“But—”
“Code,” I insisted, even managing a smile. “Right? Everything, everything is code!”
I left him standing behind the desk with his mouth open.
8
I practically ran from there, afraid he might follow in pursuit. Now why had I done that? To frighten him? How could he possibly fear me? I was helpless in a net, and he and others like him held the ends of it in their hands. Even so, I felt more confident—but why? After some thought, I came to the conclusion that I owed this moral boost to none other than Major Erms—it was not his empty chatter, his pretended sincerity, his displays of warmth and attention, things I had believed in for a while only because I needed to believe, but it was that scene I witnessed through the open door that encouraged me. For if, I reasoned, he was really one of them and held such a high position, then it was possible to fool, deceive, outsmart the Building, even in its most highly guarded strongholds. That meant the Building was far from infallible, that it was omniscient only in my imagination. A depressing discovery, in a way—yet it opened new and unexpected horizons.
Halfway to the Registry I had second thoughts. Major Erms had sent me there, so they expected me. I had to do something different, I had to break out of that vicious circle of planned activity. But where could I go? Nowhere, and he knew it. Except the bathroom. The bathroom wasn’t that bad—I could think things over there in peace and quiet, try to make some sense out of it all, and I could shave. I needed a shave. The only reason they didn’t stare at me in the hall was probably that they had orders not to.
I took an elevator up to the bathroom with the razor, got the razor and took it to my regular bathroom. But at the door I remembered something Major Erms had said, something about a close shave. Had he foreseen this eventuality? I stared at the white door. Should I go in or not? How could shaving have any effect on anything? Anyway, I could sit here as long as I wanted to, in solitude—they had no jurisdiction over the bathroom!
I entered cautiously; the place was vacant, as usual. But wasn’t the lightbulb by the urinals a little brighter than before? I walked in, and almost immediately jumped back—there was a man lying alongside the tub, a towel rolled under his head for a pillow. My first impulse was to leave. But they were probably expecting me to do just that, so I decided to stay.
The man didn’t stir, not even when I tripped over my feet and crashed into the sink; he was sound asleep. All I could see, from where I stood, was the top of his head, not enough to tell whether I knew him or not. Still, he looked like a stranger. He wore civilian clothes, had a jacket over his shoulders, a striped shirt with dirty cuffs under a thin sweater. One hand was tucked under his head, and the knees were drawn up to the chin. His breathing was deep and steady.
“Well,” I thought, “there are other bathrooms. I can move wherever I want.” Though the notion of moving was silly—what was there to move but myself?
Let him sleep, I could still shave; there was nothing subversive in that. I put the razor on the sink under the mirror, reached over the sleeping man to get the soap from the soap dish by the tub, then turned on the hot water and inspected myself in the mirror. The face of a derelict. My stubble made me look thinner; in another few days it would be on the way to a beard. I lathered up the skin as best I could without a brush and tried the razor: extremely sharp. Now shaving has always helped me think, and since the man on the floor didn’t disturb me in the least, here was a good opportunity to come to grips with my predicament.
What had happened so far? General Kashenblade had entrusted me with a Special Mission when I went to see him, then there were the displays, the collections, my first guide was arrested, the second one vanished, I was left alone with an open safe, then there was the little old man with the gold spectacles, his suicide, another officer and his suicide, then the chapel with the corpse, the priest who gave me the number of Major Erms’s office, then Prandtl, the flies in the coffee, the disappearance of my instructions, my despair, my accidental or—let’s not jump to conclusions—unaccidental visit to the Archives, next the reception room of the Investigation Department, the Admiral, the Counterdecoration Ceremony, finally my second conversation with Major Erms. Those were, more or less, the incidents. Now the people involved … in order not to sink here into a hopeless mire of conjecture, I had to take something definite as my starting point, something concrete, indisputable, a clear fact. Death would serve. I began with the little old man in the gold spectacles.
He poisoned himself because he had taken me for someone else, a courier from them; he thought, since I didn’t return his coded signals with the appropriate countersignals, that I was sent to punish him for treason. Of course, he wasn’t really an old man. There was no mistaking that shock of black hair beneath the wig. But the captain (the one who shot himself) kept referring to him as “old.” Had the captain been lying, then? Not unlikely, especially in light of what followed. The captain’s suicide definitely made his words suspect. He killed himself because he was afraid of me. The exposure of any relatively minor offense would not have driven him to take such a drastic step. Ergo, he had to be an agent for them. The little old man (let’s continue to call him that—after all, he took his guise to the grave with him) was obviously one of them. Otherwise, his suspicions and his loyalty would have demanded he turn me in, hand me over to the authorities. He took poison instead. Both deaths were quite real, undeniable—I saw them myself. So there was no doubt that both the little old man and the captain were enemy agents, the first less important, a mere pawn, the second quite important, considering his high position. Now the captain, assuming I was an investigator from Headquarters, quickly denounced the little old man to me, who was dead anyhow at the time of our conversation. He tried to explain why he hadn’t denounced the little old man earlier in the game, pleading personal ambition and an overzealous dedication to the Cause. But when he saw that I wasn’t buying this (actually, I simply didn’t understand his code), there was nothing left but to shoot himself.
Though this interpretation of the two suicides made sense, it didn’t settle the question of my role in the whole episode. That is, had it all been worked out in advance, or was my appearance in those two offices a tragic accident?
“Let’s go on,” I thought. “This analysis may yet lead to something.”
I finished shaving, wiped off the lather, splashed cold water on my face. I felt almost cheerful. My reasoning demonstrated that not everything in the Building was incomprehensible; I had managed to piece together at least a part of the puzzle. Drying my face with a rough towel, I noticed the man on the floor—I had completely forgotten him. Yes, he was still asleep. Having no intention now of going to the Registry, and hardly eager to continue my wandering from corridor to corridor, I sat on the edge of the tub, leaned back against the tiled wall, drew my knees up, and returned to my thoughts.
Major Erms, friendly Major Erms. There was trouble there. Even if he wasn’t out to double-cross the Building, I couldn’t trust him. For all his great show of sincerity, not a peep about my Mission. He either gave me compliments I didn’t deserve or dealt in generalities that said nothing. When pressed, he did give me my instructions. But then they were stolen in Prandtl’s office. That was really the important thing, the instructions themselves, not Major Erms. If he gave them to me, knowing they wouldn’t be in my possession long, then it was only to let me take a look…
And were those papers the real instructions? Real instructions would have been addressed to me, would have presented plans, suggested lines of action, and certainly would have given the scope, the essence of the Mission. But they looked more like memoirs, the memoirs of a man lost in the Building! A code? What sort of code would look like that?
Well, perhaps, if I were to believe Prandtl. Even Shakespeare could be deciphered, according to Prandtl. Though I had only his word for it. I hadn’t really seen any decoding machine, just a hand, and tape coming out of a hole in the wall.
Better no
t be too skeptical—there was nowhere left to go, that way. And that peculiar sigh in my face, as if Prandtl had something to tell me, but didn’t dare—the sigh, the expression in his eye?
That couldn’t be dismissed. There was more than human compassion in that sigh—perhaps an awareness of my predicament, knowledge of what the Building had in store for me. Prandtl was the only one I’d met who stepped outside the rule of official impersonality, having first alluded to its burden.
Yet was it really so surprising that Prandtl should know what was planned for me? Even without the sigh, it was perfectly clear that I had been summoned to the Building and chosen for the Mission—for some definite purpose. A mighty revelation! Really, was this the best I could do?
The sleeping man groaned and turned over, covering most of his face with his jacket. After which he was still again and breathing evenly.
I watched him for a while, then gradually returned to the idea I had had—for how long?—forever, it seemed—the idea that all of this, even now, was still a test, a fantastically prolonged and involved test.
Seen in that light, so much of what had puzzled me now fell into place—especially the continual postponement of my Mission, as if they were checking me out thoroughly first, seeing how I’d react in totally unexpected and confusing situations, testing my personal endurance as well, toughening me up, preparing me for the real thing. Naturally every precaution had to be taken to hide this from me; once I guessed that these situations were simulated and therefore harmless, the entire test would be ruined and the training made worthless.
Yet I had guessed! Were my powers of observation a cut above the normal? Suddenly I shuddered, almost slipping off the tub: I had found the common thread that ran through all these incidents…
In the course of only a few hours, almost at every step since I entered the Building, I had come into contact with enemy agents. First the guide they arrested in the hall after he took me through the collections, then the pale spy with the camera at the open safe, then the little old man with the gold spectacles, and the captain who shot himself, not to mention Major Erms, a prime suspect—five agents in all, five conspirators revealed—and in so short a time! It was more than incredible—it was impossible! It was impossible for the Building to be in such a state of decay, so completely, so massively infiltrated. One agent alone would make you stop and think—but four or five? Utterly beyond the realm of possibility. There had to be something behind it. A test, a staging. But that theory didn’t satisfy me. A swarm of enemy agents, open safes full of secret documents, spies around every corner—that could all be staged for my benefit, yes. But the deaths? I remembered only too well those final convulsions, the death rattle, the cooling of the body—how could I possibly doubt the authenticity of those deaths? Nor would deaths be ordered up as part of the deception—not that the Building was motivated by compassion, nothing of the kind! But purely for the most practical reasons: it was unthinkable to sacrifice the lives of well-placed and high-grade operatives simply to train another recruit, a candidate. No new agent was worth the loss of two pros.
My theory collapsed in the face of those two deaths, it had no choice. No choice?… How many times, traveling aimlessly here and there like a speck of dust in the wind, driven like a blade of grass in a stream, never knowing what the next moment would bring, sometimes submitting to events, sometimes resisting them—how many times had I been forced to admit, always too late, that in any case I always ended up exactly where they wanted me? I was a billiard ball aimed with mathematical precision; my every move was plotted out, my every thought, even this thought, this sudden sense of futility, this dizziness, that enormous, invisible eye pointed at me now, watching everywhere, and all the doors waiting for me only to shut in my face, the phones waiting for me only to go dead, my questions remaining unanswered, and the whole Building united against me! Ah, and when I was ready to break, explode, go mad, they came and comforted me, kind and sympathetic—only to let me know later, unexpectedly, through some allusion or incident, that all my secrets were known to them. Major Erms ordered me to report to the Registry, knowing full well I would defy him and head for the bathroom instead—and that was why I found this man here and was now killing time, waiting for him to wake up.
Yet why did the Building practically admit at the same time that its entire structure was infested with them, that apparently nothing could stem that fatal infiltration? Or was this cancer of treason only a figment of my imagination? The product of a disordered mind?
It was time to examine myself. In the beginning I had assumed that I was singled out, selected for something unusual. The obstacles in my way? Merely administrative errors; inconvenient, annoying, but no great cause for concern—unavoidable in any bureaucracy. When my instructions proved elusive, I resorted to bolder and bolder tactics (and got away with them), tactics which were not always clean (since I was convinced that honesty had no place here)—I had presented myself as an emissary from high up to obtain vital information, for example, or I had used, like a stolen weapon, those ominous code numbers which drove the captain to his suicide—and my lies had escalated as I pursued my goal, then as I began to avoid my goal, then as I turned about and fled from my goal—they were almost second nature to me now.
Though everything had been a lie, an illusion. But I pretended not to notice and plowed ahead, seeking some sign, some unmistakable proof of my Mission—though it had begun to dawn on me that there was no little dishonor in the honor of having a Mission, if I had to play dirty tricks, hide under desks, witness violent deaths, and then be hounded, ensnared, forced to invent one ridiculous explanation after another!
Deceived and robbed of everything, including my instructions and even the hope of their existence, I tried to explain, to justify myself—but since no one would listen, not even to catch me at my lies, the burden of the crimes I hadn’t committed began to weigh so heavily upon me that I soon was prepared to accept this role of criminal, if only to make it a reality, to have my sentence and punishment over and done with. I sought out judges, not to plead my case but to confess, confess to everything and anything. It hadn’t worked. In the Admiral’s office I had played the traitor according to what I imagined a traitor to be, I planted the most incriminating evidence, rifled the drawers, ripped out their false bottoms—in vain.
In all of this, whether trusting and believing, if only for a moment, in the Mission and my instructions, or having my hopes dashed, even the hope of my own destruction—in all of this, I had been seeking some reason, good or bad, for my presence here. But neither indications of favor nor suspicions of treachery had seemed to make the least bit of difference. Again and again I was given to understand that nothing, really, was expected of me. And that was the only thing I couldn’t accept, because it didn’t make sense.
Begin at the beginning: what if there were no staging, no test, no masquerade, but this were the Mission itself, my Special Mission?
For a brief moment, that thought was like the opening of a door—I didn’t dare examine it, only closed my eyes and listened to the pounding of my heart.
The Mission? Why should they hide it from me, then, why not simply tell me that my work would take me somewhere inside the Building, or that I was to keep certain people under surveillance? And why not brief me fully on what had to be done—instead of sending me out blindly, destination unknown, assignment unknown? If I ever accomplished anything, it would have to be an accident.
That’s how it looked, on the surface of it. On the other hand the Building had familiarized me, to some degree at least, with its methods—confusing at times, but not without certain salient features. There were departments, sections, archives, offices, receptionists, regulations, ranks, phones, all cemented by an absolute obedience into one monolithic, hierarchic structure. It was rigid, well-regulated, ever vigilant, like the white corridors with their symmetrical rows of doors, like the offices with their scrupulously kept files; the communication systems were its ent
rails, the steel safes its hearts, and its veins and arteries were the pneumatic mail tubes that maintained a constant flow of secrecy. Nothing was overlooked, even the plumbing played a vital part. But underneath that surface of clockwork precision lay a hive of intrigue, skulduggery, deception. What exactly was that wild confusion? A game? Or perhaps a camouflage to prevent the uninitiated from seeing some deeper plan, some higher order…
Could it be that my muddled, erratic behavior was exactly what they wanted? A weapon which the Building directed against its enemies? Indeed, though all unwittingly and only (it would seem) by dumb luck, I had rendered some service to the Cause! I had taken both the little old man and the captain out of action; in many other cases I had probably functioned as a catalyst, bringing certain situations to a head or turning the balance in the Building’s favor… Then I thought about the duplicity of all the people I had met—one might almost conclude that playing both sides was the general rule here—with two exceptions, the spy at the open safe and Prandtl.
There was no doubt about that spy. When even death had let me down—the behavior of the corpse under the flag was clearly ambiguous—at least the spy was left. He didn’t toy with treason, didn’t pretend, didn’t play games. Once at the safe, he photographed documents, conscientiously pale and frightened. That was the sort of thing one expected from an honest spy.
Prandtl was not so easy. My trust in him was founded wholly on a sigh. Major Erms had said Prandtl would coach me in connection with the Mission. But my conversation with Prandtl turned out to be entirely different—though now I wasn’t so sure about that either. Prandtl had said a great deal that wasn’t clear, but assured me I would understand it all later. Did later mean now?…
It was also possible that Prandtl had no idea what was in store for me, nor cared, that his gesture of compassion was prompted not by any knowledge of my future, but by what had happened, that is, the reading of that final message after successive decodings, the scrap of paper with those five words.
Memoirs Found in a Bathtub Page 11