“I see.”
“I don’t know if I can be of help to you. I just don’t know a lot. Maybe if you told me specifically what it is you’re after.”
“Yes sir,” said Bob. “There is a slight possibility, and I can offer you no proof, that somewhere in the world a man is living under a ‘biography’ that your father assembled for him. It still hasn’t been penetrated, as an example of your father’s genius.”
“Wouldn’t it be in the Agency work-name registry?”
“If he exists, he would have managed to remove it. He was a sly dog, this guy.”
“All right. Can you tell me his name?”
“You’ll scoff. According to all documents, he died in 1993.”
“Hugh Meachum! Yes, Hugh was capable of something like that. Hugh was the best. My father loved Hugh. Hugh was the ideal agent: bold, cunning, unbearably brave, but nothing like James Bond, whom Dad loathed. Hugh was smart and never showy. He didn’t need recognition or glory. The work was reward enough. He was like a priest, a Jesuit, I think. Intense, not macho, dryly witty. Many a time Hugh has sat in the chair you’re sitting in now, drinking my mother’s wicked vodka martinis, his beautiful wife, Peggy, over there, Dad and my mother here on the sofa, the four of them laughing like hyenas.”
“Hugh was quite a guy, no doubt.”
“Anyhow, he would be, what, eighty-five or so if still alive.”
“Eighty-two. Born in 1930.”
“Old-school spy. Raised in France, spoke Russian, French, and German flawlessly, Yale lit major, turned out to have the gift for the game.”
“That sounds like him.”
“I can’t tell you anything specific about Hugh. Neither Hugh nor Dad would talk about specifics. They were so disciplined, it couldn’t have happened or been committed to paper. They distrusted journalists, even if at one time Dad was a journalist.”
“It’s more a mind-set. By that I mean your father had a technique for building a legend. It may have varied case by case, but it had tendencies. It had patterns. It had technique. Possibly you would know that, or you could have discerned it or inferred it. So if you could talk about that subject, you might give me some road signs I’d be on the alert for as I continue with my inquiry.”
“I’m not going to ask you what for. If you’re vouched for by the right people and you fought hard for your country, then I’ll take you at face value.”
“I would tell you if I could. Thanks for not making me cook up a lie.”
“If it’s about the war, then I can tell you Hugh was against it, that I know. I heard him arguing quite explicitly with Dad. He’d been over there early; I’m guessing he was involved in the plotting against Diem, so Hugh was definitely a good guy.”
“See, I didn’t know that. Very interesting,” said Swagger, thinking, That’s one for the bastard. He may have killed Kennedy, but he tried to keep me alive. “Anyhow, as a result of my investigations, I’ve come upon some indicators that Hugh might be alive but underground for one reason or other.”
“Yes. A man like Hugh made a lot of enemies.”
“He can clear up some things if I can get him to talk.”
“If Hugh doesn’t want you to catch up with him, you won’t be catching up with him. He’s that clever. Maybe in his old age, he’d spill his secrets. And they’d be many and interesting. He does know a lot about Vietnam – he tried to stop it, failed, and then waged it hard as any man. Any man except possibly you. He had three tours in heavy danger. He was a wanted man. And the two of you – boy, I’d like to be a fly on the wall during that conversation!”
“I’m just an Arkansas farm boy. I wouldn’t say much.”
“Sure. Anyhow, Dad. How would Dad proceed in building a legend? That’s the issue, right?”
“Yes sir.”
“It depended on whose influence he was feeling most keenly. He was remarkably sympathetic, picking things up from the air, it seemed. A movie would stimulate him, and he’d draw on images from it. Something would happen in the news that would set him off, he’d learn a new name, it would buzz around in his head until he found a way to use it. A painting could do it, and he was an inveterate museumgoer. He was a stimulus junkie, needed provocation to work. Do you have a time frame?”
“I’m guessing – middle seventies, early eighties. Vietnam’s over and done, no one wants to think about it. China’s coming up.”
“Dad was not one they’d go to for something Chinese.”
“It could be American.”
“It could be. But again, not Dad’s forte. He was classic himself, old espionage. Ohio State, but he could hold his own with the snooty Ivies.”
“Russia, East-bloc countries, the Cold War. The old standbys.”
“The eternal enemy. Okay,” said Harry Gardner. “That would be Dad. Got it. One word: Nabokov.”
Bob blanked, and knew his eyes registered emptiness.
“Nabokov, the writer, the genius.”
“Well, sir,” said Bob, “one of my embarrassments is how poorly educated I am. I have tried to catch up, but a day doesn’t go by when I don’t humiliate myself by exposing my ignorance. I never heard of any Nabokov. I even had to look up Boswell to figure out what it meant.”
“Vladimir Nabokov. White Russian, born at the turn of the century. St. Petersburg. Lost it all in the Revolution, and the family fled to Paris, where all the White Russians went. Cambridge education. IQ 353 or something like that. Spoke English, French, and German as well as Russian, spoke ’em all brilliantly. Wrote intricate, troubling books, usually about intellectuals, with always an undercurrent of dark sexuality and violence. Probably regarded humans as another specimen to be mounted on a needle and studied. He was a butterfly collector too.”
“Your father was an admirer?”
“A devotee. As was Hugh. They’d rather sit in this room and argue Nabokov and smoke and drink and laugh than almost anything. So whether it was conscious or unconscious, I’m betting that any work product Dad turned out was touched by Nabokov’s influence. And what would that be?
“Nabokov loved all the candy corn of prose, puns, allusions, cross-linguistic wordplay, wit for wit’s sake. I’ll give you an example. You’ve heard of Lolita?”
“Old man, young girl. Dirty as hell, that’s all I know.”
“Believe me, it’s the cleanest dirty book ever written. But the bad guy is a TV writer named Clare Quilty, Q-U-I-L-T-Y, who ultimately steals Lolita from Humbert and uses her for his own purposes. Nabokov loves to play games with the names and at one point has Humbert muse in French something like ‘that he is there,’ and in French it’s qu’il t’y, that is, Q-U-apostrophe-I-L-space-T-apostrophe-Y. You see how it works? It’s a pun but in two languages, the phrase in French, the name in English.”
“So a Boswell work name would have a pun in two languages?”
“This is literature, not physics, so nothing is definite. It would be a hint, a shade, a ghost of a meaning subtly brushing against a word. If the name were a Russian name – this is a real simple example – Dad might have come up with Babochkin. That means ‘butterfly man,’ and Nabokov was known as a world-class butterfly collector. So anyone looking for a giveaway who happened to know that Dad, in his Nabokovian phase, was the author of the legend and spoke fluent Russian might look at a list of names, and immediately, Babochkin would stand out. It would be a dead giveaway. Of course, that’s the principle as enacted at a primitive level. If he were doing it for real, it would be much subtler and go through a batch of meanings and languages before it gave up its final meaning. It would bounce-bounce-bounce all over the place. And no one would ever get that last meaning because you’d have to know such a broad range of disciplines, languages, cultures. That was the sort of thing he liked to do.”