The Infant of Prague

by Bill Granger

  “Not tonight.”

  “I always figure on something going wrong.”

  “Is something going to go wrong?”

  “It never has but you have to be ready. Can I stand up straight now?”

  “Sure. Get in the car. Turn the headlights off until we’re in the street.”

  “It might be dangerous coming up without lights into the street.”

  “Take the chance,” Devereaux said.

  “It’s your party,” the driver said.

  Devereaux settled in the backseat next to Miki. Miki lit a cigarette from his case and blew the smoke against the side window. The driver pushed the car into low gear and started up the ramp to the street. In the street, he flicked on the headlamps and pulled into the square. The square was still empty and Miki had now disappeared without anyone knowing it.

  “I feel so strange,” Miki said softly. “I feel as though I have stepped on the other side of my own death.”

  Devereaux stared out the windows. Now and then, he would look behind him. There was nothing following them. The weeknight streets were nearly deserted. They drove up past the Bourse and along the line of fashionable shops that reached up the hill to the edge of the Ghent road. Baroque old Brussels, crammed with odd buildings and the neon lights of American franchise hamburger stands, appeared solemn and dull.

  “Where do we go now?” Miki said.

  “Zeebrugge,” said the driver. Devereaux said nothing. He watched the streets and kept his hand on the pistol.

  “You know what I was? Back there?”

  Devereaux turned to Miki. He had no interest in the other man but sometimes they had to talk, they had to make a friend at the point of defection when they left everything behind. Until the moment came, defection seemed one-way, a looking glass that led into a new wonderland of freedom. But there was always the naked moment when they had to step through the looking glass and leave that other, real world behind forever.

  “I was invisible and they wanted to give me an award for my invisibility,” Miki said. “I was the arranger and they all told me their secrets in the end, all the dirty little secrets that no one would be terribly interested in at all. I could tell you about a woman who makes love to her dog, a woman you would not believe this of in a million years. Do you suppose I wish to know that secret? But they all tell me everything. Because I am no more important to them than a servant. I am there to dress them, wash them, feed them. I arrange their beautiful lives for them. And not only those people. Even in the Ministry. I know so much, I know so much I wish I did not know. And now I am dead and at rest.”

  Devereaux thought Miki was talking for the sake of his own comfort.

  “Cigarette?” Miki said.

  Devereaux shook his head.

  “You are American?” They had spoken French from the point of meeting.

  Devereaux nodded.

  “Then I speak English. It is so much better than my French. The French, even these Belgiques, they always tell you how you do not speak their language.”

  “What do you know that interests us?”

  The question had been formed from the first moment in Devereaux’s mind and he had considered it for flaws. Hanley either knew or did not know and was willing to let Devereaux be the risk of a guess. In any event, a careful agent stays alive by reminding himself to know everything.

  Miki smiled. “Perhaps that should wait.”

  “Perhaps,” Devereaux said. “But why would we be interested in the secrets of movie stars?”

  “Everything is politics,” Miki said.

  Devereaux waited.

  “And politics is money,” Miki said. “Do you understand that?”

  Devereaux stared at the profile. His face was all angles and planes. There was a curious sense of good health, even of power, about him. Miki was a happy man because he had so many secrets.

  “Everything is here,” Miki said, tapping his head. “And when everything is down on paper and tape, then Miki will be disappeared. So I think it should be waited for, for Miki to speak to the man in Washington or wherever he is.”

  The long night road to the sea was illuminated by lampposts all across the little country of Belgium. The road fell away from Brussels and passed through the pleasant, rolling countryside and climbed up past Ghent. The dual roadway was empty save for the occasional elephant parade of tandem trucks the English call “juggernauts.” The trucks moved slowly toward the sea and the harbors of Zeebrugge and Antwerp and the long night’s journey across the North Sea to Britain. It was raining all the time now and the single wide windshield wiper on the Mercedes whooshed back and forth, creating a rhythm that echoed the click of the tires on the road. The dull sounds, regular as a ticking clock, lulled them. Devereaux yawned and felt his hand relax in the grip of the gun. Maybe it would all be routine after all.

  When they pulled off the road, Devereaux cranked the side window. He smelled the bare November fields and the chill odor of the sea. The narrow two-lane road brought them up past Bruges to the new port village of Zeebrugge. The wind rose. Devereaux closed the window. The wind picked up a howling sound from the sea.

  All the holiday homes were clustered in a tangle of streets west of the concrete harbor. The homes were shut for autumn and the wide, windy beach was deserted. The wind prowled inland from the sea and offered a hint of terror.

  Zeebrugge was an ugly village with a few shuttered cafés and hotels near the main harbor entrance. In the Middle Ages, the sea had come to Bruges fifteen kilometers away. Over the centuries it had brought silt and sand and rocks to the coast and the land extended more and more out into the sea, so that Zeebrugge became the new port and Bruges, lovely and old, became a place for the past.

  “This is the place? What do we do now, take a ferryboat to England?” Miki smiled. He was very relaxed now and he spoke to Devereaux as though he were talking to a friend.

  Devereaux stared out to sea. The sea was as black as the sky. The sands snaked from the beach across the road and piled up against the fences around the summer homes.

  “What do you do?” he asked the driver.

  “Make the signal. Three times. I’m supposed to go down the beach a little ways. You gentlemen are to wait up here.”

  “Why?”

  “Sir, I don’t ask those questions. That’s what I was told to do.”

  Devereaux got out of the car and Miki scrambled across the leather seat to follow him. Devereaux felt the chill pluck at his face. The wind cut at him.

  Miki shivered immediately. “Damned cold, damned cold,” he said in English.

  The Mercedes growled into gear down the street. The two men looked around them for shelter. There was the shuttered café across the road, but the wind was roaring straight at it. Perhaps in the lee of the harbor wall.

  Devereaux saw the Mercedes turn to face the sea. He saw the signal. He stared out to sea and saw the answering signal at last. Then it was all right after all, he thought. For the first time, he let the pistol slip into his pocket and he took out his hand.

  Miki turned from the wind and tried to light a cigarette. He saw it first.

  He cried out and Devereaux turned and then he too saw the Mercedes bearing down on them. The big car was moving very fast.

  Miki began to run across the street toward the café buildings.

  Devereaux, alone on the sand, pulled the pistol from his raincoat pocket and fired. The bullet went high and he fired again.

  The car nearly nicked him as it skidded on the sand and the brake lights flashed on.

  Devereaux had leaped aside. Now he was on his knees in the sand, bringing the Python up in both hands, firing.

  The glass shattered in the rear window.

  Devereaux looked around for Miki and saw the two men emerge from the gangway between two buildings. They carried boxy Uzis in their hands and they were firing.

  Devereaux shouted “Miki!” once and then returned the fire.

  The one on the left went down
hard, while the spray of machine-gun bullets plowed up the sand in front of the kneeling American agent.

  Devereaux fired on until the hammer sounded hollow on a spent chamber. He pulled the Spanish knockoff out of his other pocket and fired at the man by the café door. And he saw the man had stopped firing and was grinning at him.

  He saw the horrible grin.

  Everything had been a setup, he thought.

  And did not see the Mercedes backing up wildly in the sand toward the sea, the rear wheels spinning furiously. He did not even feel the impact when two tons of German steel caught him sideways and flipped his body up above the car and back toward the sand. Did not feel pain, thought, regret: only saw the face of the other man who had stopped firing, saw the familiar leering grin, saw what it had all meant in that final moment of life as he fell through a childhood nightmare without any sound but his own muffled scream.

  4

  JULIE ON LINE 2

  Big Ben Herguth was. He wore size 52 jackets and 46 slacks. The slacks came in at $650; he picked up his clothes at a place in Palm Springs. He was always brown from the sun, even in the rainy season of Los Angeles. The other thing about him was that his eyes were flat and dead.

  “I don’t know what the connect is, Julie,” he said. He rolled the cigar next to his unoccupied ear. The other held the receiver of a white Prince Oleg Cassini telephone. He had his boxy Sunset Strip office redecorated every year by the same decorator. He liked change but not too much change. There had been too much change the last couple of days.

  “You want to know what I think, I think there is a connection because that is the way the G works. Remember all that shit about how Reagan was giving money to fucking Iran to get some hostages out, and then it was being ripped off two ways and going back to the contras? You come to me with that bullshit for a script and I tell you to walk. I mean, William Goldman couldn’t make shit out of an idea like that. It just happened to be true though. So yes, I definitely think there is something going on between the fucking CIA and that little bitch in Chicago who decides to defect, and I think there is some shit going on by coincidence with the CIA and our old friend Miki, who disappears Wednesday night in Brussels. You fucking-A-do, I think that.”

  Ben Herguth listened then. Julie talked in a soft voice all the time. He had soft hands. He would probably live to be a hundred, which was a lot longer than Ben Herguth figured he would last, but what the hell, Ben had fun. Julie never seemed to have fun. Except for the little girls and that was not Ben’s cup of tea, but Julie was Julie and he was the most important man in Ben Herguth’s large and important life.

  Julie was saying, “The first priority is Miki. Find out who took him and why. We got a lot invested here, Ben. We don’t need a double cross from some cowboy at Central Intelligence.”

  “I still say we end-run them,” Ben Herguth said. “This is all connected to that little girl in Chi. She musta been some kinda connection. A movie star, for Christ’s sake, tell me that Miki didn’t know who she is. This is some setup, and when the G starts setting you up, it’s always some fantastic plot idea like this that nobody would believe in the first place. But why would they want Miki and why would they want to put the screws to us?”

  “The reporter at the O and O in Chicago. Kay Davis,” Julie said. “I wish I had never heard of her. Apparently, she has an in with the girl. And the girl’s attorney.”

  “I looked her up with some of my friends in the shyster business. Her name is Stephanie Fields, she’s a big do-good civil-rights-type broad. She is complicating it.”

  “I think this Kay Davis could work for us if she saw the right way,” Julie said.

  “All right, that’s the subtle approach and I take off my hat to you, you always usually make it work. But I think this is a matter of time here. I mean, if the G has got Miki and he’s starting to talk too much—”

  “What are they going to do with it? They’re in for a pound as much as a penny.”

  “That’s it, Julie. I can’t figure out their angle except they have to have an angle. All I know is fucking Miki goes to the ladies’ can at the city hall place where they was holding this party and he’s got a bimbo with him, he’s going to give her a standup bang in the ladies’ can—”

  “Who was it?”

  “Nobody with a brain, I checked that out. If she’s working the CIA, then you can sell your savings bonds and start buying Russian. You know who it is, I forget her name, she was in Zapata’s Raiders. She was the one they raped in the convent but not the nun. Sandra something, it’ll come to me. I sent my boy to talk to her and she ain’t hiding nothing, believe me. She just wanted a fuck. So Miki fucks her and stays in the john to take a pee. She goes back to the party and that’s when he got out. The john is on the ground floor. But where did he go then? And who did he go to?”

  “What do our friends in Prague say?”

  “They are not happy people. First they lose all their tennis stars and gymnasts, and now they got a kid movie star defecting along with their number-one impresario. Prague must be getting like a ghost town.”

  There was a long pause that ate up the ether between New York and Los Angeles. Julie’s voice was different now.

  “I saw the tapes from the O and O in Chicago. The little girl. She’s a cute thing. A real cute thing.”

  Ben closed his eyes. He saw the way Julie’s voice was going. He sighed. “Yeah, well, Julie, for fourteen, she’s got a nice can on her and the tits look real. But you can’t tell. You can’t tell at that age.”

  “Yes,” said Julie. It was just what he wanted to hear.

  “Nice can,” Ben repeated for Julie’s benefit.

  “Definitely a derriere,” Julie said. “Maybe it would have to be your way after all, Ben. Maybe we’d have to take her in to see what the government wants to do. Give us a card.”

  “Take her in,” Ben said. “I could get you some tapes then. We wouldn’t have to guess.”

  “Yes,” Julie said. “I’d like that.”

  Ben sighed again. He knew Julie would like that. It didn’t do a thing for Ben. Charlene in the outer office, she did a thing for Ben. Or two. Charlene was stacked and active and that was something Ben could see. But everyone was different, he reasoned. And it was just as well to humor Julie because Ben Herguth might be the biggest prick in Hollywood, but he wasn’t shit if Julie didn’t make him so. They both understood that.

  “You keep me informed. On everything. On her. You put your own people on it, Ben. You got people in Chicago.”

  “I got people everywhere,” Ben said.

  “Then you keep an eye on things. On this Davis and this Fields. And on our little refugee girl. An orphan. She says she’s an orphan. Isn’t that darling, Ben?”

  Ben said it certainly was.

  5

  THE NEUMANN SOLUTION

  R Section was funded secretly out of the vast Department of Agriculture budget. Under examination, it appeared to be an international crop reporting and estimating service of the Department. It counted grain in the Ukraine and the price of bread in Warsaw. In fact, it actually did some of these things. But in another part of Section, separate from the first, it did many other things that had nothing to do with the Department of Agriculture.

  Agriculture occupied two squat, solemn buildings off Independence and Fourteenth Street in Washington, not far from the Fourteenth Street Bridge and National Airport across the river. In the bowels of the vast bureaucracy housed in the two buildings were the central rooms of R Section.

  It had been called R Section simply because it had no other name. When it was first created as an intelligence agency during the Kennedy Administration, it was funded under a provision of paragraph R of the Agriculture budget. At the time, it was the ninth intelligence agency operated by various arms of the government including the National Security Agency, CIA, FBI, Defense Intelligence Agency, Office of Naval Intelligence, Army Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, and the Department of State’s inte
lligence section. But its main rival for power and position was always the CIA, the Langley Firm. As Kennedy had said, “I don’t ever want those bastards to be able to put me over a barrel again.” He referred to the Bay of Pigs disaster, which he blamed on the CIA. R Section was the evaluator of CIA intelligence, the spies set up to spy upon the spies.

  Or, as the present director of R Section put it, “We are the left hand seeking to know what the right hand is doing.”

  Mrs. Neumann’s aphorism had created a positive feeling inside the bureaucracy of Section. The feeling was needed following the scandals involving the previous director and a White House liaison.

  Mrs. Lydia Neumann, formerly in charge of the computer analysis division, had become the highest-ranked woman in the national intelligence community by dint of being available when she was needed. It had been a low moment for Section and Lydia Neumann had led Section out of it.

  But today she did not feel triumphant or upbeat about anything. If she had been asked for aphorisms, she would have only thought of gloomy ones.

  On this sleepy November afternoon of soft Virginia sun against the glittering phalanx of buildings on the river, Mrs. Neumann sat very still in her large office that overlooked Fourteenth Street and asked Hanley the same question she had asked him in the morning.

  “Where is Devereaux?”

  Hanley sat across the desk from her. The red leather chair squealed as he twisted in it. “We don’t know.”

  “People cannot disappear.”

  “It was exactly what we wished Miki to do.”

  “And Miki has vanished as well.”

  “The ship received the signal from the driver. We’re looking for him now. When the dinghy got to the beach, they were all gone. Car, driver, passenger, conductor. Everyone was gone. You remember Mason, the young man that Devereaux recruited? He was in London on station duty. I detached him twelve hours ago. He’s been in Zeebrugge.”

  “He’s inexperienced.”

  “But he’s outside the scope of Stowe’s people. I thought we still wanted to keep this out of regular channels.”