The Vixen

by Francine Prose

  “I have my constitutionally guaranteed God-given individual right to keep my dirty little secrets, and you have your constitutionally guaranteed God-given individual right to keep yours. And fuck you if you don’t like it. Is that a good thing or not?” Warren’s tone had grown increasingly hectoring. I grabbed the chair arms to steady my hands.

  “I guess it’s a good thing?” I said. “I mean, I know—”

  “Wrong! It’s good and bad. Want to know a story your friend Preston probably didn’t tell you?”

  “Sure.” What else could I say?

  “Okay then. This was right after the war, when everything was fresh and clean and just brimming with meaning and . . . purpose. I had a dream assignment, working with the squad that tracked down looted Old Master paintings and restored them to their rightful owners. You know about that, I assume.”

  I nodded.

  “And I assume you also know that tired philosophy-classroom chestnut: The museum is on fire. An old lady is in the gallery, and you have to choose which to save, the Rembrandt or the old lady. Your average high school sophomore can chew on that forever while their teachers take a well-deserved nap.

  “Well, I got to have it both ways, and the building wasn’t even burning. The old widow had the Rembrandt. Her husband was a celebrity Nazi who amassed a ton of stolen art. I held a gun to the ancient relict’s head and asked where the painting was, and she told me. I returned it to the nice Jewish family who’d fled to Shanghai, where I happened to have business, so it worked out. I hand-delivered the painting. I saved the old lady and the Rembrandt. Who wouldn’t want that on his résumé? Everything I’ve done for the government has been like that—like saving the Rembrandt and the old lady.”

  I said, “But nothing was burning.”

  “What?”

  “The museum wasn’t burning, the old lady wasn’t burning, the painting wasn’t burning, nothing was burning—”

  “Six million of your people were burning. Or had recently burned. Have I gotten the figures wrong? And how do we measure the deaths of eighty-seven Albanians against that statistic?”

  It was unfair. It was wicked. Warren was using the Holocaust to win an argument. To make a point. But I didn’t object. I didn’t have the strength. Six million versus eighty-seven. I’d depleted my reserves of courage when I’d asked about Anya.

  I couldn’t meet Warren’s watery blue eyes, which, before I looked away, seemed to express consummate understanding and mockery of anyone weak enough to need understanding.

  “Please don’t tell me you’re one of those idiots who object on principle to our intelligence community. What we do to protect you. Don’t tell me you’re one of those infants who believe that the Soviet Union is going to let us live our peaceful, productive, blissfully capitalist American lives, and everyone will play nice and share the wealth and the natural resources? Each according to his needs. You do know what’s been going on in Russia? The Doctors’ Plot and the show trials and more slaughter than Hitler’s wildest dreams. The mass imprisonments and disappearances and the gulag and the massacre of the Polish people and starvation and—”

  I said, “I’m not a Communist. I’m certainly not a Stalinist. Far from it, actually, sir.”

  Sir? Who says sir? A soldier. Scout’s honor.

  “So we agree. Where we differ is in how we view our personal responsibility for preserving our cherished American freedoms. It’s not your fault that your generation takes everything for granted. It’s been handed to you on a platter. Whereas my generation knows that you have to fight for it, fight with your lives, and we’re still fighting. We’re like sharks. If we stop fighting, we die.”

  “Moving,” I said. “If sharks stop moving, they die. Supposedly.”

  “You’re a clever one, aren’t you. Let’s not quibble about details. You young men will never see what we saw. And once you’ve seen the horror, you can’t unsee it. You boys will never know how quickly and easily brutality can take over.”

  I saw the photo of my father and the dead Japanese soldiers.

  “I’m surprised that no one at Harvard approached you about working for us. Though since your friends the Rosenbergs spoiled things for everyone, things have changed. They’re casting a smaller net.”

  “Approached me how? Who is us?” The first question was real. I knew the answer to the second.

  Warren refilled our glasses. “To Harvard. In vino veritas.” He downed his whiskey, and I did the same.

  “Us is the big boys installed at our dear alma mater. Quite a few Agency guys were on the faculty. In senior positions. Academics at the top of their game can do a lot of lucrative consulting. In my day the Agency recruited everyone with decent grades, that is, everyone from certain family backgrounds, regardless of how well they’d done in school. Really, who cares about grades? The vetting depended on what sort of people you came from. Old New England families and Midwestern aristocracy—they siphoned off those gene pools first.

  “If that wasn’t who you were, they might ask a few more questions. If they decided to interview you at all. Your mother’s friendship with Ethel Rosenberg would have surfaced rather early in a background check. Come on. Don’t act so surprised. Girlish astonishment is not an attractive look on a full-grown man.”

  No one knew about Mom and Ethel.

  I said, “They weren’t actually friends. They lived in the same building.”

  “Close enough,” said Warren.

  “How do you know?”

  “A little birdie told me. I’m sure you wouldn’t want me to blow the little birdie’s cover.”

  As far as I knew, Uncle Maddie was the only person except for my parents who might have known. For a split second I almost laughed at the thought of someone referring to my enormous uncle as a little birdie. I could almost imagine Maddie revealing Mom’s connection to Ethel as one of his sour, gossipy jokes. But that would have meant bringing the Rosenbergs literally too close to home. Anyway, superspy Warren must have had many ways of uncovering secrets without extorting them from my curmudgeonly uncle.

  “Here’s an interesting fact. A chapter in my story, a footnote to yours. Want to know who recruited me?” Warren tipped back his head and shut his eyes. “God help us. You know we could both go to jail for even having this conversation.”

  Mr. Big Mouth, Preston had called him. Señor Boca Grande.

  “Or maybe we don’t go to jail. We wind up in the nuthouse with Preston. There are some things we’ve sworn to take to our graves. But I say, hey, let’s celebrate our Viking heroes as their longboats head into the sunset. Every foot soldier, every lumpen draftee, gets thanked for his service. But the brave guys who work in secret also deserve our gratitude and respect. Yes or no?”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “Maybe the reason I’m even minimally surprised that you weren’t tapped is that I was recruited by your old friend Robertson Crowley.”

  Robertson Crowley. Of course. That afternoon when I’d waited to see Crowley, when I’d watched my classmates emerge, one by one, from his office, I’d been right about him spending so much longer with other students, younger versions of Warren but some women too. It was an uncomfortable memory, a fleeting impression I didn’t want confirmed. Robertson Crowley. The travels. The explorations. The stories. The acolytes and disciples.

  Warren put his fingers to his temples. “Let me recall how they put it, those old guys. They’d say, ‘Would you like to work for our government in a really interesting way?’”

  I said, “Professor Crowley wasn’t my friend.”

  “Just yanking your chain, old boy. It’s a figure of speech. Certainly you didn’t imagine that Crowley’s teaching salary or his anemic book sales or his modest inheritance was paying for all that adventure travel and research? Do you know what it costs to buy a reindeer-hide tent in Lapland? To feed the great-grandchildren of the Sicilian witches before they’ll say one word? To bribe the Albanian lesbians not to kick your ass? Not cheap, even
then. The one thing Karl Marx got right was: Follow the money. Which in Crowley’s case led straight to Capitol Hill. He needed a supplemental income. Of course that was in their glory days, before they tightened the budget, or learned to use money to control anyone whose leash they enjoyed yanking. A hardworking literary publisher, for example.

  “But it was never about the travel and research opportunities . . . or the financial support. Crowley believed in the mission, as I always have. As I do. He and I believe in keeping order and peace in the world. Is there anything wrong with that? Is that mad? Tell me, dear boy, do you believe that’s un-American?”

  “But why Sicily? Albania? Lapland? Crowley wasn’t working in Moscow.”

  “Do you imagine that our beloved professor chose the places he did because he wanted to hear a whopping fabulous fairy tale about a feral baby and a werewolf? How many stories do we need about princes turning into frogs? The stories went into his books and his teaching. But those countries were chosen for him because they were strategic. Our people had questions about their people, local government, a military buildup, information more crucial than a haunting by somebody’s dead girlfriend’s restless ghost. Not that he didn’t bring back some great yarns. But they were . . . gravy, you could say. His quote-unquote research in Albania laid the groundwork for me when I went there later. You young men will never see what we saw, the wholesale murder and suffering that totalitarianism can inflict. And you will never have our resolve, our determination to keep it from happening here.”

  At what cost? I thought. You were a murderer too. But I said nothing. It would have made Warren think less of me, if that was still possible.

  “Revenge. Dear old Crowley meant every word he said about the sweetness of revenge. If there was one thing Crowley loved, it was making the bad guys pay. And pay dearly. If you were plotting against America and Crowley found out, God help you.”

  I didn’t want to know what pay dearly meant. I didn’t want to know what Robertson Crowley did. I should have listened to his lectures more closely. Revenge wasn’t just a plot turn for him, not just a story line. It was a moral imperative. A logical plan of action. Permission for mass murder. I’d understood nothing about those Viking sagas. I never asked myself why human beings wanted stories about repaying murder with murder, about why a kinsman’s death must be repaid in blood.

  Warren let a moment pass, long enough to make it clear that he was in charge of the silence.

  “No wonder he loved Albanians. Those crazy bastards live for revenge. Their law code is based on it. I’m still looking over my shoulder for that Albanian pretending to be an Italian waiter who’s been searching for me all this time. Or some ancient dead lesbian’s widow. You’re not working for them, are you, Simon?”

  Had Warren lost his mind? I was definitely not working for the Albanian sworn virgins.

  “Joking,” Warren said. “At the end of his class, as you doubtless remember, we were supposed to go to him for advice. I was flattered when he closed the door, proud when he asked if I’d thought about serving my country in a very interesting way. It couldn’t have been less hush-hush or more straightforward. Later, of course, I understood that these end-of-semester conferences were mostly about recruitment. Though not, as it happened, yours.”

  Warren turned his palms up. Look. He had nothing to hide.

  “And that was it?” I said. “You went to work for the government. And publishing has been a . . . sideline? A front?”

  “I’ve never thought of it like that. With such a crude formulation. What is the front, what is the back? What is the middle? What tedious vulgar distinctions.” He walked over to the bookcase, and when he turned around to face me, he seemed to have grown taller, younger, more vital.

  “Guess,” he said. “Take a guess. What single achievement in my long career am I most proud of?” He hooked his thumbs under his lapels.

  I tried to think of a writer he’d published and championed, a Pulitzer Prize winner, a Nobel laureate. None came to mind. The company’s list circled my memory, swirled, and vanished like water down a drain.

  “I don’t know, I can’t—”

  “Then let me tell you. I loved the details.”

  “The details?”

  “I mean, when they’d ask me to supply a missing—a necessary—detail. You do know what a detail is, don’t you, Simon?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Yes, of course, what?” Warren sounded increasingly prosecutorial as he prepared to list his accomplishments. “When we hear detail, we think small, but I’m talking large. Historically large. Monumentally large. The missing piece, the story within a story that makes the whole thing seem credible. Real. I’m the go-to guy for that. The detail. The guy with the piece of evidence everyone can relate to, the plot point everyone can comprehend, except that people think—oh so wrongly!—that no one could make it up. Well, guess what? You can. Because I’m the guy who does it. I’m the lucky guy who pulls the chicken that lays the golden eggs out of his ass. I invent the chickens and the eggs.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What am I not making clear? All right, let’s take an example you might understand. The Rosenbergs’ magic Jell-O box. One of the big guys came to me and said, ‘Warren, old boy, we need you to make up a secret signal. Some commie hocus-pocus by which Ethel’s brother and the Russian agent will recognize each other. Something a little . . . you know . . . special. Memorable. Something everyone will believe.’ I said I’d think about it.

  “Well, it just so happened that my wife was having digestive problems. All she could eat was Jell-O. Do you have any idea what it’s like to live with a morbidly obese woman consuming obscene amounts of Jell-O?”

  I wished Warren hadn’t said that. It seemed like the worst thing he’d said so far, though I knew it wasn’t. At least he didn’t expect an answer. He’d half forgotten my presence. He knew that someone was in the room, but not necessarily me. I felt sorry for Warren’s wife, married to a man who talked about her that way. A more compassionate person might also have felt sorry for Warren, the victim of his own bad choices, going home every evening to a woman he didn’t love, to sons whose names he hardly knew. He was so unlike my loving parents, telling strangers about my Harvard education, my full scholarship, my bright future.

  “There were Jell-O boxes all over our kitchen. I had to throw them away. Every night I came home from work and disposed of cardboard containers. Sure, I was annoyed. I was taking my irritation out on an empty package, ripping it up into tiny pieces, when I thought: Got it. Secret signal. Fit the pieces together. Espionage 101.”

  “That was you?” I said. “You made that up? You invented the Rosenberg Jell-O box?”

  “Come on,” said Warren. “If you think the Jell-O box was a lie, if you think it was all an invention, then the only logical conclusion, the only obvious conclusion, is that someone had to make it up. Someone like yours truly. If God is in the details, what does that say about me?”

  “You’re joking.” I knew he wasn’t. I wished he were.

  “I’ve risen in the Agency. Higher, if not to so high they can’t still yank my chain about money. And how did I rise? The only way. By hard work. By being good at my job. Of course, before this . . . Jell-O thing, I’d had other major successes. Are successes really successes if no one knows about them? If a tree falls in the forest . . . ? I seem to have gotten off topic.”

  “What successes?”

  “Well! How polite of you to ask.” He paused, deciding, or pretending to decide, between multiple options. “I suppose my biggest personal triumph was Alger Hiss’s pumpkin. I invented that too. Grew the whole big orange squash from a teensy pumpkin seed. Need I walk you through that history?”

  “That’s okay. I know it.”

  I knew the case all too well. I’d been in high school when Alger Hiss, a lawyer and Justice Department official, was tried for espionage. One key piece of evidence was the jack-o’-lantern in which Hiss was alle
ged to have hidden rolls of microfilm of classified documents that he was giving the Russians.

  “Once again I can thank my family, my long-suffering wife and sons. One of my sons was carving a pumpkin, and I thought, Wouldn’t that be a terrific dead drop? So when they came to me about the Hiss case, it took no time to come up with the detail they needed to make the evidence pop.”

  On pop, an alcohol-laced spray misted the air between us. Had Warren been drinking before I came in?

  “But that’s lying.” Why not say it? Why not stop pretending to be the person Warren wanted me to be? Pretending to be Warren.

  “A lie?” He rubbed his chin, mock-thinking. “Maybe. A fiction, I’d rather say. Anyway, so what? Hiss and the Rosenbergs were guilty. So what if there was no Jell-O box? No pumpkin. Details, as I said. The reason I can tell you all this is that no one will believe you. You think you’re learning on the job? Well, learn this. I work with writers, men of enormous talent, creativity, and imagination. But my creativity is what gets things done. Whose words matter? Who is the one with an imagination deployed in the service of something higher than putting pretty words on a page? Who is the great writer? The real artist. Not my writers. Me. I’m the one whose details matter.”

  I stared at him with a fixity that made his face slip out of focus. Was I supposed to ask why he did what he did? He’d already told me. Should I ask: How could you live with yourself? What would that accomplish besides making me feel braver and less complicit than I was?

  “So now you’re the guy who knows it all. The brilliant young detective. But what are you going to do with all that knowledge, Simon? Go to the press? The government? They already know. Besides, it isn’t your job. It isn’t your business. Your job is to bring a novel in on time. Your job is to have The Vixen on my desk, all buffed and shiny, a juicy delectable little piggy ready to go to market. Can you do that?”