by John Gardner
“Squirrel?” she asked. She could not pronounce the word properly, mushing the “squ” so that it came out as “swirrel.”
“You always put the nuts away for safekeeping. Same with jackdaws, with all that glitters and is not gold—though sometimes they strike gold. So do you. Keep everything you learn in little compartments in your head. Every name, every crypto, telephone number, dodgy people who can do dirty work, special leverage points. You store it up for a rainy day. Now is bloody pouring. So you reach into the compartments. …”
Getting the first data was, as Kruger put it, “Like falling off a ledge.”
“You’re starting to repeat yourself, sweetheart,” Pucky told him.
“I really your sweetheart, Puck?”
“No doubt about it.”
“Good, ’cuz it looks like this one’s going to take a lot of time.” He had made contact with the mainframe but couldn’t get the password. “Have to go in through the back door,” he muttered cryptically. “Good job you got this IBM emulator. This not going to be easy, but the idiots always think they’ve got complete security with a password and some safe program up front. They forget the guys who maintain these things always make their own little trapdoors.”
She asked what he meant and he explained, in simple terms, that security programs for data bases were all very well but, if they got a serious crash on the systems, the tapes or some massive hard drive, the very things that were there to make the data bases secure would stop them getting in, because the passwords become corrupted. “The whizz-kids put in little programs of their own, so they can bypass the security. See.” He worked the keyboard. After fifteen minutes a screen came up giving him lines of programmed text. “Man Friday,” he said, cryptically.
“What’s Man Friday?”
“The maintenance man’s code. Probably checks this thing out on a Friday, regular. Once a month. Something like that. First Friday or last Friday. Bingo.” The screen cleared, giving him a menu. “We ask about the Giarre family tree first, then go to the Traccias if we don’t get the right answer from Giarre.”
“How did you learn all this, Herb? You left the Firm before they started running advanced computer courses. I haven’t even done one.”
“Self-taught, honey pie. See, nobody expects an old floozy like me to know the hidden secrets of computers.”
“Don’t you mean ‘fogey’?”
Herb looked at her with a watermelon smile, and gave her a great big wink. “Sure. Old fogey.”
“You’re not old, Herb.”
“But I’m a fogey, yes?”
“You’re a demon lover.”
“Good. Double bingo. Giarre, Sophia Maria. Start printing it out, Pucky. Sooner we get this done, the sooner we get all cozy, eh? Then I show you fogey-pogey.”
She could only hazard an intelligent guess at what he meant.
An hour later they were in bed.
“Still a demon lover, Puck?”
“Better than demon, darling Herb. More like the beast himself, with all those horns.”
“Do my best for you.”
“Deft, that’s what you are, Herb. A deft lover.”
“I got all my marbles. Stupid, maybe, but not daft.”
“Deft, Herb. As in dexterous, agile, nimble.”
“Ah.” Then, thirty seconds later, “Nimble I like.”
They lay in contented silence, holding hands, until Pucky asked, “What’s going to happen, you big sweet man?”
“Happen?”
“When this is over and we go back to the real world. This is the land where time stood still.”
“The real world, Ms. Pucky Curtiss, is wherever you want to make it. Run away with me?”
“You mean it?”
“Wouldn’t ask you else.”
“What about your …”
“Martha? My wife?”
“Your wife, yes, and the other one. The one they’ve got at Warminster now.”
“I sweet-talk the wife. Common sense. Martha knew it was for companionship. Not the greatest affair since Romeo and Juliet. We have a sit-down. Maybe she wants to go back to Germany, anyhow. There’ll be a soap opera for a few weeks, but she’s strong, self-reliant. How should I know?”
“And your long-lost traitor.”
“I said I’d kill her, but I don’t mean this. I don’t think I mean it. Don’t know. I fix her, though. Make her life a bloody misery.”
“As long as you don’t make my life a misery, Herb.”
“Shakespeare said it, Pucky, my dream—
“Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night. …”
“You do have a way with words, Mr. Kruger.”
“I have a way with Shakespeare’s words, Ms. Curtiss. Best damned word man in the business.” He leaned over and kissed her. She responded, kissing him deeply until nothing mattered but the slaking of their thirst again.
In the afterglow, she said, “I love you, Herb. Don’t get too swell-headed.”
“You really mean that?”
“I mean it. Don’t quite know why. I started out for a bit of fun. See if I could conquer the old master. Now it’s backfired. I love you.”
“Okay, you said it.” He turned onto his side, looking her straight in the eyes. “And I love you, Pucky Curtiss.”
“You do? Truly?”
“Listen to me. Beware of me also, because I never thought I’d feel like this again, and I can only express myself in certain ways. Art’s father taught me, so I do it through Shakespeare and people like that. Listen. You know what Winston Churchill wrote at the start of World War Two? When they made him prime minister?”
“He had a way with words.”
“Sure. England was on its knees. They made Churchill Prime Minister, and he wrote—‘I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial.’ Is what I feel, Puck. Everything, all the days of my life have been training for two things. First, Maestro Passau. I think he holds the key to one of the most diabolical betrayals of the old, Cold War. If he does, then there are people who should stand accountable.
“Second. All the women, the loves, of my life—which means really two—have been preparing me for you. A man doesn’t learn much about women in one lifetime, because they always turn up little surprises. But a man does accumulate some knowledge.
“All my dealings with women were paving the way for you. And also I think before that I was being prepared. Maybe other lives, like that actress believes. We all lived before, you follow?”
A nod, her eyes scouring his face.
“So, I’ve waited for you. Now, here you are.”
“And the other one. The one that betrayed you?”
“Prepared me. Made me stronger. Okay? Pucky, I love you.”
“Tell me about her, this Ursula.”
“I told already.”
“Everything.”
So, again he poured it out. This time without the gaps. “I give it to you full frontal,” he said at one point, and, naturally, he ended up in tears, sobbing against her shoulder, muttering, “Not manly this blubbings. Sorry, but the bitch screwed me, sucked me dry then spat me out. I found what I wanted now. Don’t you betray me, and I’ll never be your personal traitor. I been mixed up in this outdated profession too long. You get paranoid. You see heretics behind every shadow.”
“Oh, Herb.”
She took him in her arms, tended to his emotional needs, then the other demands of love.
Again, hours later, in the darkness, he said—
“I might even try it on my own.”
“What?” Pucky’s voice rose to a high C.
“Getting the old bugger out. Obvious we got to get him out. Why don’t I just do it?”
“Not tell Art?”
“Not tell anyone. Ju
st us, Puck. Get him out and take him to Warminster or, better still, hole up in some god-awful seaside resort. Finish pumping him clean, then hand him over, complete with the debrief.”
“You think we could?”
“Bet your balls.”
“No way.”
“Bet my balls then.”
“They’re already in hock, Herb.”
“SO WHAT NEXT, LOU? You take this fellow Gregory up to the villa and he turns out to be good American eagle, not bad Russian bear?” said Big Herbie Kruger, at nine o’clock the next morning in the living room, well back from the windows again, for the sun was out and skies were clear. People cruised the beach, and sleek speedboats provided a life on the ocean waves. Seabirds skimmed across the water.
“Something like that.”
Gregory was a tall, thin man with high cheekbones and fair hair which made him look like an undernourished Scandinavian. “There’s actually Indian blood way back in my family. Crow, I believe,” he told Passau.
(“Age of this guy, Lou?” Herbie asked.
“Late twenties, but how should I know. Yes, late twenties, had to be. Over thirty years ago and he’s still with the Agency.”)
They sat outside, on the veranda. There were scented candles, set in upturned earth-colored plant pots, spread around them to act as bug lights. The flame and scent lured the insects, which preferred them to a tasty nip of human blood. Louis thought of Stanza’s habit of just walking out onto this same veranda without clothes, or in just her underwear. He had caught her one day, leaning over the guard rail chatting to a popeyed young boy who could not get enough of the blue silk and lace against the marble skin.
“You’re going to blackmail me then, Gregory?”
“I wouldn’t use so strong a word. Persuade, possibly, but what good would blackmail do? Some idiot judge might eventually put you in jail, or have you deported to Germany. We’d rather see your immeasurable talent flourish from the United States. You’re one of a kind: the acclaimed master. You belong to the world, Maestro, and we would rather see you conquer the world from an American power base.”
“Who’s we?”
It was only then that he learned the stickman who called himself Gregory was with the Central Intelligence Agency.
“So, while I go and slave my guts out conducting, teaching, directing, you also want me to make friends and influence people?”
“Something like that. Actually it’s a little more ingenious than simply making friends, using your undoubted influence. You’re very big in your field, and we can make you even bigger.”
“The Temptation of Maestro Passau, huh? You’re going to show me the world and all its riches, then tell me I can have the entire bundle if I sell you my soul.”
“That’s about it, if you boil it down to plain facts. Yes.”
“Don’t bother to wrap it, I’ll take it just as it is.”
“I wonder if you will?”
“I did it for the Nazis, and they threw shit in my face. …”
“They threw shit in everyone’s faces. …”
“So why shouldn’t I do it for my own country?”
“Why indeed, but we have to be sure of you.”
“That’s not possible. You can’t be one hundred percent sure of anyone.”
Gregory smiled. He would have made a good understudy for Yorrick—the jester whose skull Hamlet finds in Ophelia’s half-dug grave. “Actually we do have ways of being ninety percent sure. What we’ll be asking of you is something so under-the-table that you have to keep it hidden even from your own thoughts and certainly your own eyes.”
“I cover myself with my cloak and cut my throat with my own dagger?”
“That would be one way of doing it.”
The cicadas were active early that year. Now they raised their chirping sounds so that the whole night seemed to be impregnated with them.
“You can’t give me a hint? What you want? What you want me to do?”
In the darkness, Gregory shook his head. “If you say no, or we decide you’re not, after all, the right player for this team, nobody’s even going to believe I talked to you. Actually, there are six men who, at this moment, will swear they’re having dinner with me in Berlin. I’m nowhere near Corfu. You have to come to us blind.”
“And if I tell you to go fuck a frog?”
“Oh, you’ll find it very difficult to get back into the United States, Mr. Passau. Even before we ask you to play, before you accept, we own you. I promise you that. Lock, stock and proverbial barrel.”
(“Chilled my blood, Herb. Just sitting there, chatting casually. I believed him. They owned me. I had no doubts.”)
Below, faraway—probably from Nikko’s taverna—came the sound of the bouzouki, and voices raised in song.
“So how do we find out if I’m your man?”
“We flutter you. It’s a kind of technical term, ‘flutter.’” He gave a short laugh which sounded full of fun. “The old polygraph. The lie detector. Not one hundred percent accurate, but it’s a good indicator.”
“So, go ahead, polygraph me. When you want to do it?”
“No time like the present. This way we get you fresh and uncomplicated. I use your telephone?”
He made a call: quick, professional, one sentence.
“Takes two to flutter,” he smiled. “I have a technician with me. He’s bringing the box of tricks here. Ten minutes.”
“How long’ve you been watching me?”
“Ask no secrets, Maestro Passau, and you’ll hear no lies.”
The technician turned out to be a little older than Gregory. He had the distinct feeling that the man who arrived with a black indestructible-looking custom case, was not in the technical league, but rather higher up the scale. Possibly senior to Gregory, who introduced him as Matthew.
On Captiva Island, Herbie’s head whipped up. “This Matthew. A little older? How much?”
“A few years. He’s also still about. Retired now, but stays in touch.”
“Describe him.”
“Short, thickset, muscular—in those days. Looked like a street fighter, and was uncouth in his language.”
“And you were couth, Lou?”
“Compared to Matthew, I was angelic.”
Herbie’s head began to spin dreams. Matthew had been a favorite alias of Marty Foreman, who had entered the Agency via the old OSS—the wartime Office of Special Services, the organization begun by the legendary “Wild Bill” Donovan to fight the Nazis in secret. When the CIA came into being, under Alien Dulles, a number of old OSS hands had been its nucleus. The description of Matthew was that of Marty Foreman who had risen to great heights within that massive, high-budget organization which had fought in secret through the Cold War, Korea and Vietnam. Big Herbie had worked with him more times than he could remember. Now, he heard the tremor in his voice as he asked, “You ever get his family name?”
“Never. Never with any of them. Later, I knew this Matthew was the most senior. I tell you how things worked out?”
“Yes, Lou. What next?”
They went about their business with a cold, almost frighteningly calculated professionalism: selecting a chair and placing it close to the windows inside the main room of the villa, then drawing the curtains, so that Passau had no view to distract him.
When they had put on the blood pressure cuff, the pneumograph across the chest, and the electrodes on his fingers, they told him to settle down, and the more senior man began to ask the questions.
“You’re Louis Isaak Passau?”
“Yes.”
“You are an orchestra conductor?”
“You know I am.”
“Ever been a member of the Nazi Party?”
“No.”
“But you worked for the Nazis? Against your country? All through the war?”
“Yes. I was blackmailed into doing it.”
“Just answer yes or no.”
“Yes.”
“You feel any remorse
about betraying the United States?”
“I feel betrayed. Yes. Remorse, I suppose you’d call it.”
“Okay. Any affiliation with the Communist Party?”
“’Course not. No.”
“Then what are your politics?”
“None. I’m an artist. Music is all that counts.”
“You’re saying you have no politics?”
“I’m apolitical.”
“But not asexual?”
In the here and now, Passau said he could not recall all the questions. “Long while ago, Herbie. But I had this done to me at regular intervals.”
“Sure, Lou. Agency’s famous for it.”
“Asked all the usual stuff. Homosexual? Racist? Current status in affairs of the prick? You know what they ask.”
“Sure, I’ve been asked also. This guy, Matthew?”
“Yes.”
“He have an accent?”
“Broad. Tough. Brooklyn.”
That was the clincher. Herbie was very familiar with what they called his handwriting. Marty was obsessed with fluttering people. Next to the automatic pistol, the polygraph was his favorite weapon. He had bludgeoned his way to the top of the agency with his fighting skills and a polygraph. He also said “toin” instead of “turn,” and “rehoise” instead of “rehearse.”
In his head he saw Marty watching the needles flick on the rolling paper of the polygraph. Knowing what the readouts meant, there in the Corfu villa so long ago. The needles flicked and made their marks, blood pressure and pulse tracings, tension, the galvanic reflexes. Marty could read the signals as an accountant might read a balance sheet. Passau, as he was then, would have been a sitting duck. If they did not own him before the polygraph, he certainly became their personal property once the test was over.
“So, next, Lou? They tell you what the deal was? Spell it out for you?”
“Slowly, they did. Took most of the night.”
Back in 1959, the man called Matthew told Passau that it seemed to him the Maestro was prime cut. “You have the contacts, the ability to travel. You are famous; politically beyond reproach; a man who crosses frontiers because of his talent. Also, you’re a very good liar, just what we need. Want to serve your country, Mr. Passau? Want to make up for the mistakes you made with the Nazis? Straight yes or no. If it’s no, we’ll try somewhere else.” The offer on the table. “You think you’re successful now—that you’ll be greeted with cheers and applause if you return to the United States? Yes, you would. But all that can be magnified ten thousand times if you do as we ask. You’ll be able to choose your concerts, operas, stars—even women. Anything and anyone can be yours. So how about it?”