The Once and Future Spy

by Robert Littell

  ‘Tell him-” Snow had a sudden thought. “Have you worked with Silas a long time?”

  “I can’t talk about work.”

  “Can you say whether you worked here in Washington or in New York? Surely that’s not a state secret.”

  Wesker blinked rapidly but didn’t reply.

  Snow tried a different approach. “Silas told me what you and he did.”

  Wesker shook his head. “He oughtn’t to have done that. The Company gets all hot under the collar if we talk about what we do with anyone who’s not cleared to listen.”

  Snow insisted, “I have to know if he was telling the truth.”

  Wesker arched his eyebrows as if to say he was genuinely sorry he couldn’t help her.

  “Look, I’ll tell you what he told me,” Snow said, “and you keep looking at me if you can confirm it.”

  “I can’t do that-”

  Snow decided to use Fargo’s version of the truth. “Silas said he worked with computers,” she began.

  Wesker continued to look into her eyes.

  “Something about doing a computer study of the serial numbers of a certain kind of equipment.”

  Wesker looked at her, blinking uncomfortably.

  “Of tanks.” When Wesker didn’t look away she ventured, “Of Russian tanks, actually.”

  Wesker shifted his gaze to one side. Snow said, “Oh!”

  “Hey, don’t take my looking away for anything. You made the rules of your little game, but I didn’t say I would play. I can’t divulge information on what we do. No way.”

  Snow smiled in appreciation. “I understand.”

  Wesker caught her smile. “I don’t think you do.” He laughed nervously. “For all I know you could be a Russian spy. So don’t go away thinking you know more than when you came. I just listened politely.”

  “Right,” Snow agreed. “And thanks.”

  “Oh, Jesus. Don’t for Christ’s sake thank me. I didn’t do anything.”

  At the door Snow turned to ask a question. “Did Silas ever mention an Admiral Toothacher to you?”

  Wesker shook his head stubbornly. “Wild horses couldn’t get me to answer any more of your questions.”

  Snow lay awake in her bed that night sorting through possibilities. Kabir College existed. So did Stuff tingle. Wesker seemed to say that the story about Silas studying serial numbers of Soviet tanks was phony, which meant that the story Silas told about running an eavesdropping operation was true. And someone did try to kill Silas by bringing down a building on his head; Snow had been there, had seen it with her own eyes, even if she hadn’t seen the Admiral and his two colleagues. Which meant that Silas had been telling the truth all along. She had been a fool to get in touch with Fargo, to believe the story they had cooked up about Silas being mentally disturbed; she would never forgive herself for delivering him into their hands. Silas was probably in a “hospital” all right, but it was no accident that Wesker hadn’t been allowed to see him. Silas had probably had a bad night-being quizzed by Company interrogators working in relays. A terrible thought occurred to Snow. They would have gotten their hands on the material Silas left in the dead drop, would be convinced he was a Russian spy. The Company’s board of directors, as Wesker called it, couldn’t afford to accuse Silas publicly and let him come to trial; couldn’t take the risk of Silas talking about Stufftingle in open court.

  Oh God, she thought, Silas would never be allowed to leave the hospital alive!

  What if she were to go to the newspapers and tell the whole story? No, that wouldn’t work. The Company would trot out evidence that Silas Sibley was stark raving mad or better still, that no one with that name worked for it; would talk the newspapers out of running the story; would even arrange things so that Snow herself wound up in that little “private” hospital of theirs. And that would be that.

  On the other hand, if she could get someone who knew about Stufftingle, who knew about the attempts on Silas’s life, to help her, she could try and strike a deal with the Company. If the board of directors could find it in their hearts to let Sibley go free, Silas and she would forget Stufftingle ever existed, would disappear.

  But who could help her? And why would he help her?

  A name came to her lips. She pronounced it out loud. “Admiral Toothacher!”

  Silas had once followed the Admiral, had discovered him burning the candle at both ends, after which the Company had preferred to quietly retire Toothacher rather than wash its dirty linen in public. If she could follow the Admiral and catch him burning that candle, it would give her the leverage she needed to talk Toothacher into helping her, into helping Silas.

  But before she could follow him she had to find him.

  She tried the Department of the Navy, Personnel Office, first thing in the morning, but was informed that it dealt only with people on active duty. The chief petty officer Snow spoke to suggested she try the Veterans Administration. A civilian time server there sent her around to the Office of Naval Reserve. “Sorry,” a woman wearing lieutenant junior grade stripes on the sleeves of her uniform informed Snow. “We don’t give out addresses.”

  “I don’t want to see the Admiral,” Snow explained earnestly. “I want to send him something. My husband admired Admiral Toothacher enormously. He served under him when the Admiral was captain of a destroyer. My husband died in an automobile accident”-it dawned on Snow that she was doing what the psychiatrist claimed Silas did, constructing a make-believe world using bits and pieces of the real world-”I was driving … that’s how I got this.” With her fingertips she traced the thin scar over her eye. The tears that brimmed in her eyes were real enough even if the story she told was part fiction.

  “I’m sorry about your husband-”

  Snow could see the woman was wavering. “Anyhow, he built this scale model of the destroyer, you see. In his will he left it to Admiral Toothacher. That’s why I’m trying to get his address-so I can send him the model of the destroyer.”

  The lieutenant screwed up her mouth, weighed the pros and cons, finally said, “Wait here a minute.” She went over to a computer terminal and punched in a name. A dossier flashed onto the screen. The lieutenant copied off an address on a slip of paper and handed it to Snow. “Your admiral retired to Guantánamo, Cuba, but he seems to have returned to Washington at some point.”

  Snow thanked her profusely.

  “Rules,” the lieutenant said, “are made to be bent.”

  The address the woman gave Snow turned out to be a seedy apartment hotel on lower Wisconsin. Snow bought a tiny Minox in a camera store, loaded it with very fast black-and-white film and installed herself in an all-night drugstore that had one long window on the street and another separating the store from the hotel lobby. Sipping coffee at the counter, Snow had a good view of the hotel’s giant revolving door and main desk. Night fell. Streetlights came on. Dozens of men came and went but none of them fit the description Silas had given her of the Admiral. One elderly man with snow-white hair sauntered out of the elevator around nine P.M. holding two white poodles on leashes, but he was too short and too fat to be called lanky. Snow ordered another cup of coffee, her fifth, slipped two dollar bills onto the counter and told the waitress to keep the change. Outside a heavy rain began to fall. The tired black woman behind the counter leaned across to Snow. “If you’re looking to turn a trick,” she said, “you probably came to the wrong hotel.”

  “I’m not looking to turn a trick,” Snow said. “I’m looking for a friend.”

  The waitress obviously didn’t believe her. “No skin off my nose whatever you’re doing,” she said.

  The hour hand on the clock in the lobby was just clicking onto ten P.M. when the elevator doors opened and a tall, lanky man emerged. Snow recognized him immediately. He was in his late fifties, with a mane of chalk-white hair, a slight stoop, pasty complexion. The Admiral ambled past the drugstore window less than three yards from where Snow was sitting, and she saw the aviator glasses and, behin
d them, the bulging eyes that seemed to take in absolutely everything. Snow noticed that his sunken cheeks had a dab of rouge on them. A hulking man with close-cropped pewter hair and ramrod straight posture came forward to meet the Admiral. They exchanged a few words. The Admiral nodded, slipped a raincoat over his shoulders as if it were a cape, and followed the hulking man through the revolving door to the street.

  Snow grabbed her coat and darted out of the drugstore into the street. Outside the revolving door the hulking man had opened a large black umbrella and was holding it over the head of the Admiral as he hustled him into the back seat of a blue Dodge parked at the curb. Snow went over to the taxi stand to her left, jumped into the first cab on the line. “You see the car pulling away from the hotel?” she asked the driver.

  “Sure I see the car pulling away from the hotel,” he replied with a laugh. “If I didn’t see it I’d be blind. If I was blind I couldn’t get a hack license.”

  “Can you follow it?”

  The driver, whose name according to the framed identification plaque was Ernest E. Rosencrantz, perked up. “You want that I should actually follow that car?”

  “Please.”

  The Dodge with the Admiral in it joined the flow of traffic. Ernest E. Rosencrantz worked his windshield wipers and pulled out behind it. “This ain’t for some kind of candid camera program?” he asked.

  “It’s my husband,” Snow explained. “He told me he was going to play duplicate bridge. I don’t believe him.”

  Colored lights ricocheted off the glistening pavement as the blue Dodge, weaving through traffic, drifted down “The Strip” in Georgetown, then turned off M Street onto a side street, then onto another and pulled up in front of a door with a neon sign sizzling over it that said CH CK’S. The taxi pulled up several car lengths behind. Ernest E. Rosencrantz pursed his lips. “The U is missing. Been missing for months. Chuck’s is what it should say.”

  The burly man came around to the sidewalk side of the Dodge, opened the umbrella and held it over the Admiral’s head as he got out of the car and walked to the door. He pushed a button. A small window in the door opened, a face appeared in it. The Admiral muttered something. The window closed, the door opened and the Admiral disappeared inside.

  “Is that the bridge player?” Rosencrantz inquired.

  Snow nodded.

  “If you don’t mind my saying so, he looks a little on the old side for you.”

  The burly man returned to the car and slowly cruised the street, hunting for a parking space. He found one near the corner, walked back and disappeared in turn into Chuck’s.

  Snow started to pay the driver. “Say, you look like an all right lady,” Rosencrantz said. “Maybe you should think twice about going in there.” He smiled in a fatherly way. “Duplicate bridge is definitely not what they play at Chuck’s.”

  “I need to see for myself,” Snow said.

  Rosencrantz shook his head philosophically. “I think you’re in for a surprise.”

  Snow held out some bills. “Life is made up of wounds and scar tissue, Mr. Rosencrantz.” She flashed the smile that held back tears. “I’ve passed the wound stage. I’m working desperately on the scar tissue.”

  Rosencrantz pushed her money away. “Pay me when you get back to the hotel,” he told Snow.

  “You mean you’ll wait for me?”

  The driver waved a hand in embarrassment. “Wounds. Scar tissue. I’ll be here when you come out.”

  “You’re one in a million, Mr. Rosencrantz.”

  “That’s not what the wife says,” Rosencrantz noted dryly. “I should get you to write me a testimonial.”

  Snow ducked from the taxi and ran through the rain to the door with the neon sign sizzling over it. She pushed the buzzer. The small window opened. A man with a pinched face peered out. He took in Snow and said, “You sure you know where you’re at?”

  “I’m meeting a friend,” Snow told him.

  The window closed, the door opened and she slipped in. The man with the pinched face took her raincoat and handed her a red chip with a number on it. “There’s a twenty-five-dollar minimum per,” he informed her.

  Snow pushed through a curtain of beads into the nightclub and looked around. A dozen or so couples-men with men, women with women-were dancing to slow canned music on a mirrorlike surface in the middle of the room. Strobe lights flickering from a large diamond over their heads made it seem as if the tent-shaped roof was in motion. There were booths along two walls filled with flickering candles and dark figures, and a long mahogany bar off to Snow’s right with candles spaced along it every yard. The Admiral was sitting on a stool near the middle of the bar, engrossed in conversation with an elegantly dressed gentleman on the next stool. The hulking man who had held the umbrella for the Admiral was sitting farther down the bar nursing a drink, toying with the melting wax of a candle, passing a forefinger with excruciating slowness through the flame.

  Snow strolled past him. “This taken?” she asked him, nodding at the next stool.

  “It is. By you,” he replied without looking up from the candle he was playing with.

  Snow hefted herself onto the stool. The bartender hovered. “What do you recommend?” she asked.

  “Here they usually ask me who I recommend,” he said with a suggestive smirk.

  The hulking man laughed under his breath. The bartender said, “Nobody complains about my daiquiris.”

  “A daiquiri, then.”

  “Lime or lemon?”

  “Lime.”

  The bartender filled a large glass with crushed ice, rum, lime juice, tossed in several spoonfuls of sugar, capped it with a metal cover and began shaking it to a cha-cha rhythm. He iced a glass and strained the liquid into it, popped in a straw and set the drink down in front of Snow. Wiping the surface of the bar with a wet rag, he asked the hulking man, “Can I top you off?”

  “Later.”

  “Tell me again,” the bartender asked the hulking man, “what makes a perfect number perfect.”

  “A perfect number is perfect,” the hulking man explained wearily-he had obviously been over it before-”if it’s the sum of its divisors other than itself. Take the number six. It can be divided by one or two or three, and it’s the sum of one and two and three. Or twenty-eight. It can be divided by one or two or four or seven or fourteen, and it’s the sum of one and two and four and seven and fourteen. It’s perfect.”

  “Huxstep here,” the bartender confided to Snow, “has a thing about numbers. Go ahead, try him.”

  Snow studied the profile of the customer sitting on the stool next to her. So this was the man who had tried to incinerate Silas in the parking lot, who had worked one of the wrecking balls that had almost killed her. Another piece of the puzzle was falling into place. Huxstep wasn’t a figment of Silas’s imagination either. She remembered Silas mentioning that Huxstep could solve complicated mathematical problems in his head. Snow decided to put him to the test to make sure he was the same man Silas had talked about.

  “Do you have a pocket calculator handy?” she asked the bartender.

  He took one from the drawer of the cash register and gave it to Snow. She punched in some numbers, looked at the result, said to Huxstep, “Can you divide eight sevens by 368.7?”

  Huxstep’s face screwed up, his eyes narrowed, his lips moved. Presently he said, “21095138.”

  “Where does the decimal point fall?” Snow demanded.

  “After the fifty-one.”

  Snow said, “That’s amazing.”

  “Don’t say I didn’t tell you,” the bartender said, beaming.

  A short woman with gold-rimmed sunglasses drifted over and sat down next to Snow. She popped a filter-tipped cigarette between her lips, angled her head toward Snow and asked, “Do you have fire, honey?”

  The bartender held out a book of matches. The woman looked at him in annoyance. “Did I ask you for fire, Charlie, or did I ask the lady here for fire?”

  Charlie backe
d away.

  “How ‘bout it, honey?”

  Snow said she didn’t smoke.

  The woman said with a laugh, “No vices?”

  “I drink,” Snow admitted. She sipped her daiquiri.

  “I’m relieved to hear it,” the woman said. She looked at the bartender. “Whatever she’s drinking, Charlie, bring two more. And I’ll take your fire now.”

  Around the curve of the bar the elegantly dressed gentleman sitting next to the Admiral left his stool and walked off toward the booths. The Admiral leaned forward to catch Huxstep’s eye, batted both his lids in a conspiratorial double wink; Snow had the impression that he was pleading for something. Huxstep slid off his stool and made his way to the edge of the dance floor. He tapped a thin young man with shoulder-length bleached blond hair and a face that looked half-Indian, drew him off the dance floor. He spoke to him for a moment, indicated the Admiral with his eyes, peeled off some bills from a thick wad and gave them to the young man, who folded the money away in the rear pocket of his skintight leather jeans.

  At the bar Snow fumbled for something in her pocketbook.

  “Funny I never seen you here before,” said the woman who had bought Snow a drink.

  “That’s because I’ve never been here before.”

  “Uh-huh,” the woman said.

  Huxstep, his eyes glued to the Admiral, returned to his seat. The young man who looked half-Indian eased himself onto the empty stool next to the Admiral and began talking animatedly with him. Toothacher leaned over and whispered something in his ear. The young man rewarded him with a high-pitched laugh. His shrill voice could be heard over the music. “I’ll bet you say that to all the boys,” he exclaimed.

  “No, really,” the Admiral could be heard protesting. “I knew the instant I saw you there was more to you than looks.”