The Once and Future Spy

by Robert Littell

  Snow sank to her knees and pressed her palms to her ears to ward off the explosions. “Do you know the people who are doing this to us?” she sobbed.

  The Weeder settled down beside her and put an arm over her shoulder. “I know them,” he admitted bitterly. “I’m an idiot for getting you involved.”

  One of the wrecking balls reached the room next to them with a terrible smashing sound, followed by the peal of plaster raining down. The wall against which Snow had her back trembled. Snow was trembling too and the Weeder’s description of Nate flashed into his head: like Nate, she was dancing leaf to gusts. There was another explosion in the next room, more violent than the previous one. The Weeder knew time was running out on them. He tried to move but his feet felt leaden. In his heart he knew there was no hope now, and no way out. Their crushed bodies would be discovered by a bulldozer driver clearing away the mountain of rubble. With a great effort the Weeder tried to pull Snow to him. She resisted. Angrily. She pounded on the floor with the palm of her hand. The pencil line scar over her eye turned livid. Tears streamed down her cheeks, leaving tracks on her dust-stained skin. The Weeder brought his mouth close to her ear and shouted out something he had just discovered. “I would have liked to love you.”

  Snow said something to him but it was lost in the explosion of a wrecking ball smashing into the building.

  “What?” the Weeder yelled.

  She brought her lips near his ear. “Tell me who you are,” she yelled in a voice choking with terror.

  He shook his head. The question made no sense. You can’t tell someone who you are by telling them who you are, he thought. Then he realized he had said it out loud.

  She pressed her lips violently against his ear. “Then show me who you are,” she screamed.

  Her words seemed to loosen the knot of fear in the Weeder’s chest. He willed one foot to move, then the other. The wrecking ball reached the wall behind Snow; one instant the wall was there, swaying, cracking, the next it had disintegrated and he could see, through the swirling dust, the teardrop-shaped thing swinging back into the sky. It reached the limit of its arc and hung there and started back toward them. He jerked Snow to her feet and, moving backward, drew her through a door as the wrecking ball smashed into the corner where they had been huddling.

  Grasping her mackinaw, the Weeder pulled her along a hallway. The mere act of putting distance between himself and the teardrops gave him strength. He spotted a small room filled with sinks and pipe joints and pulled her into it. On one wall was a small incinerator door, and right next to it a larger door.

  The Weeder wedged Snow into a corner and opened the larger door. He discovered a shaft with two thick ropes running down through it. He reached out and pulled on one rope to see if it was attached to anything at the top of the shaft; it gave way immediately, but as he pulled it down hand over hand the other rope started up. From the shaft came the grinding, squeaking sound of something mounting. Outside the room the two wrecking balls smashed into the walls of the hallway. The Weeder tugged frantically on the rope. A shelf came into view. He pulled it up until it was level with the bottom of the door. He turned toward Snow, who was staring with vacant eyes at the ceiling quivering over their heads. Plaster rained down. He reached out and gripped the front of her mackinaw and drew her to him, then positioned her so that she was sitting on the edge of the door and slowly folded her onto the shelf.

  One of the teardrops crashed into the wall of the hallway outside the small room. Overhead, a large piece of ceiling broke off and came splintering down behind the Weeder. He started to pull frantically on the rope, sending the shelf and the girl down the shaft. Darts of cold stung the back of his neck and his cheeks. Still pulling on the rope, he looked up. Flakes of snow were slanting in through the hole in the ceiling. There was another explosion outside in the hallway as a teardrop catapulted into a wall. The small room rose and fell under the Weeder’s feet as if it were riding a ground swell. For a second or two he thought the floor would buckle and disintegrate, but it held. The Weeder jerked on the rope but couldn’t make it descend any more. He thought it was stuck—that the girl was trapped in the shaft. Then it dawned on him that the shelf must have reached the basement. He hefted himself onto the lip of the door and swung his legs into the shaft. Grabbing the rope and twining his ankles around it, he started to slide down. The palms of his hands burned, but the sound of the teardrops crashing into the walls above him kept him from breaking his descent. He landed on Snow, who cried out in pain. Above their heads a teardrop crashed into the shaft. The rope jerked up out of the Weeder’s hands and came sliding down on top of him and Snow. The shaft filled with plaster dust. Snow sucked in air in great heaving gasps; she sounded as if she were drowning. In the darkness the Weeder kicked savagely at the walls of the shaft. One of them suddenly gave way. A door opened. Snow spilled through the door and collapsed onto the cement floor of the basement. Groping toward the dim light, the Weeder followed her and slammed the shaft door behind them.

  Far above their heads the thunderclaps, duller, more distant, reverberated as the teardrops continued to hammer away at the building.

  9

  The Admiral was ecstatic. “It is not the kind of thing you believe when it is described to you,” he whispered fiercely into the mouthpiece of the public telephone. “You’d have to see it with your own eyes to fully appreciate it. Your man Friday worked the levers like a man. First, we destroyed the stairwell between the fifth and sixth floors.” The Admiral filled his cheeks with air and mimicked the dry burst of an explosion. “One second it was there, the next it was gone. There was no way they could get down. After that it was only a matter of systematically demolishing the upper story of the building. The walls disintegrated in clouds of dust. I’ve never witnessed anything like it in my life. It was”—he racked his brain for the appropriate word—”teratogenic.”

  “Tera what?”

  The Admiral tore the word into its component parts, savoring each morsel. “The prefix, terato, is from the Greek. It means ‘monster.’ The suffix, genie, means ‘producing.’ Monster producing! You see what I’m reaching for?”

  Wanamaker managed to get another word in edgewise. “You are one hundred percent sure our little problem has been solved?”

  “One hundred and fifty percent! Two hundred even! The workmen will discover their mangled bodies in the rubble when the rest of the building is demolished. They will surely be impossible to identify. If you want my opinion, the police will not know one was a man and one was a woman. Rag dolls. Broken bodies. Limbs, heads, sexual organs all over the place.” The Admiral let out a cackle of high-pitched laughter. “They may not be able to identify the corpses as human. They may think some animals got trapped up there.”

  Wanamaker said, very gently, “Can I have a word with the jackass-of-all-trades?”

  Toothacher was taken aback. “You want to speak to the jackass?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “I’ve already told you everything there is to tell.”

  “I need to talk to him about some housekeeping chores.”

  “Housekeeping chores?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  Wanamaker could hear the Admiral cough several times in confusion. Then he heard Toothacher’s voice, pitched high, almost hysterical in fact, call, “Huxstep, front and center.”

  There was the dull thud of the phone banging against metal. Huxstep came on the line.

  “Yeah?”

  “Can you talk?”

  There was a pause. Wanamaker, his ear glued to his phone, heard the door of the booth slamming.

  “Yeah, I can talk.”

  “What the fuck is going on with you-know-who? He sounds like he flipped his lid.”

  “He’s on a high, is all. It happens when you’re not used to it.”

  Wanamaker thought Huxstep was referring to a drug the Admiral had taken. “Not used to what?”

  Huxstep cleared his throat in emba
rrassment. “Violence.”

  “Oh.”

  “He was real calm while it was going on. Directing traffic, you might say. More to the left. More to the right. But he got sort of carried away when it hit him what had happened. You got to understand, all his wars have been fought out in his head up to now.”

  “Will he be all right?” Wanamaker asked anxiously. The last thing he needed was a crazy retired admiral on his hands.

  “It’ll pass,” Huxstep said. “It almost always does. I’m gonna give him a night on the town to sort of celebrate. Take his mind off it, focus on pleasures of the flesh, like they say.”

  “If there is any chance of him having a breakdown,” Wanamaker warned, “I want him under lock and key.”

  A note of affection crept into Huxstep’s voice. “Don’t go worrying your head about it. I’ll baby-sit him till his pulse is beating normal. Then I’ll bring him in.” Huxstep seemed to be talking to himself now. “A man like him you come across once in a century of Thursdays. Underneath the spit and shine he’s genuine leather. Leave him to me,” he added gruffly. “You-know-who is the keeper of the flame. I’m the keeper of you-know-who.”

  10

  The Weeder sat on the edge of the tub in the upstairs bathroom, holding out his hands, palms up. He turned his head away as Snow, wrapped in a terrycloth robe, dabbed antiseptic on the wounds. She unscrewed the cap from a tube of homeopathic cream and squeezed a gob of it onto each palm. Soaking in a hot bath had calmed her down, though from time to time her lips trembled, her voice cracked, as if she were suddenly remembering, suddenly reliving. “You can start by rubbing your palms together,” she instructed him. “And by telling me what’s going on. Who were those people? And why did they want your money and your life?”

  The Weeder rubbed his hands together and inspected them. A raw burn mark slanted diagonally across each palm.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” Snow reminded him.

  He raised his eyes and looked directly into hers. She turned away and walked across the bathroom—her limp was more pronounced now, probably because she was exhausted—and leaned tiredly against a tiled wall. The white of her bathrobe blended with the white of the tiles, so that all that seemed left of her was her deathly pale hands and face. “If you’re right about what you said before,” she ventured, “they tried to kill me along with you because they assumed you had already told me what you won’t tell me now.” She could see he was wavering. “Just before Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in a river, she wrote something about having gone too far to come back again. Me too—” Snow’s voice faltered. “—I’ve gone too far. If you are offended by invasions of privacy, think of those balls crashing through the walls of that building.”

  He had thought about little else—while they were cringing in the pitch darkness of a windowless basement laundry room listening to the teardrops eating away at the sixth floor; when they tunneled out of the building at nightfall, Snow shaking like a leaf, and cleared the snow off the window of his rented car; when they drove through the silent streets without exchanging a word, the outside sounds muffled, Snow’s teeth chattering from fear, the Weeder’s eyes glued to his rearview mirror.

  Snow emitted a nervous laugh. “In view of what we’ve been through, I invite you to call me what everyone else calls me, which is Snow.”

  The Weeder said, “You’re not going to believe what I tell you. You’ll think I’m making it all up.”

  She smiled one of those smiles she used to hold back the tears. “Try me.”

  And so he told her: about the organization in the government he actually worked for; about Wanamaker and Operations Subgroup Charlie and Stufftingle; about Kabir College and vicious circles of uranium imploding, forming a critical mass, starting an uncontrolled chain reaction, otherwise known as an atomic explosion; about how he had stumbled across it all while trying to settle an old score with Wanamaker; about how he had tried to head off the atrocity by threatening to expose it; how Wanamaker had called in a retired admiral named Toothacher to walk back the cat and plug the leak. Once the Weeder started talking he found it difficult to stop. The emotional strain of the last few days put pressure on the language he used to describe his experiences. Words, phrases spilled from his lips. He sidetracked, backtracked, skipped ahead, drew conclusions and provided the evidence in bits and pieces afterward. “Wanamaker was responsible for her death. If he had shown the slightest remorse, given the faintest indication he was sorry. But he didn’t, did he? And I had to wipe the smug smile off his face. So I invaded his space, his privacy, and found out about Stufftingle. And now he’s trying to invade mine.”

  “Ours.”

  He nodded. “Life is arranged in vicious circles too,” he plunged on. “I knew Wanamaker was on to me, was trying to eliminate me, because I recognized the burly guy in the parking lot, the one who tried to incinerate me—he used to be the Admiral’s driver. I remembered him from when the Admiral came down to lecture at the Farm. His name was something like Hukstep. That’s it. Huxstep, with an x. He used to do arithmetic tricks—he could multiply numbers in his head faster than you could work out the problem on paper. I remember we were all taking a course, it was called Tradecraft, Introduction to. It was a requirement, even for historians, even for future weeders of trivia. They would blindfold us and drop us off at night in a cornfield in the middle of nowhere and tell us to find our way back to the Farm before dawn. I was brought in by state troopers thirty-six hours later. They told us to sneak into a factory producing jet fighter planes and steal anything we could get our hands on. I was arrested by the security people as soon as I put a foot in the door. One thing I did right, though. They told us to follow someone—anyone—who worked on the Farm and report back on where he went, what he did. To this day I don’t know why I picked the Admiral. I followed him two nights running. Two nights running Huxstep drove him to a roadside bar out in the boondocks. It was a pretty seedy place. The Admiral was burning the candle at both ends, so to speak. So I wrote it all up in my report and handed it in to my instructor. The next day the director of the school called me down to the front office. He was reading my report when I walked in. It was two pages long. Succinct. The punctuation was correct. I am very interested in punctuation, which tells you how things are related. You’re not to talk about this report to anyone, the director said. Ever. The Company doesn’t make a habit of washing its dirty linen in public, the director said. The Admiral’s retirement was announced in the newspapers a week later.”

  The Weeder rambled on, chopping the air with his rope-burned hands, talking about how the Company had lost its moral compass; had adopted the tactics of the enemy; had become the enemy. Historians were painfully familiar with the precedents, he said. This was what had happened to the Bolsheviks after their revolution: to fight White terror they invented Red terror. And when Red terror triumphed it became institutionalized. It was no longer a matter of persuading people who disagreed with the Bolshevik point of view but of terrorizing them. Wanamaker’s Operation Stufftingle had to be seen as Company terror, institutionalized. My man Nate, the Weeder said, would turn over in his unmarked grave if he knew about this. It was not what he had put his life on the line for. Was Snow—without thinking he used her name for the first time—was she familiar with the instructions issued by the Provincial Congress for raising an army? No? The Weeder happened to know the passage by heart, had even used it as an epigraph to his dossier on Nate. And he lifted his eyes and recited: “Let our manners distinguish us from our enemies, as much as the cause we are engaged in.” Manners, of course, was to be understood in the old sense of the word, that is, as a reference to the moral aspects of conduct. Socrates, who had a tendency to reduce all philosophy to manners, argued that the greatest wisdom, the best manners, allowed you to differentiate between good and evil. In our day, in our society, manners refer to the way you hold your fork, and the Company, through the good offices of its obedient servant W
anamaker, was able to convince itself that our national interests would be advanced by the seemingly accidental explosion of an atomic bomb in the heart of Tehran.

  The Weeder would have continued if Snow’s great-aunt hadn’t called upstairs, in a voice musical with age, that the soup was as hot as it was going to get. Snow ducked into a bedroom and threw on some clothes and came back to take the Weeder down. “The good part about what happened,” she told him, “is that they must think we’re buried in the rubble of that building, which means we’re safe for a while. It could be weeks before they find out otherwise.”

  “The Ides of March is a week from Tuesday,” the Weeder noted.

  “What has that got to do with anything?” Snow asked.

  “That’s when the bomb is supposed to explode in Tehran.”

  Snow understood what he was driving at. “Unless—”

  “Unless they know I’m alive and will blow the whistle on them if the bomb goes off.”

  “You’re not—”

  The Weeder said, “I don’t see that I have much choice.” And he added with a twisted, abashed smile, “I have my man Nate to think about.”

  11

  Snow’s great-aunt Esther was ninety-two years old, so she claimed when she was invited to give her age. Clicking dental bridges with the tip of her tongue, she held court from the head of the kitchen table, a thick knitted shawl draped over her shoulders to hide her fragility, a brightly colored scarf draped over her head to cover her baldness. “Don’t be so polite—help yourself to more,” she instructed the Weeder, pushing a serving dish in his general direction. She hiccupped once, brought her arthritic fingers up to her mouth and held her breath for a moment. Then she edged her hand away and waited with wide eyes to see if she would hiccup again. When she didn’t a sly smile illuminated her face. “If there’s one thing that doesn’t impress me it’s politeness. You know what they say? They say politeness doesn’t put butter on parsnips. I don’t have the faintest idea why anyone would say that but they do.” She lost her trend of thought, turned sharply to Snow and demanded, “Where was I?”