Second sight, p.11
Second Sight, page 11
“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,
3
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.
“I guess not,” he said.
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.
4
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.
