by John Gardner
“Maestro, thank you for all the pleasure you’ve given us. This has been a real treat. Haven’t enjoyed a concert so much since I don’t know when. You conduct a lot of Shostakovich? Like him?”
Passau felt his stomach turn over. They had told him that whoever made contact would ask if he conducted much Shostakovich, and if he liked the composer.
“Never met him,” Passau laughed. They had told him to say that. “Seriously, I think he’s one of the greatest living composers. Too bad he’s Russian.” They had told him to say that as well, and the contact would tell him that he really preferred the old romantics. He would mention Tchaikovsky.
“Personally, I prefer the old romantics,” the fat, tux-clad man smiled. “I’m very fond of Tchaikovsky.”
“So what have you to tell me?”
“Could we, perhaps, meet one evening? I have a few ideas I’d like to discuss.”
Passau told him certainly. They could meet tomorrow. Seven thirty at the place on Lexington. “Gave him the telephone number. Everything.”
“And the next night?”
“We went out to dinner. Forget where. Didn’t get his name. ‘Just call me Alex,’ you know?”
Herbie said he knew only too well.
Alex had talked at length. Passau said it was like some kind of psychological interview. “He seemed to know almost everything about me. How much I smoked and drank. Places I liked. People I saw. As though they’d built up some dossier on me.”
“They probably had. Way the Soviet service recruited. They had long questionnaires. Built up a profile of a possible recruit. Very detailed. Knew what you were thinking almost. What next?”
“Telephone call from Alex. Three weeks later. Wants a meeting. I have to be outside Saks Fifth Avenue. Two thirty on one of three dates. Says he’ll pick me up.”
“And you went?”
“On the last day. Last possible date.”
“And he turns up.”
“No, someone else comes. Called himself Simon. Heavy accent. Comes up behind me and says, ‘What a beautiful dress.’ It’s in the window, the dress. On a dummy. I say, ‘I’d prefer it in blue for my woman,’ and he says, ‘you could be right.’ That’s a match; what Alex told me would be the recognition. Simon’s only in town for two days, then back to Moscow. Told me straight out. We walked together. Went into St. Pat’s. Sat down and talked quietly. Made no secret of where he was coming from. Asked if I wanted to dance with them.”
“Dance with … ?”
“Herb,” Passau held up a hand. “He was being poetic, or something. Said that he heard I was a sympathizer with the Communist Party International. Did I want to serve the Party? I told him, yes. He said how I could be of value.”
“Which was?”
“Almost the same as the fucking Nazis had briefed me. Stuff from Army, Navy, Air Force, politicos. The usual. He said they’d be very generous and I told him I didn’t need the money. He just laughed. Gave me dead drops, telephone codes, numbers to memorize. There was one number I had to call once I had something for them, which wasn’t for three months. Early sixty-one.”
“And what happened, early sixty-one?”
“Gregory gives me a call and uses the mystic passwords. They tell me to go through the Russian routine with this telephone number. Do whatever I’m told, and give them a plastic bag—it was from F.A.O. Schwarz, Fifth Ave, the toy shop, which seemed appropriate. Gregory brought it round. In the bag there were a couple of rolls of film and some papers in a cardboard folder. Big deal, Gregory says. They think I’m letting them have the crown jewels. Okay? I say, ‘Fine Greg,’ and he tells me I should get a little package from them. Goes through the rules of the game.
“I make the call, they set up a meet. Outside. Central Park. Very specific. I can still show you the exact spot today. The contact’ll be carrying a copy of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Under his left arm it’s safe. Under right arm, piss off and go to a fallback, two hours. He went through all the jargon. Gave me a buzz, Herb. It was fun.”
“And the man you met?”
“Pavel. Told me to call him Paul. Said he was my case officer, handler, and he was, for about ten years. Every three months or so. Regular. Nice guy. Would only meet outside. He also carried a Schwarz bag that first time. Exchanged bags as we walked. Very friendly. Really nice.”
“So you went for a walk?”
“Gave me more numbers, one-liners for the telephones, and a couple of dead drops we might use. Did use them as well. New York Public Library and the lobby of the old Barclay Hotel—Intercontinental now.”
“Know it well.”
“He said good-bye. Gregory had told me I should walk up to the Plaza. Wait out front. Limo comes cruising in, dark windows, can’t see inside. Driver leaps out, ‘Mr. Passau, sir. Your car.’ Opens the door. I get in. Matthew’s sitting in back with a big smile. We drive off. He takes the bag from me and says, ‘Well, Maestro, you are launched.’ Talked like I was a fucking ship. We got food here, Herb?”
It was not quite midday, but Kroger wanted words with Pucky. She had gone out earlier to get provisions, but there was a job that had to be done that afternoon. In the kitchen he talked to her as they fried bacon.
“Hell on the old guy’s cholesterol,” she said.
“At ninety, he should worry. Listen, Puck, we got a lot to do,” and he eased her into the bedroom, then gave her orders, in precise one-liners as she looked at him, eyes wide and unbelieving.
“You mean it?”
“’Course I bloody mean it. We go tonight, if you fix it. Dead of night. Around two thirty in the morning, so you’d better get it right. Need a Polaroid and some film as well. Got to doctor a passport.”
“Yes, sir. Certainly, sir. Three bags full, sir.”
“We’ll only be taking three bags.” Kruger was not in the amusing vein today.
He went back to tending the bacon, and thought about what Passau had said. “The days of spying are coming into the twilight.” Twilight comes before the night, he considered. They had already been through years of night. Fighting the unseen in total darkness. Blind men with knives in a coal cellar. Or were they knives? It was over, but was it over? The whole thing, he decided, was too profound for him, so he started to listen, in his head, to the Mahler Ninth. It was apt because its music spoke of the great conundrum that was death: the composer preparing himself for his own mortality. Kruger, who knew all of Mahler by heart, had so often used this device, listening to the music in his head, without a score, without a recording. Hearing it, loving it. When he chose the Ninth he was usually in a mood to deal with his own ageing process, his personal secret meeting with the angel who was his final case officer: death. Halfway through the second movement, Passau, in the other room, began to play a recording of Strauss: Death and Transfiguration.
At least they were both thinking along the same lines.
IN ENGLAND, it was just after five in the evening, and Ursula Zunder was drinking tea in the guest suite when Gus and Carole Keene came in unannounced.
“We’ve got some questions, Ursula.” Gus cradled his unlit pipe, and Carole merely looked friendly. They sat down, all cozy, chums sharing the good old British afternoon tea with little sandwiches and cakes.
“More questions?”
“Yes. Special questions. I want you to think very hard, Ursula, because this could be a matter of life or death. Kingfisher?”
“What about Kingfisher?”
“Before you became his case officer, did you ever get sight of his dossier? I don’t mean gems from it, I mean the whole thing.”
Ursula Zunder frowned. “Of course,” she said. “Naturally. He was a big fish. I insisted that I know everything about him before I work with him. When you’re going to service an agent in the field, you really have to get a good look at his profile.”
“How much do you remember?”
Once more the frown. “All of it, naturally. I was a professional.”
Gus Keene breathed a little sigh of relief. Art’s cable had been most specific. “Tell us about it, love, would you?” He smiled at her and half understood the bleakness in her eyes.
(20)
“CAN WE SCHMOOZE A little this afternoon, Lou?”
Outside, rainclouds had started to gather. In the distance thunder rumbled, while the air had become like a Turkish bath. The Maestro gave him a little smile. “Schmooze all you want,” he said. “What d’ya want to schmooze about?”
“Oh, this, that, the other. Maybe thirty years of operational techniques. What you call all the fun of the fair. Later we get down to closer details. This guy, Paul. You say he worked with you for ten years?”
“Thick and thin, all the way during the sixties, sure. Everything changed, didn’t it, Herb? During the sixties? Stand-off in Cuba, JFK’s assassination, Vietnam, the pop culture, drugs, protests. Bad time-good time. Two sides of the picture. Change of values. The youth revolution.”
“And through it all, you met regularly with Paul, gave him stuff, took in the washing.” Herbie wanted to press on. He kept hearing Art’s voice, “Everyone’s lying in their teeth, and I’m seventy percent sure they’ve started to sniff around here.” Who was sniffing? FBI, CIA, Mob, or what was left of the four senior officers who had suborned Passau? Again he said, “And through it all, you met with the Russian guy, Paul.”
“Him, and a couple of dead drops in New York. Once a drop in Finland—Helsinki. Once in London.”
“Tell me about London.”
“Did two concerts, royal Festival Hall, then two weeks at Covent Garden, with the Passau Center’s production of Tosca. Sixty-six …”
“All the sixes,” Kruger mumbled. “In 1966 you met Paul in London?”
“No. Did a DLB.”
“Professional, Lou. Talking DLBs. Not your common dead letter box, but a fabled DLB. Where?”
“Complicated. Can’t remember it all now, but there were signals. Chalk marks to say it had been filled or emptied. Blue chalk, I remember, on a lamppost in South Audley Street, London. Later, back in New York, Paul asked if I’d gotten the joke. I hadn’t. How would I know that the lamppost was almost directly outside a producer’s office? Movies. Guy made famous spy thrillers. They thought that was very funny.”
“And the DLB was?”
“Truly I forget. This was a long while ago. A church, I think. No, churchyard. Statue of Saint Francis talking with the birds. Base of the statue, yes.”
“How did you get the instructions—in London, I mean?”
“Usual. I was told to telephone. They called me from D.C. Then I call. One-liners. ‘Harry, this is Bill.’ ‘Don’t know Bill from a hole in the head.’ That kind of thing. ‘Gray goose is flying tonight.’”
“But, Lou, you said the secret squirrels, the fabulous four, your quiet quartet, always gave you stuff to pass. You said ‘stuff’ meant chicken feed. The disinformation in which you were dealing.”
“Oh, that.” Almost a toss of the head. “Sure, one of the boys comes to my hotel room. Savoy. Great hotel. One of them comes in and gives me stuff. Says I got to call. Did it that night. Did the DLB next day. Remember it well. Pouring rain, like the Flood. Like what it’s going to do here any minute.” He glanced towards the windows. Lightning flickered like an artillery barrage, and the first drops banged against the glass—fall-out, shrapnel. Herbie hoped Pucky was being careful. He did not like driving in this kind of weather. If it set in, tonight would be murder. It would also be perfect. Can’t have it both ways, Kruger. Take all the animals you can find; two by two into the Ark and sail to England.
“Which one?” he asked, detached, almost levitating he was so laid back.
“Which one what?”
“Which of your four? Your quartet, so secret you couldn’t let left hand know what right hand was up to. Which one brought you the stuff?”
“I don’t know. Wait. Yes. Duncan. It was Duncan. Came to the Savoy all long hair and dirty jeans. I was very embarrassed. A small packet. Film maybe.”
“And the DLB in Helsinki?”
“Ha!” He threw back his head. “This was good, Helsinki. We did two concerts—Sibelius, who else? The orchestra was brilliant. I forget what else, but the DLB was really great. You know Helsinki?”
“Nodding acquaintance.”
“You know the park they have with the statue of Sibelius, Finland’s great composer? Just the head. The great domed head. Like looking at a woman’s tit on a big movie screen; talk about over the top. They took me out to be photographed with this damned great piece of sculpture. I did the DLB at the same time. Dropped my camera. Filled the DLB as I picked up. Little hole round in back of Sibelius’ neck. Package in, package out.”
“And who gave you the stuff that time?”
“Funny. I been thinking. Again it was Duncan. 1967. I said to him, ‘You get around. Always on the move; you take tablets for it?’ Not very funny, I know, but he didn’t even smile. Told me to do the job; just get on with it. That was it, so I asked him what he knew about Sibelius and he looked at me as though I were an idiot. Strange, Herb, the things that come back.”
“Very.” Herbie was lost for a moment in thoughts of the CIA’s Soviet Office’s heaviest field man being the one to feed Passau in London and Helsinki. “All in all it was a good ten years, yes?”
“Great. I nearly got myself into trouble a few times in the sixties, though, Herb. I got to tell you this because in a way it’s kind of funny. Work was my real life. Being what I was. The rest? Game playing, maybe, but you know my besetting sin, Herb?”
“Sure, Lou. The ladies.”
“Funny.” He gave a smile and the old face lit up, making him seem young again.
“Funny ha-ha, or the other kind?”
“Bit of both, Herb. Bit of one and the other,” and off he went, talking of conquests, fumbles in the dark, rejections, days of glory, nights of splendor.
“There was this harpist. Thirty years old and wanted to marry me,” he told Herbie at one point. “I was a fool. Led her on. Thought, well, maybe, why not? Then changed my mind. She made music misery. You know the old saying, the screwing you get ain’t worth the screwing you get.”
“You had a harpist who made your life a misery? Not miserable enough to stop you being top of the classical pops, though, Lou.”
“That’s the truth. The orchestra, music, interpretation always came first—before women. Women, and what I was doing in this game. Secret game. Both came second to music. Music always finished a good four lengths ahead. Fast cars, some flying, good food, clothes, nice surroundings and the little secret game to keep the adrenaline flowing. They were all sidelines, hobbies.”
“You were a bit of a bastard, Lou. No doubt about it.”
“Eighteen-karat bastard. My path to hell. Bastards know they’re bastards. Hey, you heard of this Chinese pianist, Lien Yao?”
“Beautiful girl, Lou. Still lovely though she ain’t as young as she used to be.”
“Twenty-two years of age when she came to my Center in New York. Huge talent for music. That would be 1969. Had a figure like no girl should be allowed.”
“Still not bad, Lou. The recording companies these days, you got any comment on how they market female instrumentalists?”
“Sexist.” Passau sounded almost prim and proper.
“The people who did the first album covers for that Lien Yao should’ve known better, Lou. In fact they’re still doing it—taking the pictures, I mean. You seen her picture on the new album she’s done? The concert in Moscow? How in hell do you make a girl with a piano look sexy?”
“I tell you, Herb. When she first came to me, she had been training since age five. Some smart-assed agent had taken charge of her. She arrives at my Center one morning with this smooth son of a bitch, and she has a portfolio with her—pictures they’ve just done. To my eyes they were almost pornographic.”
“No?” Herbie had begun to camp it up, because he had read the story—or so
me of it—in the dossier at Warminster. “Pornographic?”
“Well, almost. You know, she was lying across the piano in this tight, white dress, showing all she had nearly. There was another of her reaching forward to start playing. Amazing, looked like she was about to rape the thing. Never figured out how they did it. Had her tongue touching her. lips, and her bubbles thrust forward. Never figured it properly. Maybe the look in her eyes, or the way she was sitting. Maybe it was just her. She was what they’d call a turn-on those days. Legs right up to her neck; tits just right—melt in your mouth and not in your hand, know what I’m talking about?”
“I remember all that. I can’t call it to mind.”
“What d’you mean, remember? You and the cute blonde here. Don’t tell me you’re not getting a slice?”
“Enough!” Kruger’s palm slapped against his thigh, voice cracking like a piece of dry wood. He even surprised himself, then realized that he was losing his temper. Would not have a dirty word said against Pucky. What is this thing called love?
“Talk dirty about your women, Lou, but be careful what you say of others.”
“Okay. Sorry.”
“The Chinese girl? Tell me about Lien Yao.”
“Sure. Really weird. She’s a real prodigy, but you know that, you’ve heard her play. Very great young pianist. I give her concerts. Did the Rachmaninov Paganini Rhapsody; Shostakovich First Concerto; a great performance of Aaron’s Piano Concerto; lots of things. So she’s now a big hit. Fly to the moon if she wants. Just recorded the Busoni—strange piece that concerto, but she makes it alive, gives it depth. Fly anywhere that Lien Yao.”
“Still flying from what I can make out.”
