The Man Who Heard Too Much

by Bill Granger

  “No. Do you think I would hesitate?”

  Devereaux merely continued to stare at her.

  “Everyone assumes this is an accident. It was not.” He waited for another reaction, but she was now as still as silence.

  “Perhaps Michael had to be the person to have the tape. Specifically Michael and no one else. Who does Michael work for?”

  She hesitated again. “I have no idea.”

  “Come on, Rena,” Devereaux said.

  Of course she would know. It was stupid to lie. This man had the eyes of a policeman. There was a cold flatness now to replace the bleak look he had shown a moment before.

  “You act like a policeman. I am Belgian. You have no right here. I could call the conductor, I…”

  He said nothing.

  “He worked for people in the Middle East.”

  “He worked for them in Malmö?”

  “Any settlement between the U.S. and the Soviet Union is important to the Middle East.”

  “He told you that?”

  “He told me that.”

  “Is that true?”

  “You see, exactly like a policeman.”

  Another silence. The car was filled with dozing, late-morning passengers. A businessman folded his Le Monde and slipped it into his attaché case and closed the lid with a snap. Two nuns sat aloof from each other, sharing only their old-fashioned manner of dress. The speaker announced in two languages: “Bruges… Brugge.”

  “Tell Michael to stay with you,” Devereaux said. “I can arrange safety for you. For him.”

  “I am in such danger? But I don’t have whatever you seek—”

  “How do they know that? You were lovers, Rena.” Gently this time, not like a policeman.

  “Who are they?”

  Much the same, Devereaux thought. They are the people without faces who make the world.

  “People in London said he was in intelligence, in the U.S. Army, that he received a dishonorable discharge,” Devereaux said.

  “He was forced to work for them,” she said. “He told me. He hated it, hated the secrets he had to know.”

  “And now he has another secret,” Devereaux said.

  “He didn’t want it,” she said.

  The words, Devereaux thought. He tried to memorize the words she used and the tone in her voice. What was it she really said?

  She said, “He had a brother he loved, was killed in an accident. It embittered Michael. He said he had heard too much, too many secrets and lies.…” She remembered his past clearly now but could not see him as he was, running from assassins. He was her lover, her pet, a gentle man. But didn’t she use him for her pleasure because he was beautiful? Of course. It’s what lovers do all the time while pretending they are being unselfish.

  And the gray man stared at her while she had these thoughts, and it made her want to blush. Still, there was a pleasure to be derived from his gaze as well. She remembered him holding her in the courtyard, pretending they were lovers. Felt the strength of his embrace that insisted on crushing her against his chest, felt the strength of shoulders and arms and hands. She had closed her eyes for a moment, to feel the pleasure of her breasts pressed against him. And then he had fired, killed a man as he embraced her. She shuddered now.

  “You and Michael are the only ones who know about Bruges?”

  “Yes. We were discreet… at the beginning,” she said.

  “Michael has to hide in a place where they won’t find him. Might as well be Bruges. For three days. I can get the tape. Get it back to those who want it, settle this.”

  “How can you settle this?” she said.

  “I’ll listen to the tape. As Michael did. As they know he did.”

  “What if he didn’t?”

  “Michael took a train to Stockholm. They knew that, the people who put the tape in his bag.” He watched her as he spoke and saw her mouth open in astonishment. Perhaps she really was surprised, he thought. “Seven hours on a train in Sweden. He read the paper, he read a book, but he must have been curious about the extra tape. He had to be. He had to listen to it to pass the time.”

  “He might have flown to Stockholm.”

  “The train was cheaper. Michael had to take the train,” Devereaux said. In that moment, he saw Michael turning on the tape player, listening to the secrets. “He had to listen to the tape.”

  “But why?”

  Devereaux said, “Because the plan was designed that way.”

  18

  ROME

  Cardinal Ludovico was impressive in stature, in attire, in the possessions with which he surrounded himself. He moved with a graceful inevitability through the rooms of his apartment. The rooms were large, and the windows had thick, red drapes so that the summer heat could be shut out during the long Roman days. The drapes were open now for the thin light of Roman autumn. The sun was pale, a dot in the sky, and the sickly yellow light cast a surrealistic wash over the stones of the old buildings. All the city was full of noise, but it was muffled by the gravity of the walls and furnishings of these rooms. Perhaps muffled by the presence and majesty of Cardinal Ludovico.

  The journalist was English, which meant there was a certain seediness to his character and credentials. This is what Cardinal Ludovico believed, because he had a firm opinion on the nationalities of others; he was descended from the original Romans, who still lived in the Trastavere section of the ancient, disordered city. He felt the eternity of the old Romans in his bones.

  For his part, Evelyn Jaynes thought he was being extremely clever. Yes, the Sunday London paper was quite interested if there really was something, and yes, they had the money, enough advance to pay off Gustafson and get Jaynes on the first flight south to Rome. Jaynes had been polite but blunt in getting through the bureaucratic layers that protected the center of the Congregation for the Protection of the Faith. The people of the layers admitted nothing, were as truculent as scolded children, but Jaynes was sending a message through them to the intelligent source at the center of the congregation.

  “I am grateful, Eminence,” the Englishman began. It was best to be humble in the presence of so much obvious power. “The urgency of my—”

  Cardinal Ludovico spoke right through Jaynes’s words. His English was strained, full of disdain for the barbarisms of the language; his voice commandingly soft: “I believe you mentioned Michael Hampton. I believe you suggested that Mr. Hampton, a translator by trade, is somehow connected with the congregation. I can assure you that is not true. I assure you, not for yourself, but for your newspaper. The world well knows the peculiar institution of the British Sunday newspaper and the inaccuracies which form the core of its mass presentation.”

  There. There and there. Words like points, lilting in the Roman way, but pointing and slashing nonetheless. Cold leonine eyes behind the words, offering not shelter, sanctuary, or forgiveness.

  So it’s hardball, Evelyn Jaynes thought. His journalistic adrenaline was rising. He removed the paper from his jacket pocket.

  Jaynes flourished the paper with a grand gesture.

  The eyes of the lion did not waver but kept staring at the puffed pastry face of the English reporter.

  Jaynes continued: “Records of telephone calls between Mr. Hampton and the Congregation for the Protection of the Faith. Actually, in the process of digging, I found other connections.”

  Cardinal Ludovico remained standing in the center of the room. The soft light replicated the atmosphere of a cathedral during Solemn High Mass—everything was candles and incense and Latin chants, while a heavenly choir in the loft at the back of the church strained to be angels. Ludovico understood the effect, understood all his effects. He had been the eyes and ears and hands of the pope for thirty years—five popes with different agendas and needs, even needs they sometimes did not know they had until Cardinal Ludovico pointed them out.

  “Why would the congregation be interested in a conference held in Sweden?” the cardinal said. “Concerning, I believe
you said, a discussion of the sea rights of the superpowers in the Baltic?”

  The lion made a thin, grotesque smile. “You see, what you suggest is absurd, even by the absurdist standards of the British Sunday press. I cannot explain further—”

  Jaynes let the hackles strain against the tweed of his coat. “Eminence,” he began again, “I am a simple journalist and must report on what I see and what I hear. I have established the connection between Michael Hampton and the congregation… as recently as last week, with telephone calls to Rome from Sweden during the Baltic conference. I have done my homework, Eminence, and even a little detective work. There is a large Catholic population in Lithuania, Latvia, even—”

  The cardinal raised his hand gently. The gesture demanded silence. “There are Catholics even in Sweden, but the church has no navies and no need for freedom of the seas, even Baltic seas. There are Catholics in Poland on the Baltic, as well as Germany. You make no connection—”

  “Telephone records are not lies. And now a tape is missing,” Jaynes hissed, his eyes glittering. “A top-secret tape stolen by a correspondent for the Congregation for the Protection of the Faith, a top-secret Roman Catholic organization directed by the pope’s unofficial spy, Alberto Cardinal Ludovico.…” He was writing his lead as he spoke it, seeing the headline clearly splashed across the top of the front page, watching the American services picking it up and spinning the ball around the world. All from Evelyn Jaynes, your humble Harris-tweed reporter, who has walked personally into the lion’s den on Borgo Santo Spirito, just up from Ponte Vittorio Emanuele—by God! He’d given them Rome on a silver platter with all its priestly corruption and cynicism!

  In that moment, Cardinal Ludovico decided something. “Where is Mr. Hampton now?”

  “Not in his apartment in Stockholm,” Jaynes said.

  “Then, where is he?”

  “On the run, I suppose.”

  “He is not here, Mr. Jaynes,” Cardinal Ludovico said. He looked about him. The yellow light of the room revealed emptiness.

  Jaynes said, “He will be here. If he can get here. There are inquiries made, you know. By intelligence operatives from the United States and the Soviet Union. What is this about? I am only a British journalist who happened upon my little bit of information by dint of effort, by digging for the real story buried beneath the apparent story. What is the involvement of the church? You have no navy, you said it yourself, Eminence. Then why did Michael Hampton call you seven times from Malmö last week during a naval conference? Why did you finance his trip to Malmö?”

  The last was sheer guessing.

  Ludovico’s eyes flickered a moment. Just a moment.

  Jaynes saw. He did not move. His rounded shoulders beneath the Harris-tweed padding became very tense, preparing for battle.

  Ludovico made a gesture. “Perhaps you will sit down, Mr. Jaynes?”

  They settled into velvet and mahogany armchairs more suitable for the posteriors of kings.

  “The congregation has, from time to time, employed Mr. Hampton because of his abilities as a translator,” Cardinal Ludovico began, the soft voice even softer now. Jaynes did not react to the admission of a lie a moment earlier. “While translators are a large body in Europe, there is a great need both for those able to translate and interpret Middle Eastern dialects and Far Eastern dialects. With European languages, of course. The church has many contacts in the Middle East. This is quite natural, it is the cradle of our faith.”

  Lull me to sleep, Jaynes said to himself. He was writing it all down, but it was just the commercial message. “Mr. Hampton is skilled in Arabic languages. Did you know that?”

  “No,” lied Jaynes.

  “It is for that specialty that we engage him from time to time,” Ludovico said.

  Silence.

  Is that all? Jaynes put down his pen.

  Ludovico waited, hands folded on his lap, eyes serene.

  “My dear Cardinal,” Jaynes began. He stopped. What does one say to the lion in his den? “My dear Cardinal,” he began again. “The documentation is irrefutable. Mr. Hampton was employed by the one unit of the Vatican which has a reputation for conducting… affairs of intelligence, should we say? At a conference between the Americans and the Russians? Come now, sir, I really think your explanation is no explanation at all.”

  “But it is all the explanation that I have, Mr. Jaynes.”

  “First, you lie to me about the relationship between Hampton and the church, and then you retract that lie and offer another in its place,” Jaynes said. He had chosen the naked word lie to inject reality into this staged setting. “I am not a fool.” I am an Englishman, by God, you papist dago.

  “I would hope not. Speculation such as you offered a moment ago would be the work of a fool.” No quarter now, no act of accommodation.

  Jaynes licked his sandpaper lips. The point was, of course, it was all a bit thin. Not that he couldn’t pull it off if he had been one of the overpaid analysts the papers were so fond of who sit in towers and think thoughts and write down their drivel as if it was Revelation. “Afraid, Evelyn, old boy, this is all very well, very well put, but we’re dealing in facts here, not idle speculation about an unknown translator who may or may not have stolen a tape recording. I mean, your source is nothing more than a glorified janitor.”

  “Eminence.” He tried to make his eyes sincere. “I have no quarrel with you or the Roman church. I am not an antireligionist, if that’s your concern. I am not interested in sensationalism for its own sake. I am concerned for the safety of Mr. Hampton, if he is in some danger—”

  “Are you certain he’s in danger?”

  There. Just a flicker of the eyelids. What was it betraying?

  “I think there is a distinct possibility,” Jaynes continued. He watched the eyes. Would this line of speculation reveal that which the previous line had not? “I do not know Mr. Hampton—I met him briefly at the conference—but I do know the danger of knowing secret things.”

  “Do you, Mr. Jaynes?”

  Evelyn Jaynes felt chilled in that moment. Was there irony behind the question?

  “What secret things do you know?”

  Yes. Irony. And threat. Was this priest threatening him? But the voice was still soft.

  “I know Michael Hampton has a secret tape recording from the naval conference and that he has simply disappeared. I know that he works from time to time for a secret organization within the Vatican, you have admitted it.”

  “Nothing, Mr. Jaynes, is admitted within these walls.”

  Jaynes blinked.

  “You came to me to ask questions on behalf of your newspaper, which serves the British public. I told you that in three weeks time the Holy Father will announce a new era of… what word shall we use?… rapprochement with the English church.”

  This was news to Jaynes and the world.

  Slowly, the old lion gnawed on, and the journalist in Jaynes did as the lion told. The story was a good one, an interesting one, and one certainly within the purview of Cardinal Ludovico. Oh, favored Evelyn Jaynes! A story that was English to the bone, full of Canterbury and cathedrals and healing of schisms, a story spun as delicately as flying buttresses, as beautiful as stained windows. On and on and on, and Jaynes scribbled his Pitman shorthand notes and then he was outside the rooms that do not admit, he was on the Borgo Santo Spirito, heading to the bridge over the shallow Tiber, beholding the November afternoon of the eternal city on the hills.… He found a taverna almost at once and was soon plunged into confused, happy, unsatisfied drunkenness, knowing he had been used as badly as a whore and yet relishing the experience, using the story in his notes as future credit with a future editor and future advance, buying the expensive whiskey on credit against all his future.

  Michael Hampton was on hold for the moment. Jaynes had gone to Ludovico for one story and been sidetracked by another one. He couldn’t ignore a scoop put in his lap, even when he knew he was being sandbagged.

  And the
lion stood at the tall window and looked at the street and the bridge and the city.

  Dear Michael, he thought. Is it true that I have put you in the way of harm?

  But he knew he had.

  19

  BRUGES

  Rena waited for Michael in her room. She sat at the open window and watched rain fall on the canal and the narrow, cobbled streets. Bicycle traffic was heavy and the riders, covered with slickers and canvas, bent to the rain. Rain polished the cobblestones and streaked the grimy old buildings. Everything was ancient, immovable; she sat at the window like a pale, beautiful statue, as though she had always been there. There was a heartsick feeling to the day, to the rain, to her thoughts of Michael and her loyalties. She wasn’t even loyal; she would have yielded for the American agent if he had demanded it. Yielded gratefully, to feel those arms again around her and feel him press her until she opened completely for him. She would betray Michael like that.

  The window was open. Now and then, in a sudden gust, rain would splatter in and touch her beauty. She scarcely knew what she was thinking about. Michael. Dear Michael, naked in that bed before all this trouble, innocent and beautiful. The man who had held her… Suddenly she blinked, because the insistent intrusion of Devereaux colored her daydream of Michael. There was no sun, no innocence in him, in those eyes that had seen everything since the Creation.…

  She stared at the Devereaux of her imagination and imagined his oak-tree arms around her, pressing her to him for his own need. Dealing death. Unloving, ungentle, raw as spring earth turned in black Belgian fields.

  She felt stirred with desire. But for what? Better, for whom? Devereaux was gone. She was to meet Michael alone, when Michael made it to Bruges. Damn. Michael should not be harmed.… She thought of Devereaux staring at her, of the soft sound of his hard little questions and the long, arid silences between the questions. Did he trust her? It wasn’t a question of that, Devereaux had said. He seemed distracted. He had left her to sit alone by this window and wait for her lover. Perhaps Devereaux was out there in the rain, watching her waiting for Michael. She felt nervous at the thought of being under his gaze. Even now, she plucked at an imaginary bit of lint on her sweater. Was she blushing? Would he think her vain if she brushed her hair? She reached for a brush and began to make long strokes. She brushed and raised her arms over her head and exposed the delicate form of her body. She sometimes stared at her body after the bath, standing in front of the mirror while the soft sheen of her skin glowed from the warm waters. She sometimes was amazed that this was her, amazed at her physical perfection. Here she was, fragmented in thoughts, confused by a thousand memories and emotions. Yet her body was exquisite, so perfect. Men stared at her and she loved them to look at her, to desire her. How perverse of her!