Sleeper Spy

by William Safire

  “You think Clauson got drunk and fell on his face in the water, Spook?” The animal, trained by a master skilled at resisting interrogation and fooling a polygraph, maintained a discreet silence. “Of course not. Nothing happens by accident in this dodge. So what I am going to do now is to go see his boss, who is an old buddy of mine, and tell her not to jump to easy conclusions the way state troopers do. You’re going to have to wait in the car until I can take you to the pound. You helped me out, but you’re not my goddam responsibility.”

  He consulted a road map that told him he was near Fort Ritchie; good place to be near if you’re an intelligence analyst calculating the likelihood of war. Irving made a mental note to remember how to get back here in case of nuclear attack, which nobody worried about anymore. He found his way back down to Frederick, continued down I-270, and turned off at the sign that said CIA on the George Washington Parkway. He drove up to the fence at the complex and said to a guard at the gate, “I don’t have an appointment but I need to see the Director.” Before the guard could press the I’ve-got-a-nut-at-the-gate button, he said, “Ring the secretary to Dorothy Barclay and say Irving Fein is here and wants to see her. You’ll see, they know me.”

  The guard made the call, was surprised at the quick okay, but said, “You can’t bring a dog in here. Nobody can, not even if you work here.”

  “Not even a seeing-eye dog?”

  “How can you be blind and drive?”

  “I’ll lock him in the car in the visitors’ parking. It’ll be okay, I’ll get a pass from the Director, we’re very close.” He sped ahead before the guard could make a decision or a call.

  “One of your boys was knocked off in a very skillful way.”

  “Walter Clauson had a drinking problem,” Dorothy Barclay said, tapping the dossier on her desk. “He was a respected analyst, with the Agency for over thirty years, and so we made allowances. But he was going to be retired, or else riffed, this year. And his history of alcohol abuse was not inconsistent with the accident the Maryland authorities say took place at his cabin.”

  “I’m telling you it was no accident.”

  “Were you there, Irving? The troopers on the scene filed a preliminary report, I have the fax here—”

  “The troopers never got off the porch when I was inside Clauson’s cabin this morning searching through his stuff.”

  Less certainly, she looked at her fax. “It doesn’t say anything about any press interest, much less a reporter being there—”

  “I was there an hour ago. I’ve got the dead man’s big black dog in my car outside—you want me to bring him in?”

  “I believe you, Irving. And your hunches are legendary. But it would be wrong for me to launch an investigation on the basis of your hunch. The FBI is looking into it, I understand. I spoke to the Director as you were on your way up here from the gate, and he says it’s unlikely there was any foul play.”

  “You stick to that story, Director Barclay. Don’t budge an inch. Don’t investigate. And when it comes out that you covered up the murder of one of your own veteran employees, you’ll be ridden out of this place on a rail, and the President will say he doesn’t even know you, and that’s the last time they’ll appoint a woman to this job, much less a lesbian, until they turn this place into a funny farm.”

  “Irving, what do you want from my life? I’m trying to keep this agency’s nose clean for the first time in its life. An old dirty-tricks operative who’s a known drunk is found facedown in the creek. And I’m supposed to turn this place upside down looking into every operation he’s ever been a part of, because you had an appointment with him to go fishing? Give me a break.”

  He’d never told Dorothy about any fishing plans. “How do you know I had an appointment with Clauson?”

  The reply was slow coming. “There was no tap on your phone, only on his.” She was immediately on the defensive. “Don’t get me wrong, Irving—there was nothing improper about him being a source for you, or for you two to plan to go fishing or whatever. I’m all for male bonding.”

  “Clauson was on to a sleeper agent, and so am I, and so is the KGB, and it offends my sniffer that your agency wants no part of it.”

  “Counterintelligence belongs to the FBI, not to us. Go talk to them.”

  “Dotty, this is Irving Fein you’re talking to, remember?”

  “You knew me when the world was young,” she said, sighing elaborately. “You suppressed a story that could have hurt me as a lawyer. You made me a hero in the President’s eyes only last month, and I love you dearly, and I’ll treat you like no other journalist in the world. Nobody else can walk in here off the street and see the Director of Central Intelligence on demand.”

  Only slightly mollified, Irving muttered, “Had a hard time getting the dog past the gate.”

  “We’ll have a special pass made with his picture on it. Forgive me, Irving, but the story about the sleeper agent with the huge fortune is another red mercury hoax, and any involvement with CIA personnel would be a great embarrassment. Deal us out. And on Clauson, let the law take its course. I’ll attend his funeral if you like, give him a posthumous medal.”

  Huge fortune? That was the second time she’d let something slip, and it occurred to him that this very smart lady was not letting anything slip. He figured she was telling him her agency had an interest in all this, and it didn’t bother her that he and his friends were poking around, but she had to keep her official hands off. Did she know about the sleeper and the huge fortune from Clauson, or had Clauson gotten it from the Agency and leaked it to a reporter for reasons of his own? Was she making a record of this conversation for Congress to cover her ass?

  It was Irving’s turn for an elaborate sigh. “I’ll do what I can for you, kiddo, when the story breaks about an Agency man murdered and an FBI-CIA cover-up, and all the homophobe senators and bleeding-heart editorial writers come after your scalp.” He rose to go. “You live in an apartment here, or a house?”

  “An apartment in McLean.”

  “Big and roomy?”

  “Not especially, you know me. Why?”

  “No backyard?”

  “It’s on the sixth floor. Irving, what are you getting at?”

  “Can you use a big black dog? Better security than any of your goons.”

  “No. You keep the dog. What’s its name?”

  “I’m thinking of renaming him Feliks.”

  Dorothy Barclay shook her head, ushering him out. “Felix is a cat.”

  POUND RIDGE

  “You’re not going to wish that mutt on me. This house is not a kennel.”

  “It’s a nice big place, acres and acres, even a pond, and besides, you need protection.” Irving had left the dog outside, sniffing around, while he tried to wish him on Viveca in the library of her Westchester mansion.

  “You drove him all the way up here from Langley, Virginia?”

  “Seven hours. Couldn’t put a dog in a box on a plane. And don’t call him a mutt, he’s a purebred Newfoundland.” He pointed out the window. “Look at that coat, look at those lines. He could be a champ. And watch out, he inhales people who call him a mutt.”

  She could not understand Fein. One day he was savaging his closest associate; next day he was Dog’s Best Friend, trying to find a home for the pet of a source who had died.

  “Sorry. I once had a Yorkie, about three pounds,” she said, “but she was too much trouble. That shaggy black monster outside must be forty times bigger. Big dogs scare me, especially males.” And they reminded her of her father in his heyday, who was so proud of his pair of Great Danes.

  “His name is Spook.” At her sad and final shake of the head, Irving shrugged. “I’ll drop him off at the pound. They’ll dispose of him in a humane way, with an injection.” That was to make her feel like a murderess, and was more like the Irving Fein she knew.

  “The guy who died was the one who steered me to Dominick,” he said, down to business. “They must have done some wor
k together. The CIA man wouldn’t pull the name out of a hat.”

  “He’s the same one that we sent Edward back to see?”

  “Yeah. See what your pal in Memphis can tell you about Walter Clauson.”

  She let “your pal in Memphis” go by; if Irving was afflicted with unfounded jealousy, as Edward suspected, she would treat it as a compliment. “How did he die?”

  “Some dumb fishing accident. No foul play, the cops say. He drank a lot, like most of the old spooks.”

  “You look like you could use one.” She poured them both a glass of wine.

  He took out his notebook, riffled through till he came to notes he wanted, and said, “I’m breaking my head over something Clauson told me the night before he died. Let me run it past you, see if it rings a bell. He wanted to fish at Friends’ Creek.”

  “Quaker,” she said. No bell there.

  “ ‘Your current endeavor has become like an albatross around my neck,’ ” he read from his notes. “Mean anything to you?”

  “Just that it’s something weighing him down. It’s an old expression about bad luck. That’s what an albatross is supposed to be, I think.”

  “Um. ‘I want to regale you as if you were a wedding guest.’ ”

  She focused on “regale”: “That means tell a joke, doesn’t it? Cause gales of laughter.”

  “Could be.” No progress; she wished she could be more helpful, because this was evidently important to him. So far, her contribution to this story had been minimal. Lucky thing she had a contract.

  “ ‘As if’ what?” she asked.

  “ ‘As if you were a wedding guest.’ What goes on at weddings that—”

  “The Wedding Guest. That’s from a famous poem, and it has to be right here.” She went to her father’s books on the wall.

  He looked at his notes. “By Samuel Taylor Coleridge?”

  “That’s it—‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’ ”

  Irving did not know that one. She knew him to have had an eclectic education, reaching wide and deep but leaving great gaps; poetry was apparently one. “So who is the Wedding Guest?”

  “He’s the person who gets told the tale of horrible sufferings by the Ancient Mariner.” Viveca, hefting a leather-bound volume of Coleridge’s poems, turned to the table of contents, then to the poem. “And here’s the albatross. I forgot, it was a bird that symbolized heaven, and the Mariner killed it with an arrow, and all the terrible things flowed from that.” She closed the book. “I know the end by heart. ‘He went like one that hath been stunned / And is of sense forlorn: / A sadder and a wiser man, / He rose the morrow morn.’ ”

  Irving winced. “Clauson said that something I did made him a sadder and a wiser man.”

  “Then Clauson was the Ancient Mariner, with the albatross from heaven that he killed hanging around his neck, telling his awful tale to you, the Wedding Guest.”

  “I’m not good at this. I wish to hell these Agency types wouldn’t show off, playing literary games, when there’s important stuff at stake.”

  “Maybe they’re influenced by spy novels,” she said.

  “Nah. It all started with Angleton, who published a poetry magazine in the thirties and never let anybody forget it.”

  She broached the delicate subject. “What was it you did, Irving, or failed to do, that made your source sadder and wiser?”

  That seemed to trouble him. “I stirred up some trouble at the Fed, I guess. It was just an idea, to stir the pot. Never figured it might lead to this.” He stopped looking guilty and snapped his fingers in frustration. “He was on to something about the sleeper, and the DCI wouldn’t listen, and he was about to spill to me.”

  He was holding back; Edward, who also knew the dead man, would know more about it. She reluctantly agreed to board the dog for a few days while Irving made other arrangements. That cheered him up some. He opened the back gate of his four-wheel-drive vehicle and left her two twenty-five-pound sacks of dog meal, a new leather leash, a stainless-steel feeding dish, a yard-long knotted rawhide bone, and a red rubber chew-toy that squeaked.

  The dog trotted a few steps after the car, stopped when catching up became impossible, turned, looked at her, sniffed, and squatted to pee on the front lawn.

  “That’s all you know about dogs,” she said to the disappearing car. “This one’s a bitch.”

  NEW YORK

  In a lifetime of giving the most elegant power-dinner parties in Manhattan—orchestrated, themed soirées to which invitations were more coveted than the highest-society functions—Ace McFarland had never before been faced with this particular invitation and seating problem.

  He had always been scrupulous about boy-girl-boy-girl seating and was determined to remain so. In the aerie of a Park Avenue triplex that was his dining room, an odd number of people at a table could never be permitted. Having people of the same sex seated alongside each other was inelegant. If, at the last minute, some guest called in sick or was unable to land at any of the city’s socked-in airports, Ace had a substitute single male or female standing by.

  A social conundrum: what did the thoughtful host do when the Director of Central Intelligence was a famously avowed lesbian? To invite another female homosexual would be to throw off the boy-girl seating; to invite a straight single man, or even a gay single man, might be seen as inappropriate by the lesbian invitee. Ace wished he were the agent for “Miss Manners,” whose modern etiquette books probably had a CD-ROM dimension that her agent had overlooked.

  After much deliberation, the full-disclosure solution for his modern seating problem came to him: he notified the Director’s secretary by telephone that the Director would soon receive a formal invitation to a dinner party at which her partner would be one of the two guests of honor, the Director of the Russian Federation’s Security Ministry economic section, Nikolai Andreyevich Davidov. She would be the other guest of honor.

  Fortunately, Davidov was single. The young Latvian woman that Irving Fein asked be put on the guest list was—as Irving mysteriously put it—“on a parallel visit” with the KGB executive, and could therefore be balanced off by another single male, namely Irving. Viveca Farr, invited with “and guest,” nominated a Memphis banker named Edward Dominick, who Ace presumed was presentable. The Republican co-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Harry Evashevsky, would come with his wife, and that couple could ethically hitch a ride from Washington to New York on the government plane required for Director Barclay, who was not permitted to fly commercial. That travel arrangement would both save the government money and provide mutual cover in case the United States and Russia again came into confrontation and fraternizers during the thaw became suspect.

  As a widower for many years, and as the arts-social-business icon who could respectably escort a woman fifty years his junior, Ace would enliven the table with his traditional choice of the season’s most celebrated actress. For this occasion, he chose Ari Covair, the sensually emaciated French import who had starred as the heroine of the heavy-grossing movie based on Jim Lehrer’s espionage novel Blue Hearts. She could legitimately say she wasn’t a spy but she played one in the movies.

  For the publisher to bear the cost of this admirable admixture, Ace went a level higher than the fellow in the publishing house who had signed the contract for the Farr-Fein book about the sleeper. A source of Irving’s had tipped the reporter to the useful tidbit that the chairman of the publisher’s parent corporation, Unimedia, was in town from Frankfurt. This piquant bit of business-social data, when passed along casually by Irving, had been seized on by Ace. Karl von Schwebel was also a director of the Bundesbank and conversant with Russia’s economic difficulties, of interest to the Russian guest of honor.

  Von Schwebel’s wife, whose family fortune was the base of his empire, was probably a frump. But Ace already had glamorous celebrities in Viveca and Ari, with a possible third interesting woman in the Latvian reporter. Evangeline Evashevsky was a notoriously good listene
r. One frump could stand as contrast to all of them.

  The rectangular table was set for twelve. That was the perfect number, in Ace’s mind, for three separate dinner-table conversations running simultaneously, followed by some charming speeches unifying the dozen diverse people present. He looked over the menu card to make certain the passion-fruit sorbet had been substituted for the mango sorbet of the last party, which he thought lacked the necessary subtle tang. The superagent nodded, satisfied, at the passion-fruit listing on the engraved menu and proceeded to lay out the place cards. The order of battle was crucial to a dinner party’s success.

  Clockwise from Ace at the head of the table: the actress Ari was to his immediate left, next to her Davidov, then the expected von Schwebel frump, then the man from Memphis Viveca was bringing, and the senator’s nice wife. Irving was at the far other end of the table. Then coming up toward Ace was the girl from Latvia, Karl von Schwebel, Viveca, the senator, and Dorothy Barclay in the place of honor on the host’s right.

  That way Viveca would get Senator Evashevsky on one side and the global media baron on the other; Davidov, though stuck with the frump on his left, would be more than compensated by having the delectable French morsel on his right, and would be directly across from the senator; and Irving would have the senator’s wife and the girl from Latvia he wanted to be next to on his left. Ace would be able to share his attention with the piquant Ari on his left and the substantive Dorothy Barclay on his right. A good group, nicely mixed. The least desirable seat—between the frump and the senator’s nice wife—was to be occupied by the Memphis fellow, but that was the price one paid for being a nobody.

  Ace chose a Piesporter Goldtröpfchen for the first course, to please the German with “tiny little drops of gold,” and a Château Margaux to go with the lamb, to please himself. This would not be a drinking crowd, however, as most of the diners would be fearful of letting something slip or missing somebody else’s hint; the waiters were ready with bottles of Pellegrino for the sparkling water fanciers, Evian for those who preferred still water to run deep. Taittinger would do for the champagne toast; absent a major anniversary, Dom Pérignon would be ostentatious.