The Second Sight, page 39
“That sounds ominous. You and I have somewhat different ideas of what constitutes patriotism, you know.”
“True. And we’ve certainly had our differences in the past.”
“Like who killed Wolkowicz.”
“Oh, Patrick, that again. Barney Wolkowicz shot himself. Why can’t you accept the simple truth?”
“The answer to that is simple. Because you say it’s the simple truth. Therefore it cannot possibly be the truth.”
“I thought that might have something to do with it. But I asked you here tonight to talk about something else. It involves the most important questions of national security.”
“I can well believe it,” Graham said. “You must be talking about a certain video tape of one of the Outfit’s finest babbling on about your totally illegal operations against the freedom fighters of the world.”
“Ah,” Patchen said, calmly returning Graham’s agitated stare. “Then you’ve already received the package. Was there a return address?”
“Of course there wasn’t.”
“A letter signed by anyone or any organization?”
“Tune in tomorrow. And thanks for confirming the tape’s authenticity.”
“I didn’t realize that I’d done that.”
“You’re denying it?”
“How can I? I haven’t seen or heard what’s on the tape you’ve received, and even if I did you wouldn’t believe me. But if it’s anything like the ones we’ve been receiving through the mail I can understand why you’d be taken in.”
“Taken in? What are you talking about?”
“Well, for openers we don’t have a Harvey P. Walpole on the rolls of the Outfit.”
This was literally true; Walpole was a pseudonym to begin with, and only that morning Patchen had signed an order separating the man known by that false name from the Outfit and transferring him, along with the other Beautiful Dreamers, to cover organizations operated by the Outfit in Papua New Guinea, Saudi Arabia, Korea, and Taiwan. There they would live with their families in American compounds, go to work every day, receive full salary and benefits, and retire in due course on pensions equivalent to the ones they would have received if they had gone on working on the inside. This collective transfer had left a broad paper trail, but Patchen had taken that into account.
“I didn’t mention anyone named Walpole,” Graham said.
“Do they call him by some other name in your copy of the tape?”
Graham’s face registered impatience. “What point are you trying to make, exactly?”
“After what you said a moment ago about your opinion of my truthfulness, I’m not sure that it’s worth making.”
“Cut the crap, Patchen. What’s your point?” Graham’s accent was perfectly American now.
Patchen gave him a sardonic smile. “I’m trying to plant the idea that you may be dealing with a hoax.”
“Like hell I am. Everything Walpole says on that tape checks out.”
“Did you say ‘Walpole’? How interesting. How did you check it out, may I ask?”
“We used the network’s files and my personal files.”
“Which are based on what?”
“All kinds of things.”
“Old broadcasts? Transcripts of interviews? Correspondents’ reports? Newspaper clippings?”
“Among other things.”
“Of which how much—eighty percent? ninety percent?—is in the public domain and available to anyone?”
“We don’t compile those percentages.”
“But you know what they are. I think you should consider the possibility that anyone who knows his way around a public library could have come up with the basic facts in that tape—names of terrorist organizations, names of their leaders, dates and circumstances of all the sudden deaths and other misfortunes that are blamed on the Outfit. Inventing the rest—the parts you can’t check out—would be child’s play.”
An expression of stubborn skepticism fixed Graham’s handsome features in place, like a television freeze-frame. “Why exactly would anyone do that?” he asked.
“I don’t know, exactly. But the possibilities are obvious—a fraternity house prank arising from youthful high spirits, dementia arising from political conviction, a black operation by a foreign intelligence service designed to embarrass and discredit the U. S. government.”
“So what are you telling me?”
“That you should consider all the possibilities before you go on the air with this tape that fell into your lap.”
“In other words, you’re asking me to kill the story.”
“I haven’t asked you to do anything. Please remember that. I’ve tried to make you aware, in the friendliest possible way, that there’s a high potential for embarrassment in this situation.”
“For the Outfit.”
“Obviously. Also for the President and the committees on the Hill. They don’t know anything about all this.”
“You haven’t told them?”
“Why would I tell them?”
“Why the hell wouldn’t you? I wish I had a camera running right now.”
“I think the answer to that question is implicit in what I’ve been saying to you.”
Graham was on the attack now. “What the hell have you been saying to me? Just tell me in plain English.”
“I thought that was what I had been doing.”
“Then you’ve got a funny idea of what constitutes plain English, I’ll tell you what I think all this double-talk means. I think you’re trying to get me to kill this story.”
“So you’ve already said, but you misunderstand. I hope you will broadcast the tape.”
“What?”
“You heard me. I hope you go ahead. If you have no interest in covering your own ass, so much the better. I just wanted you to be aware of the pitfalls.”
Graham stood up, a sudden and, as it seemed to Patchen, involuntary movement. The two men could hear the women’s voices in the other room; they were laughing delightedly.
“What are you up to?” Graham said.
“Why do I have to be up to anything? Why are you so paranoid, Patrick?”
“Ha!”
Graham had never before been so close to Patchen in such strong light, and he saw for himself that the stories were true—Patchen’s left eye was made of glass. It was a nearly perfect prosthesis which moved with his other eye and was precisely the same color. But it had no expression, and this created the uncanny illusion that Patchen’s real eye was somehow not natural, either; it crossed Graham’s mind that the false eye might be a demonic, privacy-destroying device—a camera? a listening device? something even worse? —fabricated in the Outfit’s secret laboratories. Nevertheless, he did not flinch or look away.
“Look at it rationally, if such a thing is possible for a man of your convictions,” Patchen said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that you’re predisposed to hear, see, and expose evil where the Outfit and the U. S. government are concerned and give our enemies the benefit of every doubt. The whole world knows that, including the person or persons who sent you that tape. You’re eager to be used if the cause is right.”
“Is that so? And what cause is that, exactly?”
“Come off it, Patrick. What I’m saying to you is, ‘Broadcast and be damned.’ You’ll probably get away with it—you’ve gotten away with worse—and it may turn out to be a very good thing for the Outfit and the country.”
“You’re crazy. People believe what they see and hear on my show.”
“That’s why it will be a good thing. If we didn’t do the awful things you say Walpole says we did on that videotape, then we have nothing to lose. No secrets are betrayed and we get credit for dirty tricks and dastardly deeds that will scare the bejesus out of every little Marxist rodent cowering in a hole anywhere in the world.”
Patchen, who had chosen these last, unforgivable words very carefully, winked at Graham. This was a laborious process that slowly covered and uncovered his eerie artificial eye with a lid that was cross-hatched by scar tissue like the scales on a serpent’s skin. “And now I think we should say goodnight,” he said, getting to his feet. “Time flies when you’re enjoying yourself.”
In the next room, Martha and Charlotte were still laughing like schoolgirls.
4
YEHO STERN WAS RETIRED NOW, A POLITE WAY OF SAYING THAT HE had outlived his era and been replaced by a younger man who was not burdened by his memories or obligated by his debts. Yeho had always known that this would happen sooner or later—after all, he himself had climbed over an old man to get to the top—and when it did, he accepted it with a shrug and retired to the Negev to grow tangerines.
“The tangerine business is a good business, very interesting,” he told the O. G. “You have to run operations against nature all the time.”
“Is that tea all right?” the O. G. asked.
Yeho had just taken two cubes of sugar out of his pocket and popped them into his mouth; he was now filtering green Japanese tea through them. He made a face, but nodded. “Very bitter,” he said, “but stimulating.”
They were sitting around a marquetry table in Sebastian Laux’s office at D. & D. Laux & Co. Yeho was almost as comfortable here as in a bubble, but he was restless. The room, furnished in the style of Louis XIV, was too luxurious for him. He knew the decor was a kind of cover, that people expected the back offices of private banks to look like this, but he did not like it.
“You’re not really supposed to take sugar with this tea,” Sebastian Laux said. “It comes from Kyushu, and the plant is fertilized with the night soil of people whose diet, apart from rice and a few vegetables, consists entirely of oily fish, such as mackerel. That’s what imparts that bitter tang you noticed. You kill that taste, which is the whole point of the tea, when you put sugar in it. Or right on top of your taste buds, like Yeho’s doing.”
“How can they be sure these people eat only fish and rice?” Yeho asked
“By tasting the tea,” Sebastian answered. “The tea grower provides the fish. After that it’s the honor system, though of course he can tell if he’s got the real thing. Anyway, the Japanese are pretty scrupulous about keeping a bargain, among themselves at least.”
“The stuff makes my ears buzz,” said the O. G. “Have you ever had it analyzed for dope?”
Sebastian, who was a tea snob in the way that the O. G. was a wine snob, paid no attention to the teasing; he was used to it. He lifted a Temmoku tea bowl to his lips and took in a noisy mouthful of air along with the liquid, in the Japanese manner. No other noise intruded, although they could see the glass towers and teeming traffic of New York’s financial district through the windows of one-way glass.
Yeho hoped that the O. G. would come to the point of this meeting soon. Sebastian, not the O. G. or Patchen, had asked him to come to New York for this meeting, and he had flown from Tel Aviv on twenty-four hours’ notice to be present, but the arrangements made him wonder. If Patchen and the O. G. were using a cut-out, even if the man in between was Sebastian Laux, then they must intend to ask him to do them a serious favor. That did not trouble him; he would do for them whatever he could, as they would do for him. That had always been the arrangement. But his power to do favors was greatly diminished. The new boys didn’t like it when he paid visits to his past. New boys didn’t like Old Boys; it was a fact of nature.
Finally Sebastian finished his tea. The O. G. had been holding a plain manila envelope, sealed with Scotch tape, on his lap. He now handed this over to Yeho. “Here,” he sald. “Skim this and tell me what you think.”
Yeho, throwing back his head and holding the papers at arm’s length, read through the file Patchen had handed to him. It was a digest of the Beautiful Dreamers case, badly typed (by the O. G. himself, Yeho assumed) on drugstore foolscap. When he had finished reading, Sebastian switched on a television set and they watched the tape of Harvey P. Walpole’s drugged confession.
“Beautiful,” Yeho said, as the screen went black. “If I didn’t know better, if the target was different, I’d say it had to be us.”
“Do you know better?” the O. G. asked.
“Only on principle; nobody talks to me anymore. But it cannot be. We all know that. So who can it be?”
“David has his suspicions. You remember the Eye of Gaza.”
“Butterfly’s Arabs. Yes, certainly. You suspect the dead?”
“Did you kill them all?”
Yeho paused; this was not the sort of question the Americans usually asked him. “No, not every single one,” he said. “The number one asset, Hassan Abdallah, as Butterfly called him, was very good, very slippery. He got away from us, with two others.”
“You never told us that,” the O. G. said.
“We thought we could deal with him before you knew he was gone, and then it was too late to tell you. He’s never been heard of since.”
“That could mean he’s been sleeping and someone has woken him.”
“I agree. So what do you want me to say?”
“At this late date, what is there to say?” The O. G. went imperturbably on. “One of the things this fellow Harvey P. Walpole was working on before he was kidnapped was the Eye of Gaza. Walpole was a very good man. And just a week or two before they grabbed him, he made Hassan Abdallah.”
“Made him?”
“Identified him. Got him cold. True name Soubhi El-Nazal, born in Jordan of Palestinian parents. He went to Berkeley under a scholarship fund set up by good-hearted citizens for deserving young Palestinians. Got a Ph.D. in chemistry with honors. Brilliant student. When Butterfly picked him up, he was working for Kelch and Kuhns, A. G., a research laboratory in Munich. He specialized in pharmacodynamics, which is the experimental study of the action and fate of drugs in animals. What works with animals, of course, usually works with people.”
Applied research in drugs? Yeho was very interested now. “Did Walpole tell his kidnappers this?”
“If he did, it’s not on the tape. ‘Gee,’ we said to ourselves, ‘That’s funny. Everything else Walpole told them is on this tape. Only the part about Hassan Abdallah is missing.’ That tickled our funny bone.”
“Maybe he didn’t tell them. Under drugs people don’t remember everything, or sometimes even remember what’s true and what isn’t.”
“That’s a possibility. But it was the freshest thing in Walpole’s mind. He ‘d made the discovery only days before. If he was right, and he knew he was, he’d solved the case. He was elated. It was the breakthrough of a lifetime. It was the first thing he would have talked about.”
“You’ve got a point, I admit it,” Yeho said. “So why am I here?”
“I don’t want to embarrass you, Yeho,” Patchen said. “But you questioned Butterfly before you handed him over to the Chinese. As I understand it, you know everything he told us; Horace gave you the transcript of our interrogations. But your methods are sometimes a little more effective than ours. The question is, did Butterfly tell you anything he didn’t tell us?”
Yeho said, “Let me think.” He was not evading the question. He had dealt with hundreds of cases, conducted dozens of interrogations, since the Butterfly operation; the details of this particular case were stored somewhere in his memory, but it would take a moment to search them out. Seated in one of Sebastian’s three-hundred-year-old J. Lepautre armchairs, his sandals dangling a few inches above the magnificent rashan rug that meant nothing to him, he closed his eyes and concentrated.
After a moment he opened them again. “Only one thing that might have been important,” he said. “Butterfly said this man Hassan Abdallah was not a political, even though he said he was. What he was was a true Jew hater, a psychopath, a fellow who carried a picture of Hitler in his wallet. He wanted to finish what the Nazis had started—kill us all. He was particularly obsessed with a tribe of Jews in the Maghrib called the Ja’wabi. He wanted to exterminate them most of all.”
“The Ja’wabi?” Sebastian said, starting a little in his chair.
Yeho noted the involuntary movement. What was this? he wondered, but asked no questions. “The Ja’wabi are anusim, which means that they’re Jews who practice their own religion in secret after a forced conversion to another religion,” he said. “In this case the Ja’wabi have been pretending to be Moslems for more than a thousand years, ever since the Arab conquest of the western Sahara.”
“A thousand years?” the O. G. said.
“There’s nothing so unbelievable about that,” Yeho replied, happy to enlighten these Americans. “At least a hundred thousand Spanish Jews were baptized as Christians in the 1390s. Over the next three centuries the Holy Inquisition burned more than thirty thousand of these converts at the stake on suspicion of insincerity, and tortured another thirty or forty thousand. Nevertheless, secret prayer houses that had been in constant use by Jews since the days of the Inquisition were discovered in Spain as recently as the nineteenth century, and groups of secret Jews, the descendants of these false converts, or ‘Marranos’—the Spanish word means ‘swine’ —were found even later in Portugal and as far away as Mexico.”
“If these people have been doing what they do in secret,” Sebastian asked, “how did Hassan Abdallah find out about them?” His voice was thin and piping; it was even more obvious than before that he was shaken by what Yeho had told them. Still Yeho betrayed no curiosity. He went on with his story.
“The Russians trained the Eye of Gaza in Libya, out in the desert,” he said. “According to Butterfly, one of the trainers was an East German, a former SS man. He and Hassan were kindred spirits, of course. One day the German was telling dirty Jew stories around the campfire, and the subject of the Ja’wabi came up. Hassan was hooked.”
“The SS knew about the Ja’wabi?” Sebastian said.
“Evidently they had a file from before the war. Don’t ask me how—German thoroughness. From the moment he heard the story, the Ja’wabi gave Hassan Abdallah a purpose in life—Jews defiling Allah’s mosque, touching the Holy Koran with infidel fingers. They had to be exterminated. That very night he asked Butterfly for poison gas to do the job.”
