The Second Sight, page 19
“Then I’ll tell you,” Wolkowicz said. “I think you’ve got the idea that one of us put Christopher on ice.”
Patchen regarded him with calm interest.
“One of us?” he said. “You mean somebody in the Outfit or somebody in this airplane?”
“Take your choice.”
“Does that worry you, Barney?”
Wolkowicz grinned. “Me? Naw. Why should it? Whoever the villain is, he’s safe as long as Christopher is locked up in China.”
“Is he? How do you figure that?”
“Because whoever got him in can get him killed,” Wolkowicz replied. “And we both love him too much to take a chance on that happening.”
It was a confession; it was a threat. Or was it an accusation? Wolkowicz drank the last swallow of his beer and grinned again. “What’s the matter, kid?” he asked. “Airsick?”
2
WHEN HE RETURNED TO HEADQUARTERS FROM VIETNAM PATCHEN locked himself in his cell with the Outfit’s complete files on Wolkowicz. These archives contained no arguments for or against Wolkowicz’s guilt, no conclusions, no judgments, only the raw facts of his life and operations. If you believed what Patchen believed, if you could look behind the files and perceive what their bland surface concealed, the evidence of his treason was plain to see. But Patchen knew that nobody—not even Christopher if he came back—would see what he saw, believe what he believed. Wolkowicz was a hero who had bled for the Outfit and carried out some of its most famous operations. Patchen kept his own counsel, but for the next decade he had two fixations that were really a single, indivisible passion: the rescue of Christopher and the destruction of Wolkowicz. Nobody else was interested in either; Patchen was like the only sane man in an asylum; if he described what he knew he would destroy any chance he might have of being believed. Reality was poison. Too many people, over too many years, had failed to see the truth to be able to recognize it now.
In due course, Wolkowicz completed his tour in Saigon and came back to Washington for routine reassignment. He realized almost at once that Patchen was hunting him. The signs were unmistakable: he had nothing to do, and although no one could tell him why, he was treated at Headquarters with a cordiality that was subtly, almost unnoticeably, more intense. To Wolkowicz, the manners of the Ivy Leaguers who ran Headquarters had always been something like a shortwave broadcast: a wavering signal, obscured by static, emanating from a far-distant point. Now someone who understood the equipment had turned the dial a fraction of a millimeter to right or left and the announcer’s voice was easier to hear.
“What the fuck is going on?” he asked Patchen, having surprised him and his Doberman pinscher by appearing on the deserted towpath beside the C & O Canal at one o’clock in the morning.
Wolkowicz fell to his knees to greet the Doberman. The dog licked his face and whined happily. It loved Wolkowicz.
Patchen said, “I’m not sure I understand the question.” He was tired; he had left his cell only an hour before, at the end of a day that began at six-thirty in the morning.
“You’re freezing me out. Why?”
“It isn’t easy to find the right slot for a man of your experience and qualifications, Barney. You’re a legend.”
“You’re right,” Wolkowicz said. “And you’re also pissed off at me. Ever since I came back from Saigon, ever since Christopher got his ass in a sling, I’ve been a leper.” Wolkowicz stood up and rang an invisible bell. “Unclean! Unclean!”
“Oh. And why am I doing this to you, Barney?”
“Because I wanted to go in and get Christopher. In your book, that makes me a madman.”
“You’re not a madman,” Patchen said. “Just a romantic.”
“It would have worked. Two choppers, two squads of killers, in and out. We would have brought him home.”
“With World War III as an encore.”
“Ratshit. We would’ve brought him back alive and the Chinks would have swallowed it and kept their mouths shut. I’ve got to be honest with you, fella. I think you’ve got some deep, dark reason for wanting your best friend to be just exactly where he is.”
Wolkowicz had waited until they were under a light to speak these words. He wanted to observe Patchen’s reaction. Now, peering into his shadowy features, he saw the flash of surprise, the glint of anger that might be expected from an innocent man who has just been accused of a crime he did not commit. Wolkowicz saw something else also, and this was the thing he was looking for: a flicker of admiration. Patchen knew—knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that Wolkowicz had delivered Christopher to the Chinese. There was admiration in his expression because nobody but Wolkowicz would have been brilliant enough, or crude enough, or foolhardy enough, to drag Patchen’s deepest suspicions into the open and fling them into his face, pretending that the suspect was the accuser and the accuser was the suspect.
“What’s the matter?” Wolkowicz said. “Don’t you like my theory?”
“I love it,” Patchen said. He snorted in amusement, shook his head. “You have no shame, Barney, but nobody can say you haven’t got balls.”
“That’s how I got to be such a fucking legend,” Wolkowicz said. “But that’s history. How about a job, Boss?”
Patchen was still shaking his head, trying not to laugh. He knew he had given himself away to Wolkowicz. Now what? The two of them were alone in the middle of an urban American woods, one of the most dangerous environments on earth. Wolkowicz was capable of anything. He knew how to murder another man in a dozen silent ways. He could kill Patchen and throw his body into the canal: “SPYMASTER SLAIN.” Or carry it away: “OUTFIT CHIEF TAIN VANISHES.” Never to be found. Wolkowicz was fondling the dog again, baby-talking to it in German. Patchen laughed out loud.
“Have you ever killed a dog, Barney?”
Wolkowicz shook his head, staring fixedly into Patchen’s face as if he wanted to avoid eye contact with the Doberman. “No,” he said, “and if that’s the kind of job you’re going to offer me, forget it.” He put a hand on Patchen’s shoulder, the good one, and gave it a reassuring shake. “In fact,” he said, “forget the whole fucking thing. We’re just not meant for each other, kid, are we?”
“Well,” Patchen said, “your ways are not my ways, Barney, but it’s hard to argue with the results you get. In fact, I was going to ask you to have dinner with me tomorrow night to talk about your future.”
Wolkowicz feigned astonishment, covering his mouth with his hand. “No shit? What an impatient fool I am. I hope I haven’t spoiled everything.”
“Far from it. You’ve saved me the price of a meal. How would you like to play Christopher for a while?”
Wolkowicz registered suspicion, not surprise. “What’s that sup posed to mean?”
“You’re more like Christopher than you think. You know the work, you speak a lot of languages, you have a wide acquaintance among the misfits of the world. You’d be a singleton like him, under deep cover.”
“What cover? I don’t look like a poet.”
“You’ll think of something.”
“The arrangement would be the same as the one he had? I’d be on my own in the field and drive everybody else crazy?”
“Yes.”
“And I’d report to you, and only you?”
Patchen nodded. “To the Director, through me. What do you think?”
Wolkowicz laughed. He understood exactly what Patchen was doing: isolating him from everybody in the Outfit except himself, putting him out in the open where his every move could be observed, rendering him meaningless and friendless.
“Considering how Christopher ended up,” Wolkowicz said, “I think it’s fucking brilliant.”
3
UNTIL WOLKOWICZ CALLED ON OTTO AND MARIA ROTHCHILD IN THEIR house on Lake Leman, he had not heard Cathy Christopher’s name pronounced in more than ten years. Even then it came up by indirection when Maria chided Wolkowicz for neglecting his food. She had served poached trout, the Geneva delicacy, for lunch.
“You didn’t eat the best part,” Maria said. “The cheeks.”
Wolkowicz picked up the skeleton of the fish by the tail and draped it over her plate. “Be my guest,” he said.
Maria dug the tiny morsels of flesh from the head and ate them. “You’re only the second person ever to make me a present of their trout cheeks, Barney,” she said. “The other was Cathy Christopher. That was the only thing she ever gave anybody.”
“She had her generous moments,” Wolkowicz said. “What about all those Wops she banged in Rome when she was still married to her husband?”
Maria’s face, slightly flushed by the wine she had drunk with her trout, lit up at the prospect of Outfit gossip, captured by hidden microphones, described by watchers in the shadows.
“How do you know about that?” she asked, as if she already knew all the details and was merely testing the extent of Wolkowicz’s knowledge.
Wolkowicz went along. “I saw the pictures,” he replied. Maria drank more wine. “How did you get hold of those?” “Patchen was handing them around.”
“What a bastard. Did Paul see them?”
“I don’t know. He might have felt better if he had. She didn’t look like she was enjoying it very much.”
“God, but that’s awful,” Maria said. “Patchen is such a shit.” “He stays in character,” Wolkowicz said.
“So do we all,” said Otto. “Look at poor Paul.”
Although the weather was chilly, they were seated in the garden. Otto shivered and looked across the lake at the Mole, the snowy Alpine peak closest to Geneva and the only one visible today. He shivered again and fell asleep. Maria wrapped another blanket around him.
“Poor, poor Paul,” he said.
Minutes before, Otto had received the news of Christopher’s captivity with outward calm, but afterward his hands shook so badly that he was unable to use his knife and fork. After a brief outburst—sparkling eyes, a bark of laughter, a clap of the hands—Maria had mimicked his detachment, but she had been drinking wine recklessly ever since. After telling them about Christopher, Wolkowicz moved on to his real purpose. He had not come to Switzerland to discuss Christopher’s fate, but to plant the idea in Otto Rothchild’s mind that Patchen was responsible for it.
Otto could be counted on to spread the rumor throughout the half-world of people who worked secretly for the Americans. Even in disgrace he was in touch with dozens of the Outfit’s assets in Europe, Africa, and Asia. They were his old friends, his circle. At one time, before he made them what they were today by plugging them in to easy American money and silly American secrets, he had been the shark and they had been his pilot fish. In a sense, they still were. Otto’s disgrace, in the eyes of his friends, was the disgrace of the school prankster expelled by a slow-witted headmaster who detects the thousandth joke on himself and mistakes it for the first. They would all laugh about it at future reunions; they snickered about it now.
Maria opened a third bottle of Mont-stir-Rolle. It had been cooling in the running water of the mossy fountain, and the label came off with her hand when she set the bottle down.
“This is the only Swiss white Otto will allow in the house, even though he doesn’t drink alcohol,” Maria said. “We can’t afford French wine, thanks to mutual friends. How many Italians did Cathy go to bed with, exactly? Is there an official Outfit count?”
“I don’t remember. Half a dozen. One of them beat her up because she was such a lousy piece of ass.”
“So that was it! She wouldn’t tell me a thing.”
“You saw her afterward?”
He was interested in this news. Maria, happier than she had been in a long time, leaned back in her chair and sipped her wine. She missed the Work tremendously.
“She stayed with us,” she said. “That beautiful face was all smashed in. She wouldn’t say who did it to her. I knew it couldn’t be Paul.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Paul would never have let her see he cared that much. He never left a mark on his victims. Look at Otto. Look at me. No, it wasn’t Paul. I figured she must have decided to make Paul jealous and picked out a psychopath to have an affair with. It would have been just like her. She had the brains of a chicken.”
Wolkowicz watched Maria pour herself more wine. “You sound like you didn’t like her,” he said. “I thought you two were old school chums. The Daisy Chain, all that crap.”
“Cathy went to Bryn Mawr not Vassar,” Maria said, annoyed at his mistake. “But if they had a daisy chain, Cathy would have been voted Queen of the May. How could anybody like somebody who looked like her and had all that money? She used to carry ten thousand dollars in cash around in her pocketbook.”
“Do you think Christopher married her for her money?” “No. That was hound dog lust. You could see it in his eyes.” Otto woke up and joined the conversation.
“That’s not what Lla Kahina said,” he said, clearing his throat. “Maria, water.”
She came around the table and held the glass while he drank, then wiped his lips with his napkin.
“Lla Kahina?” Wolkowicz asked. “Who’s that?”
“The Queen of the Berbers,” Maria said.
Otto made a face of displeasure and pushed her away. “In vino stupiditas,” he said. “Lla Kahina is an old friend from North Africa who happened to be visiting when Cathy came.”
“An amazing woman,” Maria said. “She’s a clairvoyant.” “She’s a what?” Wolkowicz said.
“A clairvoyant,” Otto said. “She sees into the future.”
Maria said, “She said what happened between Christopher and Cathy was fate, that it had some hidden purpose.”
“No shit?” Wolkowicz said. “What would that be?”
Rothchild made a weak gesture and cleared his throat again. Maria, still standing by, held the glass for him again and he drank.
“According to Lla Kahina,” Otto said, “hound dog lust, as Maria calls it, is always a signal from the invisible powers that the two people who feel it for each other have been chosen to conceive an amazing child.”
“The maculate conception,” Maria said. “So to speak.”
Otto ignored her again. “No matter how unsuited to each other the couple are in every other way, no matter how unhappy it makes them, they must do what is necessary to conceive the child.” “It is owed to the world from another life,” Maria said. “That was Lla Kahina’s theory,” Otto said.
Wolkowicz leaned back in his metal chair. “You go along with that?” he asked.
“Why not?” Otto said. “It certainly fits the case of Paul and Cathy. She said the same thing about Hubbard and Lori way back when, and look at the result. Paul.”
“This clairvoyant was in Berlin in the twenties?”
Rothchild nodded. “Appeared from nowhere, this little golden girl from Africa with teardrops tattooed on her cheeks. Everyone, Barney, wanted to fuck her. Everyone.”
“Did many succeed?”
“Nobody. She had ideas about racial purity.”
“What was she, a Nazi?”
“No. She thought Aryans were inferior stock—it was the purity of her own tribe she was trying to preserve. The Ja’wabi, they were called. She wouldn’t even consider other Berbers worthy of her favors. Ja’wabi or nothing was her motto.”
Wolkowicz held out his glass for more wine. “The Ja’wabi, eh?” he said. “You’ve got quite a memory, Otto.”
“She was a memorable female. She was called Meryem in those days. Hubbard quoted a charming poem about her in his novel The Rose and the Lotus. Maria, go fetch my copy.”
Maria went into the house.
“Forgive my wife, she’s a little drunk, we don’t serve much wine in our circumstances,” Otto said to Wolkowicz. “Brecht used to say Meryem came from the Mountains of the Moon. He was a great fornicator, you know, he bred half the heifers in Berlin, no conscience whatever, unlike poor Hubbard. Actually Meryem came from the Mountains of Mountains, the Idáren Dráren, as she called them. Ah!”
Maria returned with the book, already open to the right page. Otto read the lines in a dry, quavering voice:
“ ‘Meryem has no rival,
She is worth five hundred mares
She is worth five hundred she-camels. Her saliva, I have tasted it,
It is the sugar of dried grapes.
How could I forget Meryem,
Meryem with her black lashes.’ “
“Hubbard tasted her saliva?” Wolkowicz asked.
“Certainly not,” Otto replied. “Hubbard tasted only one woman’s saliva in his whole life, and I’ve told you about Meryem’s principles. The poem’s a translation from Arabic, something he found in a book by some French general who served in North Africa. Hubbard had no imagination. His novels are really just diaries. He just wrote down what happened every day.”
“You mean it’s non-fiction?”
“Not exactly,” Otto said. “But it’s not exactly fiction, either. It’s Hubbard’s version of the truth. Not because he was a liar—we both know he wasn’t—but because he was an American. He didn’t quite understand the world he was living in, but he thought he did, so he recorded his misconceptions. It gave his work a certain Dadaesque charm. Of course infantilism was all the rage in those days.”
Wolkowicz listened without apparent interest. “Tell me more about this girlfriend of Christopher’s mother,” he said. “Was she like the Meryem in the poem?”
“She was exquisite. Zaentz—the man who made that nude drawing of Lori when she was pregnant with Paul—painted a sensational picture of her and Lori together. Here, look.”
The frontispiece of Hubbard’s novel was a tinted reproduction of a painting of two female heads, one fair, the other dark, gazing directly at the painter. The picture was as glossy and realistic as a photograph, but something was hidden in it.
Wolkowicz could not quite get it into focus. “There’s something wrong with this,” he said.
Otto was pleased by his confusion. “Do you see what it is?” he asked. “It’s right there, in plain sight. Look again.”
