“These are.… insane!” whispered Havelock, his eyes riveted on the screen. “And we’re a partner to each? Each commits us to a nuclear strike—a first strike?”
“A second also, and a third, if necessary, from submarines ringing the coasts first of China, then of Russia. Two insane agreements, Mr. Havelock, and we are, indeed, a party to each. There it is in writing.”
“My God …” Michael scanned the lines of both documents, as if studying the deformed appendages of an obscene, horrible thing. “If these are ever exposed, there’s nothing left.”
“Now you understand,” said Berquist, his gaze, too, fixed on the agreements that filled both sides of the screen, his face drawn, his eyes hollow. “That’s the unendurable threat we’re living with. Unless we follow to the letter the instructions delivered to my office, we face global catastrophe in the truest sense. The threat is simple: the nuclear pact with Russia will be shown to the leaders of the People’s Republic of China, and our agreement with the PRC will be given to Moscow. Both will know they’ve been betrayed—by the richest whore in history. That’s what they’ll believe, and the world will go up in a thousand nuclear explosions. The last words heard will be: ‘This is not an exercise, this is it!’ And that is the truth, Mr. Havelock.”
Michael felt the trembling in his hands, the throbbing at his temples. Something Berquist had just said triggered a sudden uneasiness, but he could not concentrate to identify its source. He could only stare at the two documents projected on the screen. “There’s nothing here about dates,” he said, almost pointlessly.
“It’s on a separate page—these are memoranda of intent. Conferences are to be held during the months of April and May, at which the precise dates of the strikes will be determined. April is scheduled for the Soviets, May is for China. Next month and the month after. The strikes are to occur within forty-five days of each conference.”
“It’s … beyond belief.” Overwhelmed, Havelock suddenly felt the paralysis again. He stared at Berquist. “You connected me with this? These?”
“You were connected. God knows not through your own doing, but dangerously connected. We know how; we don’t know why. But the ‘how’ was enough to place you ‘beyond salvage.’ ”
“For Christ’s sake, how?”
“To begin with, Matthias built the case against your friend Jenna Karas.”
“Matthias?”
“It was he who wanted you out. But we couldn’t be sure. Were you out, or were you simply changing jobs? From the government of the United States to the holy empire of Matthias the Great.”
“Which is why I was watched. London, Amsterdam, Paris … God knows where else.”
“Everywhere you went. But you gave us nothing.”
“And that was grounds for ‘beyond salvage’?”
“I told you, I had nothing to do with the original order.”
“All right, it was this Ambiguity. But later it was you. You reconfirmed it.”
“Later, much later; when we learned what he had learned. Both orders were given, one in sanction, one not, for the same reason. You were penetrating the manipulation—the structure—behind these documents, the link between men in Washington and their unknown counterparts in the KGB. We’re in a race. One miscalculation on your part, one exposure of the flaw in that structure and we have every reason to believe that these agreements, these invitations to Armageddon, would be shown to the leaders in Moscow and Peking.”
“Wait a minute!” cried Havelock, bewildered, angry. “That’s what you said before! Goddamn it, these were negotiated with Moscow and Peking!”
The President of the United States did not reply. Instead, he walked to the nearest chair at the table and sat down, the back of his large head and his thinning blond hair reflected in the shaft of light. And then he spoke. “No, they were not, Mr. Havelock,” he said, looking at the screen. “These are the detailed fantasies of a brilliant but mad mind, the words of a superb negotiator.”
“Good God, then deny them! They aren’t real!”
Berquist shook his head. “Read the language!” he said sharply. “It’s literally beyond deniability. There are detailed references to the most secret weapons in our arsenals. Locations, activating codes, specifications, logistics—information that men would be labeled traitors for revealing, their lives ended in prison, none sentenced to less than thirty years for their acts. In Moscow or Peking, those even remotely associated with the armaments data in these documents would be shot without a hearing on the mere possibility they had divulged, knowingly or unknowingly, even a part of it.” The President paused, turning his head slightly to the left, his eyes still on the screen. “What you must understand is that should the leaders in either Moscow or Peking be shown the adversary document, they would be convinced beyond doubt of its authenticity. Every strategic position, each missile capability, every area of destructive responsibility, has been hammered out down to the last detail, nothing left to debate—even to the hours of vehicular robot-controlled occupation of territories.”
“Hammered out?” asked Michael, the phrase a glaring intrusion.
Berquist turned around, his eyes once again the hunter’s, but wary, afraid. “Yes, Mr. Havelock, hammered out. Now you’ve readied the core of Parsifal. These agreements were negotiated by two extraordinary—and extraordinarily informed—minds. Two men hammering out every detail, each step, each point, as though his stature in history depended on the task. A nuclear chess game, the universe to the winner—what’s left of it.”
“Language again. It’s the product of two minds. It doesn’t take a psychiatrist, or a pathologist, to spot the different inputs. More to the point, Matthias couldn’t have created these by himself, he didn’t have the in-depth information that readily available. But with another—a Russian, as knowledgeable about Chinese capabilities as we are—together they could do it. Did it. Two men.”
His gaze fixed on the President, Havelock spoke in a monotone. “Parsifal is that other man, isn’t he?” he asked quietly. “The one who could rip open wounds—all over the world.”
“Yes. He has the original set of these agreements, the only other set that exists, he claims. We have to believe him. He’s got a nuclear gun to our heads—my head.”
“Then he’s been in touch with you,” said Michael, his eyes shifting to the screen. “You got these from him, not Anton.”
“Yes. His demands at first were financial, growing with each contact, until they were beyond being outrageous; they were astronomical. Millions upon millions—and millions after that. We assumed his motive had to be political. He had the resources to buy lesser governments, to finance revolutions throughout the Third World, to promote terrorism. We kept dozens of unstable countries under the closest intelligence scrutiny, penetrating their more entrenched elements with our best people, telling them only to look for the slightest substantive change. We thought we might trace him, trap him. And then we learned that Parsifal had not gone near the money; it was merely the means that told him we would do as he ordered. He’s not interested in money; he never was. He wants control, power. He wants to dictate to the strongest nation on earth.”
“He has dictated. That’s where you made your first mistake.”
“We were buying time. We’re still buying it.”
“At the risk of annihilation?”
“In the all-consuming hope of preventing it. You still don’t understand, Mr. Havelock. We can and probably will parade Anthony Matthias before the world as a madman, destroying the credibility of ten years’ worth of treaties and negotiations, but it will not answer the fundamental question. How in the name of God did the information in these agreements get there? Was it given to a man certifiably insane? If it was, whom else has he divulged it to? And do we willingly deliver to potential enemies the innermost secrets of our offensive and defensive capabilities? Or let them know how deeply we’ve penetrated their own weapons systems?… We have no monopoly on nuclear maniacs. There are men in Moscow and Peking who, at the first perusal of these, would reach for the buttons and launch. Do you know why?”
“I’m not sure.… I’m not sure of anything.”
“Welcome to a very elite club. Let me tell you why. Because it’s taken all of us forty years and uncountable billions to get where we are today. Atomic knives at each other’s throats. There’s no time and not enough money left to begin again. In short, Mr. Havelock, in the desperate attempt to avert a global nuclear holocaust, we might start one.”
Michael swallowed, conscious of doing so, the blood draining from his face. “Simplistic assumptions are out,” he said.
“They’re not even fashionable,” replied Berquist.
“Who is Parsifal?”
“We don’t know. Any more than we know who Ambiguity is.”
“You don’t know?”
“Except that they’re connected. We can assume that.”
“Wait a minute!”
“You keep saying that.”
“You’ve got Matthias! You’re running him through a computerized charade here. Tear into his head! You’ve got a hundred therapies! Use them. Find out!”
“You think we haven’t tried? There’s nothing in the annals of therapy that hasn’t been used—isn’t being used. He’s erased reality from his mind; he’s convinced himself he negotiated with the militarists in Peking and Moscow. He can’t allow it to be otherwise; his fantasies have to be real to him. They protect him.”
“But Parsifal’s alive, he’s not a fantasy! He has a face, eyes, features! Anton’s got to be able to give you something!”
“Nothing. Instead, he describes—accurately, to be sure—known extremists in the Soviet Presidium and China’s Central Committee. Those are the people he sees when these agreements are mentioned—with or without chemicals. That mind of his, that incredible instrument, is as creative in protecting him now as it was when instructing the world of lesser mortals before.”
“Abstractions!” cried Havelock.
“You’ve said that, too.”
“This Parsifal’s real! He exists! He’s got you under a gun!”
“My words, I believe.”
Michael ran to the table and pounded it with his clenched fist. “I can’t believe this!”
“Believe,” said the President, “but don’t do that again. There’s some kind of sonic thing that registers solid decibels, not conversations. If I don’t speak immediately, the vault is opened and you could lose your life.”
“Oh, my God!”
“I don’t need your vote. There’s no third term any long-er-if there is an ‘any longer’—and I wouldn’t seek it, anyway.”
“Are you trying to be funny, Mr. President?”
“Possibly. In times like these, and if circumstances permit you to grow older, you may find a certain comfort in the rare attempt. But I’m not sure … I’m not sure of anything any longer. Millions to build this place, secrecy unparalleled, the finest psychiatrists in the country. Am I being sold a bill of goods? I don’t know. I just know I have nowhere else to go.”
Havelock sank into the chair at the end of the table, feeling vaguely uncomfortable at sitting down in Berquist’s presence without having been instructed to do so. “Oh,” he said meaninglessly, his voice trailing off, looking abjectly at Berquist.
“Forget it,” said the President. “I ordered up your own personal firing squad, remember?”
“I still don’t understand why. You say I penetrated something, a flaw in some structure or other. That if I kept going, these”—Michael looked up at the screen, wincing—“would be given to Moscow or Peking.”
“Not would, might. We couldn’t take the slightest chance that Parsifal might panic. If he did, he’d undoubtedly head for Moscow. I think you know why.”
“He has a Soviet connection. The evidence against Jenna, everything that happened in Barcelona; none of it could have taken place without Russian intelligence.”
“The KGB denies it; that is, a man denies it on an official basis. According to the Cons Op records and a Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence Baylor, that man met with you in Athens.”
“Rostov?”
“Yes. He didn’t know what be was denying, of course, but he as much as told us that if there was a connection, it wasn’t sanctioned. We think he’s a worried man; he has no idea how justified he is.”
“He may,” said Havelock. “He’s telling you it could be the VKR.”
“What the hell is that? I’m no expert in your field.”
“Voennaya Kontra Rozvedka. A branch of the KGB, an elite corps that frightens anyone possessing a scrap of sanity. Is that what I penetrated?” Michael stopped and shook his head. “No, it couldn’t be. I broke it in Paris, after Col des Moulinets. A VKR officer from Barcelona who came after me. I was placed ‘beyond salvage’ in Rome, not Paris.”
“That was Ambiguity’s decision,” said Berquist. “Not mine.”
“But for the same reason. Your words—sir.”
“Yes.” The President leaned forward. “It was the Costa Brava. That night on the Costa Brava.”
The frustration and the anger returned; it was all Michael could do to control himself. “The Costa Brava was a sham! A fraud! I was used, and for that you pinned the label on me! You knew about it. You said you were a part of it!”
“You saw a woman killed on that beach.”
Havelock got up swiftly and gripped the back of the chair. “Is this another attempt to be funny—Mr. Presidera?”
“I don’t remotely feel like being amusing. No one was to be killed that night on the Costa Brava.”
“No one … Christ! You did it! You and Bradford and those bastards in Langley I spoke with from Madrid! Don’t tell me about Costa Brava, I was there! And you were responsible, all of you!”
“We initiated it, we set it in motion, but we didn’t finish it. And that, Mr. Havelock, is the truth.”
Michael wanted to rush to the screen and smash his hands against the terrible images. Instead, the words, Jenna’s words, came back to him. Not one operation, but two. Then his own. Intercepted. Altered.
“Wait a minute,” he said.
“Find another expression.”
“No, please. You started it, and without your knowing it the scenario was read, then taken over, the threads altered, going into another weave.”
“Those phrases aren’t in my lexicon.”
“They’re very clear. You’re making a rag and the birds in the pattern are swans; suddenly they turn into condors.”
“I stand corrected. That’s what happened.”
“Shit! Excuse me.”
“I’m from Minnesota. I’ve shoveled more than you’ve ever seen, most of it in Washington.” Berquist leaned back in his chair. “Do you understand now?”
“I think so. It’s the flaw that could trap him. Parsifal was at Costa Brava.”
“Or his Soviet connection,” amended the President. “When you saw the Karas woman three months later, you began probing that night. If you exposed it, you might have alarmed Parsifal. We don’t know that you would have, but as long as the possibility existed, we couldn’t risk the consequences.”
“Why didn’t anyone tell me? Why didn’t anyone reach me and spell it out?”
“You wouldn’t come in. The strategists at Consular Operations went to extreme lengths to bring you in. You eluded them.”
“Not because of”—Havelock gestured helplessly, angrily at the screen—“these. You could have told me, not tried to kill me!”
“There was no time, nor could we send couriers with any part of this information or with the slightest intimations as to Matthias’s mental condition. We didn’t know what you’d do at any given moment, what you might say about that night, or whom you might say it to. In our judgment—in my judgment—if the man we call Parsifal was at Costa Brava, or was part of the altered strategy, and he thought he was being identified with that night, he could well have been provoked into doing the unthinkable. We could not permit even the possibility of that.”
“So many questions …” Michael blinked in the harsh glare of light. “So much I can’t fit together.”
“You may when and if the decision is made on both our parts to bring you all the way in.”
“The Apache,” said Havelock, avoiding Berquist’s comment “the Palatine … Red Ogilvie. Was it an accident? Was that shot meant for me, or was it really meant for him because he knew about something back here. He mentioned a man who died of a heart attack on the Chesapeake.”
“Ogilvie’e death was exactly what it appeared to be. A mistake. The bullet was meant for you. The others, however, were not accidents.”
“What others?”
“The remaining three strategists at Consular Operations were murdered in Washington.”
Havelock stood motionless, absorbing the information in silence.
“Because of me?” he asked finally.
“Indirectly. But then, you’re at the core of everything because of the single, imponderable question: Why did Matthias do what he did to you?”
“Tell me about the strategists, please.”
“They knew who Parsifal’s Soviet connection was,” said the President. “Or they would have known the next night if you had been killed at Col des Moulinets.”
“Code name Ambiguity. He’s here?”
“Yes. Stern gave him the clearance code. We know where he is, not who he is.”
“Where?”
“You may or may not be given that information.”
“For Gods sake! With all due respect, Mr. President, hasn’t it occurred to you even now to use me? Not kill me, but use me!”
“Why should I? Could you help me? Help us?”
“I’ve spent sixteen years in the field, hunting and being hunted. I speak five languages fluently, three marginally, and more dialects than I can count. I know one side of Anthony Matthias better than anyone else alive; I know his feelings. More to the immediate point, I’ve uncovered as many double entries—agents—as any other man in Europe. Yes, I think I can help.”
“Then you must give me your answer. Do you intend to carry out your threat? These thirteen pages that could—”
“Bum them,” interrupted Havelock; he was watching the President’s eyes, believing him.
“They’re carbons,” said Berquist.
“I’ll reach her. She’s a couple of miles away in Savannah.”
“Very well. Code name Ambiguity is on the fifth floor of the State Department. One of sixty-five, maybe seventy men and women. The word, I believe, is ‘mole.’ ”
“You’ve narrowed it down that far?” asked Michael, sitting down.
“Emory Bradford did. He’s a better man than you think. He never wanted to harm the Karas woman.”
“Then he was incompetent.”
“He’d be the first to agree with that Still, if she’d followed his instructions, she’d eventually have been told the truth; the two of you would have been brought in.”
“Instead, I was put ‘beyond salvage.’ ”
“Tell me something, Mr. Havelock,” said the President, once again leaning forward in the chair. “If you were I, knowing what you know now, what would you have done?”
Michael looked at the screen, the astonishing words burning into his mind. “The same thing you did. I was expendable.”
“Thank you.” The President rose. “Incidentally, no one here on Poole’s Island knows anything about these. Neither the doctors, nor the technicians, nor the military. Only five other men are aware of them. Or of Parsifal. One of them is a psychiatrist from Bethesda, a specialist in hallucinatory disorders, who flies down once a week to work with Matthias only in this room.”
“I understand.”
“Now, let’s get out of here while we’re still sane,” said Berquist as he walked to the projector; he snapped it off, then turned on the overhead lights. “Arrangements will be made to fly the two of you to Andrews Air Force Base this afternoon. We’ll find you a place somewhere in the country, not in Washington. We can’t risk your being seen.”
“If I’m going to be effective, I’ll have to have access to records, logs, files. They can’t be moved to the country, Mr. President.”
“If they can’t be, we’ll bring you in under very controlled circumstances.… There’ll be two more chairs placed at the table. You’ll be given clearance for everything under another name. And Bradford will brief you as soon as possible.”
“Before I leave here, I want to talk to the doctors. I’d also like to see Anton, but I understand; it’ll be brief, only a few minutes.”
“I’m not sure they’ll permit it.”
“Then overrule them. I want to talk to him in Czech, his own language. I’ve got to dig around something he said to me. He said, ‘You don’t understand. You can never understand.’ If’s deep inside of him, something between himself and me. Maybe I’m the only one who can get it out. It could be everything, why he did what he did, not only to me but to himself. Somewhere in my head there’s a bomb, I’ve known it from the beginning.”
“The doctors are overruled. But I remind you, you spent twelve days at a clinic, a total of eighty-five hours in chemical therapy, and you couldn’t help us.”
“You didn’t know where to look. God help me, neither do I.”
The three doctors were not able to tell him anything he could not have guessed from Berquist’s descriptions, and in fact, the psychiatric terminology tended to obscure the picture for him. The President’s characterization of a delicate, remarkable instrument exploding under the inhuman pressures of responsibilities was far more graphic than the dry explanation of the limits of stress tolerance. Then one of the analysts interrupted—the youngest, as it happened: “There is no reality for him in the accepted sense of the word. He filters his impressions, permitting only those that support what he wants to see and hear. These are his reality—more real to him, perhaps, than anything was before—because they’re his fantasies and they’ve got to protect him now. He has nothing else, only fragmented memories.”
Not only was President Charles Berquist adept at description, thought Michael, but he also listened.
“The deterioration can’t be reversed?” asked Havelock.
“No,” said another psychiatrist. “The cellular structure has degenerated. It’s irreversible.”
“He’s too old,” said the younger man.
“I want to see him. I’ll be brief.”
“We’ve registered our objections,” said the third doctor, “but the President feels differently. Please understand, we’re working here under virtually impossible conditions, with a patient who’s failing—how rapidly it’s difficult to tell. He has to be both artificially repressed and stimulated in order for us to achieve any results at all. It’s extremely delicate, and a prolonged trauma could set us back days. We haven’t the time, Mr. Havelock.”
“I’ll be quick. Ten minutes.”
“Make it five. Please.”
“All right. Five minutes.”
“I’ll take you over,” said the younger psychiatrist. “He’s where you saw him last night. In his garden.”
Outside on the street, the white-jacketed doctor directed Michael to an army jeep behind the red-brick building. “You were getting pissed off in there,” he said. “You shouldn’t have. They’re two of the best men in the country and nobody was exaggerating. Sometimes this place seems like Futilityville.”
“Futility what?”
“The results don’t come fast enough. We’ll never catch up.”
“With what?”
“With what he’s done.”
“I see. You can’t be too much of a slouch yourself,” said Havelock, as they drove down the tree-lined street toward the dirt road that approached Matthias’s mocked-up house.
“I’ve written a couple of papers, and I’m good with stats, but I’m happy to be a go-fer for these guys.”
“Where’d they find you?”
“I worked with Dr. Schramm at Menningers—he’s the one who insisted on the five minutes, and the finest neuropsychiatrist in the business. I operated machines for him—brain scanners, electrospectographs, that sort of thing. I still do.”
“There’s a lot of machinery around here, isn’t there?”
“No expense spared.”
“I can’t get over it,” exclaimed Michael, glancing around at the receding scenery, at the macabre façades and the alabaster models, the miniature streets and streetlamps and odd-shaped blowups placed on manicured lawns. “It’s incredible. It’s something out of a movie—a weird movie. Who the hell built it, and how were they convinced not to say anything? The rumors must be flying all over south Georgia.”
“Not because of them—the people who built it, I mean.”
“How could you stop thena?”
“They’re nowhere near here. They’re hundreds of miles away working on a half-dozen other projects.”
“What?”
“You just said it,” explained the young doctor, grinning. “A movie. This whole complex was built by a Canadian film company that thinks it was hired by a cost-conscious producer on the West Coast. They started the scenic construction twenty-four hours after the Corps of Engineers threw up the stockade and converted the existing buildings for our use.”
“What about the helicopters that fly in from Savannah?”
“They’re routed on a path and into a threshold beyond the stockade; they can’t see anything. And anyway, except for the President and one or two others, they’re all from Quarter-master, bringing in supplies. They’ve been told it’s an oceanic research center and have no reason to think otherwise.”
“What about the personnel?”
“We doctors, the technicians who can handle just about everything, a few aides, the guards, and a platoon of enlisted men and five officers. The last is all army, even the ones who man the patrol boat.”
“What have they been told?”
“As little as possible. Outside of us, the technicians and the aides know more than anyone else, but they were screened as if they were being sent to Moscow. Also the guards, but I guess you know that. I gather you’re acquainted.”
“With one, anyway.” The jeep entered the rutted dirt road, the island dust billowing behind them. “I can’t figure the army. How do they keep it quiet?”
“To begin with, they don’t go anywhere. None of us do, that’s the official word. And even if they did, they wouldn’t worry about the officers. They’re all from the Pentagon Rolodex and each one sees himself as a future chairman of the Joint Chiefs. They wouldn’t say anything; it’s their guarantee of quick rank.”
“And the enlisted men? They’ve got to be a boiling pot.”
“That’s stereotypical thinking, isn’t it? Young guys like that took a lot of beaches once, fought in a lot of jungles.”
“I only meant there’s got to be gossip, wild tales all over the place. How are they contained?”
“For starters, they don’t see that much, not of anything that counts. They’re told Poole’s Island is a simulated exercise in survival, everything top secret, ten years in a stockade if the secrecy’s broken. They’re also screened, all regular army; they’ve got a home here. Why louse it up?”
“It still sounds loose.”
“Well, there’s always the bottom line. I mean, before too long it’s not going to make a hell of a lot of difference, is it?”
Havelock whipped his head around and stared at the psychiatrist. Incidentally, no one here on Poole’s Island knows anything about these. Neither the doctors, the technicians … Berquist’s words. Had that vault, that very odd room, been entered? “What do you mean?”
“One of these days Matthias will quietly slip away. When he’s gone, the rumors won’t make any difference. All great men and women have postmortem stories told about them; it’s part of the ballgame.”
If there is a ballgame, Doctor.
“Dobré odpoledne, příteli,” said Michael softly, as he walked out of the house into the sun-drenched garden. Matthias was sitting in the same chair at the end of the winding slate path where he had been seated the night before, protected from the sun by the shade of a traveler’s palm that fanned out in front of the wall. Havelock continued speaking, quickly and gently, in Czech. “I know you’re upset with me, my dear friend, and I wish only to put to rest the difficulty between us. After all, you are my beloved teacher, the only father I have left, and it isn’t right for fathers and sons to be estranged.”
At first Matthias recoiled in the chair, pulling himself farther into the shadows of the palm, the intermittent streaks of light crossing his frightened, contorted face. But a mist began to cover the wide eyes behind the tortoiseshell glasses, a film of uncertainty; perhaps he was remembering words from long ago—a father’s words in Prague, or a child’s plea. It did not matter. The language, the soft, deliberate cadence—they were having their effect. It was crucial now to touch. The touch was vital, a symbol of so much that was of another language, of another country—of remembered trust. Michael approached, the words flowing softly, the cadence rhythmic, evoking another time, another land.
“There are the hills above the Moldau, our great Vltava with its beautiful bridges, and the Wencelas when the snow falls … the Stříbrné Lake in summer. And the valleys of the Váh and the Nitra, sailing with the currents toward the mountains.”
They touched, the student’s hand on the teacher’s arm. Matthias trembled, breathing deeply, his own hand rising haltingly from his lap and covering Havelock’s.
“You told me I didn’t understand, that I could never understand. It’s not so, my teacher … my father … I can understand. Above all, I must understand. There should be nothing between us … ever. I owe everything to you.”
The mist in Matthias’s eyes began to clear, the focus returning, and in that focus there was something suddenly wild—something mad.
“No, please, Anton,” said Michael quickly. “Tell me what it is. Help me, held me to understand.”
The hollow whisper began as it had in the darkness of the garden before. Only now there was blinding sunlight and the language was different, the words different.
“The most dreadful agreements on earth are the ultimate solution. That is what you could never understand.… But you saw them all … all coming and going, the negotiators of the world! Coming to me! Pleading with me! The world knew I could do it and it came to me!” Matthias stopped, and then as suddenly as the night before, the deep whisper was replaced by a scream that seemed to block out the sunlight, a nightmare in the middle of the afternoon. “Get away from me! You will betray me! You will betray us all.”
“How can I?”
“Because you know!”
“I don’t know!”
“Betrayer! Betrayer of your countrymen! Your father! Betrayer of the world!”
“Then why not kill me!” roared Michael, knowing there was nothing left, nowhere else to go with Anton Matthias. “Why didn’t you have me killed?”
“Havelock, cut it out!” shouted the young doctor from the doorway.
“Not now!” yelled Michael in English.
“Yes, goddamn it!”
“Já slyším!” screamed Havelock into Matthias’s face, returning to Czech. “You could have killed me but you didn’t! Why not? I’m nothing compared to the world, to your solutions for the world! What stopped you?”
“Let me alone! He’s got to tell me!”
“Tell you what?”
“Ted’ starý pane?” Michael gripped the arms of Matthias’s chair, locking him into it. “What stopped you?”
The hollow whisper returned, the wild eyes now clear of uncertainty. “You left the conference and we did not see you, we could not find you. We had to know what you had done, whom you had told.”
Madness.
“You’re finished here, Havelock!” said the psychiatrist, gripping Michael’s arm and pulling him away from the chair. “What were you two talking about? I know it’s Czech, but that’s all I know. What did he tell you? I want it verbatim!”
Havelock tried to shake the numbness from his mind, the utter sense of futility. He looked at the doctor, remembering his use of the word; he would not corrupt it as the young man had. “It wouldn’t do you any good. He was back in his childhood; it was meaningless rambling … an angry, frightened child. I thought he was going to tell me something. He didn’t.”
The doctor nodded, his eyes those of a learned, older man. “He does that a lot,” said the psychiatrist, voice and face relaxing. “It’s a degenerative syndrome in old people born in another country, with a different language. It doesn’t make much difference whether they’re sane or insane; they go back. And why not? They’re entitled to the comfort.… Sorry, Nice try. Come on, I have to get you out of here. There’s a chopper waiting for you at the pad.”
“Thanks.” Michael backed away on the slate path, and looked, he knew, for the last time at Anton Matthias … přítel, mentor, father. The once great man was cowering again, seeking sanctuary in the shadows of the palm tree.
Madness. Or was it?
Was it possible? Did he—Mikhail Havlíček—know the answer? Did he know Parsifal?