The Old Boys

by Charles McCarry

  “I was about ten. And I didn’t think it up. It came to me.”

  I said, “You were an imaginative child.”

  “Was I? I wonder.”

  A figure approached out of the shadows—a middle-aged woman in a Gucci babushka and a Burberry coat, reeking of whiskey, staggering slightly on high heels and glaring at Zarah and me as her yapping miniature schnauzer tugged her down the street.

  Zarah and I walked back to her house. Fortunately, she knew the way out of the strange neighborhood into which we had wandered. I had in my pocket the only copy of her grandmother’s translation of the Amphora Scroll. While still in Budapest I had realized, out of the blue, that Zarah was the person—the only possible person—to translate her grandmother’s German version of the Amphora Scroll. Now I handed her Lori’s manuscript, still in its oilskin packet. She opened the packet and saw the handwriting.

  “Whose handwriting is this?”

  I told her.

  I said, “Can you translate this into English?”

  She read another page, then nodded. We walked back to her house in silence. I left the manuscript in her care. I will tell you a curious thing: I had not bothered to make a copy of this unique and irreplaceable document. This contravened the habits of a lifetime, but there you are. I seemed to be turning into a Christopher, suddenly trusting impulse in the same blind way I had always before put my faith in calculation.

  5

  Though I had seen most of them one by one and talked to them all by telephone, usually to my great benefit, the Old Boys had not met with everyone present since our last get-together at my house less than a month before. Time had flown for me because I had been having such a good time in Xinjiang and Moscow and Jerusalem, but I sensed that it had dragged a bit for some of the others. It was time for a meeting. Despite my deeply held belief, based on hours and hours of boredom, that meetings of more than two people are thieves of time in which nothing important is ever accomplished, I asked Charley Hornblower to set one up. In the circumstances we could hardly get together at my house, so we put on neckties and gathered at the club in time for tea.

  The clubhouse was more or less deserted between lunch and dinner except for a few shabby derelicts like ourselves. Because Ben Childress and David Wong were in the field, there were only four of us at the meeting—Jack, Harley, Charley and myself. I was still a member in good standing. While in jail, in fact, I had been charged the reduced dues of an out-of-town member. Naturally it was Paul, to whose address all my mail was forwarded, who paid these for me. The club rules said nothing about banishing convicts as long as they did not commit the mortal sin of discussing club business in their testimony or anywhere else where the newspapers might get hold of it.

  We met in the billiards room, which had no windows and was better heated than some other parts of the old mansion. As the ranking used-to-be among us, Jack presided. Jack loved meetings. He was bursting with questions. As so often in the past, the object of his curiosity—I might even say his exasperation—was me.

  Before he could launch into what I knew would his lengthy list of whispered questions, I unwrapped my pound of plastique and slammed it onto the billiards table. All present recognized it immediately for what it was. No one asked a question but all eyes were upon me—resentful eyes, because I had violated the prime rule of all meetings: never surprise anybody.

  I told them the tale of the bomb and filled them in on the rest of my adventures. Still there was no commentary—no “Gosh, Horace! That was a close call!” No “What kind of person would do such a thing?” We all knew exactly what kind of person would do such a thing. But there are no answers to empty questions and we had all been taught never to ask them.

  Harley said, “Are you movin’?”

  “No. Under the circumstances it would be unethical to rent the place or sell it. Anyway, I’m hardly ever there and anyway, they probably won’t try the same thing twice.”

  “But apparently you would,” Jack said. “Horace, what’s this we hear from Ben about running a dangle operation on Ibn Awad?”

  A dangle, I should explain, is an operation in which one dangles somebody or something before an adversary in the hope that he’ll take the bait. If he does, the benefits can be considerable. If, for example, the infamous Aldrich Ames had been a dangle instead of a genuine rotten apple, he could have falsely identified the Russians’ best operatives as American agents and smiled while the Russians fed them into the fiery furnace. Instead, of course, he fingered actual American assets, and they were the ones who were cremated alive.

  I said, “What has Ben told you?”

  “That you’re going to dangle the Amphora Scroll.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “What if it doesn’t exist?”

  “It exists, all right.”

  Jack’s blank brown eyes examined me as if reading the big E on an eye chart. He knew me. And I knew him.

  “You realize that they’re going to come after you?”

  “It’s beginning to look like they already have.”

  “Maybe,” Jack said. “I’d just like to have your assurance that you have no plans to expose yourself any further than you already have.”

  “No such plan exists.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Jack said. “As I’m sure every man here is, too.”

  The expression on his face—more accurately, the absence of expression on his face—told me that he did not really believe me. The other faces in the room were just as bland as his. If Ibn Awad decided to kill me, he’d have to kill us all, and septuagenarians are no more philosophical about a bullet to the brain than anyone else. Less so, if anything. The closer one is to the inevitable, the more desirable postponement becomes. The six of us were probably paying more, collectively, for pills than we had ever spent as a group on alcohol, and that’s saying a lot.

  Time to change the subject, Charley thought. “We should stop using the satellite phones,” he said. “Those fellows in Moscow, whoever they are, got hold of Horace’s number and called him up. They followed him to Budapest. Didn’t they also tell you they were intercepting all our calls, Horace?”

  “They said that someone was,” I replied. “But I doubt if that’s the fact. There’s just too much conversation bouncing off satellites and relay towers, millions of different instruments tuning up twenty-four hours a day, for anyone to hear half a dozen harmonicas at the back of the orchestra.”

  “Vivid metaphor,” Jack said. He was annoyed. “Then how did they get your number?”

  “Maybe they checked out the stores in the Washington area, found the one where I bought the phones, and leaned on the manager until he remembered he was a good American and gave them the number.”

  “You didn’t pay cash for the phones?”

  “Sure I did, but that’s a suspicious act in an age when every honest man pays with plastic. However, if you described me to a clerk and hinted that I was a terrorist, don’t you think he’d remember me?”

  Jack said, “You’ve always been noticeable, Horace.”

  What was the matter with him? I wasn’t the only one who wondered. Harley Waters, pale and shrunken, had been silent through all this. Now he said, “I’ve got a suggestion. Jack, Horace—stop bickerin’. It’s bad for the digestion.”

  After throwing off this spark, Harley retreated into silence. He slumped in his chair, eyes averted, mind elsewhere.

  I said, “There’s an unreported development. Thanks to Harley, we have in our hands what we think is an original copy of Lori Christopher’s translation of the Amphora Scroll.”

  Charley said, “Translation into what language?”

  “German.”

  “I can handle that.”

  “I know you can, Charley. I’ve asked Zarah Christopher to do the first translation into English. We’ll want you to do an independent reading.”

  Jack said, “Did you say Zarah Christopher?”

  “Yes. She’s fluent in German.”
/>   “She is? How did that happen?”

  “She studied it as a child. She wanted to surprise her father when they met. And then she polished it by talking to Paul after they were reunited.”

  “But she’s not part of this group.”

  “True, Jack. But she’s a Christopher. The translation belongs to the Christopher family if it belongs to anyone.”

  “Lovely sentiment, Horace.”

  It isn’t often that I am charged with sentimentality. I said, “My thought was that Zarah might see things, understand things that a non-Christopher might miss.”

  “Understand or romanticize?”

  Harley stood up. “I’m leavin’,” he said.

  I didn’t blame him. Charley said, “Come on, Harley, we need you.”

  “Nothin’ personal,” Harley said. His voice squeaked. He coughed to clear his throat. “I’ve got a doctor’s appointment in half an hour.”

  Jack offered him a lift.

  “No thanks, I’ll take shank’s mare,” Harley said. Although he seemed unsteady on his feet, he was out the door before I could speak to him.

  “Look, I’m going, too,” I said. “He shouldn’t be alone.”

  Jack stood up at the same moment I did. “I’ll join you,” he said.

  We had no trouble catching up to Harley, who was walking across the broad avenue so slowly that the light changed before he made it to the opposite sidewalk. Taxi drivers from all over the Muslim world blew their horns. Most of them had never seen a clock in their native villages. Now America had worked its magic and time was money. They were shaking their fists at this marooned old codger who was robbing them of precious seconds.

  Jack and I dodged through traffic to reach Harley. Jack, always the one with presence of mind, grabbed a taxi. We got Harley inside. He put his head back on the seat and closed his eyes. He looked bad—little blue veins on the lids, a visible pulse in his temple. Shortness of breath. Sweat on his forehead. Pallor.

  “G. W. emergency room, fast,” Jack said to the driver in a baritone so resonant that it startled me. Anything louder than a whisper would have done the same, coming from Jack.

  It even roused Harley. “Didn’t know you had all those decibels in you, Jack,” he said, in a voice so labored that I could barely make out the words.

  6

  We were surrounded in the waiting room by the wretched of the city. Because most of them talked nonstop on cell phones or to each other, we knew that gunshot wounds and knife wounds and overdoses and the sudden onset of labor pains were on their minds. Even Jack understood that these people had no interest in eavesdropping even if their hearing was keen enough to pick his words out of the hubbub.

  Half an hour later, as we waited for a doctor to bring us news of Harley, I said, “Jack, what was all that about, back in the club?”

  “We’re all concerned,” Jack said. “You’re fixated on the Christophers.”

  “And that signifies what?”

  “It makes you unpredictable. Zarah is the last of the Christophers. You regard that as reason enough to break security and entrust her with the most important piece of evidence we’ve yet discovered. And you do this without consulting anybody.”

  Jack’s summation amounted to an impeccably accurate reading of the situation.

  I said, “I’m not sure I understand why this should be so disturbing to you. She’s not going to mail a copy to Ibn Awad.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Then please tell me what the point is, Jack.”

  Jack stared at me as if confounded by my thick-headedness. His face worked—actually changed expression. In anyone else this would have been a sign of emotion. But Jack?

  He inhaled. “I did the damage control when Zarah came back from that shambles that David Patchen led her into,” he said. “That, too, was a dangle op. As director of the Outfit—director of the Outfit—Patchen himself was the primary bait. She went along with him—she was part of the dangle—I suppose because she wanted to be like her dad.”

  “And?”

  “She had a bad time. Patchen set it up so that he’d be kidnapped. The timing went wrong and she was kidnapped with him. He had some demented notion that if he was taken and tortured the Outfit would be so compromised that they’d have to reorganize it. Take it away from the presidency. Make it independent. Start over. He’d save it from its enemies.”

  I said, “That’s exactly what happened.”

  “Yes. And hasn’t it all turned out wonderfully?”

  “Not so great for you and me, granted.”

  “It didn’t turn out so great for Zarah, either,” Jack said. “Do you have any idea what happened to her?”

  I did. In fact I knew exactly what had happened to her. But I had heard the facts as a family secret, confided by Paul. I had no business sharing it, even with Jack Philindros. Besides, I didn’t want to hear it again.

  I said, “No need to confide.”

  Jack ignored my words. He said, “They shot her full of dope and ganged her while she was unconscious. She had no memory of this.”

  His formerly impassive face was unmolding as if something under the skin was about to burst forth. I might have said any number of things at this point to make things easier for him. But there was good reason to say nothing.

  “It was my job to tell her what happened,” he said.

  Again I offered no encouragement. It would have done no good to tell him to shut up. Jack was spilling a secret. This was a rare, maybe even a unique event in his life.

  He said, “I had to tell her. Two of the rapists were HIV positive. Paul and his rescue party shot them all dead, but it showed up in the autopsies.”

  He looked ravaged.

  I said, “Did you give her a blood test first?”

  Jack said, “We would have to have had her permission to do that.”

  “Needed her permission?”

  “It’s the law.”

  “But she had the test?”

  “Yes, it came back negative.” Jack said. “But she didn’t believe the results.”

  I was speechless. I had always wondered what genius had given Zarah the news. Jack Philindros, tomb of discretion, was the last person I would have suspected. At this point, in the nick of time, Charley appeared.

  Harley was going to be all right. They had given him a pacemaker.

  Exactly what the Hungarian doctor ordered. Charley was even happier than usual because he was the bearer of good tidings. And so he should have been.

  “When are they going to do this?” I asked.

  “They’re doing it right now,” Charley said. “If all goes well he can go home tomorrow. Harley will be right as rain. He can come to my place.”

  After Charley left, Jack said, “Look, I’m sorry about the outburst,” he said. “I guess I didn’t know how much that business about Zarah had affected me until I started to talk about it.”

  “Then it’s just as well you got it out of your system,” I said.

  “Maybe. But she shouldn’t have to go through anything like that again.”

  “I agree,” I said. “But it’s up to her, isn’t it?”

  “That’s probably what Patchen told himself,” Jack said.

  “He was a headquarters man.”

  So was Jack, of course. Even when he was posted overseas he stayed behind a desk in an embassy while third parties made the messes and cleaned them up. He just read about it, wrote about it, and signed the vouchers. For that matter, I wasn’t so very different.

  Jack said, “‘He was a headquarters man?’ What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Blood and ink don’t smell anything alike.”

  Jack looked me over, shrewd eyes the color of brown eggshells and just as expressive.

  7

  By now it was rush hour. The automobiles on Massachusetts Avenue alone, bumper to bumper from Union Station to the Maryland line, were probably worth more, collectively, than the gross national product of most of th
e countries that owned embassies on Embassy Row. I have never in my life commuted. Like Harley, shank’s mare has been my transport and I’ve been lucky enough, thanks to taxpayers like these idle folks in their idling Fords and Toyotas, to live most of my life in cities where walking is a pleasure.

  Washington is one of those towns, if only in the cool weeks between mid-October and mid-March when open-air exercise is possible without drowning in your own sweat. Right now I was walking past the vice president’s fortified residence, on my way to the Wisconsin Avenue Whole Foods store to buy some groceries and be snubbed by the politically fastidious regular clientele, who could tell at a glance if one’s shopping cart contained vegetables contaminated by chemicals and pesticides or chickens that had not ranged free before their heads were chopped off.

  I felt oxygen-deprived after breathing exhaust fumes during nearly an hour of uphill walking. No wonder the drivers looked so dazed, so overcome. Someone had fallen into step beside me. I looked over my shoulder and saw two more pedestrians, one about ten meters to the rear, the other across the street. Our old friends A, B, and C again. This time they weren’t Russians or Chinese or clean-cut Ohio boys with Glocks in their jeans, but fellows in matching dark raincoats and polyester tweed hats.

  As I turned into the cross street that led to Wisconsin Avenue, the one beside me, a stocky broad-shouldered man with Nixonian five o’clock shadow, looked up at me and smiled.

  “Hi,” he said.

  Let’s call him “A.”

  I said, “Good evening.”

  A said, “My friends and I would like it if you can join us in for a drink. Our place is just around the corner.”

  “Very kind of you,” I said. “But I have some shopping to do.”

  “This won’t take long. For old times’ sake.”

  “Maybe some other time.”

  “Right now would be better for us.”

  A was showing me something. It was one of those flip-open leather cases you see on television when federal agents flash their ID and everyone either becomes cooperative or starts shooting. Plainly A regarded it as a talisman. I took it out of his hand—no tug of war; he let me have it. A picture, unmistakably A, a fictitious name, Robert F. Gordon, and the official name of the Outfit embossed above its official seal. What, no badge?