Without Honor

by David Hagberg

  He’d driven up to the Baltimore-Washington International Airport to pick up his flight to New York, watching behind him for anyone from the bureau’s team on his tail. But he’d come away clean as far as he had been able to determine. Of course, again at LaGuardia he had gone through the switchbacks, the feints, the over-the-shoulder routines, and in the end, climbing aboard the tiny prop-driven executive aircraft out to Long Island, he’d even looked to the observation platform, half expecting someone to be up there even then, watching him, reporting back. By then Trotter would have been able to put two and two together and would have figured out who he was coming to see. But there’d been no one.

  The cab, which was an old Chevrolet station wagon, took him to the house, which was located on the beach three-quarters of a mile north of town. The road wound down through dunes and tall grasses that were permanently bent toward the land because of the nearly constant sea wind. They drove past an old storm fence that was half-buried in the sand, a No Soliciting sign knocked down. It hadn’t taken much to find the place from the files Day had sent over. A couple of telephone calls to a folksy local tax assessor and he’d had his directions. The house was a lot larger-than he had expected it would be. Tall dormers, a widow’s walk, weather-beaten shingles, a broad screened porch that looked out to sea, a large stone chimney—which was smoking a little now because it was chilly and old men were almost always cold, especially in the spring—were all punctuated by dark, unblinking windows. On a sand hummock below the front steps a picnic table with one leg broken leaned forlornly into the salt breeze. Big rolls of brownish foam scudded along the beach beneath an overcast sky. Way out to sea a large container ship headed south.

  He’d brought a leather shoulder bag packed with a few last-minute things. After the cabbie left, he shouldered the bag, walked up the sand path, mounted the steps, and let himself onto the screened porch. The place smelled musty and dead and very old. He knocked on the door with the heel of his right hand, the entire front wall of the house shivering under the blows. The house would be considered a disgrace in the Hamptons, he mused. Raze the place and don’t look back, Kathleen would have said. But then there never had been too many rich spies and almost never any old rich spies.

  The door opened and a very old man with watery, pale green eyes, wispy white hair, and a few days’ growth of white whiskers on his chin stood looking out. He was dressed in a thick wool sweater with the tall collar turned up, steel gray wool slacks, and thick carpet slippers. His skin seemed parchment thin, and his lips, his bony cheeks, and the arches above his eyes were blue-white and veined. His right hand, raised as if in greeting, shook slightly from a palsy.

  “Mr. Owens?” McGarvey asked. He didn’t know if he should shout. “Darrel Owens?”

  “Who the hell are you?” the old man asked, looking beyond McGarvey down toward the driveway. His voice was soft, precise, and cultured. McGarvey felt just a little like an idiot. He smiled.

  “Kirk McGarvey, sir,” He held out his hand.

  “Is something funny, for Christ’s sake?” the old man demanded looking McGarvey in the eye.

  “No, sir.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I’d like to ask you some questions.”

  “About what?”

  According to his jacket Owens had had a reputation for being a tough bastard. McGarvey had little doubt this old man was him. He’d cut his teeth during the Second World War in the OSS, and had been one of the shakers and movers when the agency was established in 1947. His name, along with Donovan’s, Bill Casey’s, and a very few others were a legend. He was seventy.

  “Darby Yarnell,” McGarvey said with just a little trepidation. After all, Owens had been Yarnell’s boss for much of the man’s career in the CIA. “Just a few questions. I won’t take up much of your time.”

  “You don’t look Russian. And your name does seem to ring a bell in the distance.”

  “Russian?” McGarvey asked.

  This time Owens chuckled. “We’ve all got our enemies, what? Russians. You’ve heard of them? They’re supposed to be the bad guys.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have come,” McGarvey said, softening his tone even further.

  The old man lowered his head and looked up at McGarvey as if through the tops of bifocals. “I’m not senile, you sonofabitch. Old, but I’ve still got most of my marbles. You came to ask about Darby Yarnell. We called him a prick, do you know why?”

  McGarvey shook his head, not knowing what to expect.

  Owens laughed. “Because he had such a perfect head.”

  “I don’t know …”

  “You have questions, son? I’ve at least got the time, if not all the answers.” Owens stepped back into the house. He beckoned. “I always figured Yarnell was too big for his britches. What’s the sonofabitch supposed to have done?”

  “I don’t know if he’s done anything. But that’s just it.” McGarvey came into the house and closed the door. He dropped his bag in the vestibule and followed the old man back into the hall, which smelled of must and age, of medicine and faintly of backed-up toilets, over all of which was the odor of wood burning in a fireplace. Masculine odors. Together, not so terribly unpleasant.

  A very large, very old dog raised its head from where it lay in front of the fireplace and looked up at McGarvey. It wagged just the tip of its tail, yawned deeply, and then laid its head back down. The remnants of lunch—soup, some bread, and a bottle of beer—remained on a broad oak coffee table. Photographs of dozens of foreign places, each with Owens and sometimes others in them, adorned the walls. The room was dimly lit and very warm from the fire. McGarvey suspected that Owens lived alone here.

  “You with the Company, then?” the old man asked. “One of the new regime? A Powers man? Hear he’s doing good things. About time, I suspect, what?”

  “Ex-Company. I was fired a few years ago.”

  Owens stared at him through eyes suddenly shrewd. “Knew I’d remembered the name. You’re the hit man who got canned over the Chile thing. A Carter regime casualty.”

  McGarvey nodded.

  “Who are you working for now? What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for answers.”

  “You going to kill him? Is that it? Is this an old vendetta? Are you settling an old score? You’re on intimate terms with the bad guys, then?” McGarvey had the feeling that the old man was enjoying this, even though he was skeptical and mistrustful. It probably got very lonely out here on the beach. Especially in the winter when the winds blew the weather in. With spring came hope. He could see it written on the man’s face.

  “I hadn’t planned on it.”

  “He hadn’t planned on it,” the old man hooted. He turned to the dog who looked up again from its sleep. “Hear that, he hadn’t planned on it. Maybe it’ll just happen, then. Moscow Center rules and all? I suppose he’s packing a piece. Probably a Makarov … light, accurate, reliable. Maybe even a Graz Buyra, the heavyweight. Do the job right. Final.”

  “Are you familiar with Oliver Leonard Day?”

  Owens’s eyes narrowed. “Justice?”

  “He would accept a telephone call from you. If you needed any kind of a confirmation he would make it, though he wouldn’t necessarily like it. I can give you his number if you have a phone out here.”

  “I’m capable of looking up a telephone number,” the old man said. He shook his head. “I’m truly sorry you are here, you know, though I suspected someone like you would be showing up on my doorstep sooner or later. Part of the business, I guess. Though one could always hope.” Again he shook his head. “Justice.”

  McGarvey didn’t know if he was referring to Justice the department, or justice the noun.

  Owens stacked the dishes on his tray and picked it up. “Would you like something to eat?”

  “No thanks.”

  “A beer?”

  “If it’s not so cold,” McGarvey said off-handedly.

  Owens grinned. “Been in Europe
for a while, then. Make yourself comfortable.” He left the room.

  McGarvey took off his jacket and dropped it over the back of the chair. The crackle of the fireplace was real. Nothing else seemed to be. On a table was a stack of magazines: Central Intelligence Retirees Association Newsletter. They went back a number of years. Over the mantle were photographs showing Owens with Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and finally Ford. All of them were signed best wishes or with similar sentiments except for Kennedy’s, which made mention of Cuba: Cuba libre—next year, Darrel. The date on the photograph was more startling, however. It was November 21, 1963—the day before Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

  “Washington was called Camelot in those days, remember?” Owens said coming in from the hall. He’d brought a couple of beers.

  “I was in the service, stationed in Germany. I remember the day Kennedy was shot perfectly,” McGarvey said.

  “Everyone remembers that day.” Owens handed McGarvey his beer. It was cellar-cool. “I was convinced a shooting war was imminent. After the Bay of Pigs, and the missile crisis, there wasn’t much left except for an all out exchange of ICBMs.” Owens looked up at the photograph, his eyes moist. “He wasn’t such a hot president, you know. But he cleaned up nice, and his wife was a looker. Our country was young—we weren’t even two hundred yet—and so was our president. Hell, we could lick the world, or at least show them the way into the twenty-first century. We were going to the moon!”

  A ways off they could hear the horn of some very large ship, the sound blown onto the shore by the breeze. Then it faded as the breeze momentarily died.

  “Will you trust the memory of an old man?” Owens asked softly. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the Kennedy photograph. “Could be faulty.”

  “As long as no one has tampered with it, such as is done with paper records, I’ll be satisfied.”

  Now Owens looked at McGarvey. “You’ve got a bone in your teeth, haven’t you, lad,” he said. “You’ve got the look about you. Oh, boy, have you ever got the look.”

  Owens was married for forty years. His wife had been dead now for nearly ten. McGarvey figured the man could write the book on loneliness.

  “Yarnell played double for the Bay of Pigs,” Owens began with no preamble. “It was his first real field assignment. We knew the Russians were getting themselves involved in a big way down there, so we decided to throw Yarnell into the equation. We wanted to see if we couldn’t hold them off. Provide a little diversion, if you catch my drift. Misdirect them. By then it was too little, too late. It was one of the few projects at which Darby Yarnell ever failed. But then, it wasn’t his fault. The conception was all wrong.”

  McGarvey hadn’t thought the man would begin with an apologia for Yarnell, but then it was Owens’s story and he’d tell it in his own fashion. Only if he got off the track, McGarvey decided, only if the old man wandered too far afield, as old men are wont to do, would he bring him back. McGarvey settled down with his beer to listen and listen closely, because if there was one lesson he’d learned well from the early days, it was that more than half of any story was between the lines. So pay attention, boyo, and you just might learn something.

  In those days, Owens explained, the agency was very young. They were still learning their lessons from the NKVD straight out of Moscow and still trying to assimilate everything their own OSS had taught them. Overlap as a conceptual term became the bane of their existence. The organizational chart had gaps a mile wide in some places, and even worse, crossovers wider. Too many chiefs and not enough Indians was the watch phrase. Their pariah was the man who tried to play both ends against the middle, and they were loaded with the type. It gave just a hint of the troubles they were having and would continue to have in the years to come.

  “In the midst of all this came Darby Yarnell, the bright young MBA directly out of Harvard. Oh, what a force he was in those days. But how ready we were for him. Let me tell you,” Owens said.

  He was recruited in the spring of his senior year right there at the school. It was before the Vietnam era when the mention of an agency recruitment team on a campus was cause for a major riot. In the late fifties there was still a lot of idealism around. The recruiting teams consisted mostly of a grade-one clerk, a regional desk officer, and as often as possible a field man home for debriefings. The clerk covered the entry-level possibilities, the desk jock talked about the advancement, the good pay, and the intellectual challenges of the Company, and of course the field man bespoke the James Bond romance of the job.

  “I don’t remember who we sent up there that year, but the young Yarnell nearly talked every one of them out of the Company, convincing them that they were wasting their time, that theirs was an immoral task, and furthermore, that someday they’d be remembered by their children as no better than Gestapo thugs, mindless wretches for whom 1984 had already become reality.”

  Of course, Yarnell had overwhelmed them with his intelligence, his breeding, and the sheer force of his personality. Who could resist such a combination in those days? Who could resist such a combination in any age? Pharaohs and czars had fallen for less. The man was possessed of that rare combination: charm and intelligence.

  “Our team came back with their tails between their legs, ready to give up on everything they’d ever learned. We didn’t have the Farm down in Williamsburg like we do now. No place really to send them to get their heads back on straight. Yarnell did it for us. He came traipsing down to Washington, innocent as all get out, ready, willing, and able to give his all for the cause. Gabriel couldn’t have done better with his horn.”

  Owens chuckled with the memory.

  “He must have been the wunderkind,” McGarvey suggested.

  “Oh, yes, the wunderkind,” Owens hooted. “Someone’s exact words, I’m sure. I was working the Latin American desk in those days, and I saw Yarnell as the perfect catch. He’d not only learned Spanish —and learned it well—in college, he’d spent time in Spain and he actually understood the bastards. Not simply their language, mind you. Any high school kid can master Spanish in a few semesters. I’m talking their souls. Their esencia. Yarnell knew what he was talking about, no question about it. He was exactly what we thought we needed at the time.”

  Yarnell went through his training at the speed of light, soaking up information sometimes faster than the instructors could feed it to him, which started his prowling days.

  “We weren’t so compartmentalized then, you know. Should have been though. The Abwehr had taught us a big lesson … I mean, Canaris did pay the ultimate price for knowing too much, having too many feelings … . And the NKVD was years ahead of us, too, but then we’d never had a Dzerzhinsky or a Beria. Still …”

  Owens was starting to wander, so McGarvey brought him back on track. “Prowling days? I don’t understand.”

  “He became an alley cat. Any handout was welcome, didn’t care which hand fed him. Went from office to office, section to section, finding out what was up. Often as not he’d drop in with a bottle of French brandy or a box of Cuban cigars, and by the time he’d left they’d all be on a first-name basis and he’d have made three suggestions in seven different directions as to how they could improve their operation.”

  Again Owens stopped a moment to think back.

  “The damndest thing about him, though—and this part I remember directly—was that no one ever took offense with Yarnell’s meddling because, quite simply, it wasn’t meddling. You always got the feeling in those days that he was genuinely interested in helping you out. He was sincerely concerned that the CIA should become the very best intelligence agency the world had ever seen. He wanted breeding in the service. Knowledge. Sensibilities for the arts. Spying to the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.”

  “So he went to Mexico?” McGarvey asked.

  Owens looked up. “After his training, after a stint with me overseeing him on the Latin American desk, we sent him down to our embassy in Mexico City.”

&
nbsp; “Mexico was our southern neighbor and in many ways our ally, but the Russians ruled supreme in the diplomatic and intelligence circles in Mexico City. They’d adopted our philosophy there from day one: If you want to run the show, throw a lot of money into it. And they did. Their embassy was bigger and better equipped than ours. They cultivated more people within and outside of the Mexican government than we did. They threw more parties, offered more clandestine aid to almost any cause in the bush, and had consulates in more outback cities than we thought was necessary.

  “For forty miles beyond our border along Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California we were king. Beyond that there was—and still is from what I’m told—a definite Russian presence. The proletarian uprising may not have gained any kind of a foothold in the desert hinterland, but democratic capitalism certainly doesn’t hold sway either. In that, rural Mexico is very much like rural Spain; the poor are concerned with their government only in as much as it has the capability of feeding their families.

  “Yarnell understood all of this long before any of the rest of us did. Some of it instinctually, some of it intellectually, and the remainder experientially. He was a very fast learner.”

  “It was ’57 when he went down there?”

  “No, more like late ‘58, maybe even the spring of ’59. I remember that he hadn’t been down there very long before we began gearing up for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and then of course he got married in the midst of the CESTA investigation and the whole ball game with the Junta de Liberación Latinoamericana. You know, revolution was coming to Latin America once and for all, and look out Western Hemisphere because the downfall wasn’t going to be exactly pretty.”