The Once and Future Spy

by Robert Littell

  “Why doesn’t you-know-who call me himself?” Wanamaker demanded.

  Huxstep had the good sense to ignore the question. “You want I should give you the good news or the bad news first?”

  Wanamaker groaned something about having enough static in his life already. “Start with the good,” he said.

  “The good news is we traced the Hertz car to the long-term parking lot at Logan Airport. The airport cops spotted it there about five hours ago.”

  To Wanamaker that sounded like bad news. “We’ve got ten days left before the Ides of March and you’re telling me he took a plane somewhere?”

  “He took a taxi somewhere,” Huxstep said. “The somewhere was an Avis office in Boston. He thought he was muddying the water. But it was amateur hour, you see what I mean?”

  “So you got a fix on the car he’s driving,” Wanamaker said, trying to coax Huxstep through the narrative.

  Huxstep would not be hurried. “He made a big point of asking directions to Cape Cod, so we knew right off he wasn’t going there.”

  “Did you, or did you not, locate him?” Wanamaker wanted to know.

  “Since this part of the story comes under the heading of good news, you ought to be able to figure out the answer.”

  Wanamaker was tempted to remind Huxstep that he was a utility infielder talking to the man who managed the team, but he decided this would only divert the conversation unnecessarily. So he waited for Huxstep to continue.

  Huxstep cleared his throat with so much enthusiasm that Wanamaker thought he was being disconnected. Huxstep went on. “You-know-who, meanwhile, remembered something from our visit to the subject’s loft in New York. The subject was looking for a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, which said pot of gold was supposed to be in Concord, Massachusetts.”

  “What pot of gold?” Wanamaker asked, thoroughly confused. If this was the good news he hated to hear the bad.

  “So we staked out the three roads into Concord,” continued Huxstep, determined to tell the story in his own way, “me on one, your man Friday on another, you-know-who on the third. And guess what your man Friday saw one hour into the stakeout?”

  “The Avis rental car,” Wanamaker said tiredly.

  “The Avis rental car,” Huxstep agreed. “So after that all we had to do was some elementary road work and we knew where he was sleeping and who he was visiting.”

  “You mind if I ask you a question?” Wanamaker said, his voice oozing irony.

  “It’s your nickel.”

  “When is you-know-who going to terminate the operation?”

  “Your question brings me to the bad news part.”

  “I was hoping you might have forgotten.”

  “The bad news part is the subject has been in contact with the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and you-know-who is worried that he might have told her the story of his life.”

  “That is definitely bad news,” Wanamaker agreed.

  “So unless you object, you-know-who is thinking of”—here Huxstep read off, word for word, what the Admiral had printed out for him on the back of an envelope—”killing two birds with one stone. But to do that he has to wait until the birds of a feather flock together.”

  Wanamaker exploded. “Unless I object! You tell you-know-who that I’m sitting here in Washington and he’s out there in the goddamn catbird seat and it’s up to him to figure out what to do, and not me, and once he figures out what to do, he should go and do it. You tell him that rank has its privileges, and one of them is operating independently without trying to lay off the blame on someone else if things go wrong by getting that someone else to authorize something at a distance. You tell him—” Wanamaker ran out of steam. “You tell him,” he said in a tight voice, “to plug the leak. How he does it is his business.”

  “I will pass on your instructions,” Huxstep said with unaccustomed dignity. “Plug the leak. How he does it is his business.”

  7

  The Weeder was squirming at an execution taking place in his imagination. He tossed on his hammock of a bed listening to the dull hum of traffic on the highway beyond the motel. A toilet flushed somewhere on the floor above him and the water spilled through pipes in the wall near his head. He heard the sound of the tires of a slow-moving car crunching on gravel in the motel driveway. His heart missed a beat. He leapt from the bed and checked the door to make sure it was double-locked, then parted the curtains the width of a finger. The Weeder expected to see the Admiral pointing at the door of his room. He expected to see the burly man with the enormous handgun held at present arms, and the woman with the veil start toward it. But the only thing he saw was a dozen parked cars. He watched for a long while but there was no sign of life in any of them. Had he imagined the wheels crunching on the gravel? Had he imagined the Admiral, the burly man, the rail-thin woman? Had he imagined the attempts on his life?

  If only he had. But he could still feel the heat of the flame from the fire breather on the back of his neck. He could still see the burly man sighting over his finger and mouthing the words “Bang, Bang! You’re dead!”

  Feeling not the slightest bit sleepy, the Weeder slipped back into the hammock of a bed. He closed his eyes and tried to empty his head of thought. He had a vision of himself skating between thoughts, avoiding them as if they were patches of thin ice. The patches were marked by warning posts planted in the ice. One said Rods. One said Hair triggers. One said Wedges. He skated safely past the posts toward images vaguely visible on the horizon. In his mind’s eye he could see one of them—it was Nate Jumping barefoot from a longboat into the shallow water off a North Shore beach, wading ashore in the darkness and sitting on a rock to put on his stockings and the shoes with the silver buckles. He thought he could make out Molly, her dark hair cut short, walking toward Nate with an imperceptible limp, her eyes wary of a new ambush—only it wasn’t Molly he was seeing, it was the woman named Snow, washed by currents of melancholy, too lucid to be passionate, always aware of herself being aware of herself.

  8

  Wearing washed-out jeans tucked into ankle-length leather boots and the mackinaw that smelled of camphor, carrying a leather knapsack filled with cameras and lenses slung over one shoulder, Snow strode with the peculiar gait that was less than a limp and more than a hesitation toward the Weeder’s car. “Morning,” she said, climbing in on the passenger’s side. “Sleep well?”

  “Not really,” the Weeder said. He detected the odor of camphor and realized that in the space of one day he had come to associate the smell with her. “I had that weird kind of insomnia where you keep dreaming you’re awake.” He shifted into drive and started down the dirt road toward the main road.

  “What you need to do,” Snow explained, setting her knapsack on the floor of the car between her legs, “is brew yourself up some herb tea last thing before going to bed. Besides making you sleep like a baby, it’s good for memory, broken nails and your sex life.”

  The Weeder glanced sideways at her to see if he was being teased, but she seemed deadly serious.

  “I’m glad to get a ride into Boston,” Snow announced. “When I’m on my own I never seem to get to where I started out for, at least not on time.”

  “You get distracted,” the Weeder guessed. He turned onto the main road heading toward Concord and studied the rearview mirror.

  Snow noticed him peering into the mirror but didn’t think anything of it. “It’s not a matter of distractions,” she said. “It’s a matter of me. Before he died, my husband”—she flashed the smile that kept the tears at bay—”used to say I reminded him of late roses. What he meant was that I had an addiction to lingering.”

  The Weeder asked quietly, “How long have you been a widow?”

  “Forever. At least it seems like that sometimes.”

  “I didn’t mean to pry.”

  “My husband was killed in a car accident four years ago this spring. I was driving at the time.”

  “I think I see,” the
Weeder said.

  She turned to him almost eagerly. “What do you think you see?”

  “I think I see what ambushed you,” he told her.

  “I never thought of it as an ambush,” Snow said. She brought a fingernail to her teeth and began nibbling on it. “When I could help it I never thought about it at all.”

  “That may be one of your problems,” the Weeder suggested.

  “Dime store psychology,” Snow snapped.

  They rode in silence for a long while, Snow absorbed in avoiding her thoughts, the Weeder absorbed in his driving and the rearview mirror. He turned onto the ring road that led to the Turnpike and downtown Boston. Remembering another trick from his countersur-veillance course on the Farm, he slowed down and drove in the right lane. Through the rearview mirror he thought he saw another car slow down and pull into the right lane half a mile behind him—or was he imagining it? He speeded up, switched to the middle and then the left lane and passed several dozen automobiles before settling back into the right lane again. He studied the rearview mirror but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

  “You have a curious way of driving,” Snow commented.

  “Where are we going?” the Weeder asked.

  “First stop is a gallery near the docks in downtown Boston. I’m having a show of some of my ‘Invasion’ photos. It’s my last chance to check the lighting.”

  “What are ‘Invasion’ photos?”

  “I did a series I call Invasions of Privacy. You saw one on my wall last night. Nudes, mostly, seen through doors that are open just a crack, through slightly parted curtains or venetian blinds. What I’m getting at, in my way, is that we live in a world of invasions— countries invade other countries, governments invade our bedrooms, men invade women, television invades our homes, punk rock invades our culture. And so on. It’s a long list. We spend our days listening to the details of the latest invasion and wait our turn. What’s changed is that in the old days we knew when we were being invaded and could make a stand. Nowadays the invasions are more subtle—sometimes we don’t even know they’re taking place.”

  Snow’s photographs, in thin silver frames hanging on whitewashed walls, made the Weeder squirm. They were invasions of privacy, and more. At the heart of each photograph was an intimacy, a wound. There was a series of three photos of old women, naked, seen through bathroom doors ajar a few inches. One was powdering her body. The second was shaving with a safety razor. The third had caught a glimpse of her reflection in a full-length mirror and was studying herself with a sad, unbelieving expression on her wrinkled face. There were several photographs of a slender young woman or, more properly, vertical slivers of her glimpsed through a partly open door; the third in the series, hanging directly opposite the photograph of the old woman who had caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, showed the young woman with her head cocked, studying with a critical eye her naked body. It was clear from her expression that she liked what she saw. There was another series, taken through parted venetian blinds, of a naked middle-aged man with a cigarette dangling from his lips, watching television. In one photo he stared at the screen as if he had heard a joke but didn’t get it.

  “So?” Snow asked. They were back in his car, heading along the Fitzgerald Expressway toward the North End, where Snow planned to photograph squatters in an abandoned building earmarked for demolition. “What did you think of my Invasions?”

  “Some of them embarrassed me.”

  “They were supposed to. Anything that’s really good—that cuts deep—is embarrassing. Sometimes I think that all art involves an invasion of privacy—in the case of a novel, I suppose the author more often than not is invading his own privacy. Listening to Callas is an invasion of her privacy in the sense that she permits you into parts of herself so private you are embarrassed to be there.”

  “I always thought she let me into parts of myself I’d never been to before.”

  “That too,” Snow said. She studied the Weeder with interest. “What is it you do for a living? Are you one of the invaders of privacy or an invadee?”

  “I work for the government,” the Weeder said vaguely.

  Snow said, with obvious irritation, “That puts you on the side of the invaders.”

  “I guess it does.”

  “If you are one of the invaders,” Snow asked, “why do you keep staring into your rearview mirror?”

  “I like to keep track of the cars behind me.”

  “You’re not very convincing when you lie. Take a left here. Park next to the fence. We’ll walk the rest of the way. I don’t want the squatters to see the car and get frightened off.”

  The building that loomed ahead, six stories, stood alone in the middle of a pile of rubble from surrounding buildings that had already been demolished. Except for two enormous cranes with teardrop-shaped wrecking balls dangling from their raised arms, the lot was deserted. A hand-lettered sign over the entrance to the building read: No Entry—Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.

  Snow took a Leica from her knapsack and fitted a telephoto lens onto it. “There was an article a few days ago about squatters occupying the building and refusing to move unless the city provided them with cheap housing,” she explained.

  The Weeder studied the building. “If there are people around, they’re keeping a low profile.”

  Snow stopped to stare at the gaping holes where the windows had been. “I once saw a beehive with one wall made of glass. You could watch the bees making honey. Imagine if one wall of an apartment house was made of glass.”

  “Another invasion of privacy,” the Weeder said.

  “Another invasion of privacy,” Snow agreed. “We’re all fascinated by the things we fear.” She started for the door. “Wait here if you like.”

  The Weeder caught up with her. They exchanged looks. He raised an eyebrow in a shrug. She smiled the first real smile he had seen on her face since he met her and ducked through the door into the shell of the building. The Weeder took a careful look around the lot. Satisfied that it was deserted, he followed her.

  With Snow leading the way they climbed a staircase littered with trash and debris. At each floor Snow put her head into the hallway and listened for a moment. On the sixth floor she began to explore the apartments. Some of the walls had already been demolished, sinks and bathtubs pried loose, toilets shattered with sledgehammers—probably, Snow noted, by the demolition people to prevent squatters from using them. The windows had been ripped out and an icy wind cut through the gaps. Snow kicked in frustration at a heap of empty sardine tins; there had been squatters here after all but they appeared to have left. The tins went clattering across the naked planks of a kitchen floor where the linoleum had been pried up. “I guess I brought you out of your way for nothing,” she said.

  From outside came the sound of tires crunching on debris. The Weeder edged over to a gaping hole in a wall. A light snow had begun to fall and the crystals slanted in through the hole into his face. Squinting into the snowflakes, he looked down.

  Six floors below a dark-colored four-door sedan crept to a stop in the middle of the lot. Three of the four doors opened. The Admiral, the rail-thin woman with the veil masking her eyes and the burly man with the handgun held at present arms emerged. The woman and the burly man trotted off and disappeared from view. The Admiral, his back arched into a parenthesis, looked up at the building, saw the Weeder and waved cheerily. He might have been coming to take tea.

  Snow started toward the hole in the wall but the Weeder pushed her roughly back into the room. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he announced in a voice so laced with fear that Snow instantly understood that their privacy was about to be invaded—and brutally.

  The Weeder started for the stairwell. From the lot came the pulsating scream of a hand-cranked siren, then the muffled backfires of two crane motors spurting into life. At the staircase the Weeder leaned over the railing and looked down.

  “Why are we running?” Snow asked in a frightene
d whisper.

  “There are people outside who want my money and my life,” the Weeder replied.

  At that moment one of the teardrop-shaped wrecking balls exploded through a wall into the building one story below them. An instant later the second ball burst through another wall, pulverizing everything in its path. The floorboards on which they were standing vibrated violently. A cloud of debris and dust drifted up in the stairwell, obscuring the Weeder’s vision, making it difficult to breathe. Snow, thoroughly terrorized, pulled a bandanna from her pocket and held it over her mouth and nose. The Weeder covered his face with a handkerchief and, pulling Snow along with him, backed away.

  “What are you doing?” Snow cried through her bandanna. She tried to slip out of his grasp. “We’ve got to get down the stairs.”

  “There’s no staircase to go down,” the Weeder told her. “That’s what the noise was—they’ve demolished the staircase between floors.”

  “You mean we’re trapped up here?”

  The Weeder dragged her back into a room and pushed her into a corner. Below, the motors of the cranes raced. And then a teardrop-shaped wrecking ball bit cleanly through the wall directly across the room from them and arced up to the ceiling before falling back through the wall and disappearing. The second wrecking ball exploded through the wall into the room behind them. The air turned opaque with dust. Snow screamed. The Weeder, his eyes tearing, located her from the scream and got a grip on her mackinaw and pulled her through a doorway into a hallway. They stumbled down the hallway into another room as one wrecking ball, and then the other, burst through outer walls behind them.

  “They’re trying to bury us alive,” Snow cried.

  “They’re going to destroy the floor above the break in the staircase,” the Weeder said. He looked around wildly. “We’ve got to get to a lower floor.”

  Outside, the two wrecking balls pummeled the building, exploding into it in brutal one-two punches every fifteen or twenty seconds. Each pair of explosions seemed louder and nearer than the previous ones as the giant teardrops worked closer and closer to where the Weeder and Snow were huddled.