The Sunday Spy

by William Hood

  “You know as well as anyone,” he continued, “that most of the unsolicited, over-the-transom stuff we get is junk, lunatic frothing, much of it unintelligible. If we’re lucky, maybe one letter in a thousand has a nugget, just enough gold to keep us sifting through all the junk.”

  Lotte raised her eyebrows and shrugged. “What else is new?”

  “This letter is different. It has the right flavor.”

  “I’ll take your word for it if you’ll tell me what you’re driving at.”

  “The letter strongly suggests that the writer had access to data that almost certainly came from Moscow. It is also laced with some stuff that could only have come from within the Firm.”

  “Fascinating, but what on earth has that got to do with me?” Lotte rolled her eyes in an exaggerated and mocking manner. “You can’t be suggesting I wrote it?”

  With an impatient gesture, Trosper waved the question aside. “In passing, the writer mentioned the Troika investigation in a rather knowing way.”

  Lotte smiled and shook her head in disbelief. “Come on, Alan. Dwyer may have thought he kept his great investigation a big secret, but I can tell you that almost everyone in the Firm knew about it by the time the three of us were fired. That’s a pretty thin reason to connect me with your investigation.”

  “You’re right, Lotte, and until you told me that you did your army reserve duty at Heidelberg, I certainly couldn’t see any connection. At least not until I remembered that our anonymous pen pal wanted us to give him a signal in a damned odd publication — Blood ’N Guts. I couldn’t see why he had chosen such an obscure magazine, or even where he’d got his hands on a copy. But it is sold in PXs everywhere, including Heidelberg.”

  “For God’s sake, Alan, that’s a thin thread, even for you. There are probably three or four hundred reservists living in Europe who do their annual training stint with the Seventh Army in Heidelberg.”

  “But you are in a position to have picked up a copy of Blood ’N Guts.”

  “I’m also in a position to have a lifetime subscription to Cosmopolitan, but I’m not ‘that Cosmo girl’ either.”

  “You’re also one of the handful in the Firm who were involved in the Tomahawk case. In fact, you were the primary backup. You knew the case inside and out, and handled the mail coming through the Baltimore drop … ”

  “That case was splashed all over the Russian press when Tomahawk was arrested,” she said derisively. “You know that.”

  “The letter drop was never mentioned … ”

  Lotte shook her head. “Have it your way. But aside from the fact that Tomahawk is long gone — dead and gone, if I may say so — there are at least six others in the Firm who know the case as well as I do.” Lotte blinked rapidly. “And I’m not even counting how many might know the details in Moscow.”

  “You’ve also let it be known that you’re feeling the pinch … ”

  “From what you implied last time, that’s just sad apples for me as far as the Firm is concerned.”

  “You’re the only one of our people even remotely involved who knows all the particulars as mentioned in the letter.” Trosper waited before saying, “Except, that is, what our pen pal told us he knows about a penetration of the Firm, and a low-level agent doubled against us in Vienna. He also mentioned a mysterious case that the new Russian service will hang on to at all costs.”

  Trosper shoved himself back in his chair, putting a little more distance between himself and Lotte. He waited before saying, “You also met Viktor Volin, and you sat in on two sessions of his debriefing. Not for long, but long enough for you both to get an impression of each other.”

  “Now you really are fantasizing … ”

  He watched carefully, hoping for some signal, a flicker of expression, an unguarded body movement. Even an impulsive, irrelevant observation. Nothing.

  “From what I’ve learned, Volin wouldn’t seem to be your type, Lotte. But if he has nothing else to offer, he has a sure hand with women. In and around the racket I’ve run into men like that, guys who seem to have a God-given ability to make women fall for them. Most of them aren’t particularly bright or subtle, a couple I’ve encountered didn’t even like women. But the rare ones more than make up for the rest — they’re genuinely fond of women, all shapes, sizes, and ages. These paragons understand and appreciate women as a distinct class of human being.”

  “Along with no-cholesterol eggs, perhaps God should have made a few more of them,” Lotte said as she took a final bite of toast. “There are times when most women would settle for a little attention from any of them.”

  “That may be true, but it’s not such a hot idea,” Trosper said. “You know that if Charlotte Mills hadn’t been killed, Volin would have denounced her. Now, I think he’s set off a chain of events that resulted in the suicide of an officer who, for all his faults, might have lived to take care of his family.”

  Lotte shrugged indifferently. “Is this the moment when I’m supposed to say, ‘Is that the whole story’?”

  Trosper smiled. “Say what you want to, but I’ve come back because you’re the only link to all the facts I’ve been able to turn up.”

  “Nonsense.”

  He watched carefully — not the slightest bit of body language, or even a thoughtless attempt to explain away a bit of evidence. Nothing.

  Now or never. One last shot.

  “Lotte, Lotte,” he said, leaning forward. “You haven’t been away from the racket so long that you can’t see that it’s not entirely preposterous to wonder if someone might have spilled enough inside poop for Volin to set up this scam?”

  She sat silently, toying with her coffee spoon.

  “Even if I’m right, it’s much less important now than the allegation that Moscow has an important source somewhere in Washington.” He waited. Nothing. “One thing is certain. The man who wrote the letter sold us a damned important Moscow Center source — an agent possibly even more valuable to them now than before the breakup and all the changes. Whoever wrote the letter also said that he’ll sell us another, even more important Moscow source. That’s what I’m after.” He shrugged. “Right now, I think Volin wrote the letter. But come what may, I’m going to run it to ground.”

  He took a sip of cold coffee, grimaced as he always did, and pushed the cup aside. “If Volin talked you into helping him with some unimportant inside data that would support the role he has created for himself, I’ll do my best to see that Duff Whyte will be the only other person who will ever share our secret.”

  This was another of the moments when Trosper wished that medical science still permitted him to smoke a pipe. With care, the business of fumbling for a tobacco pouch, filling the bowl, patting various pockets until a box of matches is found, and the climactic, successful lighting of the pipe could be played to almost any length, with the onus of silence always left on the interlocutor.

  When at last she spoke it was with an air of curiosity. “Are you offering some kind of a deal?”

  As the last word fell from her lips, Lotte turned abruptly away from Trosper. It was as if she realized only as she heard the words she was saying that beneath the surface bravado, she had uttered a confession of broken trust.

  “There can’t be any deal, Lotte. You know better than that. Tell me what you know, and when we get this sorted out I’ll see what can be done.” But what could be done? Of the few precepts that had evolved in the long history of the racket, none was more basic than that trust could only be broken once. To be known to have violated trust was never to be trusted again.

  Lotte glanced up at Trosper. Her eyes filled with tears. She knew it was over as surely as if she had heard him speak his thoughts.

  “I’ll say this for you, Alan,” Lotte murmured as she turned away to stare at the rain slashing against the window. “Your timing is damned near perfect.” She got up from the table and stretched. “I was close to rock bottom when you came last time, and in even worse shape when you telephoned t
his afternoon.” She glanced toward the fireplace. “Let’s go back and sit by the fire, they say there’s something healing about an open fire.”

  It began, she guessed, a few weeks after Volin walked out of the safe house. “I had already settled here — I know it’s an odd place, but I’ve liked it ever since I first came here with my parents. I was in shock after being fired, and couldn’t face living in Washington and becoming a permanent extra woman. Even worse, because I’d been fired, I would have been a kind of security pariah.

  “I got a good deal on this apartment, and had some nutty idea that after I got my feet on the ground, I could tide myself over by latching on to some part-time teaching at one of the schools for army brats in Germany. But those days are over, and there are more teachers than brats now that the army is cutting back.

  “I probably could have squeaked by for a while but by the time I got here, the dollar had gone to hell and the bottom had dropped out of the money I’d counted on keeping me afloat. I was fighting off the decision to admit defeat and go back to beg for some kind of a job in Washington when I got a call. Do I have to tell you who it was?”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “You were right the first time — it was Volin, all decked out with a new identity, and an Austrian passport to match.”

  “Did he tell you he’d done a bunk?”

  “No, but he was so cagey I knew something was wrong,” Lotte said. “For a while I thought I’d give the Vienna office a ring, and say that I’d seen Volin, and mention that he had new documents. Then, I thought the devil with it, I just didn’t want to get involved.”

  “How did he learn your name?”

  “He never would say, but I suppose one of the morons Dwyer used for the interrogation let it drop — if it were in his interest, Volin could hear an astronaut stub his toe on the moon. As it is, I can picture him chatting with one of the secretaries involved in the debriefing, and asking — ‘By the way, whatever happened to old Miss Friesler?’ And I can see her shaking out her blunt cut, and lisping, ‘Oh, she’s gone off to Austria — maybe Germany? Wherever Salzburg is.’”

  “And so you began seeing him?”

  Lotte blinked rapidly. “There’s no fool like a lonely woman. I hated myself for making the stupid decision to come here and for not having found a career in real life where I could have lived a normal existence. Much as the work means to me, I hated the Firm for what was done to me. And I loathed Dwyer.”

  “That’s quite a load to carry all alone,” Trosper said. “No family?”

  “I have a sister in Chicago, who’s married into academia, and a niece I love more than anyone.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “Volin said he was establishing a business, cashing in on the new look in Eastern Europe. He seemed to think it’s like the Yukon in the old days, gold piled up on every corner. It made some sense, I suppose, but in truth I never paid too much attention. He would come through Salzburg every ten days or so and we’d have dinner. Before long, he was staying here, and I was besotted.”

  Lotte got up and went to the kitchen. “I’d better make some more coffee.”

  Trosper stretched and walked to the bookshelves beside the kitchen. “Why Volin, Lotte?” he asked softly.

  Lotte laughed. “You really surprise me, Alan. From what I’ve heard you’ve been on the fast track with some pretty high flyers in your time … ”

  He shook his head. “Even if that were true, what does it have to do with Volin?”

  “Just because you’re all settled down with your feet up doesn’t mean everyone else is. Put yourself in my place. Because my parents were too busy with their careers to have had children, they raised me as if I were already an adult. It was years before I realized that I’d spent my childhood raising my younger sister. Despite that, perhaps because of that, from the time I was twelve I’ve been cast as an iron maiden. Something about me has always turned people away — in school, in college. By the time I started work, I suppose I’d begun to expect rejection, and in some unconscious way had decided to hit first, to fend people off before they could do as much to me.” She raised her voice to be heard above the clatter of cups and cupboard doors. “And that, dear Abby, is the sad story of Lotte Friesler’s life.”

  “I think you’re pretty hard on yourself … ”

  Lotte shrugged. “When I walked into the debriefing, Volin was the first Moscow Center man I’d ever dealt with. After the years in the back room, and handling a few tame agents, there I was face-to-face with the real thing. What’s more, he was the man Moscow had sent to the States with only one job, to handle Charlotte Mills. Why shouldn’t I have been impressed?”

  “You had all the judgment and experience to have handled that job.”

  “Dwyer didn’t think so,” Lotte said quickly. “But whatever the truth, when Volin called me here, I was at ground zero, the low point in my life. Of course I was suspicious of his motives, but I had a professional curiosity in what he had to say and, when you get right down to it, I suppose I was a little flattered that he’d taken the trouble to find me in Salzburg.”

  She put the coffeepot and cups on the table by the fireplace. “By the time he began staying here, I’d actually convinced myself that maybe, in his cynical way, he’d discovered — perhaps even by accident — that he’d begun to care just a little for the real me.” Her face twisted, and for a moment Trosper thought she might begin to cry again.

  Hardheaded Lotte, so tough she couldn’t bring herself to admit that even she might be loved. “And why shouldn’t he care, Lotte?”

  “Why shouldn’t he care?” she said, her voice low in despair. “Because I’m old and plain and poor — that’s why.” Her voice caught, and she turned away to dab at her eyes with a crumpled handkerchief.

  “For Christ’s sake, Lotte, you’re not at death’s door — you’re fifty-two.”

  She straightened and managed a smile. “Of course, on a good day I’d say it was because Volin’s a no-good, self-serving bastard.”

  “That’s more like it,” Trosper said. “How long was it before he got down to business?”

  Lotte tossed her head. “He took his time, but it began when he explained his allegation that the Firm was penetrated … ” She hesitated before saying, “I’m afraid this is going to disappoint you.”

  “Try me.”

  “It was phony, just as I thought at the time,” she said. “Volin really had heard some chatter by two of the Russians he was working with in Prague. The gist was that one of them had been sent to Vienna on TDY to help support and supply security for some very important meetings with a very sensitive American source. A high-ranking hot-shot came out from Moscow every time the American called for a meeting. Volin said that when he mentioned it in Washington, one of the interrogators misunderstood and jumped to the notion that the American was in the Firm. Volin was smart enough to let it stand. The meetings were always in different areas — probably wherever it was convenient for the American. Aside from the fact that the agent preferred meeting on Sundays, or holiday weekends, Volin just faked the data on the meeting places he reported, and the notion that the agent’s name began with an ‘F.’ He sucked it all right out of his thumb — and in the process ruined the three of us, the three F’s, Folsom, Findley, and little Lotte Friesler.”

  She looked sharply at Trosper. “You may not remember, but I did my best to get this across to you the first time you came here, asking about the Troika and Volin. As best I could make out, you just didn’t get it.”

  Trosper shook his head in disgust. “You’re right. It didn’t really come through to me until a week ago, sitting right in Duff Whyte’s office … ”

  “And I always thought you were so fast on your feet … ” Trosper winced.

  “What about the story he’s trying to sell us now?”

  “One night, after we’d had a bottle of wine and some brandy, he got around to it. He couldn’t have been more casual. All he said was, ‘Y
our precious Firm owes you, Lotte. They owe you plenty. They owe us both.’ Then, maybe five minutes later, he explained. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, ‘I knew they’d try to cheat me, and kick me out as soon as they thought they’d bled me dry. But I’m not that stupid. I kept back some of my best stuff, an insurance against the day they would make their move.’” She turned from Trosper and again began to readjust the fire. “It sounds so dumb when I tell it like that, but that’s exactly what he said.”

  “It’s not the first time something like that has happened … ”

  “He laid the whole thing out in about ten minutes. Later, when I thought about it, I realized he must have rehearsed himself. No one could have got it so perfect. It was like one of those Japanese poems, a haiku, every syllable measured and in place. He delivered it like a sleazy baritone, but by heaven, he sang in perfect pitch.” She waited for Trosper to speak, but then rushed on. “‘Between us,’ Volin said, ‘we can get some of our own back.’ I remember his exact phrase, ‘Share it equal, fifty-fifty. We’ll have enough to get us started again, with no harm to your damned Firm, and we’ll give Moscow a kick where it hurts the most.’ Even if there hadn’t been any wine and brandy, I probably would have gone along with him anyway.”

  She remained quiet while she stirred the embers and arranged two pieces of wood on the grate. Without looking up, she said, “So, in the morning we worked it out. I gave him enough peripheral — and I swear to God, non-sensitive — data on Tomahawk to be convincing. I probably shouldn’t have given him the Baltimore letter drop, but I figured it was thoroughly compromised and would never be used again. I told him what I thought about the way Dwyer had handled the Troika investigation, and helped him cobble up the first letter. It was his idea to pose as an illegal who’d been put on the shelf, but you were right about that stupid magazine, I did see it in the PX, and thought it might put a little sand in Castle’s gearbox.”