The Sunday Spy

by William Hood

  “That’s great,” Trosper said with evident relief. “I’d have been face down in the soup if Mr. Peach had missed this opportunity.” As he got up from the chair, he asked, “Shall I make out a check, or will you send a bill?”

  “A check now will be easiest,” Abigail said. Trosper pulled a checkbook from his briefcase. “ONAN Publications?”

  Abigail nodded.

  Trosper began to write, stopped, and said, “Damnation, I knew there was something else.”

  Abigail looked up expectantly.

  “Mr. Peach asked me to get a list of your subscribers — the sort of thing you make available to mail-order advertising firms.”

  “Is your Mr. Peach in advertising?”

  “Not at all, but he does send brochures and want-lists to anyone he thinks might have military memorabilia of interest. I’m sure many of your readers are both veterans and collectors.”

  “We do have such lists, but for legitimate advertising firms only, I’m afraid. We mustn’t let our subscribers’ names fall into the hands of our competitors, you know.”

  “Mr. Peach understands that, and would of course protect your privacy.”

  Abigail thought for a moment. “It will come out to three hundred dollars, plus copying costs. I’ll have to mail it to you.”

  Trosper made the second check out to Abigail Slotter personally.

  “Look, Paul, if you’re staying over, please come and have dinner with me. My cook loves having guests, and she’ll fix us a real Savannah meal. Authentic southern cooking is something you just don’t get very often these days, particularly eating out.”

  *

  From the doorway, Trosper waved to reassure the taxi driver. “Thank you very much, Abigail. I really enjoyed myself. I’ve never had chicken with dumplings that way, or such a good pecan pie. But I’m afraid I overdid that delicious Bordeaux … ”

  “There’s never too much wine if it comes out of the right bottles.”

  Abigail cocked her head to one side, and pushed up her glasses. “There’s just one more thing, Paul.”

  “Yes?”

  “Would you tell your Mr. Peach that if he ever has any use for a … mature … volunteer, I’m available? I’ve read a lot about what you people call ‘the racket’ and it sounds like much more fun than creating all that fantasy pulp for my crowd.”

  “The ‘racket’?”

  “You shouldn’t try to kid a kidder, Paul — if that’s your name. And you should check on ‘Sinon’ before you try to fool an old southern lady.”

  “Check on Sinon?”

  “See Woolley’s Mythology, one of the books I use to check on pseudonyms. The original Sinon was the young double agent the Trojans sent across to help convince the Greeks that their hollow horse really was a gift.”

  “I’ll be damned … ”

  “You’ll remember about Mr. Peach … ”

  “You can count on that … ”

  “Y’all come on back when you’ve got a few more years on you,” she said affectionately.

  “At this rate it won’t be long,” Trosper said as he bent to kiss Abigail lightly on the cheek. “And if you want to make Terry the Tiger O’Hara really convincing, maybe you should see that his desk is dusted, and his calendar kept up-to-date — July twenty indeed. It would never do for your readers to find out who really edits Blood ’N Guts — and probably does most of the writing as well … ”

  14

  San Francisco

  Trosper glanced uneasily across the table. Grogan had finished a glass of prune juice, and was cheerfully tucking into a large helping of low-fat yogurt, with dry, extra-thin, multigrain toast and a pot of decaffeinated coffee. Trosper avoided a shudder and dipped a bit of English muffin into the remaining traces of egg on his plate. Breakfast was a favorite meal, and the opportunity of eating it in hotels was an occasion to escape from the tyranny of no-cholesterol cereals and slam milk. Free from marital disciplines, he could order eggs and bacon, burned brittle.

  No matter whether he flew against the sun or chased it westward, Trosper knew that jet lag murdered one night’s sleep. Had Grogan been less cheerful, and contrived to look less tanned and fit, Trosper would not have been so grumpy. Not only was Grogan eating a clinically correct breakfast, but he looked as if he enjoyed it.

  “Did you run this morning?”

  “Not really,” Grogan said. “Just enough to work out the kinks.”

  “Let’s walk from here,” Trosper said, “I never can get any sense of a place when I go straight from an airport to a hotel, and then to a meeting in a taxi.”

  Fresh, with no trace of jet lag, Grogan nodded.

  Trosper had not been in San Francisco since the flower children had outgrown Haight-Ashbury. But the Union Street area was a far cry from the Haight, and marked by carefully restored buildings, attractive shops, and promising restaurants.

  The shop was in a corner building of unfinished stone, freshly painted white. Three granite steps led up from the sidewalk to a brightly varnished oak door with a heavy, beveled-glass panel. Beneath the glass, a shimmering brass plaque proclaimed ‘The Studio.” In the bow window at the left of the steps a burnished leather attaché case floated on a thick blanket of oxford gray velour. To the side, and barely visible in the half-light, Trosper glimpsed a dark leather carryall, with heavy brass fittings. Propped casually in front of the bag was an onyx tablet inscribed, “Leather For the Connoisseur” and signed, “Billy Hopwood, Artist in Residence.”

  Trosper pushed the door open and held it for Grogan. From across the showroom, a thin young man rose from behind a cobbler’s bench. His knee-length tunic was cut from gray tweed as loosely woven as burlap. His sandals, fashioned from well-worn automobile tires, were secured with leather thongs. It was a style, Trosper remembered, adapted from the Khmers Rouges and affected for a few months by admiring American graduate students in the seventies. His hair was loosely combed back and gathered in a pigtail secured by a leather thong tied in a bow.

  “If he’s just founded a religion,” Grogan whispered, “he shouldn’t count on my joining.”

  The young man stepped from behind his bench. “Look about, and ask questions if you see anything of interest,” he said. “I do the work and answer all the questions too.”

  “Is Mr. Findley here, Alex Findley?” Trosper said.

  “Upstairs,” the young man said with a gesture toward a stairway at the back of the shop. “He likes it up there — sorting papers is one of his biggies.” He paused as he stared openly at Trosper. “I’m Billy, should I tell Alex who’s here?”

  “I’m Alan Trosper, I think Alex is expecting … ”

  “Michael Grogan, Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  Billy’s jaw dropped. He stumbled back a step, clutching at his throat with both hands. Trosper had only a vague memory of the film, but thought he recognized Fay Wray reacting to her first sight of King Kong.

  Grogan’s face colored and he stepped closer to Billy. He flipped open his ID card with the badge, and thrust it toward the youth.

  Billy’s eyebrows shot up and he turned toward the stairway. “Hey, Alex, it’s a bust!” he shouted. “It’s the Feds — flush the stash.”

  From the stairway, Trosper heard the scrape of a chair across a bare floor, and then, in a pleasant baritone, “Shut up, you silly bastard … ”

  “It’s some of your old crowd, all the way from the Fuehrer Bunker, the seat of power … ” Billy’s voice rose with each word.

  A door slammed. From the top of the stairs came another suggestion. “Shut up, and stop acting the twit.”

  Grogan turned to Trosper.

  Trosper shrugged.

  “If that’s you, Alan, come on up … ”

  As they moved toward the stairway, Billy shouted again: “Make sure they read you your rights … ”

  They chatted until Alex Findley said, “What in creation brings you … brings you both … all the way out to Lotusland?” Without waiting for a
response, Alex bent over the small espresso machine on the corner of his desk. “Everyone out here is bonkers over coffee,” he said with a smile. “The beans have to come from the crop on the south side of some place in Central America, where the sun doesn’t hit the plants before ten twenty-two, or vice versa. Or whichever is more expensive … ”

  Findley’s open collar shirt, light cashmere sweater, and gray flannels were well chosen to show off his trim, five-foot-ten build. As the biographic section of his personnel file showed, Alex had completed three years in an English public school when his father, an American businessman, brought the family back from Britain to Berkeley. By the time Alex finished high school and had been accepted in the Russian studies program at Columbia, all that remained of his early schooling was, as he put it in his application to the Firm, “Greek, Latin, ancient history, the rudiments of restaurant French, and an occasional English turn of phrase.”

  “It’s something dear to your heart,” Trosper said with a smile. “Duff Whyte asked me to look into the charges made by ex-comrade Viktor Feodorovich Volin. Because of the domestic aspect, Duff and the Bureau agreed that Mike should come along.”

  Alex busied himself serving the coffee. “In these circumstances, I suppose I should say the entire episode seems like very old history. But it doesn’t. Now that you’ve brought it up, it feels as if it all happened yesterday afternoon.”

  “We’ve read the interrogation reports,” Trosper said.

  “It was a really stupid performance,” Alex said. “The team Dwyer had doing the questioning weren’t necessarily so dumb, it’s just that they were in over their heads. One of the guys had worked in the attorney general’s office in Dwyer’s home state before he joined the Firm. Most of his work must have been against criminals, like the fellow who’s had a dozen beers and gets into an argument with his no-good brother-in-law, and shoots him. That’s a crime of passion — the perpetrator didn’t really mean to do it, wouldn’t have done it if he’d been sober, and feels guilty as hell.”

  “Exactly,” Trosper said. “Lift a spy, you find a guy with a built-in alibi, no sense of guilt, and who’s at least as smart as the fellow asking the questions.”

  Grogan, who had obviously expected the worst, brightened.

  “Dwyer’s team was hopeless,” Findley said. “In three days I knew that all they had was an allegation and a vague notion where some of the hanky-panky had taken place. It was only after Lotte and I got together that it became clear that Volin was their primary, probably their only source.”

  “They never questioned you as a group, did they?” Grogan asked.

  “That’s about the only mistake they didn’t make,” Alex said. “They began by trying to keep us apart — separate buildings, different times for meetings so there’d be no chance we’d bump into one another in the parking lot. But after a couple of days their security broke down, and the interrogation had become so thick-witted, we each realized what was going on, and who else was involved. The only thing I never did determine was how Volin convinced them that it was the Firm, and not the Agency or some other outfit that had been scuppered.” He began again to fuss with the coffee machine as he said, “When it was all over, we were supposed to sign oaths swearing that we would never discuss the questioning with anyone, ever.” He glanced at Grogan. “I refused to sign.”

  As Findley poured another round of coffee, he began to smile. “There was another thing about me that bothered them … ” He dropped a sugar cube into his cup. “About midway in the interrogation, the ex-D.A. said that along with everything else wrong, they’d found me to be promiscuous. When I asked how come, the D.A. said that even for a bachelor I had too many girls. For a while I thought my memory had failed. ‘At one time?’ I asked. ‘No, no,’ the little guy said. ‘Too many live-ins.’”

  Trosper began to laugh. Findley’s social life had been the envy of his contemporaries.

  “More live-ins than normal was the charge,” Findley said.

  “I’ve always wondered about normal,” Grogan said. “Did they define it?”

  “No, but they had figured out that my various relationships came to term on an average of eleven months, give or take a few days.”

  “Could this have been because of some very unfortunate shortcoming of yours?” Trosper asked politely.

  “Certainly not,” Findley said. “But toward the end, when it became obvious they really had their teeth in this part of my problem, I decided to take the Firm off the hook for having harbored a libertine like me. So I told them that Darcy Odium … ” Findley turned to Grogan: “Odium was our first Controller, the man who hired me.” Grogan smiled politely. “So, I told them that Odium had asked me much the same question — why did I have to keep house with so many different girls?”

  Trosper began to smile. “And?”

  “‘Noblesse oblige’ was the best I could think of at the time.” Findley tilted back in his chair. “And that was the last of me with the Special Investigations Group — rotten amateurs, the lot.”

  They talked for an hour. Trosper had exhausted his questions, and Grogan had clarified other points, when Alex said, “What brings all this up at this late date?”

  Trosper flipped his notebook shut. “You have to understand that Duff’s been pretty busy since getting back from hospital. He knew what had happened to you people, but as he told me the other day, this is the first chance he had to look into it.”

  “It’s none of my business,” Alex said, “but have you guys talked to Lotte Friesler?”

  “Not yet … ”

  “She’s a damned difficult dame,” Findley said, “but she had a lot of depth on the U.S.S.R. and Russia. I was a journeyman case jockey, and there’s a dozen other guys … ” He thought for a moment. “Let’s make that three or four guys Duff could replace me with and never lose a step. But Lotte’s worked on the Soviet Union since she signed on. When Dwyer kicked her out, she walked away with a lot of the tribal memory.” He collected the coffee cups and put them on the table behind his desk. “As I remember it, Lotte was even in on the Tomahawk case of late lamented memory. If they’d paid more attention to her, that one might have come out differently.”

  “Did she have anything to do with Volin?” Trosper asked.

  “I really don’t remember, but I’d guess she might have been brought in when he first came over. She was very valuable in any early evaluation of a defector’s product, and might well have been in on his early questioning.” Findley shook his head slowly. “One thing’s certain, when I talked to her during our interrogations, she seemed to have a slightly better opinion of Volin than any of the others who worked with him.”

  As they walked out through the shop, Trosper lingered behind, studying the leather work. Billy Hopwood looked up from his workbench and watched Trosper for a moment before saying, “Y’all hurry on back now.”

  “You do good work,” Trosper said. “I’ve always liked fine leather work.”

  “And that’s a pretty good-looking pair of shoes you’re sporting,” Billy said. “You make ’em yourself?”

  “I wish I could,” Trosper said, “the way prices are going.”

  “Billy’s my nephew,” Findley said as they stood by the door. “When I told my sister I planned to settle down here, she asked me to keep an eye on him.” Findley glanced approvingly around the shop. “Actually, we’re beginning to show a little profit — he’s really very good.” He pushed the heavy door open. “Have you guys got to Volin yet? He’s the one who should have the answers, and there’s no way the dumb bastards Dwyer put on the case could have wrung him out.”

  “That’s part of the problem,” Trosper said with a glance at Grogan. “It seems comrade Volin did a bunk about the time Castle decided to take a real look at things.”

  “Cause and effect?” Findley asked, his eyebrows raised in wry concern.

  “That’s a good question,” Trosper admitted, “but I wish people would stop asking it.”

  15


  Washington, D.C.

  Widgery sat at the far end of the narrow office Duff Whyte had made available for Trosper. Two days after the young man’s arrival from New York, a new desk had replaced the tacky metal table Trosper had scrounged from a nearby office. On the following morning, an immaculate, low-backed executive chair was substituted for the varnished oak relic that Whyte’s administrative assistant had provided.

  As he closed the daily briefing file and tossed it into his out-tray, Widgery looked up and caught Trosper’s expression. “I didn’t ask for any of this stuff,” he said with an embarrassed gesture at his desk. “Hattie Barton — I’d met her at Doug MacRae’s the night I got back — said she had some stuff she wanted to get out of the warehouse, and asked if I could use it.”

  Trosper reminded himself never to underestimate the impact of a handsome face. Hard-hearted Hattie, the deputy chief of administration for supply, was notorious for her grim reluctance to repair, much less replace, any bit of office furniture or equipment whose original function could still be discerned. In her eyes, the supply budget was best spent for the price-be-damned gear uniquely designed for secret operations. For Hattie to issue a piece of new office furniture to any employee other than one of the senior officers she knew to have been with the Firm since its inception was to surrender to a foe determined to destroy civilization as she knew it.

  “Mes compliments, quand même,” Trosper muttered as he continued to scan the Blood ’N Guts subscription lists. Thirty-two hundred subscriptions seemed a modest circulation, but there were also newsstand sales which, according to Abigail Slotter, more than doubled the readership. He understood the interest fantasists might have in the magazine, but could not fathom why it had enough appeal to active-duty military personnel to warrant the Department of Defense ordering eight hundred copies a month for sale in PXs from Seoul to Heidelberg.

  “Now that Abigail has finally forwarded the subscriber list, I’m afraid there’s no alternative,” Trosper said, “but for you to name-search every one of the subscribers on the Blood ’N Guts list … ”