An Honorable Man

by Paul Vidich

  19

  * * *

  BETH GETS A VISIT

  BETH DIDN’T recognize the two men who visited her at the house. She’d been in the kitchen when she heard the loud knocking. Beth found them just outside standing side by side, cordial, polite, each holding his hat in two hands. They had short hair, both wore cinched trench coats, both had ties knotted tightly on starched collars, and she found them hard to tell apart except that one was short with wire-frame glasses and the other taller with a pencil-thin moustache. Not much alike at all, she thought, after the first impression wore off, but she thought they were peas in a pod. Two men with polite smiles who were more polite than friendly. They could have been members of a cult religion recruiting converts until she saw the holstered pistols.

  “Yes,” she said, holding the door open but not letting them in. “Can I help you?” She wiped her hand vigorously on her flower apron.

  From behind her father called, “Who is it, Beth?”

  “It’s for me,” she said in a definitive voice, calling back inside. Beth stepped outside, closing the door behind.

  “Yes?” She looked at the shorter man and then at the taller man. The same trench coats, the same polished black shoes, the same expressionless faces that made her believe that she, or someone, was in trouble.

  “Can I help you?” she repeated.

  “Are you Elizabeth Altman?”

  “Yes.”

  “We have a few questions for you,” the taller one said.

  A few questions? “What questions?” The words produced a spiral of speculation in her imagination. She had been worried all morning that her father would ask about Roger and she’d have to make a decision about speaking up, or staying silent. She felt the terrible burden of keeping his disappearance to herself. The events of the past week had been a series of disconnected episodes in that way that life itself was only random events that had no order, no beginning, and no end, but were merely things you had to react to. She found it hard to assemble a coherent picture of things. And there was no one she could ask.

  She tried to smile at the two men, but it was uncomfortable to pretend politeness. She released her apron and met the taller man’s eyes with a concerned look. “What questions?”

  The taller man flipped open his wallet to reveal a badge, and said, “Special Agent Walker. FBI.” He spoke quickly and she didn’t catch the name. “Walker,” he repeated. The shorter man didn’t smile and he didn’t introduce himself.

  “Are you here to ask about the dog?” Beth said.

  “The dog?”

  “There was a terrible barking two nights ago. It went on for an hour. It started at midnight. We heard gunshots and then the barking. We called the sheriff.”

  “No,” he said. “Barking dogs don’t usually interest us. We understand you know George Mueller.”

  She hesitated. “Yes, I do.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “He had an accident on the road not far from here. I found him and brought him here. Is he in trouble?”

  “Did you speak with him?”

  “With George?”

  “Yes, we’re talking about George Mueller. He was here for a few days and I wondered if you talked much to him?”

  She stared coldly. She didn’t like the way he was getting her to say things that he already seemed to know. “What is your interest in George?”

  “We’re talking to people who know him. People like you. Background check.”

  “I haven’t known him long. Is he in trouble?”

  “No. We’re just asking a few questions. I have a list of things we’d like to ask. Can we go over the list?”

  Beth nodded. She preferred not to, but knew she had no good reason to refuse. She wrapped her chest with her arms and glanced at the typed page Agent Walker held.

  “You’re chilly,” the shorter agent said. “Do you want to go ­inside?”

  “No.” She almost snapped her response.

  “He worked for the National Labor Relations Board. Did you discuss that?”

  “We’ve never talked about his work.”

  “Did he mention he volunteered for the American Civil Liberties Union?”

  “No, as I said. We didn’t talk about his work.”

  “So you don’t know what he does for a living?”

  It was the way the Agent Walker framed his question that made her think that it was wrong for her to know. “He works in the government. That’s all I know. That’s what he said.”

  “That’s all he said?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he say that he works for the CIA?”

  CIA? She felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. She wasn’t breathing. Her mind went blank. She knew there was a right answer and there was a wrong answer. The wrong answer would put him in trouble if he wasn’t already in trouble, and the right answer would keep him out of trouble, or not make his trouble worse. She looked down at her shoes because she didn’t want them to see her confusion.

  “That’s the Central Intelligence Agency,” Agent Walker said.

  “Yes, I know what it is. What was the question?”

  “Did he tell you he worked for them?”

  “He didn’t say that. He said he worked in the government.” She didn’t like the men. It was their presumptuous manner—the false friendliness of men asking questions using blandishments because they were not in a position to demand answers.

  “Beth?”

  She turned her head to her father’s voice. “Yes, be right there.”

  “Just a couple more questions,” agent Walker said.

  She turned her back on them. Anger at their prying insolence made the words leap from her lips. “I think we’re finished. Next time call ahead.”

  • • •

  Mueller was at his sink splashing water on his face when he heard pounding at his door. He looked up, alert. More banging from the front of the apartment. He toweled moisture from his face and slipped into a bathrobe. On his way across the living room he closed a file and considered where to hide it, looking at the box of packed books, then a drawer, and when the pounding continued he stuffed it under a sofa pillow.

  Mueller put his eye to the door’s peephole and saw Beth, absurdly distorted in the fisheye lens. He undid the police lock, setting aside the steel bar, and undid both dead bolts.

  “I need to speak to you,” Beth said urgently. “Can I come in?”

  There were hints of greasepaint on her neck left when she’d rushed to leave the dressing room after her evening performance. She still wore mascara, and she’d been crying, which had made her eyeliner run. He stepped aside. She wore gloves and an overcoat that she made no effort to remove. She stopped by the round table in the center of the room and turned abruptly to face him.

  “I need to talk,” she said.

  Talk? About what? It was a dreadful moment. He was close to her, at her side, holding her coat and helping her remove one arm from the sleeve. Her forehead was creased with preoccupation, lips tight and unsmiling, eyes alive with concern. He could see her measure the distance between them, and deciding it was too close, she took a step back.

  “You’re CIA, aren’t you?”

  Mueller felt the sting in her voice, the intensity of her scrutiny. Quietly. “Yes.”

  “And Roger too?”

  “Yes, we both work there.”

  “I’ve always hated the CIA. You’re all self-righteous men thinking the world needs to be saved. God, how did I not know?” She stared at him. “How did it start?”

  Mueller was now standing away from her, and he dropped her coat over a chair. Mueller used the moment of silence to organize his mind to shape a scenario for her that was believable without being entirely true.

  “When did he join?” she asked.

 
“He was OSS during the war and when the war ended he joined. He’d won that medal and he had a good story. He recruited me out of a New York law firm, so he was already part of it. He said to me, ‘The free world is at risk.’”

  A pause. “He said, ‘We need smart men like you down here. It’s something new. I can’t tell you about it. The pay isn’t great, but this is about democracy.’ You know him. All that bravado, all that enthusiasm. It meant something then.”

  Mueller met her eyes. “I didn’t buy the pitch, but I was at a point in my life when anything was better than what I was doing. Hours were long. I worked twelve-hour days. The cases were dull. I drank too much. . . .” Mueller paused. Leave it at that.

  All he got back was a sullen grunt. She glared. “What else should I know about you?”

  A baby’s cry came through the airshaft window cracked open for the breeze and there followed a woman’s heckling shriek and an argument between the couple who lived across the way. Mueller closed the kitchen window. He answered her question with one of his own. “Tea?”

  “Tea?” She slumped in a chair. “I’d prefer a drink. Go ahead. What else?”

  In a minute a kettle hummed softly on the gas stove and then he poured her a cup of tea. He drank his quickly like medicine while she sipped hers gingerly. A long silence opened between them.

  The thought of a lie made Mueller sick, as sick as he’d felt in the stairwell of Mrs. Leisz’s apartment building. “I’m quitting the Agency. Moving.” His hand made an arc of the room. “Leaving all of this for the next tenant. Everything but the books.”

  Loud sounds of domestic violence came from the apartment across the airshaft.

  “I didn’t mind their fighting when I first moved in,” Mueller said. “I wasn’t looking for a charming place that would brighten my life.”

  “I don’t think of you as someone who feels sorry for himself.”

  “There are things you don’t know. That’s one. I tolerate disappointment.”

  She grunted. “I know.”

  Her hand plunged in her pocket and she produced a handwritten note in Roger’s precise cursive script. “Read this.”

  Dear Beth,

  Don’t worry about me. I will be gone for some time. I don’t know how long. I won’t be able to write for a little while, but when I can I will. You are in my thoughts and always will be. There isn’t much I can say, but there is a favorite poem that comes to mind. My worst sin is my blood and now my blood pays for it. I shall think of you always. And don’t think too harshly of me.

  Your loving brother,

  Roger

  It was as close to a confession as Mueller expected to read. Mueller met Beth’s eyes.

  “They have subpoenaed him to testify. You have seen what they’ve done to the others. Demonized them. For what? For having personal lives that they don’t want splashed over the headlines of the morning newspaper!”

  She had looked away, but she again met his eyes. She slumped on the sofa and spoke prayerfully from a place in the past. “I remember him as a boy standing on the bed with a little broom he’d taken from the closet. He stood there and I was behind—his recruit. He enlisted me when he needed an army to lead, or an enemy to slay. He’d cry, ‘Half a league, half a league, half a league onward. All in the valley of Death rode the six hundred.’ ”

  Her eyes reddened. “Roger has a right to his private life. We all do. We don’t know how important it is until it’s taken from you in this mad prurient baiting that passes for civilization. You know him, or at least you know the person he lets you see. I know him in a different way. I know the little boy who could not get his father’s attention.”

  She braved her tears. “My father didn’t want Roger. I’ve never told you that. He wanted a different type of son. That’s a hard thing for an eight-year-old to take in. How does that boy understand the disappointment he sees in his father’s eyes? Is it possible to overcome that?”

  Mueller put down his cup.

  “And now they want to put him in front of television cameras, interrogate him, and use him to demonize father.” She wrapped her arms on her chest. She looked up at Mueller. “Where is he?”

  Mueller moved to the window. He saw in the dark chamber of his mind that constructs such pictures the pain that would flow from all that she did not know. He felt the pain she had yet to endure. Was there any way to spare her? Him? Them? Evil hatched long ago would become a flock of black crows flapping madly around their heads. He felt a terrible responsibility to protect her.

  He gazed down at the empty sidewalk and didn’t stir for a long time. How did he get to this place in his life, living in a grubby apartment on a grim Washington street? Nothing he’d ever imagined about his future prepared him for the moment he was in.

  He was surprised when she came up beside him, and he only noticed that she had taken his hand when he felt her head on his shoulder. She stood beside him, eyes closed, strangely peaceful. She was plain, ordinary, with a face that wouldn’t turn heads on the street. A careworn face, a kid sister’s face. The scent of her hair and the touch of her skin had the power to alter his life. He felt the bigness of her heart. He always thought it was the way women looked that counted, and it had been that way for him twice, but his feelings for Beth had nothing to do with her looks. He never meant to fall in love with Beth.

  Love. He wasn’t sure what the word meant, and he had never said it seriously. It was a vague, sentimental, romantic word, an appalling word that only led to terrible disappointment. He embraced her and felt her trembling.

  20

  * * *

  UNDERGROUND

  FINAL ARRANGEMENTS to capture Roger Altman fell into place quickly. In exchange for a promise of asylum, Vasilenko agreed to cooperate. Vasilenko confirmed that a room on the fourth floor of the Soviet embassy had been set aside for a special guest, and this could only be Protocol. Chernov had boasted he could secretly transport Protocol to Moscow and become the Communist hero who’d reeled in his big prize.

  “Tomorrow night he leaves,” Vasilenko said. “No later than that. The Sedov sails in two days. Protocol will be on it.”

  Coffin snapped, “The embassy is watched round the clock.”

  “What you don’t know is this.” Vasilenko surprised the men in the conference room when he explained that he’d found a cellar door that led from the embassy’s subbasement to an abandoned tunnel that ran under Sixteenth Street past the Carlton Hotel toward Lafayette Park. He had found the passage when he looked around for a way to leave the embassy unseen. He needed a way to come and go without being followed, surprising Mueller in the Whiskey Bar, appearing beside him in the bar as if he’d materialized out of nowhere. “Yes, George, that was my trick. I came and left clandestinely. The FBI had their binoculars on the embassy’s gate, the roof, and the windows, but I moved underground. I found an old iron door in the wine cellar behind a wall of Château Latour. I had to break a few bottles, so, of course, I couldn’t tell anyone what I’d found because they’d say, ‘Yuri, good work, but you’ll have to pay for the wine.’ So, it’s my little secret. Chernov will be glad to have it. I can lead him to the hotel, through the cellar, and there will be a car to take us to the Sedov. You’ll surprise him when he steps out to the street.”

  Beneath Washington’s streets is an unmapped web of old tunnels built in the aftermath of the British sacking of the U.S. capital. These subterranean defenses were forgotten in time and mostly abandoned to the seasonal flood waters that channeled in meandering paths to the Potomac. Sections were used in the Civil War by freed slaves arriving or departing in the underground railroad; others reclaimed to satisfy the city’s hunger for secrecy, becoming archive vaults, or passageways for congressmen to move unseen for votes in the House of Representatives, or to hasten them to hotel dalliances, and later, portions were converted to bomb shelters, or annexed by the city’s new tr
olley system.

  The trap was baited. Low clouds laid a dampening gloom over splendidly dressed guests who arrived for the Republican gala in the Hotel Carlton’s ballroom. Diligent doormen opened limousine doors and led celebrities past eager onlookers restrained by velvet rope, and through the spectacle of light from paparazzi camera flashes. Perfect cover, Vasilenko had said, to move unnoticed in the open. These had been his last words that morning before he strode purposefully into the front gate of the Soviet embassy.

  “They’re late,” Coffin said, checking his watch. “It’s past nine. Or, we’ve missed them.” This he snapped impatiently.

  Coffin stood beside Mueller in the gray mist across the street and watched the buzzing crowd gathered under the hotel’s canopy. Washington was not a European capital and there were no graceful benches to sit on, no quaint sidewalk cafés from which to clandestinely spy on a subject. No one designed the city for strolling. Certainly not in the open, subject to the city’s miserable climate. With the low clouds came a light soaking drizzle that fell on Mueller and Coffin. They had left without umbrellas and water fell in rivulets from their hats, chilling them to the bone, adding to their impatience.

  “They’ll come,” Mueller said optimistically.

  “I don’t trust him,” Coffin said. He coughed his smoker’s cough, and puffed on his cigarette again.

  Inside the telephone booth at their side the handset began to ring. Coffin answered it. Mueller split his attention between a Buick parked just down the block on the opposite side of the street, and the half-heard conversation from the booth.

  “Yes, we’re here,” Coffin said. “Nothing so far. The fog makes it hard to see. Yes, Yes, I know. There’s no room to fail. I’ll call when I know something.” Coffin hung up and turned to Mueller. “He doesn’t trust Vasilenko either.”