The Old Boys

by Charles McCarry

  Harley said, “You make him do that, tell them that, and he’s a dead man.”

  “Fifty-fifty chance,” Kevin said with a shrug.

  “One hundred percent, son. And before he dies, he’ll lead ’em back to this dacha.”

  “Let him. The owner doesn’t know we’re here. Doesn’t know us, for that matter. We’ll clean it up before we leave—put the transmitters back where we found them, wipe prints, all like that.”

  “You mean you just burgled this place and turned it into a hideout for a day?” Harley said.

  Kevin gave us his full high-noon smile, but no further explanation.

  7

  Our last conversation with Mikhail was not especially friendly. I asked him a few more questions, he snarled at me.

  “Why should I tell you anything?” he asked.

  “Why not?” Harley said.

  “I work for pay.”

  My, but Mikhail was a single-minded Russian.

  “How much do you want?”

  “Five thousand American dollars in hundreds.”

  “We can cover that,” I said. “But first the information. What was the code name for the cobalt backpack bombs?”

  “They were too secret to have an official name,” Mikhail said. “The troops called them Uncle Joes. To save weight, the bombs were unshielded.”

  “So why Uncle Joe?”

  “Because to have Uncle Joe Stalin on your back meant you were going to die young.”

  We had been standing while Mikhail reclined on a bed. His titanium leg was nowhere to be seen. Harley sat down on the mattress beside him.

  “One last thing,” he said. “This has been troublin’ me right along, so I’d appreciate it if you can ease my mind.”

  Mikhail nodded mutely. In spite of everything he liked Harley. Whatever else the two of them were, they had been professionals together for years.

  “It just seems peculiar that they’d take a wounded officer out of a hospital in the Crimea, like they did with you, and send him all the way to Turkmenistan to handle a case as big as this one,” Harley said.

  Mikhail said nothing.

  Harley said, “They must’ve had a lot of faith in you.”

  Again, silence, but Mikhail’s frozen face was thawing.

  Harley said, “So the question is, Mikhail, why did you shoot the wrong people?”

  Mikhail laughed an explosive liar’s laugh. “That was not a crime in the Soviet Union.”

  “No, but there was usually a reason for it. What was the reason this time?”

  “Do I get my money?”

  “If the answer’s truthful.”

  “They knew about you and me, Harley,” Mikhail said. “They had photographs of our meetings, recordings of our conversations, everything. So my ethical choices were limited.”

  Harley was holding Mikhail’s bankroll. He handed it to him.

  “Best use this to get across the border,” he said.

  “For these people there are no borders,” Mikhail said.

  Harley gave him a paternal pat on the arm and left the room.

  Now that he was alone with me, Mikhail’s eyes, so shiny in his last moments with Harley, turned back into dry ice. He said, “I still think you will die in Russia, my friend Horace.”

  By now it was pitch dark and snowing hard. When I emerged from Mikhail’s room I found my bag packed and waiting in the sitting room, my parka draped over it. An electric sweeper howled. Kevin’s men, mute as ever, wiped surfaces clean of fingerprints and put listening devices back where they had found them. All the windows were open. I wondered if that would be enough to get rid of the smell of fried bacon.

  I said, “No surveillance cameras?”

  “The techs installed a loop,” Kevin said. “Shows the rooms empty like they should be, over and over. Transmitters are voiceactivated, so if they hear nothing, that’s normal. The snow will take care of footprints and tire tracks.”

  “Best sweep ’em anyway, son,” Harley said. “Can’t depend on the weather.”

  He had opened his own suitcase and was rummaging through it. “Found it,” he said, unpacking an out-at-the-elbows heirloom wool cardigan and putting it on. “Chilly in here.”

  Kevin nodded amiably. “Sorry I can’t ask you to stay to supper, but as you can see we’re moving out.”

  He beckoned us to a table where a Michelin map was spread out. It showed highways in red, back roads in yellow, dirt tracks as dotted lines.

  “We are here, about three hundred klicks from Moscow, as I’m sure you noticed,” Kevin said, pointing to a spot between two lakes. “The Latvian border is about one hundred fifty klicks to the west. When you come to the end of the drive, turn left. At the second intersection, eighteen klicks south, you’re going to turn right. That will take you to the main road to the border. The usual nohassle exit fee for the Russians at the checkpoint is one Ben Franklin per head. The Latvians will let you in for free when they see your passports.”

  He handed me a set of keys with an Avis tag attached. “You should get started if you want to stay ahead of the snow. The car is outside, full tank. Please leave it, locked, in the parking lot at the Riga airport, keys, papers, and parking stub in the glove compartment.”

  Kevin handed me an open paper bag. Sandwiches and two Cokes, our supper. He looked me straight in the eye and shook hands very firmly.

  Harley shambled over and offered his hand. “You’re quite a lad, Kevin,” he said. “Best of luck to you.”

  “You, too, Mister Waters,” said Kevin.

  “Don’t be too hard on old Mikhail,” Harley said. “We made him what he is today.”

  “That’s charitable, sir.”

  “Simple truth, son.”

  In the car, headlights reflecting from hypnotic whirling snow, Harley said, “What I was lookin’ for in my valise back there was the water glass I swiped from the dinin’ room in Moscow.”

  “The one with Kevin’s prints on it?”

  “That’s the one. It was still there, but it’d been wiped.”

  Harley threw the brown-bag lunch Kevin had packed for us out the window.

  “Best not eat the sandwiches,” he said.

  FOUR

  1

  During my five days in Russia I had not had a single thought about Paul Christopher. This changed on my first morning in Latvia when Jack Philindros called me from Jerusalem.

  “I’ve been talking to a friend of your cousin’s mother,” he murmured. “It seems she passed through Palestine right after the war.”

  He meant World War II. I said, “On her way to where?”

  “The impression here is that even she didn’t know. Just wanted to disappear. However, she left a bona fide with her friend. Her wedding ring.”

  “Why?”

  “In case her son ever showed up. Which he did, about six months ago, taking the ring with him when he left.”

  While Harley Waters flew to Prague in search of people who might remember Lori, I took a plane to Tel Aviv. No one met me at the airport. Jack’s strict obedience to the rules of tradecraft ruled that out, but I knew that he would materialize before the end of the day. I took a taxi to Jerusalem, checked into the King David hotel, and waited. My room overlooked the deserted gardens and in the middle distance, the old city. I went to sleep and was awakened from a dream by a burst of faraway Uzi fire. Or maybe the weapon was fired in the dream. I wasn’t sure.

  At five o’clock precisely the bedside telephone rang. “Welcome to Jerusalem, Mister Hubbard,” Jack said. “I wanted to confirm our appointment.”

  This meant he was waiting for me downstairs.

  I had just come out of the shower. “Can you give me ten minutes?”

  “Certainly.”

  Jack met me at the elevators without a sign of recognition, turned on his heel, and led me out of the hotel. He was a little more olive-skinned than usual after three weeks in the Mediterranean sun. In a city where few wore coats or ties, he was dressed in his us
ual style—black senior bureaucrat’s suit, crisp white shirt, dark-blue silk tie, burnished wingtips.

  He led me along King David Street to a courtyard where his rental car was parked. It was the sabbath, so traffic was tolerable.

  Jack said, “We’ll be there in about ten minutes. It’s pretty secure.”

  Our destination turned out to be a Greek Orthodox monastery in the old city. Jack was staying there. As monasteries go it was pleasant enough—dusty shafts of honeyed sunlight and the muted clatter of pedestrian traffic coming in through open windows, gilded icons on whitewashed walls, old monks with youthful voices singing vespers in a chapel at the other end of the building.

  “I’ve asked Lori’s friend to join us,” Jack said. “He’s not so likely to be compromised by coming here as to the King David hotel. The monks know him.”

  “He’s a Greek?”

  “No, Israeli. A scholar. The monastery has a very good library, going back to Biblical times.”

  The man awaited us in an anteroom. Jack had told me nothing about him apart from what he had reported over the phone. He was younger than I had imagined—about Paul’s age. Despite his short stature, balding head and small paunch, he was still an almost theatrically handsome man. As a youth he must have looked a lot like the movie actor John Garfield. He wore snowwhite sneakers, brand-new jeans, a blue chambray work shirt, a leather jacket. He had very small hands.

  He closed the book he had been reading, stood up, and offered his hand.

  “Norman Schwarz,” he said. He had a ringing actor’s voice, brimming with hearty good will.

  “Horace Hubbard.”

  “Paul’s cousin. He described you to a T.”

  “How was he when you saw him?”

  “He seemed well. Happy, even. Not much changed, except larger and older, from the last time I saw him when we were boys.”

  “You knew him back then? Where?”

  “In Berlin. Our parents were friends. We went to school together, went hiking together, played football. My memories of him and his father and mother are vivid. Because of the Christopher family I am alive today. I have had more than sixty years of life that otherwise would have been taken from me.”

  I knew what was coming next but waited for Schwarz to make his own explanation.

  “In 1939, when I was fourteen,” Schwarz said, “at the last possible moment, the Christophers smuggled my parents and my sister and me out of Germany. On a sailboat to Denmark. There were many others who also escaped Hitler on that sailboat. Paul says we were the last.”

  “The yawl Mahican.”

  “Exactly. So you know about the things they did?”

  “Just the bare facts. Paul and his father rarely spoke of it. And of course his mother was lost to the Nazis.”

  “So we heard at the time,” Schwarz said. “So we believed for a long while. But it wasn’t true, at least not in the sense that they killed her.”

  “You know this for a fact?”

  “I saw her here, in Jerusalem, in 1945. It was a memorable thing. I was old enough by then to realize how extraordinary she was.”

  He pulled some snapshots from the pocket of his jacket.

  “Look,” he said. “Here she is with my mother and father and me.”

  One of the bleached figures in the overexposed photographs was a pale slender woman who could well have been Lori. She was a bit taller than the Schwarzes. Young Norman wore British army hot-climate uniform—short-sleeved khaki shirt with a row of campaign ribbons, voluminous starched khaki shorts and brown knee socks. In the pictures, Lori was the only one who wasn’t smiling.

  “How on earth did she end up in Jerusalem?” I asked.

  “On a ship to Haifa full of Jewish refugees.”

  “And how did that happen?”

  “I think the Mossad helped her. Their original mission was to rescue Jews in peril, as you no doubt know.”

  “But she wasn’t Jewish.”

  “No, but many Jews who would have gone to the camps were alive because of her.”

  “The fact that she had lived with Reinhard Heydrich was known?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “That didn’t enter into it?”

  “I imagine it had a bearing,” Schwarz said, “A positive bearing. My father said that Heydrich was dead because of her.”

  “He knew this?”

  “He seldom guessed at things,” Schwarz said. “He was with the Mossad before it was the Mossad. Even when we lived in Germany he did that kind of work. He sent a lot of people to the Christophers. They saved them all. That’s why we were so late in leaving Germany. There was always one more to rescue. Finally, when it was very late, he was ordered to go, to save himself.”

  “The Christophers knew all this?”

  “Oh, yes. That’s why they helped us.” He gripped my forearm with his childlike hand. “Imagine the courage that took.”

  I said, “Why do you say that Heydrich was dead because of Lori?”

  Schwarz’s cell phone rang in his pocket. He ignored it.

  He said, “Why do you ask?”

  “As I understand it, Heydrich’s assassination was supposed to be a British operation, carried out with British weapons.”

  “It’s true that Heydrich was killed with Sten guns. But the British weren’t the only people in the world who had Sten guns. Or friends in Prague. Or even the strongest motive to eliminate Heydrich.”

  “Are you telling me Heydrich’s assassination was a Jewish operation?”

  “If I were, I’d only be guessing,” Schwarz said. “Let me tell you what I know about Lori Christopher.”

  Her ship had sailed from Bari, on the heel of Italy. To get from Czechoslovakia, across Austria, and down nearly the whole length of Italy through the chaos of Europe in 1945 was no easy matter. The roads were clogged with displaced persons fleeing the Russians or simply trying to get back home after having been kidnapped by the Nazis. Lori had no papers, but neither did anybody else. The trains weren’t operating. Almost no one had a motor vehicle and there was no gasoline for civilians in any case. There was no way to get anywhere except by walking.

  “She lost herself in the mob until she was out of Czechoslovakia,” Schwarz said. “Then she walked across Austria, alone, traveling at night, her belongings wrapped up in a shawl.”

  “What belongings?”

  Schwarz said, “I think you already know the answer to that question. The Amphora Scroll.”

  His phone rang again. This time he answered, speaking in Hebrew.

  “Please excuse me,” he said. “But I really have to go now.”

  And with a charming smile he was gone.

  2

  Jack Philindros and I dined with the monks, who did pretty well for themselves at table. Greek salad, roast lamb, fruit, sour red wine mixed with water, gritty sweet coffee. Except for the coffee, Septimus Arcanus might have eaten a similar supper two thousand years ago in this same neighborhood.

  Afterward, in Jack’s whitewashed cell, we talked about Norman Schwarz. The walls and door were thick. One tiny shuttered window was set high in the wall above an ornate Byzantine crucifix. The silence was almost perfect, so Jack was almost audible.

  I said, “Likeable fellow, your man Schwarz.”

  “Everybody notices,” Jack replied.

  “Do you believe what he was telling us?”

  “With the usual reluctance, yes,” Jack said.

  “You’ve dealt with him before?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why the reluctance?”

  “Truthful men sometimes lie and liars sometimes tell the truth,” Jack said. “All things being equal, Norman is a truthful man.”

  “I was a little surprised at his suggestion that Lori was an agent of Zionists.”

  “It’s not impossible. Norman’s mother, who was Lori’s contact in the Mahican operation, was Yeho Stern’s sister.”

  “Oh.”

  The late Yeho Stern had been head of the Israel
i intelligence service during the earliest years of Israel’s existence. Yeho was legendary in the original sense of the word. During his long tenure as Memuneh, meaning the Big Boss of the Mossad, no one outside his service, and not everybody inside it, could be absolutely sure that he really existed.

  I said, “What about the Brits?”

  “Maybe Yeho piggybacked their operation,” Jack replied. “Taking free rides on better-financed services was one of his many specialties.”

  “So you see no holes in what Norman has told us so far?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “What, then?”

  “A possible funny coincidence,” Jack said. “Norman was in the Jewish Brigade, a unit of the British army that saw action in northern Italy in the spring of 1945, just before V-E Day. In the summer of 1945 members of the Jewish Brigade were active all along the Italian frontier with Yugoslavia and Austria, helping escaping Jews to get aboard the underground railroad for Palestine.”

  “So?”

  “Norman may have met Lori in Italy on Uncle Yeho’s orders and put her on the right boat for Haifa.”

  This made sense. No introductions would have been necessary, no explanations required. Lori already knew Norman from Berlin days, and anything he did for her could be explained as payment of a personal debt.

  Having planted this seed, Jack fell into a silence. Monastic surroundings notwithstanding, I was in no mood for silent communing and besides, he had aroused my curiosity about Norman.

  “You said that Norman is a scholar,” I said. “What’s his field?”

  “Byzantine art,” Jack said. “That’s why he’s a regular here. He uses the library. Some of the monks are Byzantine scholars, too.”

  “Don’t tell me he’s another doctor of philosophy.”

  “No, he took it up in retirement. For most of his life he was a professional poker player.”

  According to Jack, Norman had learned the game from seamen on the Australian tramp steamer that had taken his family from Copenhagen to Haifa after their escape from the Nazis. Norman showed an immediate flair for poker. He had phenomenal eyesight, which meant that he could read every card that fell, a retentive memory, and a gift for arithmetic. As a result of a boyhood spent in the company of people who mostly wanted to see him dead, he was also good at reading faces and body language.