“Tell your master to send someone a little more expert the next time.”
“Let go of my sleeve.”
“Sure.” Devereaux dropped his hand. “Tell them it doesn’t pay to send up someone dressed like a French pimp. He stands out.”
“You might regret that.”
“I doubt it.”
The Englishman mustered some dignity and took his drink to the far end of the bar again and deposited it on the bar top. He pushed a five-markka note across the bar as a tip and turned and walked up the three steps to the lobby level where a middle-aged couple were playing the slot machines.
Devereaux stared after him but the Englishman pushed through the front doors and left the hotel. Absurd, Devereaux thought. He’s wearing a suit coat and it must be zero outside. He smiled for the first time.
“Trouble, sir?” asked the barman.
Devereaux looked at him. “A queer.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
The barman frowned and looked away but stayed near Devereaux, polishing glasses that had been polished a moment before. Devereaux noticed this but there was nothing to do about it. Contact had been made; Hanley could not have expected to wait seven weeks and not have someone tumble to the fact that a special agent was in Helsinki. Even a clod like Sims.
Good, he thought. Time to get out. Time to let Hanley know the game was over.
He suddenly felt released as he had not felt for seven weeks.
The game was in the open.
If the British knew about him, everyone would know about him. Tartakoff could not get out now. Tomas Crohan, whoever he was, would stay a prisoner in the Gulag.
“I’d like another vodka,” Devereaux said. The barman picked up the empty glass and replaced it with another.
Time to let Hanley know that it was blown, that he was not the man for the job anymore. If they wanted to delude themselves, they could send someone else in.
Hanley must have known seven weeks was too long in an exposed place like Helsinki. Hanley must have known.
And then, with a sudden chill that capped his mood, Devereaux realized that Hanley had known all along.
The old man lay beneath the thin covers and felt the coldness in the ward press against his exposed face. For a moment, he closed his eyes as though the utter darkness would warm him; he tried to think of the old dreams that always had sustained him. But the wind howled against the windows of the old hospital wing and the wind insisted on winter, insisted on penetrating his subconscious so that there would be no place left for pleasant dreams.
The old man opened his eyes. He shivered and wrapped the blankets tighter against his thin frame.
A single light shone in the hall that was outside the ward of the prison hospital. He stared at the light until he saw the halos around the light, shimmering and dancing like rings of a distant planet.
He heard the moans of the sleepless in the darkness around him. The old man was waiting for the pill to take its effect, to remove him from the ward, from the moans of the others, from the howling wind pressing against the rattling windows, to lead him to the long dreams that occupied half his existence, that made the real part of his existence endurable.
What did he dream? He could not even tell anyone, for fear the dreams would dry up and then there would be nothing left to make the other existence — the real existence — bearable for him.
He could fall into the dreams unexpectedly, even during the day. These reveries would always protect him. Once, when they were building a barracks in the dead of winter in Siberia — it was so cold that wood shattered like glass — he was warmed for days by a dream that led him day and night. He never spoke during the days of the dream; he was scarcely aware of the horror and cold around him during the dream. The dream had been the only thing that was real.
Now, because he was old and because he had lived with the dreams so long, he felt like an aged suitor who must court the dreams gently for fear they will fly to another. He had bribed the nurse for an extra pill tonight and the pill would eventually let him sleep and the sleep would — if all went well — lead to the dreams that were warm and bright and full of beautiful forms. He never had nightmares; the nightmares only came during the day in his other existence. The dreams were always beautiful visitations.
Was he mad, as mad as the others?
He closed his eyes. It was a question to ask himself tomorrow. After the dreams came.
He felt himself falling, slowly, in the darkness of his mind and he did not struggle against the falling.
And after a while, the howling winter wind outside the prison hospital in Leningrad could not be heard anymore by the old man.
7
“What do you know about a man named Tomas Crohan?”
The question had first been asked that morning. It was repeated now to commence the conversation.
“You mean, Hanley, what does Tinkertoy know?”
Hanley made a face that was half grimace, half acceptance of Mrs. Neumann’s games with him.
Mrs. Neumann ran computer search in R Section. She was the memory of the Section and, in some ways, the conscience of the operation when it required such. Computers provided Hanley data, past and present; Mrs. Neumann told him what the data meant.
They sat at a table near the window in the special cafeteria provided on the third floor of the Department of Agriculture building on 14 Street.
The day was bright and cold beyond the heroic windows. Inside the drab, government-green cafeteria, the food was usual and not very good, served up from stainless-steel steam tables with much banging of plates and plastic serving trays. Hanley regretted being here. He never missed lunch at the old-fashioned bar-and-grill north on 14—he always ate exactly one cheeseburger (without onions) and drank exactly one straight-up dry martini — but the circumstances were unusual today and called for a luncheon meeting with Mrs. Neumann. And Mrs. Neumann, in her way as much a creature of habit as Hanley, could never be persuaded to leave the environs of the old building before quitting time.
“The stew isn’t so bad,” she said with the dedicated air of one who has to justify her eating habits. She speared a fork into the greasy brown mixture on her plate and retrieved a dried chunk resembling meat from the sea of carrots and potatoes.
Hanley poked at the salad in front of him. His stomach rumbled. He had not touched his food. His stomach did not understand that the pleasures of the single cheeseburger and straight-up martini would have to be foregone today. Hanley felt sorry for his digestive tract, as though it were an old friend fallen on hard times.
“Yes, Mrs. Neumann. As you say. What does Tinkertoy say about Tomas Crohan?”
“Actually, we shouldn’t eat this much meat. Not every day. Leo is on a diet now where he skips eating entirely every other day.”
“I’m happy to hear it.”
“You wouldn’t be if you had to live with him.” She put down her fork and called up Leo in her mind’s eye. “Leo is a sweet man but I’m going to have to convince him that this diet won’t work. It will ruin his stomach or ruin me. He sits around on the foodless nights and rumbles at me. In the living room. His stomach makes these terrible noises just as yours did now. I realize he can’t help it any more than you, but it is distracting. Especially when the foodless day falls on Saturday. We had people over to the house and Leo rumbles at them.”
“Mrs. Neumann, I find the subject of your husband’s digestion amazingly interesting.”
“All right, Hanley.” She put down her fork. “Let’s cut the small talk then.” Her voice had the rasp of an awl on old wood. She was very hoarse and never so much stated as whispered or rasped or seemed in a hurry to speak. Lydia Neumann was a middle-aged, handsome woman of big bones and large gestures who favored print cotton dresses. Her short, black hair was cut in spiky clumps at intervals by her husband, Leo, not because it saved money but because it created an intimacy between them that reminded them of when they had been young and very much in love. Both would be surprised now to hear that their friends thought they were still in love as they had been twenty-five years before. Leo vaguely suspected that his wife had an important role in an agency he knew very little about; he had treated her in a fatherly way about her job until the Paris matter two years before when she had been kidnapped right out of the agency. The incident had awed him and made him vow to lose forty pounds; the two matters were linked but difficult to explain to anyone who did not know the Neumanns. She was chief of Computer Analysis or CompAn in the slang of the trade.