An Honorable Man (27 page)

Mueller lifted his eyes and met Altman's gaze. “Yes, I love him very much. You can't possibly know my pain for the day he is
grown and he asks me why I didn't protect him. I abandoned him to loveless neglect in a stateless purgatory.” Mueller slumped in his chair, face gray with anger.

The two men sat across from each other for a long time without speaking. Altman gazed across the table at his companion. “I was mistaken about you from the beginning, even at Yale. Being the public school kid, the outsider, among all the self-­important nonsense must have been hard on you. I saw that and that's what I liked about you. You didn't let yourself be seduced by the nonsense. In the end,” Altman conceded, and his voice became a whisper, “in the end, I was not strong enough to purchase integrity at the price of scandal. This must sound a bit like a confession. We confess and feel better afterwards.”

“I'm not your priest.”

“No, you're not.”

“What's next?” Mueller asked.

Altman gazed at Mueller. He pondered the question. The room was quiet except for the tyrannical ticking of the mantel clock. He spoke at last. “What's next for you? What's next for me? I'm scheduled to testify tomorrow against my father in the Senate. They will make a public spectacle of me to impeach him.” He laughed in stubborn grievance. “So there I will be, if they have their way, incriminating my father because of slanders they'll bring against me. Odd, don't you think, how our roles are similar. You abandoning a son, me punishing a father.”

Mueller grunted.

Without ceremony Altman stood and moved to his jacket hanging on the door. He returned holding a glass vial, lifting it
to show Mueller the small dose of poison. Altman's eyes were steady, calm, peaceful, and they fixed on a nervous Mueller.

“The director gave this to me. He talked about honor. It's a word he used a lot in his little speech, as if somehow, I wouldn't get the idea.” Altman lifted the vial so it glinted in the chandelier. “Gottlieb made it, so I know it will work.” Altman said that with a trace of irony. “Strange how the director's mind works,” Altman said. “I can't imagine how he thought there was a chance I would do this.”

The conversation took a strange turn. Without a conscious plan the two men reminisced about their undergraduate days, both happy to steer the conversation away from the grimmer present. They were happy to share memories of their campus youth, and each story of some antic provoked another memory, and another story. The mood between them lightened and each retreated into the safer world of harmless recollections. They laughed a good bit, willing themselves into pleasantness. Someone watching these two men would never suspect what was to follow. They talked about little things, silly and stupid things; they talked about everything except the looming jeopardy.

Altman paused and drummed his fingers on the table. “George, your choices are terrible. You know that. You kept quiet about the boy and a cloud of doubt hangs over you. I can't be an accomplice to that silence. Suspicion is the end of a case officer's career. You'll be blacklisted, maybe sacked. That job in New Haven won't last long.”

Altman leaned forward and made Mueller a proposal. There was a tunnel in the basement that led to an alley. They would
leave together that night in time to make the
Sedov
. The ship would leave at midnight and they could make the hour drive in his car. “I don't trust you,” he said. “I'm sure you can understand. I need to keep you close.” Altman assured Mueller that he'd get his son, confident he could deliver on the promise. “We can sit with my contacts in Moscow. I'll explain your role, the help you've provided.” Altman suggested Mueller could be turned, doubled. He would return to America with his son and continue to work for the Agency, but he would be managed by Altman on behalf of the Soviets.

“Defect?” Mueller snapped.

Altman considered the thought. “Yes. You're good at this, George, and you've got experience. If you do well it could go on for years and to the outside world it would appear as if nothing has changed in your life. You'll have your son. Continue to see Beth. We can sit with Moscow Center and explain everything. I think they'd find this a reasonable bargain.”

Sitting before Altman, Mueller felt an urgency to punish the contempt within the offer that was being made. This man with whom he'd shared his deepest pain, pretending friendship, had used the intimacy of the conversation to induce a relaxed mood in which Mueller would warm to an anodyne choice. Mueller was offended by Altman's coy blandishments, so cynical, so self-serving. He looked at the doorway.

“Go ahead,” Altman said. “You can leave but that won't end it.”

Mueller had always been the taller of the two, but he lacked Altman's muscular bulk, and it was useless to think he could win a fight.

Mueller saw the path to Altman's salvation in the offer of his own purgatory. He felt his future slip away. In the dark corner of his mind that evaluates these things he felt a rapid fluttering of flightless wings incapable of keeping him from falling in the abyss. A quickening tremor seized his chest like a giant hand reaching across the table and squeezing his heart. The future he wanted, the future he planned for, hung in balance. The path before him forked. One path led to opprobrium, isolation, poverty. The other path took him deeper into the secret world, everything calibrated twice, every lie having a counter lie, and he'd become a shadow man cut off from human contact.

Facing across the table, Mueller asked for a moment to be alone so he could consider the offer, and he pleaded understanding for his obligation to his son and yes, Beth too, and also the director, to whom he felt a certain loyalty, and if he was going to do this he had to be certain he was ready to give up his a claim on leaving the spy business. His theatrics succeeded. Altman removed the dinner plates to the kitchen, and on his way out he said he'd return with coffee and dessert to accompany the rest of their conversation, particularly the script they'd need to agree on when they told their story to the NKVD officers aboard the
Sedov
(and, though he didn't say it, how this arrangement would crown Altman's career as a double agent). While Altman was gone, Mueller augmented his indignation with courage and removed Altman's trophy Lugar displayed inside the glass doors of the breakfront. He slid back the barrel to charge the firing chamber. The fact of its being loaded surprised him and sealed his decision. Mueller pointed it at Altman when
he kicked open the kitchen door holding two cups of coffee. Mueller took two steps forward so he was close and pulled the trigger once at point-blank range. The bullet entered Altman's mouth, which had opened wide in astonishment. Curses readied in his mind were extinguished before they found voice. Altman's fit body flew back with the force of the blast and came to a rest on the Persian rug. One leg was painfully bent under at an awkward angle, his cheek pressed against the floor, his eyes wide in fury. Mueller confirmed he was dead.

He looked down at his old acquaintance. He felt no grief for this man he'd known, and in place of regret there was only the lingering thought that everything between them was a series of incidents that made this final catastrophe inevitable. He cursed his life that it was for him to make things right. He turned away from the terrible sight. There was nothing alive there, except his memories of the man, and he surprised himself when he offered an apology.

Mueller finished his work quickly. He swept the broken china cups and carefully removed any sign of spilt coffee from floor and rug. He cleaned the table of all remaining dishes, but left the empty wine bottle and Altman's glass. He cloth-wiped the Luger, placed the pistol in Altman's grip to transfer fingerprints, and then kicked it away a few inches so it looked like it lay where it had fallen. When he was satisfied with the room, Mueller dialed a number on the black rotary telephone on a side table. He heard the director's voice when the call went through. Mueller spoke in hushed disbelief. “I came at your suggestion. He was morose and despondent at dinner. I was already outside on my way home
when I heard a gunshot. I found him on the floor. He killed himself . . . as you suggested he might.”

Mueller let himself out of the town house being careful not to be seen. Arriving at the bottom of the stone steps he turned quickly and walked away. The sidewalk was empty, the warm night alive with the alien buzz of cicadas. But passing the end of the block he happened to turn. The instinct he'd acquired in Vienna. There at the corner the young couple against a tree had turned and watched him. Mueller crossed the street and was gone.

22

HERO

R
OGER ALTMAN
was buried in Arlington National Cemetery early on a spring morning a few days after his housekeeper discovered his body in the dining room of his Georgetown home. She called the police, who investigated, but a call from the ­director to the Metropolitan Police officer who liaised with the Agency on security matters assured that the death was handled quietly, and the death was leaked to the reporters on that beat as an unfortunate accidental discharge by a war hero cleaning his souvenir Luger. At the director's request the police kept confidential evidence that he died of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. Roger Altman was identified as an employee of the Department of State, victim perhaps, again via the rumor mill, to the fact that he was one of the talented men in the department whose bachelor life drew attention. Altman's absence from the Senate witness table was decried by the senator whose peevish fit of demagoguery was caught on live television. He lashed out at unnamed agents undermining his investigation and declared he would not abandon freedom abroad by deserting freedom at home. The vile tone of the senator's huffing petulance, and his incoherence, appalled some of his colleagues and the national audience who saw his televised performance—replayed on the evening news. There followed spirited denunciations of the senator's disrespect for an American veteran whose courage had earned a Bronze Star. People who knew Altman were convinced that there was more to the story, but the senator's smear tactics brought these people to Altman's defense.

It was a small group at the grave under a gray sky. Trees were fully leafed and the sprawling green lawn was a riot of daffodils. The unhealthy sun was small and lusterless like a withered lemon. Beth was there in black veil and a shawl against the brisk morning air. It was early. She wore dark glasses and clutched her father's arm at the grave. The two of them were quiet, alone together, a few steps apart from the six men who made their own little group.

There were Roger's colleagues from the Agency. James Coffin wore a dark suit, his long, delicate fingers held his black homburg in a prayerful way. The director was there, of course, with his cane, and wearing a lumpy suit that hung sloppily on his heavy frame. Wind lifted the few long, thin strands that covered his baldness. The case's notoriety had drawn several news reporters who were collected in a gaggle a respectful distance from the grave site.

George Mueller stood between two other men who had worked with Altman and had known him from years together in the OSS. Mueller lifted his eyes from the mahogany coffin and glanced at Beth. She stood straight, face calm and proud.

A priest stood across the open hole between two army sergeants resplendent in full dress blue. They stood at attention on either side of an easel mounted with a wreath of lilies and roses. The priest made brief remarks about duty, honor, service, sacrifice. He read Psalm 23 in a strong voice, but his words were carried away in the breeze, lost on the group of mourners unless you stood in the very front. Mueller thought the priest could have spoken louder, but it was the mood he was in, the mood he'd been in for the last few days. Nothing felt right to him.

FBI agent William Walker was there too. Mueller noticed a man hanging back in the shade of an oak tree, watching, a man on surveillance. He was alone. He wore standard black and disguising sunglasses, but Mueller recognized his swept-back hair and the thin moustache. When Mueller looked again, Walker was gone.

Mueller looked at Beth in her defiant grief. She stared at the casket suspended above the hole in the ground. She supported her father, who supported her back, and they found strength in each other. There was nothing so isolating as having the burden of unanswered questions.

The director gave a little eulogy. Short and brief, and interesting only in what he left out. “He gave his life for his country,” the director said. “Few of us can say as much.”

The whole ceremony was over in thirty minutes. These things have a way of being momentous in their buildup and then are over in a flash. Once the coffin came to rest at the bottom of the hole, there was no reason to hang around. Mueller felt an eagerness among his colleagues to leave.

The director pulled Mueller away from the grave, but Mueller hung back a moment and lingered at the casket, contemplating all that had happened to this man and all the events that had brought him to this moment on this day. He wanted to pray, but he had no God to address.

Mueller made his way beside the director along the winding path. He calibrated his steps to the director's slower pace, and he looked around the vast lawn of dead soldiers whose lives were lost in the service of their country, honored with tiny flags.

“And this too will pass,” the director said. “With what we know, what forgiveness can there be?” They continued in silence. “You looked distracted, George. What's on your mind?”

“He was a troubled man.”

“He made mistakes. Unforgivable mistakes.”

Mueller waited for the director to finish his thought and then understood that the long silence meant the director had no more to say. They walked at the pace of the director's gimp leg and the cane he planted ahead of each step. Mueller put his sunglasses on against the glare of the gauzy sun.