by John Gardner
The Deputy Chief went silent.
“I need a team. Lion tamers, drivers. Ambulance, van, cars. Faster than fast.”
“Where are you?”
Herbie told him. “If you can get some uniforms here with cannons, it would help. Probably okay, but we need to come in. I think I just solved the riddle of the sphincter, son. So I need respect where we’re going. Don’t want half-arsed slap on the wrist. I have to go on talking to the old bugger. Don’t want Gus coming the old acid.”
“Room number?” Young Worboys steadied himself, holding the telephone with his chin, the right shoulder hunched, pencil in his hand, writing on the government-crested notepad. Herbie gave the details and hung up. Worboys turned around and saw Art Railton coming through the door looking like the wrath of God.
A mile or so away, the young man who had been on the Nassau flight, watching Kruger and the Maestro, was on the telephone again. “They came into Heathrow,” he said quietly. “Now they’ve split up. I haven’t got the manpower to eyeball all of them.”
“Don’t worry,” the voice at the other end of the line sounded calm, untroubled. “If we’ve figured Kingfisher right, he’ll be in touch. For years I’ve owned him body and soul. If there’s a problem, he’ll call for help. I should have come to Florida myself. Finished it there. Never mind, we’ll see to it now.” It was the same voice the young man had heard when calling Vienna. Now, its owner was here, in London.
BIG HERBIE KRUGER walked back to the hotel and waited in the foyer, anxious now that it was all unraveling. A terrible thought came to him. For two nights in a row they had left Passau alone, with a telephone. He leaned over the desk and hit the little call bell hard, causing a pink young woman to emerge from the office. She wore a pink skirt, pink angora sweater with a pink shirt. All were different shades of the color, and none of them matched her complexion.
He gave her the suite number, saying he wanted to check the bill.
“You’re not leaving us so soon?” she asked with the fear of customer complaints in her voice.
“Don’t know.” Herbie tried the warmest of his daft smiles. “Maybe. Difficult with the old man.”
She reappeared, pushing the printout over the counter. Herbie’s eyes traveled quickly down the lines of figures. No outgoing calls, so he breathed again as the unmarked car hurtled noisily into the large porte cochere outside the main door. Two big men detached themselves from the vehicle, and the driver took off towards the parking facilities. The two men wore unbuttoned raincoats and stank of local law trying to make good. Herbie stopped them as they came into the foyer, muttering, “Kruger. You come to see me, yes?”
“Had a call, sir. You’re Foreign Office, right?”
“Sure. I’m Foreign Office. Part of Whitehall also. Bit of the Cenotaph, I shouldn’t wonder. …”
“Do what, sir?” The larger of the pair looked puzzled.
“What they tell you?”
“Said to make sure you were safe, sir. You, a young woman and an elderly gentleman. They issued firearms.” He tapped his raincoat pocket. “You want us to take you down the nick—the police station?”
“No. We wait here for friends. Only want to make sure we’re safe.”
The younger man said that, within five minutes, they would own the hotel.
“Good. Needs to be under new management. Don’t tamper with the dining room and kitchens. Food is good.”
“I don’t think …” the senior officer began.
“Is joke.” Herbie flashed them his intelligent look and gave them the suite number. “Just stay outside the door for me. How long did they say … ?”
“Four, possibly five hours, sir.”
“Okay. Don’t both go for a pee the same time. Could be dangerous.” He led them up to the suite, positioned them outside, knocked and said the magic word, “Herbie.”
Pucky opened up. She looked alert, but pale and anxious. “We need to talk,” she said as he closed the door behind him, snapping on the chain and safety lock.
“Okay, so we talk.”
Passau sat, very quietly, in the seat he had occupied during the day’s interrogation. “Hi, Herb,” he said. It was almost a tentative greeting. “I got dressed like you said. We going round the world again?”
“Just a short ride, but there’s plenty of time for us to talk. Don’t move. Stay just as lovely as you are, Lou.”
In the bedroom, Pucky put a hand on his sleeve. “It’s her, isn’t it?” she said, as though confronting Herbie with some infidelity.
“Sure. Is him also,” cocking his head in the direction of the sitting room.
“You’ve told me everything, I know. But you’re not over her yet, are you?”
“Not a question of being over. That old bastard gave me a signal. Told me a fairy tale. Ursula—the one he knew as Therese—would never ask for me. Not in a thousand years. Might ask after me, but not for me. I thought I had it figured, but maybe the old fraud’s simply trying to dissociate himself from the past. Playing the innocent. Don’t know, Puck, there’s something not quite right. The fabulous four could be knocking on the door, so I got the local cops out. The Shop’s sending a team in: We go to Warminster, but it’ll be a while. Time to take him apart. Find out where he stands. See if he’s being straight.”
She nodded, reached up and kissed his cheek, patted the same cheek, let the tips of her long fingers slide down to his chin. “I love you, Herb.” She looked at him, her eyes searching his face as though trying to get some clue which would lead her to his most secret thoughts.
“Sure. Later. We talk of love, life, pursuit of happiness later. Let’s go and unhinge him now.” The smile this time was brutal.
“OKAY, LOU …” Herbie began.
“Don’t say it, Herb. What’s next? Right? Old refrain.”
They sat where they had talked all through the day, where Maestro Louis Passau had finally shown them his good side: the tenderness and caring for the individuals who made up his orchestra; where he had finally revealed his doubts and, in revealing them, caused a sudden geyser of anxiety to rise in Kruger’s mind.
“No,” Herbie said quietly. “No, not what’s next? Go back a couple of clicks, Lou. Back to your sweet Therese and the coming of Yevgeny Khavenin. You did as you were asked? You distracted his minders, got him out of his dressing room, put him in the hands of Matthew and Company?”
“I told you. The minders were angry. Quite a scene. Telephone calls to Soviet Delegation at the U.N. One of Matthew’s people got me away.”
“Lou, tell me, when you helped with this, what did you think you were doing?”
“Don’t follow you, Herb. Don’t understand your line of questioning.”
“Okay, I make it easy. Child of five could answer. Therese asked you to help with bringing Khavenin into the fold. Also said that she might need your help in the future. You were over eighty years old then. You’d seen life. You’d lived. You’re an intuitive man, Lou. Comes with your profession. You decipher all those notes on the page. Turn them into glory through the orchestra. How did you decipher Khavenin? What did you think he was?”
“Age is relative, Herbie. State of mind. Think young, I always say.”
“Answer the question. What did you think Yevgeny Khavenin was?”
“Brilliant cellist.”
“Okay, brilliant cellist. That’s what you knew he was. …”
“That’s what he proved he was. Worked with him a lot after that.”
“Played music with him, yes. Gave him great assistance, provided a platform for his genius. I take that for granted, Lou, but did you work with him in any other way?”
“Don’t understand, Herb. What other way?”
“Same thing you did with Matthew, Gregory, Vincent and Duncan. Same thing you were doing with Therese. Did you think he was more than a cellist? You told me, yourself, that you realized what was going on after Therese asked you to help with Khavenin, and signaled she also might need help. Christ, Lou, she
spelled it out for you. She told you nobody must ever know that she might want to take a leap over the Curtain. You put two and two together. Made it come out right. I’m asking if you thought your cellist was an iffy Soviet.”
“We’re talking spies?”
“’Course we’re talking spies.”
“Then the answer is no. I have a mind, Herb. Intelligence. No, what would be the point of someone coming in to play music? What tricks could he run? What kind of important secrets could he tell anybody? Going to send back the plans for a nuclear violin? An interballistic French horn? A laser-guided oboe? Me? I was different. Knew people, went places. Me they could pass off as their spy. Agent XYZ, their source among the powerful.”
“I want you to tell me. You saw through them, you said. So what did you think Khavenin was?”
“I told you. Genuine. A cellist who got disenchanted with the Communist Party, with the Soviets. Wanted to come over and play in freedom.”
“So, how did you figure Therese?”
The old man raised his head, gave Herbie a quick look of contempt, then turned away. “The moment she told me I shouldn’t mention her own dilemma, I realized what was going on. Like some missing piece of a puzzle. I knew what they had been doing. I could only guess, Herb, and I know I guessed right. Khavenin was straight, but Therese wanted to help him. I was her only contact. … Well, maybe we were her only contacts—Matthew, Gregory, Vincent, Duncan and I, the Kingfisher. Yevgeny wanted out and she helped him. I don’t know what she told Matthew and the boys. Maybe she passed him off as some important link in the chain. Therese, I knew then, was trusted by my four friends. She didn’t want them to know that she was thinking of walking out on the Soviets, that she was also disillusioned. Wanted to come later. Defect. But Yevgeny, I thought he was genuine. From the start, genuine. Solid gold.”
“And you would be right,” Herbie said quietly. “I’ve seen the file, Lou. They watched Khavenin, listened to him, for over a year. They do that with anyone who comes in like he did. They weighed him in the balance. Found him kosher.”
“So what’s the fuss?”
“The fuss, Maestro, is you. How you saw the light. Got yourself converted, then didn’t do a fucking thing about it. Why didn’t you run straight to FBI, or some Senator, even your buddy the President? Why didn’t you go and say, ‘Look, I been taken for a sucker for years. You got four guys out at Langley who’ve been stealing you blind over thirty years’? Why didn’t you do that, Lou?”
Pucky, sitting way off in the corner, still out of the reach of Passau’s eyes, thought she could hear the silence: knew what the old music master meant by pauses between bars and phrases. Silences in music, she considered for the first time, are often as poignant as the music itself. The listener is waiting, poised on the cusp of his or her senses: waiting for the next notes, the tremor of beauty, the iron fist of drama, or the shimmering draining of sadness. In the silence, the listener hears what has gone before, and almost assimilates what is to come. The music past fused with the music future—together in the great void of silence.
Finally, Passau said. “Herb, can you understand? This had nothing to do with fear. Not really. Sure, I didn’t have the guts to come out of that closet. It was a game, like kids playing cops and robbers. My life had been long. Full of experiences. Joy and sorrow—great joy and greater sorrow. For thirty-odd years I played cops and robbers in my spare time then, suddenly, I found I’d been running with the robbers not the cops. I didn’t have the strength to change sides. It was done. Over. I was hooked like a junky; couldn’t leave the other woman even when I loved my wife; couldn’t break the habit. What mattered was my work. This … this game … this extramural affair … this was my secret … a hobby that went wrong. You ever listen to Sam Barber’s music, Herb?”
“Not all that good with American composers, Lou. Know the Adagio for Strings. Who doesn’t since they used it for that movie—what was it? Platoon?”
Passau nodded. “You don’t know Knoxville: Summer of 1915?”
“Can’t say I do.”
“Barber set some words to music. Soprano and orchestra. Quite lovely. The words written by James Agee—prose and poetry, both. Soprano sings like she is talking, idly reminiscing. Top of the manuscript is written, ‘We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.’ When I first heard Knoxville, I realized that all my life I had successfully disguised myself as a child. Never put away childish things. I grew, I had a talent, but I was like a child, though my personal childhood had been almost nonexistent. A village, cousins long gone from me. Love won and lost in terrible agony. All my life I had so successfully disguised myself as a child, and I didn’t want anything to change. Not even then, when I knew they had manipulated me.”
The silence again. Both Herbie and Pucky waited for past and future to come together, bring forth a new melody, or some dreadful cacophony. When Passau spoke, they realized he was quoting from the words set to music by a beloved American composer: Knoxville: Summer of 1915—
“On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there. … They are not talking much. … After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her; and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home; but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.”
After several bars rest, again, it was Herbie who provided the new melody. “And who are you, Lou? Are you Saul Isaak Packensteiner, or Abraham Jacob Packensteiner?”
Passau lifted his head. His eyes glistened, moist, the tears not flowing yet. “Clever bugger, Herbie. Where’d you get that from?”
“In many ways, Lou, the United States is like the old Soviet Union. They don’t realize it, but they have the ultimate propaganda machine. They feed people, from birth to death, tell them they’re greatest people in the world, tell them they’re lucky to be Americans, born liberated in the land of the free, the greatest country on earth. Yet the files, the information about individuals, are also there. You can tap into computers these days and find when your uncle Izzy first came over from Germany or Russia, or your grandfather Declan came into Ellis Island from County Cork. We tapped. We found. Which one are you, Lou? The elder brother or the younger?”
“The younger, of course. Abraham Joseph.”
“So you’re how old now, Lou? Not ninety. Almost, but not quite for a few years.”
“Eighty-four, Herbie.”
“So you never actually knew your wonderful cousins. You didn’t play with them in the village.”
“It felt like I knew them. I grew up listening to my elder brother. He was obsessed by our cousins. So were my father and mother. It’s all I heard as a toddler in New York, New York, that wonderful town.”
“And everything else, Lou?”
“Everything else is true. Six years difference in age and you got it.”
“And your brother?”
“Saul? Never amounted to anything. Left home at seventeen. Like me, didn’t care to be working with leather. Hated the shoe business. Unlike me, he parted amicably with our parents. Went West to make his fortune. Died in an accident aged twenty-one.”
“You fudged all the figures, Lou? Why you do that?”
“You’d rather Capone’s thugs, his heirs and successors, would catch up with me? We came to New York in 1908. …”
“I know, you made it sound later.”
“Sure. I was twelve months old. By the time I was sixteen my father had the business going. All the stuff about my Uncle Chaim and the guy he’d tied my father to. …”
“Chorat?”
“Yea, Chorat. All happened before my time. I was a small child then. Family history.”
“But everything else, Lou—Hamovitch …”
“When I was six years old,
I had the fight with the kids and met dear Aaron Hamovitch. …”
“And the store? Your father’s store? The money? Carlo Giarre?”
“All happened. I bugged out, went to Chicago at the age of seventeen.”
“Randy little devil, Lou. So you left when … ? twenty-five? twenty-six?”
“Sure.”
“Sure what, Lou?”
“Did the booze heist in 1927, twenty years old and I was a killer, a gangster with great music in my blood. Laid up. Changed my name. Added to my age. Should’ve known you were on to me. Nobody else ever queried. No journalists, nobody. I told them I was six years older, that was it. People don’t do the sums in their heads. They accept what you say. I played around with dates, times, ages ever since. …”
Herbie stopped him, tried to do the sums, inched him back and forward trying on the dates and years. For over an hour he tried to make sense of old Passau’s tangled chronology. In the end it was obvious that even Louis had only a glimmer of his true time scale when it was put next to the history of the past three or four decades. On several occasions he said, “Herb, music is my history. The politics of life don’t interest me.” Kruger decided that the old man had successfully warped his view of age and progress.
Then they got back to the moment of change, when he met Stephan Greif and Rita Crest. “Changed my name, Herb,” he mused. “Strange, and that’s another thing: nobody even said where’d the Louis come from, it’s not a German name? Now they all say he looks wonderful for his age. …”
“You do, Lou. Even at eighty-four years, you look good. What about the bullshit, though?”
“Which particular bullshit?”
“The cousins? The letters? Your grief?”
Passau gave a sad little smile, his eyes still full and glittering. “I didn’t have to meet them to love them. When my father cut me off … said he had no son called Abraham Joseph, which is what he did say. When he sent back the money torn in half. Then I knew they were the only family I had. A man needs a family. Particularly a Jewish man like me. Not a good Jewish man, but …”
