Spyfall

by John Hegenberger

  He smiled. “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t say anything,” I said and I eased past him to stand near a rat-tan sofa that held a man who was Coward’s opposite, Errol Flynn.

  “Don’t let the old boy get you down, Streak,” warned the once-handsome actor. “And I mean that both ways.” He knocked back a half glass of iced vodka. “Flaming middle-age.”

  While Norm and I changed into dry clothes on loan from our host’s surprisingly large wardrobe, Fleming informed Coward and company of our recent unscheduled visit to Cuba. The florid, fifty-year-old Flynn said that he’d spent several days with Fidel Castro earlier in the year while making Cuban Rebel Girls.

  “I was just in Havana, too,” Coward contributed as I came back to join the small crowd. “Playing in a film with Alex Guinness,”

  “Yes, that would be the new Carol Reed picture, Our Man In Havana,” I offered, which got me a lot of stares.

  “My dear boy,” the playwright said. “You are well informed, indeed.”

  I felt my face redden a bit. “I read the trades,” I explained--which was true, but sounded silly here in the middle of the Caribbean.

  “The film is all about spies and based on one of Graham Greene’s novels,” Coward informed through a toothy smile. “I portray a double-agent.”

  Norm didn’t seem to know Coward from Cromwell, so he kept quiet--or else he was near fatigue. I kept a close eye on him.

  “I’ve read the book, of course,” Fleming said, as if anyone really cared to listen. “But I prefer Somerset Maugham over Greene any day.”

  “That I’d like to see,” Coward grinned.

  It was like watching a British version of Martin and Lewis, only with two Deans.

  I interrupted the festivities by asking if we could possibly set up a call back to the States. Coward had to try three circuits and two different operators before we could get Walt on the line.

  After all that, Fleming had the embarrassing task of asking our host and Flynn to leave us in private. “The way I figure it,” Fleming said, “my imposter brought Wade here to get him off familiar turf to kill him.”

  It was late afternoon, back in LA as the filmmaker’s voice issued from the tiny amp that Norm had jury-rigged to the telephone. “Yes, it’s now been confirmed that your man was in the employ of Nickolas Reed.”

  “He tried to take me out twice before,” I said.

  Fleming gestured to indicate that I didn’t need to shout at the telephone. He added in an even voice, “This time, he must have figured he’d have more luck, if you were out of the country.”

  “So we should have stayed home all along, huh?” Norm whispered.

  Fleming gave him a scowl. “When Kaminski initially adopted my identity in Los Angeles, he might have thought it would be a bonus if he could embarrass or expose me, while killing Wade.”

  “So, you think he had nothing to do with the skyjacking?” Walt said.

  I leaned forward as if a couple of inches made a difference in transcontinental communications. “Once the air-heist drew so much public attention, he feared that his impersonation would be quickly exposed.”

  “So he faked his heart attack, hoping to get away from us long enough to go poof, huh?” Norm said.

  “Any chance that your people can locate him?” Fleming asked the voice on the phone. “Assuming that he’s still among the living.”

  “I’ll have someone look into it.” The amplifier crackled. “At the moment, I’d expect he’d be trying to make contact with Reed or to get back to Europe, possibly.”

  That made me wonder. “It must be pretty hard to track anyone from Jamaica to Europe--when you’re sitting in LA”

  “You’d be surprised, Stan,” Walt said. “Current reports say that Reed doesn’t what to kill you anymore.”

  “Oh?” I said. “Nice to know that I’m no longer a target.”

  “Maybe that’s exactly what he wants you to think,” Fleming said.

  My head was starting to hurt again.

  “The game has changed,” Walt went on. “They’ve gotten their hands on an important operative, known as Agent Poole, in Germany.”

  Now Fleming was the one to lean forward. “Well, that puts the hair in the butter. We need to effect an immediate rescue.”

  “I agree,” Walt’s voice quickly came back. “It might be a golden opportunity, Stan, if you joined Fleming on a trip to Heathrow airport, as my intelligence agent.”

  “England?” Norm asked.

  “Besides,” Fleming said, looking up. “We need someone who has no previous connection with MI-6.”

  “Oh, I see,” Norm said. “Fresh bait, huh?”

  I had an idea to share. “You say that it’d be a golden opportunity, Walt, but it might be even more golden, if you joined us all there, yourself. I’m tired of being a Mickey Mouse pawn.” I could almost hear him purse his lips in thought, so I gave an ultimatum. “Get in the game, or I’m out, Walt.”

  The amp sighed. “All right. I half expected that you’d say something like that. I can have Roy take over for me for a few days here and check up on a couple of productions we have operating near London.”

  “Fine, but plan to spend the bulk of your time working on this Agent Poole thing,” I warned. “Or else I’m on the next flight out of here for Los Angeles.”

  “Me, too,” Norm added. “Remember, I was shot.”

  “That’s right,” I went on. “Norman was shot during the skyjacking and he’s going on.”

  “I am,” Norm nodded. “I am? For real?”

  “You can stop trying to sell me on the idea,” Walt conceded. “I’ll meet you all in England in a few days. I guess I owe you that much, Stan.”

  Which was all I needed to hear. Any doubts I had about travelling across the Atlantic were carried away in a Gulf Stream of relief and respect. Even the Noir Man seemed satisfied.

  Immediately following the end of the phone call, Fleming said, “I can’t believe that you just bluffed the Grey Seal.”

  “He probably has an ulterior motive,” I said.

  “Do you really think he’ll meet us at Heathrow airport?” Norm asked.

  “It will be the first time in a long while that the old boy got back into the game, as you put it,” Fleming said,

  “Some game,” Norm commented. “Our Man from Uncle Walt.”

  Fleming lit another cigarette and, through the swirls of smoke, said, “Welcome to the cold war.”

  “But how can the FBI work overseas?” Norm asked. “I thought that was illegal somehow.”

  “Honestly, it happens far too often,” Fleming said. “Your Federal Bureau can investigate on foreign soil when there are suspected attacks on embassies or consulates. We’ll simply be following up on established criminal activities. We can inform your CIA later of our findings.”

  The logic of that sounded weak to me, but the writer went on to promise Norm and me diplomatic passports identifying us as “couriers” of Her Majesty.

  It all seemed feasible, doable, if not fully practical. I’d been following Johnny Hazard in the Sunday comics sections and he was in London on a case, so why not? Get it done. Except this was no comic.

  When the three of us came back into the main room of the house, Noel Coward was already shuffling his bridge cards. “Now then,” he smirked, with a glinting eye, “who’s ready for a rubber?”

  PART III

  GOLDENHEART

  CHAPTER 14

  We touched down in England two days later in the rain. Unlike Jamaica, the London climate was nothing like that of my native LA. Here it was at least thirty degrees colder on anybody’s scale and wet with little or no sign of the sun. As Chiefs Thundercloud and Thunderthud used to say, “Ugh ’em.”

  I had to admit that my leg was better, but Norman’s had become slightly infected by his dunking in the falls at Dunn’s River. He’d also caught cold and now sneezed more than I did, even with my sinus condition.

  During the flight, he’
d chewed my ear off about a new Green Lantern comic he’d read last week. It was an update, he said, of an old Green Lantern comic and the new character would team someday, he thought, with the new Flash to create a new Justice Society, he predicted.

  I couldn’t keep track of all this, especially since Norm had that nasty “code in his dose.” Like Ian, I let my eyes slowly drift shut and hoped I didn’t snore, like Ian.

  The Jamaican police had not been able to get a line on the Yuri “Fleming.” If he was still kicking around, it could be that he caught one of a hundred boats out to one of a dozen islands in the West Indies that sported an airport, and was chortling at us from anywhere in the world.

  Thus, I kept looking over my shoulder.

  As we de-planed, we were met by a trim red-head, whom Ian introduced as Molly Marie O’Dee. She could have passed for a young Debbie Reynolds, somewhere between The Daughter of Rosie O’Grady and The Affairs of Dobie Gillis.

  “Ha-ware-ya?” she asked, shaking hands all around. “Ian informed me to expect ya. I’ve a car waitin’ outside. Annie baggage?”

  I quickly learned that this lass’s accent came and went depending on her mood. Sometimes it was so thin you could cut it with your elbow, while other times you’d need a chainsaw. In all cases, I figured it was false, but then again, she did have a face of faint freckles and her eyes held a lilt of green like shamrocks, so...

  “There ya go now.” She smiled as we climbed into a taxi-motor cab. Directing her attention to Ian, she cooed, “How are ya keepin, sir?”

  Fleming briefed her on our situation while we rode into London proper and got a room at a modest hotel on Commercial Street near Whitechapel Road.

  “Jack da Ripper used to oberate around here, huh?” Norm asked.

  Both Ian and Molly quickly learned not to respond to most of Norm’s comments.

  We unpacked and made plans to meet down in the hotel restaurant for dinner.

  I filled the time walking around a few blocks outside under a hotel umbrella, a misty downpour, and gray sky. “So, this is London,” I said to no one, while sounding like Edward R. Murrow.

  The slick streets seemed to be less than one lane wide and the air was filled with the smell of fried fish. In the distance, I saw a darkly cloaked figure and thought of Norm’s comment about the Ripper. It turned out to be a Bobby in a macintosh whipped by a gale.

  In some strange way, the chill or the fact that I was in an environment different from back home made me suddenly desperate for a smoke. I resisted the urge by counting the cars that sped through the intersection. Five went to the right; three went left; and eleven, plus a single motorcycle, went straight down Commercial Road on what, to me, was still the wrong side of the street. Yeah, different, all right.

  I’d planned my casual stroll down the London pavement as a way to see if it would draw any undue attention, and I got my answer.

  No one took the slightest interest in Stan Wade, secret agent, which was good and a little sad. I went back into the hotel lobby and wired a dozen red roses to Suzi with a card that said, “Wish I weren’t here, sweetheart. Back soon. Standy.”

  Walt’s flight had arrived the day before and he’d been out at Pinewood studios checking on production of his Kidnapped movie shooting there. He was already waiting and accompanied by a young blond man at a center table when we entered the small establishment’s dining area. The young man was a local actor with a highly suggestive name, Peter O’Toole, who had a small role in the new movie and wore too much Vitalis. We all caught a whiff of V-7 during dinner.

  “So you’re Walt Disney?” Ian said. “The Grey Seal.”

  Walt puffed on a fag. “I’m not Disney anymore. Disney is more than one man now.”

  “Sounds vaguely religious,” Fleming commented, sipping a martini.

  “A thing, not a who,” Walt replied, unshaken.

  I made a sound like an owl and the two men grudgingly shook hands. Walt had shaved off his mustache as a sort of disguise and that’s when I noticed that Fleming had apparently started growing one for the same purpose. I couldn’t help running a finger over my own bare upper lip. A bored, balding waiter patiently, um, waited, while I tried to find something I liked on the menu card.

  “You’re American?” the slump-shouldered man asked, holding pencil to pad, still waiting.

  I gave up on the menu and looked up into his sad eyes. “Yes, what do you recommend?”

  Without expression, he said, “Eat all of your vegetables and remember the Alamo.”

  Norm almost choked into his water glass.

  Fleming and I shared a couple of brandy and sodas. He drank the brandy and ordered some sort of roast beef item for me as we all settled in to get to know each other better.

  Ian’s support person, Molly O’Dee, said her favorite movie was The Quiet Man, but that felt too pat. She professed being awe-struck at meeting a genuine American PI, “like on the telly,” and kept asking me what happened to Flyface. I had to explain to Ian that Flyface was the villain currently running in Dick Tracy.

  “Have ya killed anyone, Mr. Wade?” she wanted to know.

  “Not since last June nineteenth.”

  “Seriously, now?”

  “I’d rather not go into it.”

  Fleming said that he thought I was full of Hollywood.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Whenever I’m stressed, I tend to slip into Bogart mode.”

  “Aye.” Molly nodded. “The USA movie tough guy in The Big Sleeping Falcon.”

  Norm giggled and told Molly that she was charming.

  As it turned out, O’Dee wasn’t her real name and she wasn’t really Irish. “I took the name from the river Dee in county Cavan,” she confessed. “And I’m a wizard with knives and chess, I am.”

  Norm quickly suggested that they play together--a little too quickly, I thought. The O’Toole guy used his deep blue eyes and soft voice to try and win her interest, but she brushed him off elegantly, seeming to prefer Norm’s company. Before the meal ended, the actor had excused himself and gone to the bar. The next time I looked around, he was gone and I never saw him again except on the big screen.

  Molly tilted her head toward Walt. “Do tell us again, why they call ya the Grey Seal.”

  He cleared his throat. “Oh, when I was young, I used to dote on the Adventures of Jimmy Dale by Frank Packard. Jimmy went around solving mysteries and fighting crime under the identity of the Grey Seal.”

  Norm went, “Eh?”

  Walt pushed back his chair slightly. “He always left a kind of gray calling card, sort of like the sign of Zorro.” He wiggled his index finger and went, “Swish, swish, swish.”

  I just stared at this performance.

  “What?” Walt asked. “You don’t think I was ever young?”

  “I don’t think you ever grew up,” Ian said,

  Walt pretended to run him through with an invisible sword, saying, “Touché.”

  Gradually, the conversation turned to our trip to East Berlin to find this Agent Poole. I wondered aloud why I needed to be involved. Ian wondered, too.

  “This is not the place to discuss that,” Walt said. “Besides, we’ll know more when we get there.”

  ‘Walt is playing you again,’ the Noir Man said.

  For once, I had to agree and tried to casually probe for more information.

  “I’m a relatively clever guy,” I said to Fleming, “and you seem clever, too. Would you mind telling me what I’ve gotten myself into?”

  “You can never be sure of things in this world, no matter how clever you think you are,” the writer said, waving out a match he’d just used to light a Player’s cigarette. “A girl came to me one time, saying her father was going to shoot himself. I ran up to his room and told the old gent that killers were after me. I needed a gun, quick. He gave me his pistol and I left him, thinking how clever I’d been. He’d never know that I’d lied about the killers as a ploy to get the gun away from him. Then I found out that he simply jum
ped out the window.”

  “So, no matter how clever you are,” I said, “things can still go wrong.”

  Fleming sighed. “Very easily.”

  “Oh,” Norm said through a stuffy nose, “Can I use dat in da nobvel I’m writing? Id’s called, My Gun is Slow and Steady.”

  Fleming looked at him coolly. “Absolutely not.”

  “Oh...just asking.”

  The dinner had been surprisingly tasty and wholesome, but the room seemed thick with spies. I folded my napkin and set it on the table. “Thanks, Ian, I think. Your story made me feel much better. Like I’m trapped in a riddle, wrapped in an enigma, inside a mystery novel.” But something in Fleming’s story stuck with me for a long time.

  We spent the rest of the evening up in Fleming’s room, making plans based on the scant information we had from various sources. The writer learned from Molly’s contacts in the British Secret Service that Nicholas Reed was rumored to be in East Berlin with the captured Agent Poole. Germany was split in half after WWII and its capital Berlin happened to be in the Eastern portion, itself split into four sectors, with only one, the eastern-most, controlled by Russia. Nick Reed’s demands from there involved me, probably out of revenge for my part in his brother August’s death earlier in the year.

  This spy stuff was all upside down and backward to my normal way of operating, back in the good old United States. I guess that’s why they call it “foreign intrigue.” If Mr. P had taught me anything about investigations, it was to methodically, doggedly stay with the case. But I wondered if that applied to the double-dealing world I was in now. Aside from Norm, everyone else in the room seemed to be hiding something.

  I found that I was staring at Norman’s friendly face as if he were one fixed point in a changing universe.

  He caught me. “Wad?”

  I shifted my gazed to Ian. “So give us the background dope on Nicholas Reed.”

  “There’s not much to tell, really,” he admitted. “There are no photos of him. At first, we didn’t even know August Reed had a brother.”

  “Moly hackeral!” Norm said. “Just like The Man Called X, huh?”