Siro by David Ignatius (short books to read txt) 📕

“Quite,” said Taylor. “Maybe one of them could do my job.” He poured himself another drink. The band was beginning another set. Taylor scanned the room with a look of pure pleasure on his face. This was the point of it all: to have a drink with a friend in an exotic bar while the band played Crimean love songs.

“Why do you like bars and whorehouses so much?” asked George. “They don’t seem like your kind of thing, exactly.”

Taylor thought a moment. It was a good question.

“Because I’m a neggo,” he said.

“What the hell is a neggo?”

“That’s a long story. I’ll tell you sometime. Let’s listen to the music.”

It was, in fact, the truest thing that Taylor could have said about himself. At the New England prep school he had briefly attended in the late 1950s, they divided the world into possos and neggos. The possos believed in things. They got to class on time, they studied diligently to make the honor roll, they wore their letter sweaters right side out. At the seminar tables, they sat without embarrassment in the “suck seats” closest to the teacher. They didn’t get drunk, they didn’t get laid; but then, they weren’t sure they wanted to. They were fine young men; they looked at life without irony.

The neggos, in contrast, professed to believe in nothing. They spent their time in the dormitory butt room, smoking cigarettes under a sign that read: “Recreant in Pacem.” They read Zen poetry and listened to Miles Davis records and could recite long passages of “Howl” by heart. When they studied hard, they pretended not to. They were in search of experience and “authenticity.” What they feared, above all, was the nothingness of ordinary life. They were, in their way, professional malcontents. When a teacher encountered a student who had lately developed that telltale James Dean look in his eye, he might implore him: “Mr. Jones, you’re not going to become a neggo, are you?”

Taylor was very much a neggo. So much so that he was ejected from school in the middle of his senior year. “Fired,” in neggo lingo. The formal accusation was that he had been gambling on a bridge game in the butt room, but many people did that without getting fired. In Taylor’s case, it was an accumulation of things: He had pissed out the dormitory window one afternoon during parents’ weekend; he had refused to take a standardized personality-inventory test. He had, in a hundred large and small ways, signaled a dislike for the school and its traditions. And the school finally reciprocated.

Taylor returned home in apparent disgrace and finished out his senior year at the local high school in his hometown in Connecticut. His grades were excellent, his test scores were brilliant, but because of the black mark of his expulsion, he was not admitted to Harvard or Yale, and went instead to the University of Chicago. Taylor’s father was mortified. In his mind, the University of Chicago was for Jews. But Taylor liked it well enough. Chicago was a neggo’s paradise. Taylor found new ways to get out of his skin and into other people’s. He would hang out at the blues clubs on the South Side, listening to Elmore James and smoking pot. Or he would drive east along the shores of Lake Michigan toward the glowing nightscape of Indiana Harbor and Gary, and play pool with steelworkers getting off their shifts. To Taylor, it was all gloriously romantic—except for school, which was a joke. As an act of nihilism and defiance, he majored in Near Eastern languages. Surely that would keep him out of law school, he reasoned. And it did. But it didn’t keep him out of the CIA.

Taylor would never have joined the CIA if it hadn’t been the 1960s, and if he hadn’t been even more contrary than people imagined. There was the pressure of the draft, of course, and Vietnam, which seemed to Taylor, even then, like an especially dumb idea. But it was more complicated than that. In the wave of generalized national negativism that followed the Kennedy assassination, the people Taylor had spent his adolescence trying to escape were now embracing his worldview. Disillusionment was setting in among the bright young men. The possos didn’t want to be spies anymore. They wanted to join the Peace Corps, go on freedom marches, hang out in jazz clubs. Even Yale men were having second thoughts. It was too much for Taylor to bear. The possos were invading the butt room. So Taylor decided to go the other way. The rebel became a counter-rebel. And the Central Intelligence Agency, already losing its annual influx of the right men from the right schools, was only too glad to have him. It was, in a way, a neggo’s paradise. As Taylor quickly discovered, you didn’t have to believe anything at all.

George might have coaxed a little bit of this out of Taylor, a hint of the sensualist’s quest for experience that had made him, as his colleagues said, a “natural recruiter.” But just then they heard the booming voice of Omar, who was approaching their table.

“I can join you, Al-an?” said the proprietor. “Not stay long. Just say hi.”

“Of course,” said Taylor, pouring him a glass of vodka.

“Some coincidence!” said Omar.

“What’s that?”

“Another American man is here tonight at my bar.”

“Oh yeah?” said Taylor. “Where?”

Omar pointed to a table across the room where a blond-haired man in his late twenties was talking with two older dark-haired men.

“I thought maybe some friend of yours, huh?” said Omar. “He come here two, three times last few weeks. He talk to Azeri men. Tatar men. Tonight I think he talk to Uzbek men. He remind me of you, maybe.”

Taylor gazed at the man across the room with a mixture of curiosity and concern.

“I don’t believe I know the gentleman.”

“Too bad,” said Omar, draining his glass. “Maybe Omar is wrong.”

“Omar is never wrong,” said Taylor.

They talked