Calvin M. Cormack III sat in his Zurich office, breathed on his glasses, wiped them on his handkerchief and hooked the wire ends over his ears. The M in Calvin M. Cormack III was something Calvin M. Cormack III would have preferred to forget entirely. The M in Calvin M. Cormack Sr and in Calvin M. Cormack Jr (his grandfather and father respectively) stood for Michael. The M in Calvin M. Cormack III stood for Manassas, the battle of the Civil War in which his grandfather had lost an arm, almost eighty years ago. The old man – still going at ninety-seven – always called it ‘the war’ (pronounced ‘wawer’), thereby ignoring the Spanish-American War, the World War and eighteen months of what the British were already calling World War II regardless of its global imprecision. He had served under General Jackson in Virginia, and had worn the arm, or rather the absence of an arm, more proudly than any medal. General Jackson had emerged from the battle with the nickname ‘Stonewall’; 2nd Lieutenant Cormack had been less lucky: ‘Catch’ – as in ‘One-handed Catch’ – Cormack. A one-armed hero, but a hero all the same. Years later, nearer the turn of the century, when he had been elected Senator for Virginia, he had been cheered into the Senate like a returning warrior – and he played the part to the hilt in a white linen suit, a frock coat, the empty sleeve pinned to the side, his frame spare to the skeletal, a shock of white hair combed back from his forehead, looking like the caricature of a circuit judge in some long-forgotten Twain story. A Southerner from tip to toe.
‘It’s crap,’ said Cal’s father. ‘He filled me up with all that rebel stuff when I was a boy. I love the old guy – and so should you – but take everything he says with a pinch of salt. All he wants to do is put back the clock. Can’t be done. We’re one nation. Don’t ever forget it.’
‘But why the name? Why Manassas?’ Cal had protested at about age twelve.
‘You’re a Southerner. Don’t ever forget it.’
It was years before this struck Cal as anything other than a paradox, and paradox was not a word he knew at the age of twelve. His father had served the Democrat party machine in Virginia, but he’d also served it in Pennsylvania and New York. It had been convenient to send Cal to school in upstate New York. On the first day they had called the roll in full, and when they got to Cal the boys had sniggered at Manassas. The kid next to him had said, ‘Manassas? What kind of a name is that?’
‘Bull Run’ Cal had whispered back. ‘It means Bull Run, that’s all. That’s what it was called by the South.’
‘Bull Run? Who in hell’d name a kid Bull Run?’
And so it had gone on. Five years or more. Manassas quickly became Molasses – he was stuck with it. ‘Molasses, molasses, skinny kid in glasses!’
When Cal was fourteen his father won a congressional seat in his home state – and he’d done it by declaring his independence of the Senior Senator for Virginia – on everything from the Silver Standard to the Pershing Expeditionary Force. Calvin M. Cormack Jr was nobody’s boy. No one, to his face, ever called him son of Catch, or dared to air the notion that he was riding the political high road clutching onto his father’s frock coat. To his own son he said, ‘I had to do it. I couldn’t live that plantation-owner gimcrack. There’s not a Cormack so much as plucked a boll, let alone jumped down, turned around and picked a bale. I appeased the old man with your name. Let him know I’d never betray the South – whatever else I did. Freed us to get on with being Americans the rest of the time.’
But then, by then, Cal had worked that out for himself. He’d heard too many of the rows between his father and his grandfather. Ante-Bellum man versus All-American man. And he had little faith in either.
The letter on the top of his in-tray was an airmail from his father. He’d know that copperplate script anywhere: ‘Capt. Calvin M. Cormack III, United States Consulate, Zurich’, written with all the pride a man could put into his son’s rank and address. He eased his glasses forward a fraction on his nose. Held the letter, not wanting to rip it open. Light as a feather. He could all too easily guess its contents. His father had been ranting at him for years now. Like father like son. It was enough to make you want to break the cycle. Fuck your life away and never marry – never, never, have children. If his grandfather flew the tattered flag of the Confederacy and talked sentimentally of the Rebels, his father flew the near-invisible flag of Isolationism and talked contemptuously of Europe. What was World War II to a beleaguered little island was ‘a European skirmish’ to Representative Calvin M. Cormack Jr of Virginia, Chairman of the all-powerful House Ways and Means Committee, and ‘little or nothing to do with any right-thinking, God-fearing American’. Not that his father feared God. His father feared nothing, as far as Cal had ever been able to tell, and certainly not an entity in which he did not believe in the first place. At least they had that in common, all three generations of them. Not much, and not enough.
He’d read it later. He just wasn’t in the mood right now. He dropped it in his in-tray and slipped a brown cardboard file out of the top drawer of his desk. In it was the decrypted message he’d received from Berlin a little over two weeks ago: ‘TIN MAN DEAD’. A simple, too simple, conclusion to a complicated life. His assistant had filled the file with clippings – more than twenty snipped pieces from the German press. A hero’s funeral. He looked at them every day. Not disbelieving. Wanting not to believe.
His office door opened. Cal was still staring at the clippings. He looked up slowly and found himself panning up from a pair of stiletto heels – albeit in army colours – the length of two short, shapely legs, across a non-regulation, over-tight, over-tailored skirt, an olive green blouse thrust out by big breasts, two corporal’s stripes on the sleeve, to a pretty face, red lips, nut brown eyes, under the shortest haircut he’d ever seen on a woman. She was clutching a single sheet of paper to her bosom. He’d no idea who she was.
‘Have we met?’ he said simply.
‘Sure, day before yesterday. Can I help it if you got a memory like a spaghetti strainer?’
‘You’re new?’
‘Cypher clerk. Whole bunch of us got in Friday. I guess you were too busy to give us the twice-over. I settled for the once-over. Hurts to know how big an impression I made on you.’
Cal was dumbfounded – no corporal in the United States Army had ever talked to him this way – but he was a slave to his upbringing. He’d been taught to stand in the presence of a lady – even a New York loudmouth like this one – so he stood and offered her his hand.
‘Calvin Cormack,’ he said.
‘Larissa Tosca,’ she replied. ‘But you can call me Lara. Now you wanna read what I got or you just wanna flirt with me? You could read it now and if it’s nothing we could flirt some more, or we could flirt all morning and let the war go hang.’
‘Er . . .’
‘OK. This is what it says. It says “Tell RG everything. Yrs Gelbroaster”.’
‘“Tell RG everything – Gelbroaster”? That’s all?’
‘Yep.’
General Gelbroaster was the head of US Army Intelligence, London. There were plenty who thought him nuts, but in London his word was little short of law. Even when his word was as terse as this.
‘I was curious about the R and the G. I checked it every goddam which way for mistakes but that’s the way it comes out. RG. Every combination I tried I still get RG.’
‘That’s OK. I know who he means.’
‘Fine. Look me up when you’ve finished.’
Corporal Tosca slapped the paper on Cal’s desk and walked out. Buttocks sashaying in the tight skirt. Quite the shortest, rudest woman he had ever met. He wondered if Gelbroaster was now recruiting people as nutty as he was himself. They’d sent him some wackos over the last two years, but this one took the prize.
Cal called the British Consulate and asked for Lt. Col. Ruthven-Greene. He heard the mechanical, ratchet rattle of the switchboard and then an unsurprisingly hearty English voice.
‘Calvin – dear boy. Just the chap I was thinking of. Tell me, do you think you could fit in a spot of lunch today? Here at the Consulate. A bit of a chat over beer and sandwiches, eh?’