Snark

by William L. DeAndrea

  “Come on, then,” she said. “I know you’re awake. Dinner.”

  Sir Lewis groaned.

  The woman pulled a table and chair close to the bed and put down the tray. “You’re eating better than a lot of people in this country are,” she told the old man. “Chop. Broccoli. Potato. Tea.”

  Hypodermic needle. She didn’t mention that, Sir Lewis thought. He said nothing. He never spoke to either of them.

  He kept waiting for her to notice the ropes, how they were different against his skin, but amazingly, she didn’t. Something on her mind, he supposed.

  He wasn’t complaining. Just let her offer him that first forkful, just let her get close enough—

  SECOND

  “What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,

  Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?”

  So the Bellman would cry, and the crew would reply,

  “They are merely conventional signs!

  “Other maps are such shapes with their islands and capes!

  But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank”

  (So the crew would protest) “that he’s brought us the best—

  A perfect and absolute blank!”

  —The Hunting of the Snark

  Fit the Second

  1

  WHEN THE PHONE WOKE her, Felicity Grace was irritated to see that she had gravitated away from the center of the bed. Toward Derek’s side. Not that Derek had ever seen this particular bed, or this flat, or known anybody calling herself Felicity Grace. Everything that made up her life now had come A.D. After Derek. After Death.

  “Hell,” she said aloud, but the phone wouldn’t give her the leisure to feel properly sorry for herself. She reached for it as she squinted at the clock. Not seven yet, good God, we must be at war.

  “Yes?” she said. Anybody who wanted anything more civil would have to wait a while.

  “Good morning, Miss Grace.”

  “Bellman?”

  “I thought you were going to call me Jeff.”

  “How did you get this number?”

  “A fine agent I’d be if I couldn’t get hold of a phone number.”

  “I cannot deal with an American being coy at quarter to seven in the morning.”

  “I read it off your telephone the other night.”

  “No you didn’t. You were never near the bedroom, and that’s where the phone is.”

  “My mistake,” Bellman said. He left it open whether he was talking about his little lie, or about not having got near the bedroom. “Seriously,” he went on, “I don’t have your number. I prevailed upon the night man here at the Tournament Press to ring you for me.”

  “You’re at the office?”

  “Why not? It’s a short walk. I need you to take me somewhere, and I want to get an early start.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the horse’s mouth,” he said cryptically. “How soon can you be here?”

  “Thirty minutes’ time.” My body will be there, she thought. My brain might not show up until sometime later.

  “Fine. I just want to catch up with my friend before he takes off.” She heard Bellman say something away from the telephone, then, “Oh, okay. My friend here says you should report to room thirty as soon as you arrive.”

  For one brief phone call, it had certainly given Felicity a lot to puzzle over as she drove to the office. What in the world was Bellman up to? And how had he got hold of Section phone code so quickly? “The night man” was Mr. Tipton, speaking from his flat through the desk watcher’s phone at the office. The phrase “my friend” in that context meant that the speaker was armed with the delegated authority of the Section chief.

  But room thirty was the most puzzling thing of all. Ostensibly, room thirty was the private studio of the art director of Tournament Press’s catalogue department. In reality, Tournament Press had its catalogues done by anonymous free-lancers, and room thirty was given over to craftsmen of a different sort—makeup and disguise people.

  What in the world was Bellman doing in room thirty? What sort of disguise would he need, on top of that cover story of his?

  “Disguise?” he said when she put the question to him in room thirty twenty minutes later. “No disguise at all, in the proper meaning of the word.”

  “Then what—oh, good morning, Natalie.”

  “Good morning, Miss Grace,” Natalie said. She was a plump, pretty black woman of about forty or so. She had come to Sir Lewis’s attention in the mid seventies, when more and more of the refugees from the madness of Idi Amin told of how they were able to elude capture and flee the country because of the skill of a woman member of an underground group. Asians, Europeans, Africans, all were given simple, natural-looking disguises that had saved their lives.

  Inevitably, it was Natalie’s own life that had been on the line—her son had betrayed her, after having held out against torture for a month. She used her skill to save herself, and got to Kenya, where one of Sir Lewis’s men found her. They brought her to London, and put her to work for the Section, where she’d been ever since. Perhaps literally. Felicity knew that any hour of the day or night she was needed, Natalie was in room thirty ready and waiting.

  Felicity turned back to Bellman. “Then what are we doing here? Why are we bothering Natalie at this hour of the morning?”

  “No bother,” Natalie said. “Mr. Bellman and I have been having a nice chat.” Natalie’s voice was always mellow and musical, but this morning there was an extra riff of amusement that Felicity found herself resenting.

  “What we’re doing here,” Bellman said, “is getting ready to pay a call on the Russian Embassy.”

  “The Russian Embassy,” Felicity echoed.

  “Right. The one in Kensington Palace Gardens.”

  Felicity decided not to ask the obvious question just this second. Instead, she said, “That still doesn’t explain the makeup section being called in. Especially since you tell me there’s not going to be a disguise.”

  “Properly understood. Do you have those pictures, Natalie?”

  “I do, Mr. Bellman. Mr. Tipton rang me and told me to have them ready.” Natalie wiped her hands on her smock and picked up two color glossies, eight by ten, full face and profile showing a woman with curly brown hair and too much makeup. The jewelry was just slightly overdone, as well, and the picture went down far enough to show that the woman was displaying just one button too much chest. The whole effect was rather tarty, but not offensive to anyone short of Mrs. Whitehouse.

  Felicity recognized the photos. “That’s me,” she said.

  “I know. You looked like that in Sweden, when you were working liaison on the captured submarine thing.”

  “You want me to look like that today?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “But we can’t. They already know me that way. They—”

  “Exactly. They know the woman in that picture is a British agent. When I spoke to Tipton on the scrambler this morning, I asked him if he had someone who’d been made by the Russians that he could loan me for the morning. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be you.”

  “I’m ready for you, Miss Grace,” Natalie said. She bowed Felicity into a padded, adjustable chair, then covered her to the chin with a sheet. She covered the red hair with a cap of fine mesh, and started smearing things on Felicity’s face.

  When Natalie had finished for the moment with her mouth, Felicity said, “All right. You appear to have taken complete command of the Section—” Natalie chuckled. “—complete command of the Section,” Felicity repeated. “Am I to be allowed to know what we’re about?”

  “Of course. We want to know what’s happened to Sir Lewis, don’t we?”

  “Of course.” It occurred to Felicity that along with all the other things he’d learned about the Section, he also knew that Natalie had a class A security clearance, or he wouldn’t be talking so freely in front of her.

  “And we suspect that the
Russians had something to do with his disappearance, right? Or that at least they know something about who’s behind it.”

  “That’s our best guess at the moment,” Felicity conceded.

  “All right, then. What we’re going to do is pay a call on the Agricultural Attaché at the Russian Embassy.”

  “Bulanin?” If Felicity hadn’t been so well trained she would have gasped.

  Bellman nodded. “Grigori Illyich Bulanin. We’ve never met but I know of him from his days in Washington.”

  “But he’s KGB!”

  “I know he’s KGB. Why the hell should I want to talk to an Agricultural Attaché if he weren’t KGB?”

  “But what’s the point?”

  Natalie chuckled again. Felicity wanted to glare at her, but the black woman grabbed her by the chin, turned her head around, and started applying crimson to her lips with a brush.

  “The point is, we show up on Bulanin’s doorstep, readily identifiable as an American spy and a British spy, and demand to know what the fuck is going on with Sir Lewis Alfot.”

  Natalie was fitting the brown wig over the hairnet. She gave it a few pokes with the end of a rattail comb, surveyed it, poked again, and pronounced herself satisfied. She whipped the sheet off Felicity’s body rather like a magician completing a trick.

  “So we just walk up to the Russians’ chief KGB man and start causing trouble, is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  Natalie said, “Undo another button on your blouse, Miss Grace. Put on the baubles. And you better change into some tarty shoes. I’ve got some high heels with ankle straps for you.”

  “Thank you, Natalie. Jeff—I am still calling you Jeff—I don’t know what to say. Your plan is—”

  “Unorthodox? Foolhardy, perhaps? Not by the book?”

  “Not by the book!”

  “Don’t you say that here? It means—”

  “I know what ‘not by the book’ means.”

  “Good,” Bellman said. The banter was gone; he was practically grim. “Then you know the Russians have a copy of the book, too. You go by one chapter, they go by the next. Things get done, but they take time.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “But nothing. We have no time. Look. This is the only way I can work. I tear pages out of the book and use them to light fires. What are the Russians going to think when I walk up to their KGB man and start kicking ass?”

  “How am I supposed to know what they’re going to think?” Felicity was having more than a little difficulty deciding what she thought.

  “They’ll think I’m insane. Then they’ll wonder, if I’m so crazy, why I’m running around loose. Why a known British agent is giving me aid, and for all they know, comfort.

  “It will make them nervous. They won’t want to make a move until they know what the hell this American maniac is up to. They’ll—Bulanin, I mean—will start making moves in the dark.”

  Bellman turned to Natalie. “She looks great to me. How about those shoes?”

  “Right here,” Natalie said. She handed them to Felicity.

  Felicity pulled off her boots. Before she handed them over to Natalie, she pulled a .32 automatic from a holster in the top of her right boot and put it in her purse. Then she fixed the straps of the high heels, and noted with angry satisfaction that Mr. Bellman was enjoying the exhibition of her legs.

  “I’m ready,” she said, and stood up to go.

  “Good,” Bellman said. “We’ll still be there plenty early enough.”

  “We’re really going through with this.”

  “Oh, yes. Because you see, Felicity, once you get someone moving around in the dark, it’s a lot easier to make him stumble.”

  2

  THE AMERICAN SAID, “WHAT the fuck is going on with Sir Lewis Alfot?”

  Grigori Illyich Bulanin put a bemused smile on his face while he lit a cigarette. It was an American brand, Merit, a low-tar filter cigarette. The ones obtainable in Britain were made in Belgium, but Bulanin was still careful to put them in a cigarette case so that no one could see the pack, and to crush them to shreds when he was done to make it less likely that anyone would take note of the brand printed on the paper. One could never tell what went into one’s dossier, and that made a difference, if a man had ambition.

  Bulanin had enough ambition for three men, and it frequently occurred to him it might be less trouble if he would smoke Russian cigarettes. He even tried to switch from time to time, but the Russian cigarettes made him gag.

  He did not like to smoke. He did not like the taste of tobacco. He had a positive horror of prospective lung cancer. But he needed to smoke. Or rather, he needed cigarettes to light. Bulanin had a tendency to be impulsive, to speak before he had considered all the ramifications of what he might say. The tendency had cost him dearly in his youth (not that he was old now, barely forty—it would be another fifth of a century before he would be in a realistic position to fulfill his ambition), and experience had shown him that lighting a cigarette was a man’s only method of temporizing without appearing weak.

  Bulanin lit his cigarette and thought. What were the American and the silent Englishwoman doing here? Yes, asking indiscreet questions in vulgar language, but why?

  Bulanin took a deep drag on his cigarette, ignoring the stinging even this mild American smoke brought to his throat. He blew a gray stream toward the ceiling. “Mr. Bellman,” he said. “I’m sure you know more about it than I do.”

  “I doubt it sincerely,” Bellman said.

  Bellman, Bulanin thought. Jeffrey Bellman. The name had been the reason Bulanin had let them in. Now, as they sat in the special visitors room, performing for the microphones and cameras, Bulanin looked at the man who (one of his Washington counterparts had assured him) had been killed a few weeks before. At the time, Bulanin had no reason to doubt the report; a Bulgarian hit team had been dispatched, and the Bulgars had no equals as killers.

  It had to be an impostor. This visit had to be a clumsy attempt to see how Bulanin reacted to a brash young man wearing the name of the agent he had ordered killed at the request of Leo Calvin.

  “I have read about Sir Lewis’s disappearance, of course,” Bulanin said. His English was impeccable, his voice suave. He had worked long and hard to get them that way. Books, and records, and live tutors, and sleep tapes, to help him master the language. Voice coaches and singing lessons and exercises to remove the harshness Westerners thought they heard in the throat of a Russian.

  It was all part of his first job for the KGB, the time when his ambition changed from wish to plan, a plan that was still in progress. He remembered Borzov, the legendary Borzov, condescending to explain things to him.

  “Grigori Illyich,” the old man had said. “You have been given a great gift, to use for the good of the State. First, though, you must hone it, sharpen it. Your voice and manner must be as beautiful as your face and body. And your brain must be more perfect than either.”

  Borzov had laughed then, and Bulanin knew that the whispers were true, that people had died with that laugh in their ears.

  “When you are ready,” Borzov had said, “we will send you, literally naked, into the West. You will learn the contents of minds through the weaknesses of bodies. You will exploit their weakness, their decadence. And you will be a hero for it.”

  Bulanin didn’t know if what he had done had made him a hero. He supposed so—it had earned him promotions sufficient to let him stop degrading himself for Borzov and the Motherland.

  Bulanin had not asked to be handsome. He had not asked for the cool gray eyes or the clean straight jaw, the jet-black hair, the broad shoulders, the narrow waist. He had not asked to be looked on by women as a challenge, as a trophy.

  It was, as Borzov said, a gift. And like most gifts, it had its price. The price was loneliness. Grigori Illyich Bulanin had made love to hundreds in the fifteen years he spent as a Raven. A Raven. A small black bird that steals shiny baubles and eats carrion. Borzov had a sense o
f humor when he chose the term. A woman who did what Bulanin had done was called a Swallow.

  As a Raven, Bulanin had nested with women, men, groups. He felt no love for any. He felt hatred for some, indifference for others, pity for the rest. And guilt over all.

  It wasn’t right to garner secrets by wringing them from a lonely heart. Torture was better. Murder was better. They, at least, left the subject some dignity; they spared the agent the necessity of hypocrisy.

  The bill for his gift was still being paid. After fifteen years as a hypocrite, Bulanin had learned to trust no one. After so much time spent inviting lonely people to his bed and betraying them, it pained to see even a flicker of interest in a woman’s eye or a man’s.

  Like the flicker he saw in the eye of the silent Englishwoman. She was undoubtedly a trained agent. From the look of her, she might well have more than once been the bait in what the Americans called a Honey Trap herself. But the flicker was there, and she couldn’t hide it.

  Bulanin thought with envy about men who were bald by the time they reached his age. Or fat or toothless or wrinkled. Every wrinkle Bulanin accumulated added “character.” A gift could be a curse. How was he to fulfill his ambition if he still looked like a movie star in his old age? That might be all right in the West, but to get where he was going, Bulanin would have to impress not a shallow, fickle-minded electorate, but the tough old buzzards of the Supreme Soviet and the elders of the Party.

  “I beg your pardon,” Bulanin said. Bad. Bellman had been talking, and he had missed it with his woolgathering.

  “I asked you what you thought.”

  “Of what?”

  “What you read about Sir Lewis’s disappearance.”

  “Most disturbing. Of course, I’ve never met Sir Lewis—my brief is exclusively agricultural matters.”

  “Naturally. And Sir Lewis is a capitalist and philanthropist. Somebody of whom the Soviet Union has no need.”

  “The State fills the functions of both,” Bulanin said. He took one more puff on his cigarette, then crushed the long stub to shreds in the ashtray.