True to Your Service

by Sandra Antonelli

  “Ah,” Kitt said, eyes on the van’s taillight. “Here we go. Who is Ethan Hunt?”

  “The spy in the Mission Impossible films.”

  “I’ve only ever seen the television series.”

  “What century are you living in?”

  “I’ve been too busy being a spy to see many films. Ethan Hawke?”

  “Ethan Hunt. He was married, but couldn’t stay with his wife. It’s not really clear if they divorced or if she,” Mae gave a sniff of a laugh, “walked away for her own safety, of course. She does come back—fleetingly in one film, and then more substantially in another, but by then she’s with another man, meaning she and Ethan had divorced, which isn’t something we have to worry about on any legal level, and Ethan Hunt was a bad example after all.”

  Kitt stared ahead, at the road and the van up ahead. He said nothing for two full minutes, reading the road signs and mileage markers, mulling over impossibility and her irrational sense of realism and spies and fiction and the faith she had in him, the faith she had in them. “Perhaps,” he said, “the spy we should be focusing on is Matt Helm.”

  She let out a groan. “Matt Helm is the forerunner of Austin Powers. Have you seen Austin Powers?”

  “Yeah, baby, yeah.” He looked at her and sniffed disdainfully. “I cannot believe I have found a hole in your fictional spy research. Have you never read the Matt Helm books?”

  “No. I was put off by the excessive 60s kitsch and camp of The Silencers and The Wrecking Crew, by Dean Martin’s boozy Dean Martin persona and Dean Martin songs. Those movies are spoofs, parodies of Bond and a major inspiration for Austin Powers. And you are none of the three. Except for maybe the boozy part.”

  “My love,” he said as a Porsche whizzed by, “your education is lacking. In Donald Hamilton’s book series, Matt Helm is a serious, former World War II assassin recruited by the US government. He’s married, has children, is middle-aged. In fact, aside from his being overweight and having children, he’s rather like me. Matt Helm kept everything secret from his wife. She thought he was an author, not a spy.”

  “I thought you were a retired Army Major turned Risk Assessment Specialist.”

  “I am a Risk Assessment Specialist, and Helm was an author and a spy who wrote westerns about cowboys, not spies.”

  “Whereas you’re a spy who once wore a cowboy hat.”

  “You miss that hat, don’t you?”

  “As much as you do. What’s your point?

  Kitt watched a lorry begin to overtake the DB11. “The point is, unlike me, Helm looked his wife in the eye and lied to her every day. She knew nothing about his past, about who he was and still was.”

  “How is it you know so much about him?”

  “Perhaps I don’t see many films, but people often leave books behind when they travel. I’ve read a lot of discarded spy and romance novels. You and so many authors are seriously misguided about how spies actually work in the world.”

  She inhaled and exhaled noisily. “You want me to believe the Matt Helm books are an accurate representation of the world of espionage?”

  “No, I’m reminding you to stop mixing up fact and fiction.”

  “I will when you stop trying to be a hero. A lot of good it does me to have you step into danger and then get sent to prison, or step into danger and die. So shut your gob about whose safety is off and who’s being reckless.”

  He ground his teeth together and looked at her. “God damn it, you frustrate the living hell out of me.”

  “Good.” She smiled.

  Her smile tempered his tetchiness and he laughed. “Why can’t we argue about the usual things couples argue about, like sex and money?”

  “Because we have enough of both.”

  “Do we?”

  “I haven’t heard you complain.” She lowered her glasses and looked at him in the dim light of the dash dials.

  His mouth pursed ever so slightly.

  “Do you want more money, more sex, or both?”

  His head tipped. “The sex has been a little light this week.”

  “Do you want to pull the car over so we can climb in the back seat?”

  “Not in the middle of a car chase.”

  Her chuckle was light. “I’ll have you know, money and sex are not the only things couples argue about.”

  “Hm, you’ve experienced a committed relationship before, and I haven’t so, what do they argue about?”

  “This is hardly fair. You know all about my marriage and I know nothing of your—”

  “Dalliances?”

  “I was going to go with liaisons, but I like dalliances better. What was it that would trigger you to depart from a dalliance?”

  “Complaining.”

  “About what?”

  “Cold-hearted husbands.”

  “All this time I thought it was because they got serious and you preferred distant, cold passion to heated, messy disentanglement.”

  “There is that, but mostly I didn’t want to be a shameful hypocrite. I never wanted the weight of expectations, which is what I think most arguments are about, unspoken expectations.”

  She found the control to recline the seat and settled back into it. “You could be right. Besides money and sex, there’s the division of household labour, children, communication, priorities, and the in-laws. We have no real reason to argue about money, sex, the division of household labour, or,” she shook her head with a sniff, “children, but you do realise we have been at cross purposes about communication, priorities, and our in-laws.”

  “You like my brother.”

  “But you don’t like mine, and I’ve yet to meet your sister or your parents.”

  “I don’t dislike your brother.”

  “Do you smell smoke?” she patted her hip, extinguishing imaginary flames.

  Kitt glanced at another car in the side mirror. “There’s a difference between liking and disliking,” he said as a boxy Volvo passed by. “Do you need me to exp…I think we may be headed for Castricum.”

  Mae sat up. “Why would you think that?”

  “Our hairy primate friend Bianco is indicating he’s about to exit and the signs point to Castricum.” He watched the altered taillights slip out of sight as the van moved off the motorway ramp. A moment later, Kitt took the same exit and stopped at the crossroads, letting the Aston Martin idle.

  “Why are we waiting?” Mae said.

  “Look out the window and tell me what you see.”

  “Dark fields.”

  “Yes, and dark fields mean if we were to follow Bianco now, our headlamps would give us away. We’ll let him get along a bit and then go.”

  She pushed her glasses up and looked down at the phone in her lap, the little red dot on the mobile’s map travelling closer to the town of Castricum. Mae searched for information on the place and didn’t find much. “Castricum is known for its vicinity to the beach and its sand dunes. A botanist from Castricum works at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. His name is Henk. He’s the author of Dendrocnide of Australasia. Do you think that’s why Bianco is going, to meet Henk?

  “We’ll find out.” Kitt turned left and drove into flat, dark farmland, the early twilight sun casting the eastern sky a cool, purplish blue, the road narrow and empty. The route took them alongside a canal and then to the fringe of town, skirting the edge of Castricum until suddenly turning south, back though flat, dark farmland, the sky purply with a pale grey tinge. A pink glow in fields cast upwards onto moving clouds. Trailing the van’s course brought them to a clump of thick pines where they turned right onto a dirt and gravel surface, the scant morning light disappearing in the dark of poplar trees and a long, high hemlock hedge.

  The little red dot that was the van quit moving. “Bianco’s stopped,” Mae said.

  Kitt slowed, the DB11 creeping along until the road ended at a stone wall and an open iron gate with two signs. One said Chateau Sicilië the other Gesloten. He let the engine idle and stared at the placards a
nd hedges on either side of the gates. “Do you remember Vlaming saying where he took people on garden tours?”

  “Yes, I think he said something about Chinese gardens at Hortus Haren, near Groningen, and a private chateau north of Amsterdam.”

  “Do you think this might be the private chateau?”

  “We are north of Amsterdam.”

  “Yes, we are.”

  She handed him the mobile that had been in her lap, pointing out the stationary red dot on the screen. “Okay, he’s not moving at the moment, so what do we do now? Do I sit here while you go off and do lone commando stuff?”

  “I’m not foolish enough to believe you’d stay here while I do lone commando stuff.” Kitt set the phone on the console between the seats. Then he swiped fingers over the dash screen, toggling the image from map view to satellite, and zoomed in on their location, which, if the imagery was up-to-date, put them on the edge of an estate with gardens, barns and outbuildings, a canal-side windmill, and fields of cultivated flowers that were most likely tulips. He looked out the windscreen into the not even half-light of a Tuesday or Wednesday morning, he didn’t know which, his eyes on the open gate. “I am, however, foolish enough to ask if you are up for a sunrise walk in the chateau gardens.”

  “A walk through a garden sounds romantic.”

  “I hope that’s all it is, romantic.” Kitt continued to look at the gate that one could view as an invitation to enter or leave freely. Open gates were more frightening than gates that were chained and locked. Chained and locked gates put out a very clear message that one ought to keep away from whatever sat on the other side, while wide open gates, like the one in front of them, were a Venus Flytrap.

  And he and Mae seemed very much like curious flies.

  Chapter Twenty

  He reversed the car along the shadowy little avenue, tucking it in behind a fat pine and low-hanging branches of a tree with little blossoms that immediately dusted the windscreen. He shut off the engine and killed the headlights.

  Mae glanced at Kitt, his eyes fixed on the sudden dark, and he breathed in and out with conditioned deliberation, clearing his head, finding inner peace, thinking, thinking, thinking—or possibly all three. He was still, so very still, and a juxtaposed exhilarating disquiet twisted around her spine, threaded into her stomach, pushed up into her throat and sinuses, and scratched inside the top of her skull.

  She set her attention on the glovebox in front of her knees and opened it. Inside was a little black zippered case very much like the one Kitt had at home, the case he kept in a lockbox beneath the window seat, the case that held a Walther-Beretta-Smith & Wesson compact 9mm pistol. There’d been a case like that with a pistol in inside it in the glovebox of a silly-looking Volkswagen Beetle Bryce had arranged for them to drive in Sicily last July. Thrilling uneasiness itched under her skin. She shut the glovebox, looked at the swirling pattern of the surface, and began breathing in and out, focusing on each breath, waiting to feel a sense of calm, but what came over her wasn’t a sense of calm or clarity. What rolled over her and popped into her mind’s eye her was simply another wave of absurdity. Like Kitt’s written-off Bentley, the silly luxury car they sat now in also had a wooden dash—burr walnut—and probably a heated steering wheel too. “What do think of this car?” she said, not at all apropos of where they found themselves.

  “I’ve been waiting for you to say something.” He shifted his gaze to where she sat in the dimness, “At the moment,” he said, feeling about under the seat and finding what he was after, “I love this car because it’s got what I hope I don’t need. Do you think the car suits me?”

  She snorted. “It lacks an ejector seat.”

  “It’s equipped with other things.” He put something on his thigh, reached for her hand and lifted it to his mouth, kissing the middle of her palm. He got out of the car and went to the boot, removing his jacket and pale blue shirt, exchanging both for a dark blue polar neck and brown zippered jacket he tossed on the roof of the car.

  For a moment, in the side mirror, the boot’s light cast a glow and Mae watched Kitt change clothes at the rear of the car. She unlatched her seatbelt, pocketed her glasses, got onto her knees on the seat, and reached into the rear where Bryce had put her small bag, rummaging about in it until she found her Doc Marten Mary-Janes. She opened the door and swung her legs outside.

  Kitt adjusted the roll neck of his shirt and watched her slip her feet into iconic British shoes that were originally German. She buttoned up Tanja’s black coat, quite deliberately ignoring him, putting on the shoulder harness he’d found under the driver’s seat. She was out of the car before he’d slid the little Walther into place and shut the boot.

  There was a chill to the damp spring air, and it would get colder just after the sun rose. He locked the car, took Mae’s hand again, and they walked away from the car and through the open gates, ignoring the sign that said, like so many other shops and businesses would at this time of day, gesloten, closed. The dirt and gravel crunched softly under their feet as they travelled up a drive lined with poplars that soon gave way to vast, open fields of flowers. In the sun, the fields beside them would be a carpet of vibrant colour as far as the eye could see. Now all the tulips were shades of grey.

  Across the expanse of blooms, a kilometre perhaps, stood barns and a windmill, its silhouette like the design on the scarf Mae had tucked around her neck. Headlamps twinkled on moving farm machinery, light glowed beyond the windmill and barns. Kitt remembered the satellite images he’d seen on the car’s GPS. The road they were on led to the chateau and then around to the other buildings. It would be quicker to reach the big house if they went across the tulip fields rather than stay on the drive. In the dim purple, blue and pinkish light of early dawn, the field he took Mae into was a foreboding black. They walked in a dirt track alongside thigh-high tulip rows, quickly covering ground. As the sky grew lighter, they reached the end of the foreboding black field that began to turn blood red, the earth clear of flora, but uneven with ruts made by tractors—like the green John Deere 6R heading into the field flowers ahead of them. Headlight on the giant, modified mower began beheading the blooms, leaving dark stems standing while the petals spilled into a neat row alongside.

  Kitt grabbed Mae’s hand and jerked her into a run toward dark blooms, to the dirt between the green stalks. “This is wrong,” she said. “This should be a field full of corn, not tulips, and we should be running from a biplane, not a tractor lopping off the heads of flowers.”

  “At least there’s no one shooting at us.” He let go of her hand. “Run.”

  She ran. Her bare knees slapped against stalks and fat flowers that might have been pink or white, she stumbled over clumps of dirt, knocking an elbow into Kitt’s side.

  “Stop, stop!” he said yanking her coat.

  She was slightly ahead of him and then she was suddenly beneath him, in the dirt, her cheek pressed into tyre tracks and old tulip stalks.

  “Sorry,” he said in her ear. “There’s another tractor coming this way, but don’t worry, it doesn’t have the blade attachments. It does, however, have headlights that would have shone on us if I hadn’t tackled you. Are you okay?”

  She spat out dust. “I’m grand.”

  The tractor rattled and hummed past the end of the row, a few metres away. When it had reached a distance he thought was reasonable, Kitt got to his feet and helped her up. “This is obviously a working farm. We’ll head for the windmill, past those sheds, and stay in the shadows along the buildings.”

  “And then what?” She dusted off.

  “Why do you always think I have a plan? You asked me to teach you and I’ve tried to teach you that this is always about improvisation. My, how I have failed.”

  “Yes, yes, you’re a terrible spy and a terrible teacher. Whatever will you do when you get back to The Consortium?”

  “Did I not just say this work is always about improvisation? Stay close and learn, Mae.” He took her hand again, hu
rrying through the tulips, an eye on the tractor, the barns and sheds, the windmill, and the glow behind it, the sleepy rising sun. “There’s something that hasn’t been sitting well with me, something I neglected to mention.”

  “I know. Run. Turn tail and run my arse off. To where, I don’t know, but I’ll feckin’ run if the need arises.”

  “Mm,” he said, reaching into a pocket. “You have a point. If you have to run, run to the car.” He handed her the key fob for the Aston Martin. “Get in and drive. Drive your arse off, Mae.

  “And leave you behind.”

  “Yes.”

  “Right. Should I know how to unlock the weapons case in the glovebox?”

  “Not at all. A weapon is safer in the glovebox than it is in your hand for someone to take from you and shoot you with. I cannot abide the thought of you being shot. Again.” He glanced at her shoulder. “Damn. The thought of you being shot again is far worse than the nonsense that was playing on my mind before.”

  “What was bothering you before?”

  “How I never mentioned that Matt Helm’s wife divorced him.”

  With a sudden laugh, she stopped walking for a step. “Jaysus,” she snorted. “Divorce. Have some faith in me. I know what you are. I know what you do, and I am aware, as entirely preposterous as it is to say out loud, you believe what you do, the contribution you make, much like firefighters and police, makes a difference, and we need people like you to save us at certain times, in emergencies, from threats we may not even be aware exist. It’s assumed people who do the work you do must come from broken homes or they are orphans, psychopaths, or have some sort of death wish. But this isn’t something you merely choose to do, it is something you have to do. Divorce,” she snorted. “I know the only way you are going to leave me is when you die.”

  “Goodness me, you said that with a straight face. You still think I’m going to die?