“It’s not just plot elements. It’s also language. Words that have been put together so many times, they’re as comfortable as an old bar of soap. ‘Dark as night.’ ‘Sky blue.’ ‘Wine-dark sea.’ ‘Raven-haired beauty.’ All those are familiar, so their meanings have eroded. They don’t carry any electricity. They remind you of a movie.”
“What about ‘Passion’s Golden Tresses’?”
“Perfect. Good God, where’d you get that?”
“It’s from an old magazine. Anyhow, I think I’m getting it.”
“Characters can be cliches too. Compare, say, Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe with Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert. Marlowe is incorruptible, smart, and brave, and he sees through everything, every motive, every feint, every lie. He’s too good to be true. Humbert, though he’s super-intelligent, makes every possible mistake, is in the grip of a pathetic obsession, can’t control his own behavior. Even when he shoots Quilty at the end, it’s not some terrific, highly choreographed gun battle but a pathetic transaction, where, shooting wildly, he runs after a begging, crying man. So Marlowe is the cliche, Humbert the authentic. Nabokov wouldn’t write about a cliche, except maybe to joke about it, to turn it on its nose, to make a game out of it.”
“I see,” said Bob. “Would Niles, after Nabokov, make a game of a cliche?”
“Well,” she said, “as you know, Nabokov loved games, so I suppose Niles had to pick up on that. He might have. His ‘code’ may involve a spirit of play. You know him better than I do.”
“Can you give me some other plot cliches? Nick of time was one, the hero never getting shot was another.”
“The most famous would be ‘The butler did it.’ That’s from a type of English crime novel in the twenties, when murder was considered an upper-class occurrence and the books were pure puzzle. The temptation of the butler was too delicious to resist: he was invisible, he was discreet, he was loyal, he knew the house and grounds perfectly.”
“There were a lot of books with a guilty butler, then?”
“Dozens. Hundreds. Then they reversed the cliche. Since everyone expected that the butler did it, it turned out the butler didn’t do it, even if he was the chief suspect. That became just as much of a cliche. But if you wanted to do that today, the real joke would be a game on the game. That is, the butler really did do it.”
“I see,” Swagger said.
“Here’s another one. It’s prevalent in a modern thriller: nothing is what it seems. The hero’s in a situation, and he continually interprets the signs for guidance. What he doesn’t know is that some evil genius has purposely constructed false signs to lead him astray. It never happens in real life, but it’s a great, if cheap, device. Most such books or movies dramatize the process by which the hero sees behind the manipulations and figures out what’s going on.”
“Got it. And if Nabokov, or even Niles Gardner, were to do a game on that, his version would make you think that nothing is as it seems, but actually–”
“–everything is exactly as it seems,” she said. “I see, by the light in your eyes, I might have scored a point.”
“Yes ma’am. I’m realizing that was the principle of the Red Nine. I thought it stood for something or labeled something or meant something else – say, a code name for an agent, a radio call sign, a chess move, something like that. In the end, it turned out to mean nothing else. It simply was what it was. He saw nine as red. He saw all nines as red, that’s all.”
“It was literal, not metaphorical. So it was the subtlest of codes, yes. The code was that there was no code. Who would ever figure that out except maybe a Bob Lee Swagger? No college professor would figure it out, because no college professor would be capable of thinking that clearly.”
“I’m thinking that maybe he used the same principle on the next step. Something seems like a code, but it’s not. It just is what it is, in plain sight, but you could look at it all day and not get that. The code is that there is no code. The secret is that there is no secret.”
“It’s too clever,” she said. “I could never use it in a book. Real life is never like that.”
It is all right to fail if you learn from your failure. Here is what I learned from the Moscow debacle. Swagger, at sixty-seven, was still very, very good. He could not be taken by run-of-the-mill criminal gunmen. He was too smart, too swift, too calm in action, too determined. Moscow had hardened him while confirming his suspicions, and he would move more directly to the target, which was, alas, me.
The second thing I learned (I have had to learn this lesson over and over again; maybe it will stick by the time I reach ninety!) is that you can’t rush things. They will happen at their own pace, at their own place in time. The more you rush, the more you cut corners, the more damage you do to yourself. I should have flown in my kill team at first notice and not tried to make do with a crew of uncertain talents and dubious motivations. To take professionals, you need to have professionals, so that issues of pride are involved, not just greed and the will to violence. My world-class killers wouldn’t have panicked, would have planned better, would have shot better, would have had more contingencies in play, would not have been thrown off their game when their sitting ducks proved to be armed.
The third thing I learned (I knew this too, but I forgot it also!) was to prepare the ground. Our team took Stronski at a place he, Stronski, knew best. He knew all the shooting angles, the paths through the bushes, the locations of the bench pedestals, which would stop incoming, and the trash cans, which would not.
I resolved to do better next time. For one thing, it would be the full focus of my attention. There would be no tending to empire and pleasure and turning to tactics in spare minutes between soirees. No, I had to go to war footing to win the war, which meant it had to be a 24/7 operation. I had to put aside my decadence and find my war brain again, and become the hard and ruthless Hugh of Clandestine Service, that old legend who’d killed a president and hundreds more in his time.
My first resolution was: take the fight to the enemy.
I knew I could not back off and let him find a new angle of attack to which I would react, because in the reaction would be encoded my failure. I was not going to live in anticipation of a move against me by this genius operator at the time and place of his choosing and pray for the luck of my guards. No, I had to go to him, I had to net him, I had to lure him to prepared ground where we knew the locations of the trees and benches and all the escape routes were predetermined, the sights zeroed, the weapons tested. It had to be done not just professionally but at the highest levels of professionalism.
I did have one advantage: I knew where he had to go. He had to go to Texas.
The only sure link to me was through the man who’d been his mentor in Dallas, and he suspected that man was an agent of mine. He’d have to reengage and infer from that a way to me. Who paid him, what were the arrangements, how did he report, how could he be played? He’d have to confront those questions.
In Texas I’d put something before him. Something so seductive, he could not resist its temptation. He would have to go after it; it would be his grail. He would study the approach, sniff a dozen times, seem to go, then back off. He’d circle around, he’d look for signs, for disturbances, for indicators of preparation and ambush, and I’d have to prepare carefully enough to survive that scrutiny. And finally – weeks down the long and winding path before me – he’d make his approach, and then we’d have him.