“I’m sorry for you, Ed,” said Strelski.
And if Ed Prescott caught the undertone, he preferred to let it pass him by, in the interest of being two men together, solving a shared dilemma.
“Joe, just exactly how much did the Brits tell you about this undercover man they had, this Pine, this fellow with the names?”
Strelski did not fail to notice the past tense.
“Not too much,” said Strelski.
“So how much?” said Prescott, man-to-man.
“He wasn’t a professional. He was some kind of volunteer.”
“A walk-in? I never trusted walk-ins, Joe. In the days when the Agency paid me the compliment of consulting me from time to time, back in the Cold War, which seems like a century ago, I always counseled caution toward these would-be Soviet defectors clamoring to make us a present of their wares. What else did they tell you about him, Joe, or did they keep him wrapped in a flattering shroud of mystery?”
Strelski’s manner was deliberately deadpan. With men like Prescott that was all you could do: parry until you had worked out what he wanted you to say, then either say it, or plead the Fifth, or tell him to shove it up his ass.
“They told me they had structured him in some way,” he replied. “They’d given him extra background to make him more attractive to the target.”
“Who told you, Joe?”
“Burr.”
“Did Burr tell you the nature of this background at all, Joe?”
“No.”
“Did Burr indicate to you how much background was there already, and how much came out of the makeup box?”
“No.”
“Memory is a whore, Joe. Think back. Did he tell you that the man was alleged to have committed a homicide? Maybe more than one?”
“No.”
“Smuggled drugs? In Cairo as well as Britain? Maybe in Switzerland also? We’re checking.”
“He was not specific. He said they had fitted the guy out with this background, and that now that he had this background we could have Apostoll badmouth one of Roper’s lieutenants and figure Roper would take to the new guy as a signer. Roper uses signers. So they gave him a signer. He likes his people flaky. So they gave him flaky.”
“So the Brits were witting to Apostoll. I don’t think I knew that.”
“Sure they were. We made a meeting with him. Burr, Agent Flynn and myself.”
“Was that wise, Joe?”
“It was collaboration,” said Strelski with a tightening of his voice. “We were into collaboration, remember? It’s come apart at the seams a little. But in those days we had joint planning.”
Time stopped while Ed Prescott took a tour around his very large office. Its darkened windows were of inch-deep armored glass, turning the morning sunlight into afternoon. The double doors, closed against intruders, were of reinforced steel. Miami was enduring a season of home invasions, Strelski remembered. Teams of masked men held up everybody in the house, then helped themselves to whatever caught their eye. Strelski wondered whether he would go to Apo’s funeral this afternoon. The day is young. See what I decide. After that he wondered whether he would go back to his wife. When things got this lousy, that was what he always wondered. Sometimes being away from her was like being out on parole. It wasn’t freedom, and sometimes you seriously wondered whether it was any better than the alternative. He thought of Pat Flynn and wished he had Pat’s composure. Pat took to being an outcast like other people take to fame and money. When they told Pat not to bother with coming into the office till this thing was cleared up, Pat thanked them, shook all their hands, had a bath and drank a bottle of Bushmills. This morning, still drunk, he had called Strelski to warn him of a new form of AIDS that was afflicting Miami. It was called Hearing Aids, Pat said, and came from listening to too many assholes from Washington. When Strelski asked him whether he happened to have heard any news about the Lombardy—for instance, whether anybody had seized it, sunk it or married it—Flynn had given the best rendering of an Ivy League exquisite that Strelski could remember: “Oh now, Joe, you bad boy, you know better than to ask a man a secret thing like that, with your clearance.” Where the hell does Pat get all those voices from? he wondered. Maybe if I drank a bottle of Irish a day, I could do some too. Deputy Assistant Attorney General Ed Prescott was trying to put more words into his mouth, so he supposed he’d better pay attention.
“Burr was evidently not as forthcoming about his Mr. Pine as you were about your Dr. Apostoll, Joe,” he was saying, with enough reproach in his voice to sting.
“Pine and Apostoll were different types of sources. They were not comparable in any way,” Strelski retorted, pleased to hear himself loosening up. It must have been Flynn’s joke about Hearing Aids.
‘Like to explain that a little, Joe?”
“Apostoll was a decadent creep. Pine was—Pine was an honorable guy who took risks for the right side. Burr was very strong on that. Pine was an operative, he was a colleague, he was family. Nobody ever called Apo family. Not even his daughter.”
“Was this Pine the same man who practically dismembered your agent, Joe?’
“He was under tension. It was a big piece of theater. Maybe he overreacted, took his instructions a little too much to heart.”
“Is that what Burr told you?”
“We tried to work it out that way.”
“That was generous of you, Joe. An agent in your employ takes a beating to the tune of twenty thousand dollars’ worth of medication plus three months’ sick leave and a pending lawsuit, and you tell me his assailant maybe overreacted a little. Some of these Oxford-educated Englishmen can be very persuasive in their arguments. Did Leonard Burr ever strike you as a disingenuous person?”
Everyone is in the past, thought Strelski. Including me. “I don’t know what that means,” he lied.
“Lacking in candor? Insincere? Morally fraudulent in some way?”
“No.”
“Just no?”
“Burr’s a good operator and a good man.”
Prescott took another tour round the room. As a good man himself, he seemed to have difficulty wrestling with the harsher facts of life.
“Joe, we have a couple of problems with the Brits right now. I’m speaking at the Enforcement level. What your Mr. Burr and his confederates promised us here was a squeaky-clean witness in the form of Mr. Pine, a sophisticated operation, some big heads on a platter. We went along with that. We had fine expectations of Mr. Burr, and of Mr. Pine. I have to tell you that at the Enforcement level the British have not lived up to their promises. In their dealings with us, they have shown a duplicity which some of us might not have expected of them. Others, with longer memories, on the other hand, might.”
Strelski supposed he should join Prescott in some general damnation of the British, but he didn’t feel inclined. He liked Burr. Burr was the kind of fellow you could rustle horses with. He’d learned to like Rooke, although he was a tight-ass. They were a pair of nice guys, and they had run a good operation.
“Joe, this class act of yours—forgive me, of Mr. Burr’s—this honorable guy, this Mr. Pine, has a criminal record going back for years. Barbara Vandon in London and friends of hers up in Langley have dug up some very unsettling background material on Mr. Pine. It seems he is a closet psychopath. Unfortunately, the British pandered to his appetites. There was a quite bad killing in Ireland, something with a semi-automatic. We haven’t gotten to the bottom of it, because they hushed it up.” Prescott gave a sigh. The ways of men were devious indeed. “Mr. Pine kills, Joe. He kills and he steals and he runs dope, and it’s a mystery to me that he never used that knife he pulled on your agent. Mr. Pine is also a cook, a night owl, a close-combat expert and a painter. Joe, that is the classic pattern of a psychopathic fantasist. I do not like Mr. Pine. I would not trust him with my daughter. Mr. Pine had a psychopathic relationship with a doper’s hooker in Cairo, and ended up beating her to death. I would not trust Mr. Pine on the stand as my witne
ss, and I have the gravest, and I mean the gravest, reservations about the intelligence he has hitherto supplied. I’ve seen it, Joe. I’ve studied it at the many points where his testimony stands alone and uncorroborated yet indispensable to the credibility of our case. Men like Mr. Pine are the secret liars of society. They will sell their own mothers and believe themselves to be Jesus Christ while they do it. Your friend Burr may be capable, but he was an ambitious man who was breaking his ass to get his own outfit off the ground and have it compete with the big players. Such men are the natural prey of the fabricator. I do not believe that Mr. Burr and Mr. Pine made a wholesome pair. I don’t say they consciously conspired, but men in secret conclave can psych one another up in ways that make them cavalier with the truth. If Dr. Apostoll were still with us—well, he was a lawyer, and even if he was a little crazy, it was my belief that he would hold up pretty well in the stand. Juries always have a place in their hearts for a man who has returned to God. However, that is not to be. Dr. Apostoll is no longer available as a witness.”
Strelski was trying to help Prescott off the hook. “It never happened, right, Ed? How’s about we agree the whole case was a piece of horseshit? There’s no dope, no guns, Mr. Onslow Roper never broke bread with the cartels, mistaken identity, you name it.”
Prescott pulled a rueful smile as if to say he did not think that he would go that far. “We are talking about what’s demonstrable, Joe. That’s a lawyer’s job. The lay citizen has the luxury of believing in the truth. A lawyer has to be content with the demonstrable. Put it that way.”
“Sure.” Strelski was smiling too. “Ed, may I say something?” Strelski leaned forward in his leather chair and opened his hands in a gesture of magnanimity.
“Go right ahead, Joe.”
“Ed, relax, please. Don’t strain yourself. Operation Limpet is dead. Langley killed it. You’re just the mortician. I understand that. Operation Flagship lives, but I’m not Flagship cleared. My guess is, you are. You want to screw me, Ed? Listen, I’ve been screwed before; you don’t have to take me to dinner first. I’ve been screwed so many times, with so many variations, I’m a veteran. This time it’s Langley and some bad Brits. Not to mention a few Colombians. Last time it was Langley and some bad somebody else, maybe they were Brazilians—no, dammit, they were Cubans, and they’d done us a few favors in the dark days. Time before that it was Langley and some very, very rich Venezuelans, but I think there were also some Israelis besides—to be honest, I forget—and the files got lost. And I think there was an Operation Surefire, but I wasn’t Surefire cleared.”
He was furious but wonderfully comfortable. Prescott’s deep leather armchair was a dream; he could lounge in it forever, just breathing in the luxury of a nice penthouse office without the unpleasantness of a lot of people getting in his way or a naked snitch kneeling on the bed with his tongue pulled down his chest.
“The other thing you want to tell me, Ed, is I can kiss but I can’t tell,” Strelski resumed. “Because if I tell, somebody will have my ass and take away my pension. Or if I really tell, somebody may feel obliged reluctantly to shoot my fucking head off. I understand those things, Ed. I have learned the rules. Ed, will you do me a favor?”
Prescott was not accustomed to listening without interrupting, and he never did anyone a favor unless he could count on one in return. But he knew anger when he saw it, and he knew that anger given time subsides, whether in people or in animals, so he regarded his role as essentially a waiting one and kept his smile going and answered rationally, as he would if he were in the presence of a raving lunatic. He knew also that it was essential not to show alarm. There was always the red button on the inside of his desk.
“If I can, Joe, for you, anything,” he replied handsomely.
“Don’t change, Ed. America needs you as you are. Don’t give up any of your friends in high places or your connections with the Agency or your wife’s arm’s-length lucrative directorships of certain companies. Keep fixing things for us. The decent citizen knows too much already, Ed. Any more knowledge could seriously endanger his health. Think television. Five seconds of any subject is enough for anybody. People have to be normalized, Ed, not destabilized. And you’re the man to do it for us.”
Strelski drove home carefully through the winter sunlight. Anger brought its own vividness. Pretty white houses along the waterfront. White sailing yachts at the end of emerald lawns. The postman on his midday round. A red Ford Mustang was parked in his drive, and he recognized it as Amato’s. He found him sitting on the deck wearing a funereal black tie and drinking Coke from the icebox. Stretched beside him on Strelski’s rattan sofa, dressed in a Bogside black suit complete with waistcoat and black derby, lay a comatose Pat Flynn, an empty bottle of Bushmills single malt whiskey, ten years old, clutched to his bosom.
“Pat’s been socializing with his former boss again,” Amato explained, with a glance at his recumbent comrade. “They had like early breakfast. Leonard’s snitch is aboard the Iron Pasha. Two guys helped him off the Roper jet at Antigua, two more guys helped him onto the seaplane. Pat’s friend is quoting from reports compiled by very pure persons in Intelligence who have the honor to be Flagship cleared. Pat says maybe you’d like to pass the word of this to your friend Lenny Burr. Pat says to give Lenny his best respects. He enjoyed the experience of Mr. Burr despite the subsequent difficulties, tell him.”
Strelski glanced at his watch and went quickly indoors. Speech on this phone was not secure. Burr picked up his end at once, as if he were waiting for it to ring.
“Your boy’s gone sailing with his rich friends,” Strelski said.
Burr was thankful for the pelting rain. A couple of times he had pulled onto the grass verge and sat in the car with the torrent booming on the roof while he waited till it eased. The downpour bestowed a temporary pardon. It restored the handloom weaver to his attic.
He was running later than he had meant to.
“Take care,” he had said meaninglessly, as he consigned the abject Palfrey to Rooke’s custody. Take care of Palfrey, perhaps he was thinking. Or perhaps: Dear God, take care of Jonathan.
He’s on the Pasha, he kept thinking as he drove. He’s alive, even if he’d rather not be. For a while, that was all Burr’s brain could do for him: Jonathan’s alive, Jonathan’s in torment, they’re doing it to him now. Only after this period of due anguish, as it seemed to Burr, was he able to apply his considerable powers of reasoning and, little by little, count up what crumbs of consolation he could find.
He’s alive. Therefore Roper must want to keep him that way. Otherwise he would have had Jonathan killed as soon as he had signed his last piece of paper: another unexplained corpse on the Panamanian roadside, who cares?
He’s alive. A crook of Roper’s stamp does not bring a man to his cruise yacht in order to kill him. He brings him because he needs to ask him things, and if he needs to kill him afterwards, he does it at a decent distance from the boat, with a proper respect for the local hygiene and the sensitivities of his guests.
So what does Roper want to ask him that he doesn’t already know?
Perhaps: How much has Jonathan betrayed of the fine detail of the operation?
Perhaps: What is now the precise risk to Roper—of prosecution, of the frustration of his grand scheme, of exposure, scandal, outcry?
Perhaps: How much protection do I still enjoy among those who are protecting me? Or will they be tiptoeing out of the back door as soon as the alarms begin to sound?
Perhaps: Who do you think you are, worming your way into my palace and stealing my woman from under me?
An arch of trees rose over the car, and Burr had a memory of Jonathan seated in the cottage at the Lanyon the night they dispatched him on his mission. He is holding Goodhew’s letter to the oil lamp: I’m sure, Leonard. I, Jonathan. And I’ll be sure tomorrow morning. How do I sign?
You signed too bloody much, Burr told him gruffly in his mind. And it was me who egged you on.
C
onfess, he begged Jonathan. Betray me, betray us all. We’ve betrayed you, haven’t we? Then do it back to us and save yourself. The enemy is not out there. He’s here among us. Betray us.
He was ten miles out of Newbury and forty miles out of London, but he was in the depths of rural England. He climbed a hill and entered an avenue of bare beech trees. The fields to either side were freshly plowed. He smelled silage and remembered winter teas before the hob in his mother’s kitchen in Yorkshire. We are honorable people, he thought, remembering Goodhew. Honorable English people with self-irony and a sense of decency, people with a street spirit and a good heart. What the hell’s gone wrong with us?
A broken bus shelter reminded him of the tin hut in Louisiana where he had met Apostoll, betrayed by Harry Palfrey to Darker, and by Darker to the Cousins, and by the Cousins to God knew whom. Strelski would have brought a pistol, he thought. Flynn would have waded ahead of us, cradling his machine gun in his arms. We would be gun people, feeling safer for our guns.
But guns aren’t the answer, he thought. Guns are a bluff. I’m a bluff. I’m unlicensed and unloaded, an empty threat. But I’m all I’ve got to wave at Sir Anthony Bloody Joyston Bradshaw.
He thought of Rooke and Palfrey sitting silently together in Rooke’s office and the telephone between them. For the first time he almost smiled.
He spotted a signpost, turned left into an unpaved drive and was assailed by the false conviction that he had been here before. It’s the conscious meeting the unconscious, he had read in some smart magazine: between them they give you the sense of déjà vu. He didn’t believe that junk. Its language moved him to near violence, and he was feeling near violent now, just at the thought of it.
He stopped the car.
He was feeling too violent altogether. He waited for the feeling to subside. Christ almighty, what am I becoming? I could have strangled Palfrey. He lowered his window, put back his head and drank the country air. He closed his eyes and became Jonathan. Jonathan in agony, with his head back, unable to utter. Jonathan crucified, nearly dead and loved by Roper’s woman.