Lucky Bastard (6 page)

I switched off the tape recorder and offered to hand it back to Peter. He waved it away. It was now part of my files.

Peter said, “She may be embroidering slightly, to give the old masochist the good time I paid for. But mainly, I think, she told the truth. Opinion?”

“That we go slowly. Learn more. Assess carefully.”

“That's not an opinion, it's a recommendation.”

“You want an assessment?”

“Yes, I do.”

At this stage, I knew from experience, he wanted a devil's advocate. I said, “All right. Tonight I saw a boy of twenty-one who has charm, guile, and the gift of gab. Also a potentially disastrous case of Don Juan psychosis. And I think if we recruit him he will do to us what he did to your call girl.”

Peter was amused—determined to be amused. “Steal our underwear?”

“No. Fuck us cross-eyed.”

Peter did not like my answer. I had stepped out of character without permission: Flippancy was not one of the privileges he had granted to me.

I said, “May I ask what
you
see in this subject, Peter?”

“Yes,” he replied. “I see talent in the raw. A cold heart. Boldness, contempt for the rights and feelings of others. Ruthlessness. He took the girl like a bandit because he wanted her, even though she wore a wedding ring and was accompanied by another man.”

“She was a prostitute.”

“He didn't know that. For all practical purposes he raped her. He created a diversion, made his friend act drunk for him, then paid him off with a pair of panties. And that smile, so American, so like the man he thinks is his father.”

“
Thinks
is his father. An important point.”

Peter shrugged. “Is it so impossible?”

Clearly Peter did not think so. That was all that mattered. Many times in the past I had seen him proven right when nearly everyone else thought that he was wrong. He was like Einstein: He saw the universe as a whole, he proposed the existence of things that other men could not see. The measurements, the mathematics, the proofs of his theory he left to others, who suffered the consequences of any small mistakes he might have made.

“I wish to proceed with this operation,” he said.

“It will be a gamble.”

“Yes. That's the beauty of it.”

“If we win.”

“Why shouldn't we win?” Peter said. “We will deal the cards. For the rest of his life.”

My heart sank. Peter had long-term plans for this boy who lived in a dreamworld, to whom no one else was real, who did not even want to touch the women he fucked with any part of his body but his penis. He wanted to bind Jack to us, turn him into an agent of influence. He wanted to keep him as he was, but at the same time transform him into an operative who would live by subterfuge his whole life long.

“Are we sure we can do what we want in this case?” I asked.

Peter lifted a hand. My role as devil's advocate was over. What he expected now was acceptance, obedience.

“We are never sure,” he said. “But it has been done before, with less promising material.”

This was certainly true. We had taken many, many gambles on imperfect men, all over the world. Some had achieved success, even very great success, through the combination of our help and advice and what seemed, especially to the man himself, the exercise of inborn talent. The others were dead or in prison, and no further concern of ours.

As if reading my mind, Peter said, “I want you to put your heart into this case.”

“Very well. What is the first step?”

“Get him to Germany.”

“You mean, give him a ticket?”

“No. He would ask questions. He mustn't know we are helping him. And he must stay in Germany for several months.”

“Perhaps a fellowship.”

Peter considered this. “Good,” he said. “By all means get him a fellowship.”

“May I consider other countries?”

“No,” Peter said. “It must be Germany, the American zone. But not Berlin.”

“I'll do my best.”

“You will succeed.”

Peter looked at his watch, flicked a glance at a single set of headlights approaching along Fifth Avenue, and changed languages. “I leave tomorrow,” he said in English. “For Cuba. Shall I say hello to anyone for you?”

I shook my head. Peter smiled, looking into my eyes, expecting great things of me.

He said, “We'll discuss this again soon. After Cuba.”

A limousine pulled up at the curb. Without another word, he strode across the sidewalk. He opened the door. I glimpsed a woman's legs, crossed at the ankles—not the legs I had admired in the Italian restaurant, but another pair, longer and even more shapely. This one must be an agent under discipline if Peter was allowing her to see me.

I said, “A clarification, please, Comrade General.”

Peter closed the car door. The lady could look, but she could not listen.

I said, “This asset will be unwitting?”

“Of course. As you say, he is deeply unstable, committed to nothing. How can we trust him?”

In the jargon of espionage, an unwitting asset is a dupe who does not know (or may not wish to know) that he is working for a foreign intelligence service. Such an operative sometimes believes (or pretends to believe) that he is working for an entirely different secret entity from the one that actually controls him. He may never even meet the case officer who is handling him, but report instead to a third person who carries instructions to the unknowing agent and reports of his activities back to the case officer.

“There must be no one in his life but you and me,” Peter said.

“Understood,” I replied. “But I will need Arthur for the fellowship business.”

“All right, but only that,” Peter said. “When you're through with him, tell him goodbye. Tell him another man will work with him in the future. I will make some arrangements in Cuba.”

“When will this happen?”

“As soon as you're through with him.”

The conversation was over. Wordless departures were part of Peter's stage business. He whirled, got into his limousine, and drove away.

Alone, like a figure in a movie—which in a way I was—I walked downtown through the sleeping metropolis. In those days they still opened the hydrants to wash the streets in the early hours of the morning. The air smelled laundered, and where water gushed from the standpipes, creating mist that enveloped the street lamps, there were miniature rainbows.

5
By the Metropolitan Museum, where there were coin telephones on the sidewalk, I called Arthur. We met an hour later inside the park. He arrived by cab, having directed the driver straight to the place where I was waiting. This was a serious breach of security, but I didn't have the heart to reprove him.

Arthur was sleepy-eyed but alert. He had brought me coffee in a paper cup. The sun was just coming up. We sat on a bench, sipping awful, acidic coffee while I told him what was required for Jack Adams.

He said, “To Germany? This will be difficult.”

“But not impossible, surely. What about a Fulbright?”

“You're joking. It's May. The Fulbrights have all been awarded for next year.”

“Can't someone be disqualified?”

“Not by sneaky means,” Arthur said. “The system is designed to prevent that. A committee of Americans and Germans bestows the awards, so nobody but the committee can take them away. And even if they did, they'd just award it to the applicant who came in second.”

I said, “Then get him some other kind of scholarship, as long as it's genuine. He must believe that it's genuine. Do not discuss it with him.”

“Pennies from heaven,” Arthur said. “You want him. That must mean I've done a good job.”

I said, “Better than you know. Can you do the thing I've just asked you to do?”

“I think so, Dmitri.”

“You must be sure.”

“All right, I'm sure. An idea is forming in my mind.”

He started to elucidate. I stopped him. “No need to tell me details,” I said. “I'll count on you. Be quick.”

“It may take several days. This will take organizing.”

“All right. But, Arthur, there must be no failure. Do you understand?”

“Comrade,” Arthur said, “I do not need to understand.”

He thought he had earned the right to address me as
Comrade.
And so he had. Now came the difficult part. I stood up, crumpling my coffee cup.

“I'll take that,” Arthur said.

“No.”

Fingerprints. He could not be trusted. Arthur read my thought and flushed. But it was just procedure: No one can be trusted. I put a reassuring hand on his flaccid shoulder.

“This is our last meeting,” I said.

He was startled. “Our last meeting? What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means we are entering a new phase. We must protect you.”

Arthur gave me a reproachful look. “And that's the way it ends?”

“Arthur, it never ends.”

I held out my hand. Arthur grasped it. “It has been a pleasure,” I said. “We are very grateful. And now we must forget each other, forget everything.”

“That will be difficult,” Arthur said.

“For me, too, my friend.”

I meant what I said.

6
A few days later Arthur delivered his report, as instructed. There is no denying that he had a certain flair.

A student of Arthur's—not connected in any way to the Movement, in fact a member of the ROTC—had won the Hoppert Fellowship to Heidelberg University. The Hoppert, endowed by a German immigrant who made a fortune manufacturing silk with child labor in the nineteenth century, wasn't a prestigious fellowship. But it paid all fees and travel costs and provided a stipend of five hundred dollars a month to the recipient.

The original recipient had been disqualified. The day after our meeting in the park, he was discovered to have plagiarized a paper on the Weimar Republic written for Arthur's honors course in political science. He had received an A for this paper—Arthur had graded it himself, but never returned it—and it had been an important factor in the award of the fellowship. Graduation was only two weeks away. The student protested his innocence, stating that his paper had been retyped by persons unknown who had erased his footnotes identifying long passages copied from an unpublished dissertation by an obscure academic named Markus Olshaker. Arthur asked the student if he really believed that he, Arthur, or anyone else could believe such a story.

Arthur told the young man he did not want to ruin his life, but a price must be paid. If he resigned his fellowship, Arthur would say nothing about the matter to anyone else. If, however, he insisted on his cock-and-bull story about forgery after the fact, Arthur would have no choice but to bring the whole matter to the attention of the dean. In that case the young man certainly would not graduate, he might very well lose his ROTC commission, and he would carry the burden of his mistake with him for the rest of his life.

The boy accepted Arthur's offer.

The vacated fellowship was awarded to a surprised Jack Adams, who graduated with high honors and won a prize for excellence in political science.

Under his yearbook picture an editorial wag inserted the words “Ruffles and Flourishes.”

A portent.

7
Just after commencement, Arthur received a wake-up call from his new handler. To his delight, he was told that he was going back to Cuba for advanced training at his old secret camp in the Sierra Maestra. He would travel secretly this time, under a false passport, avoiding surveillance by the CIA and the FBI by means of a circuitous route through Santiago de Chile and Mexico City. He was instructed to tell his wife that he was going to Cuba to help with the sugar harvest once again.

He left in June. Early in July, his wife received through the mail an envelope containing Arthur's wedding ring and a brief note in his handwriting. He said in his letter that he had fallen deeply in love with another woman, and that he had decided to spend the rest of his life in Cuba. His decision was irrevocable. He hoped that Myra would someday know the happiness that he had found.

Love, Arthur.

No return address.

His handwriting, always untidy, was even harder to read than usual, as if he had scribbled this final letter while tired, or drunk, or under the stress that facing reality always induced in him. Myra thought Arthur would soon tire of monogamy and life among the masses and come back to New York, more full of himself than ever. But she never heard from him again.

Seductions

One