The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  About this counterstrategy, Doug Townshend’s feelings were divided. For Baldwin the man and congressman he had only disdain; but if the United States was in for a binge of nuclear escalation in the 1980s, it might be better to have a muzzled hawk on the intelligence committee than an unmuzzled one, as Baldwin’s presumable replacement would be. Rick Talbott, in his independent way, was for the Agency right or wrong; Doug’s first concern had been for his country’s welfare above the Agency’s and in recent years for the world’s above his country’s, where the two conflicted. The likes of Boyce and Lee and Kampiles could be said to have been Doomsday Factors mainly from the American point of view, though their contribution to the undermining of SALT II Doug regarded as a general victory for the side of death. Poonie Baldwin unpenetrated was a Doomsday Factor (junior grade) from the world’s point of view, for in Doug’s opinion a belligerent new U.S. administration would be more of a threat to human civilization than the Soviet Union—outside its own borders—currently is. Poonie penetrated, on the other hand, would be a menace only from the U.S. point of view, while Poonie defeated might well be replaced by an even more dangerous hawk.

  Don’t of course tell Katherine any of this, Doug advised. Said worried Peter Don’t worry: I can barely follow it myself.

  And yet you must, Doug declared. This isn’t fiction; it’s the world we really live in.

  As their conflicting views of Congressman Baldwin illustrated, Doug was coming more and more to see Rick Talbott himself as a potential Doomsday Factor to be undone, lest he undo the wrong people, or the right people at the wrong moment; and it was to be feared that Talbott had come to see Townshend likewise. Their colleague John Arthur Paisley, on the other hand, they agreed was now dangerously exposed, a prime candidate for Doomsday Factorhood from either point of view. His domestic situation was unstable; a chronic depressive, he had joined a therapy group called Lifespring; among his closest personal connections were those always-equivocal Soviet defectors and a circle of ex-Agency freelancers; his unusually large command of and access to our most sensitive intelligence, and his counterintelligence expertise, must be much coveted on Corsica Neck. From Frederick Talbott’s perspective, Paisley could be or readily become a Doomsday Factor in any of at least three ways; by being himself the KGB’s Deep Mole in the Agency; by quietly covering the Deep Mole at Sagamore Flats while making his elaborate seagoing sideshow of discovering him; and/or by misidentifying, innocently or otherwise, Rick Talbott as the Deep Mole, thereby neutralizing a chief neutralizer of Doomsday Factors—from Talbott’s point of view. Whereas from Townshend’s point of view . . .

  Jesus, Doug! protested Peter, who once upon a time had found James Joyce complicated. More than once, in the course of this endless Beltway exposition, he had come to wonder whether our friend Doug Townshend mightn’t after all be not only disinformed but, in his dignified way, deranged. But then so was he, for hearing out such vertiginous madness, for not sharing it with Katherine Sherritt, for coming back for more though his muse was speechless with appall! Katydid V completed her first trimester, during which her father made reams of notes for stories not about Deep Moles and Doomsday Factors, and composed scarcely a sentence of them. For all he knew for certain, this Frederick Mansfield Talbott and John Arthur Paisley did not even exist. Perhaps Doug Townshend was practicing a mode of fiction other than the written?

  Then, at 1100 hours on Monday, 24 September 1978, the sloop Brillig was found aground below Point Nopoint, mainsail and #1 genoa set and trimmed, steering wheel unbraked, VHF radio on, a life jacket lying about in the cockpit along with a navigational chart, on which had been plotted the leg home to the Patuxent from Hoopers Island Light. The dinette table was pulled loose from its hinges; a sandwich was in the making on the galley counter, where lay an open package of lunch meat and a mustard-smeared knife. Nobody was aboard.

  Mildly over Tuesday morning’s paper, in which it was denied that the missing skipper had any present or much past connection with the CIA, Katherine wondered Do you know anything about this? Whoops: I didn’t ask that. Said Peter I don’t know whether I do or not, and called Douglas Townshend. For three days he got no answer, while the Agency was caught out in lie after barefaced lie and congressional intelligence committee members—Porter Baldwin, Jr., excepted—grew more and more annoyed with Admiral Stansfield Turner. On the Friday morning, a Jamaican housemaid in Bethesda explained that Mr. Townshend was in Perth, Australia, until next week. Chip Sherritt, deep into chess and Through the Looking Glass, proposed a weekend sailing trip (the reader now appreciates in what grim bad faith Peter Sagamore concurred with the general itinerary), and we intersected the misfortunate corpse subsequently identified as John Arthur Paisley’s.

  For the first time, and without telling Katherine, Peter sought out Douglas Townshend upon his return, and to our friend’s undisguised satisfaction pressed him for information instead of merely consenting to receive it. They met on a mid-week mid-afternoon in Carta’s Cavern, a bar-restaurant selected by Doug in the Fells Point neighborhood of Baltimore. At that hour they were the only patrons. A handsome, Latin-looking woman in a striped caftan, whom Doug seemed to know well, was tending bar. The two conferred closely for a while; then the woman brought Perrier with lime for Doug, Molson’s ale for Peter, and withdrew.

  Carla B Silver, said smiling Douglas. No period after the middle initial, don’t ask me why, and one calls her by her full name. She owns this place. Carla B Silver is Rick Talbott’s housemate of many years, but never mind that. She’s also the mother by a former marriage of Rick’s brother’s wife, the young professor you and Katherine met once at my house. But never mind that complicated business, either. The point is that Carla’s Cavern is a good place to talk. Rick was with me part of the time in Perth, as it happens, or rather I with him.

  Said Peter Perth, remembering that Perth is where Paisley’s friend Colonel Wilson was reported to have gone after returning Brillig to its mooring. Is that a coincidence, Doug?

  Not nearly so remarkable a one as your colliding with my late colleague. I am a great respecter of coincidence; otherwise I’d wonder how you happened to be at that particular spot on the ample Chesapeake at that particular moment. What can I do for you, Peter.

  What you’ve been doing, only more so. Tell me what’s going on.

  Doug squeezed his lime. Lit a cigarette. You don’t mind not sharing what I say with Katherine.

  Of course I mind. But that’s my Bay out there with those Doomsday Factors floating around in it, and it’s my kid in the works. What’s going on?

  How’s the writing coming along, Doug wanted to know.

  Said grim Peter I haven’t written a bad line in months. Tell me Paisley stuff.

  Cool Douglas replied I’ll tell you Paisley stuff. Colonel Wilson says Brillig’s table was broken already. Paisley’s girlfriend says it wasn’t. The question is whether there was a struggle.

  Paisley’s girlfriend doesn’t know boats, Peter opined. I’ve fixed our bulkhead table on Story half a dozen times, but any heavy bump could knock it loose again.

  That’s interesting to hear.

  No it isn’t. What else?

  Doug considered. A good bit of it will come out in the papers eventually. The questions will be Was it really John’s body you-all bumped into out there, and Did he do himself in or was he done in, and Why and how and by whom. My information is that nobody who knew John well identified the body. The state medical examiner invited Maryann Paisley to do it but suggested she not, on account of the decomposition, and she declined. She thought Colonel Wilson did, but he didn’t, thinking she’d done it. The Coast Guard brought the body in to the Naval Ordnance Lab at Solomons Island after you left, and it was inspected by the deputy medical examiner for Calvert County and a local marina operator, who happened to be socializing on the deputy’s boat when the state police call came through. Neither of them knew Paisley well enough to make a real identification, even though Brillig
was serviced at that marina now and then, and neither of them noticed the bullet wound, although it was a nine-millimeter hole. What they did notice was a mark on the neck like a cut or a rope burn, but they didn’t mention it to the authorities because word was out that the Agency wanted things kept quiet. The mark could have been skin slippage, after a week in the water. The state medical examiner didn’t make the identification or mention the neck lesion; he measured the body, noted the bullet wound, and amputated the hands for the FBI to make dermal prints from—the only kind you can get at that stage of the game. But get this: The FBI, to everybody’s surprise, couldn’t find any fingerprint records fresher than thirty-eight years ago, when Paisley joined the Merchant Marine at age seventeen. This despite the fact that people like us are refingerprinted every time the weather changes. The body and the hands were then cremated in an Agency-approved funeral home; that takes care of future exhumation. The other basis of identification was a partial upper dental plate identified by Paisley’s dentist in McLean, who serves a number of Agency people. It was an eyeball identification, which the dentist himself admits would fit a million other middle-aged men, but he couldn’t do better because guess what: Paisley’s dental records are also missing. The office had changed its filing system, the dentist said—evidently by throwing out all its files—and the partial lower plate that John also wore wasn’t brought to him for identification, if indeed the fellow you bumped into had one. The four-inch-undersize jockey shorts and jeans and the twenty-five-pound-underweight corpse, you’ve already heard about—it was also four inches short, by the way—but you may not have heard that those thirty-eight-year-old fingerprint records were supplied to the FBI after several days’ delay by the CIA itself, and that when a newspaper reporter turned up a better set of prints the other day in U.S. Merchant Marine files, the FBI refused to release its old set for comparison with the new one. How’s that.

  So was it Paisley we bumped into?

  Doug sipped. Doug puffed. My understanding is that my nautical ex-colleague is indeed dead. As to the how, Peter. No blood or brains or spent cartridges in the cockpit. Bullet behind the left ear. Two scuba belts around his waist—nobody has questioned that they were his belts—but no mask or snorkel or flippers or air tanks aboard. One gathers he didn’t take the weights along for diving purposes. The suicide scenario is that he loaned his car to his girlfriend to help her move her furniture with, telephoned his estranged wife to tell her cheerfully that he might be going sailing but might meet her for dinner if he didn’t, and then went sailing by himself on a windless Sunday with a boatload of high-tech electronics, a suitcase full of special antennas, two scuba belts, a handgun, and a briefcase containing his draft report on the A-Team/B-Team experiment. Also a draft agreement for marital separation and a redline telephone book so sensitive that nobody is supposed to take it out of Agency headquarters ever. He motors over to Hoopers Island Light and drops anchor. He radios Colonel Wilson not to wait up. Maybe he works on his report; maybe he tunes in on Sagamore Flats or Corsica Neck or Meade or Belvoir or the Big Bird. Sometime later—it must have been next morning, since nobody has reported that Brillig’s running lights were on—he plots his course home, weighs anchor, raises sail, turns on the VHF, and breaks out the mustard and the lunch meat—all to make it look as though everything’s normal. But instead of eating, he puts on the scuba weights, jumps or leans overboard, and shoots himself left-handed through the head. Decomposition then sheds twenty-five pounds of body weight, four inches of waistline, and another four of height, as well as opening up some neck skin. Unless your bumping him did that. But contrary to John’s plans, we presume, the gases also float the corpse a week later. Otherwise we’d all have presumed an accidental death, wouldn’t we have. Can you credit that scenario.

  Said Peter All but the thirty-waist pants. The work he was into was dangerous or cranky or both. His kids were grown; his marriage was kaput; the new girlfriend probably wasn’t a major item, just a souvenir from his other life.

  Doug nodded. John was in group therapy, or had been: not unusual for people in his domestic position, and almost par for the course in counterintelligence. His mother is dying of cancer in a Midwest nursing home; Maryann had gone out there not long before to tape some reminiscences with her for the family archives, and John had the tapes.

  That has to have been a downer, P agrees: playing those tapes at age fifty-five in his bachelor flat while he went on with his freelance life. So he thought more and more frequently of turning himself off. Being a professional in the tracks-covering way, when he decided to do it he took a few simple measures to make it look like an accident, either to spare his family the embarrassment or to get around some clause in his life insurance, or both. It’s plausible, Doug.

  It is. What about the left-handed pistol shot.

  No problem: When it’s one hand for yourself and one for the ship, either hand may take priority. Paisley happened to find himself hanging on with his right hand, so he went ahead and shot himself with his left. It’s not as if he was trying to write a letter or hit a target fifty feet away.

  Good. And the size thirties.

  Peter paused. If our authority for that detail is either the state medical examiner or the Calvert County coroner, we have evidence that neither gentleman is incapable of oversight. And the clothing was cremated with the corpse, I presume, so that’s that. Anyhow, things get mixed up in laundromats. Maybe the son left a pair of jockeys in his dad’s apartment, and Paisley stuck them in his seabag by mistake. No big deal.

  Okay. Did the fellow you bumped into have white chin-whiskers. That would seem to be a clincher.

  Couldn’t see. Did yours?

  Mine, Doug Townshend smiled. I have no information on that point, nor do I happen to know whether the beard would still be there after a week’s recycling. Seems to me it would be.

  Declared expert Peter Usually yes and sometimes no; depends on who’s been swimming through the neighborhood. No rings on those amputated hands, by the way? No wristwatch?

  I have no information on that. Is it possible for you to imagine the corpse wasn’t Paisley’s.

  Replied P.S. It’s possible for me to imagine anything; getting it written is my problem these days. There is ample precedent in our fallen world for the substitution of corpses by people who want themselves or someone else thought dead. But if you were going to such elaborate trouble, plus weighting your proxy down with just enough lead to let the crabs mess up his face before he floats back up, wouldn’t you put the right size pants on him plus your wallet and watch, to clinch the ID?

  Said Doug approvingly I would. Unless I were unusually pressed or not very professional.

  Speculated Peter If an Agency hit-boat from Sagamore Flats dropped off a size-thirty frogman near Hoopers Island Light to nail Paisley, either because he was the Deep Mole or because he’d uncovered the Deep Mole, and Paisley managed to nail the frogman instead and then said to himself Hey: Since I have this perfectly satisfactory dead frogman on my hands, why don’t I change identities like my pal Nosenko and fake a suicide so that old Maryann can collect a bundle in honor of our years together, and at the same time I’ll avoid the consequences of having nailed my ex-colleague here, who is already conveniently weighted down with lead. I’ll do a Captain Shadrin, except I’ll disappear myself to Pago Pago, where the sailing’s nice, instead of to the Gulags, where it isn’t. But shit, Doug, this is bad spy fiction. What’s the truth?

  The truth, Doug Townshend said with a little grimace at Peter’s language, is upstairs in Carla’s Cavern. But I haven’t told you about the break-ins yet, and we haven’t done the simpler murder scenarios, have we.

  Weary Peter, hooked, said Paisley was killed because he was the mole. He was killed because he wasn’t the mole but knew who was, or was about to find out with his fancy radios. He had a wet affair with the KGB types in his apartment building, for any of a dozen reasons. He was terminated with extreme prejudice by a con
sortium of the DIA, the NSA, the NRO, the NSC, the FBI, and the IRS; also Colonel Wilson and Mrs. Paisley. They broke into his apartment, stole his scuba belts, planted a few nine-millimeter bullets in his nightstand drawer, zipped over in an unmarked helicopter from McLean or Lusby to the Hoopers Island Light, where they knew he was parked, on account of his call to Wilson, and neutralized him. Since the medical examiner’s ballistics tests matched the bullet in his head with the ones in his nightstand drawer, it was reasonably inferred that he’d shot himself with his own pistol.

  Marveled Douglas How did you know about the bullets.

  I didn’t.

  They were on the closet floor, not in the nightstand drawer. Paisley’s apartment was a busy place while he was out on the Bay or in it. Brillig was found aground about eleven a.m.; the Coast Guard found the briefcase full of CIA stuff and promptly notified the Agency, who seem promptly to have notified the firm of Coopers and Lybrand; but Maryann Paisley wasn’t notified till eleven that evening. She sent their son to check his dad’s apartment, and the boy found papers scattered about, the family tapes and tape machine missing, and a number of nine-millimeter bullets spilled on the bedroom closet floor. He assumed the place had been burgled; in fact, people from both the Agency and Coopers and Lybrand had dropped in. The Coopers and Lybrand visitors took a Rolodex with sensitive numbers in it—not the same as that redline phone book on the boat, which the Agency confiscated along with the briefcase. The Agency visitor found two cartons of classified material, including a note in John’s handwriting that read Now what about Schevchenko?—but he didn’t find Paisley’s debriefing reports on Arkady Schevchenko, which matter a great deal to the verification of the A-Team/B-Team business. Those reports are still missing. So are the terminal-mother tapes and some others in which John’s girlfriend claims John talked about suicide. The girlfriend might well have dropped in, too; she had a key to his apartment. But you didn’t really need one to join the party: Both Eddie Paisley and the chap from Coopers and Lybrand simply asked the super to let them in, and people like Rick Talbott and John’s Russian neighbors ask for keys only when they’re being polite. I forgot to mention—