Twinkle Twinkle Little Spy

Mann took my arm and led me from the room, closing the door silently and with exaggerated care. I didn’t speak as we both walked downstairs to my sitting-room. Mann took off his dark raincoat and bundled it up to throw it into a corner. From upstairs there came the sudden crash of Shostakovich. Mann closed the door to muffle it.

I walked over to the window, so that I could look down into Washington Square. It was sunny: the sort of New York City winter’s day when the sun coaxes you out without your long underwear, so that the cross-town wind can slice you into freeze-dried salami. Even the quartet echo-singing under the Washington arch had the hoods of their parkas up. But no street sounds came through the double-glazing; just soft Shostakovich from upstairs. Mann sat in my most comfortable chair and picked up the carbon of my report. I could tell that he’d already been to his office and perused the overnights. He gave my report no more than a moment or two, then he lifted the lid of my pigskin document case and put a fingertip on the Hart and Greenwood files that had arrived by special messenger in the early hours. They were very thin files.

‘The car had a foreign consul plate?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘And you read that stuff on the telex?’

‘The two Russians are staying in a house leased to the Second Secretary of the Soviet Trade Delegation … Yes, I read it, but that doesn’t make them KGB or even diplomatic. They might just be visiting relatives, or subtenants or squatters or something.’

Mann said, ‘I’d like to bring in the owners of that car and sweat them.’

‘And what would you charge them with? Leaving the scene of an accident?’

‘Very funny,’ said Mann. ‘But the foreign consul plate on that car ties them to the stick-up artists.’

‘You mean KGB heavies lend their official car to three hoods?’

Mann pouted and shook his head slowly, as if denying a treat to a spoiled child. ‘Not the way you’d arrange it, maybe,’ he said. ‘But there was no reason for them to think it would all foul up. They figured it would be a pushover, and the official car would provide them with the kind of getaway that no cop would dare stop. It was a good idea.’

‘That went wrong.’

‘That went wrong.’ He ran his fingers through the urgent paperwork inside my document case. ‘Are we going to get some of this junk down the chute today?’

‘Does that “we” mean you’re about to break the seal on a new box of paper-clips?’

Mann smiled.

I put the case beside me on the sofa and began to sort it into three piles: urgent, very urgent and phone.

Mann leaned over the sofa back. He lifted a corner of the neatly stacked documents, each one bearing a coloured marking slip that explained to me what I was signing. Mann sucked his teeth. ‘Those typewriter commandos downstairs don’t know a microdot from a Playboy centrefold but give them a chance to bury you in paperwork and – goddamn, what an avalanche!’ He let the paperwork slip out of his hands with enough noise to illustrate this theory.

I moved the trayful of papers before Mann decided to repeat his demonstration; already the slips and paper-clips were falling apart.

‘Well, I’ll leave you to it,’ Mann said. ‘I’ve got to catch an airplane. Anybody wants me tell them to try the Diplomat Hotel, Miami, Florida.’

‘Don’t use your right name,’ I said.

‘I won’t even be there, bird-brain. That’s just being set up.’

I reached for the first pile of paperwork.

‘Before I go,’ Mann said still standing in the doorway watching me, ‘Bessie says will you spend Christmas with us.’

‘Great,’ I said without looking up from my desk work.

‘I’d better warn you that Bessie is asking that girl Red Bancroft along … Bessie is a matchmaker …’

‘You’re checking out a place to hide Bekuv, aren’t you?’ I said.

Mann bared his teeth in the sort of fierce grimace that he believes is a warm and generous smile.

I worked on until about noon and then one of the I-Doc people looked in. ‘Where’s Major Mann?’

‘Out.’ I continued to go through the documents.

‘Where did he go?’

‘No idea,’ I said without looking up.

‘You must know.’

‘Two little guys in white coats came in and dragged him out with his feet kicking.’

‘There’s a phone call,’ said the man from downstairs. ‘Someone asking for you.’ He looked round the room to be sure I wasn’t hiding Mann anywhere. ‘I’ll tell the switchboard to put it through.’

‘There’s a caller named Gerry Hart coming through on the Wall Street line,’ the operator told me. ‘Do you want us to patch it through to here, and connect you?’

‘I’ll take it,’ I said. If it had taken Hart only twenty-four hours to winkle-out the phone number of the merchant bank in Wall Street that I was using as my prime cover, how long would it take to prise open the rest of it? I pushed the police documentation to one side. ‘Let’s have lunch,’ suggested Hart. His voice had the sort of warm resonance contrived by men who spend all day speaking on the telephone.

‘Why?’

‘There’s a development.’

‘Talk to my boss.’

‘Tried that, but he’s in Miami.’ Hart’s tone of voice made it clear that he didn’t believe that Mann was in Miami.

‘You could just make that flight where they serve free champagne in tourist,’ I suggested.

‘You really in Wall Street? Or are they patching this to some number in Langley, Virginia?’ He gave a little chuckle.

‘What’s on your mind, Gerry?’

‘Listen! I wanted to avoid Mann. It’s you I want to talk to. Spare me thirty minutes over a cream-cheese sandwich. You know the Cookery? – University Plaza? Say one o’clock? Don’t tell Mann – just you alone.’

He had chosen a restaurant about as close to the CIA safe house in Washington Square as it was possible to get. It could have been a coincidence – the Cookery was one of my favourite haunts, and Gerry Hart might well know that – but I had a feeling that he was trying to cut me down to size before hitting me with his proposition. ‘OK,’ I said.

‘I wear a moustache nowadays. Will you be able to recognize me?’ he said. ‘I’ll be reading today’s New York Times.’

‘You mean with two peep-holes cut in the front page?’

‘Just make sure you don’t bring Captain America with you,’ said Hart and rang off.

Gerry Hart pinched his trousers at the knees, so that he wasn’t putting any strain on his twelve-ounce wool-and-mohair suit. That done, he eased his shirt sleeves far enough to reveal his cufflinks, but not so far that his black-faced Pulsar wrist-watch was hidden. The file said he was an authority on New Orleans jazz. ‘Can’t be all bad,’ Mann had remarked at the time.

‘I’m in politics now,’ Hart said. ‘Did you know that?’

‘I thought perhaps you were playing the horses.’

‘You always had a great sense of humour.’ He smiled for just a fraction of a second. ‘I’m not so touchy as I used to be in the old days,’ he said. He fingered his new moustache self-consciously. I noticed the manicured fingernails. He’d come a long way from that nervous, opinionated State Department clerk that I remembered from our first meeting.

The drinks came. I put extra Tabasco into my Bloody Mary and then offered the same to Gerry. He shook his head. ‘Plain tomato juice doesn’t need flavouring,’ he said primly. ‘And I’m certainly surprised you need it with all that vodka.’

‘My analyst says it’s a subconscious desire to wash my mouth out with disinfectant.’

Hart nodded. ‘Well, you have a lot of politician in you,’ he said.

‘You mean I approach every problem with an open mouth,’ I said. I drank quite a lot of my Bloody Mary. ‘Yes, well, if I decide to run, I’ll come and talk to you.’

I knew it would be foolish to upset Hart before I knew what was in his mind. His file said he was a 31-year-old lawyer from Connecticut. I regarded him as one of the first of that growing army of young men who had used a few years’ service in the CIA as a stepping-stone to other ambitions, as at one time the British middle classes had used the Brigade of Guards.

Hart was short and saturnine, a handsome man with curly hair and the sort of dark circles under deep-set eyes that made you think he was sleepy. But Gerry Hart was a tough kid who didn’t smoke and didn’t drink, and if he was sleepy it was only because he stayed up late at night rewriting the inaugural address he’d deliver to Congress on the day he became President.

Hart sipped a little of his tomato juice, and wiped his mouth carefully before speaking. ‘I handle more top-secret material now than I did when I was working for the company – would you believe that?’

‘Yes,’ I said. Gerry Hart liked to refer to the CIA as ‘the company’ to emphasize that he had been on the inside. His file didn’t mention service in the CIA but that didn’t mean a thing.

‘Did you ever hear of the 1924 Society?’ he asked me.

‘I’d rather hear about it from you,’ I said.

‘Right,’ said Hart.

The waitress came to the table with the menus. ‘Don’t go away,’ he told her. He ran his eye quickly down the list. ‘Club sandwich, mixed salad with French dressing, regular coffee, and I’ll take the check. OK?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said the waitress.

‘The same,’ I said. That made Gerry Hart feel very secure, and I wanted him to feel very secure.

The waitress closed her pad and took the menus from us. She came back with our order almost immediately. Hart smiled at her.

‘We have penetrated the 1924 Society. That’s why we can do it,’ Gerry Hart explained when she had gone.

‘What’s inside a club sandwich?’ I said. ‘Do what?’

‘Bring Mrs Bekuv here.’

‘Is it like a triple-deck sandwich?’

‘Bring Mrs Bekuv out of the USSR, officially or unofficially.’

‘How?’

‘What do you care how?’

I took the top off my sandwich and examined the filling. ‘We don’t have club sandwiches in England,’ I explained.

‘Even Greenwood hasn’t been told that this is a CIA operation,’ Hart said. ‘Sure, we’ll try to get Bekuv’s wife by asking the Russians through the Senate Scientific Development sub-committee but if they won’t play, we’ll make it work some other way.’

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