Pale Betrayer (2 page)

“I don’t understand.”

“Forgive me, Eric, but you do not need to. I will explain anyway: here we know our enemies and, perhaps fortunately for us, we have very few friends.”

Mather liked the turn of phrase in spite of himself. It distracted him momentarily.

“Neither you nor we should like to interrupt the good work of such international exchanges, so it becomes essential that our carrier—in this case Dr. Bradley—be kept in entire ignorance of his role. That is why we are calling on you.”

Mather felt he had missed something. “Why Peter Bradley?”

“Ah, of course. At the Athens conference our scientists will be making an extraordinary gesture. Grysenko will give film prints of recent Soviet nuclear experiment to certain scientists of other countries who my government feels have contributed to world progress in that particular area of research. It is a magnificent gesture. And Peter Bradley of course is foremost among those scientists.”

“I see.”

“It is our problem to see that Dr. Bradley also brings home what in another kind of film is called ‘a trailer.’”

It was a moment or two before Mather spoke. They had walked the distance of the park. As they approached the gate he said, but with no great hope of it meaning anything: “I wish you luck, but you don’t need me.”

“Ah, but we do and now we must have you. I have confided so much.” Jerry turned back into the park and Mather, turning after him, felt himself to be treading a counter-moving path. “You see,” Jerry went on, “in Athens itself we must establish Bradley as
the
man—there will be perhaps a half-dozen other American physicists there. It is too dangerous to use his name. You must find for him a mission—a particular, obscure work of antiquity—a monument perhaps?—something it will be imperative for him to visit because you, his friend, insist upon it. And on the day he returns he must be separated from his ‘trailer,’ but at the same time keep his innocence untouched.”

“It is untouchable,” Mather said with fervor.

Jerry had the effrontery then to laugh, and the instant Mather realized the source of his amusement his fury rose and exploded. “You son of a bitch!”

“I’m so sorry,” Jerry said. “I forgot myself and that you are now my superior. It will not happen again.” As he spoke he removed his hat and ran his hand through the black, lank hair, at the same time half-turning.

Another man who, Mather realized, seeing him, had passed them as they turned back from the gate, now joined them. He was Mather’s height but twice his build. Blond and ruggedly handsome of feature, he looked like an aging ball player.

“This is Tom,” Jerry said, “your other colleague.”

Tom, standing very straight, his hands at his sides, said: “How do you do, sir.”

Mather glowered at him and the other looked down at his own shoes. Mather knew his type from the classroom, the man who needed the grade and would do anything the teacher demanded in order to get it. A small tingle of satisfaction came with the realization.

Jerry, missing nothing, said: “You are going to find it surprisingly good sport, Eric. Think about Athens for a few days. We shall be available when you want us.”

They met twice again in the intervening months, once in the same park when Mather was ready to talk to them—he had seen one or the other of them there several times, but when he made no sign they had not approached him—and once in his apartment. Then on the morning of May 24 Mather posted a notice on the third-floor bulletin board in the General Studies Building:
PUPPIES FOR SALE—CALL EL 7-2390 AFTER 9:00 P.M.
After posting it he set about organizing a small party to celebrate the return of Peter Bradley from Athens that night.

T
HERE CAME THAT MOMENT
of stillness which sometimes falls upon a crowded room. Several conversations were suspended at once and the only sound was the metallic clicking of the mantle clock. Even the street traffic beneath the open windows briefly ceased. Dr. Peter Bradley, host to a small party of students and faculty, had paused to search his memory for the name of a Greek physicist he had met at a conference in Athens from which he had returned that day. Robert Steinberg, an associate professor of physics under Bradley at Central University, had just told a joke to which no one got the point. His audience looked at one another questioningly.

Eric Mather, his back to the mantle, felt his heartbeat quicken to strike pace with the clock’s loud tick. A moment out of time, it seemed, was being given him in which to weigh the last possibility of turning back. He could excuse himself to Janet Bradley who was showing him the dummied pages of her latest book, cross the room to her husband and say to him: “Peter, old man, I got you into something you didn’t know about …” But suppose it turned out that nothing had happened in Athens, that contact had not been made at all? He had been given a moment in which only to relish the last sweet dregs of a cup he had once thought would be bitter tea. Watching Peter tap his head, the sycophants hanging breathlessly for the wisdom he was expected to shake loose, Mather had no regrets. After all, his own greatest moments had always come from turning chagrin into triumph.

Janet turned the last page of
Child of the City
, a photographic study of the East Twenties, where she and Peter lived, to the Bowery’s edge. Mather noticed her fingers tremble. It gave him an unexpected, an almost shocking thrill, to discover that Janet cared so deeply that he liked the book and, by extension, that he liked her. He remembered then Jerry’s intimation—the misfortune of Mather’s inadequacy to such opportunity—and the memory crippled the brief, exquisite emotion. It would not spring again, wish as he might to conjure it. He pitied Janet almost as much as he did himself. He reached out his hand to her in the need to have and give sympathy. But Janet, interpreting the gesture by her own heart’s dictate, clutched the book in both hands and looked toward her husband. Her lips met, about to say his name.

At that instant Bradley snapped his fingers. “Skaphidas,” he cried. “That’s the name, Nikos Skaphidas.”

Steinberg, to those around him, said: “Oh, God. No wonder you didn’t get the point. I forgot to say the man in the story …”

His wife, Louise, cut in: “Bob, you always
do
that!”

Spontaneously the murmur of conversation resumed all through the room. Mather watched Janet, trying to catch her eyes, to seek the best of himself reflected there, his lost salvation.

“Janet …” He caught her hand and kissed it. Anyone in the room, observing, would say it characteristic of him: Eric was a great kisser of hands.

But Janet said: “Thank you, Eric.”

“It’s a beautiful book, you know. One would expect it to be, coming from you.”

She inclined her head in acknowledgment of his praise. To escape the intimacy with which she could not cope, she said: “There’s more coffee. Shall I warm it?”

He shook his head and forced her to endure a few seconds of his scrutiny. She suffered it with great poise, only the faint telltale pulse moving at her throat. Still she would not meet his eyes, keeping Peter within her gaze.

“Do you love him, Janet?” he asked quietly.

“Yes!” She tilted her chin and the word had come too quickly. A cry in the wilderness. Mather felt it at his own heart’s core. The clock behind him rasped, about to strike the hour of nine. How bitterly ironic to reach two climaxes at once in a life so barren of such moments. The others in the room had begun to move, the eagerness of the young scientists to see the film irrepressible now that the time had come. Mather heard Peter say: “Mind, there may not be anything we don’t know …” But even as he said the words his eyes were shining. He wanted to see it as much as they did.

Mather allowed himself one last thought of Janet: he wondered how he would feel about her after this night had passed. “I’d better go too,” he said. “I’ve promised to look in on the Imagists.”

“What are the Imagists?” Janet asked.

“Well, they’re neither beats nor Beatles, certainly. They’re latter-day worshippers of Eliot and Hume, and they’re so square, they’re cubed.” He smiled down at her and brushed her cheek with the back of his hand. “Thank you, my dear, for everything.”

As he moved across the room the clock struck nine. Louise Steinberg said to no one in particular, simply a despairing statement of fact: “Wouldn’t you know they’d go to the laboratory, even tonight?”

Yes, Mather thought, one would.

“Damn you, Peter,” Louise added, but without malice. Louise was getting plump. She liked comfort and was both proud and possessive of her husband who was finally making a comfortable living as well as a reputation in physics under Bradley.

“It won’t take long,” Bradley said. “I haven’t seen Janet in a week.

“Eric, come look at some pictures with us. They’re Russian.”

It was Anne Russo who said it. Her purpose, Mather thought, was to forestall his interrupting her moment with Peter. Possibly she was single-minded enough to think the pictures might actually mean something to him. Anne, studying for her doctorate with Bradley, adored him. Most of the women in his classes did. Not that he had many—Anne was the only one in graduate work—and he did his best to discourage those he had. To make it in science a woman had to be able to take discouragement. The little beasts loved Peter for giving it to them. Anne did not look like a female scientist: more the social register sort. Quite tall, she had a good body, Mather supposed, but he doubted that any of this crew was aware of it.

“I haven’t seen a Russian picture in years. They’re much too hammy,” he said, playing the scientists’ clown. He sometimes thought it why they tolerated him, for they were snobs to the last man of them.

He put his hand on Bradley’s shoulder. Peter was getting gray at the temples—at thirty-five—the burden of premature success. “How much of Athens did you see?”

“The Acropolis and the Plaka, like any week-end tourist.”

“And the Byron monument?”

“We had a hell of a time finding it …”

We, Mather thought. He had supposed that Bradley walking in Athens even as at home would insist upon his solitude. He did not like to think Bradley might again break that pattern in the next few minutes.

But Bradley was true to habit. He picked up a magazine from the side-table waiting for the others to leave before him. Janet said he did much of his reading in such odd moments, able to absorb a page at a glance. And he had the remarkable faculty of doing it without giving offence, a sort of social sixth sense. As Mather reached the door and glanced back, Peter waved and called out, “We’ll talk, Eric!”

Mather waited for a car to pass before crossing the street. There was the sound of water to the wheels’ whine over the pavement. But it was heat only. It had been too hot a day for May. He tried to think about the heat, the children playing—if you could call it play, their deadly stalking of one another among parked cars and the shattering bray of their make-believe guns. Darkness had come, the murky darkness of ill-lighted streets over which the city brightness hung, a neon-tinted nebula of smoke and fume sealing in the night below. Mather took up his self-arranged vigil beneath a street lamp and looked up at the Bradley second-floor windows. As he gave the sign to his co-conspirators who were watching—from where he did not know; he could not even be sure they were watching—the kissing of his fingertips toward the house he had left, he saw Janet in the window facing him. How extraordinary that she should be there! It brought full circle the wheel within the wheel. She abruptly turned her back so that he supposed she had seen him and taken the gesture to her own heart. Good! So much the better if something should go wrong. It was the first time he had permitted himself even fleetingly that fear. Anne Russo was with her now, shaking back her dark long hair as she spoke to Janet. Had she seen him too? He could not be sure.

In the street directly below the windows, the three male students—Mather could not keep their names straight—were hallooing up to Anne. Steinberg joined them and the party started to move up the street. A few seconds later Anne loped after them. Louise Steinberg came out and paused on the stoop. Mather had almost forgotten her. She stood a moment breathing deeply of the fume-infested air: Louise was the sort who’d embrace an oyster; she loved the world. Sometimes she audited his classes. He remembered her best there for her description of Shelley as a proletarian poet!

A light went on in Bradley’s study, a small room just off the livingroom. Peter came to his desk near the window and opened his attaché case. He took a small box from it along with some papers which he put into the less important-looking lettercase. A few seconds later, switching off the light, he left the room. Janet was drawing the livingroom shades, talking over her shoulder to her husband.

Mather’s job was done. All that remained was for him to walk away, which to the other watchers meant that Peter Bradley would now come. Mather moved quickly, for he wanted no part in what was to follow, however simple the snatching of the lettercase. Almost instantly he resented that Peter should be their dupe now that his own involvement was finished.

Mather angled his way through the half-commercial, half-residential streets that lay between the Bradleys’ and Greenwich Village. He chose his route at random fancy, striding out, swinging his body like a country boy legging joyously over the fields. That image shot briefly through his mind, his favorite memory of himself: at the age of twelve running free, scattering ducks and chickens in his grandmother’s yard, starting a partridge and her young as he dashed through a field, and then reaching the vast and silent woods unobserved, utterly free.

He was again free, exhilaratingly so, having successfully loaned his talents to a conspiracy which, he had convinced himself, would go far to destroy conspiracy. That he had been recruited less for his talents than for his availability, and that he had acted out of vulnerability more than conviction were circumstances he no longer believed himself. He had snatched honor from dishonor as perhaps did more men than he knew. Despite his continual playing on it, his knowledge of human nature was suspect to him underneath. But his problem now would be to keep his exultation secret. He knew his own weakness for the dramatic. One of the things he was going to have to avoid after the incident was over was the temptation to tell Peter Bradley the truth, that unbeknownst to himself, Bradley had been used by Soviet counterespionage.