Second sight, p.12
Second Sight, page 12
“If you know you’re not being watched, why is an all clear signal necessary?” Patchen asked.
“Because you give no signal at all if you are being watched,” Archie replied. “If you did, the people trailing you would see the signal and know it for what it was, and the cat would be out of the bag.”
“I understand. But if you’re not being watched, why not just walk up and say hello? Why transfer Pravda from your right hand to your left? Suppose there’s an off-duty secret policeman in the museum and he sees you signaling?”
Archie feigned a look of thoughtful surprise. “Good point,” he said. “I’ll take it up with Dick Hannay.”
Other instructors, all identified by first names only, dropped by to teach Patchen the rudiments of tradecraft, as the technique of espionage is called. He learned the elements of the Outfit’s secret priestly vocabulary: dead-drops, cut-outs, brush contacts, sleepers, witting and unwitting assets, the difference between an agent and an asset, and much more. He learned how to detect people who were following him on foot or in automobiles and how to follow others without being detected, how to tell whether his telephone or room was bugged (always assume that it is), how to write in invisible ink made from cow’s milk or his own urine and how to read it by holding the page over a gas burner, how to employ simple codes and ciphers, how to conduct a “seduction,” as the recruitment of an agent was called (Archie advised him to read the relevant passage in Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios), how to conduct a search and how to hide things so that they cannot be found. A sweaty man in a Madras jacket familiarized him with burglar tools—the man carried a complete set of jimmies in special pockets sewn into a canvas corset worn beneath his shirt—and taught him how to pick locks. “You’ll never have to do this,” the man said, while opening a couple of dozen locks he had brought along in a clinking satchel. “Just remember there’s no such thing as a lock that can’t be picked.” Another technician showed him how to disguise himself with false beards, wigs, devices that slipped in between his teeth and his cheeks to change the shape of his face and the sound of his voice, and body pads that transformed him into a fat man with a thin neck. Most of these tricks seemed to Patchen to be superfluous, if not laughable.
“Isn’t the spectacle of a grown man writing misspelled obscenities on a brick wall with a piece of chalk more likely to attract attention than otherwise?” he asked, after a street exercise on how to conduct meetings with agents that had required Patchen to chalk ‘Fuk U!’ on a brick wall on L Street.
“You’re right,” Archie replied. “Most of this stuff is nonsense. We inherited it from the Brits, who adore it. So do the Russians, the Germans, and all the rest of them. But be careful what you say and who you say it to on this subject. Nobody laughs at the rigmarole; it’s very bad form to laugh at it. Agents expect it; it’s part of the forbidden atmosphere, like false whiskers and cyanide pills. Mumbo-jumbo makes the whole process seem more serious, more connected to some invisible power. Like the Freemasons. Mozart wrote a whole opera about it.”
Patchen was an apt pupil. He quickly perceived that the world of espionage was a mirror image of the ordinary world, that tradecraft closely resembled the everyday behavior of people who live in small towns like the one he had grown up in and must hide their real selves from prying neighbors. His town’s adulterers, embezzlers, wife-beaters, drunks, incestuous lovers, and many others employed lies, deceptions, clandestine relationships, code words, false identities, and the other tricks of the world of espionage as a matter of course.
Had his own mother really met and married an Englishman named Patchen who was killed in the war after he impregnated her on a star-crossed honeymoon between battles, or had she simply succumbed to some temporary officer and gentleman from New York or San Francisco (or even the suburbs of Paris) who gave her his Croix de Guerre in return for her favors? Was everything his mother had told him about his origins a cover story? Many suspected that Patchen’s mother had never been married, that her son was a bastard conceived in a pasture in France, that she had made up the whole romantic story of her brief marriage. But no one dared say so to her face because no one in town knew the truth or possessed the resources to discover it.
“Suspicion is not proof,” Archie explained. “It doesn’t matter what the opposition thinks as long as it doesn’t find out the real truth.”
“ ‘The real truth’?” Patchen said. “You mean there are truths truths that aren’t real?”
Archie beamed with avuncular pleasure, as he often did on hearing Patchen’s questions. “Absolutely,” he replied. “They’re the whole basis of cover. Every truth about you is harmless, out in the open, and therefore beautifully misleading because, taken as a whole, they seem to explain everything about you. First, your wounds—they’re the first thing anyone notices about you. You come from an all-American village in Ohio, from a good family, you’re a Quaker who joined the Marines, choosing duty to country over your somewhat addlepated religion, got shot up on Okinawa and won the Silver Star, and then went to Harvard on the G. I. Bill of Rights. That’s a hell of a lot of information, more than most people can deal with. It presses all the right buttons, which is one reason—your brain being the other—why the O. G. took such an interest in you. Who would ever think to ask if there’s anything funny about you? How could there be, behind the smoke screen of all those credentials and honorable wounds?”
“Is there something funny about me?” Patchen asked.
“Of course there is. You’re a spy. Espionage is a criminal activity. Therefore you’ve agreed to live the life of a criminal during business hours.”
“I have? I didn’t realize that.”
“Please understand my meaning,” Archie said. “I’m not suggesting that you really are a criminal, only that what you have agreed to do for your country will be regarded by its enemies as criminal. When a case officer recruits an agent, he suborns him to treason. That’s a capital crime in every country in the world. Never forget that. Once you set foot on the territory of any country but your own, you’re under sentence of death the minute suspicion of your true purposes turns into proof. So guard the evidence of your operations with every atom of your being. Never let anyone outside the Outfit—anyone—not your mother, not your wife, not your priest, not the deaf-mute who has been sentenced to life in solitary confinement, learn one single fact about your work, no matter how unimportant it seems. The tiniest crack is big enough to let disaster in.”
“How about the President of the United States? Suppose he asks? Is it all right to tell him?”
“Results, yes. Methods, no,” Archie replied. “But he won’t ask. That’s what an intelligence service is for—to do the things that Presidents want done but don’t want to know about. That way, when they write their memoirs, they can say that God did their dirty work.”
The safe house was well furnished with books of all kinds, from turgid texts on the nature of Soviet Communism by American professors to Olympia Press editions of the forbidden novels of Henry Miller and the poetry of e.e. cummings. Patchen, who found it difficult to fall asleep, stayed up most nights reading. For the first time since he was wounded he began to think about the future. He had no idea what his life as a spy would be like, but he felt instinctively that it would involve living through others. In a novel about fifteenth-century Italy by W. Somerset Maugham, he found a speech by Machiavelli that intrigued him:
These painters with their colors and their brushes prate about the works of art they produce, but what are they in comparison with a work of art that is produced when your paints are living men and your brushes wit and cunning?
He copied down the words on the last page of his address book.
5
DURING HIS PERIOD OF TRAINING, PATCHEN WAS ALONE IN WASHINGton. After she and Patchen disembarked in New York, Martha had taken the train back to Ohio. Aboard ship, he had explained that he had been ordered to Washington in connection with his new job.
“What will thee be doing?” she asked.
“Working for the government,” Patchen replied.
“Will thee be doing good works?”
“I hope so.”
Martha asked no further questions about his occupation then or for a long time afterward. She was not really interested in anything that did not have to do with the Inward Light. What Patchen did for a living was unimportant except that it put food on the table and clothes on his back until he found the Christ within himself. She mentioned to Patchen that many had discovered the Inward Light under the most unlikely conditions—while in prison, or even like the English sea captain who wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace” after making a fortune as the master of a slave ship.
“Did this sea captain give all the money he’d made running slaves to Negro Relief or did he just write the hymn and let it go at that?” Patchen asked.
“The words tell how repentant the poor man was—‘Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, to save a wretch like me.’ “
“He must have kept the money if his neighbors were willing to swallow that. A poor man could never get away with such crap.”
Martha was not sure that her husband, who had suffered such awful injuries, would be able to overcome his bitterness and find peace, but she did not discuss her doubts with him. They had been very quiet with each other ever since she saw his scars for the first time; neither mentioned the incident after it took place, but they stopped making love.
Archie had provided Patchen with an accommodation address to which Martha could write, and one day toward the end of his training, he received a letter announcing that she was arriving at Union Station that same afternoon.
Archie said, “You’ll have to stop her.”
“How can I? She’s on the train.”
“Well, I guess there’s no help for it. Do you want the bedroom cameras on or off?”
A female employee of the Outfit posing as Archie’s wife kept Martha busy during the day with tours of the city. In the evening Martha heated up cans of Campbell’s soup from the safe house’s well-stocked cupboards and sometimes made bland casseroles by combining cream of tomato soup with peas and corn, cheese, and boiled rice. She was a vegetarian; one of the things she had liked best about her drunken Indians was their tasteless, odorless diet. After a week Patchen asked her to bring home a steak.
“It’s not right,” Martha said, “to kill and eat what God has made to keep thee and me company on earth.”
“All these carrots and potatoes weren’t alive before Campbell’s chopped them up and made them into soup?”
“Thee makes a joke of everything.”
“I just think that you should apply the same standards of judgment to everything.”
“How? Good is good and evil is evil.”
“Is it?” Patchen asked.
“I will not argue with thee.”
Martha’s face was flushed; her voice trembled. To her, Patchen realized, this mild exchange had seemed a quarrel. Since her arrival they had slept in the same bed, but they did not touch or kiss. That night Patchen stayed up late, reading; when he went to bed after undressing in the dark, he found Martha awaiting him between the sheets, naked. As before, she managed everything, but this time left all but the essential part of his body inside his buttoned pajamas. Next morning she woke him early and they made love again; Archie and his “wife” arrived downstairs in the middle of the act, at the moment when Martha uttered a long cry of pleasure.
“We are not alone,” Patchen said.
“Then let them put beans in their ears,” Martha said.
Her face glowed. Patchen laughed and drew her closer to him. Each time he saw her unclothed, or heard her crying out in pleasure, Patchen was amazed that such a pious girl should have been so perfectly made for sex.
“Does thee know what I am hoping?” she asked.
“No. What?”
“That the child we are making will look just like thee, not as the war made thee, but as God made thee.”
Patchen turned away. Martha tried to make him look at her, but he resisted. She crawled over his body and knelt beside the bed until he opened his eye and looked into her uplifted face.
“If I could, I would unwound thee, but I can’t,” she said. “However, I will be a wife to thee.”
THREE
1
THE OUTFIT HAD NO HEADQUARTERS. ITS EMPLOYEES, WHOSE NUMbers, cost, and true identities were kept secret from everybody except the O. G., were scattered around Washington in gimcrack temporary government buildings left over from the First World War, or in offices with the names of fictitious organizations painted on the doors, or in private houses in discreet residential neighborhoods. This milieu, in which daring undertakings were planned and spacious ideas were discussed in mean little rooms by ardently ambitious men who were mostly very young, preserved a wartime atmosphere long after World War II was over. This was exactly what the O. G. wanted.
“Nooks and crannies, visibility zero—that’s the ticket,” he said. “The day we move into a big beautiful building with landscaped grounds and start hanging portraits of our founders is the day we begin to die.”
The O. G. himself worked in a disused town house on a wooded knoll above the Potomac River. Until the last elderly member died during the fatter days of the Franklin Roosevelt Administration, this had been the clubhouse of the Society of Euhemerus, made up of men directly descended in the male line from the original American colonists, and the ceilings were frescoed with scenes showing Bradfords, Oglethorpes, Newports, and other members of the nation’s First Families in heroic postures. The watercolor on the O. G.’s ceiling depicted Squanto, a heap of dead mackerel at his feet, teaching Myles Standish and John Alden how to plant and fertilize corn.
“My Uncle Snowden called this picture ‘the parable of the oafs and the fishes,’ “ the O. G. told Patchen on his first day on the job. “He was the one who got the club to leave this place to the government. Do you know who Euhemerus was?”
“No, sir.”
“He was a Greek who believed that the gods were originally human heroes. Hence the members of the Society were descendants of the American gods, who were, unfortunately, as yet undeified.”
It was a humid August day, and the tall french windows were open, admitting a feeble river breeze. The O. G.’s office, a vaulted room with three exposures, was located at the top of the house. He stepped out onto a small balcony and gestured to Patchen to follow. The view from the balcony was famous: you could see the whole length of the Mall, from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol. Beyond this, the unroiled Potomac flowed between grassy banks.
“Washington,” the O. G. said with a wave of the hand; he wore a gold ring with the seal of the Society of Euhemerus on his left little finger. “What do you think of it?”
“I like it,” Patchen replied.
“Good for you. Not many people appreciate it.”
Patchen was genuinely surprised to hear this. “Why not?”
“It’s not fashionable—it’s a backwater. You’re just supposed to serve your time here with complaining while waiting to be sent to Paris or Vienna or London.”
“I think it’s beautiful. I feel at home here.”
This was true. On arriving in Washington, although Patchen had never visited the place before, he had felt a puzzling sense of homecoming. He liked to walk at night along Constitution Avenue, past the massive city-within-a-city of silent, deserted Greco-Roman government buildings. At such times he felt like an archeologist transported by time machine to an Athens or Rome that had not yet been informed of the glories that awaited it. Washington was like the site for the capital of a world empire that had not yet come into existence; it was pregnant with the history of the future. Or so it seemed to Patchen on his lonely midnight walks; he did not confess these high-flown thoughts to the O. G., who had been chatting to him as his mind wandered.
“I’ve always liked this town, too, except for the climate,” the O. G. was saying. “It’s something like Weimar must have been in the time of Goethe. Big old houses filled with toadies and arrivistes, all wanting the same things—the ear of the prince, membership in the inner circle, decorations to wear to each other’s fancy dress balls. There’s no real conversation, just gossip, but there are good paintings in the museums, some pretty darn good chamber music, amateur theatricals—even, until Franklin Roosevelt passed away, a benevolent prince. But no Goethe. Anyway, I’m glad you like Washington, because this is where you’re going to be for the rest of your career.”
“No hope of Paris or London?”
“Nope. You’re a born headquarters man.”
The O. G. did not explain this statement. He was famous for his impulsive judgments. As Patchen himself would say years later, when he knew him better than anyone alive, the old man decided everything between his pelvis and his collarbone. He meant this as a compliment: any damn fool could be an intellectual.
“You’re going to work for me, and only for me, right next door,” he said. “Does that suit you?”
“Yes, sir,” Patchen replied. “It does.”
“I’ll work you like a slave, but you’ll be right at the hub of events, and if I’m right about you, you’ll go up and up. Do you like .that trade-off?”
“Sounds fine to me.”
“Then let’s get started.”
He showed Patchen his new office, a musty cell lighted by a single horizontal aperture, like a cellar window, just below the ceiling. It adjoined the O. G.’s office, to which it was connected by a low door, plastered and set flush with the wall. The room was furnished with a battered metal desk, a straight chair, a gooseneck lamp, a wastebasket with the word BURN stenciled on the side, and a chipped Waterford crystal tumbler filled with sharpened yellow pencils. The dead air smelled of fresh pencil shavings. Enormous steel double doors led into a vault that was somewhat larger than the cubbyhole itself.
“This is where Uncle Snowden and his fellow Euhemerians used to hang their togas,” the O. G. said. “Not much air or light, but it’s got location.”
