Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy

Chapter Six

The Washington Square house is 'twinned' in the C.I.A. style — divided vertically — so that the back of the house, shuttered against telescopes and double-glazed against focusing microphones, is all offices, while the front half provides apartments for the staff, and so presents all the outward appearance of domesticity.

I lived on the second floor. Bekuv lived above me. Bekuv's appearance had changed during those few days in New York City. His hair had been cut by some fancy barber, and he'd had enough sleep to put some colour back into his cheeks. His clothes were transformed too: tailored trousers, a blue lambswool shirt and bright canvas shoes. He was sitting on the floor, surrounded by loudspeakers, records, amplifier components, extra tweeters, a turn-table, a soldering iron and hi-fi magazines. Bekuv looked despondent.

'Andrei was screwed,' Mann told me as I went in. I found it hard to believe that Mann was sorry about it.

'In what way?'

'Coffee on the warmer,' said Bekuv.

I poured myself a cup and took a blini.

'All this damned hi-fi junk,' said Mann.

Bekuv applied the pick-up to one of his records and suddenly the whole room was filled with music.

'Jesus Christ!' Mann shouted angrily.

Delicately Bekuv lifted the pick-up and the music ceased. 'Shostakovich,' he said to anyone who was seeking that information.

Mann said, 'Andrei spent nearly two thousand dollars on all this stuff, and now he's been reading the discount-house adverts.'

'I could have got it for five hundred dollars less,' Bekuv told me. I noticed that several of the hi-fi magazines were marked with red pentel, and there were little sums scribbled on the back of an envelope.

'Well, perhaps we can do something about that,' I said vaguely, while I drank my coffee and thought about something else.'

'Andrei is not going downtown,' said Mann, 'and that's that.' I realized they had been arguing about whether Bekuv was allowed to go out on the street again.

'Now this loudspeaker is buzzing,' said Bekuv.

'Listen, dummy,' Mann told him, bending forward from his chair, so that he could speak close to Bekuv's ear. 'There are citizens out there waiting to ice you. Didn't you hear what I told you about the shooting last night? We spent the small hours downtown in the city morgue — I don't recommend it, not even for a stiff.'

'I'm not frightened,' said Bekuv. He put the pick-up arm back on the record. There was a loud hissing before he reduced the volume a little. It was still very loud. Mann leaned forward and lifted the pick-up off the record. 'I don't give a good goddamn whether you are frightened or not frightened,' he said. 'In fact I don't give a damn whether you are alive or dead, but I'm going to make sure it happens after you are moved out of here, and I've got a receipt for you.'

'Is that going to happen?' asked Bekuv. He began looking through his loose-leaf notebook.

'It might,' said Mann.

'I can't go anywhere for the time being,' said Bekuv. 'I have work to do.'

'What work?', I said.

Bekuv looked at me as if only just realizing that I was present. 'My work on interstellar communication,' he said, sarcastically. 'Have you forgotten that I have a chair at New York University?'

'No,' I said.

'I've calculated for the initial programme of transmissions. It would cost very little money, and it will focus attention on the work we are doing.'

'Transmissions?' said Mann.

'In space there are clouds of hydrogen. They vibrate to make a hum of radio noise. You pick it up on any radio set at 1,420 megacycles. My theory is that this would be the best frequency to use for our first messages to outer space. Other civilizations are certain to notice any change in that hum of hydrogen vibrations.'

'Sure to,' said Mann.

'Not on that exact wavelength,' added Bekuv. 'They would be obliterated. We must transmit near to the wavelength, not on it.'

'Near to it; not on it,' said Mann. He nodded.

'It would cost very little,' said Bekuv. 'And I could have it working inside six months.'

'That's well before the flying-saucer men go to summer camp,' said Mann.

Bekuv looked up at Mann. His voice was harsh, and it was as if he was answering a long list of unspoken questions when he shouted, 'Twice I have attended meetings of the 1924 Society. Only twice! The last tune was nearly five years ago. Science is not the cosy little club you believe it is. Don't keep pressurizing me. I recognized no one, and we did not exchange names and addresses, for obvious reasons.'

'For obvious reasons,' said Mann. 'Because those sons of bitches were betraying the whole of America's military electronics programme.'

'And will it get your secrets back if you keep me a prisoner here?' yelled Bekuv. 'Not allowed to go out… Not allowed to make phone calls.'

Mann walked quickly to the door, as if frightened he would lose his temper. He turned. 'You'll stay here as long as I think fit,' he said. 'Behave yourself and I'll send you a packet of phonograph needles and a subscription to Little Green Men Monthly.' Bekuv spoke quietly, 'You don't like cosmology, you don't like high-fidelity, you don't like Shostakovich, you don't like blinis…" Bekuv smiled. I couldn't decide whether he was trying to needle Mann or not.

'I don't like Russians,' explained Mann. 'White Russians, Red Russians, Ukrainians, Muscovite liberals, ballet dancers or faggy poets — I just don't like any of them. Get the picture?'

'I get it,' said Bekuv sulkily. 'Is there anything more?'

'One thing more,' said Mann. 'I'm not an international expert cm the design of electronic masers. All I know about them is that a maser is some kind of crystal gimmick that gets pumped up with electronic energy so that it amplifies the weakest of incoming radio signals. That way you get a big fat signal compared with the background of electronic static noise and interference.'

"That's right,' said Bekuv. It was the first time he'd shown any real interest.

'I was reading that your liquid helium bath technique, that keeps the maser at minus two hundred and sixty-eight degrees centigrade, will amplify a signal nearly two million times.'

Bekuv nodded.

'Now I see the day when every little two-bit transistor could be using one of these gadgets and pulling in radio transmissions from anywhere in the world. Of course, we know that would just mean hearing a D.J. spinning discs in Peking, instead of Pasadena, but a guy collecting a royalty on such a gadget could make a few million. Right, Professor?'

'I didn't defect for money,' said Bekuv.

Major Mann smiled.

'I didn't defect to make money,' shouted Bekuv. If Mann had ben trying to make Bekuv very, very angry, he'd discovered an effective way to do it.

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 K.G.B. or even diplomatic. They might just be visiting relatives, or sub-tenants 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 K.G.B. 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 C.I.A. safe house in Washington Square as it was possible to get. It could have been just 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. 'O.K.,' 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 C.I.A. as a stepping-stone to other ambitions, as at one tune 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 C.I.A. as 'the company' to emphasize that he had been on the inside. His file didn't mention service in the C.I.A. 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. O.K?'

'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 U.S.S.R., 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 C.I.A. 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.'

'Wait a minute,' I said. 'What is this C.I.A. operation you're talking about?'

'The 1924 Society.'

'I don't even know what the 1924 Society is,' I said truthfully.

Hart smiled. 'In 1924 Mars came very close to Earth. Scientists said maybe Mars would try to communicate with Earth. It caused no end of a ruckus in the scientific press, and then the newspapers joined in the speculation. Even the U.S. Army and Navy ordered all their radio stations to reduce signals traffic and listen for extra-terrestrial messages. The 1924 Society was formed that year. Twelve eminent scientists decided to pool information about communications from outer space, and plan ways of sending messages back.'

'And it's still going strong, is it?'

'Now there are twenty-seven members — only three of them founder members — but a lot of people take it seriously. In 1965, when three Russian astronomers picked up radio waves on a hundred-day cycle from quasar C.T.A. - I02, the 1924 Society were considering the report even before the Soviet Academy got the news, and before the Kremlin ordered them to retract.'

'And the C.I.A. has penetrated the 1924 Society?'

'How do you think we got the first indication that Bekuv was ready to defect?'

I polished my spectacles — people tell me I do that when I'm nervous — and gave the lenses undue care and attention. I needed a little time to look at Gerry Hart and decide that a man I'd always thought of as blowing the tuba was writing the orchestrations.

Gerry Hart said, 'This is a big operation, make no mistake. Bekuv is only a tiny part of it but we'll get Mrs Bekuv here if that's what you want.'

'But?'

He stabbed a fork into his sandwich and cut a small triangle of it ready to eat. 'But you'll have to prevent Mann from putting his stubby peasant fingers into the 1924 Society. His abrasive personality would really have them all running for dear life, just at a time when we've got it ticking along nicely.' He changed the fork over to his other hand and fed himself some sandwich.

I picked my sandwich up in my fist, and didn't reply until I had a big mouthful to talk round.

'You've been frank with me, Gerry,' I said, 'and I'll be frank with you. You think we are worrying ourselves sick about getting Mrs Bekuv here? I'll tell you, we don't give a damn where she is. Sure we have made the right sort of noises and let Bekuv think we are pushing hard on his behalf, but we prefer things the way they are.'

'You can't be serious,' said Hart.

'Never been more serious in my life, old pal.'

'I wish someone had told us this before,' he said irritably. 'We have spent a lot of money on this one already.'

'On what?'

'We've paid some money to a couple of Russian airline people… we have organized travel papers for Mrs Bekuv. There was talk of getting her here by Saturday week.'

'This is a good sandwich, Gerry. They call this a club sandwich, do they? I must remember that.'

'Is your pal Major Mickey Mouse really planning to tear the 1924 Society apart?'

'You know what he's like,' I said.

Gerry Hart forked through his salad to find the last pieces of cucumber. He dipped them into the salt and ate them before pushing the rest of the salad away. He wiped his mouth on his napkin. 'No one would believe that I was trying to help you guys,' he said. 'No one would believe that I was trying to solve one of your biggest headaches and trying to stop you giving me one.'

'Are you serious about being able to get Mrs Bekuv here… getting her here by next week, I mean?'

Hart brightened a little. He reached into his waistcoat pocket and got out a tiny chamois purse. He opened it with his fingertips and dropped the contents into the open palm I offered him. There were two gold rings. One of them was old, and burnished to a condition where the ornamentation was almost worn away. The newer one was simpler in style and inside, where there was an inscription in Russian, I could see that the gold was only a thin plating.

Hart said, 'Bekuv's wife's rings: the plated one is their wedding band — with suitably euphoric Komsomol slogan — and the other one is Bekuv's mother's ring, inherited when she died.' He reached out and I returned the rings to him. 'Good enough for you?' he asked.

'A wonderful piece of foresightedness, Gerry.'

'I know it's all part of your technique,' said Hart. 'I know you are trying to irritate me but I'm not going to be irritated.'

'I'm delighted to hear that,' I said.

'But there is a time factor,' he said. 'And if you don't give me a tentative "yes", shortly followed by a suitable piece of paper, I'm getting to my feet and walking out of here.'

'Yes, well, don't forget to pay for the sandwiches,' I said.

'There's nothing in this for me personally,' said Gerry Hart. 'I'm trying to prevent a foul-up between two separate investigations.'

'Why don't you make an official report?'

'You've got to be joking,' said Hart. 'It will take weeks to go through and at the end…" he shrugged.

'And at the end they might decide that Major Mann is right.'

'There's nothing in this for me,' said Hart again.

'You're too modest, Gerry. I'd say there was a lot in this for you. You tell me that Greenwood doesn't know you are up to the neck in a C.I.A. investigation of the 1924 Society. You're too smart to hazard the main chance in search of a little career-garnish. I'd guess you keep your boss fully informed. And I'd say that you plan to come out the other side of this one having demonstrated what a powerful man you are, and what important connections you have with the C.I.A. and how you can mangle its policies if you feel inclined. If Greenwood was impressed with that — and we both know that he might be — you could wind up in Congress, or" maybe in the White House. Now don't tell me you didn't think of that possibility.'

'Don't you ever get depressed?' he asked. 'You always talk like everyone is on the make. Don't you ever get depressed?'

'I do, Gerry. Each time when I turn out to be right, which is practically always.'

'Do you hate me so much? Would you prevent Mrs Bekuv joining her husband just in case I get some political mileage out of it?'

"You're not talking to a junior cipher-clerk, Gerry. I've been there; and I know how the wheels go round, when jerks like you press the buttons…'

'Now, I've heard…'

'I've listened to you through a Bloody Mary, a club sandwich and a cup of coffee, Gerry. Now you listen to me. I'm not preventing Mrs Bekuv making a journey anywhere because I'll put my pension on an old underwear button that Mrs Bekuv has already made her journey. She's in Manhattan, right, Gerry?'

'We've got a leak, have we?'

'No leak, Gerry,' I said. 'Agents in the Soviet Union — the ones that survive there — don't send messages to guys like Gerry Hart explaining what kind of travel arrangements they might be able to get for the Mrs Bekuvs of this world — they see an opportunity open up, they make a snap decision, they act on it, and disappear again.'

'I suppose so,' said Hart.

'And I picture Mrs Bekuv as a hard-nosed Party-worker, as smart as Stalin but only half as pretty. I see her pushing her absent-minded husband into his high-paid, top-secret job, in spite of his theories about flying saucers. I don't picture her as the sort of woman who hands over her wedding rings to some strange creep who might be a K.G.B. man who likes a little hard evidence. No. But she might loan them out… for an hour or two.'

Gerry Hart didn't answer. He poured cream into the last little drop of his coffee and drank it slowly.

'We'll take her off your hands, Gerry,' I said. 'But no pieces of paper, and I can only advise Mann about the 1924 Society: no promises.'

'Do what you can,' he said. For a moment the bottom had dropped out of his world but, even as I watched him, I saw him coming up at me again as only soft rubber balls and politicians know how to bounce. 'But you're wrong about Mrs Bekuv,' he said. 'Wait until you see her.'

'Which of you asked for the check,' the waitress said.

'My friend asked for it,' I said.