The Once and Future Spy

by Robert Littell

  Huxstep regarded the Weeder and nodded. “You got to be right. The Admiral must have been off his feed this morning.” He removed his Smith & Wesson. 357 Magnum from a drawer and carefully fitted the silencer onto the barrel.

  Mildred’s eyes ignited with desire. Her chest heaved as she whispered, “Only wound him, Huxstep. That way we can see his eyes when we throw him overboard.”

  Huxstep looked at her with new interest. “I don’t think I gave you enough credit. You’re bursting with ideas.”

  “I’ve got others,” Mildred noted suggestively.

  “I guess you have,” Huxstep said.

  In his mind’s eye the Weeder could hear the beat of the kettledrum quicken. A moment more, he told himself, and it would all be over. He shut his eyes and struggled to keep his limbs from trembling, his heart from sinking under the weight of pure fear. His head began spinning, as if he had reached a height without adequate oxygen. The last thing he heard before he blacked out was the hiss of Huxstep’s Magnum spitting out the bullet that punched a hole the size of a fist in anything it hit.

  28

  The Admiral made no effort to hide his irritation. “You’re supposed to put your foot down on the brake, not the gas pedal, when the light turns orange,” he said dryly. “Jesus, where did you learn to drive?”

  Huxstep took a quick look at his watch and concentrated on the road.

  Toothacher wrinkled up his incredibly Roman nose in displeasure. “For a couple of quarters there are places where you can vacuum a car,” he remarked. “You wouldn’t be out of pocket. You could pass it off as an extra toll and get reimbursed. Wanamaker would never know the difference.”

  Huxstep turned onto the unmarked road that ran parallel to the airport’s perimeter. “Another thing,” the Admiral said. “The story you gave Wanamaker about the Weeder bashing Mildred with a wrench seemed pretty farfetched. Couldn’t you have thought up something slightly more”-he racked his brain for the right word -”plausible?”

  That was too much for Huxstep. “I would like to respectfully point out that the Admiral has been in the car forty-five fucking minutes and he has so far managed to complain about everything under the sun including my driving and my vacuuming and the story I made up to explain to the dumbest fucking agent in the entire United States of America intelligence establishment why one of his lady employees won’t be showing the half of her face you could see under that veil at the office no more.”

  “One thing I’ve noticed,” the Admiral said sweetly, “is that your sentence structure doesn’t improve with time.”

  Huxstep snorted, tucked the stray hairs that appeared back up into his nostrils with delicate clockwise thrusts of his thick pinky.

  The Admiral closed his eyes in pain.

  Huxstep turned off the road at the gate in the chain link fence guarded by a squad of Marines in full battle dress. An officer checked his laminated pass and saluted. The enlisted men dragged open the gate and waved the car through. The shuttle to Guantánamo stood at the bitter end of a runway, its engines revving. Huxstep pulled up near the portable steps. A seaman deuce wrestled the Admiral’s two Vuitton suitcases up the steps and into the plane. Huxstep came around and opened the door for the Admiral.

  Stepping out onto the tarmac, Toothacher feigned surprise. “Well, that’s a new arrow in your quiver,” he yelled over the whine of the jet engines. “I’m not accustomed to you holding open doors.”

  Huxstep yelled back, “Fuck the Admiral.”

  “Teh, tch,” cooed Toothacher. He caught Huxstep’s eye and batted both of his lids at him in a conspiratorial double wink.

  Huxstep melted. “It won’t be the same around here without the Admiral,” he shouted awkwardly.

  “Me too,” Toothacher agreed. “The idea of happy hours at Guantánamo without you to run interference doesn’t thrill me.”

  Huxstep angled his head away so the Admiral wouldn’t see the mist in his eyes. “You can’t say I didn’t go and prove it,” he yelled.

  “Prove what?”

  “That I”-Huxstep took a deep breath to work up his nerve and screamed-”love the Admiral more than numbers.”

  Toothacher nodded emphatically. “You did,” he shouted. “You do-I know it.”

  Huxstep buried the Admiral’s hand between both of his and squeezed it, then turned quickly and fled back to the safety of his car. Toothacher organized the various limbs of his lanky body so that they would function more or less harmoniously and ambled up the portable steps toward the stunning-looking petty officer with the handlebar mustache smiling invitingly from the plane’s door.

  29

  Sucking on the wedge of a lemon, Snow rewound the tape on her answering machine and played it back. Fargo’s voice, tripping over words as if they were obstacles to conveying information, came across loud and clear. “Snow, it’s me, Michael. Your friend Sibley has slipped away from the hospital. It happened two days ago. I only just found out about it. I’m coming up on the next plane.” Fargo left a telephone number in Boston for her to call if Sibley showed up before the FBI agents arrived. If she forgot the number she could call the local police and ask them to get in touch with Fargo at the Justice Department’s Boston office. “Be careful, Snow,” he added. “I don’t think he’s dangerous but you never know. If you hear from him, humor him. Play along with whatever story he tells you.”

  Snow smiled to herself. He must take her for a complete idiot. She wasn’t going to fall into that trap again. Silas hadn’t slipped away from any hospital. The Admiral, to save his own skin, had arranged for him to be set free. She hoped Silas was smart enough to realize she would be watched and stay away from her. She hoped he wouldn’t stay away forever.

  Snow could tell from the blinking light that there was another message on her tape. It began with the sound of a dental bridge clicking into place in a gum. “Guess who came to dinner?” a musical voice asked.

  The words came equipped with the mocking laughter of someone who twitched in her sleep remembering the juicy rabbits she’d chased in her time.

  30

  Great-aunt Esther opened the front door and pulled Snow inside and locked and bolted the door behind her. “He’s upstairs,” she whispered excitedly.

  Snow peeled off her mackinaw, stamped her boots to get the snow off and followed Esther into the house. “How is he?” she asked her great-aunt, who was bareheaded and bald and wore an enormous cashmere shawl wound around her frail body.

  “He’s sleeping like a baby,” Esther told her. “He didn’t admit it in so many words, but he’s had a bad time of it. Whoever he was running from must have caught up with him. It’s written on his face. It’s written in his eyes.”

  With Snow limping after her, Esther tiptoed around the hairless dog stretched out on the carpet and went upstairs. She eased open the door to a bedroom at the end of the hallway. The flame from a single candle dispatched flickering shadows across the walls of the room. Fully dressed except for his shoes, with a needlework bedspread thrown over him, Silas was curled up in a fetal position in the middle of a four-poster. “He wouldn’t go to sleep until I lit the candle,” Esther whispered. “I think he’s afraid of the dark.”

  Esther drew Snow out of the room. “Let him sleep it off,” she whispered.

  “He doesn’t have a hangover,” Snow protested.

  “I wasn’t suggesting he had,” Esther said. “I was suggesting he could use a rest.” Esther regarded her grandniece. “You are a little bit jumpy yourself, if you want to hear the truth.”

  Snow smiled sadly. “It took me a while but I know the truth.”

  Esther snapped a bridge into place. “That’s more than most can say.”

  Snow sank into a rocking chair next to the four-poster, pulled a blanket up under her armpits and mounted guard over the figure sleeping on the bed. When the candle burned down she lit a new one from the sputtering flame of the old one and embedded it in the holder. She dozed off toward midnight but came awake when
Silas started moaning. A moment more, he seemed to mutter under his breath, and it will all be over. He shifted position on the bed, arching his spine as if something was jabbing into it, then settled back onto the mattress. The sight of him curled up on the bed aroused emotions in Snow she had considered dead. She had been ambushed by grief. Then, like a hostage who becomes emotionally involved with her captor, she had become attached to her grief; it had been her habit. Now she was being ambushed once more-this time by love.

  She must have dozed again around first light but woke with a start to find Silas sitting on the edge of the bed staring at her. “Did I say anything in my sleep?” he wanted to know.

  Esther had been right about his face, his eyes, Snow realized. “You were asking for a moment more. You were saying it would all be over.”

  The Weeder stood up and Snow came off the rocking chair into his arms. They clung to each other. After a while Snow took his hand and examined it. The scab had fallen off. His life line was visible again. The sight of it seemed to reassure her. She returned to her chair and began rocking back and forth on it. The Weeder settled onto the floor at her feet. “Tell me what happened,” she urged him.

  Hesitantly at first, gathering momentum as he went along, the Weeder described his ordeal: how he had been anesthetized by the men who picked him off the Boston street; how he had come to on a boat, manacled to a piece of metal jutting from a bulkhead; how the Admiral had promised he would be shot before being thrown overboard; how, thanks to Snow, Toothacher had phoned up and instructed Huxstep to release him; how Mildred and Huxstep had argued after the Admiral’s phone call-

  Snow kept the chair rocking in the same rhythm. “All this happened-when?”

  “The Admiral phoned Huxstep a few hours after you phoned me. It was the Ides of March. Huxstep put me ashore late that night.”

  “Was Huxstep with you on the boat the day before the Ides of March?”

  The Weeder nodded. “He was there the whole time I was there.”

  Snow said, “Huxstep’s the one who does tricks with numbers.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Go on with the story,” Snow ordered. She smiled encouragingly.

  The Weeder described Mildred pulling out a minuscule pistol. She had been ready to shoot him herself if Huxstep wouldn’t do it. Huxstep had looked as if she had convinced him. He had fitted a silencer to his gun. It had been a terrible moment-the Weeder had been certain Huxstep was going to shoot him. His head had started spinning, his heart had started sinking under the weight of pure fear. He remembered hearing the beat of a kettledrum, the hiss of a gun going off as he fainted. When he had regained consciousness the boat had been heading toward Nantucket, the lights of which were visible on the horizon.

  “What happened to Mildred?” Snow asked.

  The Weeder shrugged. “She was gone. So was the block of cement. So were the handcuffs.”

  Snow rocked forward and cradled his head against her thighs. “You put your life on the line to stop an atrocity,” she said. “You’re every inch the patriot Nate was.”

  “You really think that?” the Weeder asked.

  “Anyone who knew the nightmare you’d been through would think that,” she assured him.

  The Weeder’s head burrowed into her lap. When he spoke again his words were muffled. “Knowing you believe in me changes the way I look at the world,” he said.

  31

  It was Great-aunt Esther who talked them into going to the concert at a neighborhood hall. Because of her hair, more exactly because of the lack of it, she preferred not to let herself be seen in public any longer. But there was no reason for them to hang around the house like two caged birds. Spread your wings, she urged with the leer of someone who longed to follow her own advice. Go for test flights.

  The auditorium, usually used for town meetings and slide lectures, was on the small side. The members of the orchestra were tuning up as Snow and the Weeder found their places in the middle of the fourth row and read the mimeographed program notes. A group of Harvard music students was going to play Haydn’s Symphony no. 45 in F-sharp Minor, known as the Farewell Symphony, as it had been performed, with Haydn himself conducting, before Count Ester-hazy in 1772. A lighted candle was set into a holder attached to each music stand. The houselights dimmed. The stage flickered with candlelight. The conductor appeared from the wings. The audience applauded.

  Great-aunt Esther had been right about a concert being just what the doctor ordered. Snow had her arm linked through the Weeder’s and could feel the tension slipping from his body as soon as the orchestra started playing. At one point he whispered, “To think my man Nate was at Yale when this was first performed.” A few minutes later he grinned sheepishly at her and it was almost possible for her to believe that the world was right side up.

  It wasn’t, of course. Not that Silas had lied to her; the reality was more subtle. He had invented a truth-his truth, the truth he badly needed. He had concocted the story about Huxstep being on the boat; the night before the Ides of March Huxstep had been sitting next to her in the bar in Washington. If Silas had imagined Huxstep on the boat, it meant he had imagined the boat too. Fitting in bits and pieces of reality, he had imagined everything-his eavesdropping operation, the scheme to explode an atomic bomb in Tehran, the love letters he had sent to Wanamaker to head off the plot. He had invented the story about the old Admiral being summoned from retirement to trace the leak. He had imagined the attempts on his life in New Haven. Even Nathan’s story had been a figment of Silas’s imagination. He had invented Nate’s life and superimposed it over his own life, as if the whole thing were a double exposure. Great-aunt Esther had given Snow a look at the “diary” she had shown to Silas. It was an old penny notebook filled with recipes and herb remedies that Molly Davis had collected over the years. There was no mention in it of Nate or a British plan to trap Washington on Manhattan or the Revolution; no suggestion that Nate was the father of Molly’s child. Nate may have “Liv’d defir’d and died lament’d,” but not by Molly.

  Haydn had scored his symphony so that the various instruments finished playing at different times. As each musician’s role came to an end he blew out his candle and left the stage. When the Weeder realized what was happening the tension flowed back into his limbs. There were still four candles burning on the stage. A cellist blew out his and left. The music became thinner as the auditorium grew darker. An oboe player extinguished his candle. The Weeder shivered. The violinist, playing alone now, reached the end of the score. The conductor summoned the last note out of the instrument with his fingertips and let it trail off. Then he and the violinist blew out the two remaining candles and quit the stage.

  The auditorium was as dark and as still as a pit. The Weeder, trembling, buried his face in Snow’s shoulder. He asked very quietly, “Can you get someone to light a candle?”

  The house lights slowly came up. The Weeder kept his head on Snow’s old cardigan, which Esther had found for her in an attic trunk. It still smelled from camphor balls. The Weeder noticed the odor for the first time. It tripped a memory. He felt the pull of history and slipped over the line into an incarnation. “Molly smelled of camphor the night I met her,” he told Snow.

  On either side of them people were filing up the aisles. This time Snow didn’t hesitate; desperate not to lose him, she plunged after the Weeder into his incarnation. “I propose we marry ourselves,” she said urgently. She knew time was running out; another ambush lurked ahead for both of them.

  The Weeder smiled Nate’s smile. “Are such things done?”

  Snow looked over her shoulder, spotted Fargo and two men waiting at the auditorium doors. So the police had relayed her message after all. “You need to understand,” she told the Weeder. She was reciting lines but her voice had a real sob buried in it. “Before I was ambushed by grief I grew accustomed to living the life of a married woman.”

  She faltered. The Weeder cued her. “Contrary to what is generally supp
osed-”

  “Yes,” Snow said. “That’s it.” She was in Molly’s role now and playing it with all her heart. “Contrary to what is generally supposed, women have appetites too.”

  The Weeder grasped her hand in his. “What vows would you have us say to each other?” he demanded. He peered into her eyes, aching for an answer.

  The auditorium was almost empty now. Snow could see Fargo and the others starting down the aisles toward them. She threw her arms around the Weeder and hugged him to her. Tears spilled from her eyes, her voice choked up. “I would have us pledge unconditional trust in each other,” she said softly. “This is the only thing that counts between two people.”

  The Weeder whispered, “I pledge it with all my heart.”

  “I too pledge it,” said Snow.

  32

  Wanamaker lurked in the shadow of the balcony, watching with a smug smile as the two young men in loose-fitting sport jackets put a hammerlock on the Weeder and steered him up the aisle. Huxstep, peering from a wing of the stage, formed his left forefinger and thumb into a pistol and sighted over it at the Weeder’s back. The Attorney General, standing next to Wanamaker, noticed Huxstep mouthing the words, “Bang, bang! You’re dead!” “What you do with him,” he mumbled, angling the flame of his lighter into the bowl of his pipe, sucking the tobacco into life, “is clearly not something I need to know.”

  Wanamaker started to giggle at what he thought was a joke; Huxstep’s gesture had left little room for doubt about the fate that awaited the Weeder.