Say Uncle

by Benjamin Laskin

  Hennes fulfilled the promise he made that winter day as my prisoner so many years ago, and became a true scholar. He was one of the few people I ever met who accomplished the dream he set out to achieve. My dear friend Chaim would have seen his dream come true if he hadn’t died defending it first. I, on the other hand, had lost sight of my dream. I couldn’t even recall having had one.

  We spent the first hour of the evening sipping port, smoking Cuban cigars—I always brought him a box when I visited—and talking about books, hobbies, and sports. Everything interested him: be it the subtleties of fly-fishing, a new recipe for bread, or the latest advances in medicine and technology. I knew he’d get around to why he summoned me when he was good and ready.

  When old friends meet after extended periods, they customarily inquire about one another’s family, but neither of us had one. Sharc had severed what tenuous ties I had had with mine, and Hennes’ now deceased parents had branded him a traitor after the war, and disowned him. He had no brothers or sisters. At the age of thirty-one he married a woman five years his senior, a librarian, and spent eight blissful years with her, until she died of a quick spreading cancer. He consoled himself in the deep, serene, cosmically immense thought of his favorite philosopher, Spinoza, sublimating his grief by translating the great philosopher’s magnum opus, Ethics, into Swedish. The closest thing to family we had were each other and Jason, the orphaned lad Hennes had brought back to Sweden with him after the war.

  Jason, who had worshipped Chaim back at the partisan camp during the war, moved to Israel as soon as he finished school. He joined the same kibbutz Chaim died defending. He eventually married a spirited sabra [native-born Israeli] girl named Naomi, and they sired a beautiful baby girl whom they called, Zeeva.

  Hennes didn’t like to travel. He thought that he had experienced enough adventure and travel during the war. But he loved to write, and he and Jason kept in close contact by mail. Jason, as idealistic as his two mentors, Chaim and Hennes, wrote that he was determined to raise his daughter in their spirit.

  Hennes finally got around to what he had on his mind. With typical subtlety, he asked me whatever happened to the journal I used to keep.

  “I stopped keeping it after I joined the Organization. You know that.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “Well, plainly, I can’t be carrying such a thing on me doing the kind of work I do. I can’t chance it falling into the wrong hands, obviously.”

  “Obviously,” he smirked.

  “What…?”

  “Ellery, your journal was never about work. Don’t forget I read them. They were the only literature we had in those miserable woods.”

  “Literature,” I repeated with a chuckle.

  “Hungry as I was for something to read, it was Goethe to me, my friend. That string of scribble was your link to your higher self. With the shrieking madness around you, only in those pages could you hear the whispers of your soul. You still believe in the soul, don’t you?”

  I sank back into my cushy leather chair, looked long into the blazing fireplace, and shook my head, no. I said, “When I got your card, I did something I hadn’t done in almost thirty years. I climbed a tree. I drove out to the woods and climbed a damn tree and watched the sun come up, just as I had done a hundred times with those luckless Druids of mine. I tried with all my might to recall the feeling I once knew every day. But I couldn’t. It was gone. Gone, as if it had never existed but in my imagination. I left the branches of that tree sadder and lonelier than before I climbed them.”

  Hennes said nothing for a minute, letting the words ‘sadder and lonelier’ sink into our silence like hypodermic needles.

  “So you did find it,” he said slyly.

  “No, Hennes, there was nothing. Just a numbing emptiness.”

  “Like a zero,” he said.

  “A big fat zero.”

  “A zero that holds a place,” he added. “The absence of something. That nothingness you felt is telling you that you haven’t lost what you once had, that you only misplaced it. It’s there in you somewhere, but it must be rediscovered. The nothingness you feel is trying to save what remains of your life.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “I don’t think you can. After the things I have seen and done, terrible things, I can’t possibly go back to the man I once was. He’s dead, and his youthful visions died with him. I’ve become the jaded son-of-a-bitch I swore I’d never become.”

  “You’re right, my friend. I can’t understand your darkness. Your thoughts are gloomy and your soul murky, but I still see the light in you. You must believe your friend Hennes, who is no stranger to misery, that there are still a few embers in your heart. They are imperceptible to you perhaps, but they glow, and I see them.”

  “I’d like to believe you, Hennes. But I—”

  “Hear me out, Ellery.”

  His gentle blue eyes pleaded for a chance. There was no denying the brotherly love that shone from them. I sighed through pursed lips, poured another glass of port, and opened my heart to him. To have refused the trust he sought from me would have been too cruel. “Go on,” I said.

  “I recall your journals well. I admit that I thought them, well, comically American. But know too, that I never doubted your sincerity and enthusiasm. The truth be told, I envied you and your fierce loyalty to your vision. From them and you I drew the strength to go on and to deny the fate I had resigned myself to. A month before I sent you that postcard I reread them. Oh, how I enjoyed your words!”

  “You still have them?”

  “Of course! You sent them to me for safekeeping. Do you think I’d throw them away? Don’t be absurd!”

  “Give them to me.”

  “Why, so that you can throw them into my fireplace?”

  “Yes.”

  “Never.”

  “Please, Hennes—”

  “What are you ashamed of? Do you think that by burning them you will free yourself from your youthful vision?”

  “Vision,” I scoffed. “I was blind, man. My words were the swaggering bravado of youth, whistling in the dark…”

  “So what? All courage is a kind of whistling in the dark.”

  “What do you want from me, Hennes? Do you want me to go back decades and become that young man again? You know I can’t.”

  “No, Ellery, that’s not what I want. Listen to me. For the first half of your life you were obsessed with changing yourself. You wanted to remake yourself, improve yourself. Every day had to be different from the day before. The last thing you wanted to be was—”

  “The real Ellery, right? Well that’s rubbish, Hennes. There is no real me, or you, or anybody. We are all just an unending series of fictions. We grow tired of one story line for ourselves and so invent another. Not one is any more real than the one it replaced.”

  “All right, then, and who is he in you that invents the fictions?”

  “Hell if I know. Some madman, obviously. We are all crazy.”

  “Some scared man, rather,” Hennes said. “But he too is as you say, fiction. He seems more real only because he has been with us the longest. He is the most insecure and vulnerable of all our personalities. Overly sensitive, he is easy prey for life’s vicissitudes. From the cradle onward—through our parents, teachers, peers, superiors, and all of society’s message-makers—this timid, insecure part of us is driven forward, forever stumbling and confused. It copes by inventing fictions. But, Ellery, don’t confuse him for whom you truly are.”

  “Hennes, if you know who it is that I am or what it is I must do, then just tell me.”

  Hennes sipped his port and rested the crystal goblet on his knee. “Who you are is the most courageous man I’ve ever known. What you must do is what you’ve long known. You must leave the Organization. You must reclaim your freedom and follow its path to its rightful end.”

  “But you know I can’t leave. Nobody leaves. I’m not working for the damn post office, you know. Leaving is not an option
.”

  “Do it anyway.”

  “They will kill me.”

  “No, they won’t.”

  “You don’t know these people.”

  “They may try, but they will fail.”

  “Oh, fine, and spend the rest of my life hiding in the shadows. How would that be any different than now?”

  “The difference is you’ll die a free man. That is who and what you are.”

  “These people are good. The best. They will hunt me down.”

  “You are better. Fall back on yourself, Ellery. Trust yourself. Even if you don’t know who that self is, he knows you, and he won’t let you down. And I will help you.”

  “No! I will not drag you into this. Too many people I’ve cared for have died on my account. No.”

  Hennes snipped the tip off another cigar, and nodded resolutely. I knew there was no way to change his balding, stubborn German head.

  “Even if I did manage to evade them, what the hell am I supposed to do then? What is my work?”

  He lit his cigar and blew a cloud of smoke. “Redemption, my friend. Redemption.”

  The Greenhouse Effect

  Excerpts from Journal Six, continued…

  …Leaving Sharc and the Organization would require as much preparation as any assignment I had ever undertaken working for them. When the day came to sever my last tie to Sharc, I had to make sure not only that any thread he might pick up would lead to a limp end, but had to do so while attending to the hundreds of details involved without raising a single hair on his ever-skeptical eyebrow. Sharc’s suspicious nature bordered on the paranoid. In the world he inhabited it had served him well. Suspicion was his genius. Any sudden change in my behavior would trip the warning lights in his perpetually plotting and vigilant mind. I showed, therefore, no more, no less allegiance to the Organization than I ever had.

  Point by meticulous point, I engineered my escape. Not knowing how well Sharc kept tabs on me, I had to assume he was as intimate with me as my own shadow. Gradually, imperceptibly, I moved all my finances and holdings to safer havens, scattering my trail by setting up offshore accounts and dummy accounts. Holding on to old residences, I bought new ones under aliases in places around the world where cash brought no questions. I distanced myself step by step from all acquaintances. I wanted no one to know what might have become of Mr. Peters, the reclusive Aussie real estate mogul; Mr. Groen, pimp to the rich; Mr. Volkhausen, entrepreneur; Mr. Marcs, bookie; Mr. Bauer, international currency speculator and philanthropist; Mr. Murray, arms dealer; or any of the other numerous guises I operated under over the years. I planted seeds of a dozen stories attesting to my demise to be leaked at my say-so through foggy channels that would lead to a maze of unanswerable questions.

  The unshackling of my life brought me a giddy sense of play, something I hadn’t felt since my wild and reckless war years. It was a dangerous form of amusement, but one at which I was expert. As the months passed I sensed within me the restoring of something that was sadly missed and given up for dead—a sense of purpose: the most delicious feeling of all. With the loss of each manacle came a new, enticing possibility, vague at first, but clearer with the snap of every fetter.

  A new and most problematic Sharc assignment, however, brought my cheering progress to a quick halt. The project, ‘Operation Greenhouse,’ was Sharc’s most ambitious yet, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time. It set my plans back by years, and severely complicated my already near impossible mission to defect.

  In brief, Sharc believed that it wasn’t enough to pick the best men and women he could find and train them to the excruciatingly high standards that he demanded. Half the training, he said, was spent unlearning all the bad habits and muddled thinking that his ‘chosen ones’ had previously acquired in their private lives before the Organization.

  The idea for his new project struck him, he said, after Agent Piranha joked during a meeting, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could grow an operative like a tomato in a greenhouse.” The next day Sharc let loose his intelligence team on the world to locate his tomatoes. A year later he handed me three seeds and a green-thumbed farmer.

  The farmer was a Russian double agent named Anya. I had met her once, briefly, years before: I as Mr. Murray the international arms dealer, and she as the glamorous fiancée of a Swiss banker. Anya was beautiful, with striking aqua-green eyes and ash-blond hair. She spoke English with an Oxford-groomed accent, and a sophistication that I had rarely encountered in the moneyed royalty I often came across in my work. I remember thinking at the time that she was more likely the brains behind our business than the red-nosed, balding, fat man I was dealing with. I didn’t know then that she was a KGB operative. Five years later, she was working for Uncle Sam.

  “Can she be trusted?” I asked Sharc. “If she’s so good, how do you know she won’t dump your whole project onto the lap of the KGB?”

  “She’s passed the test,” he said. “She’s more American than you now.”

  I hated and distrusted Sharc, but there was one thing about him I knew: he didn’t make mistakes of judgment when it came to his recruits. It was a knowledge I had to keep fixed in my mind like the North Star if I wanted to pull off my own secret project.

  Anya, I learned, had spent years as a chief instructor of female Russian agents, educating them in the highest arts of espionage. Sharc confided that he had the utmost respect for the Russian female agents, and that we had no women in the Organization who came close to their abilities. He said he thought a woman could accomplish much more than a man when it came to deep penetration of the enemy.

  I dreaded working with her. I was used to working alone and doing things my way. Anya was willful, vain, and impersonal. Working with her would make my carefully executed escape all the more difficult.

  The seeds selected for us to raise were three young girls—an Australian age four, a Japanese age five, and a Swede age six. The girls were culled from an immense database of orphans with no living family, and chosen based on intelligence, probable beauty, and natural prowess. Anya and I were to be parents, teachers and employers, and we were to raise them to adulthood, teaching them everything we knew. Sharc wanted them to become fluent in a dozen languages, in the ways of the world, and in the ways of espionage. They were not, however, to be told the purpose of the training. Espionage and combat were to be as natural to them as playing house.

  Raising the girls became our sole assignment, and we were expected to spend every waking hour with them, teaching and training them. Neither Anya nor I had had any experience with children, and wondered why Sharc chose us. We recalled, however, that every Sharc operative was alone in the world, making us as likely a choice as any other.

  Besides, Sharc was not interested in us becoming a ‘family.’ On the contrary, he expected our relationship with the girls to be military and unsentimental. That suited me just fine. I had long since given up any hope of having children, and had come to consider them to be little more than a nuisance. Give me a dog any day. I was a soldier and a spy. I learned long ago that emotions only got in the way of the task at hand, and that a mind muddled by sentimental thoughts would only cause me deadly hesitation. But most important, if I were to succeed in my plan to defect to freedom it would have to be alone with no strings attached. Sharc and I, then, were in rare but perfect agreement. It was a job and nothing more. The only thing I wanted from those girls was obedience.

  Anya proved to be stricter and more dictatorial than me. I don’t know what kind of brainwashing Sharc and his people had put her through, but she was the perfect soldier: unquestioning, loyal, and thorough. In our first years together Anya rarely spoke to me of anything other than the business at hand, and even then it was usually to mention my faults. She was a perfectionist who was quick to slam down her spiked heel at the first sign of any slackness or foolishness, mine more than that of the three girls.

  It was stunning to witness how this woman, who one minute looked like the small-town gi
rl next door, could the next minute become so irksomely icy and demanding, baring fangs like the bride of Dracula. She reintroduced my long lost code name, Fuckwit, and took great pleasure at pronouncing it with her frosty accent. She was a bitch.

  The girls never left our sides. They were not enrolled in any school or organization. We taught them at home, and home was never the same place for more than four months. Sharc wanted them to feel that the road was home, so that chance, unpredictability, and foreign surroundings would never intimidate them.

  Because Sharc wanted no record of the girls’ existence, no cameras, video recorders, or tape machines were allowed on the premises. The orphanage records were destroyed. Television, radio, newspapers, and magazines were also banned. Sharc did not want the girls comparing themselves to other ‘normal’ girls.

  Sharc assured us that the girls were “the cream of the crop,” and that each had undergone a battery of physical and psychological tests and evaluations to ensure they could endure the demanding pressures that were going to be placed upon their young minds.

  Every morning, two hours before the sun rose, Anya went into the girls’ room, flipped on the light, and shook each one’s little foot to wake them. No matter the weather they were hustled outdoors—we always lived in the countryside, miles from any neighbor—and put through a regimen of calisthenics, supplemented with running, hiking, climbing, swimming, or skiing, depending on where we were and the season. After breakfast the girls studied until lunch. Every afternoon they concentrated on specialized skills: martial arts and hand to hand combat, weapons training, scuba diving, horsemanship, orienteering, and survival training.

  Each evening Anya prepared supper, our favorite meal. She was a superb cook, and taught her culinary skills to the girls. Except for fish two or three times a week, Anya was a vegetarian, and we all adopted her ways, eating ten servings of fresh fruit and vegetables every day. Nutrition was one of the few aspects of our daily life for which Sharc made no demands. By the look of his gut, scaly skin, pitted, vein-cased nose, dark sagging bags under his eyes, and foul breath, food was never anything more than an appetite suppressor to him.