by John Gardner
Before leaving Windsor he used a public telephone to call the Shop. In the strange double-talk used by his chosen profession, he quickly told the duty officer that all three of them were okay, that he would be on again as soon as he had completed the job he had set out to do, and Art Railton should not get anxious. The line was open for less than ninety seconds. The equipment at the Shop took at least two and a half minutes to trace an incoming.
He drove to Basingstoke, known as “Doughnut City” because of its incredible number of roundabouts. People said of Basingstoke that the Ministry of Transport used it as a test bed for roundabouts and traffic flow.
In the main multistory garage, above the pedestrian precinct, he located the Passat, drove upwards through the lines of cars, then around the roof parking. There was no suspicion of a watcher van or car, so he took the Peugeot down, parking it in an empty slot four spaces from the Passat.
Pucky sat at the wheel and Passau snored loudly in the back. “Clean, I think,” she said with a nervous little smile. Herb nodded and they all transferred to the Peugeot. Passau was awake for six minutes, looking completely disoriented. He snuffled a bit, cursed, then went back to sleep. Herbie took the wheel and headed west, through countryside tilled and prepared for winter. The autumn seemed almost over in England and the trees were mainly skeletal. A fine, misty rain was blown like gunsmoke by a fresh, cold breeze. Whatever dead leaves were left blew wet and ruined over the roads, clogging the gutters. As they drove further to the west, so the color returned to the trees. Not as wonderful as it would be in Virginia, but all the reds, golds and browns backlit the landscape. The fine rain remained, but the breeze lost some of its harshness.
At around two thirty they pulled up by a Little Chef. Kruger had not stopped the engine before Louis Passau woke, full of spirit. “Where the fuck are we, Herb? This looks like a piss-awful place. Also I’m cold. I think my balls’re going to drop off, and what’s this shitty chef joint? Not thinking of eating here are you? Get the runs for a week.”
“Is what I like about you, Lou.” Herbie moved his considerable bulk so that he could look at the Maestro sprawled in the back. “What I really like about you is your sophistication, and your incredible vocabulary. The greatest musical director of our age. You got a mouth on you like a fishwife.”
“So Delius died of syph.”
Herbie could not make that connection though he thought about it for a long time.
Once inside the Little Chef, Passau wanted to eat everything on the menu. In the end he settled for fried eggs, bacon, sausage, a slice of fried bread, tomatoes, mushrooms and coffee. “Lost your appetite?” Herbie asked as Lou grabbed the ketchup bottle.
When he had demolished the meal, Passau asked for a double apple pie. With cream. “You must forgive my father,” Herbie told the amazed waitress. “He’s been staying with my brother whose wife is very stringy with the food.”
“Stingy, Herb.” Pucky did not meet his eyes.
“Fuck that,” Passau breathed, and Herbie apologized again. “My brother’s wife also uses terrible language.”
In the back of the car, the old Maestro fell asleep almost before they hit the road. It seemed the longest drive in Christendom. Herbie admitted that the slog across Florida had been a Sunday afternoon outing compared to the journey west.
When they arrived, Passau regarded the Buckingham Hotel with grave suspicion, but cheered up when they were shown the best suite. Four rooms costing a king’s ransom. Herbie nodded and left him with Pucky, going down to negotiate a week’s stay. He managed to cut the rate by one third and everyone seemed happy.
“There’s an entertainment quiz on Friday nights,” the girl at reception told him, as though she was offering him her body. “Your grandfather would probably enjoy that, sir. A lot of the older people enjoy our quizzes. Dancing on Saturdays. You and Mrs. Fyfield might like that. It’s not for the very young. They play old-fashioned, classical music, like waltzes and foxtrots.”
“My grandfather might like it also.” Herb gave her his best “I’m a raver” smirk. “Loves the classics. Very hot on Xavier Cugat.”
“That a group?” she asked.
“You’d better believe it.” He gave her a roguish wink and headed for the unsteady elevator.
Back in the suite, Passau was in bed. “He’s ordered a plate of tongue and salad, chocolate mousse and a bottle of wine.” Pucky looked ruffled. “I’ve told him that we’re going down to eat in the dining room.” This last delivered as a kind of ultimatum.
“Sure you don’t mind Pucky and I going down for a meal?” Herbie stood at the foot of the bed. Passau had taken the single-bedded room and was propped up with pillows, looking more than comfortable. Already he had fixed up his portable CD player and the speakers. There was a telephone next to the bed and he seemed very calm.
“I’ll be okay.” He gave a long sigh. “If I don’t feel too good, I’ll have you paged. You’re not going out of the building, are you?”
“Just going down for dinner.”
“Well, don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay. I need the rest. Just let them know I might call down. At my age you can never tell. I need the rest though.”
“Of course you do, Maestro. You know we’ve …” He was cut short by the arrival of room service—a reasonably tuned-in waiter who seemed to know what he was doing. Passau balanced the tray on his bed, looked over the mound of food and grinned. “This is the life,” he said. “Love tongue. Can’t get enough of it.”
“I had heard. Maestro, tomorrow we go on talking. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Tell you what I can. Got to finish my confession. Why we here, Herb? Someone after us?”
“Just thought you might like the change. Very bracing, the West country.” Big Herbie grinned and went through to wash, brush up and lead the gorgeous Ms. Curtiss down to dinner. She had put on a white pants suit with a lavender blouse, and her hair looked freshly washed. It smelled of summer hay, and Kruger thought how good it would be to roll in a field with her. He said as much and she laughed.
There we’re a dozen couples spread out at tables, far apart, in the big dining room, and every man eyed Pucky with the inevitable look of lechery. A tall maître d’, with a manner just short of patronizing, showed them to a table set in a window recess. Burgundy velvet blotted out the damp night. On a small dais, a bearded man played the piano—a selection from Lloyd-Webber, Stephen Sondheim, Lerner and Loewe, all of whom he embellished with trills and runs.
“Must remember not to bring the old man down here for dinner.” Herbie looked across the table at Pucky who suddenly seemed incredibly happy. “He’d be up there giving the guy a master class.”
“This is the first time we’ve eaten away from him.” She stretched a hand across the thick white linen and laid it over Herbie’s big artisan’s paw. “Things really going to be okay?”
“Things meaning Louis, or things meaning us?”
“Both.”
Kruger made a long bobbing motion with his head. “I might get the whole goods from him in a couple of days. Three maybe. Gems from his golden years. After that it may be possible to tie up the loose ends. Art, and the Warminster people, can take over. I finish. I go private again. Funny, I’ll miss that revolting old man. He’s bloody genius, but genius can get on your wick.”
“Us?” she queried, looking like a child pleading for candy.
“Is what you really want, Puck? Truly? Not just a shipboard romance?”
She did not pause. “It’s what I would like. Wanting is something else.”
“Then, okay. I fix it. One thing at a time, eh?”
A tall, friendly waitress with the name Annie on a small plastic strip clipped to her uniform came over and asked if they were ready to order. She was gray, motherly, late fifties and looked as though she worked out regularly.
They ordered the asparagus soup, sole in fennel sauce, and the blanquette de veau. “Veal in a blanket,” Herbie said, and the wai
tress laughed and moved away, her place taken by the snooty maître d’ who was doubling as sommelier. Herbie crushed the man unmercifully, quizzing him on the quality of the wines, shooting educated questions at him, and finally settling for a dry white with an excellent pedigree. The maître d’ left, eyebrows raised.
“Tell me about the secret four. Give me a full picture,” Pucky said.
“What’s to tell?”
“You seem to know them. I don’t. Draw it for me, Herb.”
He nodded and began talking about Marty Foreman. “Little guy, like steel, not couth, would’ve become a jailbird if it hadn’t been for the war—second world variety. Brooklyn street fighter. A number of minor strikes against him when the Office of Special Services picked him up and shipped him to London, so that he could channel his aggression into something positive. A lot of those guys came from near-hoodlum backgrounds. That’s what the OSS wanted—tough guys; people who wouldn’t get squeamish.
“Marty came over to Europe with some of the others. Came on the old Queen Mary, which was being used as a troop ship. There’s a story about him—could be apocryphal—that’s right, apocryphal?”
She nodded.
“Well, some of the civilian stewards had been left on board the old Queen. These OSS guys found out that the stewards were creaming it off the top from the GI Joes going to give their lives for God and freedom. Story is that Marty, with a couple of others, decided to make an example to discourage the rip-offs. They tossed one of the senior stewards over the side. Mid-Atlantic. Who knew?”
“Jesus.”
He shrugged. “If it’s true. Marty never denied it. Never confirmed. They were thugs, but had their hearts in the right place.”
The soup arrived, and was good. Between crumbling Melba toast and drinking his soup, Herbie continued.
“Marty became very good. Intelligent, loved the business. Full of intrigue. Thrived. Lived for it. They kept him on when OSS was dumped. He ended up in Covert Ops with the newborn CIA. Rose through the ranks. Agency was full of Ivy League types. Money, good backgrounds. Only a very few like Marty were allowed to stay. I worked with the guy during my early days. He always toted a gun, sometimes two. Real cowboy. Got things done. Great on extortion, burning people. Highly valued. Worked with the best, even under Jim Angleton for a time. Then he went to the Soviet Office, got promotion regular like clockwork. Became head of the department. Got a big office out at Langley. Picture of the President on the wall, good furniture, P.A., everything the American Dream demanded.”
The maître d’ brought the wine. “Let it do some deep breathing exercises for a while,” Herb told him.
“Tell me about the Soviet Office.”
“What’s to tell? Proper title was Soviet Bloc Division in the end. Went through a lot of different names. Marty got to the top in no time flat. Like a shot. They ran agents behind the Curtain. Pulled in raw intelligence which other experts analyzed. Ended up with Mike Alfoot and Tony de Paul as his left and right hands. On their own, they worked directly for the DCI—Director Central Intelligence. I think they were basically figureheads, but they did have power, even though the DCI’s office certainly supervised all agent running, and covert ops, on Soviet territory. In the end, Marty was very big wheel stuff, though.”
“But he’s out now?”
“Retired four, five, years ago. Getting on, I guess, but who isn’t getting on, Puck?”
“And the others? Alfoot, de Paul … ?”
“Top drawer material. I knew them, but they regarded me as a German mercenary. I got the feeling I was never trusted. Didn’t know them well enough. Last I heard, Mike Alfoot is Soviet Affairs. Top banana, with Tony de Paul as his Lord High Chancellor.”
“Were they capable of … ?”
“Doing what we think? Probably. Whether we ever prove it is different matter.”
The soup went and the fish arrived. Tasty, nicely presented.
And the one called Duncan—what; Bains?”
“Urquart Bains, sure. Singleton as they call them. Worked on his own, more or less. Probably for Marty, then more recently for Alfoot. Real flyer. In and out behind the Curtain. Very good. Don’t underestimate. Smooth, could have doubled Stalin—that was old joke about him.”
“So, you think our friend Louis was innocent? Unwitting?”
“Nobody’s totally innocent, Puck. I’m not, you’re not. Wilderness of mirrors, Jim Angelton called our dying profession, and he was right. Problem with the Agency is its very structure. Too big, unwieldy. Targeted on the past. Like the French and British generals at beginning of Second World War. They saw conflict in terms of trenches—the Somme, Ypres, Passchendaele: thought they were going to fight First World War all over again. Same as the Agency, and our little Firm now. Both have similar problems, but the Firm’s rooted in being part of the Foreign Service. Makes our people civil servants, and that’s not the way you should run a railway. Always twenty-five years behind the times.” He forked in the last mouthful of fish, signaled for the maître d’ and told him to pour.
The veal came, with dishes of vegetables which made the table look pretty. The silver sparkled, and the white starched linen blazed like virgin snow. The pianist played “Memory” as though he were doing justice to Chopin.
“Talk about us, Puck?”
She shook her head, a little frown tracing furrows over her pink forehead, below the soft light hair. Herbie thought she looked edible and wanted her immediately. He had not felt this way since the bad old days when Ursula Zunder, honeytrap extraordinary, had been pulling his chain.
“If you’re right, Herb, the last thirty years have been wasted time, money down the drain. Makes nonsense out of the Cold War.”
“Nonsense anyway, like all wars. Could’ve just sat back, not bothered. Let history take charge. But what do I know? Maybe it isn’t over, and maybe we didn’t win. Forget it. Everyone’s wasted their lives. Talk about us.”
She seemed to be zoned out, looking at him though not seeing him. Faraway like Passau taking one of his trips into the past. A little shudder ran through her, barely visible to the eye: minus point five on the Richter scale.
“What’s up, Puck? Touch of the Graham Greenes? End of the Affair? Or someone walk over your grave?”
She gave a little sigh. “Not serious. I’m just discovering what a really horrible, dirty, manipulative game this is.”
“Got to have your eye on the ball and a strong stomach, lovely lady.”
It was as though she had not heard him. “You sit in London, behind a desk. You go into meetings. Listen to policy decisions. Means nothing. Then you walk out into the world and find out it’s cheating, lies, gambling, whoring. …”
“You’re not whoring, Pucky. …”
“No. No, I didn’t mean that, Herb. A couple of weeks or so in the field and I feel filthy. Unclean. Playing with other people’s dirty laundry.” She took a sip of wine, and the maître d’ came over to ask if everything was all right, looking nervously at their plates, the food hardly touched.
“Everything’s fine.” Herbie gave him a chilling glance. “Fine and randy.”
Pucky smiled, “You mean dandy, Herb.”
“No, I mean what I say. Fine and randy.” He lowered his voice. “Go away,” he whispered to the maître d’. “I’m trying to seduce a young lady here.”
The maître d’ departed in confusion.
“So, you want go private like me, Puck? Get out while you’re still a virgin?”
“Probably.”
“Some things you can’t walk away from. You can go hire a car, get on a train, sprout wings and fly, but you can’t really leave. They’ll pull on your leash. When the going gets tough …”
“I know, the tough go shopping.”
“Wrong. The tough see it through before they get going. They put the house in order, finish the masterpiece, settle their bills. Only then can you think of going, Pucky, because even when you’ve gone, they have the power to haul you back in
. So it’s best to settle everything before you leave.” He gave a sad smile and extended his hands. “Look at me. Case in point. I leave unfinished business when I went private. Now it’s back haunting me. I got to finish. Stay and see it through, then we’ll both leave. What you want? Cottage? Roses round the door? Baby Krugers running around practicing tradecraft in the bathroom?”
She seemed to gather warmth from somewhere: the bleak look was burned from her face. “I want whatever’ll make you happy, sweet Herbie. God help me, I love you.”
For the second time in the past days, Herbie whispered, “My mistress with a monster is in love.” Then he took in a deep breath, swilled down his glass of wine, refilled it and gave her a quizzical look. “Good. Then let’s get all this bloody stupidity finished. Let’s win what’s left of the Cold War, and then hand in our badges. When the next one breaks out, I’d rather be missing.”
It sounded pretty reasonable, he thought, but the pianist had stopped and he wondered why he could hear the first bars of Mahler’s Second Symphony—The Resurrection—pounding in his head. Quite unexpectedly he wanted to weep.
WHILE HERBIE and Pucky talked in the main dining room of the Buckingham Hotel, Torquay, the young man who had boarded the flight in Nassau after Herbie dialed a number in Vienna. The young man lay on the bed of a hotel room near Marble Arch, London.
A voice at the distant end spoke in German. “Yes?”
“Lost them,” the young man said, his voice indicating neither apology nor concern.
“How?”
“They split. I followed the wrong one—the big one.”
“Where?”
“Windsor. Then I lost him again.”
“Okay, you know where to look next. They have to make some kind of contact. People have to join them. I think I’ll come into London.”
