The Second Sight, page 16
Wolkowicz stepped into the light of a streetlamp, gave the dog a command to prevent it from attacking, as it had been trained to do, at the sight of a firearm in the hand of anyone except the man holding its leash, and produced a Walther P-38 pistol.
“You know how to use this?” he asked.
“I know how to fire a pistol. This kind is new to me.”
“The principle is the same as the forty-five automatic you carried in the Marines, except when you point this weapon at something, you hit it and it dies. The clip holds eight rounds of nine-millimeter Parabellum ammo plus one in the chamber. Forget safeties. It’s double-action, like a revolver. To shoot, just squeeze the trigger. This one is fully loaded. See the pin sticking out of the slide? That’s how you know.” He shoved the pistol into a chamois-skin holster fitted with a spring-loaded clip designed to be slipped over the waistband of the wearer’s trousers. “Here, take it,” he said. “It’s all yours.”
Patchen took a half step backward. “No thanks.”
Wolkowicz, stepping closer, continued to proffer the weapon. Patchen made no move to accept it.
“Look, kid,” Wolkowicz said, “I know you’re a Quaker and wouldn’t hurt a fly and all that shit, but you either carry the gun and lead the dog when you’re wandering around alone at night, or you get a baby-sitter. I’m the guy who picks the baby-sitters, so don’t get me pissed off at you.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s the way it’s going to be. Now take the fucking gun and put it on. Here’s your permit.”
Patchen examined the card, which bore his photograph and a false name signed in an imitation of his handwriting that was undetectable even to him. It identified him as a member of the United States Park Police.
“Is this I. D. phony, too?” he asked. He meant: Was it false-genuine, a real Park Police credential issued to an imaginary identity, or was it a simple forgery manufactured in one of the Outfit’s print shops?
“Not so’s anybody will notice it,” Wolkowicz replied, telling him nothing. “If you want to shoot that thing off to get the feel of it, let me know and I’ll call the firing range. You should be pretty good, using your right hand and your right eye. You’ve got no choice. I’m left-eyed and right-handed, so my nose gets in the way.”
Patchen took the holstered pistol and slipped it over his belt.
“Get yourself some suspenders,” Wolkowicz said. “The gun weighs a little over two pounds, loaded. You wouldn’t want your pants to fall down and go boom.”
Wolkowicz remained at Patchen’s side for more than a week, picking him up at the office in the evening and dropping him off at home afterward, until he was sure that he could handle the Doberman. He seemed to have little else to do. Patchen remarked on this.
“I’m waiting for somebody,” Wolkowicz said. Patchen did not ask who this might be. Wolkowicz mocked his curiosity anyway. “The key suspect,” he said with an exaggerated wink.
He led Patchen to a car parked a few paces away on Constitution Avenue, then drove across the Potomac to Arlington National Cemetery, entering through a back road. They got out of the car and walked among the rows of white markers, the neon glow of the city providing enough light to find the way. Because the cemetery lay on a hill it was cooler there, and a whispering breeze stirred the trees and the many small American flags that had been thrust into the sod.
Finally Wolkowicz found a place to stand that was out of earshot for any possible eavesdropper, and began to talk.
“This is about Christopher,” he said. “I know you’re monitoring the op he’s on in Indochina.”
“You do?” Patchen replied.
“Yeah, I do. Let’s cut the shit, okay? We’re standing among the honored dead here, and I think we should tell each other the truth.”
“All right. You first.”
“His case officer is Waddy Jessup. Waddy was my commanding officer in Burma. Do you know about that?”
“I know what’s in the files. I looked you both up.”
“You ever met Waddy?”
Wolkowicz wore a look of crafty expectation; Patchen did not know why.
“No,” he said.
“Wrong,” Wolkowicz retorted. “He was your training officer—good old Archie. Remember him?”
Patchen snorted in surprise and amusement. He had never before put the two identities together.
“They say you’ve got total recall,” Wolkowicz said. “I want you to visualize Archie, remember that accent, remind yourself of all the asshole things he said to you in that Yalie accent. Got the picture?”
“I remember Archie.”
“Waddy. Let me tell you what’s not in the file. He used up our whole unit—‘Force Jessup,’ Waddy called it—in a stupid attack on a fortified Jap position because he wanted an elephant to ride and the Japs had some elephants. Killed everybody except me. The other guys were Kachins, very good troops. Then he jumped on an elephant and ran away and left me to the Japs.”
Wolkowicz lifted his hand to his mouth and spat two full dental plates into his palm. He held them out, perfect porcelain teeth glistening with spit, for Patchen’s inspection.
“The Japs pried out all my teeth with the point of a bayonet,” he said. “Waddy got away. When he got back to base, he put himself in for the D. S. C., and got it. I’m telling you all this for two reasons—first so you’ll know I’m not exactly an unbiased observer, and second so you’ll understand that I know what I’m talking about when I talk about Waddy.”
Wolkowicz opened his toothless mouth wide and put his teeth back in, then wiped his palm on the seat of his pants.
“Now, down to business,” he said. “I’ve got some sources in Vietnam, and they tell me that Waddy is going to get Christopher killed unless you get him out of there fast.”
“Killed? How?”
“Waddy sent him out on a combat mission against the French with the fucking Vietminh. Then Waddy described the whole operation to a Vietnamese kid the French have planted on him.”
Patchen felt a wave of nausea rising toward his throat.
“What Vietnamese kid?”
“A pretty little boy with a bottom like a peach,” Wolkowicz said. “Christopher’s still out in the jungle with the Communists. If they don’t kill him because Waddy’s told somebody they’ve got going down on him that he’s an American spy, the French will.”
He stepped closer, so that his face was only inches from Patchen’s and whispered his next words: “Get Christopher out of there.”
8
THE FLIMSY DOOR OF WADDY JESSUP’S APARTMENT IN HANOI WAS opened by a slender young barefoot Vietnamese who smiled contemptuously when he heard Patchen’s French pronunciation. He showed him into the living room, where Waddy lay on a bamboo sofa, reading Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard and drinking some cloudy liquid out of a glass shaped like a tulip.
“My, this is a surprise,” Waddy said, rising to his feet. “I guess the best thing for me to do is confess and get it over with. I lied to you. My name really isn’t Archie.”
They shook hands. Waddy was barefoot, too, and he was wearing a sarong; it was hotter in Hanoi than in Washington. “Would you like one of these?” he asked, holding his glass aloft. “It’s Pernod poured over ice. Ice.”
“No, thanks. I was hoping you’d join me for dinner in a restaurant.”
“Actually, Jean-Pierre was just making a cold supper when you arrived. I’m sure there’d be enough for two.”
Waddy opened his eyes wide, drew a breath, and turned with a smile to the houseboy, who was hovering behind Patchen, as if to give an instruction.
“No, thank you,” Patchen said. “I’d rather go out.”
Lips already parted, Waddy paused for the briefest moment, then spoke at length to the servant in Vietnamese. The boy glowered and left them without uttering a word.
“I was just telling him you’re a former student of mine who wants to treat me to dinner,” Waddy said. “Changes in plans upset him. He’s a moody fellow. He likes to be called Jean-Pierre, but his given name is Cu. That means ‘penis’ in Vietnamese. He had two older brothers who died in infancy. Naturally, when he was born his parents gave him an ugly, horrible name so the evil spirits wouldn’t be envious and take him, too. The Vietnamese are wonderful, David. Be with you in a minute.”
Joss sticks, burning in front of a collection of Jessup family photographs, filled the torpid air with sickly fumes. This arrangement suggested, while not quite imitating, the family shrine that was a fixture in every Buddhist home. The apartment, in fact, was furnished entirely in the Vietnamese style; Patchen supposed that the decor was designed as a statement of Waddy’s sentiments in regard to the revolution. So, possibly, was the book of Mallarme’s poetry. He tried to read it while he waited, but the verses were written in such rudimentary French that he assumed there was some meaning beneath the banal surface which eluded him.
When Waddy emerged from his bedroom he was dressed in Ivy League clothes: white bucks, khaki pants, Brooks Brothers button-down shirt, “regimental” tie, seersucker jacket. He wore the small red, white, and blue enamel badge of the Distinguished Service Cross in his lapel, a touch he had not allowed himself when working under his alias in the safe house in Foggy Bottom.
The temperature was in the nineties. They dined in an open-air French restaurant on food invented in a cold and rainy country. Waddy discussed the wine list in voluble French with the listless wife of the owner-chef and despite the heat ordered a full bottle of Pouilly Fuisse and another of Vougeot. He drank most of the wine himself, but ate very little as he plied Patchen with questions about his village in Ohio, about Harvard, about Quakerism.
“Do you mind?” he said. “I’ve always wondered about George Fox and the Inner Light and all that. Do Quakers actually quake?”
“Inward Light,” Patchen replied. “What church do you belong to?”
Waddy was chewing his asparagus. “Episcopalian,” he said. “Don’t Episcopalians quake?”
“They barely twitch when they ejaculate,” Waddy replied. “I don’t mean to offend you. All I know about Ohio I learned from a classmate at Yale whose family made sheets and tubes in Youngstown.”
“Weren’t you in Burma with someone from Ohio?” Patchen asked.
Waddy’s face did not flush on hearing this question, but Patchen had the impression that he prevented it by a conscious effort of the will.
“You’ve been talking to Barney,” he replied after another reproving silence. “He had a good war, as the Brits say, whatever he may say about it now. Actually he’s not a Buckeye at all, you know. He’s a muzhik.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s Russian for ‘peasant.’ He was born in Russia, carried out as a child on his father’s back. Barney père walked two thousand miles through the Russian Civil War, cannons to the right of them, cannons to the left of them, corpses everywhere, and they both came out without a scratch. Amazing saga. Makes you wonder.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know,” Waddy said with his bright smile.”Fate. Un coup de dés—a throw of the dice. Craps, as they say in Youngstown, Ohio.”
After dinner they rode in rickshaws to one of the many lakes within the city limits. Speaking Vietnamese again, Waddy told the rickshaw boys, who were in fact emaciated gray-headed men, to wait for them. They walked along the shore beneath lanterns strung between trees.
“Your Vietnamese seems to be pretty good,” Patchen said.
“Not really,” Waddy replied. “You should hear Paul. He’s the polyglot. Of course, all Vietnamese words have only one syllable, and he learned the language in bed from the most delicious little girl in Hanoi, but all the same he’s a prodigy. He’s like a musician with perfect pitch—amazing. Play it once and he repeats it with variations.”
“Where is Paul?”
Waddy feigned surprise that the question should be asked by someone who was not, so far as he knew, authorized to know about Christopher’s activities.
“He’s out of town,” he said.
“When will he be back?”
Waddy paused, to let Patchen know that he had gone far enough. “I really don’t know,” he said.
They had been moving through a thin crowd of Vietnamese, all of whom were fanning themselves with cheap bamboo fans. Waddy had one, too. Patchen turned into a path that led away from the lake.
“Wrong way,” Waddy said.
Patchen continued on without replying. Waddy hesitated, then followed. The three Vietnamese men who had been following them ever since they left Waddy’s apartment drifted in and out of the lantern light at the end of the path, peering into the darkness after them.
When he reached Patchen, who had stopped in the middle of the path, Waddy put a hand on the small of his back.
“You don’t remember your training very well, David,” he said. “Those fellows who were following us now know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that we know they’re tailing us.”
“I don’t think the surprise will kill them,” Patchen said.
“Maybe not, but there’s such a thing as the niceties. I have to live and work here.”
Patchen interrupted him. “Here,” he said. “I have something for you.” He handed him an envelope and a penlight.
“You want me to open this and read it here?” Waddy said. “If you please.”
Waddy tore open the envelope, turned on the little flashlight, and read, with his body hunched over the page to conceal it from the men at the end of the path. It was a letter from the 0. G., in his own hand, informing Waddy of the death of his dear Aunt Judith and asking that he come home at once to deal with the estate. As he read, Waddy chewed his lower lip.
When he finished, Patchen handed him another envelope con taining a ticket for the next day’s flight to Paris.
“You’ll be met at the customs barrier at Le Bourget by a man holding a sign that says ‘Voyages Jean et Jeanne,’ “ Patchen said. “Someone else will approach him. Follow the two of them out of the terminal to the car.”
“ ‘Voyages Jean et Jeanne’? Can’t I just call the office?” Patchen took back his penlight. “Those are the arrangements. I didn’t make them.”
“Who did? The Scarlet Pimpernel?”
“Do you want me to go through the details again?”
“I don’t think so. How could anyone forget? When will I be back?”
“As soon as you settle Aunt Judith’s estate, I guess. Meanwhile I need to know the time and place of your next contact with Paul, and the fallback.”
All the possible meanings behind the letter he had just read, and the bizarre instructions he had just been given, were now flooding into Waddy’s mind. No unit in the Outfit except Security would have made arrangements of this kind: they were like something out of a training film. Even in the dark, Patchen could sense his anxiety, but Waddy said nothing to betray it; he was already acting like a suspect.
“Paul and I have a date to play tennis at six-thirty in the morning next Tuesday.”
This was three days ahead. Waddy gave the address of the tennis court.
“What’s the fallback?”
“Same time the following Tuesday at the tomb of Thieu Tri in Hue.”
“Why Hue?”
“Because it isn’t Hanoi.”
“And if he doesn’t make that meeting?”
“Then I wait to hear from him. Except I won’t be here.” “Who else would he contact?”
Waddy stood mute. He was very close to Patchen because they had been carrying on their conversation in whispers.
“Look,” Patchen said. “I know what you’ve got him doing. How do you get a message to him if you have to?”
“Through friends of Cu’s,” Waddy said.
In the distance, the three Vietnamese were conferring, glancing in their direction. Rats gamboled on the path between them.
“Come closer,” Patchen said. Waddy did so. Without warning, Patchen, whose undamaged arm and leg were very strong, gave him a powerful shove, knocking him off his feet.
“For Christ’s sake!” Waddy said. “What was that for?” “Cover,” Patchen said. “You told me it should always be consistent with the character of the agent involved.”
He stepped around Waddy’s prostrate body and walked back to the rickshaws, telling his boy to take him to his hotel.
“What about the other one?” the boy asked.
“Monsieur a fait un jugement erroné,” Patchen said in his awful French: the gentleman made an error in judgment.
The boys smiled; Waddy and his habits were well known in Hanoi.
9
CHRISTOPHER APPEARED ON SCHEDULE FOR HIS GAME OF TENNIS. THE courts, hidden among masses of bougainvillaea, were located at the rear of a large colonial villa in a French residential quarter that was strongly reminiscent of Passy. Patchen had arrived by car half an hour early for the meeting. This was a breach of security—clandestine meetings were supposed to be precisely timed to reduce the period of exposure—but Patchen did not see how the rules could possibly matter in this case: He had been followed by a team of Vietnamese ever since he first made contact with Waddy Jessup. On his way to the tennis court, however, the streets behind and ahead of him had been empty.
“There’s no need for them to follow you here,” Christopher explained, when Patchen mentioned this odd circumstance. “The courts belong to a Frenchman Waddy picked up at the Cercle Sportif in Saigon. He’s in the colonial service, so the surveillance just gets here first on meeting days. A lip-reader watches through binoculars from the upstairs windows of the house.”
“Waddy knew this?”
“He thinks it adds to the picture of innocence, as he calls it. Just two American pals, hitting at each other by the dawn’s early light and talking about baseball. Besides, he says, it’s flattering to have your own bilingual lip-reader. Where is Waddy?”
“The O. G. called him home.” Patchen did not explain why; Christopher did not ask. “I’ve brought you a new friend,” Patchen said, nodding in the direction of a young man on the other side of the net who was practicing his backhand by hitting a ball against the back wall of the court. “Not,” Patchen said, “that you’re going to need him. We want you to come home, too.”
