Safe Houses

by Dan Fesperman

  The proprietor, Lehmann, had appeared at Baucom’s shoulder almost immediately, nodding and leaning closer while Baucom muttered an order under his breath as if conjuring up a spell. Lehmann nodded gravely and disappeared into the cellar, emerging moments later in a draft of cool, damp air with a dusty bottle that he toweled off at the bar. He brought it to the table with a corkscrew and two snifters, and did the honors as smartly as if they were in a Paris bistro with a Michelin star. The two men exchanged knowing glances. They had a past, then. Yet another chapter from Baucom’s big book of lore. Maybe Berlin was quieter now, but at moments like this you could still feel its history, its importance at the fulcrum of East and West. Come what may, spies still counted for something here.

  Helen, eyeing the glass, gave in and took a sip. Heavenly, although she didn’t dare ask how much it cost, especially after she downed the first glass as quickly as a half liter of cheap Pils.

  Baucom topped it up.

  “Erasure,” he said. “First your mind. Then the tapes. That’s your ticket back to safety. No more thoughts of that mystery fellow Lewis. No more thoughts of Robert.”

  “Kevin Gilley. I’ll say his name if I please.”

  For the first time that evening Baucom looked mildly put out. His eyebrows angled in disapproval as he leaned across the table.

  “My dear Helen, I know we’ve chosen a nice dark corner, and I can certainly vouch for Lehmann. But we’re not alone here, in case you haven’t noticed, and in Berlin the walls have ears. Remember?”

  “Sorry. But did you really just mention my safety? Do you think that’s actually in doubt?”

  “The safety of your career.”

  “Ah, my career. That vast edifice of pride and achievement.” She took another swallow. “At the moment, ‘unsafe’ would probably be a charitable description, don’t you think? And funny you should mention Lewis at all. I hadn’t even thought of that name since last night, although I suppose in its way the contents of that tape are a lot more intriguing than—”

  “See?” He smiled, but not nicely. “Already backsliding. More.” He nodded toward her glass, which she raised to her lips. Such a wonderful elixir, probably older than her, and as mellowed as Baucom, a complex vintage in his own right. In drinking it, however, she was again reminded of Lewis—or whatever his name really was—and his older companion, the wheezing gray eminence with his fancy Scotch. A touch of the urbane in his manner of speaking, despite all that nonsense about various bodies of water.

  What did it all mean? What was “the bay,” and why did Lewis need to be cleansed of its polluting waters? Who was Jack, their powerful pal who had died in ’72? And why on earth had the older fellow, there at the end, spoken so cavalierly of “elimination, plain and simple,” one of the few remarks that had needed no translation at all?

  She set down the glass and licked her lips. When she looked up, Baucom was watching her carefully.

  “You know exactly what they were talking about, don’t you?” she said. “All that gobbledygook about water. That’s why the tapes scare you. Not because of Gilley—oh, all right then, Robert—but because of Lewis.”

  Baucom shook his head, his expression passing from irritation to worry.

  “I should have known better than to bring you here in your current state of mind.”

  “My current state of mind is a pleasant sort of buzz giving way to inebriation. By your own design, Clark. Oh. Excuse me. Charles. I keep forgetting we’re supposed to be speaking operationally, for some damn reason you haven’t told me yet. And I hope you weren’t referring to the female state of mind? The scold who must be silenced? The woman scorned?”

  “Your words.”

  “But you’re not denying them, which makes you sound more like Herrington every time you ask me to forget.”

  “Now that’s a low blow. All I’m counseling is discretion.”

  “Discretion I’ll grant you. Discretion is half of what we’re paid for, so I’ll zip it for now. But erasure is out of the question, in either sense of the word. You might as well ask me to stop being so curious, and that’s the other half of what we’re paid for. Or are you too old to be curious anymore?”

  It stung him, she sensed it right away, and she tried to atone by taking his hand. He let her, a start, but in searching his eyes she saw more disapproval than pain, and after his next swallow he set down the glass as sharply as the older man had in the safe house, the knock making a few heads turn in the quiet bar. He shook his head and chuckled under his breath.

  “You belong in the field,” he said. “You’re tougher than anyone we’ve got out there, yet here you sit, a desk jockey pushing a pencil and handing out keys to Agency real estate like the night porter in some pay-by-the-hour hotel.”

  “Thanks for making me feel so vital to the cause.”

  “It’s a compliment, my dear. They don’t know what they have in you. Tell me, because this is something I’ve always wondered, when did you first know you wanted to get into this racket?”

  “You tell me. You know all about my formative years. Bible-thumper dad, obedient housewife mom.”

  “The joys of East Bumfuck, North Carolina.”

  “Wixville, North Carolina. East Bumfuck was the next town over.” And the worst day of every week had been Sunday, she couldn’t help but remember. Sitting through her father’s droning sermons, followed by long dinners at parishioners’ homes where the man of the house always took ten minutes to say grace to impress her dad, and then all you got for your patience was overcooked roast and a rice pudding.

  “It was in a dry county, I’ll bet.”

  “Good guess. You had to drive thirty miles for a fifth of whiskey, and hope that nobody from church spotted your car outside the ABC store. Coming from a place like that, who wouldn’t want to go overseas to snoop for Uncle Sam?”

  “But there has to have been a moment, a turning point. You’re a woman of epiphanies, Helen. That’s as plain on your face as those beautiful eyes.”

  She wanted to deny it, but he was right, although it had taken her years to realize it. In retrospect, her urge to be a spy, a snoop, a keeper of secrets, went back to one summer night around a card table in her mother’s kitchen, a sultry evening of distant thunder and the sound of crickets.

  Helen had just turned twelve. Her father was out for the evening, ministering to the ailing and bereaved of his flock, and their home was quiet. It was 1967, a July when you were almost afraid to turn on the television for fear of being alerted to yet another upheaval in some northerly city like Newark or Detroit, or more casualties in Vietnam, although Helen’s memory of that night’s fare was that at 8 p.m. she switched on The Man from U.N.C.L.E., the signal coming and going on their little black-and-white depending on how deftly she could adjust the bent coat hanger that passed for a UHF antenna. In those days she was fixated on the costars, two dapper spies, especially the blond Russian heartthrob named Illya, reigning obsession of all the teenybopper magazines.

  Almost as soon as she settled in to watch there was a knock at the door—Uncle Lester and Aunt Grace, from her mother’s side, stopping by with a deck of cards and a box of poker chips. Helen’s mother, usually a slave to house rules against alcohol and gambling, got out the card table from the coat closet without a moment’s hesitation, although she did pause when Lester suggested adding Helen for a four-handed game.

  Sensing an opportunity to breach a new opening on the discipline frontier, Helen leaped from the couch to demand inclusion.

  “Pleeease, Mommy?”

  “Oh, all right, then. But the minute your father turns into the driveway you run back to your room like this never happened, you hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  And that set the tone for the evening—the thrill of forbidden pleasure, a state of high alert. To make it even better, her mother staked her to a sma
ll pile of chips, offering the possibility she might win a few nickels and dimes.

  Uncle Lester spelled out the rules, explaining the difference between a straight and a flush, and teaching her how to ante up and make bets. “We’ll keep the rest simple,” he said. “Five-card draw until the little missus is ready for something more complicated.”

  To keep track of which hands were the strongest, Helen got down the P–Q volume of the encyclopedia her Mom had bought month-by-month at the A&P, and opened it to the write-up for “Poker.” She set it on the floor by her feet for easy consultation.

  But the few times she lucked into good hands, everyone else folded before she could win many chips, and she couldn’t understand why. The moment of revelation came a few hands later, when, after folding, she stepped around the table to peek at Uncle Lester’s hand.

  He slapped down his cards before she could steal a glance.

  “Don’t you come looking at my hand!”

  “But I folded.”

  “That’s beside the point.”

  “No it isn’t. I can’t possibly win.”

  Uncle Lester shook his head as if she just didn’t get it, which left it to Aunt Grace to explain.

  “It doesn’t matter if you’re out, honey. If you see his hand, you’ll be able to read his play. You’ll know whether he’s bluffing, or holding, or whatever.”

  “So.”

  “So?” Her uncle again. “Well that’s the whole point of poker, ain’t it? Reading other people? How do you think we’ve all been knowing what you’ve got? Every time you look down at that book on the floor we figure you must have something pretty good.”

  A few hands later, after again folding early, Helen went to the refrigerator for a Cheerwine. She returned to the table by an elliptical route that let her see her Uncle Lester’s cards just as he was fanning them out after the draw. Jack high. Weak. She then noted his every gesture—the flick of his eyes, the movement of his hands, the flash of his tongue to wet his upper lip—as he bluffed his way to a huge pot.

  Three hands later she took back nearly all those chips after noting the same movements just before he doubled the stakes. When he finally called and she revealed her winning hand as a measly pair of nines, he dolefully shook his head.

  “You see?” he complained, as if he’d known all along what she’d been up to. “Betty, this girl of yours is a fast learner, but she’s also a sneak!”

  Her mother winked at her from across the table, and it was still one of Helen’s fondest memories.

  From that moment onward, Helen had an insatiable appetite for ferreting out secrets. Not gossip, exactly, but all sorts of hidden stuff no one else seemed to know—about her friends, her parents, her teachers, people at church. Watch carefully, learn the signs, and before long you can discover the key to just about anyone. Her biggest coup came at summer’s end, when she finally learned why her mom was always so drowsy after lunch, right up until it was time to fix dinner.

  In good weather, her mother’s midday routine almost never varied. She would make lunch for Helen and then haul a load of wet laundry to the clothesline out back. The chore always took an inordinate amount of time, and it always rendered her droopy and slow, fit for little more than an afternoon of soap operas while she dozed on the couch, leaving Helen to her own devices. Was hanging out the wash really that strenuous? Or did she simply need to catch up on sleep after staying up too late the night before? Helen aimed to find out.

  So, the next day, after her mom put lunch on the table—peanut butter and banana on white bread, with potato chips and a bowl of Campbell’s Cream of Tomato—Helen took a few quick bites while waiting for her mom to head outside with the laundry. The moment she did, Helen tossed the rest of her sandwich and rinsed her plate and bowl before exiting through the front door. She crept around to the side of the house and took up a concealed position behind a big holly bush at one corner.

  So far, nothing looked out of the ordinary. Her mother was hanging shirts and trousers, the bigger items that would wrinkle the most if left wet for too long. Once they were in place her mother glanced side to side, checking in the direction of both neighbors. She also glanced back toward the house, and Helen held her breath. But her mom didn’t see her, and none of the neighbors was out and about. Her mother then set out for the woods behind the yard, where she parted the underbrush and stepped into the trees.

  Helen wanted to follow, but knew she’d be spotted the moment she broke cover. Peering through the holly she watched her mother proceed maybe ten feet deeper before stooping lower and rummaging for something below. She then turned and sat down—on a tree stump, perhaps?

  Shadows and underbrush made it hard to see what she was up to, but she was barely moving. There was a glint of sunlight, as if from a mirror, but little else. Helen marked her mother’s position in relation to a big oak, the one in which her father had long ago built a tree house, now in disrepair. Her mom sat there for a good fifteen minutes while Helen swatted at gnats. Finally her mother stood, turned, and stooped again for a few seconds longer, reaching down into the weeds before fording the underbrush back to the clothesline. She pinned up the remaining socks, T-shirts, and underwear, picked up the laundry basket, and walked back into the house. From previous experience, Helen knew what came next. Her mother would turn on the television and make a beeline to the couch, lost to the world for the next several hours.

  Helen waited a few minutes and got to work. She set out across the lawn, running in case her mother happened to look out the window. Reaching the woods she paused to check for poison ivy, and then stepped through a thicket of goldenrod, trumpet vine, and scrubby pine toward the big oak. Cicadas whirred like a giant windup toy. From the oak she took ten paces to her left and came upon a rusted milk crate, like the kind they used to leave on the porch for deliveries before everyone started buying at the supermarket. She opened the top flap and looked inside. Nothing but spare clothespins, although the idea her mother would buy this many extras was so preposterous that Helen reached inside and discovered they were piled atop a false bottom.

  Below lay a bottle of Nikolai Vodka, with a red-and-white label, alongside an empty jam jar that her mother must have used as a drinking glass. Helen unscrewed the cap and sniffed the spirituous but otherwise odorless vapors. That probably explained her mother’s choice. Nothing to mark her breath. And if anyone had happened upon her while she was drinking, the liquid in the jam jar would have looked as clear as water.

  So here it was, then, her mother’s secret for daily survival, cached like treasure—a bottle she must have procured on one of those sixty-mile round-trips to the next county. Or maybe she’d arranged for a trusted go-between, a cutout as they called it in the spy game. A dark secret, especially for a preacher’s wife, and Helen found it to be sad and desperate, but also reckless and exciting. She felt that way about her own behavior as well. Snooping around like this was a bit sad, but very exciting, and she knew this would not be the last time she was willing to take furtive action when something needed figuring out.

  Helen tipped the bottle for a test sip. It burned so much that she coughed, and she wiped her lips on her T-shirt. She capped the bottle and put it back into the milk crate along with the jam jar. Then she circled back to the front of the house, eased inside, and sneaked down the hall to her room.

  She told Baucom only the first part of that story—about the night of the poker game—as they sat in Lehmann’s little hideaway. The other part she’d never told to anyone, and probably never would. Baucom laughed when she described how she called her Uncle Lester’s bluff.

  “From that night on,” she said, “he would never play poker with me again. Which also taught me something. Use your best information sparingly, and pick your shots well.”

  “And what does that lesson tell you about how you should play your hand with Herrington?”

 
She considered the question while swallowing another measure of the wonderful brandy. Beats the hell out of Nikolai Vodka, she thought with a smile. She searched for an answer—not the real one, but the one she figured Baucom wanted to hear.

  “I suppose it tells me I should try to get a better read on things before making my next move. Get a little more information, to give me a clearer idea of what to do next.”

  “Splendid. A self-taught prodigy. That poker game was probably more valuable than any single thing you ever learned at the Farm.”

  “I’m not so sure about that. But, speaking of playing it smart.” She pushed away her glass, even though there was still a swallow or two left. “The last thing I should do tonight is have too much to drink.”

  He shrugged, unconvinced.

  “Even when it’s this good?”

  “Yes, even when it’s this good.” She picked up the glass, eyeing the amber liquid a bit wistfully. “My mother certainly never had anything of this quality.”

  “Your mother was a drinker, the parson’s wife?”

  She shrugged, noncommittal. She then laughed to herself, remembering a review for Nikolai Vodka she’d spotted years later by some whiskey snob in a magazine: Easy on the wallet, but few flavors other than alcohol and a light burn.

  “But you’ll erase the tapes, yes?”

  Helen eyed him carefully. For the first time she wondered where his real loyalties lay in this matter, and the possibilities were disconcerting. Crafty old veterans were wonderful for their stories and lore, but they also had the skill to nudge you in directions more advantageous to the Agency than to yourself. And, let’s face it, Baucom was Agency to the core. No one could have lasted this long without being a Company man.

  “I should go,” she said, a little sharply. He rose with her, reaching for her hand, but she moved away. “And I should sleep in my own bed tonight. Alone, if you don’t mind.”