The Syndrome

by John Case

  “Well, you’re not the first to ask,” Mamie told her, covering a tiny hiccup. “After he died, a man from the government came, and asked the same thing. Awful little man!” She tossed her head like a teenager. “I told him Cal was always quoting some dead Legionnaire. ‘Pas des cartes, pas des fotos, et pas des souvenirs.’”

  Adrienne gave her a hapless look. “I took Spanish.”

  McBride translated. “‘No letters, no pictures, and no souvenirs.’“ He smiled regretfully. “Which is not so great for us. Anyway,” he decided, “we’ve taken enough of your time.”

  “You’ve been very kind,” Adrienne agreed and, standing, extended her hand to the old woman.

  Mamie took the hand and held it for what seemed a long while, scrutinizing Adrienne as if she were a Vermeer. “You have such an aura,” she told her. Then she laughed. “Maybe you’d better sit back down.” Turning to McBride, she added, “Cal was such a bullshitter—pas des cartes, indeed!”

  Chapter 37

  She returned a few minutes later, lipstick refreshed, hair newly combed, carrying a battered briefcase and a small photo album. Raising the briefcase, she said, “He liked to do his correspondence here.” Glancing out to the window, she said, “I think we’re going to have some weather. Maybe the Florida room would be a better choice.” Beckoning, she led them down a long hall to a low-ceilinged room with large expanses of old-fashioned, jalousied windows, and a ceiling fan that turned, ever so slowly, overhead.

  Beyond the windows, behind a stand of thrashing palms, the Gulf of Mexico trembled with whitecaps, its surface black-and-blue. McBride imagined he could feel the electricity in the air. Nearby, the crimson and green leaf of a croton bush skittered across the tiled floor, pushed by the wind.

  The room itself was a comfortable one, furnished with a scattering of old rattan furniture and a profusion of plants: fiddleleaf figs, ferns, hibiscus. Citrus trees in huge glazed pots. Gardenias bloomed by the door, filling the air with their dense perfume.

  Mamie sat down between them on a little couch, with the album resting on her lap. Opening the cover, she began to turn the pages, one at a time, never lingering for long on any one. “My parents’ house,” she said, “in Amstelveen.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Adrienne remarked, and so it was.

  “They worked for the bank,” Mamie confessed. “Mother, too. A real Dolle Mina!” She turned another page, and another, musing over the photos. “My brother, Roel.” She sighed. “So handsome!”

  “Is he… ?”

  Mamie shook her head. “No. He died during the war.”

  “A soldier?” McBride asked.

  She shook her head. “Tuberculosis.” Another picture, this time of a young woman at a café table in a European city. “Can you guess who that is?” she asked coyly.

  McBride smiled. “Of course,” he replied, “it’s Greta Garbo. I’d recognize her anywhere.”

  Mamie guffawed—a big, uncompromising Ha! “Such a darling man! And what a liar!”

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” Adrienne asked. “But you’re so beautiful!”

  “And you’re very kind,” Mamie replied. Then she turned another page and stopped. Her forefinger stabbed at a 5 by 7 snapshot of half a dozen men posing for a photo on an elegant terrace in what could only be the Alps. “There!” she told them. “That’s what I wanted to show you.”

  It was a sepia-toned picture, with the men in ranks—three, standing at the back; and the same number, kneeling in front. They wore old-fashioned hiking clothes—knickers, kneesocks, heavy boots, and patterned wool sweaters. Behind them were some of the world’s most recognizable mountains.

  “That’s Cal in the front—at the very center of things, as always.”

  Adrienne peered at the picture, which showed Crane and his friends, back from a hike in the Alps. She could see at a glance that Crane had once been young and handsome, with dark eyes, broad shoulders, and an aquiline nose that pointed the way to a cleft chin. To his left was a big Scandinavian with a broad face, apple cheeks, and spiky blond hair. His pale eyes were slightly hooded and stared directly at the camera.

  “Who’s that,” McBride asked, “next to Mr. Crane?” The man seemed strangely familiar.

  “That’s Ralf,” Mamie told him. “He and Cal worked together.”

  “At the Institute?” Adrienne asked.

  “Of course,” the old woman replied. “Gunnar is his son.”

  She removed the photograph from the little slats that held each of its corners to the page, and turned it over. Written on the back in fading blue ink were the words:

  Eiger Monch & Jungfrau

  L—R: W Colby, J. DeMenil, F. Nagy

  Kneeling: T. Barnes, C. Crane, R. Opdahl

  September 8, ‘52: Palace Hotel Eiger (Murren)

  Back from the Schilthorn!!!

  “And these other men?” McBride asked.

  Mamie smiled. “Spies,” she said.

  “Did they hike together often?” Adrienne asked.

  Mamie shook her head. “No, I think just that once. There was some business.” She thought for a moment, then nodded decisively at the recollection. “I know! They’d just opened the clinic,” she said.

  “The Prudhomme Clinic,” Adrienne suggested.

  Mamie nodded. “Yes. So there was a little celebration.”

  “How did you get the picture?” McBride asked.

  “Get it? I took it,” she told him. “That’s my handwriting, not Cal’s. And there aren’t many pictures of him in those days.” She quickly turned a couple of pages in the album until she found what she was after. “This is the only other one that I know of—though maybe Thea has some.”

  The picture had been taken in the summer. It showed a mansion on a residential block in the suburbs of a European city. The building reminded Adrienne of one of the legations along Massachusetts Avenue in Washington. Huge stone urns, spilling over with luxuriant vegetation, flanked a massive front door. And at the door, posing with one hand on the lion’s head knocker and the other held up in a wave toward the camera was Crane. On the page beside the picture, in the same spidery hand as its predecessor, was the inscription:

  Herr Direktor Arrives!

  The Institute (Kussnacht)

  3 July, 1949

  “Well,” Mamie said, as she got slowly to her feet, “I’ll leave you to it. Me—I think I’ll have a little lie-down. If you need anything…”

  “Oh, we’ll be fine,” Adrienne told her.

  It was raining now, thick drops slapping at the slatted glass of the windows. Thunder rolling over the Gulf. Opening the briefcase, McBride removed some folders and envelopes, a yellow legal pad, two or three kraft-colored folders, an antique Hermés diary and a copy of the AARP Bulletin. There was also, he saw, a thick packet of letters, held together with a rubber band.

  It was, in other words, a mess—but promising. Both of them reached for the diary first, but Adrienne was the quicker. Leaning back against the couch, she began to read, while McBride went through the other material.

  Before long, he realized there wasn’t much there. It was mostly a collection of bank statements and bills, and correspondence with various brokerages. The Harvard Building Fund hoped to be remembered in his will, and Sprint wanted him as a customer.

  McBride looked up. “Anything interesting?”

  Adrienne shook her head, closed the diary, and set it down on the coffee table. “It’s poetry” she told him. “He was writing poetry in his old age.”

  “You’re kidding,” McBride reacted, unable to hide his disappointment.

  “Look for yourself,” she said, and removing the rubber band from a packet of envelopes, began to go through them, one by one. Meanwhile, McBride scrutinized the old man’s bills, looking for God knows what. The minutes dragged by.

  After a while, Adrienne reported, “It’s almost all receipts. He bought his shoes at Church’s, his books on Main Street, and his slacks at Beecroft & Vane. Filled his prescripti
ons at Rite-Aid.” She looked up. “I’m not getting anywhere.”

  McBride shrugged, and turned his attention to the photo album. Opening it to the picture of Crane arriving at the Institute, he stared at it for a long while, trying to remember.

  Adrienne noticed. “Where’s Kussnacht?” she asked.

  “Just north of Zurich. It’s the Institute’s headquarters.” He stopped talking, frowned.

  “What?” she demanded.

  McBride shook his head. “I’ve been trying to patch it together, you know? To figure out when—exactly when—I became Jeffrey Duran? And the last thing I remember, the last thing I really remember, is that I was at the Institute. I’d come to Switzerland to talk about something or other with Opdahl. I was supposed to have lunch with him.”

  “The guy who had the falling out with Crane?”

  McBride nodded, then turned the page to the group photo on the terrace in Murren. “He looks like his father,” he told her. “Opdahl, I mean.” And staring at the broad face and hooded eyes, McBride suffered the same dark shudder that he’d felt only minutes before. It was the kind of sensation that brought to mind the saying about someone stepping on your grave. He shook it off. “We’d better keep rolling,” he said.

  “Mmmmmm.” Rain began to thrum on the roof, falling beyond the windows in ropy shafts of silver. Adrienne opened an 8 1/2 by 11 manila envelope—glanced inside, and returned it to the table. “What’s that?” McBride asked.

  “Newspaper clippings,” she replied. “Obituaries and stuff.”

  McBride shrugged, and picked up the yellow legal pad—which looked as if it had never been used. As he riffled the pages, however, an envelope dropped to the table—and he saw that there was a letter, or the first draft of a letter, on the very last pages of the pad.

  Leaving the envelope where it lay, he focused on the handwritten, crossed-out and much corrected scribble in the recesses of the pad. Gunnar—it began.

  McBride paused. No “Dear,” there—so no love lost. And what was stranger: why would someone begin a letter on the inside of a legal pad—indeed, at the very end of the pad, writing from the last page toward the front? It was a trivial question, of course, and the answer occurred to him as soon as it was asked: because Crane had been carrying the pad around with him, scribbling secretly in public places, and didn’t want passersby to glimpse a word.

  The simple answer is:

  McBride paused again. “Gunnar—The simple answer is…” What’s the question? McBride wondered.

  I’m aghast at what you propose. Jericho is beyond belief, and I cannot imagine what twisted rationalizations were employed to justify it. To this day, I find the memory of my earlier passivity impossible to bear. A single plane goes down in Africa, and a million people die?

  Where was your research? What were you thinking? Did we even—ever—have a fellow in Rwanda?

  Whatever you were thinking, I won’t be party to another such disaster—which, make no mistake, Jericho must certainly become. Indeed, it promises to make its predecessor seem like a practice run. So you will not have the signature you require. It will not be forthcoming. And if, somehow, you find a way to proceed, I promise you that I will do everything in my power to prevent Jericho from coming to pass.

  Let me remind you, Gunnar, of some first principles—which it would seem that you’ve forgotten. Our enterprise was established amid the ruins of World War II. In the aftermath of that catastrophe, the West dithered its way into a Cold War that promised to add yet another Roman numeral to the serialized slaughter of the previous world wars. To prevent that, some of us came together to establish the utility over which you now preside.

  Your father was one of us. Indeed, he was one of the best of us.

  But all of us were of a part, eight men from half as many countries who’d labored long and hard in the cause of freedom—men from the OSS, the SOE and other services, who shared the same perception: that some power, some third class of individuals, aside from the leaders and the scholars, must exist—and that this third class must take upon itself the task of thwarting civilization’s mistakes…

  No more Hitlers. No more Stalins. No more Maos.

  Never again.

  The risks that we’ve taken have been unimaginable, the more so for the fact that we have never enjoyed the sanctions and immunities that are the natural lot of those in government service.

  If we go down, we go down for good—and hard—and it must all come out—not just Batista, but Papa as well, and all the rest. Are you prepared for that? I doubt it.

  The truth is, the Institute has always been a parapolitical enterprise—a third force, not unlike the Triads and the Mafia. All such institutions begin life as secret combatants, embarked upon a political mission of noble dimensions. Often, perhaps inevitably, when they lose their raison d’être—which is to say, when their cause has been finally won or lost—they do not go away, but devolve into criminal organizations.

  And that, I fear, is what has happened to the Institute under your direction: in the beginning we slew monsters—hard targets whose identities we all agreed upon. And now, with the Cold War a thing of the past, our targets have become softer and softer. The truth is, the Institute should have been shut down when Gorbachev asked for peace…

  “Look at this,” McBride said, handing the letter to Adrienne. “It’s incredible.”

  He watched Adrienne read for a while, thinking about the way the Institute had used its fellows to explore obscure technologies and practices that could be used in mind control operations (his own study, involving “animist therapeutics” and the Third World was a classic example).

  “Jesus,” she whispered. Looked up, and asked, “What’s this about ‘Papa’? Is that his father or… Hemingway?”

  “I don’t know,” McBride said. “Right now, I’m more worried about ‘Jericho.’“ His eye fell on the envelope that, earlier, had fallen from between the pages of the same legal pad. Addressed to Calvin Crane, Florida, it had no stamp or return address. Hand delivered, then, McBride thought.

  Opening it, he found a single page of unsigned text:

  My Dear Cal,

  I confess I was shocked by the piety and recklessness of your recent letter, which arrived by mail only yesterday. What were you thinking, to put such things on paper?

  Perhaps it is your age that’s made you careless—but is it possible that it has also made you pious? No one needs to remind me of “the first principles” on which this enterprise was founded. I live with them every day, as did my father—as, once, did you.

  Neither is it necessary (or desirable) for us to discuss the operation that you have so carelessly mentioned in your letter. Your role in these affairs has long been at an end. I will not discuss events in Africa—or any other activity—with you. On the contrary, it’s apparent that my decision to keep you informed of operations, even after your retirement, was a mistake.

  But you are making an even greater mistake when you withhold your signature, approving the annual disbursement of operational funds from the banking facility in Lichtenstein. That two signatures should be required for such disbursements is, as you well know, an anachronism dating back to when the Institute and Clinic were separate entities.

  That you should now take advantage of this anomaly to press your own agenda is disgraceful. And not just disgraceful: it is an attack, not only upon the Institute, but on myself. I beg you to reconsider.

  McBride turned to Adrienne, who was reading over his shoulder, having already finished the earlier letter, inspiring the one in his hand. “Mamie was right,” he told her.

  “About what?” She was still reading.

  “The money. Crane had some kind of lock on it. And he was squeezing them.” He let her continue to read until she looked up at him, signaling that she was done. McBride didn’t say anything, but just sat there, looking distracted. “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

  “My fellowship,” he told her. “I’m thinki
ng the whole thing was a sham.”

  “Tell me again what—”

  “I was studying bush therapies. That’s what it amounted to. Everything from dance frenzies to speaking in tongues.”

  “So? I don’t see how any of that would help the program.”

  “I do. That’s what it was all about: altered states of consciousness. Drugs, hypnosis, trance states. And not only that, I was encouraged to write about ‘Third World Messiahs’ and ‘mass conversion.’ And I did. I reported on a charismatic faith healer in Brazil, a defrocked priest in Salvador who was said to work miracles, and a Pentecostal politician in… I think it was Belize.”

  “So?”

  “Someone whacked the faith healer. Shot him onstage when he was up to his elbows in cancer and chicken guts. The newspapers said his killer was nuts.”

  “And you think… ?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” McBride replied. The two of them sat back on the couch, listening to the rain thrashing against the windows. After a while, he leaned forward and began to put Crane’s papers back in the attaché case. Adrienne got up, and crossed the room to the windows. Looked out.

  “It’s letting up,” she said.

  McBride nodded, then lingered for a moment over a thick manila envelope—the one with the clippings. In the upper right-hand corner was a notation in what McBride recognized as Crane’s hand: First Reports.

  Opening the envelope, he dumped the contents on the table and began to sort through them. It went quickly, at first, then more slowly. Then quickly again. They were newspaper articles—a few of them quite long, some short, most brittle and yellowing with age. There were obituaries of obscure personalities in dozens of countries, and long dispatches about the violent deaths of prominent people throughout the world. Dateline: Rwanda—

  HUTU LEADERS’

  PLANE MISSING