Second sight, p.18
Second Sight, page 18
“Yes,” Patchen said, “it is.”
Every one of Christopher’s Vietnamese enemies had been murdered one after the other within twenty-four hours after the small plane he hired strayed off course and crash-landed on Chinese territory. This handful of deaths, occurring among so many others, had hardly been noticed.
Patchen said, “You say they were killed after he was out of danger. Is it your opinion that being in the hands of the Chinese Communists is the same as being out of danger?”
“No one can reach him in one of their prisons,” Vo said. “Not Americans or Russians, and least of all Vietnamese.”
“Especially if he is in a Chinese grave.”
“Why would the Chinese kill him?” Vo asked. “They are glad to have him. A few years from now they can sell him to you for something they want. Then he will be free, they will be richer, and you will have paid your debt.”
“You’re happy he’s a prisoner,” Patchen said, truly surprised at his own thought.
“Of course I am,” Vo said. “Otherwise he would be dead.” Patchen shifted his weight, and the movement of his stiff body made both sampans rock.
“Are you suggesting that all this was arranged as a rescue?” he asked.
“That would imply that a very, very clever person made the plan.” “Who?”
“Someone who loved our friend and wanted to save his life.” “You?”
Vo smiled benevolently. “I wish I could say yes. But no, this was someone with powerful friends, money, debts that he could call in _ for payment.”
The two sampans bumped softly at the gunwales. Nothing else stirred. In the seamless Vietnamese night, sky and river were the same shade of black; water, air, and human skin the same degree of temperature. Patchen felt immersed in Vietnam, the subject of some biological process, like gestation or coma, that could only come to an end in its own natural time.
“Where will you look?” Vo asked.
“For what?” Patchen said.
“For the person who did this. For the explanation.”
“Closer to home, if you’re right in thinking that Paul’s friends did this to him, instead of his enemies.”
“And if I’m right and. you decide what this person did was a good thing, what then?”
All the more reason to kill the bastard, Patchen thought. But he said, “I’m not sure motivation is the question. Everything is a matter of trust, in the end.”
“Quite true,” Vo said. “And now I think we should say goodnight.”
Patchen reached into the other boat and shook hands. “You’ve been a great help,” he said. “Thank you.”
“It was a pleasure to see you at last after knowing you for such a long time in Paul’s poem.”
“The one you quoted?”
“No, another one. It’s one of my favorites.”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s about one soldier saving another’s life in battle,” Vo replied. “Both are wounded, but the rescued one is blinded. He thinks his rescuer may be Death. The rescuer can’t see, either, because the night is so dark. He is struck by bullets. He wants to lie down beside the other man and die. He makes himself go on by imagining that he is carrying his wounded father toward a reunion with his mother, who has been lost for a long time. The battle sounds to him like the roaring of lions in a dream he had as a child. The last line was very difficult to render in Vietnamese: ‘German is the only language that lions understand.’ It would have been better, for the Vietnamese ear, to substitute ‘Chinese’ and ‘tiger.’ But when I translated it he insisted on a literal rendering. Paul was always on the side of the original meaning.”
INTERLUDE
BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS
ON PATCHEN’S BIRTHDAY, A WEEK AFTER HIS WALK ALONG THE MALL with Christopher, the O. G. gave a supper for him. The only other guest was Christopher, and the three men sat down at ten o’clock, hours after the rest of Washington had dined. The food was cold, smoked trout accompanied by a sentimental bottle of Montrachet, followed by rare roast beef and raw vegetables and a decanted Bordeaux that had been breathing in a beaker for precisely one half-hour. The O. G. had converted the entire basement of his house into a wine cellar, refrigerated to a perpetual fifty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, and installed a heating and cooling system in the dining room that maintained a temperature suitable to the red wine being served.
Tonight the thermostat on the wall was set at sixty-six degrees. The O. G. filled Patchen’s glass.
“All right,” he said, and stepped back with an air of expectation.
Omitting the usual eucharistic flourishes of the wine taster, Patchen sniffed and sipped in a matter of two seconds. “Château Pétrus, 1961,” he said.
“Hurrah,” said the O. G., greatly pleased by the correct identification—after all, he had given Patchen his first glass of wine, all those years ago in Boston. “Happy birthday. I’ve only got six cases of this left—enough to get you through your sixties if you take care of your health.”
Patchen was almost never stumped by a wine. He had an exceptionally keen sense of taste and, provided it was served at the correct temperature, which was almost never the case when he dined anywhere but at the O. G.’s, he could readily identify any French wine by region and château, and, in the case of great vintages, by year.
Patchen’s beeper went off and he left the room to talk on the secure telephone in the O. G.’s library that was one of the perquisites of being a former Director. They both knew he was calling the duty officer on the ad hoc Beautiful Dreamers desk to check on developments.
The O. G. believed, though he had never mentioned this to Patchen, that the latter’s extraordinary palate was a compensation for the loss of his left eye. He took advantage of his absence to pay him a compliment. “David tastes wine,” he said, “like a blind man reads Braille.”
Christopher smiled politely and said nothing in return; although he knew what the O. G. meant, he thought in his writerly way that this was a strange way of putting it. Did he taste it with his fingertips?
Usually the O. G. scrupulously avoided any talk about old times in Christopher’s presence. Tonight, however, while Patchen lingered on the telephone, he departed from habit.
“I don’t want to rouse painful memories,” he said, “but David tells me you say that the important question about this Beautiful Dreamers business is not how or what or even who, but the everlasting ‘why?’. It took me back.”
“Took you back?” Christopher said. “Where to?”
“To your great days as a thorn in the side of the mighty. You said the same blessed thing when the President was assassinated all those years ago—forget about puffs of smoke on the grassy knoll and all that folderol, just find out why. And look what that led to.”
For a long moment Christopher watched the O. G.’s amiable, unreadable old face. Then he said, “What did it lead to?”
“I’m not sure I know. What’s your opinion?”
“Nothing,” Christopher said. “It led to nothing.”
“I thought that might be the way you felt about it.” The O. G. compressed his lips. “But it led to ten years in a Chinese jail for you and disgrace and death for Barney Wolkowicz. For the Outfit that was like losing Ruth and Gehrig in a train wreck. Most people would say all that adds up to more than zero.”
The O. G. wasn’t smiling. This was such a rare event that it changed the whole atmosphere. Christopher was surprised by the O. G.’s peevishness, and by the direction this conversation was taking. The O. G. had never before mentioned his imprisonment in China or the reasons behind it.
“All that came of asking the question, ‘Why?’,” the O. G. said.
“I’m not saying the question shouldn’t have been asked in that case, but most people sure as shooting didn’t want it answered.” “As far as I know, it never was answered,” Christopher said. “No, by golly. But that wasn’t for lack of trying on your part.” “Then maybe you should have given me the benefit of all this worldly wisdom at the time.”
In fact the O. G. had made it plain that he did not want to know anything about Christopher’s theory or his operations while they were going on; he let Patchen handle it.
“Sometimes I wish I had given you a talking to,” the O. G. said. His frown lifted; his customary carefree twinkle returned. “But that’s water under the bridge. Anyway, I know you: You wouldn’t have listened; you were too busy romancing the eternal verities. And besides, I respected your instincts; they were the best instincts, in the business, except, maybe, for Wolkowicz’s. He must be burning in Hell, poor fellow … What’s keeping David?”
The O. G. heaved himself out of his chair and fetched a bowl of walnuts and a silver tray holding a carafe of port wine and four glasses from the sideboard, where the dirty dishes were stacked. They were alone in the house, and the O. G. had buttled the supper himself.
Patchen returned, closing the door swiftly behind him so as not to let the heat in. “All quiet on the western front,” he said, sitting down and spreading his napkin over his lap.
“No new victims?” the O. G. said.
“Not yet.” Patchen looked his friends over. “Why the long faces?” he asked. “What have you been talking about?”
“Paul’s ability to see things that others don’t,” the O. G. replied. “And the consequences thereof.”
“No wonder you’re glum.”
“You used to believe in this gift of Paul’s,” the O. G. said. “Do you still think he’s got second sight?”
“I wouldn’t call it that,” Patchen said.
“All right, then—blood wisdom.”
“ ‘Fucking genius’ is what Wolkowicz called it,” Patchen said. “I don’t think Paul has lost it, whatever it was. Although a hell of a lot good that does anybody since he won’t use it.”
“You don’t mean it,” the O. G. said. “Look what Paul’s done already. Pointed the way.”
“That’s true,” Patchen said, pouring himself a glass of port and sliding the bottle across the table to Christopher. “My apologies, Paul. You’re a patriot after all.”
“Well, then,” the O. G. said, “we’re unanimous, with Paul not voting. He’s still able to say the sooth. He’s asked the right question and made the right suggestion to clear up this Beautiful Dreamer business. So let’s shake a leg and get going.” He rubbed his hands together so briskly that the other two could hear the chafing of skin. He said, “Boy, this is going to be fun.”
“What is?” Christopher said.
“Building a better mousetrap,” the O. G. replied. “Catching this fellow by the tail, Paul, and asking him why he’s been running up our pants leg. But how do we do it? What kind of cheese do we need? That’s where you come in.”
“Oh, no I don’t,” Christopher said.
The O. G. ignored Christopher’s protest. “You’ve done it before, Paul—picture book stuff,” he said. “Tell us how you’d do it again.”
The O. G. radiated enthusiasm. He hadn’t gotten to be the grand old man of dirty tricks by taking “no” for an answer from reluctant collaborators. Christopher shook his head in amused recognition; he had seen this virtuoso performance many times before.
Now, raising his eyebrows to summon forth Christopher’s answer, the O. G. cracked a walnut, ate the meat to clear his tongue of the taste of the splendid Pomerol he had just finished drinking, and lifted his glass.
“To the next time,” he said.
Christopher did not drink. “Uncle,” he said, “I wouldn’t do it again for all the rice in China.”
“Then I guess you’ll have to do it for some other reason,” the O. G. replied, lifting his glass of port an inch higher. “Absent friends,” he said.
They all drank. The O. G.’s eyes misted behind his pince-nez like a headmaster standing before his school’s roll of old boys who had died in a war just ended. Then he recovered. “Now, Paul, David,” he said. “Put on your thinking caps. How are we going to smear cold cream on this invisible man so we can see what he’s up to?”
In spite of himself, out of some troublesome old code he had thought was foresworn and gone forever, Christopher answered the question.
“There you are!” the O. G. said. “Simple as pie, if you’ve got the mind for the Work.”
III
PEOPLE OF THE BOOK
ONE
1
ON THE MORNING AFTER THE MEETING WITH VO RAU, AS SOON AS IT was light, Patchen and Wolkowicz took off from Da Nang in an Outfit plane and headed out to sea. It was Wolkowicz’s aircraft. In Outfit terms, Vietnam was Wolkowicz’s country because he was in charge of operations there. Christopher had been kidnapped—if that was what had happened—in Vietnam, on Wolkowicz’s territory: “On my watch,” he had told Patchen, mocking the naval slang affected by some who had gone from the quarantine of Yale to the quarantine of Headquarters, bypassing what Wolkowicz regarded as real life.
Patchen looked out the window. Below the wings of the aircraft, in the South China Sea, junks and other unwieldy sailing vessels moved so slowly over the water that they left no wakes. Wolkowicz had told him that he wanted to talk about Christopher. What more was there to say? He was gone; he was beyond the Outfit’s reach. There were some things Patchen was not prepared to say on this subject, especially to Wolkowicz. Patchen had never really believed Christopher’s theory about the assassination of the President. It was too symmetrical. It was too much like Christopher himself: poetic, intelligent, subtle, logical. It was a morality tale in which the sin of pride is punished by a terrible act of vengeance. But these were not the only reasons why Patchen doubted the theory. He knew things Christopher had not known; he suspected people Christopher had trusted. He thought that someone had led Christopher in the direction of his strengths and virtues to a false but irresistible conclusion. There could be only one reason for such a dazzling act of intellectual jujitsu: to create a diversion, to lead investigators away from the true explanation, away from the real reason, away from the people truly responsible. Only someone who knew Christopher intimately, who understood the way his mind worked, could have deceived him in this way.
“We’re here,” Wolkowicz said. He knocked on the bulkhead, opened the cockpit door, and ordered the pilot to fly in circles.
From an inside pocket Wolkowicz produced a wad of paper and photographs, separated them, and handed them over to Patchen one by one: a marked aircraft map of the Chinese island of Hainan, a dozen black-and-white snapshots of a large villa surrounded by a wall, and a sheet of foolscap on which a floor plan had been drawn and labeled in Vietnamese. These documents were slightly damp with Wolkowicz’s sweat.
Wolkowicz took the floor plan out of Patchen’s hand and pressed his blunt finger onto the penciled square that represented a windowless storeroom off the villa’s kitchen. “This is the room where Christopher is being held—for the moment,” he said. “He’ll be moved somewhere else in China tomorrow night.”
Patchen lifted his eye to Wolkowicz’s face. “What’s the source of all this gossip?” he asked.
“We try to keep our eyes and ears open,” Wolkowicz said. They were whispering; it was more efficient than shouting, and the bulkhead between them and the pilot was very thin. Patchen said, “What is the source?”
Wolkowicz opened his eyes wide. “If I didn’t trust the source I wouldn’t believe the report. But I do. Don’t worry about it. I want to talk to you about Christopher.”
“You’re already doing that.”
“Not yet I’m not. I want to go in and get him. Unmarked helicopters, shooters in civilian clothes.” He pointed to the documents. “We know the exact location of the house. We know exactly where Christopher is inside the house. We know there are six guards on duty—one at the front door, one at the back, one on the roof, three on the gate. I’ve got a team on full alert. I’ve got two black helicopters standing by, no markings, extra fuel tanks. Hainan is close—two hundred miles from Da Nang. We can go in the dark, be in and out in fifteen minutes. We can bring him back alive. Tonight. Tomorrow is too late.”
Listening to this, Patchen’s expression did not change. “Let me understand this,” he said. “You want to carry out a hostile military operation inside China.”
“Correction. I want to carry out a clandestine operation to extract a captured agent.”
“Christopher’s not an agent.”
“You’re absolutely right—he’s been off the payroll for three weeks. But what was he doing for fifteen years before that? Do you realize what he’s going to spill?”
“I realize what the Chinese could do if they captured a U. S. assault team on their territory. No.”
“No? You’re saying no? Why not?”
“You know why not. What’s the matter with you?”
Wolkowicz’s face, already flushed, grew angrier. “You’re asking me?” he said. “This guy is supposed to be your best friend.” “That’s right. At least he’s alive. You don’t think one of those six guards is going to shoot him rather than give him back?” “How do you know he’s alive? How do you know there are six guards?”
“You say your information is correct. I’m being polite.” “Don’t be. Just tell me your answer.”
“No,” Patchen replied. “The answer is no.”
Wolkowicz gave, him a look of deep contempt, but he did not argue. Then he pounded on the cockpit door.
“Home, James,” he said.
The plane stopped circling and headed back for Saigon.
As if nothing had happened, Wolkowicz got drinks out of the cooler—mineral water for Patchen, another beer for himself. “This is pretty goddamn funny when you think about it,” he said. Patchen did not ask what was so funny. He knew Wolkowicz’s techniques too well.
“You know what I think?” Wolkowicz asked.
“No,” Patchen said. “I don’t.”
They were still whispering.
