Page 78 of Exit Party

“Was a reason given for the refusal?”

Latika hesitated. “Once,” she said, “this was years ago now, I cut a man’s hair, and it turned out later he was a democracy sympathizer. I didn’t know. You can look up the interrogation records. I was held for a week, but I was cleared of any wrongdoing.”

“You cut his hair once?”

“No, three times. He came in every two weeks, and then he missed his regular appointment and it turned out he’d been arrested.”

“How does that affect your ex’s exit visa application?”

“Well, at the time he owned the salon,” she said.

On my way out the door, an hour or two later, I uploaded my interview to the transcript department, and by the time I returned to my office, the text was waiting. I spent some time reading through it in the quiet of my tiny office with the harbour view. It was a sprawling case. She had named no fewer than thirty associates of her husband’s, all of whom she thought might be involved in some way. I would need backup. I requested another agent on the case, and a day later, David Grissom arrived in my office.

I hadn’t seen him in years, since he’d appeared at the college in Fillmore to interview me for the promotion to detective, and seeing him here was disorienting. I’d thought of him as belonging to the past, and to a life that had ended.

“This isn’t weird for me,” he said preemptively, immediately making it weird. “You’re in charge of this case, you were promoted on the basis of your considerable merits, and I’m here to be of service.”

“As a first order of business, let’s get some lunch,” I said. It was a little forced, but he rose with a smile and we headed up to the rooftop cafeteria. In the employee garden, up on the roof, we sat under an awning and he described an unremarkable but dignified career. We were around the same age, but whereas I’d languished for almost two decades in a low-level position in Fillmore and then catapulted upward through the ranks when I’d decided to do so, he’d proceeded upward in an orderly fashion, until a year ago he’d landed just below my current rank. He had a calm demeanour that I liked.

“Can I ask you a strange question?” I asked, when I felt I’d established that he was someone with whom I could reasonably work.

“Go for it.”

“What did you want to be when you grew up?”

He blinked at me.

“When you were a kid,” I said.

“Oh.” He looked a little embarrassed. “I wanted to be a painter,” he said. “That was my first idea.”

“What stopped you?”

“No, I pursued it,” he said. “I tried it, for a while.” He was from Ann Arbor, Michigan. He’d gone to art school there, and for a while after school he’d tried, he’d really tried. Still life, mostly, the occasional portrait. All in oil, because the vibrancy of the medium spoke to him. I liked the way he lit up when he talked about oil paints. But then his wife, Evie, had gotten a job in California, and he’d followed her out here. This was a long time ago, just a few years out of college. He’d seen an ad for the Service Academy, and thought, well, why not? He could be an artist with a day job. But the problem is that you take a day job and then the day job takes you, that was what he’d discovered. He hadn’t painted in years now. But his favourite painting—he showed me a photo of it on his phone—was a close-up of half a lime on a plate. I zoomed in. He was very talented, or had been. The lime looked real.

“What about you?” he asked. “What did you want to be, when you were a kid?”

“I always wanted to be in Service,” I said.

He blinked. “Always?”

No, not always, now that I considered it. Since that day in the first grade when my friend across the street and her parents disappeared. A family of three, mirroring mine. If you’re afraid of monsters, becoming a monster yourself isn’t the worst play.

“Always,” I said.

In the months that followed, I immersed myself in the exit visa case. Whether or not Latika was motivated solely by retribution, the case was real and Latika’s accusations were accurate. I wasn’t sleeping well. It wasn’t just that Nico was gone, it was the case itself. I saw the potential for harm in a state not knowing precisely who was within its borders at any given moment in time. But I was born in a world in which exit visas weren’t required to leave the United State, when it was States, not State, with all the diversity of opinion and experience that the plural implied, when there were still elections, and this was something I had to work increasingly hard to not think about.

I worked the exit visa case with David, I ran down leads and cultivated three more informants, I tried to perform to the best of my ability and not think too much. But from time to time, I walked by Nico’s house. I watched Nico’s garden decline and become ragged in her absence. I saw Nico’s children, just once: their father was outside in the front garden, glaring at his phone, while Marlowe and Samir played nearby. The children looked dirty and neglected, their hair falling in their eyes.

Six months after Nico disappeared, my cousin came to Los Angeles. I was eating lunch at my desk when he called. When my phone rang, I stared at the number on the call display—ANTON WAKER—for much longer than usual before I picked up.

“Anton,” I said.

“Ibari, my favourite cousin. You in LA?”

“Always. Where are you?”

“Just landed at LAX,” he said. “I’m here for work. You want to get dinner?”