The Good Liar

“I will give you back what is yours,” she said.

“Yes, okay,” he answered.

It turns out, Aleksei Ivanov was a terrible spy. Actually, he wasn’t a spy at all, just a journalist who’d been convinced he could become one.

Ordering him to walk ahead of her, Liza directed the man from the streets of Gávea, into the neighboring favela of Rocinha. The vertical streets were winding and barely shoulder width, lined with shanty-style houses. The sheer volume of people and sounds and smells was overwhelming. The man had clearly never been in Rocinha before, she could tell from the way he flinched at the shouts from the children, many smiling despite their plight.

He looked back at her once, and she could see he was analyzing his chances of bolting. “Keep going,” she said, flashing her Glock again.

The man looked from the pistol to her face, then continued his trudge through Rocinha. They were openly stared at by the residents of the favela. The adults looked wary, the children shouted for money or cameras.

At one point, Liza saw the man reach for his pocket.

“Don’t,” she said in a sharp bark.

The man turned to her with a slightly pained expression. “I don’t have a weapon. I just thought I would give them some money.”

Liza felt herself soften, but she shook her head. “They’ll mob you if you do.” She gestured at him to keep walking.

When they reached the top of one of the coiling streets, Liza stopped the man and nodded at a shanty. The walls were covered by haphazardly placed tiles, most of which were crumbling or discolored with soot. A young man stepped outside the structure. He wore a red cloth tied around his head. His eyes were black, and to Liza, they appeared dead. He was the kind of man who scared her most—one with nothing to lose—but he was her contact in this neighborhood, someone who took money for information or accommodation or just about anything. His name was Faustino, and despite his meager standard of living, he knew lots of people in this corrupt town. Liza had found that he could get nearly anything accomplished for the right price.

“Faustino,” Liza said.

He nodded.

Surreptitiously, she took some réis out of her pocket and passed it to the man.

“May I use your residence?” she said in Portuguese.

He nodded again.

Liza directed the Russian inside. The house was just a room, really, with three dingy, uncovered mattresses shoved against the far wall. A sink and toilet, rarities in this part of town, stood unceremoniously against another wall, next to mildewed cardboard boxes filled with clothes. One wood chair, old and battered, sat in the middle of the room. Liza directed the man to sit. She turned over an empty plastic milk crate and sat across from him.

“Who are you working for?” she asked.

The man looked less frightened now, more weary. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Why were you surveying the home of João Pedro Franco?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he repeated.

“Why were you taking photographs of Franco’s home?”

He shook his head. Same answer.

They went on like this for an hour. Liza could have gone long into the night and through the next day. She’d been trained that way. But this man had not, and he soon became exhausted. Liza could see it in the way he kept searching the room, looking for an out. There were many, but apparently he hadn’t been educated in how to run. More than anything, she could tell he wanted the rock back. It was tucked in the pocket of her jeans, and Liza could see his glance continually coming back to that area of her body. The gun was there, too—in her waistband. He might have been staring at that, but Liza also wanted to think that his glances had something to do with her looks. Surprisingly, she hoped this hapless man found her attractive. There was something about him that appealed to her, an air of having seen too much, incongruously combined with the fear of having something to protect. That fear, she decided, meant there was still newness in him. She imagined that he had not been beaten down by his profession the way Liza had.

Into the third hour, almost midnight, he broke. “Please,” he said. “Please just give it back to me.”

She scooted the milk crate closer. “What will happen if I don’t?”

He looked on the verge of tears. He blinked, and the expression disappeared, but Liza had seen it. “What will happen?” she said again.

“I am a writer.” He named a well-known newspaper in Moscow.

“You’re an international journalist?”

“Yes.”

It was easy enough for Liza to guess the rest, for this was an old story. “They recruited you to provide intelligence while you traveled for your writing.”

“Yes.”

“And you did it because you needed the money.”

“No!” His green eyes slitted into anger.

“Why then?”

He looked away. “I said I would not be a part of it. I would never compromise my career. And I thought they went away.”

“Who? Who approached you?”

He exhaled loudly. “I do not know. I believed it was the F.S.B., although I couldn’t be sure. I only know that two weeks later I was visited by a man I did know. You see, I had covered this man for a story on the Russian Mafiya.”

Liza raised her eyebrows and sat back. The F.S.B., the successor to the K.G.B., could be nasty. But the Russian Mafiya was even worse. She nodded at him to continue.

“I believe this man had been asked to help the F.S.B. convince me. And this man had also been waiting for the right time to punish me for the article I’d written.”

He had a scar on his cheekbone, the only mark on his pale skin, and he rubbed at it with his forefinger.

“Did they do that to you?” Liza pointed at the scar.

He laughed. “No. My brother did this to me when I was six.” Then the laughter in his face died away, replaced by anguish. “My brother is a priest. My sisters are married. One has five kids, another four. My mother is…how do you say?…handicapped. My father takes care of her.”

“Ah,” Liza said, understanding now. “They threatened your family.”

“Yes.”

“They said they would kill them all unless you provided intelligence.”

“Yes.”

Liza reached out and touched his knee. He almost pulled away from her, she saw that. But then he simply met her gaze. “You’re terrible at it,” she said.

He laughed again, this time for a long time. A cleansing, relief-filled laugh. “I know! I told them I would be terrible. I have no mind for secrecy.”

“What happens if I don’t give you the rock? What happens if you don’t return it to them with photos?”