The Once and Future Spy

by Robert Littell

  I send my most filial duty to my Mother and

  sincere love to my Sisters and am as I ever

  hope to be, in this World and in the Next,

  Your dutiful son

  Nathan

  At dawn the fusiliers led Nate out behind the toolshed to attend to his toilet. A low morning mist covered the ground like a cushion of snow. It reminded Nate that he would never experience winter again, never throw snowballs at his sisters in the fields behind the house in Coventry, never warm his hands before a flaming hearth. He waded through the ankle-deep mist to the rain barrel and splashed water onto his face. The bath had a calming effect on him. Provost Marshal Cunningham turned up soon after. “Who is it gave orders for the condemned spy to be allowed to write letters?” he ranted when one of the fusiliers handed him the two envelopes.

  “It is customary-” the fusilier with the waxed mustache started to explain.

  Cunningham cut him off with a sneer. “Nothing is customary save I make it so.” So saying he tore the letters into halves and into halves again and threw the scraps onto a heap of garbage waiting to be burned.

  The overlapping waves of panic surged against Nate’s heart. “Let me at least have the comfort of a minister,” he said.

  “There will be no letters and no minister,” Cunningham told Nate. He barked at the fusiliers, “We will hang him and be done with it.”

  An army supply wagon drawn by two horses was brought around and Nate, chained hand and foot and guarded by a dozen fusiliers, set off for the Royal Artillery Park opposite the Dove Tavern, about a mile farther along the Post Road. Cunningham, accompanying them on horseback, rode ahead when the Artillery Park came into view to see whether his instructions had been carried out regarding the preparations for a hanging. He was furious when he discovered the artillerymen had only just begun constructing the gibbet. When the supply wagon drew up Cunningham started to issue orders for the condemned man to be chained to a wagon wheel while they waited. At that moment Captain Montresor emerged from the chief engineer’s marquee nearby. He took in what was happening, walked up to Cunningham and offered the spy the protection of his tent. Several artillery officers who had strolled over to take a look at the condemned man were watching. Feeling it would have been awkward to refuse, Cunningham reluctantly consented.

  Montresor helped Nate down from the wagon and led him into his tent. He pulled over a camp chair and gestured for him to sit on it. “Can I offer you a brandy?” Montresor asked.

  Nate, bewildered by the officer’s hospitality, nodded. Montresor poured a stiff brandy and handed Nate the tumbler. With his wrists chained, Nate took it in both hands and tilting his head, downed it in one gulp. Relishing the burning sensation in his throat, he handed the tumbler back to Montresor. “I am beholden to your consideration,” he said.

  A professional soldier who had a secret sympathy for the Colonialists’ cause, Montresor was greatly impressed by the dignity and grace of the young man awaiting execution. “How old are you?” he inquired of Nate.

  “I am twenty-one.”

  Montresor, who was almost twice Nate’s age, shook his head in pity. “You have not yet tasted of life,” he remarked.

  Nate managed a crooked smile. “I have tasted liberty, which is more to be valued than life.”

  From outside the tent came the sounds of the carpenters sawing, hammering. Nate glanced at the open tent flap with a distant look in his eyes. Montresor asked if he wanted another glass of brandy. Nate didn’t respond. Montresor walked over to the flap and looked out. The carpenters were raising the gibbet into place. He turned back to Nate. “I would ease your pain if I could,” he said softly.

  Nate said, “There is something-”

  Montresor approached the camp chair. “If it is within the realm of possibility I would most willingly do it.”

  Nate told how Cunningham had destroyed the letters he had written to his father and his brother. “I am devastated by the dishonor I will bring on my parents when it is discovered their son was hanged as a spy. If I speak a patriot’s speech before they-before my execution, will you convey my words to my countrymen so that it can be said I died a patriot’s death?”

  “I give you my word as a gentleman,” Montresor vowed. “I am due to cross the lines this very evening under a flag of truce to negotiate an exchange of prisoners. I will recount your last words then.”

  Nate felt a pang of conscience at the way he was using the Englishman. But he comforted himself it was in a noble cause. And every truth had many sides. He was showing the Englishman one side, telling him a truth. He said to Montresor, “I thank you with all my heart for this service.”

  “I will do it gladly,” Montresor assured him. “Go meet your fate with peace of mind on this score at least.”

  From somewhere outside an order was bellowed. Scores of soldiers could be heard falling in on parade. A kettledrum struck up an ominous rhythm. Cunningham appeared at the tent flap. “You have run out of time just as I was running out of patience,” he informed the condemned man.

  Nate pushed himself up from the chair. He looked Montresor in the eye for a moment. “I thank you again for the hospitality of your tent. I would take it as a favor if you would bear witness to my execution.”

  “I will,” Montresor agreed in a subdued voice. “God rest your soul.”

  Nate almost smiled. “I think there is a good chance He will. I count on it.”

  With that Nate, walking with as firm a step as the chains attached to his ankles permitted, left the tent. The sun was high and incandescent. Squinting, Nate looked at it not as if he would never see it again but as if he had never seen it before. Its warmth on his skin felt painfully delicious. A hundred or so artillerymen were drawn up in two formations on either side of the gibbet. Several dozen civilians stood behind the artillerymen. Others, attracted by the sound of the kettledrum, were wandering over from The Sign of the Dove; some still held tankards of ale in their hands. Cunningham prodded the condemned man in the back with his fingertips. Nate took several deep breaths and started toward the gibbet, toward the noose dangling from it.

  Nate well remembered the execution he had witnessed on the bowling green, remembered the spittle dribbling from the quivering lower lip of the condemned man, remembered thinking, If it ever comes to that, I swear to God I will never lose control of myself. And he raised his chin, raised his head high, straightened his shoulders and continued on as if he had no reluctance to get where he was going.

  A dray had been parked directly under the gibbet. The fusilier with the waxed mustache took hold of Nate’s elbow. “God bless you, boy,” he whispered under his breath as he helped him up onto the dray.

  Nate obliged himself to look around. He saw the noose dangling inches from his head, felt an icy hand lightly caress his spine. He raised his eyes to a pewter sky, to a pewter God. A moment more, he told himself, and it will be over. Only give me the dose of courage I need to get through it with dignity. He struggled to keep his limbs from trembling, his heart from sinking under the weight of pure fear. He let his eyes drift back to the crowd. He spotted Molly’s slave, John Jack, off to one side. His face was a mask of agony. Seeing he had caught Nate’s eye, John Jack nodded vigorously and then brought a hand up to his face to wipe away the tears. Nate nodded back once, turned his head, was relieved to see Captain Montresor standing stiffly next to a rank of artillerymen. He nodded at Montresor. The captain lifted his cap in salute.

  The crowd grew deathly quiet. Cunningham climbed onto the dray, fitted the noose over Nate’s head and tightened it around his neck. Nate tried to speak. His mouth worked but no words emerged. Dear God in heaven, he thought. Help me. The code passage from Addison’s play was on his tongue, the lines Cato recites when he sees the body of his son Marcus, and Nate opened his mouth and flung them into the deathly still midmorning air. “How beautiful is death when earned by virtue! What pity is it that we can die but once to serve our country!”

  The b
eat of the kettledrum quickened. Cunningham jumped off the dray and motioned to the two fusiliers holding the traces. They started forward, pulling the dray with them. Nate tiptoed along the floorboards to keep his footing, then ran out of dray and dangled from the noose. A muted sigh, an exhaling of many breaths, came from the crowd as Nate danced at the end of the cord, which was slowly strangling him. The fusilier with the waxed mustache started to wrap his arms around the jerking knees of the hanging man but Cunningham, smiling cruelly, waved him off.

  Here is a post scriptum:

  JOHN JACK CAME BACK FROM Manhattan barely able to speak. Gradually Molly pried the details out of him. He had seen the shadows of birds racin’ ‘cross the ground, had looked up, but there wasn’t no birds, he told her, there was jus’ Mister Nathan dancin’ at the bitter end of a rope. After a god-awful long while the dancing it stopped. Poor Mister Nathan was left to twist gently in the breezes coming in off the river.

  For a while Molly, who had dreamed the night before that life was stirring in her womb, tried to sob; but a voice in her warned that if she started she might never be able to stop. Later, beyond tears, numbness set in. She dipped her quill into the inkwell and wrote on a blank page of her diary:

  Septembre the 22nd

  Ambuf‘d, again, by greef. Nate hang’d

  in Artillery Park. He liv’d Defir’d and

  died Lament’d. A Friend I sot much by

  but he is Gone …

  23

  Fargo telephoned Snow from Washington every day. All he ever reached was her answering machine. “The doctors are quite pleased with the way things are proceeding,” he recorded one day. “Your friend is eating well. He’s even put on some weight. I have to tell you, Snow, that they’ve diagnosed schizophrenia, but there have been breakthroughs in the treatment of schizophrenia. He’s in very professional hands. There is no reason under the sun to be pessimistic about the outcome of therapy.”

  “He’s getting along just fine, Snow,” Fargo reported to the machine another time. “All things considered, he’s in good spirits and eager to get started with his analysis. Everyone is extremely hopeful.”

  A third message from Fargo said, “He’s under sedation, naturally, but the doctors think they can gradually decrease the dose as therapy proceeds.”

  The next time Fargo phoned he found a message addressed specifically to him on the answering machine. “If this is Fargo,” Snow’s recorded voice challenged, “tell me this: Have you seen him with your own eyes?”

  When Snow played back the tape she could hear Fargo exhaling in frustration. “The answer is no, I haven’t seen him with my own eyes. But I’ve talked to people who have-his assistant, Marvin Wesker, for one. That buddy of his from his college days, Roger Wanamaker, went out to visit him. The Attorney General has taken a personal interest in the case. He’s spoken on the phone with the doctor in charge. If everyone is lying about Sibley, then our government is a lie, our whole system is a lie.” Fargo hesitated. Snow could visualize him shaking his head in annoyance. Finally he spoke again. “I hope this convinces you.”

  It didn’t. Snow felt trapped between two persuasive truths. She needed to know which truth was invented and which was real. The next day she took a bus into Cambridge and went directly to the Widener Library. She still had a valid library card from the time, a year before, when she had audited a course on the history of photography. She decided to begin with the word Kabir.

  There was nothing under Kabir in The New York Times Index. On a hunch she checked a recent guidebook on Iran. The index listed “Amir Kabir College, formerly the Polytechnic College of Tehran University.” Snow went back to The New York Times Index, found a listing for the Polytechnic College. There had been an article on it in the Times in January 1982, and another in March 1984. Snow noted the dates and the page numbers, signed out the microfilms and threaded the first one through the viewing machine. She flipped through the newspaper until she came to the article. It described nervousness in the American intelligence community over rumors circulating in the Middle East that the Polytechnic College had been transformed into a nuclear research center. The second article was more specific. It cited informed sources as saying that the college’s five-megawatt research reactor was believed to be operating twenty-four hours a day. The sources speculated that the reactor’s fuel load of five kilograms of enriched uranium might one day be diverted to nuclear weapon production.

  Kabir, at least, was not a figment of Silas’s imagination.

  Tracking down Stufftingle proved more difficult. The librarian shrugged bony shoulders, shook spring-shaped locks of hair, decided that all she could suggest was for Snow to go through the indexes of books on the subject. She hoped Snow wasn’t pressed for time because there would be hundreds. She gave Snow the appropriate Dewey decimal number off the top of her head. Snow installed herself at a table in the stacks, carried over an armful of books on atomic energy, nuclear fission, the Los Alamos project, and related material, and began checking the indexes for the word Stufftingle. She kept at it all morning and half the afternoon. She was beginning to have difficulty focusing when she opened a thin book entitled Secret, by Wesley W. Stout. She almost didn’t believe it when she came across a reference to Stufftingle in the index. She thumbed excitedly through the book to page thirty-nine. The words Oak Ridge and burlesque secret document jumped out at her. She read on:

  They are taking plumscrate, raw plumscrate mind you, and putting it into ballisportle tanks … Next, this is taken to the sarraputing room … At this point, of course, is when they add thungborium, the ingredient which causes the entire masterfuge to Knoxify. … At 12:20 on the third Tuesday night of each month, 800 men known as shizzlefrinks, because their brains have been siphoned from their heads, are lined up in single file, each given two ingots of ousten-stufftingle (name of the finished product) and away they march …

  Not only was there a Kabir College. There was a Stufftingle too!

  Snow caught an evening plane to Washington, installed herself in a hotel at the airport and checked the telephone directory. There was no one in it named Toothacher, either in Washington proper or the surrounding countryside. She tried to remember the name of Silas’s assistant but it wouldn’t come to her. Snow’s mother had claimed that the best way to remember something was to think about something else. Following her mother’s advice, Snow lay down on the double bed and closed her eyes and concentrated on Silas. She was able to duplicate his voice in her head, the way it lingered over syllables at the end of a sentence when he wasn’t sure of himself, the way the words came in a rush when he felt he had something to prove. She remembered the cord burns on his palms, remembered telling him, “Your life lines have been erased.”

  Snow sat up abruptly. “Marvin Wesker,” she murmured. “That’s his name.” She grabbed the telephone directory and leafed through to the W?’s. Sure enough there was a listing under Wesker, M. She scratched the address on a notepad next to the phone and bolted from the room.

  Three quarters of an hour later she found herself ringing the doorbell of a fourth-floor apartment near the Buffalo Bridge at Q Street. The sound of loud music came from behind the door. The volume was turned down. The door opened the width of the safety chain. A young man with a thin, humorless face and enormous ears with wire spectacles hooked over them said, “Yeah?”

  “You don’t know me,” Snow began. “My name is Matilda Snowden. I’m a friend-a good friend, actually-of Silas’s.”

  Wesker let his gaze drift from her head to her feet and then work its way back up to her head again. He clearly liked what he saw because he cracked a smile and announced, “Any friend of Silas, et cetera, et cetera. Come on in.”

  He motioned her to a sofa, asked if she could do with a drink, and when she said no thank you, settled into a chair facing her. “Do you recognize the music?” Wesker asked, nodding toward a tape deck in a bookcase. “It’s a golden oldie, ‘California DreaminV The Mamas and the Papas. If I can’t
get you something to drink, what can I do for you?”

  “I was told that you’d been to see Silas.”

  “Who gave you that tidbit of information?”

  “A friend of mine who works in the Justice Department. His name is Fargo. He said he’d talked to you on the phone.”

  “I may have talked to a guy from the Justice Department,” Wesker said carefully. “But I never told him I’d seen Silas. I told him I’d been out to the, eh, hospital.”

  “You went out to the hospital and you didn’t see Silas?”

  “Hey, I don’t want to get you into trouble or anything, but I’m going to have to report that you came around asking about Silas like it is.”

  “Report me if you have to. It won’t change anything. How come you didn’t see Silas?”

  “He’d had a bad night. He was under sedation. The doctor said it wasn’t such a good idea to visit him right then.”

  “Did the doctor tell you what’s wrong with Silas, Mr. Wesker?”

  “Only that he was sick.”

  “Sick?”

  Wesker fidgeted uncomfortably in his chair. “Sick in the head,” he said. “Listen, why don’t you go and see him yourself?”

  Snow said, “They won’t tell me where he is.”

  “Hey, if you’re really a friend of his you know who he works for, huh? And who he works for, its board of directors so to speak, they get very jumpy when one of their employees has a more or less nervous breakdown. It’s no state secret that the Company has state secrets which it has got to protect, huh? If it will make you feel any better I can tell you the hospital is as modern as they come. I’m thinking of going out again the weekend after next weekend. I’m on the list of people who are allowed to visit. That’s because there’s nothing Silas can say that I’m not cleared to hear. You want me to give him a message?”