“Them?”
“If it had been thieves, they would have taken my TV, my microwave, my stereo, my clock-radio, my Winchester with the walnut-burl stock, my chain saw. These have to be cops.” She thought about it. “Special cops.” She asked, “Harry, what were they looking for?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it connected with you?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“What kind of work you do?”
“I told you. I write and edit.”
“Harry, come on. I’m not dumb.” She dropped her voice. “Are you in secret work?”
“Not at all.”
This mistruth set her weeping again. I felt one pang of pure sympathy. Chloe’s things poked and grabbed, tossed about; here was I lying to her.
“Wilbur’s father, Gilley, used to say, ‘The Hubbard family may be in the CIA, but that don’t make them better than you or me.’ If he was drunk, he would say that. Every time you drove by.”
It had never occurred to me that our Maine neighbors had any notion of what we did. “I can’t talk about it, Chloe.”
Now her voice began to rise. “Do you have any understanding of me at all, or am I just one more suck-and-fuck?” Yes, her voice was on the rise.
“The mark of how much I feel for you,” I said as slowly as I could, “is that I love my wife, do you understand, I do love her, yet I still see you.”
“That’s elegant,” she said. “I’ll keep the change.”
Are not all such conversations the same? We went on for five more minutes, and then another five, before I could hang up, and when I took my hand from the phone, I was full of misery. Any shield of detachment I had managed to fashion about my double life had been smashed by the phone call. It was now crucial to go back to our bedroom, to Kittredge, and I suffered this thought with so much intensity that I had to wonder if something I could not yet name had come near, so near that I raced up the stairs by twos and threes to the upstairs hall. Outside our bedroom, however, my will turned in on itself, and I began to feel as weak as a man sitting up with a fever. I even had one of those fantasies that appear to rise from our limbs themselves when they are aching with illness but curiously happy. I was able to conceive of Kittredge asleep in her bed. She would be in deep slumber—so went my thought—and I would ensconce myself in a chair and watch over her. With all the care incumbent on maintaining such an image, I took the last steps to our bedroom door, looked in, and indeed she was asleep even as I had conceived. What relief to possess this much of my wife; her unspeaking presence was superior to the loneliness of being without her. Could I take that as a sign? For how many years had no more than the sight of her freckled forearm holding a tennis racquet been my passport to happiness?
I stared at her as she lay on the bed, and enjoyed the first sense of relief since I had come home, as if in truth I was again virtuous. I loved her again, loved her as I had on the first day, no, not on the first day of our affair, but in the hour I saved her life.
That was the most notable achievement of my life. During a bad day, I would wonder if it was the only achievement. I had, when all was said, a simple notion of grace. I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as a reward. One could find it only after one’s virtue, or one’s courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, had succeeded in stirring the power of creation. Therefore, if I felt love now, I might not be wholly unredeemed. The apathy I had suffered before was but a clue to the great fatigue of my soul. I was not a burnt-out case so much as a wholly belabored one, my own morphine for holding off loss. I was not, however, void of grace, no, not if my love for Kittredge still lived in that rose arbor where sorrow rises from the heart.
I dimmed the lights so she could sleep, and sat beside her bed in the near dark. How long I was there I cannot say—a few minutes or was it more?—but a tapping on our picture window intruded at last on the simple gathering of my peace, and I looked over at the smallest and most astonishing sight. A white moth, its spread no more than the width of two fingers, was fluttering against the pane. Had I ever seen a moth outdoors before on a March night? Its wings on the other side of the glass were as white as Melville’s whale.
I crossed to the desk, picked up a flashlight, turned it on, and held it against the glass. The moth attached itself to the other side of the pane as though to absorb the small warmth offered by the bulb. I looked at its trembling wings with the respect one gives a true creature, whatever the size. Its black pupils, each comparable in diameter to the head of a pin, looked back at me with the same bulging intensity of expression one finds in the eyes of a deer or a lapdog, yes, I could have sworn the moth was staring back at me, creature to creature.
I slid my flashlight along the picture window and the moth followed the light. When I came to a casement that I could open, I hesitated. The prize was a moth, after all, not a butterfly. Like a maggot was its white body, and its antennae were not filaments, but brushes. I let it in all the same. There was such entreaty in that beating of wings.
Once inside, like a bird studying the place where it will alight, it circumnavigated the room before descending into a fold of Kittredge’s pillow.
I was about to go back to my chair, but had the impulse to place my flashlight against the window again, and by the movement of its beam along the ground, there out in that silvery penumbra between the last of the light and the dark of the woods, I saw nothing less than the figure of a man. He darted so quickly behind a tree, however, that I, in my turn, stepped back quickly, and turned off the flash.
OMEGA–7
IT WAS PECULIAR. THERE WAS AN UNHOLY EXHILARATION ABOUT IT. IF I had felt oppressed for the last hour by the conviction that I was being watched, this much confirmation was relief: I began to gulp in whole swallows of breath as if a stocking had been removed from my head. Indeed, I was close to happy. I was also on the edge of unruly panic.
In childhood I had always thought of myself as the feckless son of a very brave man, and I could tell the story of my life by the attempts I have made to climb out of the pit. If you think of yourself as a coward, the rashest course usually proves to be wise. My father’s Luger, captured by him during OSS days, and in his will bequeathed to me, was in a case in my closet. I could get it out and do a little reconnoitering.
I rebelled. I was hardly prepared to go into the woods. I would have to, yes, get ready. An occupation so exorbitantly professional as mine obviously develops a few personal powers even when one is, oneself, far from extraordinary. On occasion, I could force my mind into preparing for a near impossible situation. Of course, this ability was a curiously exaggerated faculty. One could also have been a contest winner on one of those television shows where you had to find the answer to a riddle while hell was popping forth on the stage and the audience roared. To clear my mind and focus my will, I confess that I liked to use a certain text from the Book of Common Prayer.
Let me admit that the words were hardly said in prayer. If I now repeated to myself the Collect for Fridays—Lord Jesus Christ, by your death you took away the sting of death: grant to us your servants so to follow in faith where you have led the way, that we may at length fall asleep peacefully in you— I was trying not to shrive myself for battle so much as to return my agitations to the deep. Repeating this prayer, if need be, ten times, my prep school years would always appear before me, and the fatal-drowse-in-chapel, as we used to call it at St. Matthew’s, would also return. I would “fall asleep peacefully” in someone, or in something, and awaken, after a five- or ten-second cut-out, to face in the direction my mind wished to follow. Every man to his own mnemonic! I came out of these ten seconds with the recognition that I must not sit beside Kittredge and keep guard until dawn. It might be prudent to sit in this chair and take care of my life, but it would lose my love. That is an outrageously romantic equation, yet I saw it as the logic of love—which usually reduces itself
to a single equation. Love is outrageous. One must endanger oneself to preserve it—a likely reason why so few people stay in love. I was obliged to discover who the prowler might be.
I removed my father’s Luger from its case and slipped a loaded 9mm magazine out of the side pocket, inserted the clip into the handle, drew back the slide, snapped it forward, heard the round go home to the breech. To the gun lover, that is a satisfying sound (and I was a gun lover at this moment). Next, I stepped to our bedroom door, opened it, locked it, pocketed the key, and, weapon in hand, strolled down the hall.
My father used to say that the Luger was Germany’s most dependable contribution to gracious living. In profile, his captured Luger is as handsome as Sherlock Holmes, and its heft in one’s palm can make you feel like a good shot in much the way a fine horse will offer suggestions to your seat that you may yet become a good rider. I felt ready.
The Keep is a house with seven doors, a mark, we often say, of the luck it is ready to bestow. We have a front door on the old house, and a back one, as well as a side entrance for the Cunard (which gives on a stairway to the beach at low tide), a door at each end of the Camp, plus the pantry exit to the woodshed and a cellar hatch.
I took the pantry door. There was no illumination from nearby windows, and the wind was loud enough, I figured, to overpower any grating of the hinges or the bolt. So it proved. I emerged with no loud announcement.
Outside, the darkness was massive, a cavern. I took comfort that the ground was wet, my steps were stilled. I had not felt so alive (in just this way) since a sojourn near to fifteen years ago in Vietnam—in truth, I had not taken ten silent steps before I was back to whatever I learned on the few patrols where I went along with a platoon on a search-and-destroy. There is much to be said for feeling alert in one’s toes and fingertips, in one’s eyes, nostrils, ears, even to the taste of the air on one’s tongue.
Yet, in the time I spent emerging from the open end of the shed, and slipping into the woods, it was evident that I was as likely to bump into some unknown party on guard as to slip up unheard on whoever might be observing our house. The night, as I say, was black, and the wind was strong. When it blew at its best, I could take ten quick strides and never hear my steps on the wet pine carpet, nor, for that matter, the whipping of a branch. So I saw soon enough that to learn anything, I would have to circle the house at a distance, then, every forty or fifty paces, work back to the lights. If sufficiently careful, I ought to be able to come up on anyone from behind, assuming, that is, that they were stationed in place. Or were they prowling like me? Did I have to watch my back? I traveled in circles more ways than one.
I must have been out for a full twenty minutes before I came across the first guard. Sitting on a stump was a man in a poncho with a walkie-talkie in his hand. I saw him from fifty feet away, his attention fixed on my front door, his body revealed in silhouette by the light above our entry, and his posture attentive, although not enormously so, no different from a hunter who has been waiting in a blind for a deer. By the posture of his body, I suspected that his assignment was to report on his walkie-talkie so soon as anyone was sighted.
I passed through a moment when I was tempted to shoot him. Raising the Luger, I lined up the dark object of his head, dramatically back-lit in my front sight, and knew I could do it—legally and spiritually. I can never remember feeling so sure of myself with a handgun; in truth, it was fifteen years since I had fired one in anger and that had been in Vietnam in the middle of a sudden and ferocious fire fight where everyone was shooting off all they had, and I, as unbalanced and blind as any grunt on war fever, emptied a .357 Magnum into a bush whose looks I did not like, although in contrast to the war movies I had seen, no Oriental with a dazed look tumbled out of the foliage, rather the bush was blasted away. Magnum force!
That had been combat mania laced with considerable funk (and pot!) and connected to little else in my life, but this impulse now came from the center of myself as cold and implacable as the desire to carry Kittredge down to the Vault. I felt—in a word—evil, and enjoyed it, and took pride in the way my hand did not quiver. I had never held a pistol as steadily in training. Yet I also knew it would not be wise to shoot him. He had to be part of a team. I would explode a situation I did not yet comprehend. Besides, the situation did not feel dangerous, not in these familiar woods, not now. The night seemed pendant, as if both of us, guard and myself, were waiting for a further event.
So I stepped back from that man with his walkie-talkie, and continued my tour around the house. I felt balanced, cool, dangerous to others, and attuned to the wet aromatic of the evergreens about me. In such a splendid state, I must have gone fifty paces around the larger perimeter I had drawn for myself before stealing in again toward the hub, but this time saw no one near the Camp, not by either door. On the next approach, however, moving in toward the Cunard where the beach stairs descended to the rock shelf, I could detect a bit of movement that seemed to belong more to a man than a shrub. Then I heard a poncho flap. The sound was as loud as a mainsail catching the wind. Another guard.
I could hardly discern him. He was but a darkness within other darkness. The Cunard, as described, projected in cantilever above the house to give a view of Blue Hill Bay. I was hidden at this moment in the inky invisibility of the rock shelf beneath the cantilever. To go forward could reveal me. I retreated therefore. I was hardly out from underneath, however, before a light went on in the long living room of the Cunard, and from my angle, I could look up through our picture window to see the head and shoulders of a man I knew but could not yet name. I could swear all the same that he was good Langley kin. Yes, this was one of us.
I returned to the woodshed, keeping my distance from the first guard. I was not in any particular fear for Kittredge. The stranger in the Cunard—familiar to me in that one quick look—had not appeared threatening so much as gravely concerned. Indeed, I was sufficiently sure of this perception to put the Luger in the drawer of an old cupboard in the pantry, as though everything would be set needlessly askew if I walked forward, gun in hand. The reconnaissance I had just undertaken in the woods, while of mixed returns for my ego (since it had been good to do it, but once done, of limited value), had succeeded nonetheless in honoring my anxiety. I had determined who the visitor was—the glimpse of his face had come into focus. He was a high official from the Office of Security, and I knew him. I knew him well. Arnie Rosen. Reed Arnold Rosen. Now, in the time I had consumed in coming back to the house, he had moved from the Cunard to the den, and it was there that I came in on him sitting in my favorite chair, smoking a pipe. Reed Arnold Rosen, once Arnie, then Ned, now Reed these days to friends and coworkers. I qualified, probably, as both. Arnie Rosen and I had gone through training together at the Farm, and seen much of each other soon after as assistants to Harlot. Was it twenty-seven years ago? Yes, I knew Reed and he knew me. It was just that by the measure of our careers, he had prospered more than myself.
All the same, I had an unholy impulse to use the old nickname, Arnie.
“Hello, Reed,” I said.
“Harry, you’re looking fit.”
I knew I was not appearing fit in his eyes. “I’m a mess,” I said, “but then it’s wet in the boondocks.”
He nodded. “I was out a little earlier.” His three-piece suit hardly showed it—English worsted and a London tailor had taken him equably through the damp.
If human beings had pedigrees as finely nurtured as dogs, our best people (whether born as Scotch-Irish, Ukrainian, Italian, or Lithuanian) would have put the ethnicity behind—we look to be one breed. We are what our vocational environment has made us: American Intelligence. It grated on me a little that I, who belonged to a pretty good kennel, had, at this point, with my professional life awash (not to dwell on my muddied clothes), less of the look than Rosen. His neat, medium-sized body and close-cropped gray hair, short sharp nose, tight upper lip (which always looked as if it were being squeezed against his capped front t
eeth), even his silver-rimmed eyeglasses fit the gray suit he was wearing about the way a foxglove sits in the sconces of its stalk.
All the same, I was glad to see him. To find that my inquisitor (whom I must have been awaiting for months) was as civilized a top cop as old Ned Rosen, allowed me to feel—there is no end to the logic of these organizational matters—back in the Company again.
“It was a bit of a jaunt to get to your woods,” he said.
How he had improved since the old days. When we trained together, Rosen, who had been Phi Beta Kappa at Columbia, Mensa, et cetera, had also been—in a word—adenoidal. His nasal intelligence kept boring forward. He was a fellow to be rejected by in-groups before they even formed.
Now, he was married to a nice gray Episcopalian lady with whom, in fact, I had once had a memorable date in Montevideo, and he had obviously learned a lot from her. The nasality had metamorphosed into the resonance of a high government official.
“Yes,” he said, “you look damp, and I’m not dry.”
Enough of the warm-up, however.
“Did you telephone Kittredge tonight?” I asked.
He took his pause, more in decorum than caution. “About Hugh Montague?”
“Yes.”
“Harry, I didn’t telephone her. I brought the news.”
“When?”
“A while ago.”
Harlot's Ghost Page 7
