Maestro: 4 (The Herbie Kruger Novels)

by John Gardner

  “You gone crazy or something? The Service is really interested in a very old, and famous, talented man who might—just might—have done a couple of naughties for the Nazis?”

  “It’s not that simple, Herb.” Arthur Railton patted his knee, as though he were petting an animal.

  “So tell me why it’s not so easy.”

  They did. They told him in great detail, and Herbie, having been in the business a long time before he put himself out to grass, listened with rising anxiety. When they had finished telling him, he asked what they wanted him to do about it.

  “We want you to represent us at the debriefing and interrogations,” the Chief told him. “Have to bring you up to date first …”

  “You mean tell me the things that don’t get in the newspapers because everyone’s gone nuts, and KGB’re the good guys now? Huh! I know all this.” He gave a ferocious nod. “And I know how long KGB’ll stay good boys.”

  “You’re well informed.” The Chief gave him a fatherly smile.

  “We all know it’s not over till the fat lady sings, Herb.” Arthur Railton was a shade too jovial.

  “Which fat lady?”

  “It’s a saying, Herbie,” Young Worboys sighed. Then the Chief spoke again—

  “Herbie, there are other things. We want you back in. Open-ended.”

  “And if I agree, you want me to look after British interests?”

  “You’re an expert on the old ways of the once evil empire. …”

  “What d’you mean once? You know what can happen. The various republics can go off down the hill like the Gathering swine, and some idiot can inherit the kingdom of the blind, which is what it is now. And, in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king. This is saying also, Young Worboys, like your fat lady doing the arias.”

  It took everyone a moment to translate the Krugerspeak and substitute Gadarene for Gathering.

  “You were an expert, Herbie. Now we need your expertise. There are going to be strange alliances; odd bedfellows; dangerous marriages.” The Chief was being uncharacteristically gentle. He usually got his way by bullying and shouting. “Possibly even other coups, and countercoups. As you say, who knows?”

  “Okay, so you want me to clean up any mess Maestro Passau just might have made?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And I get all expenses paid? Concorde to JFK? Suite at the Algonquin, New York? Reasonable expense account?”

  “Whatever you need, Herb.”

  Kruger drove back to New Forest, packed a bag, told Martha (who was, in many ways, only a temporary wife) all she needed to know and then headed off to the big old house near Warminster where the Office did everything but kill people.

  There he sat quietly and listened to what Art Railton and Young Worboys and other cognoscenti had to tell him, which took a day, at the end of which he asked, “You tell all this to the boys at Langley?”

  Art gave Worboys a sidelong look.

  “Okay, so you didn’t tell them. What about the people at the Puzzle Palace?” by which he meant the National Security Agency (NSA), who do not like being referred to as “the people at the Puzzle Palace.” Neither are they too elated when you call them the folks at SIGINT City.

  Silence.

  “And the G-men?”

  “Look, Herb,” Art began. “Look, the sources are impeccable. We told our relatives across the ocean a little of it. …”

  “Enough to hook them?”

  “More than enough. But we want you to have the full works, just as we heard it, chapter and verse, with all the cross-references.”

  “Okay.” Big Herbie did not seem surprised. He spent another couple of days reading the runes, by which he meant studying the documents, and one more day being taken over the European scene. On Wednesday he boarded the morning Concorde into JFK. There was a car waiting for him. The Guest Relations people at the Algonquin were splendid, and he had an interesting day.

  So that was why Big Herbie Kruger was standing next to Maestro Louis Passau when they tried to shoot him, after his ninetieth birthday concert in Lincoln Center, New York, on Friday, September 6, 1991.

  Mind you, there were many who had doubts about the Maestro’s true age. Some said he was a changeling boy and not really anywhere near his claimed age. How, they said with winks and nods, could a man be as vigorous and retain all his marbles if he was so heavy with years? But all was resolved many months later, when Big Herbie became the watershed of Louis Passau’s life.

  (2)

  FOR OVER FIFTY YEARS HE had been good copy. Louis Passau was one of those celebrities for whom the media recites litanies, and says its own versions of masses: the wish fulfillment of the print presses, the garbage mongers, the radio pundits and that relatively more recent rare breed, the in-depth TV superhack.

  He was great value for the specialist music critics and commentators, and had been since his sudden appearance as a musical enfant terrible way back in the 1930s. More, what made Passau so different was that he also made wonderful pickings for the diarists, the gossip columnists, the feature writers and the horde of experts who reveled in kiss-and-tell, character assassination, and all possible variations in between.

  Louis Passau was news: romance, wealth, extravagance, talent, fast cars, faster women, explosions of short-fuse temper, private airplanes, strange, unexplained, and sometimes sinister interludes, speedboats, political slings, arrows and, definitely, outrageous fortunes. All these made the tabloids, the heavy print presses, the magazines and the telecasts, with constant shock-horror fervor, or laughable delight.

  Better still, the public loved him. Not just the concert and opera-going cognoscenti and glitterati, but the whole razzmatazz, the wide spectrum: that amorphous mass to whom some of the newshounds and most of the TV shows pandered.

  So it was that when the ticket office opened, on May 5, 1991, for the Louis Passau 90th Birthday Concert to be held on Friday, September 6, in Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, all available tickets, one thousand eight hundred of them, were gone within ninety minutes.

  Avery Fisher Hall seats some two thousand eight hundred, and a thousand of these seats had been reserved for a lengthy list of specially invited guests; a list which, one columnist was to write, “precluded any other serious concert on that night anywhere in the western world.”

  In June, John Stretchfield’s scholarly but sensational book, Hitler’s Unknown Spies, hit the bookshelves. Among other startling revelations it contained chapter, and many verses, on the part Louis Passau had played on Nazi Germany’s behalf—not to mince words—as an active spy against his chosen country, the United States of America. By the end of the month, the scalpers were getting more than a thousand dollars a ticket for the concert.

  Though Stretchfield’s manuscript was above suspicion—cross-referencing hundreds of sources, citing documents that had never been used until now, and generally making a clear case against Passau—nobody really wanted to take any action. The FBI sat on their thumbs, the NSA was silent, and the CI people at Langley ho-hummed.

  All this until they received the report from their brother spooks in London. They suspected it was an expurgated version, but knew that, as far as old Louis Passau was concerned, they could not sit idly on the sidelines. Even if the Brits were only a quarter correct, Passau had a lot of explaining to do and, unless they dug the truth out of him soon, some journalist would get a sniff and the proverbial ordure would hit the propeller.

  There were top level meetings at the FBI Counter-intelligence field office on Half Street, S.W., Washington, D.C. On three separate occasions the Assistant Director drove to D.C. from his own fiefdom—the training center at Quantico. In the end they actually came to a gentleman’s agreement with Passau. He would surrender himself on the day of the Anniversary Conceit and, immediately after the event, six special agents from the Counter-intelligence department would ferry the old musician to Quantico and the quarters, never pointed out to visitors, used for major
debriefings on matters concerning intelligence and treacherous betrayal.

  The Maestro was only told of their interest in the Nazi tie-in, and Passau seemed amused by it all, even when they said there would be a Langley crew present, and also one member of the British Secret Intelligence Service.

  So Big Herb came rolling into town on Wednesday morning, was met and driven to the Algonquin, installed in one of the luxury suites and, by two in the afternoon—having taken a light lunch from room service—lay sprawled on his bed, earphones clamped across his large head, listening on his portable CD player to the last recording Leonard Bernstein had made of the Mahler First. It had been his least favorite symphony from the composer who dominated his musical interest, but with Bernstein conducting the Amsterdam Concertgebouworkest, the piece had taken on a totally new meaning for him.

  The telephone rang about twelve times and his attention was called to it only by the flashing red light.

  “Hi!” Herb said brightly into the instrument.

  “This is Bruce.” The man at the far end had the right words but Herbie did not recognize the voice.

  “As in Bruce and the spider?” He purposely pronounced it “schpider.”

  “The same. I’m in the lobby.”

  He was there, close to the elevators: a tall, slightly stooping figure in jeans, Nike sneakers, and a T-shirt upon which was printed “Moscow University 1989.” Herbie thought the only thing that marked him out as someone who had never before played for real was the rolled copy of yesterday’s London Times.

  He had to make the best of it, for the Embassy’s Assistant Resident had only been in Washington for three months. His name was Charlie Laurence and his instructions were to stay in New York until Herbie was on his way. “When you move Sunray, I’ll get back to the real world in D.C.” He grimaced. Then he suggested a stroll in the park.

  “You got mace and everything?” Herbie asked with a big smile as the doorman flagged down a cab.

  Charlie Laurence actually smiled back, which made it all worthwhile, Kruger thought.

  “London wants you to know that the Feds’ll be headed by a chap called Mickey Boomer,” Charlie said as they walked into Central Park, avoiding the heroic joggers and the horse droppings from the tourist carriages which clopped past at regular intervals. Behind them, from the cavern of Fifth Avenue, came the wail of a siren. Put a blind man down in the Big Apple and he would know where he was in a moment, Herbie thought. Nowhere else in the world did police and ambulance sirens have that strange locked-in echo produced by the wide streets and high buildings.

  “Never heard of him,” Kruger observed.

  “They said he’d heard of you.” Charlie seemed anxious to please. “But then, most people have heard of you.”

  “You hear of me, Charlie? Before this business, I mean.”

  “I heard you lecture once, at Warminster. Worth twice the admission fee. You’re a legend, Mr. Kruger.”

  “Herbie.”

  “Okay. You’re a legend, Herbie. Honor to meet you and all that.”

  “So what else London tell you? Who’s coming from Langley?”

  “Yes. Otto Khan and Boris Sangster.”

  “Big time,” Herbie said. In his mind he thought it was shrewd. Old Kubla Khan himself, he of the pleasure-domed bald pate and dreadful silences. Khan would deal with the Hitler stuff—“I Spied for the Führer,” or whatever it was called—while Boris would smash his way into the more recent problems concerning everyone’s new friends around the Soviet Union: this last being the really pressing problem of which only Herbie, among those on this side of the pond, had all the details. Well, Boris would not get far without the extra mileage Herbie had brought with him. Passau at age ninety would brush off Boris Sangster like a fly, leaving the real business to Herbie, if they allowed him to work on his own. One of the last things Young Worboys had said was, “Try to force the issue, Herb. Try to get him on his Todd and go through him like shit through a goose.”

  “On his Todd?” Herbie had feigned innocence. “What’s with the Todd? The Sweeney Todd, Demon Alibaba of Fleet Street?”

  “Don’t piss me about, Herb.” Worboys was long wise to Herbie’s eccentric ways. “On his Todd Sloan—on his own.”

  “Ah!” Big Herbie gave the game away with a grin. “The crockery rhyming slang.”

  “You’ll get a call from Boomer, it seems.” Charlie was taking long strides, trying the impossible, to match his pace to Big Herbie’s shambling walk.

  “He give me an invite to the concert, you think?”

  “You’ll get the run of the place; and you’ll go with the Feds to Quantico. Special flight laid on from La Guardia. Champagne and caviar, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “Then we go chase up and down the Gerbal tubes, yes?”

  “The what?”

  “You never been to Quantico, Charlie? Damned great brick buildings joined together by Plexiglas walkways. They call them the Gerbal tubes. Piece of trivia for you. FBI trivia, what are Gerbal tubes? Comes on the puce card marked little-known secrets.”

  “Thanks, yes. Must wangle a trip to Quantico.”

  “You’d like it. They got two commissaries and the food’s cheap. Not the Savory Grill, but what is, thank God.”

  Charlie seemed to think this was very funny and appeared a little put out when Herbie said he would walk back to the hotel by himself.

  “They said I had to keep in touch.”

  “So keep in touch, Charlie. Pander to my every whim, huh?”

  “Anything I can do …”

  Herbie gave his big daft grin. “New pecker? Million dollars? How about that for openers?”

  Once more, Charlie thought it was very funny. He stored up Herbie’s sayings so that he could eventually boast about servicing the legend that was Kruger.

  As he was leaving, Herbie told him, “I’ll call you, don’t call me.” Pause for the big grin and the photograph. “Unless London wants me to know something yesterday, okay?”

  Mickey Boomer telephoned the hotel that evening and invited Herbie to a meal and a briefing. Boomer belied his name: a smallish man with a soft voice and deceptively languid manner. The meal was in some chichi French place where the food was New York French with things like seafood gazpacho on the menu. “Good old French delicacy, seafood gazpacho,” Herbie muttered, but Boomer did not get the point.”

  Afterwards they walked silently back to the hotel. In the lobby, Boomer took a package from his briefcase. “You have a permit to carry this, Herb. Sure there’ve been changes, and Moscow Center don’t take chances no more.” He chuckled, “Certainly now their old boss is in the slammer.” He spoke of Kryuchkov, arrested with the other “coupsters”—one of the U.S. media’s more jarring new words with which they slowly poisoned the English language. Boomer gave Herbie a little cocked head, coy, look. “The decision was made by the D.C.I. Everyone associated with Passau has to carry. The Russian connection is so damned sensitive that you just never know.”

  “Sensitive you don’t know.” Herb was agreeing with him. In his room he unwrapped the package. A 9mm Smith & Wesson, forty rounds, two spare clips and a holster which fitted snugly against the small of his back. Even with what little the Brits had given them, the Soviet connection had put someone on edge. Someone, Herbie thought, had seen the needles flick. Back in London they had discussed the possibility of Kruger being clandestinely armed via the Embassy, but it had not come up with Charlie. If you followed through on the logic of Passau’s last few years, then there were people who would not want to wait for his death from old age: even a few more months—in spite of the dramatic changes.

  The briefing, on Thursday, was interesting and Kruger returned to the Algonquin with all the updates on the life and times of Louis Passau, orchestral director extraordinary—one hundred and two pages in all. They added nothing to the two biographies—one official and fawning, the other unofficial and scandalous—which had been required reading in London, together with a separate précis
which filled in huge gaps and had pictures. Herbie had another edge. He had just about every recording Passau had ever made.

  On Friday, he was one of the team waiting for the Maestro at Lincoln Center.

  IT WAS MORE like an audience with the great man than what amounted to an arrest. His dressing room had no personal touches, except for the many birthday telegrams affixed to the large, light-bulb-scaped mirror. There was one L-shaped sitting unit: old, covered in black with tiny green flowers printed into the faded material. The FBI and CIA men filed in and were introduced to Passau who, seated wearing a silk robe, acknowledged each of them with a nod, only occasionally looking up.

  Herbie thought he saw the old man’s eyes give a twitch of recognition but could not be sure. After all it was eleven years since he had come face to face with Maestro Passau. Vienna, 1980, and the dressing room in the Grosser Musikvereinsaal was stamped full of Passau character: photographs of the famous and infamous signed to the Maestro. Eleven years is a long time.

  If Passau seemed unconcerned, his wife Angela, fifty years his junior, verged on the hysterical, Herb considered. Her eyes were red with weeping and she moved in a little jumpy, puppetlike manner, hands and eyes never still, shooing them from the dressing room like a country girl bringing the cows into the barn. “Cusha, cusha, cusha calling,” he thought, wondering where in hell the line came from.

  Not that there was anything countrylike about Angela, in her black velvet, the Barnscome pearls at her throat—she had been the Honorable Angela Barnscome before Passau had courted her and whisked her to the altar. It was his third marriage, as far as anyone knew; there was always the possibility of another bride or three lurking unseen if anyone had the motivation to spend fifty years searching the files.

  Angela also wore the diamond clutch that had been Passau’s wedding present: worth ten million, it was said at the time. She was rich in her own right, British, known for her poise and English phlegm: the usual stiff-upper-lip stuff. Yet, in the corridor outside, Herbie felt that all the tension had come from Angela Passau and not her husband. Angela Passau who smelled of lemons. Herb wondered if that had a significance—the lemons.