“I will tell you frankly,” the Virginian burst out, “there is such a dearth of public spirit, such a want of virtue, such stockjobbing to obtain advantages …”
(Stockjobbing: colloq v. buying and selling, usually stocks, but in the Virginian’s sense, anything, to profit from price fluctuations. A curious accusation, coming as it did from the man who introduced the mule into America and was trying to get Congress to purchase, at a handsome price, some of his mules for use as army pack animals.)
“—such a mercenary spirit pervading the whole army that I should not be surprised at any disaster that may happen.”
Nate glanced at Colonel Hamilton, but he was sucking on the inside of a cheek and studying his boots. The Virginian reached into his mouth again with two fingers, gripped one of his wooden teeth and gingerly worked it back and forth in his gums. “Damn glue’s come loose,” he muttered under his breath. “You would think a world that could come up with Watt’s steam engine and Arkwright’s spinning frame could invent a glue that can hold a tooth in place for more than a week.”
The Commander-in-Chief treated himself to a deep breath; the storm seemed to have blown itself out. He fetched a rolled-up map of Manhattan Island from a spruce document box and spread it on the desk, weighing down the ends with two large cut glass cellars, an inkwell and his silver pocket watch. “I take it you are no stranger to Manhattan,” the Virginian said. “But are you familiar with Long Island?”
“I spent three weeks there with Colonel Webb’s Nineteenth Connecticut right after coming down from Boston in late April,” Nate replied.
The Virginian, Nate and Colonel Hamilton bent over the map. The Commander-in-Chief’s finger began to stab at it. “Our main body is here,” he said, “on the Haarlem Heights. General Putnam has five thousand men down here in the city, but he’s going to start pulling them back toward the heights. I figure it’ll take him the better part of a week to get his cannon out—he lacks horses, wagons. I loaned Put one of my own riding horses, that’s how bad things are. A mare. Hope to God I get her back in one piece.”
The Virginian’s index finger traced a line along the Brookland coast running up to the western reaches of Long Island Sound. “Howe’s regiments are stretched out here, looking down our throats from across the river. No telling when they’ll come over or where. I’ve posted militia units at the likely landing sites—that cove under the Kipp house, below the Murray Hill at Inclenberg, on the flats near the Dover Tavern. But I don’t have high hopes of stopping them on the beaches. Our troops are green as grasshoppers—my guess is they’ll cut and run as soon as the lobsters bring up some of their line ships and start to cannonade them.”
Hamilton caught the expression on Nate’s face. “Things aren’t as bleak as they appear,” he remarked. “As long as the lobsters strike below the Haarlem Heights, the general feels confident we can pull most of our troops back to the heights. And the general wins as long as he doesn’t lose.”
“The heights form a natural defensive line,” the Virginian added, talking to himself now, it seemed to Nate; it seems also to me. “After what happened to Howe at Breed’s Hill, back in Boston, I don’t reckon he’ll risk sending his thin red lines straight up the hill at us. We might be able to hold on to the heights for weeks. Months even. Long enough for me to put some starch back into my thirteen armies. Long enough for Congress to vote bonuses so I can enlist new regiments. Long enough to train the ones I already have. With luck the rebellion could have a breathing spell. Unless—”
“Unless?” Nate asked.
“Unless Howe decides to ferry troops up the East River, risk the currents at Hell Gate, and land them in Westchester. From there it’s nine miles as the crow flies to the North River and King’s Bridge connecting Manhattan to Westchester. If Howe brought up enough troops he could fortify those nine miles, cutting us off on Manhattan. His brother’s ships could patrol the two rivers, keeping us pinned here on the heights until we ran out of food. My army—my thirteen armies—would disintegrate. That would be the end of the rebellion and our dream of independence.”
Nate couldn’t keep from asking, “If that’s a possibility, why don’t you pull back to Westchester right away instead of fortifying the Haarlem Heights?”
The Virginian slipped the pocket watch into his waistcoat pocket and lifted one of the cellars. The map snapped back into a roll. “There is nothing more difficult in warfare than organizing the retreat of a defeated army,” the Commander-in-Chief said. “I need a victory under my belt—I need to lift morale and hopes—before I can risk a retreat into Westchester. If I attempted it now the armies I have the honor to command would melt away. Inside of a week I would be retreating with Hamilton here and nary a soul in sight.”
Someone could be heard galloping up to the house. There were shouts from the portico. The Virginian started for the sliding doors. “What I need to purchase,” he called over his shoulder to Nate, “is time. I must know what the lobsters are up to over there in Brookland—I must know if Howe is going to give me time to pull the army together for a retreat.”
What transpired after the Virginian left the room I gleaned from reading between the lines of a letter A. Hamilton sent to a Connecticut journalist years later. Hamilton wrote out a laisser-passer so that Nate could get across Long Island Sound from one of the Westchester ports. And he gave Nate the name of a patriot in Brookland, the widow of one of the Minutemen killed at Concord, who could put him up while he was scouting the lobster positions. Hamilton even suggested a cover story: If accosted, Nate would claim to be whipping the cat.
“Whipping the cat?” Nate must have asked. (I don’t think he would have been familiar with the expression, which came from the Middle States and the South.)
“Whipping the cat,” Hamilton would have explained, “is what itinerant shoemakers call it when they board with a client for as long as it takes to repair his shoes and boots.”
Hamilton noted that the lobsters might have occupied New York City by the time Nate reached Long Island; in which case Nate was to nose around the city too and see what he could pick up there. He gave Nate the name of a patriot he could contact in the city, an Israelite recently arrived from Poland, a banker who had loaned sums of money to the rebellion.
It must have occurred to Hamilton (it certainly would have occurred to me) to ask Nate if he had any acquaintances or relatives on Long Island or in New York City who knew he held a captaincy in the Continental Army and might betray him if they spotted him. “There is one such,” Nate admitted. He had a cousin, Samuel by name, a lawyer from Providence, nine years older and an ardent Tory. Samuel, who was a Harvard man, had gone over to the enemy in Boston and had sailed away with them when they abandoned the city. Nate had heard on the family grapevine that this same Samuel was serving as Howe’s Deputy Commissary of Prisoners in New York.
“I don’t need to tell you,” Hamilton said, “that you must avoid him at all cost.”
“The chances of us running into each other are one in a million,” Nate said.
“Which brings us to the matter of codes,” Hamilton said.
“I thought I was to bring my report back myself,” Nate said.
“You are. But it is prudent to prepare for all eventualities. If you are taken prisoner by the lobsters, the usage and custom of war is such that you will be permitted to write to your family. Your letters will pass through my hands. So I propose we establish code phrases that you can employ in your letters to indicate what you have discovered. Since you are familiar with Addison’s Cato, and we have a copy at hand, why don’t we select phrases from it for you to memorize?”
“No need to memorize,” Nate said. “I know most of the play by heart from having read it so often.”
“So much the better. You select the phrases.” Hamilton handed Nate the Virginian’s leather-bound copy.
Nate thumbed through it. “Here is the line that inspired Mr. Patrick Henry’s ‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ “ he s
aid. And he passed the book to Hamilton and quoted it from memory. “ ‘Chains, or conquest; liberty, or death.’ “
Hamilton copied the phrase into an orderly book. (It was this same orderly book that I discovered four years ago in the Beinecke Library stacks. A handwriting expert has compared the unsigned notations in the orderly book with samples of Hamilton’s handwriting and concluded they were written by the same person.) And he told Nate, “Let this phrase stand to mean that the lobsters are going to land behind us, in Westchester, in an effort to trap us on Manhattan island.”
Nate flipped through the pages of Cato until he came to another patriotic phrase. Again Hamilton copied it off into his orderly book. “Let the second phrase mean the lobsters will give the general the time he needs to prepare the army for retreat,” he said.
Hamilton made Nate repeat the phrases and their meanings several times. Then he escorted Nate to the portico of the Morris house. The Virginian was standing with a messenger on the lip of Coogan’s Bluff studying the East River through a long glass. In the distance an enemy cutter could be seen tacking from bank to bank as it beat upriver against the wind. A. Hamilton noticed the speck of sail. “It looks as if Howe’s testing the currents at Hell Gate,” he told Nate. He offered him his hand. “Good luck,” he said, “and Godspeed.”
19
The bartender, known as Yul because his head was shaven down to his sidewalk-gray scalp, set the whiskey on a paper doily with lacelike edges and slid it across to the man with the toupee, whose name was Howard something or other.
“I’m giving you fair warning,” Howard told Huxstep. “I teach mathematics at a junior high school.”
“If you don’t believe the man,” the bartender told Howard, “why don’t you put your money where your mouth is?”
Howard ran a finger around the rim of his glass but failed to produce a hum. “There has to be a time limit,” he insisted.
Huxstep, sitting two stools away directly across the U-shaped bar from the Admiral, popped some salted peanuts into his mouth and washed them down with a gulp of beer. “Listen, Yul, fifteen seconds is all I need,” he said.
The man with the toupee slipped a calfskin wallet from the breast pocket of his blazer, pulled out a crisp fifty-dollar bill and dropped it onto the bar. Huxstep, laughing under his breath, slapped two twenties and a ten on top of it. The mathematics teacher punched some numbers into his wristwatch calculator. “All right, Yul. You count off the fifteen seconds. That way there’ll be no discussion.” He looked at Huxstep. “Here’s the problem. Divide 9876.54 by 4567.89.” Yul started to count out loud. “One hundredth. Two hundredths. Three …”
Huxstep’s eyes strained at the top of their sockets. His lips moved. “The answer’s 2.1621667.”
Frowning, the mathematics teacher watched Huxstep pocket the money. “I’ve read about people like you,” he told Huxstep. “What’s your trick?”
Huxstep laughed. “I’m in love with numbers.”
“So am I,” Howard gushed. “It’s rare to find someone who feels about numbers the way I do.” He slipped onto the stool next to Huxstep. “Maybe we could meet for a quiet supper sometime and compare notes. What do you say?”
“What I say,” Huxstep said, “is you should fuck off.”
Howard smiled smugly. “I like people who play hard to get.”
“I’m not playing hard to get,” Huxstep informed him. “I am hard to get. Beat it.”
Across the bar the Admiral studied his neighbor through lidded, bloodshot eyes. He liked what he saw: the eyebrows plucked into a pencil line, the cheeks lightly rouged, the gold medallion hanging from a delicate gold chain in the V of the shirt, the gold studs and the gold cuff links instead of buttons—all the outward signs of a class act. And a body like a Citroën.
So the Admiral talked braininess. “You have a way with words,” he told his neighbor. “May I ask what you wrote your thesis on?”
“Thesis? What thesis?”
“Your Ph.D. thesis.”
“Ph.D! I have never even set foot in college.”
“You have to be pulling my leg. Your insights could only come from a systematic investigation of philosophy. More power to you if you are self-taught. You are a bookworm. Own up.”
The Admiral’s neighbor toyed with a gold-plated lipstick. “I used to read Reader’s Digest cover to cover.”
The Admiral smiled triumphantly. “I could tell there was more to you than looks.”
Toothacher’s new friend offered a manicured hand. The Admiral seized it eagerly and gave it a conspiratorial squeeze. “My friends call me Pepper,” he said.
“If you’re Pepper, I’ll be Salt.”
They both laughed, the Admiral at the prospect of burning another candle at both ends, Salt because what had started out as a dull evening had taken a turn for the better.
The Admiral was about to signal to Yul for refills for himself and his newfound friend when Huxstep came loping over. He nodded toward a booth in the back of the bar, behind the jukebox. “He’s here,” he mumbled.
The Admiral swiveled on his stool and peered in the direction of the booth. He could make out the figure of a man huddled in its shadows. The figure raised a hand and saluted him with a weak wave.
Toothacher brushed Salt’s wrist with his fingertips. “Order yourself a refill on me,” he said. “I’ll be back in a jiffy.” He hiked his lanky body off the stool, ambled across the crowded room and slid into the booth facing the shadowy figure. “Wasn’t sure you weren’t dead and buried by now.”
“I hang in there,” chirped E. Everard Linkletter, the Company archivist. “You are looking fit as a fiddle. What lures you up from the Shangri-la for retired naval officers?”
“If I told you would you believe me?”
“Try me.”
Toothacher batted both eyes in an innocent wink. “I came up to lobby the Secretary of the Navy for a cost of living increase to my pension.”
Linkletter exploded in laughter. “Come on, Pepper. You used to be able to do better than that.” The archivist brought a menthol cigarette to his nose and breathed in its aroma. “There was a time when you trusted me with those secrets of yours,” he remarked. “Someone’s screwed up, hasn’t he? The old fox himself, Rear Admiral J. Pepper Toothacher, has been called in to walk back the cat.” Linkletter studied Toothacher through dirty eyeglasses. “What are they paying per diem these days, Pepper?”
“Whatever they pay,” Toothacher said morosely, “it’s not enough.” He was thinking of the most recent love letter to Wanamaker, which had arrived that morning, an epistle so tightly held that there was no security rating on the books that pertained, or so Wanamaker had pretended when he flatly refused to let the Admiral see it. Whoever was writing the love letters, Wanamaker had ranted in a voice as scruffy as his office, knew all about Stufftingle and was threatening to expose him if he went through with it.
“He knows everything!” Mildred had asked Wanamaker in alarm.
“Absolutely everything,” he had confirmed.
“He knows about the packages we’ve been smuggling in?” Parker had asked.
Wanamaker had nodded dejectedly.
Webb had shaken his head in disbelief. “He couldn’t know where. That’s simply not possible. Even among ourselves we hardly ever mentioned Kabir.”
Wanamaker had flashed a furious look in Webb’s direction and the word Kabir had not come up again in the discussion, which had turned around the necessity of canceling Stufftingle. But the Admiral had noted it.
Linkletter raised a finger in an effort to catch Yul’s eye. “My doctor told me not to drink, so I switched doctors. What’s your pleasure, Pepper?”
“I invited you,” Toothacher said. “I’m buying. Are you still presiding over the Company’s dusty archives?”
“Here it comes,” Linkletter moaned. “It never fails. The day I meet someone who doesn’t want to know something outside channels I will give up cigarettes and sex.”
> The Admiral leaned over the table until his head was inches away from Linkletter’s. “Does the word Kabir ring any bells in that brain of yours?”
Linkletter jerked back in surprise. “I don’t believe it,” he exclaimed. “I simply refuse to. You’re the second person this week to ask me about Kabir.”
The Admiral’s bulging eyes bored into Linkletter. “Who,” he asked, “was the first?”
The Company archivist sighed. “Come on, Pepper. You’ve known me long enough to know I won’t answer a question like that. I don’t mind helping out a friend with the odd piece of information he could get by going into the archives himself. But it’s not my style to betray compartmentalization.”
Toothacher batted his eyes innocently. “And you’ve known me long enough to know I won’t let you off the hook easily.” The Admiral crooked a forefinger in Linkletter’s direction. The archivist leaned cautiously toward Toothacher, who said in an undertone, “People who leave the Company under a cloud would be idiots not to take their private files with them—to make sure the Company didn’t change its mind about paying a pension.” The Admiral narrowed his eyes to stir his memory. “An excerpt from a police blotter crossed my desk when I worked at counterintelligence. I have a photocopy in Guantánamo. It came from a Tampa, Florida, precinct, I remember. It mentioned lewd behavior. At a playground. Exposing a sexual organ to a minor.”
“It wasn’t true,” Linkletter burst out. “Not a word of it. The minor in question was nineteen years old and a professional. The Director himself decided the evidence was too flimsy, my services too valuables—”
“The Director is dead,” Toothacher said in a bored voice. “Long live the Director.”
“I retire in two years, three months and nine days,” Link-letter whispered plaintively. His eyes watered with emotion. “You wouldn’t …” He studied Toothacher’s weathered features. “You would!”
The Once and Future Spy Page 8