The Man Who Heard Too Much

by Bill Granger

  Copenhagen. It was the perfect place for spies. KGB ran so many watchers and agents out of the Russian embassy there that their presence on the trams and buses was almost ubiquitous. Sweden disapproved strongly of the strong Soviet staff presence, but that delighted Denmark, as did the constant American protests about the overpresence of Soviet “diplomats.” Denmark frequently conceived of its international role as class clown or social irritant.

  It wasn’t a matter of just running. You kept running and someone noticed it after a while and started chasing after you. The point was to stop running at the right time and start chasing someone else.

  Skarda.

  When Devereaux had said the word, Henry McGee felt deeply shocked, as if he had no secrets left at all. Skarda was buried so deep in Henry’s consciousness that it was like a second skin.

  He went to the Honest Broker in Frankfurt, the sort of man who arranges everything. He paid a handsome price, and the Honest Broker came up with three different sets of identification. The broker also took the second and third parts of the message to the Soviet stationmasters in Bonn. Let them gnaw on that.

  The message came back to Henry in Frankfurt, and it was very specific about time and place. Copenhagen. On the Stroget. In the café. By the window. Rain or shine. Five P.M.

  He was there a few minutes before five. Another cup of strong coffee. The Danish waitress with the flat, blond hair and tight sweater reminded Henry McGee how horny he was. The whole deal inside—the rampant homosexuality—turned Henry off, and he had pushed his erotic mind down into a hole. He didn’t even want to touch himself inside. When it raged up in him, when he knew he couldn’t stand it and even one of the pretty boys turning tricks inside could look good to him, he took to the yard and ran and ran until his legs cramped and his breath came in painful gasps. God. Now he was a free man, and this Danish blonde with flat hair hanging to her shoulders like the beatniks used to do was practically swinging her tits in his face. He’d like to lick those tits until she screamed.

  “You are American?”

  “And you’re Danish, like a Danish and coffee?” Henry McGee said. He smiled. He had a nice face, and the mean in his eyes just made him more intriguing. His smile was crooked enough to make girls smile back. The blonde smiled.

  And sat down.

  She wore jeans that might have been as tight as the sweater. Pale skin, pale eyes, not over thirty yet.

  “My shift is over, huh? You come with me and we can talk someplace. I don’t like to sit in here where I work.” The voice lilted, the blonde smiled at him, practically told him what was going to happen. Henry felt very tempted and then thought about being careful. There were plenty of blondes later on.

  “Can’t, honey. Waiting for someone.”

  “Your wife? Your girl?”

  “See a man on business.”

  She smiled at that. “Not a man.”

  Henry paused.

  “Maybe me,” she said.

  “Maybe you?”

  “My name is Christina.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Come with me, Henry. It’s all arranged. Even me. I’m part of the arrangement.”

  “Is that right?” He was still smiling, but the blade was out already, beneath the table, six inches from her crotch, pointed right at the seam that joined the legs of her trousers. “Is that right?”

  She had about five seconds to finish it.

  “The message is: Solidanocz is not a union but an idea.”

  Just in time.

  He put the knife back into the little holster inside his trousers. She was young and probably thought she was supposed to fuck him around a little, hold him on a string, before she put out the message. Dumb. But Henry thought he might like to crawl between her legs anyway and start doing business.

  “Just fine, honey,” he said. “Next time, put the message out up front, don’t fuck around. I’m a careful man.”

  “So am I careful,” she said, hurt.

  “Where do we go?”

  “I show you.”

  Just a girl picking up a guy in a coffee shop, taking him for a little Danish sex up the street in her rooms. Maybe she’ll charge him and earn a little unreportable money to spend on beer. The lights were on; the sun was down; the rain was very gentle on a pretty, brittle city of canals and towers.

  Henry wrapped his left arm around her waist. It was small, and he could feel her bones. She didn’t mind. It made it look right, just the two lovers going off to do it.

  They veered off left to the Skindergade, which led into Köbmagergade. Up the broad street to the canal and across into a tangle of streets. The houses were narrow and ornate and gloomy in the faded light.

  “Here,” she said.

  They went through a gate into a garden and up wooden steps to a paneled door decorated with painted flowers. Christina looked at him and wanted to smile again. “Just like lovers,” she said.

  All right. “Part of the arrangement?”

  “If I like you. If you treat me well.”

  “I like you, Tina, I do.”

  “Are you young or old? I can’t tell.”

  “I’m seven inches and that’s about all there is to it,” he said. He said it to be as crude as possible, to make the statement in front the way you had to do inside to keep your space.

  She licked her lips in a gesture learned from movies but long since part of the bag of tricks she carried around. She was committed to the cause, had been committed since she was in school. She had this stupid job, but sometimes she was given certain little assignments and it thrilled her to think she might be a spy.

  The door opened and a grandmotherly type in a print dress and short, gray hair stood in the light of the entry. She frowned first at Henry and then, in a more disapproving way, at the braless girl with long, flat hair.

  “Solidarnosc,” said the woman.

  Christina started to enter.

  “Not you,” said Grandmother. “Him.”

  Christina pouted on the step.

  Henry stepped inside and looked back. “You working tomorrow, Tina?”

  She nodded.

  “I’ll stop by,” Henry said.

  She nodded, and the door closed in her face. Grandmother held an Uzi pistol in her right hand. It wasn’t pointed at anything.

  “Upstairs.”

  The house creaked with age. A grandfather clock drummed below, the banisters squeaked when you leaned on them, the narrow stairs led up to narrow rooms. He opened the door, and there was light from a small coal fire, and a table and a chair and a man with a wide bald head dressed in black leather. Exactly like a spy, down to the leather epaulets. Henry was amused. He kept a sense of the grandmother just to his right and the leather spy at the little table just in front of him. Grandmother had the automatic weapon, probably set on single shot so that it didn’t get out of hand in such a narrow room, and the fat leather spy wasn’t showing a piece. Henry made these calculations as naturally as he thought about breathing or screwing Tina. After all, despite the messages and the threat implied, there was always the possibility that Mother Russia would not welcome him home with open arms. He had bent a few rules and regs in the business in Alaska, but that’s what you had to do in the field.

  “We are very pleased that you made your escape, Henry,” said the fat leather spy. “Directorate is delighted, I might say.” He spoke Moscow English, which is learned in schools where people try to talk like Peter Jennings.

  “You want to know about how they know about Skarda,” Henry McGee began. He wasn’t much for booga-booga with leather raincoats and little coal fires and shadows on the wall and a middle-aged lady in a print dress carrying an Uzi. Cut the crap. “I don’t know. I don’t know a thing. I know they walk in one day and ask me, and it hits me as big a surprise as if they told me I was being traded out.” The last sarcasm went unnoticed; Henry saw that.

  “They never got it out of you in all your interrogations?”

  “You
know they didn’t, or Skarda would be dead meat now instead of whatever it is,” Henry said. “I kept the faith, even when the church wasn’t lighting a candle for me. How long was Moscow Center going to let me sit in that goddamn place?”

  “Henry, you caused the problem of your incarceration. You were too clever. You set out to wreck R Section and ended up dangling in it. Then you tried that escape from the Section debriefing camp in Maryland—”

  “That was a setup. I didn’t escape. I was set up that time in Maryland after they had arrested me.”

  The fat spy waved his hand to dismiss the protest. “It didn’t matter, Henry. Prior to that, we could have worked a deal. After that, it became more difficult.” He said “deal” with the precise reverence for slang common in all who speak English as a foreign language. “We had our eye on you. Which brings us to this point: How did you manage to escape? I mean, really escape this time?”

  “Do I get to sit down?”

  “Grandmother has an Uzi.”

  “I noticed something out of place about the way she looked. Goes nice with your dress, honey.”

  Grandmother spoke in Danish to the fat leather spy, and Henry didn’t follow it.

  “Sit down,” said the fat spy.

  Henry sat hard on a straight chair. This was what you called examination time. All the cards on the table, everything above board. Students will sit five feet apart. You will have forty-five minutes. Go.

  Henry told the fat leather spy everything from the Lewistown penitentiary to Chicago to rappelling down a building in the middle of the night to a flight to New York to one fag Englishman and then on to an American in Edinburgh and a flight to Frankfurt and the Honest Broker. He didn’t leave a thing out and didn’t add a thing.

  “This Devereaux brought up Skarda out of the blue?” More colloquialism, more reverence. But the words were skeptical, and Henry felt sweat bead on his upper lip.

  See, even when you put down the right answer, it may not be their right answer. Like a fourteen-letter word for a man in charge of a plant. They want superintendent, and you put down horticulturist.

  “I thought about that. You got to have some other kind of leak.”

  “Activity in the United States is normal.”

  The Soviet Union had several thousand agents, subagents, watchers, couriers, and paid doubles in the ranks of the combined KGB and GRU (the military espionage agency) in the United States. Key espionage centers were in New Jersey; New York City; Washington, D.C.; Miami; San Francisco; and in Los Angeles. The whole machinery of intelligence against the common enemy was itself monitored twice—at the station level and at Moscow Center level by specialists who did nothing but study the theory of espionage and intelligence gathering by Soviets against America in America. The fat spy meant that there was no reason Skarda would have been leaked to anyone in American intelligence in the United States.

  Henry McGee felt naked. The knife was in his belt, but Grandmother could put twenty-five rounds into his body cavity before he cleared his blade.

  “All right. Here’s the other scenario. Everything I told you, or the important stuff, is a lie. I gave them my piece of Skarda, and they waltzed me out of prison. They told me to go home to Russia and say hello to Ivan for them and settle into my retirement. If, along the way, I happen to kill a few citizens, well, no matter, it just makes my story look more plausible.”

  “That is what some people think.” Words like letters dropped in a postal box on the street.

  Henry waited.

  “It is not logical,” said the fat leather spy. He barely seemed to move his lips when he talked.

  Henry let himself breathe.

  “Skarda is in motion. Skarda has been in motion for two months.”

  “Well, then,” Henry said.

  “How convenient for you to escape from prison during the show. Now you can play your part in it. Is it not convenient?”

  “Skarda was summertime.”

  “Winter must serve,” said the fat leather spy. “You will stay in this house until 0900 tomorrow, and then you will be moved to the operations center. Events are taking place, and you will be put in the picture at operations. You will also be reexamined,” the spy said.

  “All right.” Very cool, let it relax. Grandmother made a face at him. He looked at her and smiled a crooked smile, the one that had charmed the blond girl.

  “Grandmother will be downstairs. You will find a cot in the next room. Do you need anything?”

  The fat spy rose. He was just a lackey, Henry decided. That’s why he wears that Herman Goering outfit and why he shaved his head. “A bottle of whiskey would be nice. I know you can’t get bourbon, but a little Johnnie Walker Red would be fine. And one other thing.”

  Eric von Stroheim nodded.

  “Tina. Get me Christina, the blond girl. I ain’t had a piece of ass in two years.”

  “What am I? A procurer?”

  “The word is pimp. I get the feeling I just been put through the booga-booga by a couple of third-class couriers who have as much to say about things as Brezhnev. Just get me Tina or a reasonable facsimile and tell her she has to fuck for the cause. And a bottle of whiskey. And some of that smørrebrod that passes for food.” He stretched and felt pleased with himself. He had worked it this far, and he could let his guard down for a moment. “When we go traveling in the morning, I want to feel relaxed and nothing relaxes me like a night with a girl.”

  “This is immoral,” said the fat leather spy.

  Grandmother said, “Do as you’re told.”

  8

  STOCKHOLM

  The report filed by the Soviet agent Krykin was precise but no less damning to himself:

  At 2014 hours, the passenger express from Malmö arrived in Stockholm central station.

  Your agent Krykin waited on the platform on the level below the waiting room for Michael Hampton. Hampton was observed almost immediately. He carried two small bags in one hand and a large suitcase in the other.

  He appeared agitated and looked around himself several times as he headed toward the waiting room stairs. The agent would characterize him as seeming to be nervous or afraid.

  Because of the crowds, your agent decided not to apprehend the obviously distraught translator in the train station.

  The translator exited the station, and because it was raining, there were no cabs in line. The translator walked in the rain to the subway station on Vasagatan and descended to the train. Your agent also followed. The southbound subway train carried both men to the subway station at Centralbron in the Old Town. The translator emerged from the subway station and crossed to Lilla Nygatan, where he picked up a taxicab. The taxicab was number 2134, and your agent was unable to follow it directly. Instead, your agent signaled by pocket transmitter to the backup vehicle, which arrived nine minutes later. The vehicle then proceeded to the residence of the translator at 26 Bastugatan on the south side of the city. Your agents waited fifteen minutes in the event the taxicab had been delayed, and then it was decided to enter the premises.

  The translator was not at home, but his bags were in the foyer. The bags and rooms were thoroughly searched. It was then decided to locate the driver of taxicab 2134, who, after some difficulty, was found at home. The driver told your agent that he had driven the translator back to central station and that, for a tip of thirty-five kronor, he had taken the translator’s bags back to his home. Your agent questioned the driver closely, and he admitted that the translator had removed some small object from one of the bags and placed it in his pocket. He could not describe the object because the light was bad and because it was raining.

  It is always raining, the control said to himself. It is always done in bad light. It is always someone else’s fault.

  There is now an ongoing attempt to locate Michael Hampton in Stockholm, although it should be considered probable or even likely that Michael Hampton has left the country.

  Krykin; Sunday, 0330 hours.

  9
<
br />   LONDON

  The message bringing Devereaux to London did not explain and did not allow for an explanation in return. What could Devereaux explain?

  He had spent a long time in Rena Taurus’s apartment. He had gone through her armoire, opened drawers, strewn out her secret places. She trembled with rage, she broke long silences with curses, she followed him around from place to place. She picked up the phone once to call the police, and he took it from her hand with such brutal directness that she was even more terrified. Her childlike eyes widened and her lips pouted then, not with sexual desire but with horrified fascination. He was the beast, and her rooms, her secrets had been torn from her.

  He did the dirty things he had to do, and when he was finished, he sat her down and talked to her. He probed at the edges of her answers. She told him about Rolf Gustafson over and over again.

  “But why would he come to your room with Michael’s bag?”

  She turned her eyes away. She was silent for a moment. She looked up at him. “They knew. In the news pool. About us. It was not a secret. There was a journalist named Evelyn Jaynes there. He was a fat Englishman and always drunk. He made a pass at me.… I told him to leave me alone. He knew.…”

  “Rolf would know where to find Michael.”

  She stared at him. “Are you a moralist? We are nearly in the twenty-first century—people sleep together, they make love without benefit of marriage.… Or are you a priest? Even a priest knows these things.” And she thought, suddenly and unwillingly, of Michael.

  Devereaux had asked her the questions over and over again until her exhaustion overcame her and she could barely speak above her yawns. Finally, in a last moment of anger, she had said, “What do you want from me?”