Without Honor

by David Hagberg

  For a minute or two he stood behind his desk looking across the room at the door, staring at nothing, smelling the musty familiar odors, hearing the familiar traffic sounds outside on the street. From below he heard the tinkle of the front door bell. Someone coming, someone leaving. Fuelm could handle it.

  Much depended on Marta now. She was Swiss police after all. That one little delusion of his—the one in which he had given her the benefit of the doubt—had been shattered casually by Trotter’s people. If Marta and Liese were searching for him now, if they had sent out the alarm, run up the balloon, if they were getting nervous, then the fiction was finished in any event. With luck they would let him walk away clean. Easiest that way, he tried to tell himself. Don’t look back, you can never tell what might be gaining on you. Your heart?

  That was it then. It came down to a simple yes or no. Did he love her or didn’t he? There’d be no coming back from this one. No knocking about in the field for a week or a month or two, and then settling back into the bookstore, into the old, comfortable routines. The Swiss were far too sophisticated to let that happen. Marta, he suspected, was too fragile. And, like a strip of metal that has been bent back and forth too many times, he himself was feeling the signs of fatigue. Before long he would bend once too many times and he would break.

  McGarvey picked up the telephone, started to dial his apartment, but then changed his mind and hung up. She was there or she wasn’t. Calling her would neither drive her away, nor conjure her up. He wondered what he really wanted.

  Before he left, he looked one last time around his office. Five years of his life was coming to an end. Easier than he thought it would be.

  Füelm looked up when McGarvey came down. The young girl with the small book was gone. The other customers were still in the shop.

  “Are you leaving now?” the older man asked.

  McGarvey nodded. “You will be all right this afternoon?”

  “This afternoon … yes.”

  Of course Füelm would be in on it with his daughter and Marta. How much did they really know? McGarvey glanced up the stairs to his office door. They’d probably taken the place apart. They would know about the money, about the passport and the gun.

  “Auf Wiedersehen,” McGarvey said.

  “Ja, geht mit Gott, Kirk,” Füelm replied gently.

  Somehow the simple act of walking out of the shop became difficult. But McGarvey forced himself not to look back. He crossed the square at the news kiosk, then hurried up the hill, his hands stuffed deeply in his pockets, his thoughts black..

  Fuelm was bad enough. But Marta was going to be many times more difficult.

  On the way up the hill McGarvey avoided the issue of good-byes by working out his first steps once he got clear of Switzerland. Trotter and Day had both assured him that his track would be clean. Entering the States would create no notice—not by the Company and certainly not by Yarnell. Trotter did suggest, however, that McGarvey limit his visibility as much as possible when he got to D.C. There were still a lot of people around who remembered him. And Washington was not such a large metropolis that a chance meeting of some old crony was out of the question. Nothing would probably come of such a meeting, but why tempt fate? Why spit in the face of the gods? Trotter had muttered.

  Evita Perez, Yarnell’s ex-wife who lived in New York City, would be his first, most obvious target. But there were other issues he wanted to address; issues that were none of Trotter’s or Day’s business … at least not for the moment.

  One of the old hands in the Company in the early days when there seemed to be genuine purpose to most things (or was McGarvey just younger then?) had talked earnestly about excess baggage. Not the kind carried through airports, but the kind all of us carried in the form of relationships—wives, friends, associates. The man who comes up clean of baggage, is the man you’ll most likely see alive at the end. Entanglements can be fatal. Travel light.

  Sound advice, wasn’t it? Hurtful at times, but then so was the amputation of a gangrenous leg in order to save the body.

  They’re all enemies, don’t kid yourself. Just as if they held a gun to your head … wives, lovers.

  But he had already seen it was time to leave, hadn’t he? He’d already made that decision, even before he had seen and spoken with Trotter.

  He went to the end of the terraced street and turned the corner, climbing up to the next row of houses perched on the side of the hill so that he could avoid the stairs to his place. From the top he could look down at his building, as well as at the road, the stairs, and even a portion of the street below.

  Nothing moved. No cars were staked out. No one waited around the corners, under the eaves, in doorways. He considered turning away and simply leaving. He would buy a few things in Geneva before his plane left. Get away clean. Paris first. Then New York. Paris would be his buffer zone. By the time they realized he had skipped, it would be too late for them to do anything about it. But Marta was one of them. It made him angry, this vacillation. A lack of commitment, his sister would say. She was right. Bucking up his shoulders, he tossed away the cigarette he’d been smoking and trudged back down the hill and around the corner to his place. On the stairs he suddenly could hear the radio playing above, and he could smell Marta’s perfume, a clean, lilac odor. His stomach felt hollow. The door opened. She stood there in a pretty skirt and blouse. She had been crying.

  “You didn’t think to pick up some bread, did you?” she asked. “We’re almost out.”

  “No. Sorry,” McGarvey said. At the head of the stairs, she stepped aside for him. He hesitated for just a moment but then went in, taking off his coat and laying it on the side of the couch. Now he felt like a stranger here with her.

  “Are you hungry? Did you have lunch?” she asked, coming in and closing the door.

  “I’m going away, Marta,” he said. “I came back to get some things.”

  “Away? A long time? A long distance?”

  “Out of Switzerland.”

  Marta sagged a little with relief. “Back to the United States? Has something happened? Can I help? Kirk?”

  McGarvey had gone to the bedroom door. He felt terrible. He turned back. “Listen, Marta, I know.”

  She nodded.

  “I know that you and Liese work for the federal police.”

  “How long?” she asked.

  McGarvey shrugged. “I guess I always suspected. I always knew that you were here with me because you were ordered to be here. Because I was a CIA … operative.” He’d almost said killer.

  “At first, Kirk,” she said queerly. “I swear it was only at first. Not later.” Her eyes begin to fill again.

  “Don’t …”

  “I love you, Kirk. I have for a long time now. Don’t you know that, too?”

  “Don’t do this to yourself.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  McGarvey shook his head. “It’s not possible.”

  She took a step closer. “You were followed, you know, from the square to the store, where you picked up your gun, and then to the safe house above the lake.”

  McGarvey wasn’t really surprised about that. “Have you been ordered now to stop me, Marta?”

  “No one cares, darling, so long as whatever it is you’ve been given to do does not occur on Swiss soil.”

  “I’m leaving the country. Tonight.”

  “Take me with you.”

  “No.”

  “Then I will wait for you. When this thing you are going to do is finished, I will come to you. Wherever you are.”

  “But not back here.”

  She shook her head. “They won’t let you return.”

  McGarvey looked at her. It had been a mistake coming back. He hadn’t counted on it being this hard. He wanted now to take her into his arms and hold her close. Make love. The hell with Trotter and Day and their problems. The hell with Yarnell and the Cuban slimeball. The hell with it all. But he simply could not do it. Something deep inside of him,
in some little dark corner, anchored his soul as if by a chain wrapped around a bloody great rock. If it ever broke loose, he suspected he would founder and drown.

  He turned and went into the bathroom where he got a pair of scissors and his disused shaving things. The photograph in his passport showed a clean-shaven man.

  “It must mean something to you, these five years,” Marta said at the doorway. “Us.”

  “I can’t change,” McGarvey said looking at her reflection in the mirror over the sink. “You can’t. None of us can.”

  “I know what you do … what you did. I don’t care.”

  “It’s over, Marta. You know it.”

  She sighed. “Ah … Kirk. It hurts, damnit. It bloody well hurts. Do you know that?”

  McGarvey nodded, but Marta turned and left. He could hear her in the kitchen putting on the tea water. He paused with the scissors before he began to cut his beard. It wasn’t too late, he told himself. Or was it?

  Marta stayed in the kitchen while he finished shaving and trimming his hair. In the bedroom he changed into a pair of slacks, a clean shirt, and a sport coat, then packed a single suitcase and a leather overnight bag. When he was ready he telephoned a taxi service to bring him to the bus station. A direct service was operated between Lausanne and the Geneva airport. He brought his bags downstairs to the outside door, then went back up to the apartment. Marta sat at the kitchen table, a cup of tea cradled between her hands, a bottle of cognac open in front of her. A snub-nosed .38 revolver lay on the table. He’d never seen the gun before. He looked at her eyes. She had stopped crying. She seemed distant. For a moment or two, McGarvey stood in the doorway watching her; he thought just at that moment that she looked very brave and strong and wonderful. He waited until she looked up at him, but her eyes were the eyes of a stranger, so he turned and left the apartment.

  At Cointrin Airport, he bought a one-way ticket to Paris on the early evening flight, then sat at the bar in the Plein Ciel drinking a whiskey, smoking a cigarette, and trying to fix in his mind exactly how Marta had looked. The restaurant was very busy, and more than once he imagined that the Swiss police had stationed someone here to make sure he actually left. He had disassembled his gun and packed it with his toilet kit in his checked-through luggage so that there would be no problem with airport security. Customs could be a problem, but if he ran into trouble he could call the Washington number Trotter had given him.

  Yarnell was assistant DDO at Langley when the Company went into its slump. The lean years, remember? … That was your era, Kirk. Who do you suppose pulled the plug on Chile?

  10

  McGarvey arrived in New York City after his five year hiatus with little or no fanfare. It was early afternoon on a chilly spring Friday. He took a cab into Manhattan, watching from the back seat as the great city showed itself from across the river. He had forgotten just how big and dirty and exciting New York was. He had forgotten about the billboards, about the derelict cars along the sides of the roads, not even worth the scrap. He had forgotten about the traffic and the city smells and the feeling of tense excitement here. Out of habit he took a room in a Forty-second Street hotel just around the corner from the United Nations, had a quick shower, retrieved his gun from his luggage, and then went for a walk. The city was alive in a different way than were cities in Europe. There was a roughness here that seemed to exist side-by-side with elegance very easily. Street people competed with limousines for the right of way. What was uniquely American, in McGarvey’s view, was that both belonged, both had the same right to be wherever they wanted to be, and no one seemed to notice, let alone dispute the fact. As a young man growing up on the plains of the Midwest, New York had been his Mecca. His escape from a humdrum existence. His salvation. Yet Washington had snagged him, and anyway he had actually spent more years in Europe and in South America than here in the States. So it was good to be back. If there was one spot in the world that was uniquely American—large, brash, contradictory, free—it had to be New York City, and he reveled in the fact that he had come home, no matter the reason.

  After a dozen or so blocks he found that he had circled around to the United Nations complex. He crossed First Avenue, trudged up the few steps past the guards, and walked the broad footpath down to the East River overlook where he leaned on the broad rail. The wind was cool here, but he didn’t mind. After Chile, Kathleen had come up here to straighten herself out (while she was seeing her attorney friend). They had met right here for the last time out of court, and she had told him that she was through with him. It had been spring then, too. She looked more beautiful than he had ever seen her, though she had already begun to hold herself differently; prim, proper, a little disdain showing. She couldn’t go on like this any longer, she said. The uncertainty and fear had become debilitating. For a moment there he thought she was worried sick out of love for him. But she dashed that hope. Her life was no longer hers to control; too many sleepless nights, mistrustful friends (what few she still had), and ugly rumors she was having a hard time keeping from their daughter. Just what was it, after all, that he did do for a living? Could he just tell her that once and for all? They could not go on.

  McGarvey looked up from his thoughts. He would have quit for her then and there. The Company fired him a few weeks later in any event. But already it was too late for them. Too late for him.

  He had an early lunch at the Howard Johnson’s across from Grand Central Station (he was still on Swiss time), then entered the Grand Hyatt Hotel, where he used a public phone to call the Washington number Trotter had given him. It was his first request for assistance and thus the signal that he had accepted his assignment and had actually begun. When he was finished he felt dirty. He went back to his hotel, stripped, and stayed in the shower for a very long time.

  The day of the starving artist or writer was all but finished in SoHo and Greenwich Village. St. Christopher’s was a large, exclusive, four-story nightclub-cum-salon with apartments above on Broome Street, which never had (in its new life, at least) nor ever would see anyone starving. Tucked between an art gallery and an antique shop, it once had been a sweatshop factory of some sort. On its facade a plaster shield near the roofline was carved with lions and the date 1907. The windows had once been bricked over. They were open now and looked stainless steel and new. It was just past nine-thirty. From inside came the sounds of music and laughter. McGarvey went to the doorman, as he had been instructed to do, and gave his name as Peter Glynn. He was let inside and into a small vestibule where he paid a twenty-five-dollar cover charge to a lovely young woman wearing a colorful off-the-shoulder peasant dress. A big bullfight poster from Mexico City was framed on one wall. Hung on another was an Aztec sun calendar. Now he could hear that the music was Mexican; several guitars competed with a flat trumpet. He signed the guest register.

  “Welcome to St. Christopher’s, Mr. Glynn,” the young woman said, glancing at what he had written. “Have you been here before?”

  “No. This is my first time.”

  “I’m sure you will enjoy yourself.”

  “I was told Ms. Perez might be here this evening.”

  “Yes, of course. Shall I say who is asking for her?”

  “Tell her an old friend,” McGarvey said. “From Mexico City. In the old days.”

  “Certainly,” the young woman said, inclining her head. She picked up her telephone as McGarvey went through the frosted glass doors into a large, crowded room that had been designed to look as if it were a Mexican village on the edge of a lagoon across from which a large volcano spewed smoke and fire. A mariachi band played on a tiny stage at the base of the volcano.

  A young woman, scantily dressed in what appeared to be nothing more than crepe paper, escorted him to a small table off to one side, where she took his drink order of bourbon and water, and then left. Across the room on a slightly raised platform couples crowded around a long bar; some also sat at tables on the main floor. He thought he recognized a few of the faces from tel
evision or movies. At one large table, half a dozen older men (with the unmistakable look of politicians) were seated with six young, very good-looking women (with the unmistakable look of high-priced call girls).

  His waitress came back with his drink as he was lighting a cigarette. “Will you be dining with us this evening?”

  “Perhaps later,” McGarvey said, looking up.

  “Do you wish to be alone … for the evening, Mr. Glynn?” The girl was smooth, but very young.

  McGarvey smiled. “It is being taken care of, thanks.”

  “Of course.”

  It was fitting, he supposed. Yarnell was selling himself to the Russians. The man’s ex-wife was apparently selling herself to everyone else. McGarvey leaned back, then forward, as if he were a weary traveler stretching his back. He reached beneath the table and with his fingertips explored the base of the support. He felt a tiny loop of wire which emerged from the tabletop and disappeared into the base. It explained why the girl had used his name; for identification on the tape recording.

  More people kept coming in, but no one was leaving. There was a lot of smoke from the volcano and from people’s cigarettes. When the band stopped playing between sets McGarvey could hear the sounds of running water even over the babble of dozens of simultaneous conversations. Then the ragged trumpet would blare, the guitars would take up the beat, and the noise would begin to echo off the walls.

  The voice on the telephone had not been Trotter’s. McGarvey had not been surprised by that fact, but he had been irritated, not only by the man himself, but by his insinuating tone. In addition to Trotter and Day—and the Cuban—knowing that McGarvey was involved, now there was Trotter’s buffer service. It was necessary, at least for the moment, for his old friend to keep him at arm’s length, but it was beginning to gall McGarvey that too many people over whom he had no control knew of his interest in Yarnell. Even if the mesh is fine, the bigger the sieve, the more that leaks out.