by John Gardner
“Never.” He gulped, and the tears began to flow. “Sophie broke me,” he sobbed. “On the rack. Forever I shall feel guilty. You think Stanza knows? This was the great disaster of my life. The greatest love story ever, and the biggest calamity.”
“I know.” Herbie could not give him comfort. Passau had gone through a huge torment because of his love for Constanza Traccia. Like all things in life, what was done was done. Nothing could be changed. All of Louis Passau’s life was a distortion.
“Perhaps,” he took the Maestro’s hands in his. “Perhaps, Lou, in a way she was your daughter. Perhaps that was what you were meant to believe. Maybe you should go on believing it.”
“Perhaps.” Passau’s eyes fixed again at a point behind Herbie’s shoulder, finding his gateway to the past once more.
Peter Brack brought Ephron’s car to the front of the house just after the convoy arrived. Ten minutes later, Passau was taken out, surrounded by a phalanx of men who had lived through the worst days of the Cold War. They got him back to Warminster without incident, and Big Herbie Kruger gave a long sigh of triumph and relief, even though he knew it was going to be a hard winter.
He did not know just how hard it would be.
(7)
AT WARMINSTER THEY HAD a full house. The guest quarters were occupied to the hilt, and Gus Keene was forced to open up two of the secure rooms in the main house. It took three days, for they had been closed for years, since the underground guest quarters had been built.
There were also diplomatic incidents. The Chief returned from Brussels, looking as though he had been in conference with God who had found him guilty of every sin in the book.
Hard-faced, no frills men from Washington and Langley came and went: listened to tapes; talked with the two men from Mossad; spent time with Louis Passau, whose wife Angela had been jetted in, courtesy of the Royal Air Force. They pored over documents, flung angry questions at Big Herbie, and left with briefcases bulging, only to return again with frowns and more tough talk.
After a couple of weeks the news filtered back that Mike Alfoot and Tony de Paul had been removed from their positions of trust at Langley, and were holed up at the CIA’s Farm at Camp Peary.
“They’ll never come to trial,” Young Worboys told Kruger. “The Americans need to sweep this under the carpet. Election next year. It’s all too heavy for them to bear—the thought that, for thirty years, they had a massive leak is something they can’t face.”
“Shredding and burning going on like the last days in Saigon,” Herbie said without glee. “Poor buggers. They’ll have to pull the entire Agency apart and rebuild it.”
“We’re all going to do that, Herb.” Worboys gave him a look which somehow spoke of pity.
Out in the real world, the face of the old Soviet Union was going through its own decomposition. Nobody knew where it would end. In the meantime, Marty Foreman and Urquart Bains were still missing. Men and women from Langley were searching the cities of America and Europe, combing the highways and byways, seeking clues. They found none as far as Warminster was concerned.
“They’ll find them. Got to find them,” Herbie said to Tony Worboys, though he did not sound confident.
“Not worried are you, Herb?”
“Marty always worried me. He used to say that he was really only a step away from being on the wrong side of the law. Also used to say he would always extract vengeance, even if it killed him.”
“Figure of speech.” Worboys’ voice clouded with doubt.
“Marty never used figures of speech. I heard him say it many times. Once even saw him extract vengeance. As for Urquart Bains … well, he was always pretty crazy. They were both great risk takers in the old days.” He paused, his thick fingers raking his hair. “Sure, Young Worboys. Sure I’m concerned. Will be until they find Urquart and Marty. Never know what they’d do.”
Meanwhile, the debriefings continued. Grueling days of question and answer stuff. Nothing heavy; no signs of the rack or thumbscrews, but word had gone out that it had to be thorough. When the final history was written, all things must tally.
Louis Passau insisted that Herbie be with them during every session. In the end it became arduous. With Angela now present, the Passaus’ suite smelled of lemons, and Herbie remembered Constanza. He also realized, with a flash, that the old aristocratic English family, the Barnscomes, had come down through the ages from a Jewish line. Angela herself was Jewish. He now knew who the Mossad had put close to Passau.
Peter Brack was allowed to fly back to Tel Aviv, returning a few days later with more stacks of printouts and pages of dates and times.
The guards were tense. Security tight, and the hard-eyed men from D.C. came and went as though they held the power of life and death over everyone.
Herbie made several telephone calls to his wife, Martha. Their marriage had been one of complete openness, and she was always telling him that the time would eventually come when he would wish to walk away quietly. She knew that moment had arrived. Slowly she disentangled herself, so that the final call was almost lighthearted.
They spoke in German.
“It’s time for decisions …” Herbie began.
“You’ve already made your decision. This time you’re not coming home?”
“Probably, Liebling. Almost certainly not. I think it’s time for you to visit your sister in Frankfurt.”
There was a long, though not unhappy, silence.
“It’s brutal, I know,” Herbie said softly.
“I wasn’t worried by the brutality. I was thinking what I should wear. I knew it was about to happen. Now it’s come, I’m quite relieved, Eberhardt. Might I take the piano with me?”
“We don’t have a piano, Martha.”
“Then to hell with it. You will know where I am if you need me.”
So, it was done. Completed.
In the evenings, Pucky and Herbie planned their future. They were like a pair of young lovers, discovering life. Herbie almost felt newborn. The joy showed on their faces; their friends and colleagues rejoiced for them. When the work was done, they would be married and take a year off. Pucky wanted to be in Venice for the Carnival. “I’ve always longed to be there for Carnival,” she told him, as they lay close in their big double bed, courtesy of Gus Keene who had wooed and won his own wife in this same place, between long probing sessions of interrogating.
“We got the greatest love affair since the world began,” Herbie said to her.
“Since Louis and Constanza,” she replied, and was immediately ashamed, wanting to bite her tongue.
Herbie still had occasional dreams. The red wineglasses and the Dürer drawing came back, unwanted, when he least expected it. He put it down to the proximity of Ursula Zunder.
The people who handled security were careful to keep the various protagonists apart, but one morning, when Herbie took a shortcut, coming up onto the lawn from the bunker emergency exit, he walked straight into Ursula, who was being given her hour of outdoor exercise, two minders’ in tow.
They stopped, facing each other; the years now shrunk to a matter of a few feet.
“Herbie,” she said with a little start of shock. “Oh, Herbie. You’ve forgiven me, yes?”
He looked at the woman, saw the changes, and also saw the original beneath. Hundreds of days and nights raced through his head. The happiness, joy, hardship, and final treachery, cut a great bleeding gash in his memory.
“No,” he said coldly. “Some things nobody should ever forgive. Not just you. I can never forgive the Nazis. Be with me until I die, Ursula. That also goes for the bad old days of your lot. We cannot forgive, because that means forgetting also. If we forget, then we’re doomed, because the past will creep back to poison our future. If I forgive—if we all forgive—then maybe we won’t notice when the things we once hated return to bring chaos again.” He gave her a quick, unfriendly nod and set off towards the house.
Pucky was coming towards him, her long legs striding
out and the beautiful hair riding her head as though she were swimming through the air.
The true horror came in that time between Christmas and the New Year. Later, people said the security was relaxed because of the festivities. People had been brighter, more friendly. Gifts were exchanged. On Christmas Eve all of them, even Passau, Angela and the Mossad men, came into the big house and sang carols, the four Jews putting aside their own way of life to join hands with their Christian brothers. It meant nothing to them.
The days were bright, with no hint of fog or snow, and there was a sense of accomplishment among all of them. Soon they could go back into the world.
Two days after Christmas, Herbie and Pucky joined Louis and Angela Passau, together with three of the security men for a walk. A slow tramp around the estate. As they were leaving, Mark and Peter, from Israel, asked if they could also come.
They walked the entire perimeter, heading right around the house, back to the little woods and spinneys far from the road. Herbie told them of night exercises he had done along the edge of these wooded areas, long ago when he was learning about border crossings. “In those days,” he said, “we had a huge staff here. An entire platoon of men who acted as KGB frontier guards. It was rough, tough and tumbling dangerous.”
They were laughing, happy, only a few feet from the edge of a dense clump of trees, and it all happened very quickly. Later, when he thought of it—when the nightmares would not let go—Herbie saw it all in slow motion—
First, a sudden shout from one of the minders. He saw two of them draw their weapons, and his eyes came up, following the pistol barrels; saw the cannonball shaved head of Marty Foreman, and the tall, skinny, aged hippielike Urquart Bains, as they leaped, suicidally, from the bushes where they had laid up for two days (or so it was decided later).
Herbie went for his own pistol, shouted for them to get down, saw Pucky, in an act of complete and automatic folly, throw herself in front of old Maestro Passau, shielding him from the flying bullets.
Herbie’s anguished cry, like an unearthly animal trapped in dreadful pain—“Nooooooooahhh!”
Foreman and Bains went down in seconds. The minders had riddled them with bullets in the time it took to draw breath, but the slugs from Marty’s and Bains’ weapons, aimed squarely at Passau, had torn into Pucky’s chest. Terrible bullets. Glaser slugs that entered the body and exploded, sending dozens of number 12 shot to rape her flesh.
Herbie saw that Foreman and Bains were dead. He hurled himself onto Pucky, who lay in the little trench her flying body had dug into the soft grass. Her chest was one great gaping wound, but he held her to him, his own clothes soaked in her blood; tried to give her CPR; kept feeling for a pulse long gone. So suddenly had the terror struck that he thought it was another of the nightmares; could not believe the truth, even when they gently pulled him away, and he heard Mark and Peter, the Israelis, making their own act of respect, by saying Kaddish over the ravished body.
“Yit’ gadal v’yit kadash sh’me’ raba. Amen.
B’al’ma di v’ra chir’ute. Amen.” “Magnified and sanctified be His great name. Amen. Throughout the world which He has created according to His will. Amen.”
Somewhere, from faraway in his head, Herbie heard the sound of Pucky’s golden laughter. Or was it, he wondered afterwards, the sound of weeping?
On the day after they buried her, he drove up onto the Berkshire Downs, to one of his favorite spots. A place where he had gone many times before to find peace. There, alone and far from other humans, he howled like King Lear. Then he looked across the swell of the earth, saw the smoke from far-off chimneys, and wept his heart out.
For Big Herbie Kruger it was all over. He had fought his war. Won it, lost it, won it again, then lost it irrevocably. He had faced bleak times on many occasions in the past, so he knew the strength would return, and the madness pass.
Now, he sought sanctuary in his old companion, the composer, Gustav Mahler. In his head, as he gazed out across the beauty of the landscape, he heard words from the Songs on the Deaths of Children:
You must not enfold night within you, you must let it drown in everlasting light, A small lamp has gone out in my dwelling, hail to the joyous light of the world.
He sucked in air, ran a hand over his face, then lumbered back to the car, his uncoordinated walk almost that of a spastic child. In his head the music rose and fell. He thought of Louis Passau and his agony which, in the end, had never been an agony at all. He tried to draw hope from that: tried to draw some kind of faith; saw the old Maestro shrug, and heard him say, “Who knew, Herb? Who knew?”
He drove back to Warminster and dialed a number in Frankfurt, swallowing all pride, for he knew it was dangerous for him to go out into the world alone.
Author’s Comments
MANY PEOPLE HAVE TO be thanked, not least Desmond Elliott, who has managed my professional affairs for over twelve years, who has always been right, and remains an inspiration. Here in the U.S.A. special thanks goes to my new publisher, Otto Penzler, and his lovely wife Carolyn. I first met Otto over twenty years ago and we have been insulting each other ever since. We have both longed for the day when we could work together. Now that day has come, and I, for one, am ecstatically happy. My wife, Margaret, must be thanked for the endless hours she has spent checking manuscript, and putting up with my musical snobbery.
Also, I would like to mention Priscilla Ridgway of MWA who opened certain doors for me, and Vince Talamo, head of security for the Lincoln Center, who gave me his time and advice.
Last, but far from least, my dear friend over the past thirty years, Diana de Rosso. Diana’s incredible and glamorous life includes singing at La Scala, Milan, and being a spy, so she qualifies as an expert witness. She has set me right on several important musical points. If I have inadvertently made any musical gaffes, it is my fault for not listening to her.
There is one additional note. Chronologically, this book is set in the autumn of 1991, at a time when H.M. Government still refused to admit that there was such a thing as the Secret Intelligence Service. In May of 1992 the Prime Minister pulled the covers off the SIS and also named C—the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service. The C who appears briefly in the opening chapters of this book is a fictional character, and is in no way connected to, or based upon, the real, and very distinguished, current C.
Finally, this might appear odd, but I wish to thank a fictional character. All authors of fiction are a little mad, for they live mainly with characters who exist only in their minds. I want to thank one of the main protagonists—Big Herbie Kruger. Kruger has traveled with me through six novels now and, though I know he is a fiction, I feel as though he is an old and favorite friend. Thank you Herb.
John Gardner
Virginia, 1993
Turn the page to continue reading from the Herbie Kruger Novels
Confess yourself to heaven;
Repent what’s past; avoid what is to come.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet, Act III, Scene 4
1
THE EIGHT MEN AND FOUR women had been chosen from over one hundred unknowing candidates. Each had a special skill and all at one time or another had lived in the West, attending universities or technical training colleges. All spoke at least two languages other than their own. All had proved their loyalty. They were called Intiqam—Vengeance.
They had left their country singly over a period of fourteen days. They had already spent two months together, pledging to bring true revenge onto the heads of the Western powers. Intiqam prayed and meditated; had regular visits from instructors who counseled them on the way in which they could pass clandestine messages to one another; learned how they could become invisible in the cities of the West and evade security and law enforcement agencies.
They memorized lists of names and mastered a plethora of detail concerning the cities in which they would operate. Above all else, they were taught the ingenious ways in which they could bring su
dden death to individuals and groups of people. Two members of Intiqam were already conversant with the most difficult and dangerous final stroke of the plan that they called Magic Lightning.
The night before the first man left, they stood together and swore that the terror they would take to New York, Washington, Paris, Rome and London would, in the end, make the inhabitants of those cities, and the countries to which they belonged, beg on their knees for mercy.
Their varied, solitary journeys took a further month, each of them taking a completely different route, so that by late March they were together again—one cell in London, the other in New York. The cells each consisted of four men and two women who settled down to a period of waiting so that, after a year had passed, the cells had become integrated within their particular areas, the individuals were known by sight to shopkeepers, neighbors, newspaper sellers and the staff of several banks. They were model citizens. They had become invisible.
It was over a year before the two cells received the message to start the first phase of their campaign. It came on a Friday afternoon, which meant they were to begin at midnight. In English the activating word was Illusion.
Later, on that Saturday, it was calculated that Gus Keene’s car left the road—less than three miles from his destination—at a little after three in the morning. He was almost certainly dead by the time the vehicle exploded in the kind of fireball you usually see only in the movies, or on the television news from some war-torn part of this unstable planet.
At the time of this horrible death many things were going on across the world. In New York, because of the five-hour time difference, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera was nearing the conclusion of that night’s performance. In his lair, under the Paris Opera House, the Phantom himself suddenly disappeared from a tall ornate chair. There one minute and gone the next. The illusion had been prepared by Britain’s foremost magician, Paul Daniels.
