The Once and Future Spy (3 page)

T
he Weeder, as usual, kept most of himself up his sleeve. “A bit of this, a bit of that,” he replied. His face corkscrewed
into a sheepish grin; having to be coy about what he did for a living made him uncomfortable. He discovered sediment at the
bottom of his wineglass and shook his head in annoyance. He had no respect for wines that voyaged badly; also for people.
The thought crossed his mind that he was voyaging badly, but what could he say? That he prospected in currents of conversation
for nuggets of treason? His physicist friend would laugh if he didn’t believe him and leave if he did.

“You haven’t changed,” the physicist, whose name was Ethan Early, said. “Remember that American History professor who gave
you an A because you knew more than you said, and me a C because I said more than I knew?” The physicist snickered pleasantly.
“Why don’t you try telling the truth for once, Silas. The whole truth, nothing but.”

“Whose truth?” the Weeder asked. “Which truth?”

Nodding appreciatively, Early plunged on. “The word out on you is you don’t work for the State Department at all. A lot of
your former classmates, me included, think you’re some sort of spook.” He leaned over the table; the southernmost handpainted
sunflower on his silk tie slipped into his bowl of fettucini, but the Weeder didn’t say anything. “Own up, Silas. Do you carry
cyanide pills and false
passports?” Early asked eagerly. “Do you dot your
i
‘s with microdots and post your letters in dead drops? Are you armed?”

“I
am
armed,” the Weeder said, “with a sense of humor. Which is what protects me from friends like you.” More coyness; another
sheepish grin.

At the next booth an elderly man raised his voice in frustration. “Admit it,” he whined. “Admit you slept with him.”

The elderly woman sitting across from him pleaded, “Oh, God, you’re not going to dredge up something that happened forty-two
years ago.”

“Did you, yes or no, sleep with him?”

“That was spilled milk, which you’re not supposed to cry over,” the woman complained. She was silent for a moment. Then she
blurted out, “Sometimes I wish you’d die!”

“I’m trying,” the old man retorted. And he emitted a high-pitched whistle that reminded the Weeder, sitting with his back
to the two old people in the next booth, of steam seeping from a grudgingly open valve in his SoHo loft.

The physicist leaned toward the Weeder. “What is your position on spilled milk?” he whispered.

“If a historian isn’t interested in spilled milk, who is?” the Weeder said. “It’s the amniotic fluid of history.”

“But do you cry over it, Silas, that’s the question?”

“It is an article of faith with me that spilled milk is definitely something to cry over,” the Weeder assured his friend.
He thought: If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be walking back the cat on Nate.

“There is hope for you yet,” Early remarked.

They were contemplating layered Italian desserts when the Weeder finally got around to steering the conversation onto physics.
“And what frontiers are you pushing back these days?” he casually asked Early.

“I am, believe it or not, counting hydrogen atoms,” the physicist replied.

The waiter, passing, called, “So, everything all right?”

“Your food is eatable,” the Weeder called back. “Your wine needs work. Your prices too.” To the physicist he said, “Why are
you counting hydrogen atoms?”

“If there are more than three to every cubic yard of space, the universe will eventually fall back on itself. When things
get dense
enough, there will be another big bang and history will start all over again. If there are less than three, the universe will
expand forever. Distant galaxies will flicker out like spent candles. If some poor son of a bitch is still here to observe
all this, he will be adrift on this life raft of a planet, alone in a dead universe.”

The Weeder said with emotion, “Some people are already adrift on this life raft of a planet. But that’s another story.”

The physicist spotted the traces of fettucini sauce on his sunflower. He moistened the tip of his napkin in a glass of water
and dabbed at the stain. “When you phoned,” he said, “you mentioned something about wanting to pick my brain.”

“I almost forgot,” the Weeder said. He fished some three-by-five index cards from the breast pocket of his sport jacket and
offered them to Early. “I came across a batch of notes that don’t make much sense to me. I thought they might to you.”

The physicist glanced at the first card, then shuffled it to the back of the pack and read the next one. “Well, U-239 is definitely
not a German U-boat, if that’s any help.” Early looked up. The Weeder, so casual a moment ago, was hanging on his words. “It’s
uranium, and the other 239 is plutonium. The chemical notations mean that U-239 loses two electrons and converts two neutrons
into protons to become Pu-239. Given the context, ‘rods’ obviously refers to uranium rods. They are sealed in aluminum cylinders
and inserted in graphite. You slow down a chain reaction by removing rods. You speed it up by adding rods.”

“What about ‘hair triggers’?”

“The thing that makes uranium and plutonium stand out in Mendeleyev’s crowd is that, atomically speaking, they have hair triggers—they
can be made to explode relatively easily. How can I explain it? Look, Silas, say you are operating an atomic pile, either
with uranium or with plutonium. You are removing or adding rods to slow down or speed up the chain reaction, right? The size
of the rods and their spacing are very delicate—get one wrong and you wind up with an uncontrolled chain reaction, otherwise
known as an atomic explosion.”

The physicist shuffled the top card to the back of the pack and read the next one. “ ‘Wedges’ refers to the way early uranium
or plutonium bombs were constructed. Wedges of uranium in the case of the Hiroshima bomb, wedges of plutonium in the Nagasaki
bomb, were
arranged in circles—maybe we should call them vicious circles—and imploded by a ring of conventional dynamite placed around
the perimeter. The implosion packed the wedges into a critical mass which, in turn, resulted in a chain reaction and an atomic
explosion. The thing to remember when configuring wedges of uranium or plutonium into bombs is this: for any given shape there
is a critical weight, and the stuff explodes instantly when it reaches that weight. So you’d better have your calculations
down pat before you start to configure.”

Early handed the index cards back to the Weeder. “The documents you came across are obviously old hat. Whoever wrote this
was worrying about the various ways that someone going through the motions of constructing a primitive atomic device might
bring on an accidental atomic explosion.” Early smiled across the table. “Has what I said helped you any?”

The Weeder had a faraway look in his eyes as he murmured, “I’m not sure.”

For starters, I’ll do my man Nate:

I
N MY MIND’S EYE I SEE HIM STILL
dancing leaf in the rebellion’s gusts. His hair, cut short because of lice during the siege of Boston, would have grown long
enough for him to wear it again in a knot at the nape of his neck, which was the style he preferred. He would have been paler
than usual, and weaker; he had “taken the smallpox” (as the inoculation was called) three weeks before when he was home on
leave and was only just getting back on his feet. One day in mid-August, when the sky over New York had the dull sheen of
pewter, Nate and his friend from New London, S. Hempstead, were sent in from Haarlem to see if they could requisition bayonets,
which the eighty or so men in Nate’s Company (part of Colonel Webb’s Nineteenth Connecticut Volunteers) desperately needed.
Rumor had it that a Dutch ship carrying bullets and bayonets had run the blockade and docked on the North River.

Nate wouldn’t have been in a particularly good mood that day. The girl with whom he had had “polite intercourse” (Nate’s phrase,
not mine) while he was teaching at Haddam’s Landing—she had been one of the handful of girls in his early morning Latin class—had
written to say that she had gotten engaged to a constable from Hartford.
When the cat’s away, mice will play, is what Nate must have thought. (It’s what I would have thought if I had been in his
shoes, but that may tell more about me than Nate; it certainly says something about how I reconstruct history.) The sweltering
heat was probably accumulating in drifts, and Nate and his friend would have stopped at Cape’s Tavern on the Broad Way for
a tankard of cool ale. Later they would have scrambled over the barricades that had been thrown up on the streets sloping
down to the river and asked some of Colonel Glover’s Marbleheaders, in their tarred fisherman’s trousers, where they could
find the Dutch ship. The Marblehead men would have shrugged; as far as they knew there was no Dutch ship, and no bayonets.

It would have been like Nate to suggest that they take a gander at the enemy before heading back up the Broad Way to Haarlem;
he was by nature and instinct an adventurous soul who had the fears any sane man had but constantly tested himself against
them. He and his friend would have climbed onto one of the parapets at Old Fort Amsterdam to gaze at the forest of masts off
Staten Island. One of General Knox’s gunners, sunning himself next to his cannon, might have noticed Nate was an officer and
decided to bait him.

“Count the masts if you got the nerve.”

Nate would have made a stab at it (there was never a challenge he wouldn’t rise to), but soon given up. There were too many.

I can hear the gunner drawling, “How ‘bout you, Sergeant?”

I can see Nate smiling that broad ear-to-ear grin of his and saying, “Go ahead, Stephen.”

Stephen surely shook his head. “A man could lose his taste for rebellion counting the enemy.”

The gunner would have laughed pleasantly. “We been countin’ them out with long glasses. Ten ships of the line, twenty frigates,
seventy-three warships all told, another hundred fifty or so transports. Heard General Knox say as how this was the goldurnest
force the lobsters ever sent ‘gainst anyone.”

If I know my Nate, he would have remarked on the note of pride in the gunner’s voice. And he would have thought: He’s an optimist
because he doesn’t know enough.

It was about then that Nate and his friend Stephen heard the slow mournful beating of the kettledrum. The sound seemed to
come from the bowling green, Nate’s old stamping ground; he had
kicked around a football on the green when his company had been billeted there.

“What’s that about?” Stephen asked.

The gunner, a burly cordwainer from the Maine Territories, bit off a plug of tobacco and spit some juice onto the parapet.
“Ain’t you heard? There’s gonna be a hangin’. Go ahead and watch if you got the stomach for it. There ain’t no charge.”

Nate and Stephen surely exchanged looks here. Stephen, who at twenty-two was a year older than Nate and never let him forget
it, said “I’m all for heading back.”

Nate shook his head stubbornly. He had never seen a man executed, but he figured it was something he ought to know about.
All the rebel officers fought with halters around their necks. Nate had torn out from the New York
Weekly Post Boy
the article describing the sentence imposed by a British judge on an Irish rebel. “You are to be hanged by the neck,” the
judge had informed the condemned man, “but
not
until you are dead; for while you are still living your body is to be cut down, your bowels torn out and burned before your
face, your head cut off, and your body divided into four quarters, your head and quarters to be at the King’s disposal; and
may the Almighty God have mercy on your soul.”

It was on the bowling green that Nate first spotted the Commander-in-Chief. He was chatting with his portly Commander of Artillery,
General Knox. Nate had never set eyes on the Commander-in-Chief before, but he recognized him instantly. He was a heavy man,
easily a head taller than anyone around him, with thick thighs and meaty hips and high cheekbones and a prominent nose. A
black cockade jutted from the brim of his hat, indicating he was a general officer. He wore his hair powdered and tied back
at the neck with a red ribbon, indicating he was a gentleman. He sat his horse as if he had been born on one.

The Commander-in-Chief was not someone Nate was predisposed to. He had heard too many unpleasant stories about him: how he
had been a land speculator back in Virginia; how he had married a rich widow for her money; how he had advertised in newspapers
to recapture a runaway slave but had kept his name off the advertisement; how he had turned up, conspicuous in his officer’s
uniform, when Congress was deciding on a Commander-in-Chief even though he hadn’t drilled a militia unit in fifteen years.
It was whispered about that the tall
Virginian wanted to be an American king, and Nate half believed it. On top of everything, he was clearly an amateur when it
came to military matters; faced with an enemy expeditionary force that was said to number thirty-two thousand regulars (if
you counted the mercenaries), the Virginian had committed the blunder of dividing his army, which numbered about twenty thousand
and included a high percentage of inexperienced militiamen. It didn’t take a genius to understand that the military situation
was desperate. But the Virginian, whose only experience came from some skirmishing in the forests of the Ohio during the Seven
Years’ War, seemed oblivious to reality.

Now I’ll do the execution:

A
NERVOUS CLEARING OF A DRY THROAT
here; the author squirms at executions, even when they take place in the imagination.)

A company of black-shirted Pennsylvania riflemen, and another of “shirtmen”—Virginia frontiersmen wearing fringed buckskin
shirts and armed with long rifles so accurate it was said they could hit a target that a New England boy had to squint at
to see—were drawn up on the green. Those who had hats wore them against the sun. A crude gibbet had been constructed not far
from the statue of Farmer George (he normally had a Roman numeral III after his name) on a prancing horse. A thick rope neatly
tied into a noose dangled from the gibbet. The muffled beat of the kettledrum faltered as an open-sided dray appeared on the
Broad Way end of the green. The drummer boy, staring at the dray, had forgotten what he was there for. An officer kicked him
in the ass. The drumbeat started up again.

The dray was pulled onto the green by two beady-eyed oxen that kept their heads down in their yokes and drooled onto the cobblestones.
Half a dozen armed shirtmen walked on either side of the dray. Nate noticed their rifles were fitted with bayonets and wondered
where they had gotten them. Standing on the dray, his arms tied behind his back at the wrists, was Sergeant T. Hickey, until
recently a member of the Commander-in-Chief’s personal bodyguard. He had been
convicted, a woman whispered to Nate, of plotting with a group of local Tories to poison the man he was supposed to be guarding.
There was talk that some peas the Virginian had by chance not eaten had killed the chickens they were thrown to.

Maybe it was true, Nate reflected. But whose truth? Which truth?

The condemned man, wearing homespun breeches and a dirty white collarless linen shirt open at the neck, struggled to keep
his balance on the dray as it was pulled past Nate and Stephen and several hundred civilians who had come to witness the hanging.
Next to Nate a man wearing a cooper’s canvas apron hoisted a small boy onto his shoulders so he could get a better view. Nate,
in the front rank, studied the condemned man’s face. His cheek muscles twitched, his eyes darted from side to side, spittle
dribbled from a quivering lower lip. Nate noticed a stain spreading around the man’s crotch, and I think, I imagine Nate thought:
If it ever comes to that, I swear to God I will not lose control of myself.

Nate repeated “I swear” out loud, almost as if he were taking an oath.

The dray drew abreast of the Commander-in-Chief sitting impassively on his white mare, which was pawing playfully at the ground
with her right front hoof. A general from central casting on a horse from central casting. (I know a historian is supposed
to be above this kind of comment, but history desperately needs a giggle now and then. Humor me while I humor history.) The
condemned man’s darting eyes caught a glimpse of a pine box. It dawned on him that he was looking at a coffin—at
his
coffin—and he spun around toward the Virginian on the white mare and cried out in a brittle voice, “Excellency, Excellency,
have mercy on a poor sinner who is not eager to meet his Maker,” or words to that effect.

Nate saw the Virginian’s patrician eyes narrow into slits and being not far away, he heard him comment to General Knox, “My
tenderness has been often abused. Matters are too far advanced to sacrifice anything to punctilios.”

(Punctilio/pΛnk’tiliaU:n. [pl. punctilios] a delicate point of ceremony; etiquette of such point; petty formality. The Virginian
had a curious sense of punctilios!)

The dray reached the gibbet. Hickey became aware of the dangling noose and sagged to his knees. Tears streamed down his cheeks
and he started breathlessly hiccuping the way a child does when he cries
too hard. Two shirtmen, tough cookies who looked as if they had seen their share of scalped corpses during the Indian Wars,
climbed onto the dray. They grabbed Hickey under his armpits and hauled him, still hiccuping, to his feet. One of the shirtmen
fitted the noose over the condemned man’s head and tightened it around his neck.

Stephen tugged at Nate’s sleeve. “Come away,” he whispered, but Nate didn’t move.

The crowd grew deathly quiet. The Virginian’s central casting horse snorted. General Knox, his maimed hand concealed in a
silk scarf, nodded. An officer elbowed the drummer boy. The beat of the kettledrum quickened. The two shirtmen jumped down
from the dray. Another shirtman whipped the flank of one of the oxen with a long white birch branch. The beast blew air through
his lips and stood his ground. The shirtman cocked the branch. Hickey, watching from the dray, the noose tight around his
neck, managed to scream “Mother!” between his hiccups. The branch swatted down across the oxen’s flank. The animal started
forward, dragging the other oxen with him. Hickey tiptoed along the floorboards of the dray to keep his footing. Then he ran
out of dray and dangled from the noose. A muted sigh, an exhaling of many breaths, came from the crowd. The hanging man developed
an enormous bulge in his crotch, the result of an involuntary erection. The women present averted their eyes.

The child on his father’s shoulders laughed nervously; he wasn’t at all sure what he was seeing.

Nate felt an icy hand caress his spine. He raised his eyes to the pewter sky, to the pewter God, then obliged himself to look
back at the hanged man. Still hiccuping, he was jerking at the end of the rope, which was slowly strangling him. The Virginian
on his white mare made an impatient gesture with his hand. General Knox signaled to the shirtmen with a crisp nod of his head.
One of them strolled over to Hickey. He wrapped his arms around the jerking knees of the executed man and pulled himself up
until his weight was hanging from Hickey’s body.

The hiccuping stopped. Then the jerking.

Nate saw the shadows of birds racing across the ground and looked up, but there were no birds, there was just Hickey dangling
from the bitter end of the rope, and the shirtman dangling from him in an erotic embrace.

Nate and Stephen caught their horses, which were grazing in a
fenced-in field behind Cape’s Tavern, and saddled them and started them walking up the Broad Way in the direction of the old
Dutch village of Haarlem. They passed a fat woman rooting in garbage. They passed a company of John Haslet’s Delaware Continentals,
whom everyone called the Blue Hen Chickens, heading on foot for Kipp’s farmhouse and the cove under it; some carried muskets,
some carried pitchforks. The Chickens were handing around a transparent green jug and taking healthy swigs from it as they
marched. Nate and Stephen passed a deserted farmhouse that had gotten a “Hillsborough treat”—thinking Tories lived in the
house, rebels had smeared it with excrement.