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The pictures start coming while Lorraine’s working, two weeks after the Berlin Wall comes down.
It’s supposed to be a straightforward case, is the thing—the senator Lorraine’s shadowing is suspected of selling state secrets to the highest bidder. But the man’s smart, and Lorraine’s not quite at the top of her game just yet.
She fucking hates Berlin. Even when she’s in California, thousands of miles away from that shit-stained blood-soaked city.
Anyway—the senator’s either smart, or someone in the CIA’s on his payroll. The latter makes her stomach churn in disgust, because, really. Getting made twice in a row from the very start? What shit luck, really.
So it’s not much of a surprise when she sees an unmarked brown envelope on the bed in her hotel room one day. She imagines it’s some kind of threat, so she pulls her gloves on and handles the envelope with all the care she’d give to a ticking time bomb.
What slips out are pictures.
But they aren’t of her.
They’re of the senator and a CIA agent that Lorraine’s worked with in the past, in a clandestine meeting in a dirty back alley somewhere. She flips through the images, sees a flash of green in the senator’s hand pass into the agent’s, a white envelope in the agent’s hands given into the senator’s keeping.
There’s a note on one of them. It says, November 18, 1989, in familiar handwriting.
Lorraine stashes the pictures back inside the envelope. The senator likes his coats, she’s noticed, and if there’s anything she learned in Berlin, it’s that you can hide anything in an expensive coat, from a gun to a bug.
--
The senator goes to trial. The agent is fired, and goes to jail.
“Job well done, right, Lor?” says one of her coworkers, clapping her on the back on their way out of the bar. “How’d you do it, though? I mean, Jesus, man’s more slippery than an eel.”
“I had some help,” says Lorraine, thinking of poetry.
--
The next package contains five pictures, of a major philanthropist coldly executing a man. It also includes a tape.
Lorraine doesn’t actually need the tape, she bugged the man’s coat and heard much of his shadier dealings, but it’s nice to have evidence corroborating her story. Her superiors know how easily she can fake a conversation, after all.
She turns the plain brown package over in her hands, and on a whim, writes a line she remembers from her days in Britain: what of all the lovers now parted by death, grey death?
She leaves the empty envelope on her bed, and doesn’t see a response for a week. She doesn’t see a package for a week either, but then she’s off-duty for that time.
The next mission she has, she steps into the hotel room to find a brown envelope, still unmarked. There are pictures inside, details to help her put together a more complete narrative of the last few days of the life of a crime lord found in his pool.
There’s a line written on the back of one of the pictures. Do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there, I do not sleep.
She smiles.
--
The next mission she has goes straight to shit.
Lorraine staggers back into the hotel room, cursing the mafia and the bad intel and every goddamn fucking asshole in a building burning miles away. She curses Berlin, and Percival, on top of that too. She takes off her shoes and stumbles into her bedroom.
There’s an unmarked brown package on her pillow. She sits down, and opens it up, wondering what’s inside this time.
There are the requisite pictures of the crime lord she’s tracking, but she highly doubts she’ll need them, considering that he’s dead. But there are also pictures of the beach, of lovers in the street, of the neon-bright inside of a club.
Written on the back of the last one, depicting the palm trees swaying in the breeze and the people kissing underneath, are the words: but love is the sky and i am for you, just so long and long enough.
There are coordinates for a dead drop, under the words.
She takes up her pen once more and writes, Tell me how it goes. Send me some kind of a letter. And take care of yourself.
She goes after an ice bath, pulls on her heels and a black dress, and leaves the envelope, empty but for the picture of the palm trees. She catches a glimpse of dark hair and smiles.
--
They keep in touch, after that. Lorraine gets the packages in more conventional ways, and in drops taking place in the middle of a crowded street or in the dead of night. She leaves scraps of poetry, scours through books of poems for lines that she can ape.
She isn’t a poetic soul. If she ever was, all the blood on her hands has washed the poetry away. She takes from other, better writers instead, it’s much easier that way. Plagiarism in the name of romance, she thinks, and writes another line onto the back of a picture.
She catches glimpses of dark hair at the drops, sometimes. Not always, but often enough that Lorraine’s certain of her source.
But she likes playing this game—this game of poetry and pictures, unmarked brown envelopes and lines lifted wholesale from books of poetry. It’s a risky game to play.
Lorraine is well used to risk.
--
It’s in the middle of summer when the game finally comes to an end.
It’s not at a drop, or anything—it doesn’t even have anything to do with a mission. But Lorraine hears a scream and ducks into an alleyway, sees a flash of dark hair, sees her kicking out and clawing at a thug. Her camera lies somewhere nearby, broken into pieces.
Shit, that’s going to be expensive to replace.
Then Lorraine moves, grabbing the thug by the shoulder and turning him around to punch him in the nose. She hears a sickening crack, and the man stumbles back, swearing up and down at them.
Lorraine steps forward and drives a knee up into his stomach, then slams her fist down upon his back. She kicks him once in the head for good measure.
Delphine gets to her feet, breathing hard. Dark eyes flick from her assailant to Lorraine. “Thanks,” she says. She’s bleeding from a split lip, and her voice is a little hoarse, but she is so, so alive.
“Well,” says Lorraine, “you looked like you needed saving.”
“My savior,” says Delphine, and Lorraine catches her lips in a kiss, tastes copper on her tongue.
All right. So maybe Berlin wasn’t all bad.
--
Afterwards:
“Sara Teasdale. Really?”
“I had to catch your attention somehow.”
“I’ve been following you around since Berlin. You didn’t need to.” A heartbeat, then, “So how many books did you buy?”
“Far too many to keep on one shelf.”
“I have two shelves.”
“You can have them.”
“And you?”
“...Always.”