The Old Boys

by Charles McCarry

  “Know what that is?” he said, tapping the packet, which was wrapped in some sort of slippery yellowish material.

  “No.”

  “Oilskin. Nobody’s made oilskin since Hannah was a pup.”

  “What’s inside?”

  “Open ’er up,” Harley said.

  Inside the oilskin was an envelope, an old one with grease spots on it that smelled faintly of lanolin. The envelope was unsealed, unaddressed. It contained five pages of velvety prewar writing paper, covered front and back with decisive vertical script written in black ink with a fine-nib fountain pen. Lost art, lost tool. The lines ran straight across the page as if ruled. No words were crossed out or corrected. In direct light the aging black ink showed greenish highlights.

  “You can read German, can’t you?” Harley said.

  “Barely,” I said. “What is this?”

  “Marie doesn’t know. I believe it’s Lori’s translation of the Amphora Scroll. She left it with Nandine. Marie found it when the old woman died.”

  I was nonplussed, deeply skeptical. It’s not that I don’t believe in windfalls. Like more respectable pursuits such as scientific research and brokerage and practicing law, espionage is an organized search for windfalls. But this? In Budapest, where no one has ever given anyone anything, not even love, for free?

  I said, “Why is she handing this over to us?”

  “Again accordin’ to Marie, everybody she’s related to is dead or lost or in exile,” Harley said. “She thought it ought to stay in Lori’s family, of which you’re a member.”

  “What a noble impulse.”

  “That’s what I thought. So I bought her a fur coat.”

  Despite the value of the merchandise I held in my hand, I was startled and showed it. A fur coat? Did he think money grew on trees?

  “Don’t worry,” Harley said, reading me perfectly as usual. “’Twasn’t sable. Or even new.”

  Harley went to the men’s room. For the past ten minutes he had commanded my entire attention, but before that I had noticed a young man across the room. He arrived shortly after I did, took a table in the window, and ordered coffee. He wore tiny headphones. Maybe he was listening to music, though it did not seem so because he was not swaying to the beat or singing along as his generation is wont to do. He wore a forest-green parka over a sweatshirt with “UCLA Football XXL” on the chest. Baseball cap, corduroys and multicolor sneakers with thick corrugated soles completed the ensemble. This costume made him noticeable in a room filled with shabby old men and women dressed like Ronald Colman and Bette Davis. He looked vaguely Middle Eastern— not quite an Arab, perhaps a Turk or an Armenian.

  Was he following me? The fact that he chose to sit in the window—there were less exposed tables all over the room—earned him the benefit of my vague doubts. No trained man would do such a thing—unless, of course, he was maintaining visual or electronic contact with someone in the street. The afternoon light, such as it was, was behind him and this made it difficult to see his face. Was this technique or happenstance? The face, close-shaven, open and friendly, could even have been an American face.

  Harley returned. I called for the check. While I was paying it the youth stood up and left. The asthmatic old waiter, even more paranoid than I, scuttled to the abandoned table, wheezing in anxiety. He seemed reassured, even pleased, by the banknote he found under the youth’s coffee cup.

  Outside in the street there was no sign of the youth. I described him to Harley. He took a look around and said, “No sign of him now. Want to go for a walk?”

  “I could use a German-English dictionary,” I said.

  “Follow me.”

  He stepped off at his usual 120 paces per minute. After walking in a circle through a warren of medieval streets, we arrived at an international bookstore. The youth was already inside, headphones in place, browsing through a French-language Michelin green guide to Hungary.

  “Wonder how he got here first,” Harley said. “Could have somethin’ to do with the earphones.”

  I found a pocket German dictionary, paid for it, and left. Harley lingered till the youth followed me. Then he followed him. Would the youth detect the sandwich? Apparently not, but at this point what did appearances mean? He window-shopped along behind me in his many-colored sneakers.

  After ten minutes of this, I stopped at the mouth of a narrow alley that ran between the blind sides of two large buildings and waited for the youth to catch up.

  When he did, I stepped aside and said in English, “After you, son.”

  Without fuss or change of expression he walked into the alley. Harley waited at the entrance. After a moment another young fellow, also dressed by Land’s End, crossed the street against the light, tapped Harley on the shoulder and said, “After you, sir.” Now Harley and I were the ham and the cheese in the sandwich.

  To the original youth I said, “What can I do for you?”

  The youth was in tip-top physical condition. Broad shoulders, flat stomach, square jaw, keen brown eyes without a single speck of red in the whites; a nondrinker. He had large bony hands that could turn in an instant into large bony fists. Nothing on his breath but coffee and strongly perfumed toothpaste. His backup pretty much fit the same description.

  The youth said, “When a man your age invites a man my age into an alley, the question usually is what can the young man do for the old man, and at what price.”

  He spoke English with an accent, faint and to my ear undefinable. I heard Harley say, “Watch out!” He choked on the words. I took my eyes off the youth for an instant and saw that the other youth had his left forearm across Harley’s throat. In his other hand he held a knife, blunt edge of the blade across the bridge of Harley’s nose. I felt metal against my own skin, looked down, and saw that the youth was pressing the muzzle of a cocked pistol against my Adam’s apple.

  He was much shorter than I. He said, pleasantly enough, “Please do not do anything foolish.”

  At least for the moment, he had nothing to worry about. However, I was worried about Harley’s heart. He looked pale and limp and seemed to be breathing with difficulty.

  “My friend is in trouble,” I said.

  “So are you,” said the youth. He unlimbered a cell phone, punched in a number with his thumb, and spoke into it. In broken Arabic. In Russian he said to me, “In a moment a car will come for us at the end of the alley. You will come with us quietly. Your friend will stay here. We have no interest in him.”

  “What is your interest in me?” I asked.

  His phone rang. He answered it. Harley was now breathing convulsively, as if these were the last lungfuls he would ever inhale. Suddenly he went limp, his joints collapsing as if his spinal cord had been severed. The youth who had charge of him—suspecting a ruse, I suppose—tightened his grip on Harley’s throat and lifted his knife as if to stab him. My own captor was still busy on the telephone, speaking Arabic too fast for me to understand. He had his back to Harley and the youth with the knife. I made the mistake of thinking twice about doing something violent while he was distracted, but I was afraid Harley might get stabbed if I made a move. It looked as though Harley was already dead, but somehow it seemed worse that his corpse should be knifed than his living body. The eyes of the knife man moved slightly, as if he saw somebody behind me. I heard the discreet pop of a silenced pistol. His right eye, which had been dark and liquid, turned into a gob of blood. He dropped the knife and went over backward. I pushed backward against my own captor as hard as I could, and we fell down together, him firing his pistol into the air as he went. The shots were virtually noiseless. He fell over the entangled bodies of Harley and the other man. A man wearing a black watch cap and a black leather jacket leaped by me, kicked the gun out of the gunman’s hand, then knocked him senseless and voiceless, if he did not kill him, with a karate chop to the Adam’s apple. He stood the unconscious man up, threw him over his shoulder, ran down the alley to an open window and dumped him through it. Another man,
also wearing a black watch cap and leather jacket, did the same with the corpse of the youth who had had the knife. It was all very businesslike.

  A third man, dressed just like the other two, said, in flat Ohio English, “Sorry about this.”

  It was Kevin. I said, “Nothing to apologize for.”

  His men were cleaning up the ground where the dead man had lain. It didn’t take them long, partly because they knew exactly what they were doing and partly because he had fallen on his back and bled into his own skull.

  Mere seconds had been consumed by all this action. Harley stirred and clutched his chest. I shoved Kevin aside and took hold of him. His whole body was trembling violently. In his breast pocket I found his tube of nitroglycerin pills and put two of them under his tongue. He breathed more easily.

  In a faint voice Harley said, “I feel like puking. Bad sign.”

  He lost consciousness again.

  Kevin and his troops immediately went into action. One of them punched a number into a cell phone and spoke into the mouthpiece in Magyar. Kevin and the other man stretched Harley out on the pavement and began giving him CPR. Kevin administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while the other fellow ripped the buttons off Harley’s shirt and pounded his chest. Under the pasty skin on his torso Harley had a rib cage like a robin’s. I was afraid this bodybuilder would splinter the ribs.

  Kevin said, “He’s breathing.” The other man felt Harley’s wrist, then his forearm. He said, “I can’t get a pulse.”

  Kevin took over the chest massage. After a moment he said, “The heart is beating. But it’s slow and very faint. His skin is cold. Let’s cover him up.”

  Cover him up? I began looking for a head to twist. But what they meant was “keep him warm.” They laid him on his own furlined coat and wrapped him in their parkas. I added my old raincoat. Harley’s face, shiny with cold sweat, was the color of suet. The gun that the youth had pressed to my throat lay in plain sight on the pavement next to Harley’s head. A fellow could end up with quite a firearms collection hanging out with these cowboys. I pointed to the weapon. Before the medics arrived, Kevin picked it up and put it in a pocket of his parka.

  They carried Harley to the mouth of the alley. A car arrived, instantaneously, it seemed. Kevin took the wheel. The others loaded Harley in the backseat. I got in with him and held his head on my lap during the trip to the hospital. When we arrived at the emergency exit, two men and a tall gawky woman with mop of flying dark ringlets dashed across the driveway, pushing a rattling gurney. They took Harley.

  Kevin parked the car, then joined me inside. The gesture surprised me, but not so much as his obvious concern for Harley. You might have thought that he was the sick man’s grandson. As we waited for the doctor to emerge with a report, Kevin kept going up to the wicket and asking for bulletins in what sounded to me like fluent Magyar, a language practically no non-Hungarian speaks. He had to wait in line. The husky woman on duty looked like Leonid Brezhnev after a sex-change operation. She told him nothing.

  There were no chairs left in the crowded waiting room. Kevin touched me on the shoulder and led me outside. The din of traffic, the warped minor-tone DOOT-doot of approaching ambulances, the confusion of the loading dock, made conversation relatively secure.

  I said, “What was that all about?”

  “Beats me,” Kevin said. “Those fellows were Chechens, hired men.”

  “Whose hired men?”

  “There’s a fatwah on you. Did you know that?”

  “I’d heard something about it.”

  “It could be connected to that,” Kevin said. “There’s a big reward for you. Or it could be something else. You did make enemies in Moscow.”

  “And you just happened to be in Budapest and decided to come to the rescue in the nick of time?”

  “Actually, no. We were watching over you.”

  “Thanks a lot. But why?”

  Before he could answer, I saw the doctor through the glass door. Kevin saw her too. He said, “Meet me at midnight on the bridge by the coffeehouse where you met Harley today.”

  Then he turned on his heel and walked briskly away toward the parking lot. I went inside. The doctor wore a long, white medical coat with her name, Józsa Fodor, embroidered above the pocket. She had the wary unwavering eyes of a woman who knew how attractive she was but wanted no sign from me that I might have noticed this, too.

  In staccato American English she said, “Your friend has had an episode of ventrical atrial fibrillation. He will recover.”

  She waited for a question, and when I asked none, kept talking. “His pulse was below thirty, his blood pressure very low. He had no injuries except for a small cut on his nose. Can you explain that?”

  “No.”

  “We have given him drugs to restore the rhythm of the heart and thin the blood. He could have a stroke. He should have a pacemaker-defibrillator implanted. But in America, where it will be covered by Medicare. European pacemakers cannot be monitored properly in America.”

  “You trained in the States?”

  Instead of answering the question she said, with strong eye contact for emphasis, “He should be more careful in the future.”

  I quite agreed. “Clearly he should take better care of himself,” I said. “When may I see him, Doctor?”

  “Now, if you wish. He will stay in the hospital tonight. Tomorrow he’ll be released, barring complications, which I do not anticipate.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Come with me.”

  She showed me to his door and left us alone. Harley was propped up in bed. His color was a little better than it had been in the alley, but he looked old and exhausted. He was hooked up to an intravenous tube and a heart monitor. His thin hair was disheveled, his sharp collarbones stretched his parchment skin. He looked up at me with milky eyes.

  I said, “Sorry about all this, Harley. My fault.”

  “Seemed like a good idea at the time,” Harley said. “What happened to those fellows? D’you wring their necks?”

  “Didn’t have to. The cavalry arrived.”

  “Ours or theirs?”

  “Kevin and a couple of his commandos came to the rescue. He said the whole thing was just a coincidence.”

  “He did? You’d better have a talk with that boy, Horace. He needs counselin’.”

  Harley’s voice trailed off even before he dropped the final g. His eyes closed. His mouth fell open. He uttered a wordless gargle. Frightened, I spoke his name. When he didn’t answer I stuck my head out the door and shouted for the doctor. She came at the run, ringlets bouncing, but Harley had merely fallen asleep.

  6

  I met Kevin on the bridge at the appointed hour. The murky city seemed to be sound asleep. Street lamps traced the outline of a hill with a bulbous church steeple at its summit. During the Soviet occupation, Harley had told me, this bridge had been such an ideal rendezvous point for spies and counterrevolutionaries and subversive lovers that the secret police had planted microphones in the railings. Under Communism there had not been enough traffic noise to interfere with the mikes. Evidently Kevin had never heard this story or believed that the new democratic Hungary had torn out the wiring, because when I asked him again why he had Harley under surveillance, why he had gone into the business of rescuing us, and what I was supposed to think of him, he began to talk as if there were no tomorrow.

  “Look,” he said. “You’re being tracked. Every phone call you make, every flight you book, every car you rent, every person you meet shows up on the screen. Example: Yesterday you met with Marie Károlyi, a former party girl of Yuri Andropov’s, among other enemies of humanity, and every word of your conversation, which lasted two hours and forty-two minutes, was picked up by a transmitter. You’re on somebody else’s turf, trampling on the footprints, sir. They want you off it.”

  I said, “Who wants me off it?”

  “It’s not just you. It’s the whole gang of you. The Over the Hill Gang—that’s what
they call you guys. They’re very annoyed.”

  “I’ve got the picture. Now let me ask you again, Who is They ?”

  He said, “The system.”

  “Ah, the Keystone spooks. For whom you’re the designated messenger?”

  Kevin winced. “The world has changed,” he said. “No matter what you and your chums used to be, you’re amateurs now. You’re out of date, out of the loop, senile, a danger to yourselves and everybody else. After all, we’re talking about nuclear weapons.”

  “You concede that Ibn Awad has nuclear weapons?”

  “I’m talking about the hypothesis. That’s one of the objections to you. You’ve got this hypothesis you’re trying to prove instead of relying on cold facts.”

  Cold facts, in my experience, mean about as much in relation to one another as a spoonful of iron filings stuck to a magnet. It is what people actually do that counts, not what you think you know about their intentions. I said, “Is that your personal objection?”

  Kevin smiled. He said, “You mentioned a fabulous one-time offer in the message you left for me.”

  “That seems to have been bad timing,” I said. “Maybe I’ll get back to you.”

  Kevin nodded and handed me an engraved calling card: Mr. Osborn Denison. A number with an unfamiliar country code was written on the back.

  “If you do, use this number,” Kevin said. “Call on a land line, from outside the United States.”

  My turn to smile. Was it was possible that I had made a friend?

  7

  My German was never more than adequate. During my apprentice tour in Frankfurt, English-speaking German assets—supercilious veterans of the Abwehr who acted, not without reason, as if their American handlers were working for them instead of viceversa—did all the sidewalk work. I scarcely ever set foot outside the I. G. Farben building. After staying awake most of the night with Lori’s translation of the Amphora Scroll and my German-English dictionary, I realized that deciphering the manuscript was beyond me. I would need help from someone I could trust and trust absolutely. A member of the family. I made two reservations on an afternoon flight to Washington.