The Once and Future Spy (14 page)

W
anamaker kept a tight rein on his emotions, grunting into the telephone every now and then to indicate he was receiving the
Admiral loud and clear and not appreciating a word he said. Had he misjudged the Admiral after all? he wondered. Walking back
a cat was a cerebral activity perfectly suited to Toothacher’s manifold talents; acting on the conclusions may simply not
have been his cup of tea. Wanamaker shrugged a shoulder. When he came right down to it, what choice did he have?

“On paper,” the Admiral was saying, “the plan looked perfect. Maybe that was the problem… the perfect is the enemy of the
good. Our jackass-of-all-trades removed the fuse to the alarm system so it wouldn’t go off when we closed the fire doors.
The air, according to the printed notice on the fire box, was extracted from the inner glass tower in thirty seconds. Are
you still there, Wanamaker?”

Wanamaker grunted.

“We waited eleven minutes before pumping the air back in. Eleven minutes should have been enough to suffocate him three times
over. Houdini could only hold his breath for four minutes.”

Wanamaker, bored with the details of the game when he already knew the final score, grunted again.

“Our jackass and your man Friday went in and searched the stacks from top to bottom. You can imagine our stupefaction when
they
couldn’t find our friend.” The Admiral must have sensed that he was losing his audience. “Aren’t you curious how he got out?”

Wanamaker grunted. The Admiral decided to interpret this as an expression of interest. ‘They didn’t find our friend, but they
did find a glass box built into the side of a wall on the top floor that said, ‘Oxygen mask for emergency use only. Break
glass with hammer to get mask.’ Or words to that effect. The glass, of course, was broken, the oxygen mask missing. Nearby
there was a metal ladder spiraling up through the roof of the glass tower to a submarinelike escape hatch. The escape hatch
led through a crawl space to the roof of the library. On the back wall of the library building was a fire escape, with the
bottom length of ladder lowered to the ground. Are you getting the picture?”

Another grunt crept stealthily over the telephone line, followed closely by a question: “You still think he’ll assume it was
a coincidence?”

For a moment the Admiral didn’t respond. Then, very quietly, he said, “You ought to know that our friend saw me.”

“You let him get a look at you!”

The Admiral could hear the note of astonishment in Wanamaker’s voice, could picture him rolling his ungroomed head from side
to side in frustration, could imagine the flurry of dandruff flakes, dislodged, drifting past the rumpled shoulders of his
unpressed sport jacket into an open container of low-fat cottage cheese. Toothacher screwed up his face in disgust. In his
view what was killing the Company was too much HYP—too much Harvard, Yale, Princeton. When he caught up with the Weeder there
would be one less.

“He was looking down from the stacks,” the Admiral continued. “He saw me depress the handle that set the pumps to work sucking
out the air.”

“Good God! If he saw you, he recognized you. We both took your course at the Farm.” Wanamaker must have been lighting a fresh
Schimmelpenninck from the soggy stump of an old one glued to his lower lip, because he didn’t say anything for a while. Then,
“He’ll go to the police.”

“What would he tell them?” the Admiral asked. “That the Company he works for is trying to kill him? The detectives would commit
him for psychiatric observation. If they believed him, the whole story would come out—Stufftingle, the Ides of March, the
Company eaves-dropping
through ordinary garden variety telephones. Think of the headlines in
The New York Times
. Think of the scandal. Congress would castrate the Company. No, no, fortunately for us, our friend has a reputation as a
patriot. My guess is he’ll run for his life. We should be able to catch up with him in a matter of days. Ha! He’ll still be
a patriot, but with any luck, he’ll be a dead patriot.”

T
he Weeder tried the number from a downtown Boston booth, got the recorded message again. “You’ve reached Snow,” a husky voice,
vaguely self-conscious, vaguely irritated, snapped. “I don’t take calls or return them except on Sundays. And then not always.
Don’t bother leaving a message.”

He left one anyway. “It’s me again. Silas Sibley. This is the fourth time I’ve called in three days. I’ve come a long way
to see you. I’ll call back later in the day. Can you do me a favor and turn your machine off and answer your phone? It’s important.
To me, at least.”

To kill time he drove over to Charlestown and climbed Breed’s Hill and roamed around the battlefield for several hours. Listening
to the wind whistling past his ear, the Weeder felt the pull of history and slipped over the line into an incarnation. The
whistle of fifes was carried to him on the wind—the lobster lines, decimated in two previous assaults, were forming up for
the third attack. He could see the hundred or so militiamen behind the rail fence on the flank of Breed’s Hill fitting new
flints in their muskets so the guns wouldn’t misfire. Cocking his head, he thought he heard the moans of the British wounded
crawling away from the rebels. He caught the distant sound of shouted commands. It was the British general Howe ordering his
men to remove their heavy backpacks so they could advance more rapidly. The Weeder saw Howe taking up position at the head
of the light infantry and grenadiers heading for the rail fence. Colonel
Knowlton, in command of the militiamen at the rail fence, yelled for his men to hold their fire. Howe shouted an order. The
front rank knelt, the lobster line aimed and dispatched a volley at the rebels. Most of the shots flew high; the lobsters,
the Weeder knew, tended to overshoot because they used too much powder for the weight of lead in their cartridges.

Howe drew his saber. The Red Coats leveled their bayonets and broke into a trot. When the lobster line reached the stakes
that the rebels had hammered into the ground forty yards from the rail fence, the militiamen fired. The Weeder could see the
young officers around Howe crumpling to the ground. The lobster line itself cracked like an eggshell. Howe could be heard
bellowing urgent commands. The Red Coats closed ranks and continued on. The Weeder could see Colonel Knowlton waving an arm
wildly; could see the militiamen, out of powder, lacking bayonets, scurrying away. The Red Coats fired a last volley at the
fleeing rebels. Smoke obscured the rail fence, then slowly drifted away. The Weeder spotted Howe staring back across the fields
at the scores of Red Coats sprawled in the grotesque positions that dead men assume. Howe’s face was a mask of shock, of dismay.
The thin throaty cheers of the surviving lobsters reached the Weeder.

And then, as if a needle had been plucked from a phonograph record, the cheering stopped and the Weeder found himself listening
again to the wind whistling past his ear. The sound lured him back against his will into the present. His face corkscrewed
into a sheepish grin as he realized what had happened: running for his life across a Colonial landscape, he had taken momentary
refuge in history.

It wasn’t the first time that history had provided this service; had given him a place to go when he didn’t like where he
was.

His lifelong obsession with Nate had been part escape, of course. But there had been more to it than that. Much more. The
Weeder had always attributed his fascination with Nate to an emotion he presumed he shared with his illustrious ancestor,
namely an abiding commitment to a delicate tangle of lovers and relatives and friends; to an extended family which, when you
pushed it out far enough, constituted the entity known as country. In a deep sense, Nate and the Weeder subscribed to the
same social contract: With all its faults there was something here, some ideal, albeit unachieved, worth fighting for.

Running, and running scared, looking over his shoulder to make sure the Admiral wasn’t one jump behind him, the Weeder felt
closer
to Nate than he ever had before. Nate too had been running scared; had been looking over a shoulder; had (the Weeder supposed)
failed to see whatever it was that finally caught up with him in time to avoid it; had gone to meet his fate fortified, as
far as the Weeder could figure out, only by a cranky patriotism, a vision that derived its power from a knowledge of how things
were and how they could be. Nate, in short, had had high hopes. The Weeder, following Nate’s star, shared them.

The sun was hovering over the rooftops of Charlestown when the Weeder squeezed into a telephone booth, fed some coins into
the slots and dialed the Concord number again. It rang four times. A female voice came on the line.

“Yes.”

“It’s Silas Sibley. We spoke on the phone three weeks ago. You said I could come up and talk to you about a project I’m working
on.

“Didn’t you get my letter?”

“Your letter? No. I left New York last week. I was doing some research in New Haven.”

“I wrote you that I’d changed my mind.” The voice on the other end of the line hesitated. “Can I ask you a question?”

The Weeder said, “Please.”

The voice changed pitch slightly. It was interested instead of defensive. “What sign were you born under?”

“I’m a Capricorn.”

“What’s your ascendant?”

“To tell you the truth I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“What’s your birth date?”

“I was born the same day as Elvis Presley, January eighth.”

The response seemed to alter the chemistry of the conversation. “Ah,” said the voice on the other end of the line. Then, reluctantly,
“Come if you must.” She gave him directions. Did he know the road that ran past the North Bridge? Seven and a half miles after
the bridge he was to turn right. There was a mailbox. Painted bright red. The road was unpaved. Eventually it forked. He was
to stay left. The road ended at a house. The voice on the phone suggested a time. The Weeder eagerly agreed. He started to
mumble his thanks but the line went dead.

Back in his car, the Weeder’s thoughts drifted to the Admiral. He would have discovered the scorched Volkswagen parked on
a side
street near Yale by now. He would have guessed that the Weeder had switched to a rented car and started asking around. He
might have gotten a description of the Hertz car the Weeder was driving; might have asked the state police, on a pretext,
to look out for it. Searching his memory, the Weeder recalled a lecture at the Farm about avoiding surveillance. “Change cars,
change trains, change buses, change hotels,” a one-time station chief had advised. “Change clothing, change routines, change
habits, change anything you can possibly change.”

“How about wives?” the Weeder, always ready with a quip, had asked innocently.

The class had laughed. The instructor had said, “If you can change wives it wouldn’t hurt, but it’s probably easier to change
cars.”

With three hours to wile away before the rendezvous, the Weeder decided to cover his tracks. He drove through rush hour traffic
to Logan Airport and abandoned his Hertz Toyota in the long-term parking area. He hopped an airport shuttle to the terminal,
waited in line for a taxi and asked the driver to take him to an Avis office in downtown Boston. The taxi driver studied his
passenger in the rearview mirror. “You can get a bus over to the Avis place here at the airport,” he said.

The Weeder shook his head. “I’m superstitious about renting cars at airports.”

Muttering something about different folks having different strokes, the driver swung his car into traffic.

At the Avis counter the Weeder made a point of asking directions to Cape Cod and even had the agent trace the route on a map
for him. Then he headed out the Massachusetts Turnpike toward Concord. He got to the post office just as it was closing and
retrieved the pawn ticket he had put in an envelope and addressed to himself care of General Delivery, Concord. He stopped
for a hamburger and french fries at a diner, lingered over two cups of coffee to make time pass, finally started toward the
house where the woman who called herself Snow lived.

He turned off the main road at the red mailbox and bounced along the unpaved road full of potholes, his headlights playing
on snowbanks from a storm the previous week, on fallen trees, on what was left of an old fence. Around a curve the headlights
picked out the weathered planks of a one-story house set in a clearing. Light from several
candles flickered in a window. The Weeder killed his headlights and walked up to the door.

It opened before he could knock. A woman wearing corduroy jeans and a loose-fitting flannel shirt stood in the doorway. She
held a candle in a holder with a reflector that directed the light onto the Weeder. Her own face was lost in shadows.

“I’m Silas Sibley,” the Weeder announced.

“You don’t look like a Capricorn,” the woman observed.

“What do Capricorns look like?”

“Generally speaking, they don’t look frightened. They’re more open, more seductive. You really didn’t get my letter?”

He shook his head. “I must have left New York before it arrived.”

The woman said, “What’s done is done. You might as well come on in. My friends call me Snow. If you become one you can too.
Until then you can call me Matilda.”

The Weeder closed the door behind him, stamped his feet on the mat, threw his overcoat across the back of a wooden chair and
installed himself in front of a fire crackling in the chimney that formed the center of the house. He held his hands toward
the flames and rubbed his fingers together.

The woman named Snow set her candle down on a small table. She glanced in annoyance at the Weeder’s overcoat, decided she
didn’t like where he had thrown it and hung it from a peg on the back of the door next to a mackinaw. Watching her, the Weeder
thought: What she cares about she is fanatic about.

Snow appeared with a glass and offered it to the Weeder. “Prune cider,” she announced. “Homemade, it goes without saying.
When’s the last time you saw prune cider in a supermarket? Drink it—it’s good for the digestion, ingrown toenails, warts.”

The Weeder took his first good look at Snow. She was younger than he had expected. She had incredibly pale skin and dark straight
hair cut short and parted in the middle, with wisps curling off negligently from her sideburns. There was a pencil-line scar
over her right brow. Her fingers, curled around the glass she offered him, were long and thin, her nails bitten to the quick.
She seemed more tangible, more down to earth, than he had imagined she would be the two times he had spoken to her on the
phone. It came as a relief to him that he would not have to invent her.

Taking the prune cider from her, the Weeder looked around the
cabin, or what he could see of it in the flickering light of the chimney and half a dozen candles. It seemed to be an echo
of her: spare where she was gaunt, solid, no-nonsense furniture to match her solid, no-nonsense clothes. An assortment of
cameras and lenses and tripods was heaped on a long scrubbed oak table in a corner. A high, narrow framed black-and-white
photograph of a nude hung on one wall. The woman in the photo, seen through a partly open door, masked her face with her fingers
and peered through them at the camera. Her eyes conveyed shyness or sadness—or all of the above. The photograph was illuminated
by a candle set on the floor. In the photo the nude was illuminated by a candle set on the floor at her bare feet.

The house smelled of freshly baked cookies, which the Weeder spotted cooling in a tray on a window ledge above a wood-burning
stove. It also smelled of camphor.

“The camphor,” Snow said, reading his mind, “comes from the mackinaw over there. I found it yesterday in a trunk filled with
camphor balls.” Walking with a limp so slight it seemed more like a hesitation, she crossed the room and sat down in a rocking
chair. She rocked back and forth, toying with a gold wedding band as she sized up her invited, then uninvited, then reinvited
guest. The Weeder seemed mesmerized by the photograph of the nude. “You are wondering whether the woman in the photograph
is me, but you are too conventional to ask,” Snow guessed. “The answer is yes. Kundera has a character somewhere who talks
about a girl’s face lighted by the nudity of her body. That’s the effect I was trying for.” She twisted in the chair to look
at the photograph, studied it for a moment. “In the end, clothes are a form of mask,” she observed, thinking out loud. Turning
back to the Weeder, she waved a hand toward his clothes. His trousers were rumpled, his sport jacket frayed at the sleeves,
his shoes scuffed. There was a suggestion of irony in her voice as she asked, “Is this how you normally go calling?”

The Weeder grinned sheepishly. “Thoreau, who came from this neck of the woods, said you should distrust any enterprise that
required new clothes.”

Snow flashed a strained smile that the Weeder immediately recognized; it was the smile people used when they wanted to keep
from crying. He had seen it on his mother’s face at the funeral of his father; had seen it in the mirror the day he came home
from work to find his wife had taken his son and left for good.