Without Honor

by David Hagberg

  “Aren’t you going to ask me to join you? Buy me some lunch?” she said. She worked for an engineering firm nearby. “Or wouldn’t Marta approve?”

  Instead of the leisurely filet of sole and half bottle of pouilly-fuissé he had contemplated, the two hours seemed to drag interminably with the egocentric kid prattling on about how he should dump Marta and move in with her.

  “Daddy adores you, of course, but if you didn’t want him to know, it could be our little secret.”

  “No secrets.”

  “Fine,” she said, brightening even more. “Then we’ll tell him that …”

  “We’ll tell him nothing, Liese, because nothing will happen.”

  Finally managing to disentangle himself by three o’clock, he walked up to the library to continue the research he had begun six weeks ago on Voltaire, who had lived and worked for a time in Lausanne. But he found that his concentration had been shot to hell; reading a rare edition (with notes in the margin) of Candide, his mind bounced back and forth between Kathleen, Liese Füelm, and Marta, so he gave it up and was back home by four-thirty.

  “Bad day?” Marta asked innocently when he came in. She was ten years younger than he but looked even younger than that, and had a glow about her. She was tall, not unattractive, with long dark hair, wide eyes, and sensitive lips. She carried herself with an athletic grace. In the winter she skied, in the summer she swam, and year-round she jogged five miles each morning, rain or shine, after which they would have breakfast and then often make love.

  “Kathleen has sent a lawyer after me, and Liese is up to her old tricks again,” he said, throwing off his coat, and opening a beer.

  Marta smiled. She was fixing their dinner. “There’s nothing your ex can do to you in Switzerland. As far as concerns Liese, why don’t you jump her bones. She’ll back off fast enough. She’s only flirting, you know.”

  “Fucking. That’s your goddamned answer for everything, isn’t it?” McGarvey snapped. “Christ on a cross!”

  She looked up, her eyes bright. “I’m sorry, Kirk …”

  “Yes, you are.”

  She had started to cry then, which really set him off, so he had proceeded to take her apart, piece by piece, bit by bit, attacking her eating habits, her physical fitness insanity (as he called it), her sense of clothing style or lack of it, her constant prattling about totally inconsequential shit, and her sex-solves-everything juvenile attitude. And she stood and took every bit of it. Had it been him on the receiving end of such a tirade, he would have lashed out. She had not, which made him even angrier.

  It was his turn to be sorry this morning, though he knew it didn’t really matter. He suspected he could say or do almost anything to her, and she would remain. Out of love, or loyalty, or for some other, darker reason?

  “You awake in there?” she called from the kitchen.

  He reached over to the night table, got himself a cigarette, and lit it before he answered. “Just coffee, Mati. It’s all I can stand.”

  He could hear her laughing. It was a musical sound.

  She appeared in the doorway with a cup of coffee in hand, a big grin on her face. Her hair was pinned up, and she had changed out of her jogging suit into a thick robe.

  “You were a real shit last night, you know,” she said.

  “I know,” he said, turning away. It was hard to face her. He had drunk too much, and this morning he had a splitting headache. So why couldn’t he tell her he was sorry?

  Her grin faded and she came the rest of the way into the bedroom, setting the coffee down and perching on the edge of the bed. She reached out and touched his knee beneath the covers. “What is it, Kirk?”

  “Nothing,” he mumbled.

  “It worries me when you get like this,” she said. “Do you want me to talk to Liese?”

  McGarvey laughed, though there was no pleasure in it. “It’s not that.”

  She studied his face. “What then, boredom?”

  “Yes, that.”

  “You’re forty-four and your life is passing you by. You’re no longer in the fray, is that it?”

  McGarvey said nothing. It seemed like years since his life had even had a semblance of real purpose. Yet in the seventies when he worked for the Company he had been just as frustrated: only it was in a different way. The Carter administration had ended it for him. A dozen places, a hundred faces all passed through his mind’s eye with the speed of light. Santiago, Chile, had been the end. Afterward he had been recalled, and within six months he had been dumped. Overexuberance. Taking matters into his own hands. Operating outside his sanctions. Failure to keep a grasp on the world political climate.

  “I talk in my sleep. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “All the time,” she said.

  “Do you write it all down, Mati? Have you got a little black book?”

  She started to rise, but he sat forward and grabbed her arm.

  “I want to know.”

  “Why are you doing this, Kirk? Haven’t you had enough? Do you forget what you were like when you got here? You were a wreck.”

  “And you were Joan of Arc riding in on your white charger, your armor all polished, your sword sharp, raised to do battle. Are you telling me that, Mati?”

  Her nostrils flared and there was a momentary spark in her eyes, but her control was marvelous, and she ended her little battle by merely shaking her head. “We can’t go on. Not like this.”

  McGarvey released her arm and lay back on the bed. Christ, he felt rotten. Marta was almost certainly a watchdog of the Swiss federal police, sent to his side so that they could keep track of him. Former Central Intelligence Agency operatives made a lot of people nervous, especially the Swiss, who valued their clandestine CIA banking operations above all personal considerations.

  Was she his watchdog? Or was it love he saw in her eyes?

  “No, we can’t,” he said.

  She got up from the edge of the bed and went back into the kitchen.

  He sometimes thought of that part of his past as the glory days. And they were that, weren’t they? he asked himself. Ruefully he had to admit a certain nostalgia, even though he understood that the reality wasn’t anywhere near as exciting or interesting as his memory of it.

  Why did he get out in the first place? The end was coming long before they kicked him out. He could have changed things to prevent it. Only he was too blind, too stupid, to see it. Stewart had made a great show of fighting for him. Yet, later, after Alvin had bought it in Geneva, McGarvey had heard that Stewart had bad-mouthed him all over the agency. It was Washington. It was the power that had corrupted them all. The ends justified the means, didn’t they? By then Phillipi was out, Mason had been killed short of the runway at Andrews, and like the meek inheriting the earth, the quiet but sly Danielle had been bounced upstairs.

  McGarvey threw back the covers, got out of bed, and padded into the bathroom, where he looked at himself in the mirror. Already there was a lot of gray creeping into his hair, flecks of it throughout his beard. There were bags under his bloodshot eyes, and the beginnings of a paunch were showing, though his legs and arms still had something left to them.

  It occurred to him that his life had happened in three quantum jumps, each more debilitating to him than the last. The first stage was his childhood and youth, which ended with the death of his parents in a car crash. His sister was given their cash, their stocks, and their bonds, but he was given the ranch in western Kansas which he sold for something under three quarters of a million dollars. Living on the interest, he had enjoyed a certain financial independence from that moment on, but the loss of his parents and the harsh disapproval of his sister, who had wanted the ranch kept in the family, had left him out in a spiritual wasteland. The second devastation had come with his dismissal from the Central Intelligence Agency because he had killed a tinpot general in Santiago on orders that had changed, unbeknownst to him, in midstream. Now this, his retirement to ostensibly the most neutral place in the world,
was the third stage. He had the feeling it was also coming to an end, and when the finish came the results would be catastrophic for him, as had the ends of the first two stages of his life.

  Marta came to the doorway. “I can’t help if you close up on me,” she said softly.

  He looked at her reflection beyond his in the mirror. He was afraid of her. Afraid that after all she was nothing more than a Swiss police watchdog sent to keep track of him. And even more afraid that she was not pretending that she loved him.

  His sister said he could not understand what a commitment was … what it meant. “Do us all a favor, Kirk, and grow up.”

  “Like you and Al?”

  “Why do you think the ranch was left to you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Mom and Dad hoped it would change you. Settle you down.”

  McGarvey focused on Marta. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  3

  “Boredom.” He spoke the word aloud as he turned the corner in the rain and trudged down the stairs below his apartment block. Perhaps Marta was right. Or perhaps he missed the States. It had been five years since he’d been back. Not the McDonald’s, or the Three’s Company, or the jostling machinations of an upwardly mobile population—those weren’t things to be missed—rather it was the feel of the country, of her cities. Telephone operators who honestly understood English, little things like that. A decent martini. Supermarkets. Sears. Penney’s.

  Two young girls sharing an umbrella came up the stairs. McGarvey had to step aside to let them pass. He turned up his coat collar and at the bottom hesitated a moment to look down at the lake before he continued. Before too long it would be summer.

  He and Marta had a small sailboat. Perhaps they’d take a trip across the lake to Evian on the French side. Last summer had gotten away from them, as had the summer before and the winters in between.

  He stopped short. That was it. Time was passing like a wide, slow-moving river, deceiving in its flow. You never realized the volume of time that was going by until moments such as these when you suddenly awoke, face to face with your own mortality.

  A trip back to the States was certainly possible. Füelm was capable of running the shop. It would get him away from Liese’s games (which he actually found flattering when he would admit it to himself). It would be a book-buying trip. It was time he saw his sister and his nephews in Salt Lake City. On the way out he would stop by and see the ranch. Visit his parents’ graves. And then there was this business with Kathleen and her attorney friend. He smiled inwardly. It would give him a certain perverse pleasure to show up on their doorstep, tell her in no uncertain terms what he thought, and then kick the attorney’s ass up around his shoulders. His daughter was a teenager now; young, delicate. How much like her mother had she become? It was something he needed to know. It was time, he decided, that Elizabeth found out her father wasn’t some ogre, some hippie living in a commune in Europe. It made him angry to think of the things Kathleen would be teaching her.

  Marta would understand. It would give her a much-needed vacation.

  Turning these thoughts over in his mind, McGarvey continued downtown, the city coming alive with the morning. Lausanne was a wonderful town, filled with contrasts of which the Swiss were inordinately proud but which tourists often found disconcerting. Rising from Lac Léman (here never Lake Geneva), the city hastened up into the hills in tiers on which the old and the new were situated in sharp defiance of any sort of convention. An eighteen-story modern skyscraper on a low tier might compete with a lovely Georgian cathedral perched on a hilltop. Old shops and homes, within rabbit warrens of narrow twisting streets and alleys, were being gutted in one section of the city to make way for the new, while all around the Notre Dame, the selfsame architectural style was being faithfully restored. It was a city of footpaths, of quaint bridges and overpasses, yet the din of heavy (at times even crazy) traffic was nearly constant.

  He arrived at the busy Place Saint-Francois across from which his bookstore was located. As he did every morning, he stopped at the news kiosk and picked up a copy of the Paris edition of the Herald-Tribune. When he arrived here five years ago he had been a basket case. His nerves were shot to hell. Around every corner, in every doorway, under every overhang, in every shadow lurked some dark figure from his past. Perhaps friends of the Chilean general he had assassinated. They believed in vendettas. Perhaps the KGB, perhaps the Bulgarians who had been so active just recently, according to the newspapers. Perhaps any of dozens of people he had crossed could have come here to watch for him, to wait for the one moment of weakness, the moment when he would be vulnerable. As he had been doing since he had come here, McGarvey stood a few moments beneath the kiosk’s awning, pretending to look at the headlines of the other papers on display while he scanned the large square and his approaches to the bookshop.

  An exercise in futility, nothing more, he thought, although to adequately cover the square would require several teams, some of them stationary, at least one mobile. They’d stand out, especially here given the Swiss penchant for routine. He shook his head and started to turn. All a moot point. He himself had fallen into the bad practice of routine; up at the same time each morning, the walk along the same route, the newspaper, the quick scan, and then off to the store. Even an amateur could nail him after a few days’ observation.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a dark blue van pulling up across the square. A tall man in a dark overcoat materialized out of the crowd, hopped into the passenger side of the van, and a moment later another figure, this one dressed in a tan mackintosh and wearing a wide-brimmed hat, stepped away and walked off in the opposite direction. The van took off, merged with traffic, and disappeared around the corner toward the Regina. McGarvey held himself in check against the instinct to look directly across. Instead, he stuffed the newspaper in his sodden jacket pocket and headed around the square along his usual route.

  There was no way of knowing for sure, of course, but he decided that he would bet his next six months’ income that the two from the van were not Swiss. They did not have the look.

  McGarvey had to hold up for a break in traffic before he was able to cross, and then he hurried, head bent low, apparently in deep concentration. The man in the tan mack was fifty yards beyond the bookstore pretending to take refuge from the rain in a shop doorway.

  Across the square he spotted the van coming up from the lake. Two legmen, one van. They were amateurs. Lookers. No hit men here.

  The tan mack looked directly his way, then stepped out of the doorway and hurried off in the opposite direction. The Ford van came around the square, and it headed again toward the Regina Hotel. As it passed, McGarvey saw the driver and the man in the dark overcoat riding shotgun, both studiously watching traffic. The plates were Swiss, but it was a rental.

  Americans? He got the impression they might be. They had the look. But what did they want? Why the hell had they come after all these years? He was no threat. He wasn’t writing a tell-all book like so many expatriate Company men had done … were doing. He had no ax to grind. Not now. He was merely trying to live his life here, out of the fray.

  His store, International Booksellers, was a two-story yellow brick affair, rare books and the office on the top floor, the main body of the store on the first. It was nestled between a tobacconist and a perfume shop. McGarvey stepped across the sidewalk, dodging the heavy pedestrian traffic, and went into the shop. Several customers were browsing. Füelm, a short, scholarly-looking man with white hair and steel-rimmed glasses, was on his hands and knees, holding his glasses up with one hand as he myopically searched the spines of a row of books on the bottom shelf.

  He looked up. “Good morning, Kirk, is it still raining?”

  “Cats and dogs,” McGarvey said, hurrying up the iron spiral stairs off to one side.

  At the front window he looked down on the busy street for a minute or two, but the blue van did not make another swing, although he thought h
e saw the tan mack round the corner across the way.

  Why had they come now? Marta would say he was imagining things. He knew better.

  He turned away from the window and hurried back to his office where he closed and locked the door, then unlocked the big bottom drawer of his old oak desk. Reaching underneath he slipped the wooden stop and pulled the drawer all the way out, setting it aside. From beneath the main pedestal he withdrew a small bundle wrapped in oilcloth, which he quickly opened. Inside was a well-used, well-oiled Walther PPK automatic, loaded, two extra clips with it. The compact weapon had been his companion in the old days. On more than one occasion it had saved his life, and at times he thought of it as an old friend. He handled it with great respect now, wiping off the excess oil with his handkerchief, then working the slide back and forth, pumping out several shells. He released the clip from the automatic’s butt, reinserted the rounds, and reloaded the gun.

  Possibly they were Americans, he thought, stuffing the gun and spare clips in his coat pocket. Possibly they were the opposition here with an ax to grind. He put the drawer back in his desk, locked it, then left his office and went downstairs.

  Fuelm was at the bottom of the stairs. “I was just coming up.”

  McGarvey hesitated on the bottom tread. Outside, the blue van passed on the street.

  “Kirk?” Füelm said softly. “Are you feeling well this morning?”

  “Just fine, Dortmund. What was it you needed?”

  Füelm eyed his wet jacket. “Are you going back out?”

  “An errand to run. Was there something you wanted to ask?”

  “I can’t quite seem to put my hands on the Oxford Aquinas.”

  “Upstairs on my desk. There’s a hold on it for Herr Bergmann. He said he’d be in later this week for it.”

  “That explains the mystery,” Füelm said, stepping aside to let McGarvey pass. “Everything is fine with you?”