Agent in Place (12 page)

The editor began reading Kelso’s copy with more concentration. Then, as he reached the third page, he stopped and frowned. I’ve seen worse, he repeated to himself; and I’ve also seen another just like it: these letters,
m
and
n;
that blocked
t
... Identical. He looked up, startled, but Kelso was already out of sight. “Who the hell does he think he’s kidding?” he asked aloud. He signalled to the girl at the next desk. “Hey, Melissa, get me that copy we were working on yesterday. The Holzheimer story.”

“Just his piece, or the attached memorandum?”

“The memorandum, dammit.”

When it arrived at his desk, he needed only one glance.

“Well, what d’you know?” he said softly. He had never thought Kelso was one of the smart alecks, but this put him right at the top of the list. “That guy is full of surprises.”

“What guy?” Melissa asked.

He didn’t explain, just sat there grinning as the meaning behind Kelso’s trick became quite clear to him. Then he rose and went to see if some of his friends had ten minutes to spare: this joke was too rich not to be shared around. It would cause some small earth-tremors, but Holzheimer would feel most of them. And serve him right, too cocky by far; all that contemptuous dismissal of the “oldies,” all those paeans of praise for the “new” investigative reporting, hallelujah, amen. As if that concept of journalism had just been invented, and never practised for a hundred years or more before this latest crop of
Wunderkinder
made the newspaper scene. What had a good reporter ever been, except investigative?

* * *

Tom had a standard rule about his arrivals in Washington. He never wanted to be met at the airport. What he liked was to reach home and find a wife with arms outstretched, ready to meet his, as he dropped his bag and closed the door and shut the world away. Dorothea had her own rules: everything prepared to welcome the traveller—steak ready to broil when needed, flowers arranged, candles waiting to be lit on a supper-table for two, ice-bucket filled, Ravel or Debussy gently playing, bathroom tidied up from her own hasty dressing, a large towel folded near the shower; and her own appearance, from brushed hair and careful make-up right down to house-gown and pretty slippers, never betraying the mad rush around the apartment since she had got back from the office barely one hour ago.

Tonight had been more of a wild scramble than usual. She was fixing the earring in place, congratulating herself that she had possibly ten minutes to spare for a last check on things—when she heard the key in the lock, and Tom’s voice. She came running, cheeks pink with haste, eyes dancing with amusement at her undignified scamper that suddenly changed into a more decorous approach. But it didn’t last. Tom’s arms swept her up as he kissed her, swinging her off her feet. One sandal was lost, an earring dropped, hair sent flying free. And “Oh, darling,” was all she could say once his grip was loosened and some breath came back into her body.

He looked round the room, looked back to Dorothea. Nothing had changed: everything was just as he had been remembering it. Strange, he thought, that this is the one fear I take travelling with me: that some day I’ll come back and find it all different, all lost. This is the only truly permanent thing in an impermanent world. He kissed her again, long and gently.

* * *

He had managed to catch some light sleep on the flight across the Atlantic, which kept him going until he reached home. But the preceding week had been a tight stretch of work, and Tom was tired, admitting it frankly. It was difficult to shake off the tyranny of hours: Paris time had been seven thirty when he rose Monday morning; and now, after he had showered and changed and had supper (but not steak tonight—a chicken sandwich and a drink were all he wanted), Paris time would be three fifteen
A.M.
Tuesday. The glamorous life of a travelling journalist, he told himself wryly. There was Thea, radiant, desirable, glowing with life and love; and here he was—adoring her, yet longing, as he thought of the big beautiful bed in the next room, for deep instant sleep between smooth cool sheets. But his willpower was adrift too: he seemed incapable of moving, of breaking away from this quiet happiness. He sat at the table, relaxed and content, finishing his last drink slowly, listening to Dorothea’s soft low voice filled with interest as she questioned, watching the subtle changes in her expression and mood as he answered.

Now she was talking about her own week in Washington. Yes, she had burned all bridges, faced Bud Wells in his TV den. “Oh, of course there were all kinds of objections and counter-arguments. But I was firm; I really was, darling. That’s the side of me you don’t know.”

“Don’t I?”

“Anyway anyway anyway, I’m free as a bird from the first of January,” she said lightly. “Have you heard any more about your own leave of absence?”

“Didn’t have time to check.”

“It will come through?” she asked anxiously.

“I suppose.” Then he grinned and added, “Yes, it will come through, darling.”

“Oh, Tom—stop teasing! Where shall we spend it? Not here. That telephone will never stop ringing, and you’ll be yanked back to the office.”

“That happens,” he agreed.

“I’ve been making a list of places where we could find a small cottage. It keeps getting shorter as I cross them off, one by one. I’d like some spot where we don’t have to dig ourselves out of the snow before we can collect the morning mail. No sleet or cold rain, either.”

He said nothing, only watched her with growing amusement.

“You don’t really want to go into the wilds of Vermont for the winter months, do you?”

He shook his head, smiling now. Thea’s concern touched him. He knew what her own choice would be. “You’d like some sun and sand,” he suggested.

“But the trouble with Florida or the Caribbean is that I can’t see you beachcombing. All very well for a week, but for
three
months?”

“You don’t finish writing a book by staring up at blue skies,” he agreed.

“And then,” she said, “you need a place where you can keep in touch with everything that’s going on—newspapers sold at every street-corner, isn’t that your idea of bliss? Book-stores, too. A museum, galleries, interesting little streets to wander around in—after all, you can’t be glued to your desk for ever.”

Again he shook his head, his smile broadening, letting her run on, keeping his own suggestions to the end.

“And what with the way you check and double-check, you’ll need a reference library near by, won’t you?”

“Or else ship three crates of books.”

“Then I give up. There’s no place that feels like a holiday and yet offers all that. We’ll have to settle on some college town—oh Lord, I had
enough
of college towns when I was a faculty brat. Where else, then?” She was disconsolate. Perhaps they’d stay right here in Washington, after all. An end to all her dreaming of something different, something new. Vacations in the last five years had been few and interrupted: either her job or his was always tugging holidays apart. “All I wanted was some place where you could finish the last two chapters of your book as well as—” she paused—“oh, just being together. Or does one cancel the other?”

“Only if I get sidetracked.”

“I won’t—”

“You sidetrack me very easily.”

“This time, I promise. Truly.”

“Truly and seriously, I’ll need six clear hours at the desk each day. And a couple more to rewrite what I put on paper the night before.”

“I promise, darling,” she repeated most solemnly. “I’ll start a book of my own.
The Talkative Great
—all about the tongues swinging loose on TV interviews. Or I could call it
Strip-Tease In Words
. Or
The Day of the Exhibitionist
. Or
Leaking Secrets
—
Drip Drip Drip
.”

“At least, you’ve got plenty of titles,” he teased her. “No problem there.”

“The only problem we have at this moment is—not how we’ll spend these three months, but where.”

“What about the south of France?”

She stared at him. “Don’t joke.”

“I’m dead serious,” he assured her.

“But it’s impossible—out of our reach, darling.”

“Not as I see it.”

“I had a look at our savings account last week,” she told him. “We’ve got to put aside a large dollop for income tax in April. Remember, April is the cruellest month.”

“And that leaves us about six thousand dollars flat.”

“Which isn’t so much, once you pay fares across the Atlantic and—”

“We make use of this apartment. I’ve found someone who wants it.”

“A stranger—here? Can you trust him with your books and records and—”

“Not a stranger. Maurice Michel.”

“Your Paris friend? The diplomat?”

“He and his wife are coming to Washington in February for a couple of months. So we’ve agreed to trade. We get three months in his place for his two months here. Fair enough.”

“We’re exchanging?” She was still astounded, scarcely believing.

“Why not? I had dinner with him last night. It’s all settled. He has a cottage on the Riviera—nothing elaborate—his father once lived there, owned a small flower-nursery. It’s simple and rustic.”

“Running water?” she asked.

“I don’t see Michel fetching a bucket from a well.”

She began to laugh, remembering the immaculate Frenchman who had visited them here last year. And to think of all the lists she had made of possible places and expenses—and Tom had arranged everything. No fuss, no trouble. In one night. Over dinner in Paris. “Darling you are
wonderful
.” She rose, came round the table to meet him with a tight hug and a wild kiss.

“And that’s a pleasant idea to take to bed. Come on, Thea.” He put out the candles, began switching off the lights, and checked the front door lock. “No, no,” he said as he came back to the table and found her beginning to gather the supper dishes together. “Let’s just relax tonight.”

“I’m too excited to sleep.” It was barely ten o’clock. Even if she had an office to remember each morning, her idea of bedtime was usually midnight or later. Days were always too short, somehow.

“I’ll persuade you into it.” Then he looked at her quickly. “What’s wrong, Thea?” Her eyes were wide as she stood so very still, watching him. She was close to tears.

“Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s wonderful.” Her voice trembled, and she tried to cover the surge of emotions with a little laugh. She failed quite happily, as he smoothed away the threat of tears with a kiss. “I love you love you love you.”

He kissed her again. And again, straining her close to him, saying in a voice that was almost inaudible, “Never leave me, darling. Never leave me.”

* * *

The morning came, bright and beautiful as far as he was concerned. Thea had let him sleep on for an extra hour—he had a dim memory of her, fully dressed, dropping a goodbye kiss on his cheek as she was about to take off for a nine o’clock appointment at her office. Complete metamorphosis, he thought now: the girl of last night, all floating chiffon and soft shoulders, teasing lips and hands, sweet seduction complete, had become the successful woman, neat in sweater and well-cut pants suit, attractive and competent, equalling the male competition in brains, surpassing it in looks and natural warmth. What poor man had a chance against all that? Fifty-fifty, Women’s Lib insisted, and with every right on their side of the argument; but weren’t they forgetting some natural advantages that tipped the scale? And long live those natural advantages, he thought, leaving the disordered bed as he recalled that he too was due at an office this morning. Nine thirty now, he noted: time to get a move on.

The supper table’s remains had been cleared, his breakfast tray ready along with a note warning him that Martha came in to clean around eleven. He’d be well out of here before the vacuum-cleaner—one of his minor dislikes—started breaking up the peace of this apartment.

He scrambled some eggs, and had a leisurely breakfast, with four newspapers for company. Recession was deepening, inflation swelling, the Middle East seething as expected, Vietnam making its unhappy way back into the headlines, the CIA a cripple and perhaps to become a basket-case, terrorism in London, floods in Bangladesh, drought in Africa; and oil-spill over everything, from prices and veiled threats to bitter denunciations. By comparison with all this gloom, his own piece on current French reactions to NATO seemed almost reassuring although, when he turned it in yesterday, he had thought, Here goes another report to ruin a lot of breakfasts tomorrow. There was only one misprint in it—
fare
instead of
fire
—to wrinkle a few eyebrows. His lucky day, he thought: no transposed lines, no broken paragraphs.

On the page opposite his own by-line, was another column with Holzheimer’s name heading it. So young Holzheimer was starting to dig into NATO too, was he? And with considerable help from someone: the full text of a NATO Memorandum “now under serious consideration in Washington” was printed along with Holzheimer’s analysis and comments. There was no hint of the source for this piece of information, beyond the usual “official who preferred to remain anonymous, but who verified the authenticity of the document.” Also, of course, “The Pentagon has not denied the existence of the memorandum” and “The State Department offered no comment in response to this reporter’s repeated questions.”

So there was another abominable leak, Tom Kelso thought: we are becoming a nation of blabbermouths. It wasn’t only on harmless TV programmes that there were (in Thea’s words) “Leaking Secrets—Drip Drip Drip.”

He had heard of this memorandum—some evasive, upper echelon gossip had been seeping around for the past few weeks, but no one knew the details. (Maurice Michel, last night in Paris, had quizzed him about it. If the French hadn’t been able to learn its particulars, then it was pretty secret stuff.) What was it all about, anyway? With professional interest as well as private misgivings, he began reading it carefully.

It was a warning bell, he decided when he finished its final paragraph: an attempt to shock the Americans into taking a closer look at détente and its actualities, at pitfalls ahead for unwary feet. It wouldn’t make NATO more popular with several segments of the public, he decided, but when did Cassandra ever have an easy role? He’d question some of NATO’s statements himself—there was no proof offered, for instance, of certain ominous trends, unless one allusion to certain facts and figures meant that there was some appendix, some other part of the memorandum perhaps, that had not been included in today’s publication. But as it stood now, the document was simply an unpleasant shocker: not an actual breach in security, as far as he could see—except that some son of a bitch had taken it upon himself to make it public. He wasn’t blaming Holzheimer: few journalists could resist a chance of a scoop. But the point was simply this: NATO’s opponents would use it to help weaken the Western alliance still more. He could hear them even now. “Scare tactics,” the right-wingers would say, “to get more men and money out of old Uncle Sam.” Or, from the left, “shocking belligerence...cold warriors...imperialist aggression.” As for Holzheimer himself, he carefully avoided giving his own private judgment. (Perhaps he hadn’t made up his mind. The by-line was everything, was it?) He had contented himself with heaving a brick through a plate-glass window: often tempting enough, Tom admitted, but definitely resistible. Holzheimer shared one belief with his unknown source—he mentioned it twice so that no one would fail to understand his high motives. The public has a right to know, he stated. And who would quibble with that, when (apparently) no breach of real security was involved?