An Honorable Man

by Paul Vidich

  He was a solitary bicyclist on the narrow road to his cottage. He had worried his leg wasn’t healed well enough to pedal that distance, but found he had no difficulty. Fresh air filled his lungs and he concentrated on the small world that opened in front of him on the dark road. Out of nowhere a car came up from behind and illuminated a tunnel into the night, and Mueller suddenly gripped the handlebars tighter, preparing for the impact of wind. Terror squeezed his chest and then just as suddenly the automobile sped past and disappeared into the night.

  Mueller entered the cottage with the key above the doorjamb. The kitchen was cold, but little had changed since he’d left. Beth’s flowers had dried and their colors faded. He tossed them in the garbage and then went to the living room. He didn’t turn on the light, but lay on the sofa. Moonlight entered the bay windows where the owner had closed in the porch.

  Mueller put his head on a pillow and gazed at the ceiling. His shoes were on and so was his overcoat. He placed his hands on his chest, palms down. The moon hung in the sky like a lantern and washed his face in metallic light. The room was otherwise dark. He lay on the cusp of sleep, but sleepless, for a long time. His eyes gazed at the ceiling looking at nothing and seeing only shimmering shapes as clouds disturbed the moonlight. His mind drifted to the past, and to the moments of his youth and regrets for things done, or left undone, and his whole body filled with powerful emotion. His mind was a jerky kinescope of scenes from college, the war, and from Vienna.

  It seemed to him that all the moments of his life occupied the same space, the past collected in the present, and future events already existed and were waiting for him to find his way to them—just as he knew what to expect when he got to the office and his secretary greeted him with her predictable cheerfulness. He knew what to expect tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. He simply had to wait in his loneliness for his future to arrive.

  For no reason he thought of May 5, Vienna, the night of the food riots, when he’d been stuck in the Soviet zone waiting for the turmoil to subside so he could return to the Innere Stadt. He remembered gangs of children racing through the narrow streets without shoes, desperate, hungry, moving in waves, disappearing and then reappearing. He was on his way to visit his son at his estranged wife’s apartment, and he’d been making his way to an unguarded spot where someone who knew the city grid could slip in and out of the Soviet sector. He remembered windowless Soviet military vehicles racing toward the children, the city frozen in terror that they’d be detained and sent east to a camp. He waited at a corner, taking longer than he should to make his way to safety, as he worried these children were at risk. Young boys no older than twelve or thirteen, and many younger, desperate for safety racing past barriers of smoldering car tires. No one knew how terrible it would be. Chaos had come suddenly from a single gunshot on the peaceful march, and then the noise, confusion, and desperate movements of children who’d been gathered together to show the world the face of a starving city. And he remembered seeing Roger Altman hard against a building seeking cover from the rampaging troops. He too was at the point of entry to the safe alley separating the American zone from the Soviet. That had surprised Mueller, and then he’d seen Altman risk his life for one of those children. A young girl had fallen, her leg cracked when she caught her ankle in a wide sewer grating. Altman ran out and took the innocent girl from the street just as a Soviet jeep bore down. He saved her life. Mueller came back to this uncomfortable recollection from time to time, and sometimes it would come to him out of nowhere, ambush him while he was resting, or reading, or waiting for the trolley. He’d look up at nothing and see that night in his mind’s eye. He could be walking through a quiet neighborhood in Georgetown where nothing had changed in years, and he’d see the face of a girl, and he’d feel, almost physically feel, the memory leap out at him, and time would slow down in the gravitational pull of the past. He never asked Altman why he’d been there that night. He never wanted to know. He remembered only how he’d saved the girl’s life.

  • • •

  Fiery noon. Mueller looked out the cottage’s sunroom window at the bay. The day’s fine weather was almost mocking. Molten sunshine bore down mercilessly from a blue sky. A light breeze rustled spring flowers budding in the tired earth and two gulls, carried on the wind, held a vigil above the cove.

  Mueller lifted his binoculars and looked at the pink Soviet compound across the narrow stretch of water. The green Buick and black sedan he’d seen before were again parked in the driveway. There was a strange quiet to the place. It was Saturday, but the tennis courts were empty and there was no sign of life. With the binoculars he saw that the second-floor curtains were drawn.

  Mueller hadn’t heard from Vasilenko and he was curious about that. He owed Vasilenko money for his last drop. News coming from Moscow was reverberating throughout the chain of command and the director had gotten it right that it was impossible to know whether Stalin had been dead for some time—murdered—or died in the way medical bulletins said he had. All signs pointed to a purge.

  The loud honk of a car warned Mueller that someone had arrived. A car door slammed shut and he heard his name called, and then again. Then he heard the kitchen door burst open.

  “So you are here.” Beth stood in the open door, arms akimbo. “Are you okay? You look like you haven’t slept.”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “I took a late bus.” He tried to smile to be pleasant, but the expression on his face was lost to a nagging preoccupation. Mueller stood slowly. It surprised him that he was touched she had come by, but he was at a loss for words, uncertain whether he should bring up the incident at the party. His eyes drifted as he searched for the right words.

  “Your secretary didn’t know where you’d gone. She said you’d taken the day off.”

  Secretary? He looked directly at Beth.

  “I got your number from Roger. I wanted to invite you to dinner. To make up for being rude at the party. If I was rude. So, here I am, in person.”

  “I see.”

  “You missed the winter races.”

  His expression was blank.

  “You know, people on sailboats trying their best to finish first.”

  He’d forgotten. “Who won?”

  “A crew from the Naval Academy.” She laughed. “Roger thought they cheated.”

  There was a beat of silence.

  “How was your week?” she asked.

  Mueller shook his head. “Miserable. About as bad as it could get.”

  “We have that in common, for what it’s worth, but I expect it’s not worth much. We had a scare when our dog disappeared, but then she came back. The threatening calls have stopped. Will you to come to dinner tonight?”

  Her hands were plunged in her pockets, and she stood awkwardly like a schoolgirl. “Will you?”

  It bothered Mueller that he had the power to disappoint her. He wasn’t ready for that responsibility. “What time?”

  “Early if you want a drink. Say six. Roger will be there. Shall I pick you up?”

  He nodded at a canoe that he’d pulled ashore earlier that morning. “I’ll paddle. It’s not far.”

  They stood side by side at her red convertible in the gravel driveway, hesitant, each waiting for the other to say a word, or make a gesture of separation—but neither did. She waited for him to say something, and when he didn’t, she slipped into the driver’s seat and slammed the door. She drove off.

  • • •

  Quiet dusk. Mueller sipped iced tea on the back porch of the Altmans’ grand Victorian home and stared at a girl playing under a wide oak tree. He was alone at a table set for dinner. The little girl was playing by herself in the deepening shadows, only a child. Six years old, if that. From a low branch there was a swing made of rope and an old tire. The scrawny little girl was skipping rope. Her face was pale, hair wild, feet without shoes, and her dress too larg
e. She looked clumsy each time she brought the rope over her head and made an effort to hop.

  Mueller gazed at the girl, about his boy’s age, he thought. He heard vague, excited voices in the kitchen. Then a woman ran out of the back door and swept the child into her arms. It was Roger’s fiancée. She wiped dirt from the child’s face and then carried her quickly in a protective embrace to the housekeeper’s cottage that sat in the rear of the main house.

  “The girl isn’t Roger’s, if you’re wondering.”

  Beth had come up quietly behind Mueller and now stood at his side, wiping her hands on her apron. She nodded brusquely toward the cottage where the woman had disappeared with her daughter. “He helped her out of a jam. They have an arrangement. He gives her a little money each month and she plays along as his companion. It’s good for both of them.”

  Beth looked at Mueller, suddenly appalled. “I’m telling you this in confidence. Do you understand? You must never repeat it.” Her eyes had opened wide and were worried. “Roger would kill me if he knew I’d told you.”

  Mueller nodded agreement. He wasn’t happy to have this obligation to her. A promise held within itself the source of its own disappointment.

  She forced a smile. “We’re almost ready to eat. Roger is finishing dessert. I think he’s making a berry pie. He hates to cook, but he has one berry pie recipe that he makes when we have friends over. The kitchen here makes cooks out of all of us noncooks.”

  She sat beside Mueller in a cane chair and poured herself a glass of red wine from the decanted bottle. She leisurely sipped from the stemmed glass. They sat in the gloaming with a view of the dying twilight sun on the horizon. High up above the trees there was a remnant of blue sky. Slowly, Beth leaned forward. “How long have you known my brother?”

  Mueller was tempted to pour himself a glass of the wine. Alcohol made it easier to speak in half-truths. He saw it in all his colleagues. Deception. Stress. Hard drinking. It was a bad combination.

  “We were at Yale together.”

  “Roommates?”

  “Different years.”

  “What was he like in college?”

  “Like? Mixed up, like the rest of us. A little quiet, a deep reader. He impressed all of us with his intelligence. He read poetry. A lot of Ezra Pound. Shakespeare’s sonnets. And then there was this other side of him—the political side. We said that he had the anticommunist fervor of an ardent socialist. If the Spanish Civil War hadn’t just been lost, I think he would have volunteered. He was romantic about things like war and freedom and friendship. He liked to quote that line, I forget who said it, Kipling or Forster: ‘If one had the choice of betraying one’s country or one’s friend, one should hope for the courage to betray one’s country.’ . . . Idealism is an illness that strikes young men. We found it easy to believe what we wanted to be true.”

  “You were like that too?”

  “In my own way. I didn’t have his passion.”

  Beth gazed at Mueller. “I never saw that side of him. I was twelve when he left home. He was the tall, handsome older brother who always had a group of friends around. A girl at his side, or a man. The men were all funny and clever, and the women were funny and clever too, but sexless. I remember thinking that he inhabited a totally different planet than the one I was on. I tagged along when I could, the kid sister who got in the car with these terribly smart people. I was in awe, really. I would look in their faces and give them imaginary lives, just like I gave lives to the people in front of Saint Patrick’s who dropped a coin in my Salvation Army bucket.” Beth’s eyes had drifted off, but they returned to look at Mueller. “You know him pretty well.”

  “We’ve known each other. But I don’t think you can say I’ve ever really known him.”

  “I’m not asking for an existential answer, George. No, that’s not my point here. Of course, no one knows anyone really. You think you do until there is that one thing that surprises, and you reconsider their entire life in light of that new fact. Well, I know that, but that is not what I was asking. I was simply asking how close the two of you are. You do work together.”

  Mueller saw that Beth had taken her paper napkin and was tearing it in halves, quarters, and eighths. She tossed the shreds into the air. “Puff,” she said. “The past isn’t what it used to be.”

  They were quiet for a very long time. She stood and tossed her apron on her chair. “Let me get him. The food must be ready. Are you chilly? Shall we move inside?”

  “No. This is fine. Thank you.”

  “How’s the leg?”

  Mueller couldn’t help himself. He lowered his trousers and displayed the angry scar. “You could practice medicine.”

  • • •

  Mueller watched a sturdy little motorboat plow through the bay’s choppy water, waves splashing over the bow. The boat churned along without a signal light, and Mueller wouldn’t have seen it except that the man at the wheel smoked. Even at that distance the lit end of his cigarette glowed like a tiny beacon. The boat made its way along the shore and then turned sharply to the jutting dock of the Soviet compound.

  Mueller heard a creaking floorboard and turned just as Roger Altman and Beth came out to the porch. Altman carried a pot roast garnished with baked potatoes and she held a plate of steamed vegetables. Brother and sister placed dinner on the table.

  There was quiet except for bustling dinner preparations and scraping chairs, and when that ended there was just silence. Mueller had gotten over his anger, but he made no effort to engage Altman in conversation. The two men sat opposite each other. Their eyes met.

  “Good to see you, George,” Altman said. “We wondered where you’d gone off to. Nobody in the office had a clue. They called the morgue. Can you believe that? Then Beth said you were out here.”

  “I hope it wasn’t a secret,” Beth said, suddenly concerned.

  “No.” Mueller nodded at Altman’s forehead where a flesh-colored Band-Aid was stretched over an eyebrow. To Beth, “Did he tell you that I tried to kill him with an oar?”

  She laughed, but Altman was only mildly amused.

  “Three stitches,” Altman said. “I was lucky.”

  Beth leapt from her seat. “I’ve forgotten the butter. We can’t start without butter for the potatoes. Don’t start. I want to say grace.”

  Mueller and Altman sat in silence after Beth ran off to the kitchen. Mueller had no reason to continue to talk about the incident—things like that were best forgotten, confined to memory.

  “Bad luck with the FBI,” Altman said. “Everything okay?”

  “Bad week. I needed time by myself.”

  “Of course. We all do. Don’t fret about the test. I flunked once. There’s a pill, you know. Every one of us who is good enough to be worth the trust they place in us does something that doesn’t fit into the new regime of rules.” Altman nodded toward the cove and the small boat, which was now docked.

  “Keeping track of the Russians?” Altman poured himself a generous glass of wine, which he swigged like water. “Something is up over there. Cars coming and going all day. I’ve got a telescope in the den. After dinner we can take a look.”

  Dinner was at turns pleasant and quiet, and loud and boisterous. Quiet prevailed when the conversation stuck to the books they’d each read and when they shared their common taste for the grainy black-and-white movies that were coming out of postwar Italy, but it turned raucous and argumentative when they debated the future of democracy. Altman denounced the spectacle of Senate hearings that were marching through its list of witnesses before his father was brought before the television lights again. “Once they get you on the stand,” Altman said in defiant complaint, “they ask what they want, and smear you if you refuse to answer. It’s bad soap opera. Everyone will be eager to hear what I know about Father.”

  “You can’t let them do that,” Beth said, leaning forward
.

  “Of course I can’t, but they’ll ask. They’ll go on the attack.”

  Altman opened a second bottle of burgundy, which he drank by himself when Beth covered her glass with her hand. Beth became troubled with the conversation when it lurched to politics, and started to clear the table. She took the stacked dishes into the kitchen, leaving the two men alone. Mueller was sober and Altman not. The breeze off the bay was cool and brought with it the sound of laughter and voices from homes along the cove.

  “This too is a question I’ve considered,” Altman said.

  Mueller turned his attention away from the bay and the voices. Mueller’s thoughts had drifted, but “this too” got his attention and he was curious what he had missed. “This what? Did I miss something?”

  “The whole question of—” Altman stopped himself from saying more when Beth returned. She plunked down in her chair.

  “Are you still talking politics?”

  Altman looked at his sister. “Would you excuse us? We have something we have to discuss. We’ll be in for dessert in a moment.”

  Altman lit a cigar. Two men alone again under a starry night, cicadas all around. Altman blew a smoke ring and then a second ring inside the first. “Coffin isn’t handling this well,” he said. He looked at Mueller. “He’s caught up in the theory of counterintelligence and he looks for proof with logic and analysis, but what he doesn’t do, and this is why he will fail, is he doesn’t look at the human factor. This is why he is wrong about you. You don’t fit the profile of someone who would turn.”

  Altman enjoyed another draw on his cigar. “If you wanted to turn, how would you make the first contact? Have you thought about that? Would you walk in to the Soviet embassy? Here? Overseas? Would you identify yourself with your real name?”

  “Are you asking me?” Mueller looked at Altman.

  “Yes. I’m curious. How would this have started? Real name to provide your bona fides? Or a fake name to protect yourself?”