by John Gardner
First he scouted for wheelchairs. There are always wheelchairs in airport terminals if you know where to look. People who are sent to assist travelers tend to dump the chairs once they have collected their gratuity. They like to disappear for an hour or so for a smoke or a cold beer. The chairs are often left unattended for some time. It took Herbie four minutes, and, once he had found a chair, he headed straight for the Budget Car Rental desk and explained that he had a sick elderly gentleman who he could not get down to the car rental area. Could they bring a car up for him if he did the paperwork here and now? As he spoke, Herbie felt in his left inside breast pocket, the one containing paperwork, credit cards, passport, everything he’d need, in the name of Buckerbee. In other pockets he had I.D. and all the trimmings in his own name, and the names of a Professor Spinne, and Gordon Lonsdale. This last had been a piece of humor only Kruger would have the nerve to use. Normally you would not put the name of a notorious Cold War Russian spy on extra paper.
The Buckerbee wallet included a Platinum Amex card which, though she would never in a thousand years show it, impressed the girl at Budget. Car rental agents are rarely interested in faces. They look at I.D. and the kind of paper that gets pushed over the desk at them.
Mr. Buckerbee had German paper: Federal Republic paper, naturally, now the D.D.R. was definitely dead.
He filled in the forms; the Amex card was given the thumbs up from the electronic telephone swipe, and the girl said a silver-gray Cutlass Supreme would be outside the arrivals terminal in fifteen minutes.
It was, and so was Herbie, pushing the wheelchair into which he had loaded Passau. People actually helped to get the Maestro into the car. Later, not one of them came forward. Herbie had made Louis Passau put on his coat and wrap his mouth in the silk scarf he had been carrying in the pocket. “Play almost dead, Lou,” he had advised.
“I am almost dead.”
“So you don’t need to do one hell of a lot of acting. Good.”
They drove back along the expressway and headed south. Hours later, at a little after three in the morning, a touch north of Washington, D.C., they pulled up, for the second time that night, at a twenty-four-hour gas station.
After Herbie had filled the car he used the telephone booth: dialing an 804 number straight out of his memory bank. It rang ten times before a sleepy, slightly disgruntled, voice answered.
“You remember the night they invented champagne?” Herbie asked.
“Jee-ru-sa-lem, Her—”
“Name’s Cross, sir. James Cross, as in a church, huh?”
Naldo Railton, now in his sere and yellow years—seventy-four to be exact—felt his memory retreat across the years to the last time he had spoken like this to Herbie. Naldo, which was a nickname for Donald, was the man who took over a young spindly German boy, an OSS asset in Berlin just after World War Two, and helped turn him into a member of the British Secret Intelligence Service. The lanky boy was Eberhardt Lukas Kruger.
Now, long retired and living out placid golden years with his wife, Barbara, in the shadow of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, Naldo’s heart leaped at the sound of Big Herbie Kruger’s voice, and his mind ran an endless stream of memories.
“Of course, Mr. Cross. I remember you well. What can I do?”
“You heard anything yet?”
“About what?”
“Good, you haven’t heard anything yet. I need to meet.”
“Come here. You’ve got the address.”
“Not the wisest plan in the world, sir. No.”
“Ah.” There was a long pause, during which Herbie strained to catch any clicks, hums or power being drawn off the line which might indicate a wiretap—even though he knew it was unlikely he would detect anything. It was equally unlikely that anyone in New York or Washington had figured he was, as they said in old hard-boiled dick novels, on the lam with Lou Passau. He was banking on it.
“How long?” Naldo asked.
“Three hours tops.”
“Right. Town called Ruckersville, to our north. I’ll be parked in a white Lincoln. Plates are ONE 391. You’ll just have to drive through the place to see me. Got it, Mr. Cross?”
“See you,” Herb smiled, then, as an afterthought, added, “Don’t grow anything from your backside.”
Passau slept, and, half an hour later, Kruger pulled in to an all-night diner, taking steaming Styrofoam beakers of coffee out to the Cutlass and gently waking his passenger.
“We arrived somewhere?” Passau stretched, made sucking movements with his mouth, signifying that it felt like a parrot’s cage.
“Soon. I wanted you awake. Coffee. Didn’t know if you took sugar.”
“Sure I take sugar, one of an old man’s vices.”
Herbie tore the edges off three packets and dumped them into the beaker, stirring it with the little straw they give you in places like that in lieu of a spoon.
“How much longer?” Passau asked.
“Couple of hours before we meet a friend, then heaven knows. I need a place to squirrel you away. Out of sight and mind. So we can talk. Who tried to kill you, Lou?” The final question fired from the lip quickly to catch the old man off guard.
“Kill me? Oh, those people with guns? I have an idea, but it’s a long story.”
“You’re going to be good with me, Lou, aren’t you? You’ll talk. Tell all ...”
“With no porky pies? Maybe. Depends on what you want. I’ll give you all the German stuff, but it’ll take time. Stretchfield got most of it right in his book, but then he tried to blackmail me. To understand, you have to learn about me, Herb. You have to know why it all happened.”
Kruger gave a big mock sigh, sipped the scalding coffee, and said, “I’m more interested in the last five years, Lou. More concerned about Mother Russia. Very interested in the last few months, to be honest.”
There was a long silence. Passau contemplated his coffee, and, for a moment, Herbie tensed, thinking the old man might hurl it in his face. Instead, Passau spoke very quietly, “If you want all that, it might take weeks. You see, Herbie, you would have to travel with me through this whole damned and bloody century, because—I tell you already—you have to understand why.”
“I don’t mind as long as we reach the end of the journey together.”
“My last confession, eh? Give me extreme unction? Cleanse me from my sins? And me a good Jewish boy.”
“However you want to think of it, Lou. I’ll hold your hand, and go the whole way, if that’s what you want. I’ll even try and do a deal for you. Get you out and into safety.”
“At my age?” A second long pause. “There must be music. I can’t do it without being able to at least listen to music.”
“I’ll fix it.” Herbie took another sip. “We have a deal?”
“Maybe.”
“We’re two old spies, Louis. A couple of dodos left over from the big freeze. Soon we might be extinct. At least we can leave our story. Others could profit, because the people we both used to work for will still go on. They’ll go on with it until the end of time, whatever they say—death of communism, death of fascism, death of all isms. You know it, don’t you?”
Passau nodded, finished his coffee and handed back the beaker. “Let’s get going before my memory gives out altogether.” He seemed very still, very calm and, in a way, very young. “I have a tale that’ll take the wax out of your ears, Herb. The genuine article. The laughter and tears. The soundless wailing, the silent withering of autumn flowers.”
Herbie recognized the last sentence as a quotation, but he could not catch where it came from.
“You think you know from spies, Herb. You know from nothing till you hear what happened to me.”
Herbie nodded, then turned on the ignition again, and put the Cutlass in drive.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1982 by the Literary Estate of John Gardner
cover design by Jason Gabbert
ISBN 978-1-4804-0617-9
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