HUBBARD CHRISTOPHER WAS KILLED THE FOLLOWING AUTUMN WHEN he was struck by a car in Berlin. In the family burial ground at the Harbor, Paul Christopher released a handful of his father’s ashes into the wind on the hillside above the Harbor. The little company of mourners—members of the family and a few men from Washington—smiled faintly as they watched the puff of gray powder disperse in the limpid September air, as though an invisible Hubbard ambled from guest to guest, whispering jokes to relieve the solemnity of the moment.
Afterward, Patchen limped down the hill alone. One of the affable mourners, a pink-skinned, white-haired man in a dark suit and a homburg hat, slowed his pace to walk beside him.
“You must be David Patchen,” he said.
“Yes.”
He wore pince-nez with thick round lenses, and these reflected the autumn foliage and magnified his blue eyes. They twinkled: he looked like the kindly family doctor in a Norman Rockwell illustration.
“I don’t know if you realize it,” he said, “but Hubbard Christopher took a great shine to you.”
“If that’s so,” Patchen said, “I’m very glad to hear it. We only met once.”
“It’s so, all right, or I wouldn’t be telling you it is. Hubbard thought the world of you. Have you ever thought about getting a monocle?”
“A monocle? No.”
“Hubbard thought it would be a good idea. He was going to mention it to you next time you met. You might consider it. Once you learn to keep it screwed in it’s a dandy thing to wear. Hypnotizes people—it’s all they can look at, so they forget the rest of the appearance. ‘What did he look like?’ you ask. ‘He had a monocle,’ they say. Can’t remember another blessed thing about the fellow. Hubbard’s wife’s uncle, old Paulus von Buecheler, had a monocle. Lost his eye in the First War, fighting the Russians. He got a monocle right away. In later years he fell off a jumping horse ‘ and kept the monocle in; fell off Hubbard’s boat in a storm in the Baltic and swam ashore without losing it. Of course, he was a real old-fashioned Prussian, but there’s no reason why a monocle wouldn’t be a good solution for you.”
“I’ll consider it, sir.”
“Will you, now? That would have pleased Hubbard. Well, if you decide to go ahead, ask Paul where his great-uncle Paulus got his monocles. He’ll know the details. You’ve got to go to Germany to get the right kind.”
“You knew the German side of the family?”
The man peered through his pince-nez as if the question was wholly unexpected but very welcome. “Yes, I did. Fine people, the old type of German. They weren’t all thugs, you know; that was just a story the British started as propaganda in 1914. The Buechelers are all gone now, you know, except for Paulus’s widow. Every one of their boys was killed in the First War, three of them. Then Paulus went back in as a general in the Second War at the age of sixty and was killed in Russia.”
They reached the bottom of the hill. The others had gone inside the house. Cars were parked the whole length of the drive. A black Cadillac halfway down the line started its engine and rolled toward them, crunching gravel beneath its tires. The driver, a young man about Patchen’s age, got out and came around the car to open the door.
“David Patchen, this is Tommy Dawson,” he said. “You’re a couple of ex-Marines. Tommy was in on Saipan and Iwo Jima, came out a major. We’ll be going along—can’t stay for lunch. You’d better get inside before they eat it all.”
Patchen and Dawson shook hands. A grease-stained bag and a quart bottle of Hampden ale lay on the front seat.
“Ah,” the man said. “You got the liverwurst sandwiches, Tommy?” “Yes, sir. And the ale. Warm.”
“Good.” He turned to Patchen. “Elliott’s cook makes wonderful liverwurst sandwiches, spreads Limburger cheese on one slice of rye bread, German mustard on the other. The local ale is good, smells like skunk the way ale should, but you have to drink it warm. Well, goodbye.”
He held out his hand. His grip was powerful, not merely strong. He smiled, showing square, nicotine-stained teeth.
“You graduate in June?” he asked.
“February,” Patchen replied.
“Do you now? Well, then, we’d better get busy. Any languages besides Japanese?”
“What?”
“Do you speak any other foreign languages besides Japanese?” “I don’t speak Japanese.”
The other man gave him a look of keen interest.
“You don’t? That’s odd, somebody said you did,” he said. “Not that it matters.”
He got into the car. Patchen watched him open a briefcase, extract a desk diary, and study it. He rolled down the window.
“I’ll be in Boston a week from Wednesday,” he said. “Let’s eat lunch together.”
“All right.”
He wrote in his book with the stub of a yellow pencil. “Twelve sharp.” He gave Patchen the name of a club and its address on Beacon Street. “Just keep this to yourself for the time being, will you? Don’t mention it to Paul just yet. Compartments!”
Patchen watched the black car go down the drive.
Compartments? he thought. What are those?
Patchen presented himself at the varnished black door of the club on Beacon Street at five minutes before noon on the appointed Wednesday. There was no sign or bell or knocker, only the house number. He lifted the latch and walked in. A porter in a thread bare jacket greeted him.
“Good day, sir.”
Patchen said, “I’m meeting one of your members for lunch.” “Welcome, sir. May I ask which member?”
The man in the pince-nez had not told Patchen his name, and Patchen had asked no questions about him.
“I’ll know him when I see him,” he said.
If the porter saw anything strange in this reply, he gave no sign. “Very well, sir,” he said.
The porter, a small elderly man with a deep convalescent’s pallor, came out from behind his desk.
“Do you have to go to the bathroom?” he asked.
“No, thank you.”
“Then follow me, if you please, sir. You can take a seat in the Strangers’ Room. You’ll be able to watch out for your gentleman from there.”
He led him three steps across the foyer to a small anteroom furnished with Victorian sofas and chairs. Prints of Yankee clippers and portraits of old men in high collars and muttonchops hung on the wall. Patchen sat down on a horsehair sofa facing the door. Somewhere in the deeper precincts of the club a grandfather clock began to strike, and just as the chimes ended and the hour gong began, the man in the pince-nez came in. He looked quite different without his homburg hat, like an actor who has taken off his costume. His hat had flattened his white hair, which was parted in the middle to show a long straight line of pink scalp, and this slight dishevelment added to the transformation.
He was grinning with delight as he advanced toward Patchen with his hand outstretched, and Patchen could imagine what he must have looked like as a boy. “You found the place, I see,” he said, crushing Patchen’s hand. “Good. Do you have to go to the bathroom?”
“No, thanks. I’ve already been asked.”
“Have you? Good. Graves is very conscientious about that; for some reason the younger porters don’t like to ask. He says you wouldn’t give my name.”
“I don’t know it, sir.”
“You don’t?”
“No. What shall I call you?”
The man in the pince-nez smiled and the boy showed through again. “I’ll let you decide that,” he said. He pulled a sheet of paper and a fountain pen out of the inside pocket of his jacket and, after uncapping the pen, handed both to Patchen. “Do you mind signing that here?” he asked. “We can’t take papers upstairs.”
Patchen looked at the paper. It was a form, a secrecy agreement under which the signer promised never to divulge to anyone any part of the conversation he was about to have on this date with the other person whose signature appeared below. Patchen signed it. The man in the pince-nez, leaning over a round parlor table covered with a fringed cloth, signed it too.
“Now for some food,” he said.
In a dining room filled with members and waiters who were all white-haired or bald, the man in the pince-nez scribbled his name and the figure 2 on a chit and handed it to a waiter.
“And let us have a half-bottle of the good white, please.”
They ate thick pea soup and cod cakes made from salted cod, followed by bread pudding. The “good white” turned out to be a 1929 Puligny-Montrachet, golden in the glass. Patchen had never tasted anything like it.
The man in the pince-nez, watching him take his first sip, said, “You like wine, do you?”
“I do now.”
“Wine has been a good friend to man, especially when it’s cod cakes for lunch.”
While they ate the penitential food and drank the voluptuous wine, the man in the pince-nez talked about baseball. Patchen listened with interest as his host described having seen Tris Speaker, Napoleon Lajoie, Christy Mathewson, and Home Run Baker play during the era of the dead ball.
“I’m a great admirer of Babe Ruth and Ted Williams and modern fellows like that,” the man in the pince-nez said, “but they changed the game when they introduced the rabbit ball. It became less of an imitation of life.”
“How so?” Patchen asked.
“Taking a human lifetime as the equivalent of a season of baseball, nobody hits sixty home runs. Most hit one or two, or none, and think they’ve done all right. The most Home Run Baker managed in one year was ten, and look what they called him.”
“Twelve,” Patchen said. “In 1913.”
The man in the pince-nez smiled with pleasure at the correction. “Absolutely correct,” he said. “You know, mankind in all its thousands of years on earth has only invented two perfect systems, the English sonnet and the game of baseball. Each is governed by absolute rules which cannot be bent without destroying the form and therefore the result, and yet everything known to the human heart and mind, everything, can happen within them. Rules and imagination—that’s the winning combination. Or don’t you agree?”
“So did Hubbard Christopher,” the man in the pince-nez said, wiping his lips on his napkin. “Most people think my idea about baseball and sonnets is hogwash. They’re taught that everything is complicated, that rules get in the way and results don’t matter. They think the game’s the thing and never mind the consequences. Makes ‘em feel they’re pretty darn smart to get through the day uncaught. But they’re wrong. Everything that really matters in this world is simple, and that’s why it’s so doggone hard to play the game. That’s what I want to talk to you about. Let’s go into the other room.”
At a glass case by the entrance of a large sitting room, the man in the pince-nez selected two fat Havana cigars, clipped the ends himself, and handed one to Patchen.
“That’s a whale oil lamp,” he said, leaning over to light his cigar with the yellow flame.
They sat down together in facing armchairs in a far corner of the room. Other members wandered in, but did not come near. “Well, let me put the question,” the man in the pince-nez said.
“Would you like to come to work for me?”
Patchen was not startled; nothing the man in the pince-nez said or did surprised him any longer. “What would I do?” he asked.
“That’s not your worry. It’s up to me to find out what you want to do and make it possible for you to do it. What do you want to do?”
“I want to live in privacy.”
“That’s all?”
“No.”
“Then what? Tell me what’s in your heart, son.”
Patchen drew in a deep breath, and with it clouds of aromatic cigar smoke. He was unused to it and his eye watered.
“I want to work against war,” he said.
“Work for peace?”
“No, none of that bullshit. I want to be an enemy of war.”
The man in the pince-nez examined Patchen’s wounds—it was impossible to look at him without doing so, but most people pre tended not to see the damage. Then he leaned forward and squeezed his knee—not the wounded one, the whole one, knowing which was which.
“All right,” he said. “When can you start?”
“Around the end of June,” Patchen replied. “I’m getting mar ried in April, but we’ll be back by then.”
“Back from where?”
“Paris.”
“Good place for a honeymoon, Paris,” the man in the pince-nez said. “But learn a little French before you go. Talk it to Paul, he’s fluent. The French are bastards if you can’t speak their language. Correct pronunciation is their idea of a system, but it ain’t baseball. I’ll send somebody up to see you with a contract. He’ll mention that he’s a friend of the O. G.”
After supper that night, while he and Christopher were walking back to their room, Patchen asked a question. It was difficult because he did not want to remind Christopher of his father’s death by using the wrong words.
He said, “That old fellow with the white hair who talked to me at the Harbor the other day … Do you know who I mean?”
“The one in the pinch-nose glasses?” Christopher said. “That’s the O. G. He’s the Director of the Outfit.”
“The Outfit?”
“The U. S. intelligence service.”
Patchen laughed, explosively, in astonishment. Only hours before, he had agreed to become a spy without realizing that he had done so.
“Is that who he is?” he said. “Why is he called the O. G.?”
“It stands for ‘Old Gentleman.’ It’s a joke. Actually he’s prematurely white—he’s only a little older than my father.”
“How did he know your father?”
“They worked together during the war,” Christopher said. “Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside.”
PATCHEN AND MARTHA HAD SEEN LITTLE OF EACH OTHER SINCE SHE graduated from Radcliffe. She had heard the call shortly after leaving Cambridge, and since then she had been in Guatemala, living with a tribe of Indians. They were all drunk all the time, from the age of puberty. They were peaceable drunks; they fermented alcohol from sugar cane to make a drink called guaro and consumed it for religious reasons, then lay about quietly in the drinking hut, which had been set aside for the purpose, waiting for visions. The cult had no priests or liturgy; drunkenness was all. Musicians took turns tapping out a mournful four-note tune on a marimba, day and night.
In their village, located in a clearing in the jungle near the overgrown ruins of Maya temples which looked like small green mountains, Martha had lived as the Indians lived in all respects except for the drinking. She slept on the ground in a leaky hut, weeded corn, and cut cane with the women; she ate the tribal food, which consisted of unleavened corn bread, boiled beans with chili peppers, squash, a pear-shaped vegetable called güisquil, and potatoes. Martha spent much of her time treating the wounds the Indians inflicted on their own bodies: in their stupor they often fell down or ran into things, or cut or scalded themselves. One woman bled to death in front of Martha’s eyes after she fell on her machete and severed a deep artery in her thigh. Martha, unable to locate the source of the bleeding, had been unable to save her life.
“The other women ran and got guaro for her, and she drank as she died,” Martha told Patchen. “They said it would be a bad thing for her to go into the next world sober.”
Martha was not a missionary in the usual sense of the term, and she made no attempt to convert the adult Indians, or even to turn them away from drink. She was a believer in the Inward Light, a form of Quakerism which emphasizes the Christ within each person while ignoring the Scriptures and the historical Jesus. As such, she confined herself to doing what she described as “the unasked,” bandaging the Indians’ wounds and sharing their work. Most died young, usually of liver disease and kidney failure, and their children, brain-damaged in the womb by alcohol, were born dull.
The children did not begin to drink until puberty, which came as early as ten in some of the girls, and Martha had concentrated on the younger children, teaching the girls how to sew and the boys how to repair an automobile; she had gone to night classes at a vocational school in Boston to learn these skills herself. With Patchen’s help she had purchased a surplus Army Jeep which grease-smeared little boys took apart and put together again many times under her supervision. They enjoyed this work, and once they learned how to fit the parts together, were amazingly quick at it.
“It was always a wonderful moment when they stepped on the starter and the engine started after they’d put the Jeep back together,” Martha said, “but they didn’t really like noise made by a machine. After a minute or two they’d turn it off so they could hear the marimba.”
Although the children were as clumsy as the adults—the girls pricked themselves with their needles, the boys suffered gashes and smashed fingers from wrenches and screwdrivers—Martha had hoped that embroidery and auto mechanics would prove to be means of escape from the village for some of her pupils. But as soon as pubic hair appeared on their bodies, the children were initiated into the cult by means of a ritual called tragando el gato, “swallowing the cat,” so called because they were required to drink a whole cup of guaro without pausing for breath, and gulping that much raw alcohol for the first time was like letting a clawed animal with a long, twitching tail scramble down your throat. After initiation the children disappeared into the drinking hut. They did not seem to recognize Martha thereafter, but went about in the stupor that would last for the rest of their lives.
Martha investigated the origins of the cult and concluded from hazy stories the Indians told her that a Spanish deserter from the army of the conquistador Pedro de Alvarado, who subdued Guatemala in the sixteenth century, had taught them to ferment and drink alcohol. In the drinking hut, the largest building in the village, they kept a life-size effigy of the Spaniard, wearing his breastplate and helmet, seated on a throne. They called him Maximón.
A large unglazed pottery vessel, about a pint in capacity, hung from the effigy’s neck, and the Indians filled this with guaro every morning; by nightfall the guaro was gone. The Indians said that Maximón drank it, but Martha thought that it vanished through evaporation. At evening they placed a lighted cigar between the effigy’s lips, and it smoked this rapidly, down to the end, the tip glowing in the darkness and the acrid tobacco smoke drifting out of the hut.
“I think the Spanish deserter is their real god,” Martha said, “but they’re very secretive about him, except to say that he gave them a thousand children.”
“How did he do that?” Patchen asked.
“By impregnating the women. I think he got them drunk, then did what he wanted to do.”
“Then they’re all related to God, who was a drunk.”
Martha gave a little grunt, as if Patchen had implanted this blasphemous idea by injection instead of merely speaking it aloud; he was alway surprising her by seeing things that she could not see.
“Of course that’s what they think,” she said.
She began to weep.
“What’s wrong?” Patchen asked.
“Thee just made me realize that there’s no hope for my Indians in this world,” she replied. She addressed Patchen with the Quaker “thee” when they were alone; it was a sign of love and belonging, and he liked it. Nevertheless, he called Martha “you”; he was a birthright Quaker himself, but a non-believer.
“Your Indians? How are they yours?”
“I am not speaking possessively. Thee will understand some day.”
Martha did not believe in unbelief, only in the idea that people were sometimes mistaken about what they believed, or in Patchen’s case, mistaken about what he thought he did not believe.
It was night, three days after Martha and Patchen had been married in Ohio. They stood together on the fantail of the liner America, watching the phosphorescent wake of the ship as it passed through the dingy waves of the North Atlantic. Martha had never been to sea before. She had never even seen the sea—she had traveled to her Indian village in her Jeep, driving alone through Mexico, navigating by compass and sleeping in the open—and she found its ceaseless motion soothing and mysterious.
“Maybe you’ve just got a taste for monotony,” Patchen said after she had questioned him about the Pacific and he had told her that the two oceans were equally uninteresting.
“A taste for monotony? What does thee mean?”
“Well, the beat beat beat of the tom-tom in your village of drunks.”
Her eyes filled with tears again. “Sometimes, David,” she said. “I think thee has no heart at all.”
Patchen said no more. He had practically no experience with women, apart from his mother, but he was beginning to understand, only two days out of New York, that it was far easier to make a joke to a good woman than to deal with the consequences,
BEFORE PATCHEN JOINED THE MARINES HE AND MARTHA PLANNED their honeymoon in detail: they would sail to France on a luxury liner, first class, using the money she had earned and saved for the purpose. In Paris, but not before, they would consummate their marriage. Because Martha had been called to Guatemala instead of teaching school, she had been unable to save money for the wedding trip as she and Patchen had planned.
Fortunately, Patchen had already signed his contract with the Outfit. The document, backed in blue like any other legal paper, confused him when he read it. He and the courier who delivered it to him met in the grill room of the LockeOber restaurant.
“I’m a friend of the O. G.’s,” the courier said, smiling and shaking hands. They were surrounded by lawyers and politicians who all seemed to know each other and to remember each other’s stories; Patchen thought it was a strange place to do secret business, but the courier ordered oysters and ale to be followed by stuffed lobster and a bottle of Pinot Gris as if the real purpose of the meeting was to enjoy a good lunch surrounded by happy strangers.
“This is not addressed to me,” Patchen said. “It’s in the name of somebody called Percival D. Indagator.”
“It’s addressed to you, all right,” the courier replied; he wore a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows and smoked a pipe, as if disguised for a sojourn among professors. “That’s your funny name, the name you’ll go by on the inside. Actually, it’s a great compliment—the O. G. chose it himself. It means ‘explorer’ or ‘investigator’ in Latin. There aren’t very many Latin funny names. Mine is Latvian, I think.”
“Do I sign it Percival D. Indagator?”
“If you please. You’ll get used to it. But don’t get so used to it that you sign checks with it. It’s happened.”
The courier uttered a soft, merry chuckle; as Patchen was to learn, secret jokes, however small, were always more amusing to Outfit bureaucrats than the ones outsiders were permitted to know. The contract called for a starting salary of five thousand dollars a year, nearly as much as Patchen’s grandfather made as a judge in Ohio. He signed it with his new pseudonym.
“I’ll need a receipt for this, also signed with your funny name,” the courier said, laying a plain manila envelope sealed with Scotch tape on the table. “Don’t open it here. We’d like you to write us a letter every month to this address; it doesn’t matter what you say in it, we just want to know you’re alive and well.”
He gave Patchen a file card with an improbable name, the Reverend S. Booth Conroy, D. D., and the number of a post office box in Washington, D. C., typed on it.
“Memorize the name and address, then burn it,” the courier said. “The john’s a good place to burn things if you don’t have a fireplace. You can just flush the ashes down. Be sure to wipe the soot off the bowl and open the window to let the stink out.” He handed Patchen another index card. “When you get back to the good old U. S. A.,” he said, “please go to Washington and call this number at noon, twelve o’clock straight up, on August sixth. A man will answer by repeating the last four digits of the number in reverse order. You’ll say, ‘Hello, I’m a friend of Monsieur Georges.’ The man will reply, ‘Good Old Georges! Is he still wearing that green overcoat?’ He’ll suggest a meeting place and time. Do exactly as he says. When you meet he’ll say, ‘Do you have something for me?’ Give him the keys you’ll find in the envelope and say, ‘Rue de Passy.’ He’ll respond, in French, with the house number, seventy-eight bis.”
Patchen gazed steadily at the smiling courier, but made no reply. “All understood?” the courier asked. “Remember, he’ll answer with the last four digits of the number in reverse.”
“I’ll remember. What’s the man’s name?”
“They didn’t tell me that—you must have a need to know, that’s the rule. And I don’t, in this case. Neither do you.”
“But he knows who I am?”
“You can’t be sure that he does. So don’t tell him.” The courier took his pipe out of his mouth and leaned across the table. “Compartments,” he murmured. He left money on the table for the bill, rose to his feet, and walked rapidly out of the restaurant.
The manila envelope contained one thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills, two round-trip first-class tickets to Le Havre aboard the America, the keys to an apartment in the rue de Passy, and a first edition of a nineteenth-century manual for suitors and bridegrooms entitled What Every Young Man Ought to Know.
“Be careful in Paris,” the O. G. wrote in a typed, unsigned note. “The rue de Passy is full of White Russians; they all put a ‘de’ in front of their names and try to borrow money from you. My best wishes to you and your bride.”
Martha insisted, gently, that they adhere to their agreement to wait until they got to Paris to consummate the marriage. Patchen did not protest. Like most middle-class American males of his generation, he took it for granted that the female controlled sexual behavior. He had never thought of Martha in carnal terms. Before he left for his port of embarkation to the Pacific, Martha had shown him her breasts, but that was the closest he had ever come to a shared sexual experience. Martha, sitting in the front seat of his grandfather’s Buick with her dress unbuttoned and her eyes closed, seemed to think that the sacrifice of her modesty was a gift that would carry him safely through battle—or if it did not, make dying more bearable.
Although his desires were as urgent as those of any man his age, he was remarkably clean-minded. Bawdy jokes had never amused him, and he was surprised when, in his senior year in college, Christopher told him that the lyrics of many popular songs had double meanings. It had never occurred to Patchen that “nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina in the mornin’ “ did not necessarily refer to the scenic beauty of a Southern state or “Making Whoopee” to dancing the Charleston and drinking whiskey from a hip flask.
On their wedding night, in a Pullman compartment, Patchen undressed in the cramped washroom and emerged in pajamas and bathrobe. Martha stood by the curtained window in her dark going-away suit with the corsage still pinned to the lapel; the scent of gardenias saturated the compartment.
“Thee remembers our promise about Paris?” she asked. “Yes. Do we have to keep it?”
“Does thee want to become one person in a place like this?”
From Patchen’s point of view, after half a lifetime of imagining sexual congress with a naked woman, anyplace would have done, but he had been cautioned that brides were sensitive to their surroundings. Only that morning his mother, who had never before mentioned sex to him, enjoined him to remember that he was responsible for Martha’s pleasure, which came before his own because it made his pleasure possible. She had not used those plain words, but Patchen had understood her meaning.
Martha, tapping her foot, awaited his reply.
She shook a playful finger at him. “Then get thee into the upper berth.”
Then, to his astonishment, Martha undressed before his eyes, removing her jacket and skirt and draping them on a hanger, then peeling off the rest of her many garments and folding them neatly. She kept her back turned to him all during this exciting process, but she was as unselfconscious as if she were all alone. Patchen had never seen her with her hair down, much less naked. When she turned around after loosening her hair and arranging it so that it covered her breasts, he gasped at the loveliness of what he saw. He had been raised in the belief that the female body was the most beautiful and desirable object in Creation, and his first glimpse of it—the small waist, the dimpled navel, the curve of the hip, the pink nipples shyly hiding beneath the curtain of hair with its rippling lights—made him understand that he had not been lied to.
“Please hold this for me,” Martha said, handing him a mirror.
Holding one hand over her pubes, she brushed her hair with the other, fifty vigorous strokes on one side and fifty on the other. As she bent gracefully to the left, and then to the right, her breasts were fully exposed one after the other. Her hair crackled under the brush, and when, smiling mysteriously, she took the mirror back from Patchen, static electricity leaped between their fingers.
“Thank thee,” Martha said.
Holding her body away from her bridegroom, like a young girl dancing with someone she does not like or does not know, she kissed him on the lips. Then, turning her back, she pulled a nightgown over her head and got into the lower berth. In a matter of minutes she was fast asleep, breathing regularly as the train rattled over the roadbed. Patchen fell asleep in a state of unbearable excitement and had a dream that relieved it almost immediately, although even in his sleep he felt a married man’s twinge of guilt and tried, unsuccessfully, to stop his sleeping body from doing what it insisted on doing. Martha repeated the undressing ritual aboard ship on each of the nights they were at sea; after the first night on the train, Patchen managed to remain faithful to her in his sleep, but he looked forward eagerly to Paris.
Martha liked the borrowed apartment in the rue de Passy, which was equipped with everything needed for living, even food in the refrigerator. A stranger’s clothes, two or three suits with London tailor’s labels, and some shirts and ties, hung in the closet.
“Whose place is this?” she asked.
“It belongs to someone Paul knows,” Patchen said. He had not yet told Martha what he was going to be doing in Washington, only that he had got a job in that city and the salary it paid, and his conscience told him that this was a deception even though he himself did not yet know what, exactly, his work would consist of.
On their first evening in Paris they went to Maxim’s, as Martha had planned. Her only jewelry was her new wedding ring; she had refused a diamond engagement ring out of principle. She wore flat-heeled shoes and a dark dress—her mother had sewed her trousseau, which consisted of the same drab buttonless dresses and suits that Martha always wore—and on seeing her homemade clothes and Patchen’s scarred face, the headwaiter pretended that he could not understand what Patchen was saying to him. As the O. G. had suggested, Patchen had learned a little conversational French from Christopher.
Patchen switched to English, but the headwaiter did not understand that language, either. When Martha tried Spanish, he turned his face away as if from a disagreeable odor. “If they pretend not to understand you,” Christopher had advised concerning the French, “just give them some money.” Patchen gave the headwaiter a thousand-franc note and they were shown to a table in a far corner of the dining room.
Patchen ordered two table d’hôte dinners, the cheapest meals on the menu, and half-bottles of Montrachet, Pommard, and Taittinger Champagne to go with the sole, lamb, and dessert. The sommelier nodded approvingly at each choice, and also, Patchen thought, at his frugality.
“Come on,” Patchen said to Martha, standing up and offering his arm. Because her parents rejected music out of religious scruple, Martha had never learned to dance, but she followed him onto the floor. The orchestra, costumed in prewar tail suits and boiled shirts, was playing a Strauss medley, Tales of the Vienna Woods, Wiener Blut, and other waltzes that Patchen recognized but could not name. Midway through the second number, Martha caught on to the steps and the rhythm, and they whirled clumsily around the floor, Patchen limping on his bad leg, but as happy as he had ever been in his life, in this red-plush room filled with music and the smell of delicious food where his mother and father had danced on their wedding night.
The music stopped and they went back to their isolated table. The sommelier poured some white wine into Patchen’s glass and he swirled it, inhaled it, and tasted it as he had seen the O. G. do in his club. The headwaiter himself served the fish, filets rolled up and decorated with tiny shrimp. Patchen took this gesture as some sort of apology, but then the man leaned over and whispered in his ear in English, a language he had been pretending not to understand only a few minutes before.
“I have been asked,” he said, “to request that you and Madame will be so kind as not to dance any more.”
After he went away Martha asked Patchen what he had said. “Just telling us to enjoy the food. How do you like it?”
“It’s not fishy at all,” Martha said. “Thee was blushing so I wondered if he’d guessed we’re on our honeymoon.”
“Maybe he did at that,” Patchen said.
That night Martha, a little giddy after drinking alcohol for the first time in her life, was very kind to him. He found, to his mortification, that he had some trouble making love because of the difficulty of turning over in bed when he only had the use of the muscles on one side of his body. Once he fell heavily on his bride, making her gasp. Martha, stroking his hair, found ways to accommodate to his disability. Wine quickened her responses and slowed Patchen’s, so that they reached orgasm within moments of each other; Martha, astonished by the novelty, wanted another climax, and then an other. Patchen provided what she asked. Finally, just before dawn, they fell asleep.
Patchen was awakened by the sound of the drapes being drawn. Martha, stark naked, stood in front of the filmy curtains, gazing out over the Trocadéro. The glass shivered slightly in sympathy with the traffic below. Seeing her in his first instant of consciousness, silhouetted against the gray foreign sky, Patchen was seized by an irrational fear that she was going to fall out of the window.
“Martha!” he cried.
She jumped in surprise and uttered a little shriek. The gesture and sound, and the sight of her body that had made him so happy, filled Patchen’s heart to overpouring. He leaped out of bed and limped across the room, smiling.
He was naked, too. Martha had never seen him unclothed; they had made love in the dark, undressing each other under the covers. Now she saw his wounds for the first time, the mass of angry scar tissue that covered the left side of his chest, stomach, arm, and leg like a mass of congealed blood.
Martha had no time to think, no time to compose herself. Her eyes widened; she covered her mouth with both hands and stag gered back against the window, wrapping herself in the curtain to hide the front of her body from Patchen, while she pressed her back, nude and still warm from their wedding bed, against the transparent glass.
ON THE APPOINTED DATE AND TIME, PATCHEN CALLED THE TELEPHONE number in Washington; as the courier had instructed, he identified himself as a friend of Monsieur Georges.
“Look,” said the man who answered, “why don’t we get together for breakfast and a chat about good old George?”
“Breakfast?” Patchen said. What about the green overcoat?
“It’s the most important meal of the day—didn’t your mommy tell you? I’ll pick you up at seven sharp tomorrow morning on the northwest corner of 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. Watch out for a small black Morris Minor. It’s a British car. Have you ever seen one?”
“No.”
“Then you’ll recognize it. It doesn’t resemble anything made in America.”
The man repeated these simple instructions twice more before hanging up. To Patchen’s surprise, he was effusively congratulated next morning by the driver of the Morris for having appeared on the right street corner at the right time.
“You’d be amazed how many graduates of our great Ivy League universities can’t manage it,” the man said. “Do you have something for me?”
Patchen, leaning over to look in the rolled-down window, gave him the keys to the apartment in Paris.
“Rue de Passy,” he said.
“Soixante-dix-huit bis,” the man replied, shaking hands through the open window. “Hop in. You can call me Archie. I’m your instructor.”
Archie’s voice was different from the one Patchen had heard on the telephone. After he had fitted his tall, stiff body into the tiny front seat, Patchen mentioned this. Archie, a balding middle-aged man with the manners of a Jazz Age undergraduate, gave him a delighted sidelong look.
“You’re right,” he said. “We’re all ventriloquists. We’ll teach you how to change your voice. It’s one of the first things we do.”
Patchen had no idea why he had been summoned to Washington. While maneuvering his sluggish midget car through the sedate Washington rush-hour traffic, Archie explained.
“You’re going to learn to be a spy,” he said. “The course is called Tradecraft 101; I’m your dean of studies, spiritual adviser, and professor of philosophy. It’s damn funny how much slower this car goes with two people in it.”
Patchen underwent weeks of training and indoctrination in a safe house, a narrow brick residence on a quiet street near Washington Circle. Like the apartment in the rue de Passy, it was fitted out with clothes, books, phonograph records, opened letters and bills, toilet articles, food, and drink to create the illusion that the fictitious name in which it had been rented belonged to an actual person. Patchen spent the greater part of each day with Archie, chatting about his new world or watching training films in which obvious Americans met nervous Central Europeans in museums, cafés, and other public places. Usually the agents carried several objects—a wrapped package, a newspaper opened to a certain page, an umbrella—and gave the all clear signal by switching these objects from hand to hand or juggling them in some other way according to a prearranged sequence.
“If you know you’re not being watched, why is an all clear signal necessary?” Patchen asked.
“Because you give no signal at all if you are being watched,” Archie replied. “If you did, the people trailing you would see the signal and know it for what it was, and the cat would be out of the bag.”
“I understand. But if you’re not being watched, why not just walk up and say hello? Why transfer Pravda from your right hand to your left? Suppose there’s an off-duty secret policeman in the museum and he sees you signaling?”
Archie feigned a look of thoughtful surprise. “Good point,” he said. “I’ll take it up with Dick Hannay.”
Other instructors, all identified by first names only, dropped by to teach Patchen the rudiments of tradecraft, as the technique of espionage is called. He learned the elements of the Outfit’s secret priestly vocabulary: dead-drops, cut-outs, brush contacts, sleepers, witting and unwitting assets, the difference between an agent and an asset, and much more. He learned how to detect people who were following him on foot or in automobiles and how to follow others without being detected, how to tell whether his telephone or room was bugged (always assume that it is), how to write in invisible ink made from cow’s milk or his own urine and how to read it by holding the page over a gas burner, how to employ simple codes and ciphers, how to conduct a “seduction,” as the recruitment of an agent was called (Archie advised him to read the relevant passage in Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios), how to conduct a search and how to hide things so that they cannot be found. A sweaty man in a Madras jacket familiarized him with burglar tools—the man carried a complete set of jimmies in special pockets sewn into a canvas corset worn beneath his shirt—and taught him how to pick locks. “You’ll never have to do this,” the man said, while opening a couple of dozen locks he had brought along in a clinking satchel. “Just remember there’s no such thing as a lock that can’t be picked.” Another technician showed him how to disguise himself with false beards, wigs, devices that slipped in between his teeth and his cheeks to change the shape of his face and the sound of his voice, and body pads that transformed him into a fat man with a thin neck. Most of these tricks seemed to Patchen to be superfluous, if not laughable.
“Isn’t the spectacle of a grown man writing misspelled obscenities on a brick wall with a piece of chalk more likely to attract attention than otherwise?” he asked, after a street exercise on how to conduct meetings with agents that had required Patchen to chalk ‘Fuk U!’ on a brick wall on L Street.
“You’re right,” Archie replied. “Most of this stuff is nonsense. We inherited it from the Brits, who adore it. So do the Russians, the Germans, and all the rest of them. But be careful what you say and who you say it to on this subject. Nobody laughs at the rigmarole; it’s very bad form to laugh at it. Agents expect it; it’s part of the forbidden atmosphere, like false whiskers and cyanide pills. Mumbo-jumbo makes the whole process seem more serious, more connected to some invisible power. Like the Freemasons. Mozart wrote a whole opera about it.”
Patchen was an apt pupil. He quickly perceived that the world of espionage was a mirror image of the ordinary world, that tradecraft closely resembled the everyday behavior of people who live in small towns like the one he had grown up in and must hide their real selves from prying neighbors. His town’s adulterers, embezzlers, wife-beaters, drunks, incestuous lovers, and many others employed lies, deceptions, clandestine relationships, code words, false identities, and the other tricks of the world of espionage as a matter of course.
Had his own mother really met and married an Englishman named Patchen who was killed in the war after he impregnated her on a star-crossed honeymoon between battles, or had she simply succumbed to some temporary officer and gentleman from New York or San Francisco (or even the suburbs of Paris) who gave her his Croix de Guerre in return for her favors? Was everything his mother had told him about his origins a cover story? Many suspected that Patchen’s mother had never been married, that her son was a bastard conceived in a pasture in France, that she had made up the whole romantic story of her brief marriage. But no one dared say so to her face because no one in town knew the truth or possessed the resources to discover it.
“Suspicion is not proof,” Archie explained. “It doesn’t matter what the opposition thinks as long as it doesn’t find out the real truth.”
“ ‘The real truth’?” Patchen said. “You mean there are truths truths that aren’t real?”
Archie beamed with avuncular pleasure, as he often did on hearing Patchen’s questions. “Absolutely,” he replied. “They’re the whole basis of cover. Every truth about you is harmless, out in the open, and therefore beautifully misleading because, taken as a whole, they seem to explain everything about you. First, your wounds—they’re the first thing anyone notices about you. You come from an all-American village in Ohio, from a good family, you’re a Quaker who joined the Marines, choosing duty to country over your somewhat addlepated religion, got shot up on Okinawa and won the Silver Star, and then went to Harvard on the G. I. Bill of Rights. That’s a hell of a lot of information, more than most people can deal with. It presses all the right buttons, which is one reason—your brain being the other—why the O. G. took such an interest in you. Who would ever think to ask if there’s anything funny about you? How could there be, behind the smoke screen of all those credentials and honorable wounds?”
“Is there something funny about me?” Patchen asked.
“Of course there is. You’re a spy. Espionage is a criminal activity. Therefore you’ve agreed to live the life of a criminal during business hours.”
“I have? I didn’t realize that.”
“Please understand my meaning,” Archie said. “I’m not suggesting that you really are a criminal, only that what you have agreed to do for your country will be regarded by its enemies as criminal. When a case officer recruits an agent, he suborns him to treason. That’s a capital crime in every country in the world. Never forget that. Once you set foot on the territory of any country but your own, you’re under sentence of death the minute suspicion of your true purposes turns into proof. So guard the evidence of your operations with every atom of your being. Never let anyone outside the Outfit—anyone—not your mother, not your wife, not your priest, not the deaf-mute who has been sentenced to life in solitary confinement, learn one single fact about your work, no matter how unimportant it seems. The tiniest crack is big enough to let disaster in.”
“How about the President of the United States? Suppose he asks? Is it all right to tell him?”
“Results, yes. Methods, no,” Archie replied. “But he won’t ask. That’s what an intelligence service is for—to do the things that Presidents want done but don’t want to know about. That way, when they write their memoirs, they can say that God did their dirty work.”
The safe house was well furnished with books of all kinds, from turgid texts on the nature of Soviet Communism by American professors to Olympia Press editions of the forbidden novels of Henry Miller and the poetry of e.e. cummings. Patchen, who found it difficult to fall asleep, stayed up most nights reading. For the first time since he was wounded he began to think about the future. He had no idea what his life as a spy would be like, but he felt instinctively that it would involve living through others. In a novel about fifteenth-century Italy by W. Somerset Maugham, he found a speech by Machiavelli that intrigued him:
These painters with their colors and their brushes prate about the works of art they produce, but what are they in comparison with a work of art that is produced when your paints are living men and your brushes wit and cunning?
He copied down the words on the last page of his address book.
DURING HIS PERIOD OF TRAINING, PATCHEN WAS ALONE IN WASHINGton. After she and Patchen disembarked in New York, Martha had taken the train back to Ohio. Aboard ship, he had explained that he had been ordered to Washington in connection with his new job.
“What will thee be doing?” she asked.
“Working for the government,” Patchen replied.
“Will thee be doing good works?”
“I hope so.”
Martha asked no further questions about his occupation then or for a long time afterward. She was not really interested in anything that did not have to do with the Inward Light. What Patchen did for a living was unimportant except that it put food on the table and clothes on his back until he found the Christ within himself. She mentioned to Patchen that many had discovered the Inward Light under the most unlikely conditions—while in prison, or even like the English sea captain who wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace” after making a fortune as the master of a slave ship.
“Did this sea captain give all the money he’d made running slaves to Negro Relief or did he just write the hymn and let it go at that?” Patchen asked.
“The words tell how repentant the poor man was—‘Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, to save a wretch like me.’ “
“He must have kept the money if his neighbors were willing to swallow that. A poor man could never get away with such crap.”
Martha was not sure that her husband, who had suffered such awful injuries, would be able to overcome his bitterness and find peace, but she did not discuss her doubts with him. They had been very quiet with each other ever since she saw his scars for the first time; neither mentioned the incident after it took place, but they stopped making love.
Archie had provided Patchen with an accommodation address to which Martha could write, and one day toward the end of his training, he received a letter announcing that she was arriving at Union Station that same afternoon.
Archie said, “You’ll have to stop her.”
“How can I? She’s on the train.”
“Well, I guess there’s no help for it. Do you want the bedroom cameras on or off?”
A female employee of the Outfit posing as Archie’s wife kept Martha busy during the day with tours of the city. In the evening Martha heated up cans of Campbell’s soup from the safe house’s well-stocked cupboards and sometimes made bland casseroles by combining cream of tomato soup with peas and corn, cheese, and boiled rice. She was a vegetarian; one of the things she had liked best about her drunken Indians was their tasteless, odorless diet. After a week Patchen asked her to bring home a steak.
“It’s not right,” Martha said, “to kill and eat what God has made to keep thee and me company on earth.”
“All these carrots and potatoes weren’t alive before Campbell’s chopped them up and made them into soup?”
“Thee makes a joke of everything.”
“I just think that you should apply the same standards of judgment to everything.”
“How? Good is good and evil is evil.”
“Is it?” Patchen asked.
“I will not argue with thee.”
Martha’s face was flushed; her voice trembled. To her, Patchen realized, this mild exchange had seemed a quarrel. Since her arrival they had slept in the same bed, but they did not touch or kiss. That night Patchen stayed up late, reading; when he went to bed after undressing in the dark, he found Martha awaiting him between the sheets, naked. As before, she managed everything, but this time left all but the essential part of his body inside his buttoned pajamas. Next morning she woke him early and they made love again; Archie and his “wife” arrived downstairs in the middle of the act, at the moment when Martha uttered a long cry of pleasure.
“We are not alone,” Patchen said.
“Then let them put beans in their ears,” Martha said.
Her face glowed. Patchen laughed and drew her closer to him. Each time he saw her unclothed, or heard her crying out in pleasure, Patchen was amazed that such a pious girl should have been so perfectly made for sex.
“Does thee know what I am hoping?” she asked.
“No. What?”
“That the child we are making will look just like thee, not as the war made thee, but as God made thee.”
Patchen turned away. Martha tried to make him look at her, but he resisted. She crawled over his body and knelt beside the bed until he opened his eye and looked into her uplifted face.
“If I could, I would unwound thee, but I can’t,” she said. “However, I will be a wife to thee.”