“It was no choice at all.”
“He was part of the team, he had to do the best thing for the Section.”
“We pulled him out of Vietnam fifteen years ago. Sent Manning in. Before your time, Admiral. He sent back an evaluation predicting the Tet offensive by the North. Sent it nine months before Tet. Naturally, it was shot down by Langley. We didn’t know then that Langley was building up its own case, faking the evidence of our ‘victories’ in Vietnam.”
“That’s under the bridge, that’s a long time ago,” the Old Man said.
Hanley talked on softly, as though still in a sort of reverie. “The national security adviser ordered us to bring him back. He said we didn’t need defeatists in the field. Defeatists. November gave us the truth and we killed the messenger. He only wanted to go back to Vietnam. I knew it, but we had a standing flag in his file, always: No Eastern duty. Exile. I think he felt he was an exile in the West.”
The Old Man sucked the dry stem of his pipe for a moment and stared shrewdly at the other man. “You knew him better than anyone,” the Old Man said finally.
Hanley blinked and came out of the fog of remembrance. He realized, with something like regret, that it was perfectly true. He knew Devereaux as well as anyone had known him. And he didn’t know him at all.
5
The pigeons outside the second-floor window fluttered noisily on the droppings-splattered ledge, and Felker, listening to the cooing and rustling feathers, realized it was not a dream. He had dreamed of the pigeons all during the restless night after the boy from the front desk brought him the message; the pigeons settled around him in the dream and then on him, the air filled with feathers and their small amazed eyes, the stench of them smothering him in the dream. There had been a woman in Hamburg, long ago, who fed the pigeons and let them settle on her, on her arms and even her hat. She was a filthy beast, as filthy as the pigeons themselves. In the morning, now, the pigeons always seemed angry, with the sunlight or with each other; their cooing took on an air of challenge.
Felker realized he was sweating, though the room was not warm.
No. He wouldn’t lose his nerve just yet.
He grasped the package of Senior Service on the scarred pine table next to the double bed and shook out a cigarette. He sat on the edge of the bed and lit it and blew the smoke against the shuttered windows. His body was small, powerful, and he was naked. He had black hair on his back and chest, and wiry hair spiking his scalp. His eyes were deep and suspicious and black. There was a long, livid scar down the left side of his chest where they had removed part of one lung. Don’t smoke, the doctors had said, it is dangerous. He had been amused by that, as though everything in his life were not fraught with the sense of impending death.
He had waited for contact for twenty-one days.
Waiting was more difficult to face than terror. Waiting crawled around him, made him itch.
Felker had not expected it to be so difficult to contact the Americans.
He had a story for them. It would pay good money. The Americans always paid, unlike the parsimonious English, who wanted every account line filled in.
He would tell them about English spies at the American base and about Soviet spies as well. And about the code book he had taken from Reed — book and encoded messages as well.
He inhaled again and let the smoke trail out of his nostrils.
California. He would live in California. It sounded like a good place to live, like Venice, warm and with water. He wanted to be warm.
Three days ago, the Americans had made contact at last; their agent met him on the Rialto bridge over the Grand Canal.
The American looked like an Italian; he wore a bow tie. His eyes were cynical, even contemptuous. Felker had been amazed by all he knew. Felker had tried to tempt him with the code book; they knew about that. And the American had told him that Reed was dead and that Felker had killed him.
Felker had realized the English double-crossed him, even at the end. Pim. Pim had killed Reed and laid the blame on Felker. So all of Felker’s caution had been justified. The Soviets would think Felker had killed Reed, and the Americans thought so as well.
“So what is it that you have to sell us?” the American agent, Cacciato, had finally asked.
“Messages. Dozens of them. Encoded. And you can break them with the book code. Simple stuff.”
“And what do the messages say?”
“Are you crazy? First we make a deal.”
They had bargained on the Rialto bridge, where centuries of traders had bargained before them. Around them old women hustled to morning shops; below, the Grand Canal was full of midmorning traffic: barges and the water buses called vaporettos and gondolas and motor cruisers.
“We know about you, Felker,” the American had said and smiled. “You were a terrorist, in Munich.”
“Arms dealer, please,” Felker had protested.
“A terrorist. Moving Czech arms to the Irish Republican Army, cash on demand, very profitable until our British friends at Auntie tumbled to you.”
“Businessman, just like American businessmen. You sell to the highest bidder, and a hell of a lot worse than Czech machine guns.”
“The English found you and turned you.”
“The English took me to their house in Heidelberg and they did things.”
“Torture? Are you delicate now?”
Felker had not been angry. It was part of the bargaining. Yes, he had thought, they tortured me and I never forgot it.
“You worked Malta for them.”
“And Marseilles. I lost part of my lung at Marseilles, it was a trap. The English were watching the heroin trade.”
Cacciato had frowned at last. “To make sure it only went to America.”
“Something like that,” Felker had said. “I’ve got stories and stories for you.”
And so they had talked and bargained and played the game, and when the American left the bridge, they thought they understood each other.
Felker had waited two more days and then the second message had come, the night before. It had robbed him of sleep, along with the cooing pigeons beyond the shuttered windows.
Felker now rose from his bed in the darkened morning room and went to the dresser. He began to pull his clothing out of the drawers. He had bathed the night before, paying fifteen hundred lire for the bathtub hot water faucet, which was kept behind the front desk. The faucet was returned upon completion of the bath.
The American response had been firm. They would go along with Felker’s requests for asylum and money. He would take the third charter boat at the San Marco piazza dock at seven and go to the island of the Lido beyond the tight cluster of islands that is central Venice. He would walk across the Lido to the deserted beach, and there he would be met and picked up by a fast boat for Corfu. Felker would simply disappear from the face of the earth, and neither the British nor the Soviets would know who held him.
Pim, Felker thought suddenly, seeing the face of the fat Englishman. He had killed Reed and nearly done in Felker. He had always had contempt for Pim, but at the moment of crisis Pim had done the right thing exactly in killing Reed. Exactly what Felker would have done.
6
“I’m sorry to be late.”
“I was early.”
“There were so many distractions at the last minute, I had to just leave them.”
“I was watching the old man playing the accordion.”
Manning half rose as Jeanne Clermont came to the table, but she sat down quickly across from him and he sank back into his chair. It was the first springlike day, and Henri had placed tables on the sidewalk in front of his restaurant, the Rose de France. Manning had chosen the table farthest from the open door of the brasserie, across the walk from the stately elms in the place Dauphine.