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

“Does he have anything to do with the Soviet Union?”

“Shhh.”

The waiter arrived. Margaret ordered a Tanqueray martini, straight up, with a twist of lemon. Anna ordered the same thing. It was a celebration, after all. The waiter looked surprised. In the fraternity of waiters, women dining together are regarded as cheapskates. They don’t drink, they order salads, and they tip ten percent. Spending money in restaurants does not ordinarily give them the same rosy glow of substantiality it does men. Margaret had discovered some years ago that if she ordered food and drink like a man, she would be treated like one, at least by waiters.

“What’s he like?” asked Anna.

“Who?”

“Stone.”

“He’s one of the old boys. I suppose he’s like the rest of them, only a bit smarter. To be honest, when you’ve been around them as long as I have, their personalities begin to blur a bit.”

“What are they like then, the old boys?”

“You know very well what they’re like,” said Margaret. “They drink too much. They screw too much. They’re smooth and confident and they like to talk loud in restaurants.”

“Stone wasn’t loud.”

“He’s quieter. But he’s still one of the boys. You have to remember that I have spent a lifetime watching these men, usually from a quite subordinate position. So I know the sorts of things about them that they don’t know about each other.”

“Like what?”

“Their vanity. Their anxieties. Their weaknesses. The things that women know about men. Although in Stone’s case, I must admit I’ve never heard him express a moment’s anxiety or doubt about anything.”

The waiter returned with the drinks.

“To London!” said Margaret, clinking her glass.

“To success!” responded Anna. She was beginning to like this idea of a secret club whose mission was to travel abroad, eat in good restaurants and save the world.

“He seemed sort of sexy,” continued Anna. “For a man in his sixties.”

“Who?”

“Stone.”

Margaret laughed. “Of course he does,” she said. “They all do. That’s the thing about secrets. They give a man a certain air of knowing what he’s doing, even if he doesn’t have a clue. I think that’s why they all stayed in so long, actually.”

“To get laid?”

“Really, Anna!” Margaret looked at the younger woman in mock horror. But of course that was exactly what she meant.

“What would he be like to work for?”

“Why? Did he offer you a job?”

“No,” said Anna. “I was just curious.”

“He’d be fine, up to a point. But what you have to understand about the old boys is that it is hard for them to imagine women as colleagues. They think of us the way adults think of children. They like us, enjoy us. Respect us, even. But we are in a different category.”

“Stone looked tired.”

“They all look tired,” said Margaret. “And no wonder. They are tired. Exhausted. Things haven’t been going too well for the old boys, if you hadn’t noticed. Their world is collapsing, and they don’t know what to do about it.”

“What about the younger ones?”

“They’re a mess.”

“How do you mean?”

“They would like to be like the old boys, but they can’t because the world has changed. The dumb ones still try. But the smart ones know it’s impossible.”

“So what do they do, the smart ones?”

“They get flaky. Or they quit.”

The waiter approached again and recited the evening’s specials.

“I’ll have the string-bean salad,” said Anna, “and the grilled sole, with no sauce.” The waiter frowned.

“That’s not much of a meal,” said Margaret. She turned to the waiter. “I’ll have oysters. And a rib-eye steak.” Her tone conveyed the authority of the carnivore.

“I’ve changed my mind,” said Anna. “I’ll have the same thing. The oysters and the steak.”

“Yes, madam,” said the waiter, radiating the glow of his now quite substantial customers. “Would you like to see the wine list?”

“Of course,” said Anna. And she picked out a quite respectable red Burgundy.

Anna had not been entirely honest with Stone, or with Margaret, for that matter. The factors that had drawn her toward working for the CIA were more complicated than simple boredom. She was afflicted with the disease, common and occasionally fatal among intelligence officers, of wanting to make the world better. She had, in that sense, a deadly ambition to do good. What had pushed her toward leaving Harvard was a growing sense of the disarray and misery in the world. She read about Lebanese being slaughtered on the streets of Beirut or the massacres by the Khmer Rouge and she wanted to do something about it. When people experience such feelings in their late teens, they join protest marches; when it happens in their late twenties, they—on occasion—join the CIA.

Anna had not been completely honest about her research either. Far from the dry investigation she had described to Stone, it was wet with the blood of generations of Ottoman victims. Her dissertation had brought her to the edge of one of the world’s great calamities—the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in World War I and the slaughter of Armenians and Turks in eastern Anatolia. She had become interested in the subject initially through her freshman roommate at Radcliffe, an Armenian-American named Ruth Mugrditchian. Poor Ruth, with the unpronounceable name and the large, sad eyes. Her family lived in Worcester, and Anna—the Wasp princess from boarding school—had not been sure at first whether to accept when Ruth invited her home for Thanksgiving. But she said yes, and the tales she heard over those four days about the massacres of 1915 left a lasting impression. She heard how Ruth’s great-aunt Ahvanie had staggered across the Syrian desert with a Bible in her hand, collapsed in a ditch exhausted and starving, and been left for dead—yet somehow summoned enough strength from her Bible to make it to Aleppo, and then America. She heard the story of Suren, the grandfather of Ruth’s cousin, whose dying mother had bribed an Arab to take her little son and hide him in a well until the Turks were gone. Suren, too, eventually made it to America. It was