The Second Sight, page 43
“What deal, precisely?” Christopher asked.
“Well, as I just said, the assassination of Heydrich.”
“What was the point of killing him?”
“The point? The point was that your mother made it possible. Obviously this lunatic couldn’t be recruited. What could we offer him? He thought Germany was going to win the coming war and he was going to be the second Führer after Hitler retired full of honors and much beloved. So did a lot of other people. The only thing to do with him, if we were going to do anything at all, was to kill him and hope for happy results. The trouble was, the war came much sooner than anyone expected. I handed Mrs. Christopher my billet-doux on August tenth. On August twenty-third the Hitler-Stalin Pact was signed. On September first Germany invaded Poland. There was no time to lay on the operation.”
“So you abandoned it?”
“Delayed it. It goes without saying that your mother was the key to success. She wanted to get your father and herself out of Germany, having already got you out, and of course she had her opportunities. Heydrich in his loony way encouraged her to sail off to Denmark, smuggling Jews and other enemies of the Reich in that famous sailboat your parents kept in Rügen. Each time she returned he regarded it as a sign of her love for him. He would get quite emotional about it. I’m truly sorry to tell you these sick-making things in such plain language. After all, this woman was your mother, and one can imagine how you feel even after all these years, but these were the facts. Of course he kept a jolly close eye on the Last of the Mohicans … have I got the name right?”
“It was just Mahican, spelled with an ‘a’.”
“Really? Well, I was rather close. Odd how one remembers every detail of the long ago at my age and forgets to button one’s trousers,” Sir Richard said with a smile. “Anyway, Heydrich took the precaution of shadowing the Mahican with a Gestapo E-boat out of Rügen, and I suppose the crew would have intervened in certain circumstances. You may recall that you were always stopped and searched after you came back into harbor; that was Heydrich’s way of saying cheerio. In any case, your mother and father got Meryem out, and I was quite sure that they’d try to do a bolt, too. But Heydrich was much more sure that they wouldn’t. Very serene about it, he was.”
“He talked to you often about my mother?”
“My dear fellow, he talked to me about nothing else. We kept on meeting in the fleshpots. Heydrich would have two or three or four tarts a night; I’ve never known a man with such an enormous appetite for female companionship. He never touched Lori, of course. In his mind she was far above all that; you can be quite at peace on that point. In any case, he wasn’t a bit worried about her coming back from the sail with Meryem. He’d set the whole thing up as a test of her fidelity. The details were appalling.”
“In what way?”
“In what way?”
“I’d really rather not go into it. It’s enough to say he locked Meryem up in a room as a means of tightening his hold on your mother. He was crude, you see. That was why he was so effective. One simply can’t deal with the unthinkable unless one is as mad as Heydrich was. But he knew he held all the aces.”
“Which were what?”
Sir Richard coughed, a sign, Christopher thought, of mild embarrassment, or of the wish to feign it. He pressed him to continue.
“Well, of course he was head of the entire German police apparatus,” Sir Richard said. “So he knew all sorts of things. Things that might influence your mother.”
“What, specifically?”
“Specifically?” Sir Richard said. “I’m awfully sorry to tell you this, my dear fellow, but since you ask, Heydrich knew, on the morning that he let Meryem go, that you yourself had landed in Hamburg on that very day and taken the train for Rügen. Your parents had sent you off to America with the O. G.—or the Y. G. as he then was, ha-ha—but I gather you turned right around and came back on the next ship. Isn’t that so?”
“Yes,” Christopher said. “It’s so.”
Two days after the O. G. delivered him to Elliott Hubbard on the pier in Manhattan, Christopher had used a letter of authorization given to him by his father to draw money from his parents’ account at D. & D. Laux & Co. Then he had bought a third-class ticket on the Bremen and sailed back to Germany. His mother and father were in danger; he wanted to be with them.
“When your parents got back from smuggling Meryem out of the country,” Sir Richard said, “there you were, waiting for them. That changed everything, of course, because it gave Heydrich a rather valuable hostage, your parents’ only son, the last of the line on both sides of the family; Heydrich researched matters of that kind. He still managed the odd charade, of course, just to touch up the parental anxiety—I believe you went along on the last voyage of the Mahican when Otto Rothchild was the only passenger. The E-boat tagged along on that one, too. Heydrich was taking no chances. All the same, he was pleased as punch when your mother turned up back in Rügen. By then it was all over. Whatever arrangements she made for you and your father, your mother had to remain in Germany. Heydrich had won. She knew that quite well. She got you out on the last possible day, of course.”
“Stop,” Christopher said. “Are you telling me that her arrest at the frontier was pre-arranged, that Heydrich let my father and me go in order to keep her? That she agreed to that?”
Sir Richard sighed. “I’m afraid so. But in the end, remember, we did kill the bastard after he became the führer of Czechoslovakia. He took your mother with him to his kingdom in the east, of course, and it was she who made it all possible because she knew what his every move was going to be. She died at the hands of the Gestapo, of course, like all the others who played a part in the operation. I won’t burden you with the details. Of course we hadn’t a hope of getting her out, but she knew that from the start. She was a very, very gallant lady, and I’m glad you know the full particulars at last.”
He looked into Christopher’s ravaged face, then reached out a hand in genuine sympathy. After all, even though Christopher and his people were not English and could never be English no matter how hard they tried, he had known the family for fifty years.
“My dear boy,” he said. “My dear, dear boy.”
11
CHRISTOPHER TREATED SIR RICHARD SHAW-CONDON TO LUNCH AT the local pub after all. To the Englishman’s relief his visitor had quickly regained control of himself—outwardly, at least. He did not touch the food that the waitress, an unkempt trollop who scratched her itching scalp with a ballpoint pen, dropped onto the table before him. While Sir Richard ate his gummy smoked salmon followed by a leathery mixed grill and drank the better part of a bottle of Romanian merlot, they discussed the twentieth-century novel, remembering the names of characters and plot details for each other. Christopher was not saying much, so Sir Richard did most of the talking. He had always been a great reader, he said, passing the time with novels purchased from operational funds while waiting in hotel rooms or train compartments or on windswept park benches for agents to turn up. Spending his service’s money on books had never troubled his conscience. They were very useful as recognition signals: “I shall be reading a novel called Nile Shadows; if the coast is clear I shall close the book and put it into my pocket of my mackintosh. Follow me into the lavatory.” Lately he had been reading these works all over again, revisiting the scenes of his youth, as it were, because he had known most of the originals of the characters. The English novelists of his generation had in many cases spent the whole of their adult lives writing about the adolescents they had met at Oxford. “I seldom bother with books written by Cantabrigians,” he said. “They’re always by and about boring Communists who call themselves Catholics or vice-versa. Not that it matters any longer. I mean to say, it’s all over.”
“What’s all over?” Christopher asked.
“The age of political delusion. Communism, Socialism, Fascism, Gandhism, Nkrumahism, the lot.”
“You think the gods are dying?”
“They’re in their boxes, my dear fellow. Except for the eternal Tories, of course. In their boxes. Seems odd to have one’s own century almost over with and all passions spent and near-forgotten, doesn’t it?”
“A relief,” Christopher said, very softly, even for him.
Sir Richard looked up warily, wondering if this American, if that’s what he was, was actually going to reopen the subject of his mother in the midst of the gang of provincial solicitors and bank clerks who were crowded into what used to be the saloon bar, eating their midday sausages. Well, he was welcome, if that’s what he wanted. Sir Richard fixed Christopher with a bulldog look. He made no apologies for having sent Lori Christopher to her death half a century before; unless he was actually telling the story, he could barely sort out her demise from all the other heroic sacrifices he had made possible during his long career as a handler of agents. But Christopher uttered no reproaches. If he knew anything, he knew that secret agents, like all other members of the human race, did what they wanted in their hearts to do; they were only coerced into destroying themselves in the kind of novels that Sir Richard refused to buy, even with other people’s money.
“What time is your train?” Sir Richard asked.
“One forty-five.”
“Then you’d better be hopping.”
Christopher paid the bill, and as he waited for his change, Sir Richard slid a book across the tabletop. It was a copy of the British first edition of The Rose and the Lotus.
“I bought this long before I knew either of your parents,” he said. “Saw it in Hatchard’s as I was stocking up on reading matter for Germany. On first reading I thought for a few pages that the author must be an Englishman. He certanly wrote like one. But then I realized that he couldn’t be because I didn’t recognize anybody in the book. Wanted to meet them all the same.”
He was an admirer of Hubbard’s work. On his last meeting with Christopher, when the ‘71 Riesling was poured, he had quoted a line of Hubbard’s poetry comparing the taste of hock to hyacinths and honey. Now, with a rueful glance at the empty bottle of Iron Curtain claret before him, he quoted it again. “I’m sure you read all your father’s books as a younger man,” he said. “But if you haven’t read this one for some time, then you ought to try it again in the light of the new knowledge that’s just come your way. Another thing you might like to know. Your father and I used it for a book code when he went into Germany for us in ‘40.”
“Did you tell him about your connection to his wife?”
Sir Richard looked shocked. “Good heavens! No. Nor would you have done. What if the Gestapo had got him?”
On the long train ride from Northumberland to London, Christopher read the book, with its description of the Experiment and its portraits of Lori and Meryem that were more vivid than Zaentz’s painting. It was the first time he had looked into its pages for many, many years, and by the time he reached his destination, he had decided what he was going to do.
INTERLUDE
BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS
“I UNDERSTAND YOU AND YEHO HAD A TALK IN THE DESERT,” SAID Patchen to Christopher.
“Yes,” Christopher said.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you all that myself, but you left town before I had the chance.”
“That’s all right. The story had a certain added force, coming from him.”
Patchen coughed, as if covering some other sign of emotion. “I’ll bet it did,” he said, “but that wasn’t the reason the messenger was chosen. It’s nice of you to help us out, all things considered.”
“There were other considerations. Yeho explained the situation very clearly.”
They walked on through the autumn night with the Doberman scouting ahead along the murky tow path. In spite of the kidnapping of the third Beautiful Dreamer in Washington itself, the dog remained Patchen’s only visible protection from his enemies. A bolt of lightning rent the black sky far to the west, over the Appalachians.
“Rain in the suburbs late tonight, high pollen count tomorrow,” Patchen said. “Have you ever noticed how much people in this town talk about the weather?”
In Christopher’s experience they spoke of little else. He said, “I’ve noticed. Do you have a theory about that?”
“Funny you should ask. Yes, I do. It even has a metaphorical dimension. Shall I go on?”
Patchen was in a caustic mood.
“Go on,” Christopher said.
“It has to do with the fundamental nature of the place,” Patchen said. “You remember Sebastian’s eightieth birthday party up in New York—all those friends of his, stock market wheeler dealers, big-time lawyers, publishers, Hollywood producers, that man who owned a baseball team, captains of industry, doctors who were curing diseases by replacing people’s genes?”
“I remember. The baseball man told the O. G. he always wanted to be a spy.”
“What did the O. G. say?”
“His eyes lit up. Baseball! He said, ‘It’s never too late. Let us know if you want to start up a team in some interesting place and need a silent partner.’ The fellow thought he was kidding. Go on with your theory.”
“Well, looking around the table at all those New York faces,” Patchen said, “I realized that I was surrounded by people who lived by their wits, whose whole purpose in life was to make things happen. Whereas in Washington the entire purpose of being, the real function of government, is to prevent things from happening—war being the supreme example.”
Christopher chuckled. “The moral being that the weather is interesting because it can’t be prevented?”
“No, that’s the metaphor,” Patchen said. “The moral is more interesting. The Outfit’s purpose is to make things happen in an organism in which nothing is permitted to happen. That’s why it’s always being attacked by white corpuscles like Patrick Graham and White House assistants.”
“It’s a virus?” Christopher said.
“Worse, a conscience. ‘Out of darkness, truth.’ Well, let there be darkness.”
The thought seemed to cheer him tremendously; he had not spent a lifetime at the O. G.’s elbow without learning to love a joke on the opposition.
Christopher put a comradely hand on his friend’s paralyzed shoulder and felt him chuckling within himself. Even the Doberman, cocking its head and uttering a questioning whimper, seemed to detect the change in his master’s mood. Patchen thought the animal was merely bothered by the distant electrical storm.
“See?” he said. “In Weimar, even the dogs talk about the weather.”
V
OLD BOYS
ONE
1
TWO DAYS AFTER HIS DINNER AT THE PATCHENS’, PATRICK GRAHAM received another mysterious communication. A man with a Middle East accent called him on his unlisted number at home and identified himself as a member of the group that had kidnapped Harvey Walpole and sent Graham the tape of his interrogation.
“What may I call you?” Graham said, with flawless underground etiquette. “What is the name of your commando?”
The caller answered the second question.
“I’ve never heard of any freedom fighters operating under that name.”
“There are many things you have never heard about, Mister Graham.”
“What, for example?”
“Be patient. Walpole is not the only one. Perhaps you will be told who the others were. Perhaps you will be sent other tapes.”
“Some say that Walpole doesn’t exist.”
“Doesn’t exist? You believe this?”
“I can’t discount it. What proof do you have that this man is who you say he is?”
“You will have proof,” the voice said, before disconnecting.
Graham was breaking in a new secretary, a young woman who had just graduated with honors from Dartmouth (he hired Ivy Leaguers and graduates of the Five Sisters only), where she had been a marathon runner. She ran to work every morning in the dark because she had to report to Graham’s house on O Street at five o’clock in order to tape the satellite network news feeds that he watched while he did his exercises, an hour later.
As she crossed the P Street bridge on the morning following the phone call, another runner, also a woman, overtook her in the half-darkness and thrust a plastic Safeway shopping bag into her arms. The lower half of this woman’s face was concealed by a surgical mask, but the secretary had an impression of intense Oriental eyes and black hair. “For Mister Graham,” said the masked woman. “Very important.” Then she accelerated, turned left into the ramp leading to Rock Creek Parkway, and got into a car that sped away in the direction of the Kennedy Center.
“Did you see her face? Did you get the license number of the car?” Graham asked.
“No. I told you, she had this mask on. She may have been Japanese.”
“Japanese? Why do you say that?”
“The surgical mask. They wear them when they have a cold.”
