The Once and Future Spy, Page 3

  It would have been like Nate to suggest that they take a gander at the enemy before heading back up the Broad Way to Haarlem; he was by nature and instinct an adventurous soul who had the fears any sane man had but constantly tested himself against them. He and his friend would have climbed onto one of the parapets at Old Fort Amsterdam to gaze at the forest of masts off Staten Island. One of General Knox’s gunners, sunning himself next to his cannon, might have noticed Nate was an officer and decided to bait him.

  “Count the masts if you got the nerve.”

  Nate would have made a stab at it (there was never a challenge he wouldn’t rise to), but soon given up. There were too many.

  I can hear the gunner drawling, “How ‘bout you, Sergeant?”

  I can see Nate smiling that broad ear-to-ear grin of his and saying, “Go ahead, Stephen.”

  Stephen surely shook his head. “A man could lose his taste for rebellion counting the enemy.”

  The gunner would have laughed pleasantly. “We been countin’ them out with long glasses. Ten ships of the line, twenty frigates, seventy-three warships all told, another hundred fifty or so transports. Heard General Knox say as how this was the goldurnest force the lobsters ever sent ‘gainst anyone.”

  If I know my Nate, he would have remarked on the note of pride in the gunner’s voice. And he would have thought: He’s an optimist because he doesn’t know enough.

  It was about then that Nate and his friend Stephen heard the slow mournful beating of the kettledrum. The sound seemed to come from the bowling green, Nate’s old stamping ground; he had kicked around a football on the green when his company had been billeted there.

  “What’s that about?” Stephen asked.

  The gunner, a burly cordwainer from the Maine Territories, bit off a plug of tobacco and spit some juice onto the parapet. “Ain’t you heard? There’s gonna be a hangin’. Go ahead and watch if you got the stomach for it. There ain’t no charge.”

  Nate and Stephen surely exchanged looks here. Stephen, who at twenty-two was a year older than Nate and never let him forget it, said “I’m all for heading back.”

  Nate shook his head stubbornly. He had never seen a man executed, but he figured it was something he ought to know about. All the rebel officers fought with halters around their necks. Nate had torn out from the New York Weekly Post Boy the article describing the sentence imposed by a British judge on an Irish rebel. “You are to be hanged by the neck,” the judge had informed the condemned man, “but not until you are dead; for while you are still living your body is to be cut down, your bowels torn out and burned before your face, your head cut off, and your body divided into four quarters, your head and quarters to be at the King’s disposal; and may the Almighty God have mercy on your soul.”

  It was on the bowling green that Nate first spotted the Commander-in-Chief. He was chatting with his portly Commander of Artillery, General Knox. Nate had never set eyes on the Commander-in-Chief before, but he recognized him instantly. He was a heavy man, easily a head taller than anyone around him, with thick thighs and meaty hips and high cheekbones and a prominent nose. A black cockade jutted from the brim of his hat, indicating he was a general officer. He wore his hair powdered and tied back at the neck with a red ribbon, indicating he was a gentleman. He sat his horse as if he had been born on one.

  The Commander-in-Chief was not someone Nate was predisposed to. He had heard too many unpleasant stories about him: how he had been a land speculator back in Virginia; how he had married a rich widow for her money; how he had advertised in newspapers to recapture a runaway slave but had kept his name off the advertisement; how he had turned up, conspicuous in his officer’s uniform, when Congress was deciding on a Commander-in-Chief even though he hadn’t drilled a militia unit in fifteen years. It was whispered about that the tall Virginian wanted to be an American king, and Nate half believed it. On top of everything, he was clearly an amateur when it came to military matters; faced with an enemy expeditionary force that was said to number thirty-two thousand regulars (if you counted the mercenaries), the Virginian had committed the blunder of dividing his army, which numbered about twenty thousand and included a high percentage of inexperienced militiamen. It didn’t take a genius to understand that the military situation was desperate. But the Virginian, whose only experience came from some skirmishing in the forests of the Ohio during the Seven Years’ War, seemed oblivious to reality.

  Now I’ll do the execution:

  A NERVOUS CLEARING OF A DRY THROAT here; the author squirms at executions, even when they take place in the imagination.)

  A company of black-shirted Pennsylvania riflemen, and another of “shirtmen”—Virginia frontiersmen wearing fringed buckskin shirts and armed with long rifles so accurate it was said they could hit a target that a New England boy had to squint at to see—were drawn up on the green. Those who had hats wore them against the sun. A crude gibbet had been constructed not far from the statue of Farmer George (he normally had a Roman numeral III after his name) on a prancing horse. A thick rope neatly tied into a noose dangled from the gibbet. The muffled beat of the kettledrum faltered as an open-sided dray appeared on the Broad Way end of the green. The drummer boy, staring at the dray, had forgotten what he was there for. An officer kicked him in the ass. The drumbeat started up again.

  The dray was pulled onto the green by two beady-eyed oxen that kept their heads down in their yokes and drooled onto the cobblestones. Half a dozen armed shirtmen walked on either side of the dray. Nate noticed their rifles were fitted with bayonets and wondered where they had gotten them. Standing on the dray, his arms tied behind his back at the wrists, was Sergeant T. Hickey, until recently a member of the Commander-in-Chief’s personal bodyguard. He had been convicted, a woman whispered to Nate, of plotting with a group of local Tories to poison the man he was supposed to be guarding. There was talk that some peas the Virginian had by chance not eaten had killed the chickens they were thrown to.

  Maybe it was true, Nate reflected. But whose truth? Which truth?

  The condemned man, wearing homespun breeches and a dirty white collarless linen shirt open at the neck, struggled to keep his balance on the dray as it was pulled past Nate and Stephen and several hundred civilians who had come to witness the hanging. Next to Nate a man wearing a cooper’s canvas apron hoisted a small boy onto his shoulders so he could get a better view. Nate, in the front rank, studied the condemned man’s face. His cheek muscles twitched, his eyes darted from side to side, spittle dribbled from a quivering lower lip. Nate noticed a stain spreading around the man’s crotch, and I think, I imagine Nate thought: If it ever comes to that, I swear to God I will not lose control of myself.

  Nate repeated “I swear” out loud, almost as if he were taking an oath.

  The dray drew abreast of the Commander-in-Chief sitting impassively on his white mare, which was pawing playfully at the ground with her right front hoof. A general from central casting on a horse from central casting. (I know a historian is supposed to be above this kind of comment, but history desperately needs a giggle now and then. Humor me while I humor history.) The condemned man’s darting eyes caught a glimpse of a pine box. It dawned on him that he was looking at a coffin—at his coffin—and he spun around toward the Virginian on the white mare and cried out in a brittle voice, “Excellency, Excellency, have mercy on a poor sinner who is not eager to meet his Maker,” or words to that effect.

  Nate saw the Virginian’s patrician eyes narrow into slits and being not far away, he heard him comment to General Knox, “My tenderness has been often abused. Matters are too far advanced to sacrifice anything to punctilios.”

  (Punctilio/pΛnk’tiliaU:n. [pl. punctilios] a delicate point of ceremony; etiquette of such point; petty formality. The Virginian had a curious sense of punctilios!)

  The dray reached the gibbet. Hickey became aware of the dangling noose and sagged to his knees. Tears streamed down his cheeks and he started breathlessly hiccuping the way a chi
ld does when he cries too hard. Two shirtmen, tough cookies who looked as if they had seen their share of scalped corpses during the Indian Wars, climbed onto the dray. They grabbed Hickey under his armpits and hauled him, still hiccuping, to his feet. One of the shirtmen fitted the noose over the condemned man’s head and tightened it around his neck.

  Stephen tugged at Nate’s sleeve. “Come away,” he whispered, but Nate didn’t move.

  The crowd grew deathly quiet. The Virginian’s central casting horse snorted. General Knox, his maimed hand concealed in a silk scarf, nodded. An officer elbowed the drummer boy. The beat of the kettledrum quickened. The two shirtmen jumped down from the dray. Another shirtman whipped the flank of one of the oxen with a long white birch branch. The beast blew air through his lips and stood his ground. The shirtman cocked the branch. Hickey, watching from the dray, the noose tight around his neck, managed to scream “Mother!” between his hiccups. The branch swatted down across the oxen’s flank. The animal started forward, dragging the other oxen with him. Hickey tiptoed along the floorboards of the dray to keep his footing. Then he ran out of dray and dangled from the noose. A muted sigh, an exhaling of many breaths, came from the crowd. The hanging man developed an enormous bulge in his crotch, the result of an involuntary erection. The women present averted their eyes.

  The child on his father’s shoulders laughed nervously; he wasn’t at all sure what he was seeing.

  Nate felt an icy hand caress his spine. He raised his eyes to the pewter sky, to the pewter God, then obliged himself to look back at the hanged man. Still hiccuping, he was jerking at the end of the rope, which was slowly strangling him. The Virginian on his white mare made an impatient gesture with his hand. General Knox signaled to the shirtmen with a crisp nod of his head. One of them strolled over to Hickey. He wrapped his arms around the jerking knees of the executed man and pulled himself up until his weight was hanging from Hickey’s body.

  The hiccuping stopped. Then the jerking.

  Nate saw the shadows of birds racing across the ground and looked up, but there were no birds, there was just Hickey dangling from the bitter end of the rope, and the shirtman dangling from him in an erotic embrace.

  Nate and Stephen caught their horses, which were grazing in a fenced-in field behind Cape’s Tavern, and saddled them and started them walking up the Broad Way in the direction of the old Dutch village of Haarlem. They passed a fat woman rooting in garbage. They passed a company of John Haslet’s Delaware Continentals, whom everyone called the Blue Hen Chickens, heading on foot for Kipp’s farmhouse and the cove under it; some carried muskets, some carried pitchforks. The Chickens were handing around a transparent green jug and taking healthy swigs from it as they marched. Nate and Stephen passed a deserted farmhouse that had gotten a “Hillsborough treat”—thinking Tories lived in the house, rebels had smeared it with excrement.

  The day grew heavier. A pall of dust kicked up by horses ahead of them on the Broad Way hung in the air, obliging Nate and Stephen to mask their noses and mouths with bandannas. For a long time neither man said anything. The silence turned awkward. Eventually Stephen broke it. “That was a god-awful thing we saw today.”

  Nate fingered the hair mole on his neck. When he was a boy his friends had teased him about it, telling him it meant he would one day be hanged. “A long life has a lingering death,” Nate replied through his bandanna, quoting the English version of a Latin maxim he had memorized at Yale.

  As near as I can figure, all this took place three weeks before Nate got involved in whipping the cat.

  6

  The first working session had gotten off to a relatively sluggish start. “The desk clerk offered me a room with a queen-size bed,” the Admiral was explaining. “I naturally inquired about the view. ‘If you are into brick the view is terrific,’ he told me. I am not inventing. ‘Into brick’ were his precise words. I let him know I was into park. He consulted one of those television screens attached to a typewriter. ‘I can give you park,’ he said, ‘but no queen-size bed.’ ‘What is it with you and queen-size beds?’ I asked him. He gave me as thorough a once-over as I have ever had. ‘Just playing a hunch,’ he said.”

  “Into brick,” repeated the middle-aged woman whose face was masked by a veil. She clucked her tongue appreciatively.

  “I am afraid park will cost you slightly more a day than brick,” Toothacher informed Wanamaker. “I trust you will feel the additional money was well spent.”

  “Brick, park, it’s all the same to me,” Wanamaker said impatiently. He noticed that the Admiral’s eyes were rimmed with red. He’s been off carousing with Huxstep, he thought, but what he does with his free time is his business as long as he plugs my leak. Wanamaker pushed a batch of dossiers across the felt to the Admiral. “For starters, here are the service records of the twelve staffers assigned to Operations Subgroup Charlie. Mildred here is my man Friday. She was raised in Tehran, speaks Persian, Pashto, Avestan and Kurdish fluently, can pronounce the Ayatollah’s name without an accent. Only ask her. She will get you whatever else you feel you need.”

  Mildred reached up and lifted her veil. “I am a navy brat,” she announced breathlessly. “I was weaned on stories about you. Admiral Toothacher this. Admiral Toothacher that. For me, Eisenhower, Kennedy were minor figures in the Toothacher era. Frankly, it is a thrill just to be in the same room with you.”

  When it came to matters of seduction, the Admiral followed an old formula that in his experience seldom failed; he flattered the beautiful people for their brains, the intelligent ones for their looks. ‘The pleasure is entirely mine,” he solemnly informed Mildred. “I seldom get to work with someone who is as easy on the eyes as you.”

  Mildred, flustered, let the veil drift back across the upper half of her face. “You are not at all what I expected,” she admitted.

  “Dear lady,” the Admiral said, “dare I open that Pandora’s box and ask what you expected?”

  Under her veil Mildred blushed. “I was anticipating pie.” She lowered her eyes, her voice. “But you are all meringue.”

  Toothacher, absently shuffling service records, turned back to Wanamaker. “I will need to see the paper trail on the sensitive operation you referred to.”

  Once again a muscle over Wanamaker’s right eye twitched. He started torturing a paper clip. “The paper trail is thin.”

  “Thin? How can that be?”

  “As far as the sensitive operation is concerned, nothing in writing was ever circulated. The few scraps of paper dealing with the operation never left this office.”

  The Admiral studied his former man Friday through the middle lenses of his trifocals. “I will naturally need to know what you are up to.”

  Wanamaker’s face was utterly immobile. “That’s out of the realm of possibility.”

  “I must be missing something,” the Admiral said sarcastically. “You obviously trust me or you wouldn’t have asked me to walk back the cat for you.”

  “I would trust you with my life,” Wanamaker said with such fervor only a fool would have doubted him. “But our sensitive operation is another story.”

  “It will make my task infinitely more difficult,” the Admiral noted.

  Wanamaker shrugged a shoulder. Toothacher saw there was no point in insisting. “What about deadlines?” he asked. “I should know if there is a clock ticking.”

  “I suppose it won’t compromise the what if I tell you the when,” Wanamaker said. “For reasons I will not explain to you, we must execute the operation by mid-March or call it off.”

  “How very poetic—I mean to have the Ides of March as a deadline. That doesn’t leave me much time.”

  “One day short of four weeks,” said Mildred.

  The Admiral favored her with an ironic smile. “Thank you.” He turned back to Wanamaker. “Of the twelve people in your subgroup, how many are in on your little sensitive operation?” he asked.

  Wanamaker ticked them off on his fingers. “There’s me. There�
�s Mildred here. There’s Parker. There’s Webb. That makes four.”

  “The others don’t have an inkling of what’s going on?”

  Wanamaker shook his head. “The others keep track of terrorist groups.”

  Toothacher was a breath away from abandoning the whole thing. How could he be expected to plug a leak on an operation he didn’t know anything about? Let Bright Eyes get another sucker to walk back his cat. Suddenly the idea of returning to Guantánamo, to his wife of twenty-nine years who wheezed in her sleep, to the endless boredom of pinochle and happy hours, was too much for him. He batted both eyes in Wanamaker’s direction. “Shouldn’t I at least know what code name your operation goes by?”

  Wanamaker hesitated. He studied a hole a Schimmelpenninck had burned in the felt. He advanced an empty low-fat cottage cheese container across an imaginary chess board, then took back the move. He shrugged a shoulder. He arched an eyebrow and lowered it. He was obviously having a conversation with himself. Finally he said, “Do I have your word you won’t repeat it to a living soul?”

  The Admiral, who loved secrets the way other men loved women or money or fast cars, shivered in anticipation. “It is another white hair that will go to the grave with me,” he promised.

  “We call it Operation Stufftingle.”

  “Stufftingle?”

  “Stufftingle.”

  7

  The Weeder’s humorless deputy dog, Marvin Wesker, finished cleaning the IBM mainframe with the feather duster. “Would you be annoyed if I vacuumed tomorrow?” he called across the loft to Silas Sibley, who was weeding through the night’s crop of printouts at his worktable. “I’m already behind with my programs.”

  “Vacuum tomorrow if you like,” the Weeder replied, “but get yesterday’s stuff shredded and down the chute before you attack the new pile.”

  “My dream in life,” Wesker muttered as he ran the reams of computer printout paper through the shredder, “is to work at an operation with a classification so ordinary you can have a cleaning lady.” He replaced the empty burn baskets and settled into the chair in front of his terminal, across the enormous worktable from the Weeder. “I don’t mind weeding,” he explained. “I just don’t see myself vacuuming. I have a Ph.D. I speak four languages fluently. I have a working knowledge of three others. I’m overqualified.”