“He came,” Rapke said. “Early this morning, just as you said.”
“Calls himself Bodden, does he?” the Colonel said.
“Yes. Yes. Bodden. Otto Bodden.”
“And you hired him, of course.”
“Yes, yes, just as you instructed.”
“Good work. Rapke. Perhaps he will even turn out to be a competent printer.”
“Yes, that is to be devoutly wished. Now, is there anything else that I am to do?”
“Nothing,” the Colonel said. “Absolutely nothing. You will treat him exactly as you would treat any other temporary employee. Is that clear?”
“Yes, naturally.”
“And one more thing, Rapke.”
“Yes.”
“Keep your mouth shut. Is that also clear?”
“Yes,” Rapke said. “Most clear.”
After Rapke had hung up, the Colonel asked Sergeant Lewis to have Captain Richards come in. A few moments later Richards came in, filling his pipe, and sat down in a chair before the Colonel’s desk. The Colonel watched bleakly as Richards went through the ritual of lighting his pipe. The Colonel didn’t mind pipe smoking. He smoked himself, cigarettes; chain-smoked them, in fact. But all that business of filling a pipe and tamping it down and lighting it and then knocking it all out somewhere, it really was a bloody nuisance.
“Rapke called,” Colonel Whitlock said.
The Captain nodded and went on with the lighting of his pipe.
“He’s across,” the Colonel said.
The Captain nodded again. “Came across this morning about seven. They even shot at him. Or toward him. Three fishermen were there. They saw it.”
“Rapke hired him.”
“Good. Does he call himself Bodden?”
“Mm. Otto Bodden.”
“I’ll let Hamburg know.”
“Yes, do that,” the Colonel said. “And you should ask them how long we might have to keep an eye on this fellow before that major of theirs arrives. What’s his name?”
“Baker-Bates. Gilbert Baker-Bates.”
“Coming from America, isn’t he?”
“From Mexico, sir.”
“Same thing,” the Colonel said.
7
If the dwarf hadn’t got drunk in the French Quarter in New Orleans and stayed that way for two days, and if he hadn’t insisted on visiting Monticello in Virginia, and later insisted that Jackson give him a guided tour of the University of Virginia, then they could have made it to Washington in a week instead of the eleven days that it took them. During the tour of the university, Jackson had to listen to Ploscaru lecture learnedly on Thomas Jefferson. The lecture went on so long that they were delayed another day and had to spend the night in Charlottesville.
They arrived in Washington at a little after noon the next day and managed to get two rooms at the Willard. After unpacking and sending his suit out to be pressed, Jackson went down the hall to Ploscaru’s room.
The dwarf let Jackson in, went back to the bed, hopped up on it, and sat cross-legged while he examined his four passports. One was French, one was Swiss, one was Canadian, and the last was German. The dwarf tossed that one aside and picked up the one issued by Canada.
“Canadian?” Ploscaru said.
Jackson shook his head and looked around for the bourbon. He found it on the dresser. “What would a Canadian be doing in Germany?” he said as he poured himself a drink.
Ploscaru nodded, put the Canadian passport down, and picked up the Swiss one. “Swiss, I think. A Swiss would have business in Germany. A Swiss would have business anywhere.”
Jackson picked up the Canadian passport, flipped through it with one hand, and tossed it back onto the bed. “If these things are so perfect, why didn’t you use one of them to go down to Mexico with me?”
Without looking up from the Swiss passport, Ploscaru said, “Then I would have run into Baker-Bates, wouldn’t I’ve?”
Jackson stared at him for a moment and then grinned. “You knew he was there, didn’t you?”
The dwarf only shrugged without looking up.
“God, how you lie, Nick.”
“Not really.”
“You lied about Baker-Bates. You lied about Oppenheimer not speaking English. You lied about his daughter, about her being a spinster.”
“She is.”
“She’s not even thirty.”
“In Germany a woman if not married by twenty-five is a spinster. Eine alte Jungfer. It’s the law, I think. Or was.”
Jackson went over and stood by the window and looked across Fourteenth Street at the National Press Building. A man directly opposite stood at a window and scratched his head. The man’s coat was off, his tie was loosened, and his shirt sleeves were rolled up. After a moment, the man quit scratching his head, turned, and sat down at a desk. Jackson wondered if he was a reporter.
Jackson turned from the window, found a chair, and sat down in it. “And then there’s Kurt Oppenheimer, the boyish assassin. You lied about him too.”
“Actually, I didn’t.”
“No?”
“No. What I did was fail to mention everything that I knew about him.” Ploscaru looked over at Jackson and grinned. “You’re getting wet feet, aren’t you?”
“Cold feet.”
“Yes, of course. Cold feet.”
“No. Not exactly,” Jackson said. “It’s just that I haven’t figured out what lies I’m going to tell the Army and the State Department.”
The dwarf smiled cheerfully. “You’ll think of something.”
“That’s what bothers me,” Jackson said. “I probably will.”
Ploscaru had to see the White House first, of course. After that they followed Pennsylvania Avenue down to where it jogged around the Treasury Building and had lunch at the Occidental, where the dwarf was impressed by all the photographs of dead politicians on the walls, if not by the food.
When they had finished lunch, the dwarf said that he had to see some people. Jackson didn’t ask whom. If he had asked, he was fairly sure he would have been lied to again.
After the dwarf caught a cab, Jackson went back up to his hotel room and started making phone calls. It was the third call that paid off. The man whom Jackson had phoned was Robert Henry Orr, and when Jackson had first known him he had been in the OSS and everyone had called him Nanny, because it was to Nanny that everyone turned who wanted something fixed. Now Orr was in the State Department, and he didn’t seem at all surprised that Jackson had called.
“Let me guess, Minor,” Orr said. “You finally decided that you wanted to come home and you called poor old Nanny. How nice.”
“I didn’t know there was one,” Jackson said. “A home.”
“Not yet, but give us another year. Meantime, I could put you on to something temporary, perhaps in Japan. That would be nice. Would you like that?”
“Not much,” Jackson said. “Maybe we could get together for a drink later on.”
There was a silence, and then Orr said, “You’ve got something going on your own, haven’t you, Minor? Something naughty, I’ll bet.”
“How about the Willard at five-thirty in the bar?”
“I’ll be there,” Orr said, and hung up.
Robert Henry Orr had been a beautiful child in the early twenties — so beautiful, in fact, that he had earned nearly $300,000 in photographic-modeling fees not only in New York but also in London and Paris. Most adults who had been children in the twenties could still remember that beautiful face with its long dark curls grinning out at them from a box of the cereal that then had been the chief competitor of Cream of Wheat. In fact, a large portion of adult America had grown up hating Robert Henry Orr.