The Once and Future Spy

by Robert Littell

  The Admiral laughed dryly. “I didn’t think the late lamented Director would have turned you loose to operate on your own. It wasn’t his style. When he knew he was dying of cancer, he would have passed you along to someone he trusted—someone in the superstructure who massages your ego and tells you what a fine job you’re doing when your spirits are low.” Toothacher slipped into his father-confessor role. “You want to tell me who it is?”

  “I can’t. He made me swear.”

  The Admiral acted hurt.

  “Honestly,” Wanamaker said. “I would if I could, but I can’t.” When the Admiral didn’t say anything, Wanamaker asked, “What do we do now?”

  “When’s the last time you laid eyes on Sibley?”

  Wanamaker told him about the Yale reunion the previous spring. “It all fits. The asshole wanted to know what I was up to.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him to fuck off.”

  “That must have been when he decided to zero in on your phone.”

  “I told him something else,” Wanamaker remembered. “I told him if he found out what I was up to, I’d have to get him murdered.”

  Walking in lockstep, they started back across the bridge toward the car. “During my watch,” the Admiral mused quietly, “my collaborators never really understood what made me tick. I didn’t get my kicks out of fighting the cold war. I wanted to win it. You know something, Roger—you don’t mind if I call you Roger?—it’s not too late. If we bring off Stuff tingle, it could turn the whole ball game around. It could set off an avalanche of victories.” Toothacher brought his arm up again and let it settle across Wanamaker’s shoulders; community of interest, in the end, was stronger than physical repugnance. “Now that we’re in this thing together,” he said, his tone as fatherly as he could push it, “why don’t you concentrate on Stufftingle and let me worry about the author of those love letters.” In the darkness the Admiral’s bulging eyes blinked furiously. “Aside from everything else, I have a personal score to settle with friend Sibley.”

  23

  The raspy voice of the thickset man filtered through a haze of tobacco smoke. “Be careful,” he warned. “There are things I want to know and things I don’t want to know. I leave it to your intuition to distinguish between the two.”

  Wanamaker could barely contain his excitement. Words spilled out. “The Admiral’s identified the author of the love letters,” he announced. He wondered if the thickset man had had the men’s room checked for bugs. As a precaution, he turned on the cold water faucet full blast. It occurred to him that the thickset man might think Wanamaker didn’t trust him, so he began to rinse his hands under the running water.

  At the next sink the thickset man coughed up a grunt of satisfaction. He studied his image in the mirror as if he hadn’t seen it for a long time.

  Wanamaker glanced uneasily at the door. “You sure we won’t be interrupted?” He pictured the two young men in loose-fitting sport jackets blocking with their bodies the door to the men’s room. “What if somebody has to pee very badly?”

  “My people won’t prevent him from urinating. They will only prevent him from urinating here.”

  Wanamaker opened his mouth to giggle at what he thought was a joke. Then he decided it hadn’t been meant as a joke and aborted the laugh. “About the love letters, the guy who sent them’s named Silas Sibley. You want to know how he ticked to Stufftingle? Or how the Admiral ticked to him?”

  Sucking thoughtfully on his pipe, the thickset man said, “No.”

  Leaving the faucet running, Wanamaker began drying his hands on a paper towel. “Then all that’s left to talk about is what we’re going to do to neutralize the leak.”

  The thickset man pursed his lips and shook his head.

  “You don’t want to know that either?”

  “Definitely not. The only thing that interests me is Stufftingle. All I want to know is that it is back on track. How you get it back on track I leave in your very professional, and I assume very discreet, hands. I don’t really give a damn what you people do, so long as you don’t do it in the street and frighten old ladies walking their spaniels.”

  “Yeah, well, there is still the small matter of locating the guy who wrote the love letters in the two weeks and two days left to us before the Ides, but my Admiral friend doesn’t foresee any great problem there because the asshole who wrote them doesn’t know we know he wrote them.”

  The thickset man seemed disturbed about something. “We?”

  “The Admiral and me.”

  “The Admiral and you?”

  “The Admiral figured out what Stufftingle was on his own—”

  The thickset man turned on Wanamaker. “Someone outside your cell is aware of Stufftingle? I thought it was clearly understood—”

  “There’s nothing to get nervous about because the Admiral’s all for it. He thinks it’s a first-class idea, something we should have done years ago. You have to understand about the Admiral. The thing that motivates him is nostalgia. He’s nostalgic for the days when an agent used a code name and left a sample of his Morse “fist” on file so the enemy couldn’t send phony messages over his call sign. He’s nostalgic for when everyone knew who the enemy was and anything you did to weaken or embarrass him or confuse him was legitimate, and you didn’t have to go sucking up to the turkeys from Congressional Oversight. Listen, the Admiral’s one of us. He’s offered to see the business of the leak—” Wanamaker started selecting his words carefully so as not to tell the thickset man something he didn’t want to know—”through to its logical conclusion, if you get what I mean without my actually going and spelling it out.”

  “He’s going to plug the leak?”

  “Him and Huxstep and Mildred. Right.”

  “What will happen if they fail?”

  “The Admiral’s anticipated that contingency. He’s cooked up a worst-case cover story. If the leaker goes public, we’ll claim he has a history of mental instability. The Admiral has a shrink up his sleeve who’s preparing a written diagnosis—schizophrenia, whatever. If we need to, we’ll pull that out of the files to protect ourselves.” Wanamaker shrugged a shoulder. “It’ll be our word against that of a lunatic.”

  “Does this Admiral friend of yours”—Wanamaker didn’t miss the sarcasm here—”know about me?”

  “He’s no dummy, the Admiral. He could find his way through a labyrinth of half-truths blindfolded. He’s figured out I must be reporting to someone in the superstructure, but he doesn’t know who. And you can bet he’s not going to find out from me.”

  “That is precisely what I am betting,” the thickset man remarked. He flashed a thin smile at his reflection in the mirror and seemed genuinely gratified when his expression smiled back at him. When he spoke, he appeared to be addressing the reflection in the mirror. “Thank you for bringing me up-to-date,” he told it, and he reached into his jacket pocket to turn down the hearing aid.

  “The pleasure—” Wanamaker started to say, but he saw that the thickset man could no longer hear him, and didn’t waste breath finishing the sentence.

  24

  While Huxstep worked his way through an enormous ring of keys, the Admiral, wearing spit-shined oxfords and a jumpsuit, checked in with Mildred. “Traviata, this is Parsifal. Do you read me?”

  Mildred’s voice, sounding as if it originated underwater, filtered back over the walkie-talkie. “Parsifal, this is Traviata. I read you five by five, Admiral.”

  The Admiral winced. “We use code names like Parsifal and Traviata,” he lectured the walkie-talkie, “in case anyone is listening in on this channel. That way they won’t be able to identify who is speaking.”

  Mildred clicked on after a long pause. “My tradecraft is rusty, but I’m a fast learner,” she said.

  “Any activity on the street?” the Admiral asked Mildred.

  The walkie-talkie burst into life. “Quiet as a morgue, Parsifal.”

  At the door of the Weede
r’s apartment, Huxstep growled, “I think I got it.” The key he had slipped into the lock clicked audibly as he turned it. “One more to go and we’re inside,” he told Toothacher.

  The Admiral ambled over to the head of the stairs and looked down five flights to the front door. The three floors directly under the loft where Sibley lived were rented by mail-order houses. The young woman who lived on the bottom floor had a backlog of mail piled up in front of her door. He and Huxstep appeared to have the building to themselves. And there was Mildred, huddled in the Chevrolet outside, to warn them in the unlikely event that Sibley, who seemed to have left town two days before, turned up.

  Another of Huxstep’s keys fitted perfectly into the top lock and it clicked open. He eased the door back on its hinges with the palm of his large hand and listened. The Admiral, armed with a flashlight, tiptoed up behind him. “Opening locks,” Huxstep muttered, “is like taking candy from a baby.”

  The Admiral, his bulging eyes rimmed with raspberry red, whispered, “I have trouble opening them even when I have the key.”

  “It’s all in the wrist,” Huxstep observed in a bored voice.

  Toothacher glanced quickly at Huxstep to see if he was playing with words. It would have been out of character, or at least out of the character the Admiral was familiar with. Huxstep’s face was not so much innocent as empty. Nothing hidden there, Toothacher decided. He pushed past Huxstep into Sibley’s apartment and switched on his flashlight. The beam stabbed into the corners of a long, narrow loft with uneven knotty pine floorboards and brick walls and a boarded-over skylight. The loft smelled (the Admiral noticed instantly) as if it had been aired and cleaned regularly. No hint, not the faintest, of mildew, of dust. And not an ashtray in sight. If it weren’t for an old grudge, the Admiral could have almost liked the man the archivist had referred to as “the Weeder.” Near the back wall, behind an open kitchen space, Toothacher could make out a neatly made double bed covered with a cashmere shawl. A small black-and-white television set stood on a stool facing the bed. An Eames chair and a footstool and a reading lamp were off to one side. An enormous gilt-edged mirror was leaning against the wall near the Eames chair; the Weeder, the Admiral realized, had positioned the mirror so that he could glance up from his book and see himself reading. Which raised the intriguing possibility that Silas Sibley, like so many others, related to an image of himself he invented for the mirror more than an inner self that existed independently of the mirror.

  Toothacher’s flashlight played over some bookcases built against an entire wall facing the open kitchen. “Start there,” he instructed Huxstep. Grunting, Huxstep headed for the back of the loft. The Admiral spotted a long table that obviously served the Weeder as a desk.

  Smiling to himself in anticipation, he settled into the wooden desk chair with the high cane back. Every item on the table seemed to be in its place. There was a color photograph, in a silver frame, of a small boy with long blond hair building sand castles on a beach. There was a fish fossil that doubled as a paperweight. There was a cut glass inkwell filled with ink and an old-fashioned pen with a gold nib jutting from a cut glass holder. Next to the inkwell was a lined grade school notebook. Toothacher reached for the notebook and began thumbing through it. There were alternate entries, one written in the flowing hand of someone who prided himself on penmanship, the other printed in rigid block letters crowding onto each line as if space were rationed.

  “I assume,” read one notation written in rigid letters, “from the amount of tissues in the wastebasket that you have a head cold. Don’t say I didn’t warn you about bathing in a bathroom with a broken radiator. I’m leaving some homeopathic pills, you dissolve two of them under your tongue four times a day, and some thyme for infusions, drink all you can, eat also, you starve a fever, you feed a cold. And for God’s sake get the radiator fixed. Also have you given some thought to what I said last week about aspirins?”

  The notation was signed, “Yours sincerely, Mrs. Doolittle.”

  “Many thanks,” said the next notation written in flowing script, “for the homeopathic pills and the thyme. I admit to feeling better already. As for the aspirin a day, I feel I am too young to worry about heart attacks. But I appreciate your mentioning it. I left a pile of shirts on the bed—if you have time, you can iron them. If not, not.”

  The entry was signed, “S. Sibley.”

  Another entry, in rigid printed letters, read: “The vacuum cleaner needs bags. The iron needs distilled water. The kitchen needs paper towels and liquid soap, no matter what the ads say one brand is as good as another so buy whichever’s cheapest. I need a vacation but what with one thing or another I can’t afford to take it and wouldn’t know where to go if I did, but thanks for suggesting it, you are definitely my kind of white liberal, I don’t mean that as an insult, just the opposite. Yours sincerely, Mrs. Doolittle.”

  The Admiral flipped to the last entry in the book, written in Sibley’s flowing script. “Tomorrow I’m off and running for three weeks,” it said. “With any luck I may be able to fill in some missing links. If you can air the loft and vacuum before I return, I’d appreciate it. S. Sibley.” There was a postscript: “Could you check the box downstairs and bring up any mail—I don’t want to advertise that nobody’s home.”

  Huxstep called from the back of the loft, “There must be two, three hundred books here. There’s a hundred more stacked on the floor of the closet. What you want me to do with them all?”

  “Hold each one by the spine and shake it—see if anything falls out.”

  Huxstep, muttering under his breath about how there had to be better ways of making a living, went back to the bookshelves. The Admiral turned to the wooden filing cabinet next to the table. He pulled open a drawer, saw typing paper, opened another, found envelopes, opened a third, discovered a thick folder tied with a ribbon. He set it on the desk, undid the ribbon, opened the folder. Inside was what appeared to be the carbon copy of a typed manuscript. The first pages contained a quotation:

  INSTRUCTIONS for the inlifting of MEN

  … let our manners diftinguifh us

  from our enemies, as much as the caufe

  are engaged in.

  IN PROVINCIAL CONGRESS

  at New York June 20th 1775

  Intrigued, the Admiral turned to the second page and read, “For starters, I’ll do my man Nate: In my mind’s eye I see him still dancing leaf in the rebellion’s gusts.”

  The perspiration on Toothacher’s palms, the tingling in his scalp told him he had come across something significant. The Admiral leaned eagerly over the manuscript and plunged on. He heard the beat of the kettledrum on the bowling green. He passed “Whose truth? Which truth?” He witnessed the execution of Sergeant Hickey. He came to the part where Nate takes two steps forward. His friends try to talk him out of volunteering. Nate persists. The Commander-in-Chief. not a very sympathetic figure, personally briefs him. “I need to know what the lobsters are up to.” Exit the Commander-in-Chief. When last seen, the Weeder’s man Nate is selecting patriotic phrases from Addison’s Cato to use as codes.

  The Admiral looked up. E. Everard Linkletter, his archivist friend, had filled him in on Silas Sibley. This Nate he was writing about was a distant relative of his and a lifelong obsession. It struck Toothacher that Sibley was doing to Nate what he, the Admiral, was doing to Sibley, walking back the cat on an operation that had gone wrong. Sibley was taking Nate’s mission apart piece by piece to discover why his illustrious ancestor ended up the way he did. “I’m off and running for three weeks,” Sibley had written in the notebook to his cleaning lady. “With any luck I may be able to fill in some missing links.”

  Off and running where? The Ides of March was two weeks away. If he and Huxstep and Mildred could catch up with Sibley and neutralize him before then, Wanamaker could go ahead with Stufftingle. But the Ides of March was the absolute limit. Kabir was being closed down permanently on the fifteenth. The faculty and the atomic facility were being
transferred to a remote base in the countryside. It would take Wanamaker years to smuggle enough uranium into the new site and mount the operation again. Faced with this delay, the locals in Tehran, not to mention Wanamaker’s contact in the superstructure, would lose their nerve, would scurry back to their holes. A great occasion to make the world more congenial to American interests would have been lost forever.

  The Admiral’s flashlight played over the desk. Under the fossil paperweight was a pile of unopened envelopes that the cleaning lady, Yours sincerely, Mrs. Doolittle, must have brought up. Toothacher leafed through them. Most of them were bills, bank statements, advertisements. Two were personal letters. Toothacher held the envelopes up to the flashlight one at a time, but he couldn’t make out the writing because the letters inside were folded. He reached into a pocket of his jumpsuit and produced a length of bamboo that had been carefully split not quite to the end. It was a trick of the trade the Admiral had picked up from an agent in Hong Kong. Working the bamboo into the first envelope through a small opening at the corner of the flap, Toothacher pinched the folded letter in the split bamboo. He carefully turned the length of bamboo so that the letter wound itself around it, then pulled both the bamboo and the letter out through the small opening. He unwound the letter, flattened it on the desk and read it. It was from the director of Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven. “This will confirm our phone conversation of yesterday,” it said. “Browse till the cows come home, Silas. If you stop by my home Sunday morning, I’ll give you the back door keys. You’ll have the place to yourself.”

  Toothacher checked a Master Plan of Leads to Run Down appended to the Nate manuscript. Sure enough there was an entry marked “Beinecke Stacks—A. Hamilton’s missing letter to Nate’s brother Enoch could be buried in the uncatalogued Hamilton papers.”

  Using the length of bamboo, the Admiral returned the letter to its envelope and extracted the second letter. Unrolled from the split bamboo and flattened on the desk, it was cryptic to the point of rudeness. “On the phone you were very persuasive,” it said. “But I’m having second thoughts. My privacy is more important than your wild-goose chase, at least to me. Forget my yes. Please don’t come. Please.” There was no signature on the letter, no return address on the envelope. The stamp had been canceled at Concord, Massachusetts. On Sibley’s Master Plan of Leads to Run Down, the “pot of gold at the end of the rainbow” entry read: Molly’s diary—Concord descendants?