The Once and Future Spy (26 page)

“Oh, God, you’re not going to dredge up something that happened fifteen years ago. We were instructed to follow someone as
part of a course on surveillance. I picked you at random. There was nothing personal.”

“You ended my career at random,” the Admiral said, barely moving his lips as he spoke. “You ruined my life at random.” He
collected his papers and zippered up his windbreaker. It occurred to him that waiting all those years was what made it so
sweet. Revenge was a meal that tasted best cold.

The Weeder started to ask, “When … how long …”

Toothacher understood the question, waved a comforting hand. “That bridge won’t be crossed for two or three days yet,” he
said. “What are we today? Ides minus three. I will have to report back to Washington before the final decision can be taken
on you, on Stuff tingle. The worst case must be examined. Alternatives must be explored. But I will tell you, in all honesty,
that there is little doubt what your fate must be, given the situation we all find ourselves in. There can be no question
of your being brought to trial. Surely someone with your intelligence can empathize with this point of view even if you are
not inclined to agree with it.”

“I am in great pain,” the Weeder said as the Admiral got up to leave. “There is a piece of metal digging into my back.”

The Admiral looked down at the Weeder, took in the awkwardness of his position, clucked his tongue in sympathy. He ducked
out of the cabin, returned soon afterward trailed by Huxstep, who was struggling with a large block of cement, the kind used
to weigh down temporary traffic signs. The stump of a metal pole, with a hole drilled neatly through it, protruded from the
cement. Seeing the block of cement the Weeder’s heart started beating wildly. Huxstep wrestled the block to the cabin floor,
reached behind the Weeder and unlocked one of the handcuffs, freeing the Weeder from the piece of metal sticking out of the
bulkhead. Then Huxstep locked the open cuff through the hole in the metal pole jutting from the cement block, attaching the
Weeder to the block by one wrist.

“In case you was wondering,” Huxstep said, “that’s to make sure you sink to the bottom so nobody finds your corpse.”

The Weeder turned on the Admiral, who was watching behind Huxstep. His words became gasps for air. “You promised … you gave
your word … the end would be painless … dignified.”

The Admiral looked offended. “What do you take us for? Throwing someone to the sharks while he is still alive is the kind
of thing our adversaries would do. In liberal circles it is popular to suggest that two enemies warring for any length of
time tend to resemble each other, but this is not at all true. At least not in our case. Our manners distinguish us from our
enemies. Huxstep here has strict instructions to shoot you
before
throwing you overboard.”

The Weeder sat up, massaged the welts on the wrist that had been freed. He caught Huxstep sizing him up with eyes the color,
the coldness of pewter. He had seen toughness before but Huxstep represented a different order of things. He had a toughness
that was more than skin deep, that was indistinguishable from viciousness. It had to do with the way he looked out at the
world and obviously didn’t give a damn about it. “I hope he remembers,” the Weeder remarked morbidly.

Mildred stuck her head through the double doors. “I think I hear the helicopter,” she announced in a grating voice that somehow
always managed to get on the Admiral’s nerves.

“I don’t think it is likely that we will meet again,” Toothacher told the Weeder, “but I want you to know I won’t soon forget
you. You will be another secret that will go to the grave with me.” He raised his baseball cap in salute and threaded his
bony fingers through his tangle of hair. “You will be another of my white hairs.”

And here, finally, is Nate’s reunion with his Tory cousin, Samuel:

A
T FIRST LIGHT NATE ESCORTED
Molly to the Manhattan island ferry point. She was loath to leave him but he reminded her of her vow to obey. “I am not violating
principles you hold dearly but acting on them,” he insisted.

The ferryman called for those who were crossing to Brookland to come on board. Several merchants carrying haversacks filled
with wares walked onto the ferry. Molly clung to Nate’s coat. “Your patriotism is as strong as my hate,” she whispered, “but
I will not let you go.”

Nate gently pried loose her fingers. “I am not asking you for permission.”

He stepped back. Molly raised her eyes to the heavens, as if there were something there that could change the course of history.
Her gaze fell on a sliver of a moon pale with first light. “How the moon requires night,” she said absently. Then she added
urgently, “Me also, I require night.” And she backed onto the flat ferry and stood with her eyes riveted to Nate’s as it eased
away from the dock. She stared at him until he was lost in darkness.

Carrying his wooden kit slung over one shoulder, Nate quickly made
his way to Wall Street, to the alleyway across from Haym Salomon’s house. In the street in front of the house an orderly was
holding the reins of half a dozen horses. There was a commotion at the front door. Two cavalrymen dragged Salomon down the
steps into the street. His wife stood on the top step stifling her tears in an apron. A cavalryman tied Salomon’s hands in
front of him, then passed the end of the cord up to another cavalryman who had mounted his horse. Taking a good grip on the
cord, he dug his spurs into the flanks of his mount. The horse started forward at a brisk pace. Salomon, a man in his middle
thirties, was almost jerked off his feet as he stumbled after the cavalryman holding the leash. Laughing, the other cavalrymen
swung into their saddles and followed. They turned a corner and disappeared from view.

Nate sprinted across the street and up the steps. Salomon’s wife was still standing at the open door staring at the empty
street, at the dust from the cavalrymen’s horses settling back onto it.

“What happened?” Nate asked breathlessly.

“They had a warrant accusing him of being a colonial spy,” Salomon’s wife said miserably. She added, “Haym scribbled a note
for you when he heard them coming.” She reached into an apron pocket and handed Nate a folded slip of paper. “God keep you,
young man,” she said hastily, and retreated into the house.

Nate unfolded the note. On it Salomon had scrawled: “Your cousin breaks fast daily around the hour of nine at Fraunces’ Tavern.”

A housewright delivering sidings to a building site directed Nate to Fraunces’ Tavern, the old De Lancey mansion at the corner
of Pearl and Broad. The sun was up by the time he got there, the street in front of the tavern crowded with wagons and horses
being held by stable boys provided by “Black Sam” Fraunces, the enterprising proprietor. Nate turned around the tavern several
times, then decided he might as well break fast himself while he was waiting. The tavern was crowded and noisy. He eventually
found a place at a corner table next to a beefy constable who eyed him and his wooden kit with curiosity when he sat down.
A waitress with her bosom swelling over the top of her bodice brought a steaming cup of mocha coffee, half a loaf of bread
and a small wooden tub of butter. The constable finished his meal, leaned back, lit a cigar and dispatched a dense cloud of
vile-smelling smoke into the air. Coughing, Nate waved a hand to clear it away-and found himself staring straight into the
eyes of
his cousin Samuel, standing with his back to the bar not three yards away.

Samuel, who had just turned thirty, smiled caustically. “Of all people,” he called.

“Small world,” Nate agreed.

The constable slipped one large hand under the wide leather belt that ran from his left shoulder to his right hip and looked
from one man to the other.

Leaning confidently back against the bar, Samuel toyed with Nate the way a cat toys with a field mouse. “What brings you to
New York, cousin?”

“I am repairing shoes nowadays.”

A guttural laugh seeped through Samuel’s lips. “I always wondered what skills they taught at Yale.”

“Times are difficult,” Nate remarked.

“Isn’t that the god-awful truth.” Samuel cocked his head. “Odd no one in my family mentioned anything about you repairing
shoes. Last I heard you had quit teaching Latin and taken a commission in the rebel army.”

At the adjacent tables all conversation abruptly ceased. The beefy constable turned slowly to study Nate. “What’s this about
you being a rebel officer?”

Nate had a sudden loss of nerve, a sudden urge to run for it. He imagined himself (I imagine him too) peering through the
single glass pane, watching Molly at her toilet; imagined her cry of surprise, of sheer pleasure, when she caught sight of
him. He shook his head as if he were dismissing a persuasive image and replied evenly to the constable, “I don’t guess there’s
any point in me denying it.”

Here is the interrogation of my man Nate:

A
FTER HIS ARREST AT FRAUNCES’
Tavern by the beefy constable, Nate was handed over to a squadron of Light Dragoons, who bound his wrists and ankles in irons,
hustled him into a stagecoach and started out for General Howe’s headquarters
at the Beekman Mansion overlooking Turtle Bay. The stagecoach, with two brass-helmeted dragoons inside and a dozen others
riding ahead and behind, headed up the Eastern Post Road that ran from New York City to King’s Bridge. Because the day was
scorching hot there was a brief pause at the spring-fed Sunfish Pond to water the horses then the coach and its escort started
up the flat-topped rise that some called Inclenberg Hill and others called Murray’s Hill, sped past the driveway leading to
Robert Murray’s country house and continued on toward Turtle Bay and the Beekman Mansion.

Arriving in midafternoon, Nate was delivered into the custody of Howe’s Irish Provost Marshal, William Cunningham, a hulking
man with short-cropped hair and patriotic tattoos (For God and George III, Britannia Rules) on his arms. Hobbling because
of the ankle chains, Nate was hustled into a toolshed next to the greenhouse. His wrists were secured behind his back, with
the chain laced through a jagged piece of metal embedded in one of the wall planks. Nate squirmed as the metal dug into the
small of his back, tried to find a comfortable position, failed. “I am in great pain,” he told Cunningham.

“Are you, now?” Cunningham asked with a sneer. “The poor fellow’s suffering great pain,” he told the guards. Several of them
smiled knowingly. Before they closed the door, leaving the prisoner in total darkness, Nate caught Cunningham sizing him up
with eyes that had the color, the coldness of pewter. He had seen toughness before but Cunningham represented a different
order of things. He had a toughness that was more than skin deep, that was indistinguishable from viciousness. It had to do
with the way he looked out at the world and obviously didn’t give a damn about it.

With the sun beating down the temperature inside the toolshed became stifling. Nate lost all track of time. He tried changing
his position but whichever way he turned, sharp pains stabbed through his back. In order not to dwell on the pain he summoned
up an image of Molly, seen through the window of her room, nude, a candle next to her bare feet. He remembered the feel of
her wet skin as she pressed her body against his. He heard her voice saying, “If you are absolutely set on going through with
this mad scheme of yours, I propose that we marry ourselves.” It had been an indelible encounter, beyond the polite intercourse
he had experienced before, beyond even his wildest flights of fantasy.

Outside the toolshed the guards were being changed. Nate was brought back to the present-brought back to the metal stabbing
into his back-by the grunts of relief coming from the Northumberland fusilier being replaced. He heard orders shouted from
the Beekman Mansion. A crisp “Aye” came from the fusilier at the door. A key turned in the padlock and the door was pulled
open. I can imagine Nate squinting as the sunlight stabbed into the interior of the toolshed. Two fusiliers, sweating profusely
under their brass helmets, burst in, leaned their rifles against a broken plow and set about undoing the chain that held him
pinned to the metal embedded in the wall. His wrists were freed and manacled in front of him. Jerked roughly to his feet,
Nate hobbled between the guards out of the shed, across the well-tended garden alive with late snow-white roses, toward the
back entrance of the mansion.

As he reached the wooden steps leading to the kitchen, the door ahead was thrown open and a tall fusilier emerged. He held
a rifle in one hand and a chain leash attached to the manacled wrists of Haym Salomon in the other. Nate looked at him in
horror. The Jew was almost unrecognizable-his face was full of purple bruises. One eye was swollen shut. His nose was twisted
to one side and caked with dried blood. Salomon shook his head imperceptibly and tried to whisper something, but his lips
were too swollen to form words.

“Bring the spy along smartly now,” Cunningham bellowed from the kitchen, and Nate was sent flying through the doorway by the
flat of a hand on his back. Cunningham, wearing breeches held up by braces and a sweat-and-blood-stained shirt, smiled at
him as if he were greeting a long-lost friend. He nodded at the fusilier, who produced a ring of keys and unlocked the manacles
from Nate’s wrists and ankles. Massaging the welts on his wrists, Nate heard Cunningham bark, “Strip.” He looked at Cunningham,
then at the dozen or so fusiliers lounging against walls and tables. “If you won’t undress yourself,” Cunningham snarled,
pronouncing each syllable of each word carefully, “my boys here will be doing it for you.”

Moving stiffly, trying to maintain what dignity he could, Nate pulled his shirt over his head, then kicked off his shoes.
He removed his stockings and breeches. “Strip,” Cunningham said, pointing to Nate’s drawers, “means down to the bone.”

Nate hesitated. Several of the fusiliers pushed themselves off the wall. Nate quickly removed his drawers and stood naked
in the
middle of the kitchen. He was vaguely ashamed of the whiteness of his body, of appearing naked before his enemies. Cunningham
nodded at the clothes. A fusilier spread the garments on the kitchen table. Scratching absently at the inside of a nostril,
Cunningham turned to inspect them. He searched methodically, running his fingers along every inch of every seam, feeling the
hems to see if anything had been sewn within, examining stitching to see if it showed signs of having been redone. As he finished
each garment he discarded it on the floor. Finally only Nate’s shoes were left. Cunningham picked one up and turned it in
his large hand, looking at it from various angles, poking at the sole to see if he could pull it loose. He reached inside
and dug his fingernails under the inner sole and pried it up. Nate heard his snort of delight when he caught sight of the
folded letters. Cunningham tucked the stray hairs that had appeared back up into his nostrils with delicate clockwise thrusts
of his thick pinky. He found the pages from Nate’s notebook folded under the inner sole of the other shoe. Flinging the shoes
at Nate’s feet, he collected the documents, struggled into a tight uniform jacket and rushed from the room.

“Can I put my clothes on, then?” Nate asked.

One of the fusiliers said, “What do you take us for? Hanging you while you are stark naked is the kind of thing the rebels
would do. We are not like our enemies.” The other fusiliers laughed.

Nate pulled on his clothes and waited. He could hear flies buzzing in the kitchen, voices droning in the heart of the house,
a pulse throbbing in one of his ears. It came to him as a revelation that he was desperately afraid of being afraid; that
it was this deeper fear that kept the normal fear for life and limb at arm’s length.

Someone shouted an order out of a window. Minutes later a horse galloped up to the kitchen door and a captain with engineer’s
insignias on the sleeves of his uniform came running in. He glanced at Nate and disappeared into the hallway. A quarter of
an hour went by. Cunningham returned to the kitchen, beckoned Nate with a jerk of his head and pushed him down a corridor.
An orderly stood before the sliding double doors of the drawing room. He opened them and stepped aside. Cunningham put a hammerlock
on Nate and marched him into the room.

The Commander-in-Chief of His Britannic Majesty’s Expeditionary Forces in the Americas, Major General William Howe, sat on
a high-backed settle chair, peering through a magnifying glass at the
documents Cunningham had discovered in Nate’s shoes. To Nate’s eye, the General had the lean, hungry look that comes from
presiding over a military campaign from which little glory was to be derived; it was common knowledge that Howe complained
bitterly that His Majesty’s ministers had such a low opinion of the American fighting potential that any setback, not to mention
a defeat, could put an end to the General’s career. (It was surely not lost on Howe that the debacle at Breed’s Hill in Boston
had put an end to his predecessor’s career.) With his sloping shoulders, his sunken cheeks, his pasty complexion, his chalk-colored
hair, Howe looked to Nate like a
fin de race
nobleman who knew not only where the various bodies were buried, but what they had died of-and who had profited from their
deaths and could be accused of murder if the need arose.