The Man Who Heard Too Much

by Bill Granger

  “I was—I was going to get more.”

  “Where?”

  “I—I’m meeting someone. Someone with money.”

  “In Berlin.”

  “In Belgium.”

  The small, ugly laugh again.

  “Believe me,” Michael began.

  “I believe you, Herr Hampton, you are much too simple not to be believed.” And the hideous laugh came out of the darkness again.

  “They were going to kill me. How did I get away?”

  “I saved your life, Michael. Is that worth anything to you?”

  “How did you?”

  “Do you know this place?”

  “No—”

  “It is one of my places, you might say. One of the places where the rats are at home.”

  There. He had not noticed it before until the other spoke the word. He could hear the rats scurrying in the darkness, crooning to each other. The darkness was alive with rats. The rats ran along, stopped, sniffed, stared at him. The rats watched him.

  For no reason, the creature laughed again. The laugh shattered the darkness and remade it into a more sinister form. There were rats, and there was this maniac with the high-pitched voice who laughed at nothing.

  “I am the Rat. Do you know me?”

  “I don’t know you. Please take the knife away. You might slip—”

  “I might slip on purpose, Michael, and cut your eye out. I might do it anyway because you have a credit card in your wallet. If I killed you now and left you here for a week, I could use that card for many things. Many, many things.” The creature paused. “So stop games, Michael, and tell me the truth about the money—”

  “I have to go to Belgium, I—”

  “You said that before, and I didn’t believe you.” And the knife slipped a little, cutting the flesh below his eye.

  The sudden pain made him want to vomit.

  The creature pulled the knife away.

  It was just enough, and Michael was just desperate enough. He lunged forward in that moment, upsetting the candle, plunging the windowless tomb into darkness.

  He grasped the creature’s hand.

  The knife plunged into his arm.

  Pain like heat. Blood in warm waves from the wound. He held on and the creature hissed. The rats in the blinding darkness scuttled away, making angry sounds.

  The hand. He had to turn the hand. He wanted to break the wrist.

  The hand opened, finger by finger, and the knife clattered to the damp concrete floor.

  But the Rat bit down in that moment, and Michael cried out. The bite was deeper and it hurt more than the two knife wounds. The Rat had torn his flesh again.

  Anger filled him. A day of running—of real, shaking fear—had transformed him. He was a mild man, a lover and listener. He never thought of himself as a creature who could howl with rage or pain, who could fight to the death, who would intend to kill another man.… The Rat fastened to him, and he felt a thin throat beneath his hand and squeezed. Kill the Rat and kill the life and the screeching laughter in the darkness.…

  The Rat squeezed his testicles with a bony hand. White pain. The Rat squeezed again, and Michael let go of the throat and then hit out, striking something, making the white pain from the center of his body turn into mere red rage.

  The Rat was thrown off and came back to the attack. The Rat was sinewy, all hands and teeth and feet, twisting and pulling and biting.

  Michael grasped hair and pulled.

  The Rat howled and kicked out. Pain boiled in Michael’s bowels. He pulled the hair back and down and felt the creature’s body falling.

  He pounced then, the cat upon the bird in darkness.

  He squeezed at the creature and produced another scream.

  Michael grinned in the darkness.

  He wanted to cause pain. It was pleasant to cause this pain, to strike and kill and hear the howl in the darkness, the rage and pain mingled until the last sound became a death gurgle, a mere whisper before eternity.

  He hit the creature again. And then again. He held the creature’s hair and struck at what must have been the creature’s face.

  Unexpectedly, the Rat bit again, despite the pain.

  The teeth cut into the fleshy palm of the striking hand, and Michael cried out now.

  “Goddamn you!”

  And he slammed the thin body down on the concrete floor and fell on it, sought to smother it with his weight and size.

  His bleeding hand found the other’s neck.

  He could still the head and the slashing teeth. He had the neck and controlled the creature now.

  The creature writhed beneath his grip a moment.

  Then, curiously, it was still. Death, coming as the last whisper in all the sounds of the world.

  Michael stopped squeezing.

  Had he killed?

  Without meaning to, he let out a great sob.

  His hand pulled away from the still form of the creature. He scrambled in the darkness and found the candle on the floor. He found a wooden match in a dish and lit the candle.

  Darkness retreated before the pale light and went to the corners of the immense room where the rats roosted, waited, watched.

  The creature did not move.

  Terror filled Michael’s heart for what he had done.

  All his life was filled with gentleness. He had become tender from the earliest age, he could not harm a creature. His father had found this disgusting. Will was a hunter who killed for food and without philosophy. They needed the food; they never killed more than they ate. In the autumn, they hunted deer on the ranges, in the snow, killing in the vast loneliness of those pastures and open lands. But not Michael. He went with them; he could gut the deer and did so. He would be as bloody as a butcher at the end of the hunt, and it did not bother him, nor the glassy eye of the dead deer, nor the skinned meat hung in the meat house. But the moment of the killing—from the point of life to the point of death, a bridge of just an inch of time—could not be crossed. His father mocked him, but Will understood his tender heart all his life. Was it that easy to be transformed into a killer? Turn a man loose and then hunt him over two days, through three countries, make it absolutely sure he understands that the object of the game is to kill him and the only way the prey can escape death is to kill in turn—and then what will happen to his gentle nature and quiet voice and placid manner?

  And now he had stilled that creature, squeezed the life out of it with his large hands.

  He brought the candle across the floor to the place where the creature lay.

  He gasped.

  The face was dirty and perhaps, in life, it was hardened. But now it was so young, so soft, the eyes shut against the darkness. Death softened, he thought.

  He held his hand to the creature’s face.

  He put his hand against its neck. Beneath the skin, he felt the slow, steady beat of the heart.

  Not dead. For a moment, he wanted to cry because of the release he felt.

  He tore open the creature’s shirt to better listen to its heart.

  He felt so glad in that moment that his eyes teared. The creature, whoever he was, had saved his life.

  And then he stopped.

  He looked down at the pale, dirty skin.

  He felt dizzy again.

  The bleeding hand and arm and cheek ceased to pain him in that moment by the shock of it.

  Breasts.

  Young, budding breasts, with dark nipples.

  With horror, he saw the eyes slowly open. They blinked in the darkness. The eyes were tan, almost without color. They stared at him for a moment as he knelt in openmouthed shock.

  And the creature smiled without any humor at all.

  It was a woman.

  15

  LONDON

  The Americans stood before the palace and watched the bright British troops perform the changing of the guard. The old, cheerless Buckingham Palace was not occupied by any of the royals this grim November Monday. One was in U
lster, continuing the tradition that held that the six counties of Northern Ireland were part of the heart and soul of Britain. One was in the West Indies, beneath the Caribbean sun, showing the flag to the natives, who had been bloodlessly freed of British rule less than forty years earlier. One was in Scotland, living the life of a hermit on a sun-dappled crag called Ben y Vrakie above the valley that contained Pitlochry. He was studying the works of Thoreau and longed to be freed of his aimless, stupid, and extremely wealthy life. In another age, he would have scourged himself in a cell. Throughout Britain and the empire and the Commonwealth, the royals embodied flag and history and displayed themselves as museum pieces or caged creatures in a sort of royal zoo. The Americans who watched the British troops in blood-red uniforms shout and march and wheel so smartly did not know any of these things; nor that, less than a mile to the east, across Hyde Park and Park Lane, in the very formal building at the corner of Grosvenor Square, the director of operations for an intelligence agency was being told stories of murder.

  “There’s no question—”

  “No, Mr. Hanley, no question.”

  The second man was Vaughn Reuben, director for special projects in the Central Intelligence Agency. Vaughn Reuben—in that Langley bureaucracy of intelligence gatherers, disinformation dispensers, go-alongers, dirty tricksters, political policy planners, and all the rest—was simply a spy, the master of spies for the Langley Firm.

  They were in the glass room inside the U.S. embassy. The glass room was also called the clear room. The Central Intelligence Agency had offices and staff in the embassy, and it was to the CIA that the director of R Section had been called. That was a humiliation in itself. And the humiliation was intended. Langley was putting the bad-mouth on R Section for fumbling security at the Malmö conference, for jeopardizing a new and secret relationship with the Soviets, for dragging its collective feet.

  The master of spies for Langley wore a tweedy jacket, brown-striped shirt, plain blue bow tie, and smoked a pipe. He was a Yale-professor-type out of central casting. His image was as carefully calculated as a presidential candidate’s. He was in the bureaucracy, but he had been moved up rapidly because of his friendship with the ambitious man who was chafing as vice president of the United States. Whenever they could, they played golf together. The vice president confided in the Yale professor and spoke of his frustrations—principally his frustration with the secretary of state. The secretary of state had the president’s ear, his heart, his balls, and his trust, while the vice president had none of these things. In six years, it would be the vice president’s turn, but the secretary of state seemed determined to make sure that eventuality would not happen. The vice president, in his weak frustration, was very useful to Vaughn Reuben.

  Hanley’s eyes were rimmed with red. Everything in his manner seemed pale and subdued. His suit was extremely ordinary, a serviceable government gray. It might have been a uniform. His fringe of hair was white and his rabbity appearance was aided by the inevitable cold that visitors to Britain in November manage to acquire in the first few days. His nose was red and sore. His cheeks were flushed. He felt like a man in front of a furnace one moment and in a rainstorm the next.

  “I know what’s going on in Washington,” Hanley said. “The matter of this missing tape.… Langley is utilizing our embarrassment to further… to further what, Mr. Reuben?”

  “We have no secret agenda,” Reuben said. He sucked dryly at the stem of his pipe but produced no smoke. His eyes gazed on Hanley as he might have gazed on a prized student in the first row of Philosophy 210.

  “Every agenda is secret in the trade,” Hanley said.

  Vaughn Reuben pulled at his pipe again. To Hanley’s relief, he did not draw smoke. The glass room permitted no sound to intrude or to leave. The problem was, it was damned stuffy as well.

  “Two Soviet agents, Arkady and Viktorinov, were murdered about 0700 in Brussels, in the area of Rena Taurus’s apartment. What was your man’s mission exactly?”

  “To observe—” lied Hanley. What was it exactly? He was getting whipsawed—first by Mrs. Neumann, who had express orders from the NSC, which got them, in turn, from the secretary of state with the blessing of the president; then by the well-known buddy of the vice president. This was a setup, but Hanley could not see the dimensions of it.

  “Observation is not resolution, is it?” A little joke. Vaughn smiled. Hanley didn’t bother. The Soviet directorate for “direct action” abroad was called the Committee for External Observation and Resolution. It was in charge of wet contracts.

  “You forget the Russians are involved in this circus as well. R Section had joint security at the conference in Malmö with KGB. So R Section pursues its mission, which you know very well—to get back that damned tape. We are cooperating at every level with KGB.” The lies came easily. “I have no idea what transpired in Brussels.”

  “Yes. That’s the problem, isn’t it?” Vaughn stared through the glass walls at the opaque walls. “CIA was frozen out of Malmö. I can’t understand why. R Section had a chance there, a real chance to shine, and you muffed it.”

  “And you were sent here to harass me.” It was not a question.

  “Yes. That’s what I was sent for. The heat is terrible, isn’t it?”

  “Stifling.”

  “What was your man’s mission? In Brussels.”

  “That’s no business of yours.”

  Reuben smiled. It was the pleasurable, chilling smile of the cat. “A man named Henry McGee was linked in a message delivered to our Stockholm station by a Soviet defector. He escaped from prison a few weeks later. A very suspicious escape. Henry McGee was a mole inside R Section for a very long time, the most traitorous double agent in your history.… Quite a long time…”

  Hanley stared and said nothing.

  “Quite a long time… And now this business in Malmö, a missing tape recording of minutes of a secret agenda and delivered to a man who is clearly a security risk. Michael Hampton, dishonorably discharged, former top-secret clearance in Army Intelligence, worked with unsavory people at the UN in New York, skipped to London, questioned by the Brits—”

  “At whose behest, Reuben?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Little Langley pressure? You were after his body once, weren’t you?”

  “That’s gossip, isn’t it?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Oh, come off it, Hanley.”

  They were just crossing swords now, circling, touching metal to metal to probe for reaction and weakness.

  “The point is, there’s supposed to be cooperation between Section and KGB.”

  Hanley looked at him. “It doesn’t sit well on your tongue, either, does it?”

  No reaction. Pipe stem prop, bow tie prop, tweed jacket prop, and no reaction except for a blink. Vaughn Reuben said, “We are intelligence agencies. We don’t set policy and we don’t have secret agendas.”

  “Vaughn, your section ran the war in Nicaragua for nearly nine years.”

  “Is that true?”

  “You supplied the arms to the Afghanis.”

  Blink. Blink, blink. Silence.

  “The point is, Hanley, the Russians will take it all terribly badly that one of yours wetted two of theirs on the streets of Brussels this morning. Instead of going after the girl, the way he was told to.”

  “He works in mysterious ways.”

  “November,” Reuben said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Devereaux,” Reuben said. “A dangerous man. Some might judge him a psychopath. Certainly a sociopath.”

  “November,” Hanley repeated, hearing the word for the first time.

  “Damnit, Hanley—”

  “Civility, Reuben. The ‘damnit’ doesn’t go with the professorial clichés you affect, unless you’re turning into a John Houseman portraiture,” Hanley said.

  “I’m doing as I’m told. Told to put the screws to you to get the tape back.”<
br />
  “And ice two probable innocents,” Hanley said.

  “I don’t know about that.” Blink. “We don’t sanction people.”

  “No. We never kill.”

  “Except there are two dead in Brussels.”

  “Hardly innocents. Russian agents in a hostile environment. Maybe the Belgians did it.”

  “Your man killed them. And he snatched the girl.”

  “Did he?”

  The question was never answered.

  “The point,” said Reuben. “The point is that we have to get the tape.” He lit the pipe up.

  16

  BERLIN

  Michael understood some of it. There had been an opening in the side of a building for a disused coal chute. The metal door was hinged at the top. The creature—the girl, the woman, Rat, whatever she was—had opened the chute as he stood by the building waiting for the gunmen. She had grasped his ankle and jerked him to his knees, and then he had slid down the chute, banging his head on the closing door. The girl had pulled him from a shelf alongside the chute. She must have been very strong.

  But then, she was strong. She had nearly killed him. And he, in desperate rage, had nearly killed her.

  He touched the bite wound on his hand. His hand was swelling. She was probably infected. She was dirty, thin, and her eyes were wild.

  He had been sitting on a box for thirty minutes, watching her. He had his wallet and passport back, along with the sixty marks and a small quantity of leftover Swedish kronor.

  He had the knife.

  He held it in his left hand because of the swelling of his right.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked. She had scarcely moved, not even rebuttoned her dirty shirt. Her hair was short, not so much cut as hacked to that length. It framed her face and made her look androgynous. Perhaps she intended that. She had an air of severity and contempt, even sitting half-naked in this coal cellar.

  He spoke. “You saved my life when you pulled me in. Then you could have killed me later. Why did you trouble yourself?”

  The same harsh laugh. “It was no trouble, Michael.”

  He stared at her.

  She stirred and sat up. “Cops. Pigs. Fascists. I wouldn’t raise my hand to help one. They were chasing you, and it pleased me to frustrate them.” She glared at him in the candlelight. “I didn’t give a damn about you. Another innocent lamb born to be fleeced. I should have just cut you when I saw the credit card. I’d be living high now, instead of sitting here listening to your voice.”