The Once and Future Spy Read online

  He began weeding through the Hamilton papers. There were itemized bills for services rendered, for clothing purchased, for repairs to the roof over the earth closet in the backyard, all dated after the turn of the century, so the Weeder knew he was dealing with the right time span. There were drafts of letters, dictated but unsigned, written—if the Weeder’s amateur eye was any judge—by the young Harvard tutor who had served as Hamilton’s secretary between 1799 and his death, which was the period when Nate’s brother Enoch boasted of having received a letter from Hamilton. Most of the letters were filled with gossip about political figures of the day. The mayor of New York was said to have taken a bribe from a construction firm angling for a contract to build horse-drawn public transportation vehicles, which were to be called “street-cars.” A. Burr was said to have lost his new wife’s fortune in a land reclamation scheme and was consoling himself in the arms of a black mistress in New Jersey. G. Washington was supposed to have so many wooden teeth in his mouth that he went to a carpenter for repairs rather than a dental surgeon.

  Stuck between two pieces of blank paper with watermarks that said “Fool’s cap” was an unsigned, undated partial draft of a letter that recalled the “troblous times.” “A Remarcable Patriote” had volunteered to spy behind the British lines while pretending to “Whip the Cat.” The author of the letter had had the signal honor of “superintending” the mission. There followed a detailed description of how the patriot had crossed Long Island Sound and had made his way across Long Island to the village of Flatbush, to the house of the widow of a Concord martyr. From there, with the help of the young widow, he had scouted the British positions in Brookland and the western reaches of Long Island, had discovered the “opresing Britich, freshe from their Victory over the Colonials, Rejoyceing as if Bedlam was broke loose.” According to the widow’s diary, which Hamilton claimed to have read, the patriot had gleaned British intentions, had devised a plan to thwart them. A coded report had been sent back that had provided the Commander-in-Chief with vital information. If the war had not been lost then and there, it was safe to say it was due in no small part to the “Martyr in ye glorious Cause of Liberty,” whose end had been so “cruel and uncristion” it aroused “Pastion” in all who knew the “True and Reale storie.”

  There had been periods in the Weeder’s life when the discovery of a document that mentioned Nate by name, even one with a cryptic reference to him, would have reduced him to dizzyness. Now, however, a corner of his brain was obsessed with the event of the previous night, with the burly mugger who had tried to incinerate him. The Weeder was unable to shake the queasy feeling that he was missing something important, something that went to the heart of the matter. Had he seen the mugger before? If so, where? For the hundredth time he let snatches of conversation trail through his thoughts, picking at them for clues.

  “What is it you want?”

  “What I want, what I need to have is your money and your life.”

  The Weeder had given him a chance to correct the slip. “You mean ‘or.’ “

  “I mean and.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “That’s one possibility. There are others.”

  Sitting at the binder’s table, gazing sightlessly at the stacks of rare books around him in the glass tower, the Weeder once again explored these other possibilities. It could have been a random mugging. Or a case of mistaken identity. Or an attack provoked by drugs. Or the attacker could have been, as the Weeder had suggested to him, stark raving mad. An image of Admiral Toothacher, lecturing back at the Farm on methodology, came to the Weeder; smiling slyly, the Admiral had summed up possibilities at the end of his talk. “Or all of the above,” he had said in a singsong voice. “Or none of the above. Or any combination thereof.”

  And then, suddenly, it came to the Weeder; the vision of the Admiral at the Farm had triggered a memory. Toothacher had arrived in the morning and departed in the evening in a sparkling black limousine with shiny whitewall tires and a small admiral’s pennant flying from the right front fender. The door to the limousine had been held open, the car had been driven by a hulking chief petty officer with short cropped hair and eyes the color of pewter. It had been driven by the man who had attacked him in the faculty parking lot, who had demanded his money and his life!

  Another snatch of conversation, one the Weeder had unconsciously avoided, echoed through his head.

  “So what governments are you stabbing in the back these days?” he had asked Wanamaker when they ran into each other at the Yale reunion the previous spring.

  “If you were to find out,” Wanamaker, smiling smugly, had replied, “I suppose I’d have to get you murdered.”

  So the attempt on his life had not been a coincidence! The Admiral had walked back the cat, had somehow traced the leak and the love letters to the Weeder. Having found the leak, they were trying to plug it.

  Shivering, the Weeder rose to his feet. He felt an icy hand caress his spine. He would race off to the nearest police station, he would tell the sergeant on duty—what? That a mugger had tried to incinerate him the night before because he knew that an agency of the United States government was planning to explode a primitive atomic device in Tehran on the Ides of March? Because he had set out in his bumbling way to stop what he considered an atrocity without bringing the whole world down on the Company? Nobody would believe him. Even worse, someone might—and he would be fitted into a strait-jacket and shipped back to the Company in question by the local police who preferred not to get involved in matters of national security.

  Whatever he decided to do, he would be a fool for hanging around Yale. They had been waiting for him once, they would be waiting for him again. He tried desperately to remember some of the things he had learned at the Farm about avoiding surveillance. All he could come up with was the story of the OSS agent who had thrown the Gestapo bloodhounds off the scent by urinating on his tracks. He couldn’t see that urinating on his tracks would have the slightest effect on the people who were after him. It occurred to him that the best thing would be to abandon his clothing at the motel, abandon his almost classic car. He would rent an automobile in New Haven and disappear into New England. Even if they discovered he had rented a car, they would have no way of knowing in what direction he had headed. If he could manage to stay out of their clutches until the Ides of March…

  From somewhere below him in the glass core of the Beinecke Library came the thud of a heavy fire door being slammed closed. The sound seemed to skate along the glass walls of the building within a building, to resound through the stacks. At the back of the glass tower, another fire door slammed shut. And a third. The Weeder edged between two stacks and peered down through the glass wall at the main lobby, sandwiched between the inner glass tower and the outer shell of the building, two stories below him. A rail-thin woman wearing a scalp-hugging feathered hat with a black veil masking half her face (was he imagining it or did she look familiar too?) was standing at the main desk, looking up. She spotted the Weeder and wagged a finger at him, as if he had disobeyed a biblical injunction and was being mildly chastised for it. A burly man the Weeder instantly recognized as the fire breather from the faculty parking lot the night before appeared at the other end of the lobby. He was holding an enormous pistol, fitted with a silencer, at present arms. He saw the woman with the veil pointing and followed her finger until he spotted the Weeder. The burly man formed his left forefinger and thumb into a pistol and sighted over it at the Weeder. He mouthed the words, “Bang, bang! You’re dead!”

  And then the Weeder saw the Admiral, hunched over like a parenthesis, his mane of chalk-colored hair flying off excitedly in all directions. The Admiral backed up to get a better view of the Weeder, studied him with his bulging eyes for a moment, then turned toward the large red fire box on the wall. He broke the glass with a small hammer hanging next to it, pulled open the door and pushed down the large brass lever to the position labeled Danger—Exhaust.

  Fro
m the dozen or so grilles installed in the walls of the inner glass tower came an ominous hissing.

  The Weeder had worked in the library his junior and senior years and understood instantly what the sound meant. The Beinecke housed some of the rarest books and manuscripts in the world. In the event of fire, there was a system to seal off the glass core where the books were stored by closing hermetic fire doors and then pumping out the air. No air, no fire. There was supposed to be an alarm to warn the people working in the stacks that they had thirty seconds to clear out.

  A pulse throbbed in one of the Weeder’s ears as he raced for the narrow metal staircase that corkscrewed up to the top floor of the core. Plunging up the steps, already short of breath, he became aware of the gravitational drag of the earth pulling at him through the soles of his shoes. With each step lifting his feet took more effort. His vision started to blur. A rasp stuck like a bone in the back of his throat. His lungs burned. Gasping for air, he clutched the railing and hauled himself up, hand over hand. He reached the top floor and sagged against a whitewashed brick wall and lashed out wildly with his palm, searching for the small glass box that had been installed during his senior year. The throbbing in his ear grew into a roar, drowning out the hissing, and the space around him began to go dark, as if the light were being sucked out of the glass tower along with the air. Suddenly the tips of his fingers struck something smooth. He willed his fingers into a fist and plunged it into the glass, groped through the shards for the mask, fumbled in what had become a nightmare to fit it over his face as his knees ceded to gravity and he sank in the general direction of the center of the earth.

  4

  Wanamaker kept a tight rein on his emotions, grunting into the telephone every now and then to indicate he was receiving the Admiral loud and clear and not appreciating a word he said. Had he misjudged the Admiral after all? he wondered. Walking back a cat was a cerebral activity perfectly suited to Toothacher’s manifold talents; acting on the conclusions may simply not have been his cup of tea. Wanamaker shrugged a shoulder. When he came right down to it, what choice did he have?

  “On paper,” the Admiral was saying, “the plan looked perfect. Maybe that was the problem… the perfect is the enemy of the good. Our jackass-of-all-trades removed the fuse to the alarm system so it wouldn’t go off when we closed the fire doors. The air, according to the printed notice on the fire box, was extracted from the inner glass tower in thirty seconds. Are you still there, Wanamaker?”

  Wanamaker grunted.

  “We waited eleven minutes before pumping the air back in. Eleven minutes should have been enough to suffocate him three times over. Houdini could only hold his breath for four minutes.”

  Wanamaker, bored with the details of the game when he already knew the final score, grunted again.

  “Our jackass and your man Friday went in and searched the stacks from top to bottom. You can imagine our stupefaction when they couldn’t find our friend.” The Admiral must have sensed that he was losing his audience. “Aren’t you curious how he got out?”

  Wanamaker grunted. The Admiral decided to interpret this as an expression of interest. ‘They didn’t find our friend, but they did find a glass box built into the side of a wall on the top floor that said, ‘Oxygen mask for emergency use only. Break glass with hammer to get mask.’ Or words to that effect. The glass, of course, was broken, the oxygen mask missing. Nearby there was a metal ladder spiraling up through the roof of the glass tower to a submarinelike escape hatch. The escape hatch led through a crawl space to the roof of the library. On the back wall of the library building was a fire escape, with the bottom length of ladder lowered to the ground. Are you getting the picture?”

  Another grunt crept stealthily over the telephone line, followed closely by a question: “You still think he’ll assume it was a coincidence?”

  For a moment the Admiral didn’t respond. Then, very quietly, he said, “You ought to know that our friend saw me.”

  “You let him get a look at you!”

  The Admiral could hear the note of astonishment in Wanamaker’s voice, could picture him rolling his ungroomed head from side to side in frustration, could imagine the flurry of dandruff flakes, dislodged, drifting past the rumpled shoulders of his unpressed sport jacket into an open container of low-fat cottage cheese. Toothacher screwed up his face in disgust. In his view what was killing the Company was too much HYP—too much Harvard, Yale, Princeton. When he caught up with the Weeder there would be one less.

  “He was looking down from the stacks,” the Admiral continued. “He saw me depress the handle that set the pumps to work sucking out the air.”

  “Good God! If he saw you, he recognized you. We both took your course at the Farm.” Wanamaker must have been lighting a fresh Schimmelpenninck from the soggy stump of an old one glued to his lower lip, because he didn’t say anything for a while. Then, “He’ll go to the police.”

  “What would he tell them?” the Admiral asked. “That the Company he works for is trying to kill him? The detectives would commit him for psychiatric observation. If they believed him, the whole story would come out—Stufftingle, the Ides of March, the Company eaves-dropping through ordinary garden variety telephones. Think of the headlines in The New York Times. Think of the scandal. Congress would castrate the Company. No, no, fortunately for us, our friend has a reputation as a patriot. My guess is he’ll run for his life. We should be able to catch up with him in a matter of days. Ha! He’ll still be a patriot, but with any luck, he’ll be a dead patriot.”

  5

  The Weeder tried the number from a downtown Boston booth, got the recorded message again. “You’ve reached Snow,” a husky voice, vaguely self-conscious, vaguely irritated, snapped. “I don’t take calls or return them except on Sundays. And then not always. Don’t bother leaving a message.”

  He left one anyway. “It’s me again. Silas Sibley. This is the fourth time I’ve called in three days. I’ve come a long way to see you. I’ll call back later in the day. Can you do me a favor and turn your machine off and answer your phone? It’s important. To me, at least.”

  To kill time he drove over to Charlestown and climbed Breed’s Hill and roamed around the battlefield for several hours. Listening to the wind whistling past his ear, the Weeder felt the pull of history and slipped over the line into an incarnation. The whistle of fifes was carried to him on the wind—the lobster lines, decimated in two previous assaults, were forming up for the third attack. He could see the hundred or so militiamen behind the rail fence on the flank of Breed’s Hill fitting new flints in their muskets so the guns wouldn’t misfire. Cocking his head, he thought he heard the moans of the British wounded crawling away from the rebels. He caught the distant sound of shouted commands. It was the British general Howe ordering his men to remove their heavy backpacks so they could advance more rapidly. The Weeder saw Howe taking up position at the head of the light infantry and grenadiers heading for the rail fence. Colonel Knowlton, in command of the militiamen at the rail fence, yelled for his men to hold their fire. Howe shouted an order. The front rank knelt, the lobster line aimed and dispatched a volley at the rebels. Most of the shots flew high; the lobsters, the Weeder knew, tended to overshoot because they used too much powder for the weight of lead in their cartridges.

  Howe drew his saber. The Red Coats leveled their bayonets and broke into a trot. When the lobster line reached the stakes that the rebels had hammered into the ground forty yards from the rail fence, the militiamen fired. The Weeder could see the young officers around Howe crumpling to the ground. The lobster line itself cracked like an eggshell. Howe could be heard bellowing urgent commands. The Red Coats closed ranks and continued on. The Weeder could see Colonel Knowlton waving an arm wildly; could see the militiamen, out of powder, lacking bayonets, scurrying away. The Red Coats fired a last volley at the fleeing rebels. Smoke obscured the rail fence, then slowly drifted away. The Weeder spotted Howe staring back across the fields at the scores of Red
Coats sprawled in the grotesque positions that dead men assume. Howe’s face was a mask of shock, of dismay. The thin throaty cheers of the surviving lobsters reached the Weeder.

  And then, as if a needle had been plucked from a phonograph record, the cheering stopped and the Weeder found himself listening again to the wind whistling past his ear. The sound lured him back against his will into the present. His face corkscrewed into a sheepish grin as he realized what had happened: running for his life across a Colonial landscape, he had taken momentary refuge in history.

  It wasn’t the first time that history had provided this service; had given him a place to go when he didn’t like where he was.

  His lifelong obsession with Nate had been part escape, of course. But there had been more to it than that. Much more. The Weeder had always attributed his fascination with Nate to an emotion he presumed he shared with his illustrious ancestor, namely an abiding commitment to a delicate tangle of lovers and relatives and friends; to an extended family which, when you pushed it out far enough, constituted the entity known as country. In a deep sense, Nate and the Weeder subscribed to the same social contract: With all its faults there was something here, some ideal, albeit unachieved, worth fighting for.

  Running, and running scared, looking over his shoulder to make sure the Admiral wasn’t one jump behind him, the Weeder felt closer to Nate than he ever had before. Nate too had been running scared; had been looking over a shoulder; had (the Weeder supposed) failed to see whatever it was that finally caught up with him in time to avoid it; had gone to meet his fate fortified, as far as the Weeder could figure out, only by a cranky patriotism, a vision that derived its power from a knowledge of how things were and how they could be. Nate, in short, had had high hopes. The Weeder, following Nate’s star, shared them.