by The Cool War
Jasper—or “Yosper”—was a puzzle. Since he was from IPF’s European customer-relations department, it followed as the night the day that he had to be a spook. But he offered no secret plans, conveyed no instructions; when Hake mentioned the name “Curmudgeon” in his presence the old man gave a cracked laugh and said, “Curmudgeon? Is that what you think I am? Let me tell you, sonny, I’m exactly what you’ll be in another forty years—only better,” he added virtuously, “because I accept the Lord as my Savior, and you don’t!”
But he was always there, he and his four silent helpers. The marmosets got their grapes and mealworms every four hours; where there was sun to make it possible, got an occasional afternoon in the open air; were brushed and groomed and picked over for fleas. The marmosets had plenty of supervision.
What the kids had was Horny Hake.
By the time they reached Copenhagen, Hake believed he had encountered every ailment young human flesh was heir to—or heiress to; especially heiress to: cuts and scrapes, sulks and sneezes, faints and fevers. (126 hours down, 344 to go—better than a quarter of the way.) By Oslo it was mostly fevers and sneezes. They weren’t serious, but they kept Hake up most nights to make sure they weren’t. Alys slept securely through to breakfast, explaining that Hake’s long experience with counseling had made him so much better at handling night alarms that there was no point, really, in her waking—-“just to be in your way, Horny.” And, of course, the Marmoset Duennas did not let themselves get involved. Their lives had become pretty easy, with the number of woolly monkeys dwindling at every stop. But adamantly they continued to refuse to have anything to do with the children; one species of sub-human primate was all they had contracted for.
Sven and Dieter, Mario and Carlos—why did Hake always have difficulty telling them apart? They were very different in height, weight, and coloring. It had to do with the way they wore their hair, all in a sort of Henry the Fifth soupbowl, and the clothes: always the same, pale blue jackets and dark blue slacks. But there was more than that. They seemed to think and talk the same way. Hake often had the impression there was only one person speaking, sometimes with a German accent, sometimes Spanish, but with only one mind behind them. “Yosper says we must go to bed early, six a.m. flight in the morning.” “Yosper advises do not drink this water, last month PLO terrorists filled reservoir with acid.” As it seemed to Hake, the mind behind them was Yosper’s.
And all of that made sense, perfect sense, if they were in fact disciplined spooks on the payroll of International Pets and Flowers, alias Lo-Wate, alias the shock troops of the cool war. But were they? Hake saw no sure signs. No unexplained absences from duty. No secret meetings. Not even meaningful glances among them, or sentences begun and left incomplete. If they were spooks, when were they going to start spooking?
More than once Hake had made up his mind to confront Yosper and demand the truth. Whatever the truth might be. But he had not gone through with it, only with hints. And Yosper never responded to them. It was not that Yosper was not a talkative man. He loved to talk. He never tired of telling Hake and Alys all the ways in which the cities they raced through were inferior to their American equivalents —not counting, now and then, the occasional place where you could get a decent smorgasbord or a worthwhile Jagertopf. And he never tired of explaining to them why Unitarians shouldn’t call themselves religious; Yosper was Church of God, twice born, fully saved, and sublimely sure that the time would come when he would be sitting next the Throne, while Hake and Alys and several billion others would be deeply regretting their failures in a much worse place. But he wouldn’t talk about anything related to espionage.
And he wouldn’t help with the kids; and of the two failures, Hake found the second hardest to live with.
By the three-quarters mark they were in Munich. The children’s sneezes were reaching a crescendo, and Hake himself was feeling the strain. He was more exhausted than he had ever been since the days in the wheelchair, and unhappy with the way his insides were conducting themselves. But there was an unexpected delight. Yosper had arranged for an American school in Munich to take the children off their hands for the whole weekend, and so the grownups had the pension to themselves and forty-eight hours to enjoy it.
The enjoyment would have been more pronounced, Hake thought, if his gut had not felt as if someone had stuffed it past its load limit with chili peppers and moldy pickles. He did not quite feel like seeing the town. Still… three hundred and sixty hours down, and only a hundred and ten to go! And no kids till Monday morning.
The pension turned out to be the top floor of a grimy little office building, on a side street near the intersection of two big boulevards. From the outside it didn’t look like much. But it was clean and to Hake, who for fifteen days had been resentfully calculating the energy costs of jet fuel, high-speed elevators and hotel saunas, it was a welcome relief from power-pigging. He did not mind that the rooms clustered around an airshaft, or that there were no porters for the luggage. He didn’t even mind the fact that he had to carry Alys’s bags as well as his own—“I’m really sorry,
Horny, but I just don’t feel up to lugging it.” He didn’t mention that neither did he.
Dinner was potluck, cooked by the proprietor and served by his wife. To Hake’s surprise, Alys showed up for it. Evidently she had run out of Turkish majors, SAS copilots and Norwegian desk clerks. She spent the afternoon in her room but appeared, wan but gracious, at the head of the dinner table. As she picked up her spoon she was brought up short by Yosper rapping a fork against his glass.
“Yosper always says grace,” said Sven—or Dieter—with a scowl.
“Of course,” said Yosper, also scowling, and then bowing his head, “Our Lord, we humble servants thank You for Your bounty and for these foods we are about to eat. Bless them to Your own good ends, and make us truly grateful for what we receive. Amen.”
As the five scowls disappeared, Mario—or Carlos—said, “It is a good custom to have, is it not so? It is like Pascal’s wager. If God is listening, He is pleased. If not, no harm is done.”
“Don’t be irreverent,” said Yosper, but mildly. “Pascal was a con-man. You shouldn’t obey God’s commandments to save your skin. You should obey because you know God exists, and the daily miracle of life proves it to you.” Alys coughed and changed the subject.
“Horny, I haven’t been idle all day,” she said sweetly, handing him a couple of newspapers and a magazine. “These were in my room. I’ve gone through them all and marked the parts that interest you.”
Yosper peered at her over his uneaten soup. “How do you know what interests him?”
“Oh,” she said brightly, “it’s a sort of research project I’ve been doing for him. He has been very interested in what he calls the increasing degradation of life—you know, all the things that mess us up— Horny, is something wrong?”
“No,” he said, and then, with more conviction, “Oh, no. Go ahead. I was just thinking about something.” What he had been thinking about was that if Yosper reported to Curmudgeon, he would surely report that Hake was doing a little unauthorized digging. But the second thought was, why not? He hadn’t been told not to be curious. And one of the things he was curious about was how Yosper would react.
Which turned out to be not at all. The man took the napkin out of his lap, dropped it on the table and waved away the plate the proprietress was bringing over from the mahogany sideboard. “You know,” he said, “I don’t think this is exactly what I’m in the mood for. What do you think, Dieter? Want to try the Hofbrauhaus?”
“Good idea, Yosper,” said Dieter enthusiastically—or Carlos; and all the others followed suit.
Alys said wanly, “Should we come too?”
“No. You wouldn’t like it.”
“Are you sure?”
He cocked his head at her—with his beard and bald head, he was beginning to look like a marmoset, Hake thought. “They have some, uh, private meetings. But,” he said cunningly,
“the food’s remarkable. Sausage you wouldn’t believe. Big mugs of beer. And Schweinefleisch Pork, all pink and white, with that red cabbage and potato dumplings, and all that rich, fat gravy—”
Alys dropped her spoon. “Excuse me,” she said, fleeing.
Yosper grinned at Hake. “Looks like she lost her appetite.”
“Yeah. I’ll tell you, Yosper,” Hake said. “Actually, I don’t feel too fine myself. I think I’ll skip dinner and turn in early…”
At least he wasn’t sick to his stomach. Grateful for that, he chained the door to his room and opened the papers Alys had given him: A London Times, a two-day-old Rome Daily American, the international edition of Newsweek. Besides reading material, he had a secret treasure of his own: two shot-sized bottles of whiskey sours, acquired on one of the many flights when he didn’t have time to drink them. Rock and rye was good for a cold, he reasoned. Who was to say whiskey sours weren’t too?
They went down. And, surprisingly, they stayed down. They made him feel—well, not better. But at least different.
The buzz from the whiskey flavored the misery from the cold, or whatever, enough at least to make a change.
He thumbed through the news, for conscience’s sake more than interest’s:
The tax on liquid hydrogen was going up fifty percent “to finance research on making America fuel-independent within the next thirty years.” The mad killer who had fire-bombed twenty-two Chicago women wearing mood rings had been caught, and announced God had told him to do it. International Harvester had delivered its 10,000th Main Battle Tank, Mark XII, direct from the production line to the U.N. scrapping grounds in Detroit. The President declared that the bargaining-counter production rate was insufficient for the needs of upcoming disarmament talks, and proposed a special bond issue to finance 5,000 additional advanced warplanes to be built and scrapped within the next five years. (He also mentioned that the income tax would have to go up to pay for the bonds.) The microwave receivers in Texas had to be shut down for ten days because of excessive damage to the Van Allen belts; as a result coastal Louisiana was battling its heaviest spring blizzard and most of Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico were without power.
A normal enough week in America. Alys had also marked European news, but Hake didn’t really care enough to read it. He had seen enough griminess and grittiness in the past fifteen days to decide that the Europeans were not really any better off than the people in Long Branch, New Jersey, as far as the quality of life was concerned.
And besides, the quality of his own life was not seeming very good just then. The whiskey sours might have been a mistake.
Dizzily he got up and peered at himself in the mirror.
He really felt sick. Being sick alarmed Hake to a degree that a man who had been well all his life might hardly understand. He inspected his tongue (reasonably pink), his eyes (everything considered, not really very red), and wished he had something to take his temperature with.
Maybe all he needed was a little more sleep, and, to be sure, a hell of a lot more exercise. He hadn’t been able to pack his barbells. He studied his belly, looking for a sign of a paunch; his dorsals, for a hint of flab. None there-—yet. But he had missed two weeks’ jogging and a dozen judo lessons on this trip, and how long could he continue to do that without penalty? He resolved to try to trap at least one of the Ocean Grovers into at least a Ping-Pong game the next morning.
But in the morning he was in no shape to do it, even if it hadn’t been Sunday and the girls off at the American school or disrupting some unfortunate church.
He bathed, shaved, dressed and unsteadily left the pension to seek a drugstore. Within three blocks he passed two of them. Both were closed, but at least they gave him the name of what he was looking for. He excused himself to an elderly gentleman sunning himself on a doorstep and asked, “Bitte, wo bist eine Apotheke?” He had to repeat it twice before he got an answer, and then the words that came back at him were not helpful. But the pointed finger was.
The druggist was a young woman who wore her red hair in ringlets. She spoke no English, nor Hebrew, nor any of the varieties of Arabic Hake summoned up. If the kibbutzim had not been so strict in their customs he might at least have had a little Yiddish to try on her. But all he had going for him was ingenuity. After that had failed four or five times it occurred to him to cough dramatically against the back of his hand and pantomine drinking from a bottle. “Ja, ja!” cried the druggist, enlightened, and reached him something off the shelf.
Blearily Hake peered at the label. Of course, it was all in German.
Antihistamin-Effekt seemed understandable enough. But what was a Hustentherapeutikum? The names of the ingredients were easier to read. Science is a universal language, and by adding a few letters and subtracting some he managed to figure out some of the things that were in the bottle. The difficulty with that was that Hake was no pharmacist, and exactly what maladies were Natriumcitrat and Ammoniumchlorid good for? When he came to the dosages he felt himself on more solid ground. Erwachsene had to mean “for adults” (if only because the column next to it was headed Kinder). And 1-2 Teeloffel alle 3-4 Stunden seemed to reveal itself.
While he was hesitating, a tall woman in a floppy hat came into the store and began peering thoughtfully at a display of cosmetics. Hake rehearsed the entire rest of his German vocabulary three or four times, and then crossed over to her for help. “Bitte, gnadige Frau,” he began. “Sprechen-sie English?”
She turned to look at him.
The face under the floppy hat was one he had last seen in a Maryland kitchen. “Pay the lady, Hake,” she said. “Then let’s you and I go where we can talk.”
If the drugstores seemed to want to close on Sundays, the bars did not. They found a sidewalk cafe, chillier than Hake would have preferred but at least remote from other people, and the woman ordered them both big brandy-snifters of raw Berlin beer with raspberry syrup at the bottom of each glass. Hake took what he estimated to be a 2-Teeldffel swig of the Hustentherapeutikum and washed it down with beer. The cold was gratifying on his palate. The taste, less so. It wasn’t what his body wanted, and the pressure in his gut increased. He felt as if he wanted to burp, but was afraid to risk it. He said. “You know, young lady, I could have you arrested.”
“Not here you couldn’t, Hake.”
“Kidnapping is certainly an extraditable offense.”
“Offense? Oh, but Hake, you didn’t file charges, did you?”
“There’s no statute of limitations on kidnapping.”
“Oh, hell, Hake, lay off the lawyer talk. It doesn’t become you. Let’s talk about realities, like why you didn’t report me to the fuzz. Have you thought about the reasons for that?”
“I know the reason for that! I, uh, I didn’t know where to report you.”
“Meaning,” she said bitterly, “that you had committed yourself to the spooks and knew you shouldn’t involve the regular police. Right? And you were afraid to tell the spooks about it because you didn’t know what would happen.”
He kept his mouth shut. He didn’t want to admit to her that he simply hadn’t known how to contact the Team until the time had passed when it seemed appropriate. He was also aware that he shouldn’t be telling this woman anything at all. Or even be talking to her. Who knew if that waiter, idly kicking at a windblown scrap of newspaper, or that teenage girl in the hot-pants suit biking down the boulevard, was not reporting to someone somewhere about this meeting?
Under other circumstances he probably would have liked being with her a lot. Whether in zipper suit or flowered spring dress and floppy hat, she was a striking-looking woman. She was at least as tall as Hake, would be taller if she wore heels, and slimmer than he would have thought of as beautiful—if, on any of their meetings, it had ever mattered whether or not she was beautiful. She was perplexing in many ways. For instance, how quaint to wear an old-fashioned gold wedding ring! He hadn’t seen one of those in… he couldn’t remember when he had seen one las
t.
“I don’t have much time, Hake,” she said severely, “and I’ve got a lot to say. We checked you out, you know. You’re a decent person. You’re kind, idealistic, if you picked up a stray kitten you’d find it a home. You work ninety hours a week at a dog job for slave pay. So what did they do to you to turn you into a killer?”
“Killerl”
“Well, what would you call it? They’re close enough to killers, Hake, and you’re just getting started with them. Who knows what they’ll have you doing? When you took this job, you must have known what it meant.”
It was impossible for him to admit to this young, handsome, angry woman that not only didn’t he know what the job meant, he hadn’t yet found out exactly what it was. He said thickly, “I have my own morality, lady.”
“You exactly do, yes, and yet you’re doing things that I know you know are violating it. Why?”
He perceived with relief that the question was rhetorical and she was about to answer it for him. Carrying on this conversation was getting pretty hard. And his ears were bothering him. There seemed to be a distant roaring. He tried to concentrate on her words, in spite of the growing evidence in his stomach that he was sicker than he had thought.
She said mournfully, “Why! God, the time we’ve spent trying to answer that one. What changes people like you? Money? But you can’t want money, or you wouldn’t be, for God’s sake, a minister. Patriotism? You weren’t even born in America! Some psychosis, maybe, because you were a cripple most of your life and the girls wouldn’t go near you?”
“The girls,” Hake said with dignity, “were very often willing to overlook my physical problems.”
“Spare me the story of your adolescent fumblings, Hake. I know that isn’t it, either. Or shouldn’t be. We checked you out that way, too. So what does that leave? Why would you flipflop a hundred and eighty degrees, from being an all-giver, helping anyone who comes near you any way you can, to a trouble-making, misery-spreading cloak-and- dagger fink? There’s only one answer! Hake, what do you know about hypnotism?”
