The Once and Future Spy (21 page)

She heard his shoes, his clothing falling to the floor. She felt his trembling hands on her shoulders turning her around.
She smiled to hold back the flood of tears but it was no use. She pressed her wet skin to his dry skin, she fitted her body
into the curves of his, she burrowed under his chin with her face, she pressed her lips to the hair mole on his neck, she
sobbed as she had sobbed only twice before in her life.

T
o the Admiral’s bulging eyes, Wanamaker’s outer office wasteland looked as if it had been hit by a tidal wave. Desks, coffee
tables, swivel chairs, filing cabinets, magazine racks, the telephone switchboard, the two standing lamps, the government-issue
metal coat tree (duly stamped Mark something or other, Mod. something or other) had all washed up in the middle of the room.
The pile was covered with white paint-stained canvas drapes. Two men in white paint-stained overalls, with paint-stained cigarettes
glued to their lower lips, were wielding rollers, methodically covering the grimy walls with a fresh coat of cerulean blue.
Admiral Toothacher paused in front of the miniskirted receptionist, who was sitting on the only uncovered chair in the room
painting her fingernails a shade of metallic gray best described as pewter. She looked up, suppressed a smile at the sight
of the chalky hair flying off in all directions, asked, “So what do you think, Admiral?”

“What do I think about what?” the Admiral inquired starchily. He was a bit put off at being addressed so directly, and so
familiarly, by a
secretary
.

‘The color, natch.”

Toothacher glanced at the walls, found the color unremarkable, admitted as much.

“I’m not talking about the walls. I’m talking about my fingernails.”
And the secretary waved one drying hand, fingers spread-eagled, in his startled face.

“I have seen worse, I just don’t remember where,” the Admiral commented with premeditated gracelessness. (It was one of the
quirks of his personality that the happier he felt the ruder he became.) “Can I interrupt your
work
“ -he emphasized the word insultingly- “long enough to inform me if R for Roger Wanamaker has arrived yet?”

The secretary regarded the Admiral with undisguised disdain, shook the stiff locks of her home permanent to indicate that
the promotion policies of her government were an unfathomable mystery to her, cast a devastatingly bored look at the door
leading to the inner sanctum to suggest that the early bird was digging for worms somewhere behind it. The Admiral directed
his bulging eyes on the door with such intensity that the secretary suspected him of having X-ray vision. By the time she
realized how ridiculous the idea was he had disappeared into the room and slammed the door emphatically behind him.

Inside, one look at Wanamaker’s sidewalk-drab two-day stubble was enough to convince the Admiral that something was amiss.

“You look as if you are carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders,” he commented as he dusted the lopsided armchair
facing Wanamaker’s desk with his handkerchief and gingerly fitted his body into it.

“I’m having a bad day with gravity,” Wanamaker conceded.

The Admiral decided he would be generous and break the ice. “Aren’t you going to offer me a choice of coffee, tea or something
with a kick to it?” he asked. He flashed what his wife had once laughingly described as his smile of complicity.

Wanamaker thrust a Schimmelpenninck between his teeth and lit up. A perfect halo of smoke wafted into the Admiral’s face as
Wanamaker pushed a telegram across the desk. Toothacher ducked under the smoke ring, leaned forward, angled his head and read
the telegram out loud. “ Tm alive and well. Stuff
bingle
is not. The Weeder.’ “

“Bingle, of course, should be tingle, as in Stuff
tingle
,” Wanamaker noted glumly. “The
t
got replaced by a
b
somewhere between here and Boston, which is where the telegram came from.”

“Someone is pulling your leg,” Admiral Toothacher ventured with a sinking heart.

Another halo of smoke emerged from Wanamaker’s puffy lips.
Some words leapt like trained circus dogs through it. “There-is-no-corpus-delicti!”

“No corpus delicti?”

“In the rubble. In Boston. I checked.”

“That is simply out of the realm of possibility.”

Wanamaker pried open a paper clip with his thick, squared-off fingernails and began twisting it into various shapes. He worked
the metal back and forth until it snapped and discarded the halves in a desk drawer. “You have let me down badly,” he told
the Admiral. Wanamaker’s expression was totally expressionless, but his voice had slipped into a range normally associated
with eulogies. “I used to idolize you,” he said. “You were an icon for me, a father figure. I thought you were the only thing
standing between us and the Bolshevik hordes.” Wanamaker shrugged a shoulder to indicate that times had changed. “Now you
can’t even arrange things so I can explode a relatively small atomic device in the city of my choice.”

Trying to avoid Wanamaker’s eye, Toothacher let his gaze drift across the room. It settled on the tacky photograph of the
President the Admiral batted both his eyes to bring it into focus, then caught his breath in surprise-the President appeared
to be
blinking back
at him. Toothacher plucked a large handkerchief from a pocket of his blazer and wiped away the perspiration that had accumulated
on his brow. He bitterly regretted this visit to Wanamaker’s office. He should have taken the first plane back to Guantánamo
and retreated into the boredom of its happy hours without saying good-bye to his former man Friday. Now his clothes, his hair,
would smell of fresh paint, of tobacco. His clothes could be dry-cleaned, his hair washed with soap and water. But the stain
on his reputation-that was another matter. Watching Wanamaker suck on his cigar, the Admiral was suddenly overwhelmed by the
sensation that he had been wasting his time; wasting his life. How he longed for the halcyon days when everyone used code
names-his, he remembered, had been Parsifal- and was required to give a sample of his Morse “fist” so that no one could send
messages in his place. In those days an espionage agent had to be something of a metaphysician, shoring up, against his ruin,
seemingly unrelated fragments to get a handle on the ultimate nature of reality, of existence. It had all been very pure,
very beautiful even. But the world had moved on.

The Admiral sighed inwardly. If he could wind up this last assignment on a positive note, he vowed never to allow himself
to be lured out of retirement again.

“What day are we today?” the Admiral asked Wanamaker.

“The seventh.”

“That still leaves eight days to the Ides,” Toothacher noted without much enthusiasm.

B
iting on a cuticle, Snow flipped to the next page in the Weeder’s manuscript. She was up to the part that described Molly
and Nate exchanging vows. Her eyes became moist. She pulled a handkerchief from her jeans pocket, noisily blew her nose, continued
reading.

The Weeder noticed Snow’s shoulders trembling. “Where are you?” he asked quietly.

“I’m in the boardinghouse,” Snow replied. “Molly has just asked Nate to renounce all pride, ostentation and vanity in apparel
and behavior.” She bent back to the page, gasped softly, turned impatiently to the next page, read it, lifted her head, closed
her eyes, breathed through her nostrils. When she felt calmer she read the entry a second time. “Oh,” she murmured. “It’s
an incredible story. And the way you tell it-what’s amazing is she doesn’t try to hide. She makes me feel as if-”

The Weeder finished the thought for her. “As if you were invading her privacy. As if you were photographing her naked through
a slightly open door.”

Snow nodded carefully. “I’ve always thought of my photographs as wounds, and the language you would use to describe the photographs
to a blind person as a kind of bandage over those wounds. Molly was ambushed by grief-that’s her wound. And she is treating
the wound with language. Describing a wound is one way of treating
it. When she tells Nate she has appetites, she’s talking about more than sexual appetites, I think. She’s talking about an
appetite for life in general; she’s talking about the absolute necessity to relate to people, which is incredibly difficult
to do once you’ve been ambushed by grief.”

The Weeder said, “You’re speaking from experience, obviously.”

Snow nodded slowly. “I was driving the car when my husband … when Jeb was killed. If I had been more alert … if I had been
quicker.” She shrugged tiredly. “If, if, if, if.” The smile that kept the tears at arm’s length installed itself on her lips
as she turned back to finish reading what the Weeder had written.

Across the room he watched her devour the manuscript. The unrelated fragments he had collected over the years were falling
neatly into place: General Howe’s cryptic reference, in a note to his brother, about how the Colonial spy being an officer
in Colonel Knowlton’s regiment made all the difference; Montresor’s account, in a letter to his wife, of being summoned to
translate some Latin documents into the King’s English; the story, contained in a diary, of Provost Marshal Cunningham’s refusal
to let a condemned man write last letters or give him access to a clergyman; A. Hamilton’s story of having worked out coded
sentences with Nate; the description of an execution in John Jack’s oral history.

Snow finished reading the manuscript, looked up at the Weeder. “My great-aunt Esther told you all these things?” she asked.

“She let me have a look at Molly’s diary. I filled in the gaps.”

“How do you know so much about Nate?”

The Weeder grinned sheepishly. “It’s me, Nate.”

Snow studied his face, not sure how to take this piece of information. “You’re Nate?”

He could see the idea startled her and backed off. “In a manner of speaking.”

The Weeder walked over to stare out the window. The night was filled with the low hum of traffic from the turnpike, which
cut through the neighborhood two blocks away. Across the alleyway, in a boxlike apartment building, a young woman in jeans
could be seen through a first-floor window with its shade half-drawn. She was leaning with her back against a wall, talking
into a telephone. At one point she held the phone at arm’s length and stared at it, as if she couldn’t believe what she was
hearing, then brought it back to her ear
and resumed the conversation. Snow came up behind the Weeder-he could feel her breath on his neck-and looked at the woman.
The Weeder shook his head. “I’ve lost my appetite for invasions,” he muttered. “One way or another I’m getting out of that
line of work.”

“For me,” Snow said, “invasions can still be instructive.” She studied the Weeder’s reflection in the window, noticed that
he looked preoccupied. “Where are you?” she asked.

“I was thinking about my man Nate. I was thinking about how he got the lobsters to change their plans. Howe never did land
at Throg’s Neck and strap Washington in Manhattan.” The Weeder’s eyes appeared to lose their ability to focus. Thinking out
loud, he said, “In the end Nate’s scheme was brilliantly simple. He set out to convince Howe that his enemy knew what he was
up to. If I could convince Wanamaker that
his
enemy knows what he’s up to …” His voice trailed off.

Snow asked, “Who is Wanamaker’s enemy?”

“It’s the Russians who are Wanamaker’s enemy. It’s Savinkov who is”-the Weeder spun around; his eyes focused on Snow –”Wanamaker’s
enemy.”

“Savinkov?”

“He’s the KGB station chief in Washington. One of the things I did for the Company was eavesdrop on Savinkov. If I could somehow
convince Wanamaker that the Russians know about the bomb, that Savinkov is only waiting for it to explode to leak the story
to the world, the Company will have to abandon Stufftingle the way Howe had to abandon the amphibious operation against Throg’s
Neck.”

Snow wasn’t sure she followed him. “How could this Savinkov know about the bomb unless he had a spy in Wanamaker’s office?”

“That’s just it,” the Weeder said. “What if I were Savinkov’s spy? What if I had been spying for him all along?”

“But you’re not. You weren’t.”

“I could pretend. It shouldn’t be too difficult to drop a clue in the right place.” Suddenly the Weeder’s eyes widened in
discovery. “I could use the dead drop in Boston!”

“Now you’re losing me,” Snow admitted. “What’s a dead drop?”

The Weeder grasped her wrists. “It could work! A dead drop is an out-of-the-way hiding place agents use to pass messages and
money and film back and forth with their handlers. When I was eavesdropping
on Savinkov I found out he knows that the FBI is servicing his dead drop behind the radiator in the men’s room of a museum
here in Boston. Which means that if I were to deposit something in this particular drop Savinkov wouldn’t get it, but the
FBI would.”

“What could you put in the drop?”

The Weeder beamed. “What Nate put between the soles of his shoe-evidence. I could start with the pawn ticket, which would
lead the FBI to the printouts on Stufftingle. The FBI wouldn’t know what they were and would turn to the Company for help.
The Company would never tell the FBI what it meant-but my bosses would draw the appropriate conclusion. Stufftingle had been
compromised. I could add a personal note to Savinkov-in Latin, why not? because he speaks Latin, and how would I know that
unless I worked for him? I could say here’s the final batch of printout on Stufftingle. I could inquire about something personal-something
that only someone who knew Savinkov intimately would be familiar with. His hemorrhoids! I could ask him if the medicine I
recommended for his hemorrhoids had helped him!”

Snow took the Weeder’s hands in hers and turned them so that his palms were facing up. She touched the scabs that had formed
over the rope burns. “Your life lines have been erased,” she noted worriedly.

The Weeder pulled his hands free and turned to stare out the window. He went over the whole thing again in his mind looking
for flaws, but couldn’t find any. “The beauty of it,” he said, “is that they won’t be able to reschedule another Stufftingle
after the Ides of March deadline passes. Once they think the Russians know about it they’ll have to cancel Stufftingle permanently.”

Snow asked, “What will they do to you if they think you’re a Russian spy?”

The Weeder shrugged; the answer seemed evident. “They can’t very well put me on trial. I know too much. About Operations Subgroup
Charlie of the Special Interagency Antiterrorist Working Group. About Stufftingle.”

Snow let this sink in for a moment. “Did you ever think of bypassing the CIA? Of going to the Justice Department, for instance?
Or the President?”

“What do I do? Waltz into the Oval Office and say, ‘Mr. President, there are things going on out there you should know about.’
Consider the possibility that he already knows about it, that he may
have authorized Stufftingle. The President and the CIA’s late lamented director were thick as thieves. It would have been
entirely in character for the director to mention, in an offhand way, that he was going to explode an atomic device in Tehran
unless the President had a coughing fit in the next ten seconds. And when the President didn’t cough, to set the wheels in
motion.”

“You’re paranoid,” Snow said. “There are people in the White House or the Justice Department who would be appalled if they
discovered what was going on. It’s not only the business of the bomb-what’s it called?-Stufftingle. It’s also the attempt
to kill the one person who is trying to stop this insanity.”

“You’re forgetting about the world being upside down,” the Weeder told her. He added impatiently, “I know what I’m talking
about. I know how these things work. And being naive doesn’t increase anyone’s chance of survival.”

“I’m not naive,” Snow said flatly. “And I’m not convinced you’re right.”

“My problem isn’t to convince you I’m right,” the Weeder remarked moodily. He produced the pawn ticket from the billfold of
his wallet. “It just might work,” he said.