by Paul Vidich
The visit ended. Mueller stood at the apartment door and faced Mrs. Leisz, sleeping infant in her arm, son tugging at her hand. “Will you come again and read to him?”
“Of course.” Mueller nodded at the child. “He’s a sweet boy.” What could he say? This was the hard part of the job. Poor woman, Mueller thought. On his way down the stairwell he felt a stirring of remorse. He felt the burden of what it took to explain a corrupt world to an innocent mind. Mueller stopped suddenly on the landing, his lanky frame bent over, dry heaving an empty stomach. He felt as bad as he’d ever felt. The lies he had to tell.
4
* * *
RUSSIAN EMBASSY
FRIDAY NIGHT, Mueller was back in his office on the second floor of Quarter’s Eye. The hall was deserted; the whole place had emptied out. The weekend was ahead, but Mueller felt none of his usual relief that he had two days to himself.
He had finished his report on meeting with Mrs. Leisz and he’d included his speculation, for what it was worth, and he knew it wasn’t worth much. But it was all he had. Mrs. Leisz was in the dark about everything. She could be of no help, but also no harm. Leisz’s mistake? Mueller suspected he’d come across a clue to Protocol’s identity in the embassy’s cable traffic. A compromising clue in a coding error, a mistake. Leisz probably didn’t know what he was looking at. Or perhaps he did? Somehow they got to him first. Mueller had read all of Leisz’s intercepts from that afternoon, but nothing stood out. Just stuff Mueller expected to see, about power struggles in Moscow among rival Politburo factions looking to succeed Stalin, and ordinary cable traffic. Ordinary to anyone except the man who knew what he was looking at.
The problems of the Agency were big problems, but he no longer felt they were his to solve. He didn’t care. He just didn’t care anymore. He had once enjoyed his work, but the pleasure was gone and his interest had dissipated like sun burning off a morning fog. Where once there was a struggle between good and evil, the clarity was gone, and he was in a new gray-toned world where right and wrong blurred. The many innocent people who were collateral damage haunted him. He knew himself well enough to recognize the signs that he was becoming a burnt-out case.
He sat at his desk stodgily for several minutes looking at nothing in particular. The office’s one window looked onto the ventilation shaft, so he kept the blind closed. It was musty. A cell, really. And depressing. He removed a page of stationery from his desk drawer and picked up a pen. He composed a brief letter of resignation addressed to the director. “What in God’s name are we accomplishing here? Where does respect for human dignity come into play?” He finished the note, put it in an envelope, moistened the flap with his tongue, and sealed it. He placed the envelope in his outbox where his secretary would find it Monday morning. His mind played out the events that would follow. Colleagues he would disappoint, who wouldn’t say they were disappointed, but Mueller would see it in the way they avoided him. Everyone knew it was poor form to resign. We’re fighting evil. Mueller thought about Alfred Leisz struggling against the piano wire around his neck, gasping for air, leaving his face red and wildly contorted. Mueller forced the image from his mind.
Mueller looked at the envelope for a long time without any expression whatsoever, and without any responsibility. Thank you for helping, she’d said. What help? Mueller removed the letter of resignation from his outbox and put it inside his desk under his fountain pen.
“Ride home?”
It was Altman. He stood in the open door in his overcoat, his cheeks warm with scotch.
“With you?”
“I’m perfectly fine behind the wheel, old boy, so long as the driver in the oncoming car is sober.”
Mueller’s ulcer was good cover to pass on the booze. He wasn’t sure how his drinking colleagues got their work done. He knew which reports were written in the morning and which after lunch. Good reports were those whose language was efficient, clear, concise. Afternoon writers sealed their thoughts with the cold kiss of gin.
“You should drink less,” Mueller said.
“You, George, should be less abstemious. Each of us walks with his devil.”
Mueller rode with Altman in his roadster coupé through the city’s lightly trafficked streets, wind lifting snow pushed onto the sidewalk.
“So,” Altman said. “Did you learn anything from her?”
“Nothing. She’s in the dark. She won’t ask questions.”
“That’s a start.”
“Leave her alone.”
Mueller was surprised when Altman pulled to the curb at Sixteenth Street just across from the Soviet embassy.
“Why are you stopping?”
“There,” Altman said.
A brightly lit guardhouse bordered the tall gate and a guard in cap leaned toward the glass and peered into the night. Behind, the dark Beaux Arts mansion whose shuttered windows gave it a forlorn look. A high fence with sharp iron tips ringed the old building and reinforced its forbidding appearance. Harsh fluorescent light in the kiosk showed the inquiring face of the lone guard. Three cars were parked inside the gate.
“The one in the middle,” Altman said. “Vasilenko takes it to the Soviet compound on Chesapeake Bay on weekends. It’s your best shot. FBI don’t tail them that far. Remarkable, isn’t it? Good for us.”
Mueller saw nothing unusual about the green four-door sedan except that it was a Buick, not a Moskvitch. “He gets the privilege of his own car?”
“And a driver.”
“Anything else?”
“He’s a colonel.”
“What does that mean?” Mueller snapped his question with more irritation than he intended, and now his mood was out there.
“George, what’s bothering you?”
Mueller didn’t have an answer. At least not an answer he was willing to share.
“I’m curious, George. You’re being goddamned touchy. Head in the clouds about this.”
“I know what I need to do.”
“I have reservations too. We all do. The ends don’t justify the means, George, but they’re all we have.”
Mueller was dropped off in front of his apartment building. Altman leaned across the seat and spoke to Mueller through the open passenger window. “Come out to our place next weekend. We’re across the water from the Soviet compound. Two birds with one stone.”
Altman withdrew, but then leaned toward the open window, and yelled after Mueller, climbing the building’s steps. “My sister is there, old boy. In her is the end of breeding. She would like someone to speak with and you may be just the one to commit that act of bravery.”
• • •
A cover story had already been arranged for George Mueller. It didn’t surprise many people in Quarter’s Eye that he was placed on medical leave. These people were reassured that the ulcer he’d developed in Vienna would not interfere with his work, but he needed to seek treatment at a sanitarium, and during that time he’d be in the office less, reducing his workload. During those next few days he complained to whoever cared to listen that the Agency was losing its way, and there was rapidly deteriorating morale. Bright, patriotic professionals had been recruited with promises of exciting overseas service. Then they were put in dead-end posts as glorified messengers and typists. He shared these opinions openly, perhaps recklessly.
On the day he cleaned up his office there were colleagues who came to see him off who didn’t expect him to return. He’d been removed from the routing list of daily intelligence summaries in the standard procedure for men on medical leave, but some saw it as a sign he was out. After that colleagues stopped speaking to him about work, or spoke to him not at all, or diverted the talk to safe and inconsequential topics. Everything was made easier by his ulcer because it was real, as were his opinions about the state of affairs in the Agency. He could plausibly explain himself to colleagues and the explanation had the ben
efit of being true.
Rumors circulated that the losses in Europe were his fault in some way, and he’d been asked to leave, but no one had specific details, so office gossip invented ludicrous scenarios. There was his divorce in Vienna; there was the incident, repeated several times by vigilant janitors, that he had left his office safe unlocked and that was how Leisz’s cover had been blown. The accumulation of little oversights and lax behavior fueled speculation that Mueller was a security risk.
5
* * *
CHESAPEAKE BAY
THE BAY was a boisterous gray under a low ceiling of angry clouds.
Mueller straddled his bicycle on the windswept road that snaked along the bluff. He was stopped there at the viewpoint within sight of the cove’s far shore and the weekend beach homes that dotted the coastline. Cold rain had begun to fall and the intermittent drops hit fiercely. Too warm for snow, but not so warm that he could ignore their biting cold. In the distance, sheeting rain fell from dark clouds moving across the bay.
He spotted the Soviet compound on the spit of land beyond the other homes. It was where they said it would be, and it looked as he’d been told it would look, but there was a sense of moment, being there and seeing what had been described. The pink Belgravia-style mansion was approached by a long circular driveway that ended in broad steps leading to the front door. The color was enough to draw the eye, not the gaudy pink he’d first imagined when he heard the word, but a rose limestone that was soft on the eye.
Mueller raised his binoculars and scanned the grounds. Below the mansion there were tennis courts, a soccer field with patches of brown showing through the melted snow, and a covered swimming pool. Dull green privet hedges bordered paths that meandered through bare gardens on their way to the water. There was no one out. Too wet. Too cold. Mueller saw one black car parked in the driveway with stanchions, Soviet ensigns whipping in the wind.
Mueller biked to the town of Centreville, the nearest community that served that part of Chesapeake Bay, a small place, hardly a town at all, but there was a bank, a church, a Main Street, and a liquor store. Mueller dismounted across the street and studied the two black sedans parked in front. Same make and model as the car he’d seen in his binoculars. He recognized the diplomatic license plates. He saw several men in suits inside the store’s plate glass window and he followed them when they emerged, talking among themselves, joking. He watched them closely, but wasn’t sure he recognized the man he’d come to find.
• • •
Mueller could feel the cashier’s eyes follow him while he browsed the shelves of gin. Their eyes had met when Mueller entered. The doorbell clanged when Mueller stepped in and the cashier had looked up from his Saturday newspaper.
Mueller put a pint of cheap gin on the counter. “How much?”
“Three bucks.”
He was a stocky, older man in a cardigan sweater buttoned over a shirt and tie, and his gray hair was parted on the side. He wore wire-rim glasses and a wide smile, and Mueller knew that he wasn’t getting out of the store without having to listen to some story about something. Mueller looked to see if he had exact change, but he did not. The cashier held the five-dollar bill hostage.
“You here for the races?”
Mueller nodded. Why stand out.
“A lot of folks come down early to fit out their boats, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“You’re not from here, are you?”
“No.”
“I haven’t seen you here before.”
“I’m not from here.”
“I know most of the folks from around here, even the weekenders. Small town. You get to know everyone. I even know some Russians.”
Mueller looked at the cashier.
“That was them who just left before you came in. . . . I’m short on ones. Quarters okay?”
Mueller nodded. “They come in a lot?”
“Oh, yeah.” The cashier rolled his eyes in an exaggerated expression. “It’s a funny story, you know. The first owner of the place out on Pioneer Point started the winter races. He gave a party for all the skippers, but his wife—she’s from New York—got bored down here and wanted nothing to do with the place. She finally divorced him. She called the place a pink elephant. He wanted to make a killing dividing the estate into lots, but the planning board turned him down. He sold the place to the Russians out of spite. We weren’t happy. Communists right here in Centreville? I’m still not happy about it. But don’t get me wrong. They don’t bother me. The neighbors got upset at the chain-link fence. And their guard dogs. They bark a lot.”
The cashier pushed Mueller’s change across the counter.
“They’re good customers,” he continued. “They park outside and come in groups of five or six. Buy Schmidt beer, Smirnoff vodka, and sometimes they get Jack Daniel’s. Don’t speak good English. Half the time I don’t know what they’re saying. They point a lot. They’re pretty quick with their embassy IDs and remind me they don’t pay tax. Nice about it, but the extra paperwork is a hassle. Seem like regular folks. Just don’t trust their driving.”
Mueller pocketed his change.
“When I see them come barreling down the road I give them plenty of room. What’s your name?”
“George.”
“Nice to meet you, George.”
Mueller took his pint of gin in its brown bag and slipped it in his deep overcoat pocket.
This became his routine. Each day that week he sat on the bench across the street from the liquor store and waited for cars from the Soviet compound to arrive. He read the newspaper or a novel, or sat in the sun. When the Russians arrived he made a mental note of the license plates, and he recorded their faces in memory. A few women got out of the cars, but it was mostly middle-aged men, usually in hats and heavy coats, often loud, and Mueller got to know who was the driver, who the passenger. When they entered the liquor store Mueller crossed the street to buy his pint of gin.
“You again,” the cashier said.
Mueller intervened the third day. The driver of one car was pointing to a shelf and having a hard time getting his meaning across to the cashier. The Russian was polite, but became exasperated at the cashier’s slowness, and he pointed excitedly, yelling out a string of words, which entertained his companions, who laughed.
“He’s looking for cognac,” Mueller said, helpfully.
After the Russians left, Mueller went to pay for his pint. “You speak Russian?”
“I understand a bit.”
“What else did they say?”
“They called you a few names.”
On the fourth day Mueller saw the forest-green Buick. He recognized the driver. He was the same man who insulted the cashier. Heavy, thick neck, stubby fingers. Mueller knew what he had to do.
He crossed the street, walked up to the driver, and said something he knew would provoke the man, a little hostile, certainly insulting. Words were exchanged. There was some shoving. A fist thrown. The driver’s Russian companions were outside the store in a moment restraining their agitated colleague. Mueller’s pint of gin had broken on the sidewalk in his fall, and the Russian driver bled heavily on the hand where glass had opened a gash. A few townspeople gathered around the scene, but no one had seen what happened, so no one knew if the incident had been the fault of the Russian or of the stranger who’d crossed the street. No one heard what had been said, although the cashier vouched for the stranger. This all happened in the afternoon that day.
The oysterman’s cottage Mueller had rented sat two miles outside of Centreville on a cove. He biked back there after the incident. The house was a small, quiet place with a gently sloped roof and a screen porch. Wind, rain, and sun had leached color from the shingle siding and the place fit into the colorless winter landscape. A second nearby building held an old canoe, discarded crab cages, rus
ted parts of gasoline engines, and an old pickup. Mueller got the cottage for a good off-season price and in the first week he’d found a way to engage his mind with all his free time. He read in the sun, cooked a bit, found time to contemplate the lengthening daylight, and rehearsed the quiet life he planned for himself and his son after he resigned.
He didn’t wait long after returning from town that afternoon, and he again set out on his bicycle. He made an incongruous picture—grown man, in office shoes and a car coat, pedaling his rickety bike on the narrow road in blustery weather.
He passed low-lying fields of pussy willows left over from the previous season, and further on he veered left on the dead-end street that ran alongside a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Yellow signs warned trespassers to keep out. The road ended at a locked gate with red plaque adorned with hammer and sickle.
Mueller straddled his bicycle and looked through the iron bars. The land was drained of color and trees were bare in winter undress through the patch of forest. He made out the rose limestone mansion. There was no one to speak with at the gate, no one to engage, and he began to wonder why he’d come. They had to come to him, he reminded himself. This wasn’t going to work.
On his bike ride home he saw the green Buick. The car came into view when it swerved around a curve at high speed, straddling both narrow lanes. With a tight grip on the handlebars, Mueller aligned his bike’s front wheel along the road’s edge. He had no room on his right where the thin strip of shoulder fell into a culvert. He narrowed his eyes on the small world of white paint. He moved deliberately, but not slowly, and he was very aware of the automobile speeding toward him. Mueller thought he’d be safe, so he angled slightly but suddenly, taking up more of the lane. The car swept past. Wind slapped his body, jostled the rickety front wheel, causing him to lose control. The bike jumped the culvert and Mueller was thrown off.
