In War Times (44 page)

“You’re back.” Sam put his book down and helped her with her scarf and coat. She sat on the wooden bench next to the door; he knelt and pulled off her rubber boots. “Nasty weather.”

“Very nasty. Very bad stuff out there, Sam. Like they say, it’s cold. On the large scale of things, we’re headed for the next ice age. Better than the hot stuff, I guess. I told you I didn’t want to come here.” She threw herself into their largest, softest chair and drew up her legs, making herself compact, tiny. Sam went into the kitchen, heated some cocoa he’d prepared for her earlier, and carried two hot cups into the living room.

Bette took hers. “Thanks.”

She looked fragile, her face white, her eyes wide and blue, the fringes of her blond hair wet with melting snow. Sam poked the fire and waited for her to talk.

“It just makes it so easy for them. To use me.”

“I guess I shouldn’t have taken the job.”

“No, I don’t think it makes any difference, honey. It made it easier for them, but that’s all.”

“So you would have had to go Christmas shopping in Munich even if we lived in Honolulu.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“I suppose the money is untaxable.”

She laughed and cocoa sloshed from her cup. She brushed it off her ski pants in an impatient motion. “That’s one good thing, isn’t it. Same old Swiss account. I hope the kids don’t waste it all on unwise choices of mates or something. I guess I was naïve to think that it could ever be over.” She looked at him keenly. “But that was the promise, wasn’t it?”

Hadntz’s promise.

He got up and put on Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things.” He liked Trane’s sinuous subtlety, the marvelous tone of his sax, and his musical concepts, which sometimes could be even more abstract than Bird’s. He went into the kitchen to get a beer.

“Bring me one too,” Bette called, when she heard the refrigerator open. She lit a Camel, assumed the lotus position, and situated an ashtray in front of her on the cushion. He opened two bottles of a particularly fine local beer.

“Where is it, Sam?” she asked, when he stood once more in front of the fire.

“Who wants to know?”

“I can’t say. But I will tell you one thing. Remember the work on radar, the work on the bomb? The same kind of work is going on now in Russia, regarding the device. They seem to have a copy of the plans.”

Sam laughed. The beer and the music merged; avenues of thought opened. Which version? What if, what if? “What if it worked?”

“Maybe it does.” She crushed out her cigarette and lit another. “Have you heard from Wink?”

“I thought we agreed not to talk about it.”

She nodded. He could tell she was starting to get wired from the cigarettes. “We might have to.”

“Why?”

“Gulags. Ghosts. My ghosts, in particular. The promise of more to come. Satellites with warheads. Awful, awful weapons, Sam. New kinds of chemical warfare. The Nazis didn’t use their sarin.”

“It dissipates too quickly.”

“Well, the Russians have huge stockpiles. They have an H-bomb. They have anthrax. We have all the same stuff. It looks as if Hadntz was right. Neither of us is going to quit until we’re all dead, using whatever methods we can find. Switching sides and ideologies until it’s all over. It’s not the ideologies that matter. It’s something deeper. Something that she was on to. That’s my opinion. There will be no world for our children. If the Soviets were gone, it would be someone else. That’s why it’s vital—”

He seated himself on the back of her chair and massaged her neck. She arched back and pressed against his hand.

He said, “I’ll think about it.”

“That’s all I’m asking.” She lifted her face to his. He bent down and kissed her, set the ashtray aside, and gently uncrossed her legs. He lifted her up with a grunt, at which they both laughed, and staggered over to the stairs.

“This isn’t going to work, Dance. We won’t fit.” She pulled several layered shirts off over her head as he followed her up the stairs, and let him complete the job once she locked the door behind them.

The following day, after much thought, he took Bette for a walk downtown for coffee. On the way, as they passed between the huge piles of snow on either side of the sidewalks, he told her that he had the HD10, and how he had gotten it from Wink on Midway.

She nodded as he talked. “We knew someone had this. And I was pretty sure it was you. Now here’s what we’re going to do.” She squinted her eyes against the bright winter sun.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Now that I know where it is, I can relax. The only thing missing is Perler’s version.”

“Perler!”

“Remember him? Your phone guy in Muchengladbach.”

“I remember him well. He took back his device and vanished. And you’re the one who gave it to him in the first place, right? In the interest of full disclosure.”

“Yes, Dance. I gave it to him. He was part of a bona fide assassination plot, and it was my job to help him however I could. Hadntz gave me that device—the one I gave Perler—when we made the deal about dropping you in France. I’ve always kept my knowledge of the device from my superiors. I suspected that Hadntz was on to something from the beginning; I was assigned to shadow her, and I became fascinated by what she was trying to do. I never told anyone about it; in fact, for a long time, I was the only one in the organization aware of it at all. I was operating outside their parameters.

“So you’re a traitor.”

Bette nodded. “I suppose you could look at it that way, but it’s really only a very tiny part of what I’ve done as an agent. They’ve always suspected both of us; that’s the main reason they’ve kept you on the payroll.” She pulled out her pack of cigarettes. “I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that Perler went over to the Russians. It must have been shortly before they entered Berlin. No one hated Hitler more than the Russians. They’d hated Germans for centuries, and vice versa. But—” She lighted her cigarette and snapped the lighter shut. “Get this:
Perler is the only reason our wonderful intelligence organization has any idea that the legendary device exists at all
. They found out about it from
Moscow
.” Her laughter rang out in the sharp, cold air.

“So the Russians have one too.”

“Yes. But the thing is, they have no plans. I think I bought their only copy of the plans from that guy in Berlin. He didn’t know what it was; didn’t care. Hell, at that time, if I’d known the right people, I could probably have gotten the heavy water too.”

“Maybe the Russians have their own version of Wink, filling them in.”

“You really think so?” asked Bette.

“No. Actually, I don’t. And Hadntz hated them too.”

“They killed a lot of her relatives. I don’t think she’s to blame. It couldn’t have been her. It’s completely my fault.”

“What do we do now?”

“You just keep it. I don’t even want to know where it is.”

“So you can’t talk under torture.”

“You think that’s funny.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You know I’m supposed to carry a cyanide pill?”

“Bette! You don’t, do you? What if the kids get hold of it?”

“No, of course I don’t, for that reason,” she said. “And it wasn’t issued to me to kill myself in case my own guys get nasty, which is a scenario that is much more possible than my capture by SMERSH, which seems to have lost interest in me. But that’s what I’d probably use it for, particularly if my own guys thought that I was a double agent. They wouldn’t hesitate to use torture. They’ve got a lot of tools at their disposal.”

“Lysergic acid?”

“That’s one of them, but most are infinitely less pleasant.”

“
Are
you a double agent?”

She grinned. “Would I tell you? You’re not very tough. You’d spill the beans right away. But no. I guess I am in this sense, though. I don’t want my organization to know about this, and I’m not going to tell them.”

After his assassination, most of Kennedy’s international outreach programs were canceled. The NATO school was closed. Within months, the Dances had said goodbye to their German friends and packed. As the plane taking them to Washington took off, Bette said, “Things could have been so much different. It’s a watershed. Things will change. For the worse, I’m afraid.”

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.

—
W
ILLIAM
B
UTLER
Y
EATS
“The Second Coming”

A
FTER THEY RETURNED
from Germany, Sam went back to work for the Navy as a fire protection engineer. He and Bette bought a run-down mansion in D.C. On one side of the house was a long tree-covered slope that ran down to a creek, across from which was parkland. The creek flowed into an enticing viaduct beneath the street, which Sam declared absolutely off-limits to the kids, though he was sure they ventured into it nonetheless. What kid wouldn’t?

Their next-door neighbors, the Hansons, were black, and delighted to see someone move into the long-empty place. Jackie Hanson was a schoolteacher and her husband, Terence, was a pharmacist. They had a boy, Doug, who was Brian’s age. Doug and Brian became best friends. Most of their other neighbors were black, as well, with a few whites and one Chinese family. Sam’s family was a welcome participant in neighborhood activities—the Fourth of July block party, Christmas caroling, and kids playing at one another’s houses.

Sam and Bette were happy to have found the place, similar in some ways to the multicultural environment they’d grown used to in Hawaii. Sam was also pleased because he loved Washington and because he could ride the bus to work. They could make do with one car. As the children grew, they rode the busses to the far reaches of the routes, an education in itself, and mastered the schedules.

Built in 1902, Halcyon House, as they called it, was turreted and solid, with plenty of hiding places for the kids. The entire family worked on the house, room by room, as 1964 unfolded, re-lathing old walls and plastering them; carrying boards and nails from room to room, and learning to use tools. Bette decided to become a Montessori teacher, which was, she said, the best way to change the world. After she completed her training, she opened a school in the back of their house, which helped pay the mortgage. Sam had long since ceased to be startled by her sudden changes of direction. He supposed this was just her new cover. But she seemed to enjoy it.

In summer, the favored place for game-playing was the huge screened-in side porch, which overlooked a gully that roared during heavy rains with the swollen creek. Most evenings, after the dishes were done, the family gathered there. Sam tried to read, but was usually drawn into a game of Clue or Mouse Trap. To help them become well-rounded, he taught them how to shoot craps and play poker.

With huge-winged moths batting the screen and cars passing now and then in the summer night, they tossed the dice, spun the arrow, and formulated private strategies for winning at canasta or spades beneath the light of an old, yellow-shaded floor lamp. Another table always held a jigsaw puzzle. The present one was pure white.

Sam also taught them gin rummy. “I lived on card winnings when I was first in the Army,” he told them, as they played gin one Friday night. Rows of cards snaked across the table. “I only had three dollars in my pocket when I went in, and they didn’t pay me for six weeks. I lived on my winnings, and I’ve never been broke since.”

“I have no such heroic tales,” Bette said, and laid down her winning hand. “Gin.”

One of the things Sam liked best about their house was that it had a real attic, accessed by a real, though narrow, staircase. It came complete with some old unwanted trunks and dressers the former owners had left behind, and was now filled with the mysterious, evocative remnants of several generations of his and Bette’s families.

It was there that Sam hid the clear, soft, plastic-like substance that the HD4 had become when Wink introduced the HD 10 to this world. Into the bottom of the lead box went the thin, smoky piece of plastic, anonymous and unfathomable, and then he locked the box. He pried up a floorboard in a corner where the roof came down to the attic floor, stowed the box, and screwed down the board tightly. He shoved a trunk over it, and loaded it down with old, dusty mathematics books. Then he set up a barricade of broken chairs, empty picture frames, an ironing board, and other assorted junk abandoned by, he suspected, a long line of previous owners. When he was finished, his hiding place looked just like the rest of the huge attic—another pile of unappetizing debris.

The rest of the house, old-fashioned and welcoming, pretty much suited his idea of what a house should be. A friendly tricolor collie they found at the dog pound, dubbed Winston, and a tabby cat, Eloise, followed the kids around. Sam built a tree-house for the kids, which Jill used for reading and Brian and Doug as a command center for their bike-riding explorations of Washington. Bette’s crossword puzzle magazine was always on the kitchen table, open at the difficult ones at the end, something to do while she waited for food to fry, boil, or bake.

Sam cultivated the antique roses and peony bushes already in the yard. He planted hundreds of bulbs, with the grudging help of Bette. Starting his flats indoors in March, he tended the seedlings with care. Seeing them grow, bloom, flower, and fruit was a source of satisfaction, and he actually enjoyed weeding. Forced forsythia blooms brightened the living room in February, and during the summer, bouquets of zinnias and delphiniums. He foresaw each month’s tapestry of color in intricate detail, red tulips flanked by yellow daffodils; pink roses rimmed by spikes of purple iris, as he labored in the plain dark earth. The garden prospered, a respite from experiments, tests, reports, and frequent trips to the Naval Research Lab in Maryland.

Lyndon Johnson was president. On November 23, 1963, less than twenty-four hours after Kennedy’s assassination, he signed a reversal of Kennedy’s draw-down plan in Vietnam. Instead of winding down the war, as had been Kennedy’s proclaimed intent, he ramped it up dramatically.