Spy Who Read Latin: And Other Stories

by Edward D. Hoch

  Taz’s voice was barely a whisper. Overhead they could hear the roar of an incoming jet. “It is my turn to play detective. How did you know there were thirty-five missing pages?”

  “I went back to Mander’s apartment tonight and found them hidden under the rug.”

  “I must have them,” said Taz.

  Rand took a thick envelope from his pocket. “They’re yours. I’ve already photographed them.”

  The Russian smiled slightly. “Thank you.” Then, “Did you really think I would have killed you tonight?”

  “For a moment I wasn’t sure,” Rand admitted. “You surely wanted more than just a spy who could read Latin. You must have people in Moscow—”

  “I wanted more.”

  “Me?”

  Taz eyed him for a moment. “But not dead. Alive—as a defector. I was to offer you a great deal of money.”

  “You didn’t mention it earlier.”

  “No. I realized from the moment I saw you that you were a different sort of man.”

  “Aren’t we both?” Rand got to his feet. “I have a plane to catch.”

  Taz nodded. “What about the girl?”

  “I’ll give her a story—something with lots of cloaks and daggers.”

  “But not the truth?”

  “There are so many truths.” Rand said. “We can share one of them with her—the one about a brave and foolish young man named Harry Truce.”

  Rand walked with Taz to the door, shook hands quickly, and hurried toward his plane. He did not look back.

  The Spy Who Traveled with a Coffin

  THE MAN IN THE black raincoat was an assassin. He was, actually, quite skilled at his job, and he was employed only by the most important governments. He liked the work, especially the frequent travel that went with it. This day he was even enjoying Tokyo in the rain.

  Harumi-Dori is a street that runs up from Tokyo Harbor to the grounds of the Imperial Palace. Crossed at two points by the new expressway, it perhaps symbolizes modern Japan as well as any other street in the capital. At least that was what the man in the black raincoat was thinking as he walked along it, past the Nishi Honganji Temple and the famous Kabuki-Za Theatre. The old Japan and the new—Kabuki and expressways.

  He paused at the corner, decided that the rain had almost stopped, and turned down the collar of his raincoat. Then he crossed the busy street and entered the offices of the Japan News Agency. The newsroom was on the third floor, and he found it without difficulty. It was a crowded, bustling place of clattering teletype machines and chattering Japanese voices. Very much like a newsroom anywhere else.

  But then he paused. The desks were set in neat rows, and there was no identification on any of them. Thirty-six men occupied the room, seated at thirty-six desks, and he had no way of identifying the man he sought. He pondered a moment, deciding on the best tactic. His knowledge of Japanese was limited, and he could not simply ask for the man he sought without attracting attention to himself and warning his prey.

  There was a pay telephone in the hallway outside the newsroom. He dropped in the necessary coins and dialed the number of the news agency itself. When the operator answered, he spoke the name of the man he sought.

  “Shoju Etan.”

  She made the connection and he heard a phone in the newsroom begin to ring. One among many, but the only one to start ringing at exactly that instant. He let the receiver hang free and stepped back into the newsroom. The man was at the head of the center row of desks, as befitted his position. A dull, middle-aged Japanese speaking now into the silent phone, questioning, waiting.

  The man in the black raincoat stepped quickly to the desk and fired one shot from the Llama .32 in his hand. He needed only one shot. The man at the desk slumped over dead, and the phone receiver clattered to the floor.

  Then there were screaming and shouting, the turmoil so familiar to his way of life, and death. The man in the raincoat twisted his lip in a sort of smile as he backed through the door and headed for the fire stairs. A copy boy was blocking his path, and the man swung the Llama automatic in a wide arc, catching the youth on the temple. Then he was through the door, running quickly down the stairs to the safety of the street…

  When Rand stepped off the big jet airliner at Tokyo Airport two days later, the sun was shining brightly. The time change during the flight from London had tired him, and he should have been sleeping, but the sights of the strange and exotic city freshened his mind.

  “Your first visit to Tokyo, Mr. Rand?” a voice asked. It belonged to a dark-haired American with fashionable sideburns and badly capped front teeth.

  “Yes, it is,” Rand replied. “But not my first to the Orient. I visited Hong Kong some years back.” He moved into line at the Customs counter. “You must be Lanning.”

  “That’s right,” the American said. “My car is outside.”

  Ten minutes later, seated in the back of an American limousine far too large to pass unnoticed on Tokyo’s crowded streets, Samuel Lanning produced his identification. Rand inspected the plastic-sealed I.D. card from the Central Intelligence Agency. He’d seen them before, and if they weren’t quite as colorfully printed as the Americans’ Secret Service identification, they were still impressive.

  “You fellows should get your Treasury to print these,” Rand commented. “The Secret Service ones look like miniature money.”

  Sam Lanning blinked and slipped the wallet back in his pocket. “You’ve been to America? The Secret Service rarely gets to London, I know.”

  “Oh, yes, New York, Washington, other places. I spent some months there just last year.”

  Lanning nodded. He spoke a few words in Japanese to the driver and then settled back. “Your department is Concealed Communications, isn’t it?” he asked. “Codes and things?”

  Rand smiled. “Codes and things. I must say I’m impressed with your car. I didn’t realize the CIA paid so well.”

  The American snorted. “The car belongs to the Embassy, and they don’t pay that well. I started at $8000 a year, about what I could have made as a high-school teacher, and a good deal less than I might have earned as an actor.”

  Rand nodded. The man was interesting, even by the usual standards of the trade. “You were an actor?”

  “I did a little Shakespeare after college.”

  “Hamlet?”

  “No, but I did Iago once in a semiprofessional production of Othello. That’s the longest role Shakespeare ever wrote.”

  The sedan took an expressway that looped around the Imperial Palace and then left it to wind through the narrow streets of the city. Lanning explained that they were in the Bunkyo-Ku section in the northern part of the city. The car passed the Kodokan Judo Hall and slowed to a stop before a middle-class apartment house. The streets here were filled with young people, and Rand asked about them.

  “Tokyo University is only a few blocks away,” Lanning said. “Things are normal there now. It’s almost time for the summer vacation.”

  “Who will we be seeing here?” Rand gestured toward the apartment house. “Mrs. Belgrave?”

  “Yes. And the other.”

  Rand frowned at the CIA man. “A replacement for Shoju? I assume someone replaced him after the killing on Monday.”

  Lanning smiled, as if proud of his little secret. “No one could replace Shoju in this operation, but happily we don’t have to. Shoju Etan is alive.”

  “Alive?” Rand could not conceal his surprise. “But the papers said—”

  “Someone else was sitting at his desk. We decided to play along and throw the assassin off the track temporarily.” He opened the door. “Shall we go up now?”

  Shoju Etan was a short balding Japanese of indeterminate age, with twinkling eyes that seemed always friendly. Rand had met him in London some years earlier, when he was once honored by a journalism group.

  “Shoju! I’m so glad to see you alive!” Rand hurried to shake his hand.

  “Ah, the Double-C man!” The slanted
eyes took on their familiar twinkle. “I am indeed alive. I could hardly depart this earth without having written that interview we talked of in London.”

  “The reports in the paper—”

  “Ah! We never believe what we read, do we, Mr. Rand? I was writing a series on the Tokyo zoo, and went out for further information. Another man was using my desk, and unfortunately he was mistaken for me.”

  Rand became aware of the woman who sat in one corner of the pleasant room, her face hidden in shadow. “You must be Mrs. Belgrave.”

  She stood up and offered her hand. Seeing her face, he was a bit surprised by its obvious youthful beauty. Somehow he’d expected Gordon Belgrave’s wife to be close to his age—a woman in her fifties. But Mrs. Belgrave could have been no more than 35, and her flashing red hair contrasted strikingly with the pale skin of her face.

  “How do you do, Mr. Rand,” she said, speaking with a slight British accent, as of one who has lived most of her life far from her homeland. “I do hope you can help free my husband.”

  “I’ll do what I can, of course,” Rand assured her. Then, to Lanning, “Suppose you run over the situation for me. I must admit this attempt to kill Shoju here was more than I’d bargained for.”

  Lanning cleared his throat, a little like a lecturer. “Sure. Glad to, Rand. As you know, Gordon Belgrave is the American representative of a book publishers’ council who was sent to Moscow to negotiate an agreement with the Russians on book royalties. The Reds had been pirating American books for years without paying anything, and lately there’s been some reverse pirating by U.S. publishers. Mrs. Belgrave accompanied her husband, and perhaps she should take up the story at this point.”

  They turned toward the redhaired woman, and in that moment her pale drawn face revealed more of her ordeal than any words she might utter. Finally she pulled herself together and began. “We’d been there about two weeks, and Gordon had met with various minor government officials, when one night without any warning we were arrested as we were leaving the hotel for dinner. They said my husband was an American spy, and the—they took us away to jail. I was questioned several times and so was my husband. Finally this man Taz said that I was being released because I was British. He said Gordon had confessed to being an American spy, and would have to stand trial.”

  Rand interrupted. “Taz is my opposite number in Moscow. His field is codes and ciphers. He wouldn’t be involved in a routine espionage case.”

  “We know about Taz,” Lanning said. “That’s why you’re here, Rand. I understand you’ve met the man.”

  “We’ve met twice, in East Berlin and in Paris, and I think we respect each other’s work. It goes no further than that.”

  “But you’re the man to talk to him, to reason with him. He has some coded messages that Gordon Belgrave is supposed to have sent.”

  “Did Belgrave really confess?”

  Lanning motioned to the Japanese reporter. “Shoju can best answer that. He was there.”

  “I was,” Shoju Etan admitted. “I was in Moscow on this series of articles I mentioned, and when I heard of the arrest I hurried to the Kremlin. After some time I managed to see Taz, and he took me with him while he interviewed the prisoner. He said he wanted to avoid the sort of publicity that spy arrests usually received in the Western press. He wanted to show me that Belgrave had not been tortured or brainwashed or otherwise coerced into making a confession.”

  “And Belgrave did actually confess?”

  “He did,” the Japanese reporter confirmed. “He said he had sent telegraphic messages to Allied agents in London using something called a SYKO cipher. Taz had the evidence of the messages themselves.”

  “What information was he supposed to have sent?”

  Shoju stirred uneasily. “I did not include this in my published articles on the matter, but the Russians are working on a new form of SUM missile—surface to underwater missile—for use against America’s Polaris submarines. I believe Taz suspects that Mrs. Belgrave’s husband was spying on this activity.”

  “I see,” Rand commented. “But how can I help?”

  Mrs. Belgrave stood up. “My husband is innocent, Mr. Rand. Completely innocent. He’s—not well. He had a nervous breakdown about a year ago, and has been under treatment since then. I believe the Russians have done something to his mind.”

  “I’m sure the book publishers’ council wouldn’t have sent him to Moscow if he were seriously ill.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t anything he couldn’t control,” she insisted. “In fact, he’d been much better since the shock treatments at the hospital. But I can’t help feeling that his confession was the result somehow of his mental condition.”

  Rand turned to Lanning. “What about it, Lanning? Was he working for you?” He knew it was a foolish question, which could only bring a negative reply.

  “Absolutely not,” the CIA man insisted. “Belgrave was an Army Air Corps Intelligence officer during the Second World War, but he’d been completely separated from any sort of government service ever since. He has absolutely no connection with the CIA, NSA, or any other agency.”

  “I’m inclined to believe you,” Rand said with a smile. Then, to Shoju, “You’re returning to Moscow?”

  The Japanese nodded. “I said in my last article that I would return this week with Mrs. Belgrave to try and free her husband.”

  “You think that’s why they tried to kill you?”

  Shoju shrugged. “I do not know.”

  “All right,” Rand decided. “I’ll go with you to Moscow. Since the British government sent me all this distance to help, I hardly think they’d want me to quit now. When is the next plane?”

  “There is only one flight each week from Tokyo to Moscow,” Shoju informed them. “Every Thursday on Japan Air Lines.”

  “Tomorrow.” Rand considered for a moment. “All right, tomorrow it is.”

  On the way back to his hotel, alone with Lanning in the back of the limousine, Rand asked the question again. “Is he one of your men, Lanning?”

  “No. That’s the truth, Rand.”

  “All right. Next question. Who tried to kill Shoju at his office?”

  “We believe it was a Turkish assassin named Sivas. He arrived in Tokyo three days ago and promptly dropped out of sight.”

  “Who’s he working for?”

  Lanning spread his hands. “That we don’t know. He generally takes assignments from governments rather than from individuals. In recent years he’s been quite active in the Middle East and the Balkans.”

  “Albania?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Would he work for Moscow?”

  “Certainly, if they paid him.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “Medium, dark. His appearance has a way of changing.”

  “I see,” Rand said. He saw, but he didn’t like it.

  They gathered at the airport the following day—Rand, Lanning, Mrs. Belgrave, and Shoju Etan. An oddly mixed group, by any standard. Rand looked over his fellow passengers and wondered for the first time what he was doing there. Would he really have any influence with Taz on the Russian’s home ground?

  The flight was only about half full, with the rest of the passenger list consisting of an assortment of Oriental businessmen and traveling diplomats. There were only two women on board—Mrs. Belgrave and the lady with the coffin.

  Rand noticed her at once, but he could hardly credit that to acute powers of observation. She was a striking brunette of perhaps 35—about Mrs. Belgrave’s age—and her vaguely Oriental features seemed a perfect blending of the East and West that the flight itself symbolized. Her dress was Oriental, but when she spoke to her traveling companion it was in an English that could only have been learned in India or Hong Kong or some other outpost of the faded Empire.

  Her companion was a grumbling man with a sinister face that seemed perpetually twisted into a frown. Lanning took one look at him and whispered to Rand, “Now that fellow could pa
ss for a Turkish assassin any day of the week!”

  But it was the coffin more than anything else which attracted attention to the odd pair. A series of adjoining seats had been removed from the rear of the plane’s passenger compartment, and six stocky baggage handlers helped carry a full-sized coffin on board. There was a noticeable stir among the passengers, and one man was even about to leave the plane. The pert young stewardess moved up and down the aisle, assuring everyone that the coffin did not really contain a body.

  Rand glanced out the window at the morning mists that drifted across the field. Then, as he watched, the big jet engines came to life and the plane began to move. He glanced at his watch. It was 8:20 a.m., Japan time. They were right on schedule.

  When they had reached their cruising altitude, Rand unbuckled his seatbelt and moved across the aisle to speak to the handsome brunette with the coffin.

  “Excuse me,” he said, “but I must admit that my curiosity has the better of me. If there’s no body inside, what is in it?”

  She smiled up at him. “Sit down. Join us. It’s been so long since I’ve heard a real British accent.”

  “Thank you.”

  She introduced the sinister, grumbly man by the window. “This is Dr. Hardan, my associate. I am Yota Twain.”

  “My name is Rand. This is my first trip in the Far East, and I’m not accustomed to coffins sharing the passenger quarters on an airline.”

  She laughed, a musical blending of two cultures. “It is rare, and we had to obtain special permission.”

  “You still haven’t told me what’s inside that couldn’t be trusted to the baggage compartment.”

  “And I’m afraid I can’t.” She made a pretty face. “It’s secret!”

  “Classified material,” the frowning Dr. Hardan said. “Can’t talk.”

  “I think it’s a body after all,” Rand said, smiling.

  “Perhaps it is,” she agreed. “Perhaps I’m a witch, Mr. Rand, and it is the body of something very old, very dangerous. A monster of sorts.” She was smiling as she spoke, but somehow her words were not humorous. Rand felt a chill down his spine.