AHMM, September 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  But W.E. knew, of course he did. Same as it ever was.

  "It's a good thing, son. The Guardians. If a man like you is at the top."

  Luther tilted his head. He'd begun to think otherwise—Dalrymple told him his advocacy put a wall between the two of them when they should've worked to be as close as any two partners; and Sarah Tolchinsky, white and a devout Jew, chaperoned his cause through the D.A.'s office. Sharon Knight said Tolchinsky was the one who made the call to the mayor's office to set him straight.

  Hell, even Steele's snitch was white.

  "Pop,” Addison sighed, “I'm thinking I've got to look deep before I decide."

  "You get yourself good people like Hammer and Cookie and you'll be all right."

  As Luther Addison nodded, W.E. ran a paper napkin across his lips, hiding from his stepson a smile of everlasting satisfaction.

  Copyright (c) 2007 Jim Fusilli

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  MARLEY'S WOMAN by John C. Boland

  The lodge was sixty miles west of Washington, and the afternoon drive left Charles Marley exhausted. He registered and carried his own bags to a chilly cabin, made microwave coffee, and settled down at a table. Peering from the gingham-draped window, he had to wait only ten minutes before he spotted Perry Werner, wearing an English-made jacket and whipcords, climbing the path among the yellow larch with a fishing rod over his shoulder. Sporting a two-day beard, Werner was handsome and expensive looking; a woman might think twice about his upkeep. Without the beard he was on the A-list for Embassy Row cocktail parties.

  Marley limped onto his porch. Werner's creel hung heavy.

  "The fishing must be good,” Marley called.

  Werner spared him a brief smile, no real attention. “It says so in the brochure,” he replied. He crossed the yard to his own cabin. Around dusk, as Marley sat with his bad leg elevated, his lap covered with a blanket, the door of the cabin across the way opened, and Werner walked uphill to the dining hall.

  * * * *

  Charles Marley was seventy-two years old, officially out to pasture. He was neither bored nor in need of money, but he was nonetheless available for whatever Chick Donaldson's masters threw his way. Ten days ago, over breakfast at the Hay-Adams, the CIA deputy had said it was time to wrap up Werner's operation. “He isn't hurting us, but if somebody's going to sell low-level intelligence, it should be someone like you, Charlie, who's put his time in."

  "What does Perry Werner do?” Marley asked. He neither liked nor trusted Donaldson, and he rejected the invitation to share his humor.

  "He's our third- or fourth-ranking analyst on the Western Sahara. Princeton ‘91. Socially successful far beyond his station. He can recite Ma'arri's poetry in Arabic and Spanish, I'm told."

  "Where did you learn that?"

  "One of our translators said he tried it on her. She wasn't open to seduction that week."

  "Is that what put you onto him—poetry? Or seduction?"

  "No, he failed his polygraph nine months ago, and—"

  "Nine months?"

  "We've had other distractions, Charlie."

  "Who is he selling to?"

  "Anyone who might have an interest. Morocco, Algeria, Spain, some former East Germans. It's Africa; everybody thinks he's a player.” Donaldson watched Marley pick at his scrambled eggs. It was the way old people ate, picking at things. The way they lived and thought too. No more big lusty bites of anything, which was good, from the Agency's perspective. A man with no appetite wouldn't get into trouble. Chick Donaldson understood Marley. He wondered if he should order another pot of coffee, then decided against it; he didn't like public restrooms. “Werner isn't important, he hasn't got access to any policy thinking. But it's time he was shut down. Get a few photos, tell him nicely he's out of a job."

  "No espionage charges?” Marley was needling Donaldson; he knew the director loathed public embarrassments.

  "Werner is hurting the people he sells to worse than he's hurting us. That is, if they think he knows which way we're advising the principals."

  "Is the Agency advising on this one?"

  "Oh, hell yes!” Donaldson dropped a hint of a disloyal thought. “We advise on everything."

  Donaldson had eaten his breakfast quickly, one slender hand curled possessively between his plate and Marley's. He was round faced but otherwise showed no sign of plumpness. He was tall and vaguely intellectual, like someone who might have stayed on at his university if he had been one degree less clever. He had begun fidgeting, as though he had another meeting.

  "Tell me more about Werner,” Marley said. “Does ideology play a role in his spying?"

  "There wouldn't be much of an ideological angle these days, would there?"

  "He could harbor general anti-Western feelings."

  "No sign of it."

  "Money?"

  "Nobody's paying Werner much. Try boredom, Charlie. No kid with testosterone grows up wanting to be an analyst on the Western Sahara desk. Werner's put himself in the field, cloak and dagger, risking discovery. He's probably having the time of his life."

  Donaldson hadn't spent time in the field. He had been head of analysis when he was plucked to be Director Popper's errand boy. Marley, who had spent all his career in the field, didn't remember the time with pleasure. He had never been on any hostess's A-list, and he had been an inept seducer, except of other spies. He had been quite good at getting people to turn against their countries.

  * * * *

  Marley kept a loose tag on Perry Werner for a week without seeing a contact. He dropped him off each morning near the CIA's gate at Langley, Virginia, and picked him up in the mad evening rush into the District. He babysat the spy's apartment building on upper Connecticut Avenue, listening to Werner's conversations with visitors. There was a woman on Tuesday who came with Werner from a restaurant and stayed the night, and a celebrated hostess on Thursday, who could spare two hours before her husband expected her home. Neither visitor talked Western Sahara politics. Perry Werner recited no eleventh-century Arabic poetry.

  The overweight man operating the surveillance van whistled silently in admiration of Werner's stamina. He noticed how avidly Marley listened and said nothing but thought plenty. He had never worked with the old man before, but he decided this guy had a dirty mind.

  "How many nights we gonna do this?” he asked.

  Marley didn't answer.

  He watched his quarry at restaurants. He followed him to a movie on Wisconsin Avenue with a young boy the file photos identified as his son. There was no embassy party for Werner that week. Marley supposed an envelope could have been passed in a hallway. He didn't think Werner did much business. Donaldson was right not to care.

  He doubted, when Werner's computer log showed him booking at the mountain lodge, that the young spy planned to make a contact there. It was too elaborate. But he couldn't be certain.

  * * * *

  His leg hurt as cold weather approached. After Werner headed up the hill to dinner, Marley almost didn't follow. He felt no desire to enter a dining room where he would stand out because he was old and alone. But if Perry Werner was going to pass documents—or let himself be debriefed—Marley would feel foolish if he missed the event. There were too many people going back and forth this evening for him to toss his neighbor's cabin. He put on a flannel shirt and a tweed jacket and leaned on his cane up the hillside.

  A young woman worked Marley's table and a dozen others without noticeable strain. She had registered him that afternoon. Marley smiled when she brought him decaffeinated tea. He had an avuncular manner that implied his carnal appetites had died before she was born. It wasn't true, but no person could see into another's heart.

  "My daughter was almost as fast at a table as you,” he said. “She worked her way through college.” Lies, all lies.

  She gave him a smile. “I've been doing it since I was sixteen."

  "Two or three years, then."

  "Yeah, I wish. Are you enjoying yo
ur stay?"

  "It's very comfortable.” Her name was Lori Miner. Describing the resort's amenities she'd had a proprietary air. He asked, “Is your family the owner?"

  "Barbara and I bought the place from our mom."

  "Where is your sister?"

  She wrinkled her nose. “Barbara's got the bookkeeping brains. I slop coffee, and Barb's husband Merle hammers nails. We're a good team."

  She hurried off to another table.

  Perry Werner stayed in the dining room late with an afterdinner drink. The room was mostly empty when Lori came and sat with Werner. As they talked, Marley watched with the bitter envy of a man who could scarcely remember when pretty young women had shown interest in him. Few ever had. He went back down the hill in the dark to his cabin. He sat with the lights off, watching until after midnight, but Perry Werner didn't return to the cabin across the yard.

  * * * *

  At breakfast, Marley paid attention to the other guests. No one was plausibly an agent from a North African government or Spain. Nor was there an obvious representative from the Polasario Front that claimed sovereignty over the Western Sahara. The resort was full of families, fishermen on buddy expeditions, couples invigorated by mountain air.

  One family spoke German.

  Marley watched them. The adults were stout and dark, their two children restive. They had been in the swimming pool before breakfast, when the air was cool and Marley wore a sweater. His German was good enough to pick up the Bavarian gutturals in the boys’ plea that they be allowed to ride horses, and in the parents’ reluctant permission. Marley doubted that the family had come from the eastern side of the Wall.

  Hammering drew him to the back of the dining hall. A pickup truck with the resort's name on the door was canted beside a stack of treated lumber. A blond, muscular young man in a wool shirt, pencil in the corner of his mouth, was trying to replace the beams of a loggia that had rotted. Marley leaned on his cane. “You need a helper,” he said.

  The young man looked over his shoulder. “Are you volunteering?"

  "I did some carpentry when I was younger."

  "I should have known you then."

  "You weren't born yet,” Marley said. He introduced himself, then stayed and held a beam steady while the man who said his name was Merle Follett drilled holes and fitted lag bolts.

  "The lady inside told me you folks own the place,” Marley said.

  "It owns us. Which lady were you talking to?"

  "Lori."

  Merle Follett nodded. “Can you move the beam a little?"

  Marley did as he was told.

  * * * *

  He tried to keep an eye on Perry Werner but couldn't, really, without being obvious about it. So he kept an eye on the Germans—both the man and the woman—because he wasn't at heart a sexist; at least a quarter of the spies he had known were women, and more than that ratio among East Germans. He found over that morning and early afternoon that it was possible for him to have one of the parents in sight much of the time (the one who wasn't tending the children), and otherwise he stayed on Perry Werner. The system wasn't perfect. If Werner slipped a sheaf of papers to the parent who was babysitting, Marley wouldn't see it. If Werner was here to meet an old Greek fishmonger who drove a truck past the front road at exactly 1:18 P.M., then the weekend was a waste. In either case, the business would be more complicated than Marley assumed. Perhaps more important too.

  When the afternoon turned warm and everyone was at the swimming pool up beside the office, Marley turned over Werner's cabin. He found neither a bundle of classified documents nor a PowerPoint presentation on desert insurgencies. He did find two things that were interesting. One was a small handgun, a 7.65 Astra about as thick as a pack of cigarettes. The other was a book of translations of poems by Abu'l ‘Ala’ al-Ma'arri. Neither item was particularly useful to a spy, but both might have belonged to a man with a romantic opinion of himself. In Werner's travel bag, there also was a pretty good supply of scented aftershave lotion and condoms. Tradecraft, Marley thought, according to Ian Fleming.

  He left the cabin and made his way uphill to the office. For a moment he mistook the sister behind the desk for the one who had registered him. When she lifted her head from a keyboard, he admitted his mistake. “It must happen quite often,” he said. “You young ladies even wear your hair the same."

  She smiled. “I should be flattered. Lori is eight years younger."

  "The little sister."

  "How can I help you, Mr.... I'm sorry—"

  "That's all right. My name is Marley, like the ghost."

  "You look healthy for a Christmas ghost, Mr. Marley. I'm Barbara Follett. Is there something...?"

  He had been studying her without taking his glance off the deer's head mounted behind the desk. She had a round, smooth face, cut by a few worry lines between her heavy blond brows. If she kept the books on a family business, worry was probably inevitable. Her hands were large and square, with bitten nails. Her gaze was straightforward.

  "I have a niece who lives about twenty miles from here,” Marley said. “She's crazy for horses, loves outdoor work. Rather a homely girl, unfortunately.” He added the last with a wince. “I wondered if you need any seasonal help."

  "Now and then, we do. Weekends, holidays. There's nothing full-time. Has she had food-service experience?"

  "I'm not certain.” He tried the smile again. “Your sister seems to have the restaurant in hand."

  "Even Lori needs help around Thanksgiving."

  "She told me you do the books and your husband pounds nails."

  "He tries to, when he isn't down in D.C.” Her smile was lopsided. “If you buy a place like this, it helps to have an investment counselor in the family. Even then ... Would you like to buy a resort, Mr. Marley?"

  "I'm afraid I lack the entrepreneurial spirit,” he said. Later it occurred to him that the statement was unusual for him in that it was true. He had been a civil servant all his career.

  * * * *

  An Asian couple had a cabin a few doors down. They kept to themselves. Much of the time, so did the Germans. Introducing himself at the corral, he learned the German man's name was Hans Gruss. The boys were saddling up with a guide for a trail ride.

  "I needed a weekend of rest,” Marley confessed. He would be a rambler. “Washington gets too noisy this time of year. One can never remember six months later what the fuss was about, but in my profession—I'm a newspaperman—we have to treat it all seriously."

  Gruss looked at him sideways.

  "Bad investments,” Marley sighed, thinking of Merle Follett, “or I would retire."

  Gruss nodded but didn't pick up that thread either.

  "Your boys seem to be natural horsemen,” Marley tried.

  "They ride in Europe too.” Hans Gruss let out that information grudgingly. He was focused on the mounting. He had turned deliberately away.

  "Well, perhaps I will see you around,” Marley said and hobbled off.

  From his cabin he phoned Donaldson, asked him to run Hans Gruss—"der Deutsche Gruss,” Donaldson replied, chuckling at his cleverness—and propped up his leg on the bed. If Gruss were a spy, commercial or state run, he should be more approachable. Yet, in Marley's experience, one seldom found a better class of German or Frenchman who would casually disclose his career beyond “in academia” or “in business.” So reticence was a plausible national cover. Still, not a helpful trait in intelligence gathering. A conundrum, then. Hans Gruss could be an inept spy, a clever one, or not a spy at all.

  He wondered why he had bothered. Well, he had learned the name the German family was using. Der Deutsche Gruss. He grunted. When Chick Donaldson knew the smallest thing, he couldn't help showing off. Der Deutsche Gruss was the Hitler salute. So Donaldson was a scholar as well as a turd. Marley napped for a while, woke up cursing himself—his age, really—because this two-bit assignment, a meatless bone that Donaldson and Popper had thrown him, was proving too much.

  He kne
w he had been dreaming, and as his mind cleared he knew the subject. He hadn't dreamed about 1968 in months. There had been a wisp of it as he woke ... a paving stone flickering past his head into the heavy smoke that rode down from Soufflot on the backs of policemen. He had been a cultural attaché, and though a few eyebrows were raised as he hung out with the students who were rioting across Paris, nobody was truly surprised. Everyone who mattered at the embassy knew who he really worked for, and that his real assignment was to identify the Communists on the barricades. The girl from Arles, who must have been about twenty, interested him most. Even in his dreams he couldn't recall her name. When intellectuals professed support for the students’ idealism, she announced the revolution's aim was to execute intellectuals. (They applauded louder.) She called herself a Maoist, but she knew laughably little of Mao or China; she wore a Che Guevara T-shirt, as revolutionary heroes were substitutable goods. Marley knew better than to pretend he was a revolutionary. He was a hanger-on. She slept with him anyway. She slept with everyone. In the middle of the night, he could almost put a face on his memory of her ... but not a name. It was the realization, late in the dream, that he was no longer in his thirties, that he couldn't therefore be in Paris, that he couldn't be talking with her, which caused the thing to fall apart. He squinted at the smoky street as he sensed the riot moving away. He didn't want to lose track of her. She had been with him just now, his pretty little Maoist. Ten years ago, he had awakened with his teeth gritted in longing, sometimes in tears. Now he merely awoke.

  There was no point in wondering what had become of her. If she was alive, she had grown old. It didn't matter.

  * * * *

  In the afternoon, he followed Perry Werner across a larch-studded ridge and down to a stream. He hung a quarter-mile back, moved with stealth despite the pain in his leg, to prove he could still track a quarry without the bastard's noticing. He set himself up on a hillside that got a bar of autumn light and watched the man work the stream. Werner was an experienced angler. It was possible he was here to fish.

  At dinner, they had a full house. The older sister, Barbara Follett, took charge of the kitchen and helped the younger woman with the tables. They barely spoke. Efficiency, he wondered, or a chilly relationship? Lori paid no particular attention to Perry Werner, who left the dining room an hour before it closed. Marley followed him back to the cabins.