The Spy

by Garbo Norman

  Not concentrating on the music, he stumbled over Pamela’s foot and felt her hand tighten across his back as she led him into the beat again. She laughed and teased him, a bright, crisply attractive business executive with a still youthful figure, whose forty-year-old face had betrayed her by finally looking like a forty-year-old face. She had Stern’s assurance, however, that when the swelling disappeared, at least ten of those years would also be gone.

  By one o’clock, David was drunk and sentimental enough to get out his camera and take some pictures. The walking wounded, thought Burke, rather fuzzy-headed himself by then. What a curious thing they shared. And he had never really been a sharer, neither by nature nor by profession. In fact for twenty years he had led the kind of solitary, secretive life from which even his wife had been barred and from which she had finally abdicated. Yet here, tonight, he had somehow not wanted to remain apart. .Maybe the old Burke would have chosen to welcome the new year alone in his room, but apparently not the man who was currently calling himself Cole.

  The champagne gave out about two, and much of the euphoria shortly thereafter. Then came the confessionals, with everyone tired and vulnerable.

  It was Lilly who slid into it first. Because she was in the theatre and had a fair amount of ham in her, she started off by dramatizing a little too much, by picking up fragments of characters she had once played and taking on some part of their pain as her own. Still, her frustrations were real enough, along with the doubts that might be eased for a while by the new facade Dr. Stern had given her, but would never be cured entirely. She was in the kind of business, she told them, where you either had it or you didn’t, and a new nose and boobs weren’t about to make that much difference. Look at Streisand’s nose, for God’s sake! But Streisand had a great and original talent, and finally that was all that mattered. Why kid herself? Second-rate when she walked in here, she’d be second-rate when she walked out.

  Hank followed. When it came to second-rate, he claimed seniority. It was all there in his won-lost record. You just had to read it. The ring hung a clear and brutal price tag on a man. So he expected no miracles from his new face. His scars cut a lot deeper than his skin. But even as he spoke, his eyes were dark and hot and held their own secret hope Never mind the words, said his eyes. They were just a kind of creative suffering, a ritual confession, a necessary pouring on of ashes. His eyes knew better. He was a human creature after all. He owed whatever powers had created him a human life. And without hope, you stopped living.

  Pamela picked up the cue next, with the wry, pseudotough, self-mocking approach that was her usual protective style, but which only served to add its own thin glaze to her anguish. She asked questions that did not have any answers. She wanted to know why she had suddenly been made to feel less, when she was not less. What was wrong with people? How could they live out their lives yet learn nothing of what really mattered? All at once, youth seemed to have become the supreme virtue. By merely having failed to live more than a limited number of years, you were automatically judged more desirable physically, and superior professionally than those who had lived a while longer. An utterly insane rationale. Yet she herself had finally surrendered to it and allowed a perfectly decent, serviceable face to be turned into that of a younger and only vaguely familiar stranger.

  With David, of course, it was different. His lacerated face had made him the only one of the group who was not there through choice. His reconstructive surgery had been necessary, not elective. Though he had less to laugh about than any of them, he chose to handle it laughingly. He was planning a whole new career, he told them, in horror movies. He’d be a natural. He wouldn’t even need any make-up. He was going to speak to Lilly’s .agent about booking him for a new TV series. They’d call it Monkey Man, he said, and proceeded to demonstrate his talent for the part by scampering about the room, arms dangling, making chattering, simian sounds. Nobody laughed.

  Since Burke was allegedly an accident victim also, he had to be doubly careful about how he contributed his own feelings. So he offered what he hoped would be fitting and sympathetic fiction, picturing himself as a man without family or close personal ties, without significant past or visible future, a rather pathetic solitary animal that had chosen to live out life burrowing alone.

  It was only afterward that he realized, with a kind of cold amusement, that it had not really been a fiction at all.

  At shortly after three, David, the self-proclaimed Monkey Man, lurched towards a window, threw it open, and peered at the pavement far below. Grinning drunkenly, and with his camera-still dangling about his neck, he half turned, waved, and called a cheerful, “Happy New Year”, to the others. Then he climbed onto the window sill and started to push himself off. Burke leaped forward and grabbed his arm just as he was going over. For a moment, the two figures swayed over the edge. Finally, they fell back into the room and Hank Ryan slammed the window shut.

  They all huddled over David, who smiled benignly at them, then wept, then just sat on the floor, looking at nothing. Forming a tight, curiously emotional circle, they held one another close. There was no one else, anywhere. The night and the New Year enclosed them.

  Lilly left first with David, taking the now sober and trembling Monkey Man to her room and, Burke hoped, into the at least briefly comforting sanctuary of her bed. When Pamela and Hank began looking at one another with hungry eyes, Burke left also. Still wearing his party hat, he drifted slowly along the corridor to his room and lay down on the bed. It was very late but he was not sleepy and he just lay there, with the lights on, staring at the hospital ceiling.

  Chapter 1

  THE BEGINNING. Almost a year after Burke’s facial surgery, he saw his former wife, Angela. It was on a Saturday afternoon in late November, in a crowded gallery of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was standing in front of Monet’s Vetheuil, which she had always loved for its brightness and color and dazzling illusions of sunlight. She had grown up in a series of gloomy, sunless Brooklyn tenements and had been chasing fragments of sun ever since. She was facing the other way, but he would have known that neck anywhere. Merely the way she held it had once been enough to break his heart.

  “My God,” he thought. “When am I going to stop loving her?”

  His reaction surprised him. Lately, several days at a time would go by without his thinking of her. And it was harder and harder to remember certain details of her face and body. All of which may have made it easier for him to deal with, yet also made him sad. Perhaps you finally did have to bury your dead, but no one said you had to do it happily.

  Angela turned and her glance passed over him without recognition, leaving a cold residue. Ah, I’m the one who is dead, Burke thought, and at that instant he began to function professionally.

  It took him only moments to survey the gallery and narrow the possibilities to three men and one woman, although choosing the woman was an afterthought. They had begun to use women on surveillances only recently, and Burke had never fully adjusted. He made his final selection more slowly, drifting after Angela through the next few galleries and down the main stairway before settling on a short, plump man in a rumpled tweed jacket as his most likely candidate. To a casual observer, the man would have appeared no different from any number of other art lovers enjoying a weekend visit to one of the world’s great museums. He looked at all the paintings, studied some more intently than others, appeared suitably rapt and sat down to rest occasionally. But he also never moved closer than ten feet from where Angela happened to be at any given moment, and to Burke, this was sloppy tradecraft. When Angela left the museum an hour later, the man was still a short distance behind her.

  Allowing a safe interval, Burke followed. It was important to know if Angela was actually living in the city or just visiting. He also wondered whether she knew she was being used as bait. There was nothing in his knowledge of his former wife to make him believe she would let them use her this way, but a lot could have happened in the two years
since he had last seen her. At that time, she had been living and working in San Francisco. Now, with the Service keeping her under surveillance, there was no way for Burke to accept her presence in New York as an accident.

  From a block away, he saw her enter a converted brownstone on Seventy-fourth Street between Park Avenue and Lexington. The small man got into a station wagon, with a two-way radio antenna, parked diagonally across from the house. He sat behind the wheel and read a newspaper. Burke continued on to Second Avenue, found a public telephone, and looked up Angela Burke in the directory. She was not listed. He dialed information, asked for a new listing under her name, and a moment later had her number. Then on the off-chance that someone might be in, working, on a Saturday, he called the San Francisco office of the public relations agency where Angela had been an account executive and learned she had been transferred to New York two months before. There was little doubt that the Service had arranged the move. Two months of dangling bait, he thought, and be had finally stumbled over it. But fortunately, without biting.

  He took a taxi home, poured himself half a tumbler of bourbon, and sat down to think.

  In retrospect, it had not been a bad year. He had a comfortable apartment in a graceful old building that overlooked the Hudson, a spacious, north-lighted room in which to paint, no money pressures, and enough time to do all the things he had spent most of his working life complaining that he never had time to do. He read. He went to the theatre. He haunted the museums and galleries. He joined an indoor tennis facility and played, with cheerful aggressiveness, at least three times a week. In fact for a period of extreme adjustment, during which he’d had to accommodate himself to a new face, new identity, and new way of life, it had gone far better than he’d had any reasonable right to expect.

  Still, he had never tried to fool himself about his future. He was too much of a professional, knew too much about the way these things worked, to believe he would ever be totally in the clear. When he walked along a street, he watched pedestrians, cars, doorways, and windows. In restaurants, he sat with his back to walls, preferably in corners, rear and flanks protected. Before lie entered his own apartment, he always listened for a moment at the door, then checked for a tiny, almost invisible splinter of wood he never failed to leave wedged between the door and jamb, about a foot above floor level. He did these things partly from old habit, partly to keep his mind alert, and mostly because a small part of his brain believed that at any given moment his life might depend on them.

  Tony Kreuger had stated it with his usual ambiguity at their last meeting. “You’re out of it, but you’re not out of it. And don’t ever forget that.”

  Kreuger had been no more specific than that. He never was, unless there was an absolute need to know names or details. Which was one of the things that made him so good.

  Holding his drink, Burke walked to a window and stared across the Hudson at the Jersey shore. He felt no fear or excitement, only a peculiar apathy, and this bothered him. He considered it a symptom of emotional disintegration. During the past year of his new life and identity, he had been given to frequent reviews of his old life and identity and rarely found them enjoyable. Making a judgment now, he felt forced to admit that he had mismanaged just about everything. His life was a mess. But since it had never really been too great at any time, there was not that much to mourn over.

  Taking a long delayed inventory, he wondered whether he was a smart man or a fool. Well, at this point he could hardly claim to be brilliant. Perhaps at one time he might have considered his intelligence to be equal to the top of the line, but not anymore. Intelligence without discipline was like a fast thoroughbred without a rider, and for a long time now his brain had been galloping without true reason or control. Certainly his behavior on that hill outside Beirut, more than a year ago, could be classified as neither reasonable nor controlled. All he had done there was indulge himself in some fancy emotionalism. Had he allowed himself to think the thing through properly, he would have known that if he didn’t kill Abu Hamaid as ordered, they would simply have someone else do it. Which was precisely what they had done, and within the week. So much for his concern about Hamaid’s life. At best, it had been a futile moral gesture, a belated sop to his own doubts. Had he really cared about Hamaid, he would have found some way to warn him. Which, technically, would have made him, Richard Burke, a traitor, and probably would not have helped Hamaid anyway, but would have at least shown greater sincerity of intention.

  So he was a fool.

  Kreuger had a stronger word for him. “You’re a schmuck!”

  he had shouted, and Kreuger rarely shouted. “Twenty goddamned years and you can still pull something like this? You can still indulge yourself in what, for us, is the ultimate vice… pity? What kind of future do you think you’ve got now?”’

  “I don’t care about that. I’m getting out.”

  Kreuger had looked at him with a mixture of disgust and anger. “Okay. Good luck, schmuck.” Still, it was Tony Kreuger who had sent him to Obidiah Stern for his facial surgery and stayed with him all the way.

  The first hint that he might be in trouble had actually appeared a little more than two months ago. It was nothing dramatic, just a brief, rather cryptic announcement in the New York Times to the effect that there had been a personnel shake-up in the State Department’s Office for Middle Eastern Affairs, along with several unspecified policy changes. There was also the implication that these changes reflected deep concern all the way up to the Oval Office itself, and carried the threat of further shock waves during the months ahead.

  When Burke read it, he called Kreuger from a public booth up in Connecticut, gave him the number there, and waited for him to call back from a safe phone. “What does it mean?” he asked when he heard his friend’s voice once more.

  “Among other things,” said Kreuger, “that it was a serious mistake to have had Abu Hamaid killed.”

  “So?”

  “So you may be in a kind of sticky spot.”

  “Why?” Burke asked, having a fair idea of the answer but wanting any possible doubt removed. “I was the guy who didn’t kill him. Remember?”

  “Yes, but you knew about the original order. Which makes you one of the potentially damaging loose ends. And you know how they are about neatness in these things.”

  “Lovely.”

  “You’re not badly off yet.”

  “When will I be?”

  “When they find you.” said Kreuger.

  “You’re very funny.”

  “You know I always make bad jokes when I’m worried. But you’re okay for now. At least as long as the agent who actually did the shooting is still walking around.”

  “How will I know if he’s not?”

  “Call me at two week intervals.”

  Burke did, and on the third call Kreuger gave him the news.’ “They got to him yesterday.”

  “How?”

  “An auto accident.”

  Burke was silent.

  “I’m sorry,” said Kreuger.

  “I know.”

  “You realize, of course, that I’m in as bad a spot as you.”

  “I don’t realize anything. You never did tell me the mechanics of it.”

  “I never had that much to tell,” said Kreuger. “I never knew exactly where the order to kill Hamaid originated. It just came down on a need-to-know basis, and I passed it on to you the same way.” He laughed, but it had a cold sound. “And I called you a schmuck for cutting out. If you hadn’t, you’d be buried right now.”

  “I may still be.”

  “Yes, but they’ve got to find you first, you lucky bastard. If they should ever decide to label me a threat, they know exactly where I am and what I look like.”

  Well-intentioned hogwash from a friend. Kreuger was, of course, exaggerating the possibility of his own danger to make him feel better. The soothing panacea of a shared threat. Nevertheless, from the moment Burke told him he was getting out, Kreuger had in
sisted on not knowing any of the details. “I don’t want to know where you’re living,” he said, “what name you’re using, what you’re doing, or what your goddamned face looks like. It’ll be better for both of us that way.” It was a basic Service tactic. What you didn’t know, no one could ever make you reveal.

  Now, sipping his drink, Burke stared blankly out the window at a tug working a string of barges upriver. He was finding it hard to concentrate. Seeing Angela had disturbed him more than he cared to admit. He felt tempted to get out somewhere and call Kreuger, tell him he had seen her, and find out what, if anything, he knew about it. But he put down the urge. It was easy enough to figure out why they had switched her to New York, and there was nothing that Kreuger could add to it. There was also no sense in letting his friend know he was alerted to the bait. It was not lack of trust Kreuger was probably the only one left he could trust. It was just that it was always better to keep something in reserve.

  He broiled a couple of hamburgers for dinner, then went into his studio and fussed with some sketches until well after midnight. When he felt tired enough to sleep, he allowed himself, a double brandy as insurance and went to bed.

  Chapter 2

  Four days later, on Wednesday, Burke picked up an early edition of the New York Times and discovered that he was in even greater trouble than he had feared.

  As before, there were no major headlines. It was just a small, single column notice on the obituary page to the effect that Anthony Kreuger, an internationally known geophysicist based in Washington, D.C., had died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. Although no suicide note had been found, Kreuger was reported to have been despondent and in poor health for some time, and the coroner’s office as well as the police felt there was little doubt that he had taken his own life.