Sleeping Dogs

As the train added power, slowly clacking out of the station, Margaret sat stiffly, willing it to go faster. She timed her breaths to the precise moments when it passed the poles along the track, and found that she felt smothered, until they were floating past too often to have anything to do with her breathing.

Cautiously she pretended to look out the window, but craned her neck to use the reflection to look at the other people in the car. In the very back were two elderly ladies in flowered dresses who had raised a redoubt of oversized purses and shopping sacks to repel any smokers who might try to sit nearby. They were wisely returning from a morning at the shore early enough to miss the crowds of horse fanciers and gamblers and be in their flats in time for tea. There were three young boys in the front who could be misidentified as representatives of the very element the old ladies intended to avoid; they had hair cropped in peculiar patterns of tufts and lawns like little dogs, and sported clothing of leather and denim held together with metal rivets. But they were well mannered, merely nudging one another at intervals and pointing out landmarks and milestones that were invisible to Meg. She guessed that these must have some significance in their lives, perhaps scenes of early exploits as they had widened their range away from Brighton and closer to London.

“Why are we going to London?” she whispered.

Schaeffer studied her and acknowledged the injustice of it. She looked small and young, her bright green eyes even greener because her pumping heart had brought more oxygen than she had ever breathed into her, and even now something hard and admirable was keeping her from going limp and gray from the shock. She had first approached him out of a sense of adventure, and had stayed involved out of some notion that liveliness was better than torpor, but she hadn’t signed on for this. “It’s the sensible thing to do,” he answered. “Most people leaving town will be going to London, and once we’re there, they have to pick us out of millions of people.”

“Of course,” she said. “I’m not sure that was what I meant to ask you. I was hoping you’d tell all, as they say.”

He thought about what had happened. She had come to his house this morning in the full and delighted confidence that she was the wildest creature in the little universe she inhabited. Now the walls had shattered and let real monsters in. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I never should have let this happen. You were very brave.”

“I’m trying to hold on to my sanity,” she said quietly. “Michael, I can’t even believe this is happening, has happened—no, it’s still happening, isn’t it? I’m afraid, and I want to know if I’m just being weak, or if I’m right to be afraid because in a minute they’re going to stop the train, drag us off and …” She stopped, and he could see her making a conscious effort to beat down the terrors that were spontaneously taking on specific shapes with hard, defined lines. She failed, but he could see she was holding them on one side of a line for the moment. “Or will I always have to be afraid because it’s never going to be over?”

Schaeffer searched for something that would make sense to her. “Sometimes in the newspapers you read that somebody in Parliament made a speech demanding that the warmonger Americans get out. Well, I guess I’m one of the ones they mean.”

It gave him a morbid fascination to watch her mind grab for this little bit of comprehensible nonsense and clutch it to her. “I should have known it,” she said. “I even thought about it, but I told myself there really weren’t any such people, or anyway that I’d never see them. CIA. What could you be but one of them? You move into a big old house all by yourself and never talk about anything that could even begin to give anybody an idea of who you are or what you did before.”

In her mind’s rush to gather evidence to support the lie, she had begun to forget that there were other people on the train. He put his hand on her forearm and moved his eyes toward the three boys at the front of the car. “To answer your question, I think the bad part is over now,” he whispered. “We just have to be sure we aren’t followed.”

“Where are we going? MI5? Your embassy?”

He shook his head. “All of the obvious places will be under surveillance. We’re on our own.” He tried to remember which it was: “in the cold,” or “out of the cold.” “We’re going to have to stay out in the cold for a while.” Then he remembered that he would have to prepare her for the future. “Or I am, anyway.”

“One more thing, and I won’t ask for any more secrets,” she said. “Those men weren’t English, except maybe the last one. They looked like Italians. What has Italy got against you?”

He had to block that avenue of thought. “They were Bulgarians. They probably came in from Yugoslavia across the Adriatic into Italy; that’s the way they usually do it. They look the same, and lots of them speak the language. It’s only a few miles.” He was quoting a travel brochure he had seen once: “An hour or so by boat on a calm, sunlit sea.” Or was that Coleridge: “Down to a sunless sea”? He had been reading some of the books in the library of his house again, and it sounded familiar. He felt a small prickle of alarm. Books were a trap. If he accidentally quoted from one of them, she would recognize it.

Her face retained its look of intense concentration. “But why were they after us—after you? You were in Brighton only for the day, and even I didn’t know we’d be there before this morning.”

He looked as puzzled as he could. “That’s something I’ve got to find out. I came to England ten years ago, and since then I’ve been in the deepest cover. Even the chief of station in London doesn’t know. I’d say our troubles must have started in the United States.”

“A mole?” she said. “A Bulgarian mole inside the CIA?”

He let his puzzlement turn to frustration. “That’s the hard part. There’s no telling the nationality in a case like this. The information could have come to the KGB, and they may have passed it on to Bulgarians in this area.”

She looked very sad. “Poor Peter and Jimmy. They weren’t up to this sort of thing at all.”

He stared out the window at the flat green countryside sweeping past, and strained for something to give her, like a present. “I’m going to tell you something that’s absolutely secret. Very few people even inside the Western intelligence community have heard it, and I’m not cleared by your government to be one of them. There’s a special room inside a building near Whitehall. It’s a big room in a basement, and outside the door there are always two sergeants of the Royal Marines, fully armed and at attention on two-hour shifts. Inside the room are hundreds of identical black-velvet boxes, with little gold plates on them engraved with the names of the heroes of the secret wars. When a member of England’s intelligence services does something spectacular, there’s a quiet ceremony where he’s given a medal. Because who he is and what he did must be kept secret, the medal is put inside the little velvet box and kept in trust by the government. But years later, when the man dies and the secret is no longer crucial to national security, the Queen invites his family to the Palace for an audience and gives them the box. But it’s not just for professionals. A lot of the boxes in that room are set aside for people like your friends, just regular citizens who maybe got involved by accident, or performed some service when the need arose. For the moment their families and friends are going to think that Jimmy and Peter were killed by robbers or something—whatever story the government puts out for the press. But someday they’ll get a little printed invitation to come visit the Queen, and then they’ll know.”

Margaret stared at him, and in her eyes he could see that she wanted to be able to tell the story, to go to Peter’s sister or Jimmy’s mother in some private room of the gigantic old country houses they lived in and whisper the lie he had offered her. Then there was no telling where it would go, and he knew it wouldn’t hold up. “You’ve got to keep that to yourself,” he said. “If it ever got out, the Russians would do anything to get into that room and read the citations—the ones for the last fifty years, anyway.”

“But you know, and now I know,” she said. “Michael, if I could tell just one or two people … and after all, it’s their secret, theirs and mine, not yours.”

He wavered as he thought about her. If she told it, she would probably make up lots of details that would make it sound more authentic, but he couldn’t chance it. “It’s a deep secret. None of them would ever have told an American, even one who’s been here for years trying to protect their country.”

“Then, how do you know?”

He sighed, as though he were giving in against his better judgment. “A few years ago, a man from MI6 managed to get inside a Soviet communications post in Afghanistan. How that happened, and how he got out, I can’t go into. But he ended up with me. He’d seen some things: the specification plates on the equipment, written texts on the computer screens and so on. The problem was, he didn’t speak Russian. He’d looked at them, but there was no way he could remember them because they meant nothing to him; just gibberish. His own people tried hypnotism, locking him in a sensory-deprivation chamber, everything. But they knew that we’d experimented with certain drugs. I can’t name them, but chemically they’re several generations beyond truth serums.

“This Englishman came to my house and met a doctor we’d flown in from Langley. The doctor shot him up, and he started to draw. He drew for days. He drew the Russian letters he’d seen on the computer screens, and made diagrams and maps. He saw everything all over again, and traced it on paper. But he also started to talk. It was endless, compulsive talk about all kinds of things that he’d kept secret. He told me about sexual experiences, childhood lies and things his parents hadn’t caught him at, secret fears and worries that he’d never resolved. It turned out he was from an old family that had been involved in British secrets for generations. The way it sounded, they were recruited by their fathers about the time they left Eton for Oxford, so they’d be sure to study hard and read the right books. Anyway, one thing he told me about was the room with the velvet boxes. When he’d been in the service only a few months, they called him in and showed him around. There were boxes in there for his father, who had helped crack some German code, and his great-grandfather, who’d done something or other in the Boer War, and I think somebody was in the Crimea. He kept raving on about the medals—the Victoria Cross, the Distinguished Service Order and I don’t know what else.

“The whole thing seemed to bother him a lot. At first I thought it was because when he got the tour he was so green. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, and seeing all those medals made him think he could never amount to anything compared to all of his ancestors. After the drug wore off, I asked him about it, and he said that wasn’t it. By now he had a few medals and citations in a box of his own. It was the secrets that bothered him. A lot of the things from a hundred years ago are still current: secret family contacts in Russia and East Germany, for instance, that have been kept up for generations. If those got out, the Russians would have whole families put up against a wall. Things change on the surface, but not underneath, in the world where spies live. It all seemed to him like a string that might unravel. If one thing came out, it could be traced to something else, and so on.”

“But this is different,” she muttered. “What can it possibly hurt to give their families something to hold on to?”

“It’s not different,” he said. “Knowledge is dangerous. You’d be doing them no favors.” He wondered if he had sounded ominous enough, but it made her stop asking, and he had to be satisfied with that.

As the train rattled on toward London, he stared out at the grass and trees. He wondered if he detected in himself some annoyance at her for luring him out into the world where they could find him, but decided he did not. She had made such a small, innocent offer, and the consequences had been huge and abrupt. It wasn’t even a problem she could have imagined. But now he had to work his way out. He had done exactly what he had promised himself he would never do. He had become lazy and comfortable and forgetful. It had been so stupid that it now struck him as a kind of miracle. For some time, maybe for years, he had kept up a few hollow rituals and observed a few minimal precautions, but it was only out of habit.

He remembered a day nearly fifteen years ago in New York, when he had waited for a man named Danny Catanno to come home from a night at the theater. He had sat in the dim light the man had left burning in the huge living room and contemplated the nature of human beings. This man no longer called himself Danny Catanno. He had been an accountant for a friend of the Castiglione family in Chicago, changing a few dollars into apartment houses and putting particular people on the payroll as managers or handymen or gardeners. But one day Danny Catanno had bought himself a BMW and paid for it in cash. Somehow the IRS had gotten curious about it because it had cost sixty thousand dollars that had not come through a bank account. Within a few days Catanno was sitting in a room somewhere that was full of men who could not afford BMWs but were good enough at arithmetic to prove to Danny that he couldn’t either.

Years later—maybe seven—somebody had seen Danny Catanno in New York. The Castiglione family, by now run by the son and his two sons since the old man had retired to the Southwest, had quietly made inquiries. It wasn’t that he had done any real damage to the family reputation. The name had been famous since before the son was born. And the family friend had gotten off with a small fine and a wordy warning about fraudulent business practices and shady connections, because he had never been arrested before and had other friends besides the Castigliones. But the Castigliones were curious about the same thing that had attracted the IRS—the BMW that wasn’t attributable to any of Danny Catanno’s personal bank accounts. Danny was a thief.

A contract had been offered for Danny Catanno as soon as he had disappeared, but it had produced no satisfaction. After he had been spotted, the Castigliones had decided to hire a specialist.

Schaeffer had known that the Justice Department had some kind of agreement with Castoria College, which granted degrees to people on the basis of oral examinations given in courtrooms thousands of miles from its campus in New Hampshire. The government lawyers also gave their graduates false birth certificates and driver’s licenses and social security numbers, and then they said, “Good-bye and good luck.” All he had to do was to keep checking Danny’s mother’s mailbox for a month to see that Danny was beginning to forget his troubles. About once a week there was an envelope from a brokerage in New York with a check in it. When he had gotten to New York, all he’d had to do was to pick up a little brochure the company put out advertising the qualifications of its brokers. Among the dozens of brokers who had gone to places that meant nothing to him, he had found David Cutter, an honor graduate of Castoria.

He had looked around the apartment a bit while he waited for David Cutter to come home. It was the sort of place that cost a million or more up front, and another half-million that had to be paid to decorators, furniture dealers and art galleries. In the antique writing desk he had found a pile of credit-card receipts for expensive restaurants. He had been astounded. The man had even gone on a trip to the Bahamas a month before. People had a way of pushing things out of their minds, like the ones who built fancy houses in the floodplain of the Platte River, or on top of fault lines in California. It was a miracle that a man like David Cutter had lived as long as he had. He had gone to restaurants where he couldn’t help but sit next to people who would do anything to gain favor with the Castiglione family. He had spent his days betting large sums of money for people, a lot of whom had gotten it in ways that must have brought them into contact with acquaintances of the Castigliones. What did this man think? When he had made his reservations for the Caribbean, didn’t he Wonder who might be sitting next to him on the plane?

Schaeffer had looked in drawers and closets, bookcases and backlit cabinets, thinking about human folly. All the time he was planning. If ever in his life he had to disappear, he would submerge without a ripple and never come up again. He would never allow himself to become so comfortable and mentally lazy that he forgot he wasn’t the man he was pretending to be. That night he had made the decision to begin the preparations for his own disappearance. He would put money in safe-deposit boxes in towns he never visited. Often in his career he had found it prudent to use false names on credit cards and licenses. But now he would do it in earnest, start to build up a few identities and never use them, so that they would be old enough and deep enough on the day when somebody began to look for him the way he had looked for Danny Catanno.

Eddie Mastrewski had raised him to abhor mistakes. It was better to stay home than to make a mistake, better to pass up the money than to take a chance. The police could be as stupid as cattle, spend the day stumbling over their own feet, but in the evening they could go home, pop open a beer and sleep like stones. But people like Eddie and the boy got to make only one mistake. That was true of people like Danny Catanno too, only Danny didn’t seem to know it. He had accepted an identity as Cutter the stockbroker, and somehow he had forgotten that he wasn’t Cutter the stockbroker. The money and respectability that protected people like Cutter couldn’t protect him.

Before he had satisfied his curiosity in the apartment, he had found Danny Catanno’s gun. It was hidden in a little pop-out compartment in the wall beside the bed. The gun was lying under a pile of gold cuff links, a couple of watches and some hundred-dollar bills. It would have taken Danny thirty seconds in bright light to fumble around for it. It looked as though it had been placed there a long time ago and forgotten. When he examined it, he found it hadn’t even been cleaned and oiled lately. But he found it worked well enough when Danny Catanno came home from the theater. The police told the reporters the next day that David Cutter was a lesson to others: an unlicensed firearm was just as likely to be used by a burglar as by its owner.

Now Schaeffer wondered how he had forgotten about Danny Catanno. He had managed to set aside enough money, and he had nurtured the identities until they had sufficient patina on them to obscure their flaws, but he hadn’t done the rest of it. He had put off getting the plastic surgery, telling himself at first that he needed to get a feel for the country before he could be sure how to go about it. Surgery would involve spending a lot of time in London being photographed and examined by doctors who might wonder why a man with perfectly regular features would want something expensive and painful done to him in a foreign country. Then later, when he had learned to move around comfortably in England and was confident he could have accomplished it, he had developed other reservations. People in Bath knew him by now, and would wonder why he would suddenly do such a strange thing. He had put it off so long the dangerous time was probably past. If anybody had traced him here, they would have gotten him by now. And certainly all that time must have changed him as much as surgery would.…

The truth was that hiding had made him reluctant to obliterate his face, because it was the last thing left that was part of who he really was. He had already destroyed or relinquished everything else. He would never have run out of excuses to put off the plastic surgery. For the first time he understood Danny Catanno.

It was late afternoon. The southern outposts of London began to pass by the train, and brown brick buildings appeared that reminded him of the ride from Kennedy Airport through Queens. Then it struck him that the similarity wasn’t the reason he had thought of it. He was going back. As the train pulled slowly into Victoria Station, he calculated: assuming the police had found all five bodies by now and were questioning everybody at the racetrack, it would still take them a couple of hours to find out that the Bentley had stopped to let out a man and a woman. They would take still longer to satisfy themselves that the man and woman were no longer in Brighton, and that the only place that made any sense if they wanted to hide was London.

Fingerprints didn’t worry him. In spite of the nonsense the police put out for public consumption, not one of them in a hundred could lift a clear print from anything more textured than glass or metal. Neither he nor Meg had touched the windows, and Peter had opened the door for them. And if they had idly grasped the door handles, the killers would have touched them afterward, and probably wiped the surfaces off before they left.

His mind was already working its old, habitual, methodical way through the traps and snares. He turned to her as they stood up, careful to keep his face turned away from their companions on the train. “Keep looking out the window. You said nobody knew we were going there today?”

“That’s right. I met them on the way to your house. They saw me on the street and told me when they’d pick us up.”

He assessed the damage as they walked across the platform toward the gigantic enclosure of the station. It wasn’t so bad, really. If the police were lazy or stupid it was nothing at all. Their professional habit of seizing upon the most easily comprehensible explanation would make them overlook things that didn’t fit. They would assume a gang of thieves had murdered two wealthy citizens, then quarreled over whatever they had found on the bodies or in the Bentley. There would be no telling what that was, because somebody in the gang must have lived, and he would have carried it away with him. That part was inevitable: no matter how much they wanted to, the police would not be able to convince themselves that three men who had died of a broken skull, a knife up under the ribs and a bullet fired from five yards out had not required the services of at least one person who hadn’t been found on the scene. But even that much would take them a few more hours, because before they could commit themselves, they would have to go over everything with tape measures and cameras and sketch pads. And they would bring with them the assumptions that would make their efforts a waste of time. Because all the time they would be preparing to look for the missing man among the local street thieves, not among the acquaintances of the two wealthy victims in the Bentley.

Just as he had at Brighton, he made Meg stay in the ladies’ restroom while he bought the tickets. He had to get her out of here without letting more than a few people see them together. He waited at the most crowded ticket window, then all he said was, “Bath. Two,” to hide his accent, and took the tickets without looking at the man inside.

They met again and stood a few yards apart on the platform just before the train was to leave, and boarded separately as though they were unaware of each other. Later, if anyone remembered seeing a pretty young woman in a yellow dress, they wouldn’t remember seeing her with a man. As Margaret had walked across the huge nineteenth-century station, he had watched her. She came out of the ladies’ room with several other young women in bright, stylish dresses, and stayed within a few steps of them all the way to the platform. An observer might have said she was one of them, five girls who each merited a second glance, but who all drifted across the crowded place at once, a single vision of colors, stockinged legs, clashing scents, smooth white complexions, hair up, hair hanging long. Which one was blond and which dark? Who would remember? And the women themselves were laughing and talking with animation, too interested in themselves to pay attention to each other, let alone to someone who was simply walking in the same direction. He didn’t know if she had done this instinctively to fade into the herd of people who could hide her best, or had merely let the fear guide her, the terror of being alone attracting her to people as much like her friends as possible. It didn’t matter; they were going to get through this.

On the train he found her again, but when he sat down beside her, he realized that she’d had time to think. “We’ll stop at your place and close the house,” she said. “Then you’ll stay with me.”

When she conducted him into the library, he was envious. She had grown up here, in huge rooms with twenty-foot walls in two tiers, all of them lined with paintings and books. It didn’t matter what the books were about or who had written them. To him they were a symbol of privilege: the more ancient and eccentric they were, the greater the advantage. The room represented how many generations of people who had titles and money and manners and tutors and parents—ten?

“Do you have to go? You could stay here and call for help. Or we could drive up to Yorkshire. Even if they’d been watching you, nobody could know about that, and lots of people must have been hidden there over the years. My forebears in the time of Henry the Eighth didn’t feel comfortable with the forced conversion and may have hidden a monk or two—lots of people did. I do know somebody hid from Cromwell there three generations after that. We were exactly the sort of people he was born to rid the world of—still are, to the degree we can manage it. It’s a huge, rambling place with lots of rooms, but the village is small enough so nobody could come after you without being spotted.”

It entered Schaeffer’s mind that her ancestors really weren’t from the same planet he was. Time meant nothing to her, or to any of them, really. If he chose to stay at the family estate, she would feed him and bring him the daily newspapers until one of them died, and then he would be part of the story too. He opened his suitcase and pulled out his two passports. He looked at one of them and handed it to Meg. “I’ve got to go to the United States. When I’m ready to come back, I may call you and ask you to mail this to me.”

She looked at it, then plucked the other one from his hand and read the name aloud. “Charles Frederick Ackerman. It hadn’t occurred to me that you might have another name,” she said, her voice a little hollow.

“Michael Schaeffer is the real one.” He put his arm around her waist. The name already sounded strange to him, like the name of someone long dead.

“What I’ve been trying to say is, are you going because you have to, or because you think being with me puts me in danger? Because I really don’t mind.” It struck her as an odd thing to have said, so she added, “Really.”

“I have to find the mole.” He studied her face. There was no possibility of an argument; of course he had to find the mole. Whose job was it if not his? She had read all the spy novels, then given them to him to read. He wished he had paid more attention to them, but he hadn’t. Her questions might grow more astute and penetrating, so he needed to think more carefully about what he said. But he also needed to think about reality, and time was passing.

The Satterthwaites would stay on at his house indefinitely, keeping it open and clean and inhabited, and they would feed his cat. Mrs. Satterthwaite had understood that he sometimes traveled, and she would continue to pay the bills out of the household account. He had always been like a ghost in his own house, coming and going quietly without having any discernible effect on the daily business of the place. The Satterthwaites were the real occupants, living high among the rafters upstairs and showing little curiosity about anything he did. If he never came back, the will he had filed in the solicitor’s office a few blocks away would be revealed to them. Mr. Satterthwaite would paint a neat, hand-lettered sign that said BED AND BREAKFAST, and they would continue to care for the place and serve the food; the only difference would be that he would be replaced by other ghosts who came and went quietly.

He closed his suitcase. “I have to get back to London tonight for the plane.”

“I’ll get the keys to the Jag.” She moved to pull open the library door.

He watched her go. He knew that someday, if he lived to be old and alone, he would look back on this moment and grind his teeth with anguish and remorse, straining his memory for the exact color of The Honourable Meg’s hair and the way her yellow dress swayed as she tugged open the big oak door.