to her, he had two names, then he was a stranger, an unknown colleague, and these strange men, they earn themselves two names until we are such which to call them) had smiled. He leaned back and threw his arm over the empty chair next to him, fingers dangling and arm bracketed around nothing. “Or hookers,” he said with a smirk. His eye contact had not wavered and for the first time in a list of many times to come (for this is a story that goes back a long time, a long, long time) Pam felt trapped by him. She did not blink but rested her palms against the tops of her thighs.
He laughed. “Get yourself a drink, Pamela,” he said. She blinked. “I’m Noah Vosen.”)
In the restaurant in New York, Noah says: “Are you sure? I’m buying.”
-
38.
It would be easier if he was just a villain. Villains are easier to understand in this business, they are easier to generalize, all in possession of a delirious monomania obvious to the eye. The heroes are more difficult. In this job, the heroes kill and they leave blood in their wake; bodies disappear beneath the calm surface of waves and sink same as purpose and ambition sink low and hold in the body that walks away, never clean.
Cruelty in the name of liberty, Noah would say. Except for that he never said it to her. The mind can be just as unreliable as the heart, but Pam doesn’t like to think that. She doesn’t like to think of him as a voice in her head, but just because you don’t wish to think it doesn’t mean you have altered its existence.
(We both want the same thing, he said.
We both go about it in two very different ways, she said).
-
39. NEW YORK CITY - 2006
In her file they refer to him as an indiscretion.
She thinks it a nice way to phrase it, neat in a way she has never been able to quantify herself or others, and maybe that’s the reason she likes it. Maybe she likes the fact someone somewhere, that unidentified they, was able to give him a name that worked.
Pam visits him only once in prison. It’s the first year of his sentence and she goes out of some personal sense of duty. The walls are a dingy painted brick, everything mechanized and cold, and when Noah sits down on the other side of the glass he’s clad in a muted gray; he looks more medical than inmate, and she bites the inside of her cheek.
He stares at the phone before he picks it up. When he does, he speaks first. He says: “You were the last person I expected to see here.” He looks old. Pam doesn’t know how to respond to that so she stares openly. His hair is grayer, and if he was a softer man she would call him sadder, but Noah never did sad. He did rueful, he did jealous, angry and indignant, but never sad.
“How are you?” she asks, mouth firm, lips thin.
He sort of laughs, mouth still closed, half a chuckle, and it’s regretful and more than a little angry.
“How’s the office?”
Pam shrugs. “Good. The same. The world turns on.” She pauses. “I’m thinking of leaving.”
Noah is quiet, drums his fingers on the table. “You’re not going to leave,” he says. “No one leaves of their own volition.” They lull into an unfriendly silence.
She is about to hang up the phone when she hears him say, the voice tinny and distant though he sits right before her: “The Brothers Karamazov,” he says. Pam freezes, the phone held away from her ear and she blinks once; Noah does not.
“What?” she breathes. She knows he cannot hear her, her mouth too far from the receiver but he can see her lips move.
“The Brothers Karamazov,” he repeats. The phone bumps against her ear and she swallows. “You read it in Munich. You were reading it in Munich,” he says. He looks as though he will continue, but he doesn’t.
“Yes,” Pam says. “I was. I did.” He smiles with closed lips and neither says anything. There is the babble of Spanish to Pam’s left and what sound like tears to her right. She is among prison widows, she can recognize that.
“‘The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular,’” he quotes. She smiles despite herself, mirrors his own tight smile, hers more wan than his.
“Truer words…” she murmurs.
“I was never a traitor,” he says.
“No,” she says. She doesn’t explain that there is a flipside to that, an opposing force just as frightening and dangerous. She doesn’t think she needs to. He gets it. “Neither was I,” she says.
Noah smiles and something catches in the back of her throat.
“No,” he whispers.
-
As she crosses the parking lot it has begun to rain. She pulls the collar of her jacket up around her neck and quickens her pace. When she reaches her car she sits for a moment, hands flat against the steering wheel and she takes a deep breath. The rain is coming harder now and she stares at her hands, at the windshield, the sliding, collecting rain, the blurred parking lot beyond it.
She always knew the two of them would add up to more than just a proud boy with a gun and a girl with a book. Pam runs a hand over her mouth and the breath she takes sounds almost like a shudder. Her phone rings, but she does not jump. She closes her eyes and answers it, a sharp, “Pamela Landy,” and then a simple, “I had an errand to run.”
“I’ll be right in,” she says.
She starts the car.
-
40. NEW YORK CITY - 2004
Despite anything else, know this: Pam never liked him. Remember that. At no point in their twisted retelling of modern American history did she ever like him. She could respect him, but that part came begrudgingly, and respect is not the same as affection. She knew they would never be friends, that they barely qualified as lovers. She knew she would never have him in her corner. And what do you do with a man you can’t trust.
Pam still doesn’t know.
They put Noah in cuffs and she watches them lead him away. She thinks Bourne is still alive, but the victory rings empty and hollow. She should have seen that coming, too.
The cop car drives away without sirens and the night is brisk and cold, a strong wind threatening. “I’ll walk,” she hears herself say. “I’ll walk,” she repeats. She wraps her arms around herself and turns on her heel, her pumps loud on the concrete.
Pam thinks she’ll go home. She’s been awake for a very long time.
-
41.
That’s a lie: she liked him in Prague. She never liked him as much as she liked him in Prague.
(If this was in her file, next to this statement it would read: NOTE: The use of the word like here is deliberate, perhaps even a code).
In Prague there was still a Cold War going on, Prague was after Munich but before Paris (and every romance is born and dies in Paris), and they both were responsible for surveillance of the target. The target was a supposed asset gone rogue, a concept that surprised her, even then; it was 1986, summer, hot, they had not slept together yet, Paris had not happened, yet).
In Prague he had mumbled into the bare curve of her shoulder,
“We could take them all.”
He said: “We could kill them all.”
Here is a lie:
She never thought he meant it.
Here is the truth:
She never liked him as much as she liked him in Prague.
She kissed him full on the mouth after he said it.
-
42.
Over the phone Jason Bourne said: “Get some rest, Pam. You look tired.”
She doesn’t think about these men much anymore.
-
43. NEW YORK CITY - 2004
“Past is past, Pam,” he said. “Alright?”
And then he paused.
-
44.
fin.