Exiles (36 page)

Yet Spiegel was glad to have a final opportunity to set things straight with Aaronson. So many had vanished from his life without a word. With Aaronson, he felt, there was a need for closure, for healing. By chance at first, and then by their own volition, the skein of their lives had crisscrossed, entwined, entangled, and Spiegel sensed that wherever they went in the future, no matter how great their separation, neither would ever be wholly free from the influence of the other. Spiegel remembered that night long ago when Tracy had stood them back-to-back and taken their measure. It was as if, ever since that moment, they had been walking away from each other until they had come full circle, and at last here they stood, face-to-face.

“It’s freezing in here,” Spiegel said, as he shook himself out from his bag. “Maybe we could get a fire going and keep this place warm through the night. Or is it already morning? Who the hell knows? You have a watch?”

Aaronson shook his head. He had been living, like Spiegel, by an internal clock, which had been thrown hopelessly out of sync by the constant daylight and the stress of flight and dislocation.

“Then we’re on our own.” Spiegel got up and threw some kindling into the belly of the stove, and he busied himself getting a fire under way as Aaronson talked.

“You thought you could get away easy,” Aaronson said. “You didn’t expect to see me ever again, did you?”

“We were waiting for some word from you,” Spiegel said. “We waited as long as we could.”

“And did you enjoy the job? Of being me?”

“Look,” Spiegel said. “I’m not sure how much you know about what’s gone down while you were away, in regards to Tracy.” As Spiegel spoke, he felt his throat clutch. He realized that the topic of Tracy was a dangerous vortex at the center of their conversation, like a black hole in a field of white ice.

Aaronson smiled and put his hand on Spiegel’s shoulder. “You fooled them all, every last fucker,” he said. “You never cracked, and you never let on. You gave me the chance I needed. Everybody thought you were me.”

“I was your cover.”

“The black cloak that concealed me from the eyes of the world. Well done.”

“Thanks.” Aaronson must have heard about the fracas on TV2, about the May Day riots, about the ARMS tribunal. Everything. “But what about you?” Spiegel said. “How come we never heard from you? You disappear and leave me to carry all that weight. Half the world’s looking to find me: border patrols, army intelligence, the Uppsala police, religious fanatics, even the press. And the only thing I hear about you are these mysterious reports that you’re back in Sweden, that you’re drawing money out of the ARMS treasury. So did you even go to Germany? What were you doing all this time? Junior year abroad? Europe on five dollars a day? Where the fuck were you?”

“You should have been able to find me. You just looked in the wrong places or asked the wrong people.”

“I didn’t ask anyone,” Spiegel said.

“You never asked the Uppsala police? You never talked to the press? You never had any contact with your father?”

“I never revealed anything to the cops about you,” Spiegel said. “I never told that reporter my real name. In fact, he wrote a big story proving that I don’t exist.” Spiegel paused for a second before continuing. In the dim light, he tried to scrutinize Aaronson’s face. But Aaronson’s face showed nothing. The fringes of his unruly beard nearly covered his features, hiding his expressions from view. “And just what do you know,” Spiegel asked, “about my father?”

“I know who he is,” Aaronson said. “I suspect that he’s been kept informed, that’s all.”

“Not by me,” Spiegel said. “He doesn’t even know that I’m in Sweden. I had someone in the States send him a bunch of postcards that I wrote before I left.”

“Okay, so you never sent him reports,” Aaronson said. “That’s fine. But did you ever think that maybe somebody else . . .”

“Was watching me?”

Aaronson nodded. “You must know that your father’s agency keeps a close eye on the resisters, on any American receiving support from a foreign government.”

The kindling caught. Spiegel pushed two birch logs into the maw of the fire and slammed shut the stove door. Quickly, the room smelled of smoke and radiant iron. Spiegel sat on the floor, beside the stove. “And what about you?” he asked. “Is that how you received your support?”

“You mean from a foreign government?”

Spiegel remembered what Inspector Svenson had led him to believe: that Aaronson had been nourished on a diet of rubles. Maybe he had been right about the food but wrong about the source of the supply. “I mean,” Spiegel said, “were you getting support from my father’s agency? Were you being paid for information?”

“You mean, am I a fucking spy?”

Spiegel didn’t answer.

“I’ve cut my deals,” Aaronson said. “That wasn’t one of them.”

“I didn’t think so,” Spiegel said.

“Now don’t go making me out better than I am. After I busted up the draft office, I would’ve been willing to work for anyone who could have brought me and Tracy to safety. I would have worked for your father’s agency if they had come through with an offer. They didn’t, and I took the best deal I could get.”

“What are you talking about?” Spiegel asked. “You make it sound like you were shopping for a used car.”

“No, what I’m saying is that I didn’t have a lot of time or a lot of choice. You’ve got to understand my situation,” Aaronson said. “I couldn’t stay in Canada, and I couldn’t go back to the States. It wasn’t easy getting to Sweden, believe me. I had a lot of help. But not for free, you dig? Not without cost.”

Aaronson looked off in the middle distance as he told Spiegel more of his story. It was as if he had rehearsed the role for some time but had never had a chance to say his lines, an understudy behind a hale and durable lead.

“When they turned the heat up on me, and on Tracy, in Toronto, we began to look around for a way out of Canada. I’m sure she’s told you. We thought about heading west to BC and trying to get lost somewhere in the Yukon or about buying a cheap ticket to Mexico or trading in her VW for two Harleys and taking our chances back in the States, on the road. Anyway, we heard about a cell in Montreal that specialized in cases like ours.”

Aaronson described their journey to Montreal, their long nights in a transient hotel by the railroad, lying on a narrow bed beneath a dangling bulb, waiting for their contact. At last a message was left for them at the desk, and Aaronson set off for a workingman’s café with long, bare wooden tables where men with coal-blackened hands ate sandwiches on thick bread and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes. He sat, he drank coffee, he pretended to read a newspaper in French, until a man tapped him on the shoulder and led him to a back alley where a rusted Renault was parked in idle. They drove on narrow streets to a dusty warehouse in the industrial flats by the St. Lawrence where, in a cloud of cigarette smoke and whiskey fumes, in air that sat still and dead beneath the huge blades of an immobile fan, a small brown man wearing thick plastic eyeglasses drew up a set of fresh documents. An old printing press clunked out some papers that smelled of cheap ink. A young girl, her face shrouded by a veil, her dark eyes averted, handed Aaronson a packet of tickets, which he stuffed into his jacket lining. They gave him pressed clothes and new shoes and money for a haircut and shave. He left the warehouse carrying a leather valise. He was told it was never to leave his sight until he handed it off in Copenhagen. Back at his hotel room in the city, a man was sitting on the iron-frame bed. Tracy was gone. The man held a gun casually in his right hand. He didn’t flourish it or aim it. He just wanted to be sure that Aaronson knew the gun was there. He conveyed the information that Aaronson would not see Tracy again until the delivery had been successfully completed. On his way out, the man swung his fist at the dangling bulb, smashing it with the butt of the gun.

Aaronson flew to Frankfurt and took a series of trains north to Denmark. The journey went smoothly. Apparently, he was a clean marker and nobody picked up his trail. In Copenhagen, he made his delivery.

“But nothing is face-to-face,” Aaronson said. “Everything’s done through intermediaries, you know. There are so many steps and layers, so no one person can unravel the whole skein. The only people I saw were my two contacts on either side, the guy who gave me the valise and the one I handed it to in Denmark. From there, it entered a network where stuff can be moved very easily to all the Baltic ports. Do you know what I’m saying?”

“Yes, I think I do,” Spiegel said. “You made your delivery to someone from the church.” Everything became clear to Spiegel. The church must be a cover for a band of smugglers posing as proselytes. It was a perfect system. They lived on boats in the Scandinavian harbors, and they came ashore to preach among the lonely wanderers of the Western world, preferably ones whose wallets were bent like a bow around a bulge of traveler’s checks. They set up their tables in airports and train stations, they worked their way through crowds, selling their pamphlets and artifacts, disciplined and ascetic, so visible that they were hardly noticed, at worst a public nuisance, living just below the horizon of official surveillance. Their internal network was intimate yet dark and complex, so a dollar handed to a threadbare prophet in Heathrow could be sucked into the system, flushed clean through any number of Swiss or German banks, then pumped back out into one of the clandestine passageways, the capillaries that connect the floating churches, the missions, the publishing houses, the schools, hospitals, academies. Nothing that entered the bloodstream of the church would bear a mark or a trace.

“I wasn’t supposed to know much about what I was carrying,” Aaronson said. “I was just the mule. But I was led to believe it was a sample case.”

“You were crazy,” Spiegel said. “If you’d been busted, they could have locked you away forever.”

“It wasn’t drugs, man. It was electrical stuff, wiring and diagrams, transistors for stereos, TV sets.”

“Then why all the secrecy and the threats?”

“The trade embargo. This stuff was going to China, from an American manufacturer. The Canadian warehouse, the cash being moved through the church, the factory in Sweden where we held the ARMS meetings—it’s all part of the screen to hide the source of the goods and to conceal the profits. These corporate pigs see an enormous consumer market developing in China, and they want their piece of it. They don’t give a shit about the war, about politics, about the international Communist menace. They just want to be at the switch when Chairman Mao lets the masses turn on to the bourgeois decadence of rock’n’roll and Walt Disney.”

“Power to the people.”

“Right on.”

Aaronson said nothing for a while.

“But when Tracy came to Uppsala,” Spiegel said, “you could have quit the movement and walked away from the guys running the factory and all their demands. Why didn’t you go back to school or go toss hay on a dairy farm?”

“Once you’re in, it’s hard to get out. I had access to all the money I’d need for ARMS—”

“—and for your way of life—”

“—but I knew that it wasn’t like a contribution to United Way. There were strings, and obligations. I was supposed to keep a steady stream of money moving south to the church headquarters. Of course, eventually the stream became, shall we say, diverted.”

“To your own little pool.”

“Yes. I knew it was only a matter of time before they’d paddle up the stream to find its source.”

“But they found me.”

“Exactly. My plan worked.”

“Did it? Maybe it worked for you. But not for everyone you left behind, you son of a bitch! Why didn’t you get in touch with us? Why didn’t you come back?”

“Easy, man,” Aaronson said. “You’ve got to understand my situation. If the guys in the church found me, they’d have killed me—”

“Great. They’d have killed you. But you were willing to leave me there to take the heat, your heat. They’d have killed me instead!”

“But you were saved, right?”

That was true. But how did Aaronson know?

“The Uppsala police saved me. They knew I wasn’t you. . . .”

“Not just them. The military police knew, too. They didn’t want anything to happen to you on their watch. They wanted me. If they could get me, arrest me in Germany, and reveal the sources of the movement’s financial support, it would be an enormous blow to ARMS. They had a trap all set to spring shut. They were just waiting for me to walk into it. They still are.”

“Don’t they know where you are now?” Spiegel asked.

“Their network is dismantled, thanks to you. Their lookout has abandoned her post.”

“
Her
post?”

“Haven’t you figured out that she was sending regular reports on you, on the whole movement?”

Spiegel’s heart stuck in his throat. He felt sick suddenly, dizzy, as if the floor were spinning and the walls closing in on him. How could she do that? He couldn’t believe Tracy could dissemble so convincingly, about her feelings, and her passion. But spies did that all the time, at least in the movies. Had she betrayed Aaronson as well? Had Aaronson vanished from Uppsala to get beyond the reach of her control?

“That’s why you left Tracy,” Spiegel said. “She was working for the other side, and you didn’t care if I got involved with her. It left the road clear for you to make your getaway.”

Aaronson laughed. “Not Tracy,” he said. “Ms. Julie.”

“Melissa? She was spying on me, all that time? And telling—”

“She was a better actor than you thought, right?” Aaronson said. “They cast her against type.”

“They?”

“The military police. Criminal Intelligence Division. For all I know, she was on active duty. You didn’t really think she was just an exchange student, did you?”

Of course, Spiegel thought. Melissa knew everything. And now she is gone, off to play another role. Her revels now are ended. He took a breath. How close he had come to the precipice, but he had not taken the plunge. Spiegel was glad he never fell for Melissa, despite her allure and her proximity. If he had, maybe he would have been the one to be shamed and defeated. Maybe his road would have dead-ended at the bottom of a pond. He felt a pang in his heart for Jorge.