Second sight, p.13
Second Sight, page 13
He walked into the open vault. There were other safes within this safe, battered olive-drab file cabinets fitted with combination dials; these were stacked one on top of the other. After climbing a library ladder, the O. G. opened one, working the combination from memory, and rummaged in a drawer. He withdrew a stack of files stamped in carmine with the words TOP SECRET • EYES ONLY • NOFORN.
“Here,” he said. “Read these and tell me whether you think these fellows have got any chance of bringing this operation off.”
Patchen switched on the gooseneck lamp and began to read. It took him hours to work his way through the jumbled files, in which significant passages were sometimes separated by thirty or forty pages of seemingly irrelevant cables, dispatches, letters, and reports written in dense bureaucratic prose. The various parts had been contributed by many different people, some of them foreigners who had only begun to learn English, some of them Americans who had mastered the esoteric vocabulary of the inner government so thoroughly that their sentences were incomprehensible to anyone but another initiate. Neither human beings nor places went under their own names in these documents, but were identified instead by pseudonyms which sounded like real names, by cryptonyms which were gibberish, or sometimes by numbers or a combination of numbers and letters.
In the end Patchen understood, or thought he understood, that he had been reading the raw files of a plan to set up a network in Berlin, using the Russian-speaking daughters and widows of men who had been killed by the Communists to become the mistresses of high-ranking Soviet officers and entice them to reveal secrets. Many girls had already expressed interest in the scheme; it was thought that they would be both effective and reliable because they were motivated by hatred and revenge. Those who succeeded in trading sex for military secrets would be given new identities and allowed to emigrate to the United States.
“Well, what do you think?” the O. G. asked when Patchen knocked and entered the O. G.’s larger office.
“I think the idea is all right,” Patchen replied. “But I think the operation itself is a recipe for disaster.”
“Do you? Why’s that?”
“We’ll either get caught or get burned. The Russians must keep a close eye on their generals, and if two or three of them suddenly acquire good-looking young mistresses who all speak Russian, they may regard that as a suspicious circumstance.”
“True. Anything else?”
“There’s nothing in the files to suggest we’ve investigated the girls.”
“That would be very difficult. They’re all displaced persons from inside Russian-occupied Europe.”
“You mean we picked them up on the streets and accepted their stories on faith?”
The 0. G. nodded. “That’s about the size of it.”
“So all we really know about them is that they speak Russian and they’re willing to sell their bodies in the cause of freedom.” “Yep.”
“Then how do we know the Russians aren’t sending these girls to us?”
“Why would they do that?”
“So that they can feed us false and misleading information through the girls. I think we should get rid of them and whoever introduced us to them, and then begin over again and concentrate.”
The O. G. had been listening intently. “Concentrate on what?”
“New girls, just plain whores with no political motivation,” Patchen said. “The targets should be younger Russians—captains, majors, lieutenant-colonels. Men young enough to think with their peckers. The girls should act like virgins, make the Russians fall in love with them. Then the girl says, ‘Prove your love and I’ll sleep with you. Bring me some little thing from your unit, a photograph of your tank, a telephone book, something written in Russian.’ Then, when they’re hooked, we move in and threaten to expose them unless they play ball. Some may know useful things right ńow. Others may be useful for the future.”
The O. G. poured himself a glass of water from the thermos’ pitcher on his desk, and drank.
“Want some?” he asked, pointing to the pitcher.
Patchen nodded, poured himself a full glass, and drank thirstily; the O. G. watched him.
“The moral question doesn’t trouble you?” he asked.
Patchen said, “What moral question?”
“Turning girls into whores. Blackmail.”
“No. As you say, it’s just a case of finding out what people want to do and making it possible for them to do it.”
The O. G. gazed at him for several seconds in great seriousness. Then he threw back his head and laughed.
“I was right, by golly,” he said. “I saw that you had your head screwed on straight up in Boston, over the codfish cakes. Couldn’t believe my luck.”
“May I ask why, sir?”
“Because. Son, you’re a skeptic and you say what you think. I’ve got all the enthusiasts I need around here.”
Thereafter the O. G. and Patchen were together all day every working day from seven in the morning until whatever hour the O. G. went home. He met everyone the O. G. met, heard everything the O. G. heard, went with him to lunch every day. At the end of the day he rode with him to his house above Rock Creek Park, absorbing instructions that would require another two or three hours of work after he dropped the old man off.
The O. G. called Patchen “Son”; Patchen never called him anything but “Sir.” Gradually, as his powers grew, Patchen became known and feared throughout the Outfit, but his duties and his position were never defined. Others thought that he operated outside the apparatus; in fact he was implanted so deeply within it as to be detached from its rules. At Harvard, Patchen had been a familiar but nameless figure; men in the Outfit who had been there at the same time remembered him because of his appearance, though few had ever known who he was. It was a puzzle to them why the O. G. preferred this grotesque outsider without background or connections to themselves.
As more and more prankish operations were disapproved before they could begin, many thought that Patchen was exercising a puritanical influence over the sunny nature of the O. G., that he was systematically robbing the Outfit of its schoolboy élan. One disappointed officer tried to saddle him with the nickname “Rasputin,” but a cleverer rival gave him a crueler name, “The One-Eyed Man.” It stuck.
Patchen did not object to the nickname because the proverb it came from—”In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,”—expressed so aptly the situation in which he perceived himself to be from the first day he opened a secret operational file until his last day on duty.
2
ONLY DAYS AFTER HE STARTED HIS NEW JOB, PATCHEN CAME THROUGH the door and found Paul Christopher seated in front of the O. G.’s desk.
“I think you fellows know each other,” the
O. G. said. “Sit down next to your rescuer, Son.”
Rescuer? Patchen did not understand the allusion. The O. G. went right on talking.
“Paul is going out to Indochina,” he said, pausing to light his pipe. He gave Christopher a confiding nod. “David knows all about it.”
This was true, in the sense that Patchen had studied the details of an operational plan that involved penetrating the Vietminh, as the guerrilla force fighting the French in Vietnam was called, in order to try to find out what its resources, tactics, and fighting spirit were. But the penetration agent had been identified by a pseudonym; Patchen had no idea that Christopher had also been recruited into the Outfit, much less that he was the agent in question. It was a very dangerous assignment; both the Vietminh and the French were likely to kill any American who got between them.
“I want you two to work with me on this,” the O. G. said. “No desk officer—just the three of us.”
“What about Waddy?” Christopher asked.
Wadsworth Jessup, Alice Hubbard’s brother, was already in Hanoi, and the operational plan called for Christopher to report to him.
“Be kind to Waddy,” the O. G. said. “Carry out his schemes with due regard for your own neck; observe the niceties. But Waddy’s schemes aren’t the reason for the trip.”
The mechanism in a long-case clock standing against the wall whirred but did not strike; the O. G. kept it wound even though the chimes had been disconnected. The O. G. always ate his lunch at noon precisely, and now, as the clockwork clicked out the hour, they heard the rattle of china and glassware as a trolley from the kitchen approached his doors. So that the waiter would not see Christopher, he and Patchen went into Patchen’s cell while the luncheon table was set up.
In Patchen’s cell, he and Christopher exchanged amused smiles. “I guess I’m not supposed to say this is a pleasant surprise,” Patchen said.
“Or ‘fancy meeting you here,’ “ Christopher replied. “How was Paris?”
“All right. Martha is here in Washington. We’ve just bought a house. Can you have supper with us tonight?”
“If I can bring a girl.”
“Bring her. She and Martha can discuss the issues of the day.”
They smiled again. Christopher’s girls, invariably pretty, invariably earnest, invariably defenders of one political faith or another, had seldom warmed up to Patchen, or he to them.
The O. G. flung open the door to his office; a table was laid by the fireplace with a white cloth, dishes, and silver.
“There’s a pretty nice rockfish out here,” he said. “How about helping me eat it? I’ll be Mother.”
He fileted the grilled fish expertly, spooned asparagus and halved lemons onto the plates, and handed them around. Like the dented silver platters and the knives and forks, the china bore the seal of the Society of Euhemerus, a golden column surrounded by a wreath of Greek letters.
“Can you read the Greek, Paul?” the O. G. asked.
Christopher pushed his food aside with his knife and studied the seal. “ ‘Sacred scripture?’ “
“Correct. That’s how I want you fellows to communicate after Paul gets out there—in Greek cipher.”
“I don’t read Greek,” Patchen said.
“No need to,” the O. G. said. “All you have to do is learn the Greek alphabet—a morning’s work. During the Indian Mutiny British officers sent hundreds of secret messages to each other through enemy country by writing plain English in the Greek alphabet. The code was never cracked.”
The O. G. poured water into chipped crystal goblets. After their first lunch together Patchen never saw him drink wine again in daylight. The Montrachet he had ordered in Boston was meant to help him, Patchen, relax.
“The Brits all know about the Greek cipher,” the O. G. said. “It was a jolly prank on the Wogs in addition to being useful. I knew a villain of a Brit who seduced the young wife of an American millionaire and used the Greek cipher to write her indecent letters describing their assignations. The husband found the letters, all tied up in a blue ribbon, got suspicious, and asked a Greek he knew to translate them. The Greek read every page, lingering here and there over an especially fine passage, then handed the letters back. ‘This is a translation of Alice in Wonderland,’ said the Greek, a fellow of some wisdom and experience. ‘The letters are from your wife’s teacher. She must be a remarkable woman—this is a most ingenious way to learn a foreign language.’ The Greek dined out on the story for years afterward.”
Before he spoke again the O. G. finished his lunch, working rapidly with his knife in his right hand and his fork in his left, bolting the food like a European. Then leaned back in his chair and lighted his pipe, studying his guests over the flare of the match.
“Ever heard of the Quoc Hoc School?” he asked.
The two younger men shook their heads.
“Famous high school in Hue, the imperial capital of Vietnam,” the O. G. said. “Quoc Hoc is the womb of the revolution. Half the Vietminh went there—Ho Chi Minh among others. With darn few exceptions, every one of them came from a good bourgeois family. And thereby hangs a tale.”
The O. G. taught by parable, and the tales he told often came out of his own experience. The moral was always the same: things done on impulse always turn out better than things done by calculation.
“During the war,” the O. G. said, meaning the First World War, in which he had enlisted as an aviator while still in his teens and long before the United States became a belligerent, “I was posted to a French squadron for a while, flying Spads. Under the French system, every officer had a servant, and mine was this little Tonkinese fellow, no bigger than an American twelve-year-old and a lot less hairy. His name was Vo, and Vo was the worst servant in the squadron. He was always reading; another reason why he and Paul will get along. Vo would get lost in a book and forget to shine your boots or whatever. He’d had a hell of a time, fellows kicking him in the pants for lollygagging and so forth, but I thought he was all right. One morning I caught him reading Rousseau by the dawn’s early light instead of heating up my shaving water, so I had to go up and search for the Red Baron without a shave. When I got back, he acted like he expected something pretty bad from me, but all I did was take him aside and talk to him about schedules. Had a hell of a time getting him to see my point.”
The O. G. lived by his schedule, believing that it set him free; by using his time according to a predetermined plan, he enjoyed a hundred little moments of satisfaction in the course of every day, and also quarantined himself from bores. He was a good mimic. Now, speaking French with a flat American accent while acting the character that had been himself at age nineteen, and the same language with a singsong intonation when playing the part of Vo, he reconstructed a conversation that took place thirty years before and three thousand miles away. He made himself large and earnest when he was the American, small and doubting when he was the Vietnamese. Finally Vo was convinced. The O. G. unstrapped his wristwatch, which Vo knew to be his most cherished possession because it had been given to him by his father, and gave it to the Vietnamese.
“Well, sir,” the O. G. said, returning to real time and place, “Vo started living by a schedule the very next morning, and by George, he liked it! Changed his life. The first benefit came immediately: he was out of trouble for not doing his duty, because he had plenty of time to do whatever was required of him with plenty more left over to read to his heart’s content. To make a long story short, Vo turned into a great scholar, which is the very highest and most respectable thing someone from his part of the world can be, and he went back to Hue and got a job teaching at Quoc Hoc School. He taught all those fellows that are out in the jungle now—taught ‘em Rousseau, who begat the Vietminh. That’s where it all began. How about some coffee?”
He poured muddy coffee, made according to the Euhemerian recipe by pouring boiling water into a bed of well-aged grounds to which a handful of fresh-ground coffee and an eggshell had been added. Cream poured into this liquid had no effect on its color, nor did sugar affect its taste. The O. G. drank a large cup of it, black, before he spoke again.
“Now this plan to penetrate the Vietminh is a good one,” he said. “There’s no telling what kind of information a smart young fellow might come back with, but information is funny stuff. In this game, there are lies, damn lies, and what you want to believe. What really counts is action, not words. Anyway, Vo’s boys are going to beat the French, so what interests us is not the present, about which we can do nothing, but the future, where we might possibly have some influence. Paul should get in as deep as he can with these Communists and still walk back out. Remember, they’re not simple peasants by a long shot. Keep eyes and ears open. Report all that stuff to Waddy. It’s a nice diversion.”
Eyes shining, the old man paused and looked from one young man to another.
“Diversion from what, sir?” Patchen asked.
“From Vo,” the O. G. said. “That’s Paul’s real target. There was an inscription on the back of that watch I gave him. ‘Sed fugit …inreparabile tempus—time is flying, never to return.’ Virgil. Look him up for me, Paul. Quote him the Virgil; he’ll remember. He knows who and what I am now or I don’t know Vo. If he doesn’t turn you away from the door, get him to teach you Vietnamese. Become his student—that’s the way to his heart. He must be thinking about the future, too. Find out what it is he wants to do, and let’s see if we can make it possible for him to do it.”
3
THE GIRL CHRISTOPHER BROUGHT TO DINNER AT THE PATCHENS’, AN intense young woman named Maria Custer, was enthralled by Martha’s adventure among the drunken Indians of Guatemala. She had just graduated from Vassar College.
“God, how I envy you,” she said after hearing about the guaro cult. “How did you ever find these amazing people? You are going back, aren’t you? You must be a legend to them. I mean, this white woman simply appearing out of the blue and binding up their wounds.”
“I’ve thought of going back,” Martha said, “but I have a husband now.”
“What difference does that make? You must go back—I mean, they must be waiting for you. Look at the Aztecs. Cortes conquered them in no time because they thought he was the golden-bearded god they had been waiting for. What was his Aztec name, Paul?”
Patchen answered the question. “Quetzalcoatl.”
“No, that’s wrong; Quetzalcoatl is the plumed serpent,” Maria said. “It starts with an ‘M.’ Malinche! That’s it!”
“That was what Montezuma called Cortés, because that was the name of Doña Marina, Cortés interpreter, and the two of them were always together,” Patchen said. “Quetzalcoatl had a long, dark beard.”
“Did he? Maybe that explains the confusion over names,” Maria said, smiling brightly as she waited for the interruption to end. She had very dark hair herself, set off dramatically by pale bluish skin. Her large, somewhat bulging eyes were placed very wide apart above high cheekbones. The hair was dyed, as Christopher realized when he encountered her a year or two later in Paris after it had gone back to its natural toast brown color.
