She turned to look at him.
The face under the floppy hat was one he had last seen in a Maryland kitchen. “Pay the lady, Hake,” she said. “Then let’s you and I go where we can talk.”
If the drugstores seemed to want to close on Sundays, the bars did not. They found a sidewalk cafe, chillier than Hake would have preferred but at least remote from other people, and the woman ordered them both big brandy-snifters of raw Berlin beer with raspberry syrup at the bottom of each glass. Hake took what he estimated to be a 2-Teeldffel swig of the Hustentherapeutikum and washed it down with beer. The cold was gratifying on his palate. The taste, less so. It wasn’t what his body wanted, and the pressure in his gut increased. He felt as if he wanted to burp, but was afraid to risk it. He said. “You know, young lady, I could have you arrested.”
“Not here you couldn’t, Hake.”
“Kidnapping is certainly an extraditable offense.”
“Offense? Oh, but Hake, you didn’t file charges, did you?”
“There’s no statute of limitations on kidnapping.”
“Oh, hell, Hake, lay off the lawyer talk. It doesn’t become you. Let’s talk about realities, like why you didn’t report me to the fuzz. Have you thought about the reasons for that?”
“I know the reason for that! I, uh, I didn’t know where to report you.”
“Meaning,” she said bitterly, “that you had committed yourself to the spooks and knew you shouldn’t involve the regular police. Right? And you were afraid to tell the spooks about it because you didn’t know what would happen.”
He kept his mouth shut. He didn’t want to admit to her that he simply hadn’t known how to contact the Team until the time had passed when it seemed appropriate. He was also aware that he shouldn’t be telling this woman anything at all. Or even be talking to her. Who knew if that waiter, idly kicking at a windblown scrap of newspaper, or that teenage girl in the hot-pants suit biking down the boulevard, was not reporting to someone somewhere about this meeting?
Under other circumstances he probably would have liked being with her a lot. Whether in zipper suit or flowered spring dress and floppy hat, she was a striking-looking woman. She was at least as tall as Hake, would be taller if she wore heels, and slimmer than he would have thought of as beautiful—if, on any of their meetings, it had ever mattered whether or not she was beautiful. She was perplexing in many ways. For instance, how quaint to wear an old-fashioned gold wedding ring! He hadn’t seen one of those in… he couldn’t remember when he had seen one last.
“I don’t have much time, Hake,” she said severely, “and I’ve got a lot to say. We checked you out, you know. You’re a decent person. You’re kind, idealistic, if you picked up a stray kitten you’d find it a home. You work ninety hours a week at a dog job for slave pay. So what did they do to you to turn you into a killer?”
“Killerl”
“Well, what would you call it? They’re close enough to killers, Hake, and you’re just getting started with them. Who knows what they’ll have you doing? When you took this job, you must have known what it meant.”
It was impossible for him to admit to this young, handsome, angry woman that not only didn’t he know what the job meant, he hadn’t yet found out exactly what it was. He said thickly, “I have my own morality, lady.”
“You exactly do, yes, and yet you’re doing things that I know you know are violating it. Why?”
He perceived with relief that the question was rhetorical and she was about to answer it for him. Carrying on this conversation was getting pretty hard. And his ears were bothering him. There seemed to be a distant roaring. He tried to concentrate on her words, in spite of the growing evidence in his stomach that he was sicker than he had thought.
She said mournfully, “Why! God, the time we’ve spent trying to answer that one. What changes people like you? Money? But you can’t want money, or you wouldn’t be, for God’s sake, a minister. Patriotism? You weren’t even born in America! Some psychosis, maybe, because you were a cripple most of your life and the girls wouldn’t go near you?”
“The girls,” Hake said with dignity, “were very often willing to overlook my physical problems.”
“Spare me the story of your adolescent fumblings, Hake. I know that isn’t it, either. Or shouldn’t be. We checked you out that way, too. So what does that leave? Why would you flipflop a hundred and eighty degrees, from being an all-giver, helping anyone who comes near you any way you can, to a trouble-making, misery-spreading cloak-and- dagger fink? There’s only one answer! Hake, what do you know about hypnotism?”
“Hypnotism?”
“You keep repeating what I say, but that’s not responsive, you know. Yes, I said ‘hypnotism.’ In case you don’t know it, you show all the diagnostic signs: trance logic, tolerance of incongruities, even analgesia. Or anyway analgesia of the soul; you’d be hurting about the kind of people you’re involved with if something didn’t stop you. Even hypnotic paranoia! You pick up cues that a person not in the trance state would ignore. You picked up cues from us after we kidnapped you! That’s why you didn’t report us, you know.”
“Oh, come off it. Nobody hypnotized me.”
“As to that, how would you know? If you’d been given a post-hypnotic command to forget it?”
He shook his head obstinately.
“Oh, sure,” she sneered. “You’d know, because you’re you, right? But if you weren’t hypnotized, how do you explain signing up with the spooks?”
I can’t, he thought. But what he said out loud was, “I don’t have to explain anything to you. I don’t even know who you are—except your name’s Lee and you’re married.”
She looked at him thoughtfully from under the brim of her hat. Hake couldn’t see her eyes very well, and that disconcerted him. Well, everything about her disconcerted him. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said shortly. He was not feeling well at all, and sitting out at this trashy, chilly sidewalk cafe—Munich was having some sort of garbagemen’s strike, and the sidewalks were loaded with old, stale refuse—was not making him feel any better. And the distant yelling was louder and closer.
When he came back, the waiter had brought refills of the Berlinerweissen, and Lee had removed her hat. She looked a lot younger and prettier without it, and forlorn. She would have seemed quite appealing under the right circumstances. Which were not these. Hake realized apprehensively that he had finished the, whole first beer. The syrup at the bottom had cloyed his palate enough so that he wanted the astringency of the new one, but his stomach was serving notice that it was prepared to take only so much more insult.
“As to who I am, Hake,” she said moodily, “I’ve blown my cover to you already, haven’t I? So my name is Leota Pauket. I was a graduate student at—never mind where. Anyway, I’m not even a graduate student any more. My dissertation subject was disapproved, and that’s what started all this.”
“I hope you’re going to tell me what you’re talking about.”
“You bet I am, Hake. Maybe more than you want to know.” She took a long sip at the new beer, staring out at the littered street. “I’m a Ute.”
“You don’t look Indian.”
“Don’t wise off, Hake. I’m a Utilitarianist. I used to belong to the Jeremy Bentham Club at school. You know: ‘the greatest good of the greatest number,’ and all that. It was a small club, only six of us. But we were closer than brothers. I’ve had to deal with some pretty crummy people since I got into this, Hake. There are bad ones on the other side too, as bad as your lot, and I can’t always pick my allies. But back at school they were a good bunch, all grad students, all in economics or sociology. All first-class human beings. My dissertation advisor was our faculty rep, and she was something else. She’s the one who suggested the topic to me: Covariants and correlatives: An examination into the relationship between degradation of non-monetary standard of living factors and decreasing international tensions. She helped—”