One from Without

by Jack Fuller

  “The people at the restaurant were Agency?”

  “I think not,” said Fisherman.

  The conversation stopped until they had passed the bottom. As the little girl reached the top, she squealed loudly enough to take the operator’s attention away from the geese.

  “Quite a coincidence that you and Nederlander and Kerzhentseff were in such proximity,” Rosten said.

  “Somebody must have been turning the wheel,” said Fisherman.

  “They’re running an operation against you.”

  “It has been tried.”

  “Is Kerzhentseff dead?” said Rosten.

  “They’re all in denial,” said Fisherman. “The Soviet empire is falling. With our help, the mujahideen will drive the Russians out of Afghanistan, but we are doomed to a holy war with the victors. This means that we and the Russians will have a common enemy, the way we did in the Second War, though this time we are the ones who first made a pact with the devil. The Atlantic Ocean will not be enough to protect us, but it will be worse for the Russians. The zealots are hard upon their southern flank. Some at the Lubyanka recognize the new reality. At Langley they do not.”

  The wheel slowed. Fisherman fell silent. When they reached the bottom, the operator began to unhook the restraining bar. Rosten reached into his pocket and tore off two tickets, but Fisherman was already out of the car.

  “Wait,” said Rosten.

  “Read the books,” said Fisherman and turned and walked stiffly away.

  The operator held the bar open. Rosten watched Fisherman go. The girl above them began to whine.

  “Going or staying, mate?” said the operator.

  Rosten handed him a ticket. The car rose. He watched Fisherman shuffle toward the cover of the trees. Rosten went over the top and down again. Up and over and down. After the second time around, Fisherman was no longer visible. Up and over and down. Eventually the girl and her mother left, and he was alone on the wheel. Then he reached the bottom, and the operator stopped the machine and set the brake.

  “You all right, mate?” he said.

  “Thinking,” said Rosten.

  “I got trouble with me dad, too,” said the operator. “Left him in Australia and made a run for it.”

  “That work?” said Rosten.

  “I’m still talking about him, ain’t I?” said the operator.

  11

  When Rosten returned to his office, on the desk lay an old book. Fisherman must have left it, another history lesson. He picked it up and looked at the spine. Personae by Pound. When he lifted the worn cover, he saw that it was an original edition, signed by the poet himself in 1940. On the first blank page Fisherman had written:

  For an old bitch gone in the teeth,

  For a botched civilization.

  Rosten sat down at the desk and read poem after poem. Troubadours, condottieri, jousting knights. Only one stanza really spoke to him:

  For God, our God, is a gallant foe

  That playeth behind the veil.

  He set the book down, picked up the phone, and dialed. Schneider answered at the first ring.

  “I need to talk,” Rosten said. “Soon.”

  “That bad, laddie?” said Schneider. He did not pause for more than a second before he named a place. The Royal Albert Hall would have a crowd to hide in, he said. They were showing Fantasia with a live orchestra.

  “Fantasia,” said Rosten.

  “When I saw the notice in the Telegraph the other day, I thought of you,” said Schneider.

  Rosten put Personae in the safe, splashed water on his face, and left the Embassy. Scores of kids were at the carnival in Kensington Gardens now, and on the paths through the green were mothers with prams, runners, old folks out for a hobble. He stayed to the edge, passing the Hyde Park Barracks and the Iranian Embassy, which was as heavily fortified as the American. Up ahead was the Royal Albert. Many times he had passed this great circle of red brick, Stonehenge of empire, but he had never been inside.

  Within minutes Schneider appeared before him and conjured two tickets. A little girl stared, as if expecting a rabbit.

  “This way,” said Schneider, edging them into a spot near an entrance. Children and parents pressed uncomfortably close. “Kind of twitchy aren’t you.”

  When the doors opened, the crowd swept them inside, Schneider in front. He turned into a stairway and was able to wait for Rosten to catch up. When they reached the second tier, they stepped into an alcove, which had just enough room for the two of them. The crowd surged on.

  Rosten launched right into it—his dinner with Ellen Bradley, the file she had shown him, the inscription in the Ezra Pound book, Fisherman on the Ferris wheel.

  “He was running Kerzhentseff,” Rosten said.

  “Stands to reason,” said Schneider.

  “Then what is this about?”

  “That’s too easy, laddie,” said Schneider. “Revenge for a murder.”

  “The guy in the Charing Cross Tube station?” said Rosten. “You said Fisherman had nothing to do with that.”

  “Eventually McWade realized that he didn’t,” said Schneider. “It’s the murder of another friend that he blames on Fisherman.”

  The throngs of children just kept coming.

  Years after the Wheeler murder, Schneider said, Fisherman got on the trail of a man from the National Security Council called Michael Ross, who was working on a major nuclear arms-control deal with the Soviets. Fisherman learned that Ross was trading highly classified information with the other side, maybe to get a treaty done, maybe because the Russians owned him. “One Russian in particular,” Schneider said, “the one whose picture the pretty girl showed you last night.”

  Eventually Fisherman proved that Ross had been doubled years before. He also discovered that Wheeler was onto Ross and Kerzhentseff and that they were the ones who’d had him murdered. When McWade found out, he lost it, demanded that Ross be arrested if not shot on the spot. But if Congress had learned there was a Soviet mole in the U.S. delegation, it would have put an end to the talks. Nobody wanted that, not even Defense. So a legend was written that attributed Ross’s departure from the National Security Council to health issues, which did ensue shortly, by the way, ending his life. Thanks to the legend, the Soviets didn’t realize that Kerzhentseff had been thoroughly compromised. To keep it that way, he needed Fisherman’s protection, so he turned. Fisherman fed him information that reestablished him with his comrades. All the while, he kept Kerzhentseff’s secret compartmented in a box with only three people inside—Fisherman, the DCI, and McWade.

  “And the cat,” said Rosten.

  “The which?” said Schneider.

  “You’re in the box, too.”

  “Every man needs a pet,” said Schneider. “Even Ernest.”

  He told Rosten how McWade ended up being promoted to replace Ross, on his way to even bigger things. “You would think he might have had a little gratitude,” he said, “but then one of his own turned up dead, facedown in a canal in Berlin. McWade was sure Fisherman had put out the order. That’s what this is about, laddie.”

  “You let me think Kerzhentseff was running Nederlander,” said Rosten.

  “There didn’t seem any harm in it,” said Schneider. “Nederlander is a shit.”

  The crowd was beginning to thin. Rosten lowered his voice.

  “I saw Kerzhentseff in the park across from where Fisherman and Nederlander met,” he said.

  A bell began to chime. It was time to take their seats.

  “Right here,” said Schneider, pointing to the doorway directly across from them.

  “It wasn’t a coincidence.”

  “Not very likely.”

  “I don’t think I was entirely wrong about Nederlander.”

  “In this business you’re not usually entirely anything,” said Schneider. “We’d better get moving or we’ll miss the show.”

  The lady at the door sold Schneider an oversized souvenir book and directed the
m to their seats. The hall was so cavernous that even children could not fill it with noise. Schneider became immersed in the book, which had pictures of the Disney scenes and small blocks of large type.

  Up front the orchestra prepared itself, a trumpet doing Stravinsky while an oboe played The Nutcracker and fiddlers scurried over a variety of phrases that, played simultaneously, produced a sound like a Cubist’s Beethoven. At various places around the hall were huge movie screens. Beyond the closest one the pipes of an organ poked out the top. As the lights began to dim, the Disney logo appeared. The oboe struck a steady note, and the orchestra tightened itself down on it. Then the conductor appeared to polite applause and a scatter of little voices. Soon came the booming opening of Bach’s D-minor Toccata and Fugue. The silhouettes of musicians appeared on the screen, slowly fading into clouds and then abstract patterns of light.

  Next came a piece from The Nutcracker. When it concluded, a voice filled the hall, explaining that the story the next music told was almost two thousand years old, a tale of a sorcerer and his apprentice, a smart young fellow, too smart. Schneider pointed to the picture of the great magician in his book.

  The first time Rosten saw Fantasia was when his mother and father took him to the Chicago Theater downtown, which had the biggest screen he had ever seen. He remembered the way he had found his mother’s hand and held to it when he saw the enormous sorcerer, his face lit by glowing eyes. After being ordered to scrub the floors, poor Mickey managed a spell to command a mop to carry water for him then fell asleep to dreams of commanding galaxies. When he awakened, he realized he did not even have the power to command the mop to stop. He tried to destroy it with an ax, but this only managed to create more mops. Soon the place was a raging flood. When the sorcerer returned and fixed things, Mickey’s only punishment was a smack on the rump.

  Schneider’s book still lay open to the image of the great sorcerer as the film moved on. When the word “Intermission” finally appeared on the screen, the children erupted. The lights came up.

  “Why was Kerzhentseff in Leicester Square?” said Rosten.

  “Ernest knows what he’s doing, laddie,” said Schneider.

  Rosten stood. Schneider held the program book out to him. Rosten did not take it. He turned and followed the crowd into the corridor and then made his way to the first exit.

  Outside, he walked quickly but without a destination. Saturday strollers idled in the park on the other side of the street. He turned into Kensington, proceeding through Knightsbridge, avoiding the Palace and the tourists, until he found himself in Westminster, which was mercifully empty on a Saturday. Up ahead was the Abbey. When he reached it, he saw a sign that gave the time for Evensong. He must have looked confused, because a small woman, probably in her fifties and dressed for High Mass, waved to him from a queue.

  “You need a ticket.” she said as he approached.

  “I’m just here for the music,” he said.

  She reached into her enormous purse and pulled out a guidebook.

  “Here,” she said, finding the page and showing it to him. “Evensong is free, but it says that buying a ticket to tour the Abbey first helps you get a good seat. There, about halfway down the page.”

  He thanked her and went to the back of the queue. He was a tourist, just like her. He had been since the day he had left New Haven. Maybe he had been a tourist even there. Maybe that was why Hawthorne had selected him. A tourist is a pocket to be picked.

  The sun was coming through a hole in the blanket of low clouds as Rosten approached the stone arch of the entry. A breeze off the Thames smelled of diesel and brine. The attendant handed him a map. Rosten followed it to the Poet’s Corner, where Shakespeare presided, chin on fist, elbow on a stack of books, looking foppish, which was all wrong for one who knew the souls of those who have the power to hurt. Over there was Chaucer’s canopy bed. Dickens was underfoot, lying with Kipling and Tennyson. But where was Wilfred Owen? No dulce et decorum est pro patria mori for him. That was for Kipling. But wait. There he was on a paving slate with Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, his words wreathing them: “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”

  As Rosten stood with head bent, a man came through, announcing that the Abbey hours were ending. The woman’s guidebook had said that to go to Evensong, you exited into the nave inside the Great West Door, where the map showed a stone in the floor for Winston Churchill near a memorial to FDR. One of these hallowed men had allowed Coventry to be bombed to protect a secret. The other had built the first nuclear weapon. The Abbey was a place fit for Fisherman—a small, forgotten stone in some anonymous corner, perhaps, but among his kind.

  Rosten saw the woman again. She had placed herself near an iron gate. She waved.

  “Was I right or was I right?” she said. “First in line.”

  When a man in a cassock came to open the gate, she and Rosten followed him into the shadows. The organist’s lighted perch rose on their right, a candle in the dark. When they turned a corner, Rosten stopped. The Quire stretched out before him, pews facing pews across a wide center aisle, illuminated both from high above and by small reading lamps with bright red shades. Some of the seats bore plaques identifying them as belonging to the great dignitaries of the realm.

  “Come on,” she said. “You don’t need a knighthood.”

  They filed in with the rest of the tourists and watched as the singers filled the empty sections, boys and men, all wearing white surplices over long red robes and carrying folders that matched the lampshades. Only the woman was between Rosten and the choristers. He felt as if he had let himself again be drawn into a place where he did not belong. Then the sweet birds sang. The anthem was old, its words Latin, a dead language on the lips of boys. He closed his eyes and let himself sink into a cavernous sense of mortality.

  The service that followed was in English. The woman held out a book where it was written, but he did not recite. The choir sang again, this time in its native tongue. The preacher prayed. Then it was over, the choir filing out first, then the tourists. He hung back, breathing candle wax and old stone, the river and the must of graves, until the man in the cassock bade him out and clanked the gate shut behind him. A few people were praying in the nave, an elderly couple who seemed to be both together and alone, a scatter of singles, a woman dabbing tears. He found a place among them and sat.

  Fisherman’s game was too dark to divine. All Rosten could hope to do was to abide the plainest meanings. He reported to Fisherman, but he had not signed an oath to a man. He served something larger. It was so easy to lose sight of this in his windowless cell, alone, p and not p. Maybe Fisherman recruited young, middling humanists like him simply because the study of poetry had talked them out of plain meanings.

  The scuff of footsteps slowly died away behind him as the tourists left. Soon there was only the sound of the cathedral itself, which, like a seashell, whispered in the voice of something that wasn’t there. He pulled out his wallet and found his AT&T credit card and McWade’s number in Ellen Bradley’s handwriting on a folded piece of paper. Then he stood and walked directly over Churchill’s name and out the door.

  It was easy to find a scarlet phone booth. When he closed the door, it smelled damp, but no worse than Edward the Confessor’s resting place. The credit card would leave a trace, of course, but everybody seemed to know his every move anyway. When the call went through, McWade’s secretary seemed to recognize his name. Cars hissed past as he held on the line. He pushed with his fingertips against the window, which did not yield the way they did in the States. When McWade finally came on, he did not let Rosten say a word.

  “Get to the Embassy code room,” he said. The phone clicked dead.

  Rosten took a taxi. Kowalczyk wasn’t on duty. The Marine guard at the entrance was new. He would not let Rosten through.

  “Isn’t my ID good anymore?” said Rosten.

  “Sorry, sir,” said the guard. “Somebody will be here t
o escort you.”

  “Is this Fisherman’s doing?”

  The Marine was as unresponsive as a guard at Buckingham.

  It could not have taken more than a minute before the Chargé d’Affaires appeared, smiling and holding out his hand to be shaken. Rosten had seen him from time to time, but only in an official car coming or going. Technically, he was called the Deputy Chief of Mission, but Fisherman always used the French, which he said better fit the man. Even on a quiet Saturday, the Chargé wore a beautifully tailored gray suit and a school tie, knotted perfectly against the blue of his shirt front and the striking white of the collar.

  “Let me take you up,” he said.

  When they reached the code room, the Chargé identified himself on a speaker and then punched in a combination on the keypad next to the code-room door, which swung open on a space that looked too ordinary to be secure—coffee pot half full, children’s drawings pinned above a single Steelcase desk.

  “I’ll leave you with Jimmy. He’ll take care of you,” said the Chargé. “I hope we have a chance to meet properly someday soon.”

  “You’ll be in there,” said Jimmy, pointing to a door that opened onto a room not much bigger than a closet. “Don’t fool with the phone until it rings. He’ll call you.”

  Jimmy closed the door, leaving Rosten in a silence so deep that when he clapped his hands to break it, the room swallowed the sound. A phone, as gray-green as the river, sat on a device the size of a minirefrigerator. Rosten picked up on the first ring.

  “I told Fisherman everything,” he said.

  “I expected no less,” said McWade.

  “But I see now that it is possible that Fisherman drew Kerzhentseff to Leicester Square to set him up,” said Rosten. “For some reason Fisherman must have wanted Nederlander to get points with his KGB handlers.”

  “Did Fisherman tell you this?” said McWade.

  “Of course not,” said Rosten. “But he must have had a reason.”

  “He always does,” said McWade.