The Parsifal Mosaic (31 page)

“Months, weeks, days-everything, every place we were … I was. Belgrade, Prague, Krakow, Vienna, Washington, Paris. There was nothing remotely startling, but I suppose that’s a comparative term. With the exception of an exercise in Prague where we got some documents out of the Státní Bezpečnost—the secret police headquarters—everything was pretty routine. Gathering information, which damn near any tourist could have done, that’s all.”

“Washington?”

“Less than nothing. I flew back for five days. It’s an annual event for field men, an evaluation interview, which is mostly a waste of time, but I suppose they catch a whacko now and then.”

“Whacko?”

“Someone who’s crossed over the mental line, thinks he’s someone he’s not, who’s fantasized a basically routine job. Cloak-and-dagger flakes, I suppose you could call them. It comes with the stress, with too often pretending you
are
someone you’re not.”

“Interesting,” said the doctor, nodding his head in some abstract recognition. “Did anything else happen while you were there?”

“Zero. I went to New York for a night to see a couple I knew when I was young. He owns a marina on Long Island, and if he ever had a political thought in his head, I’ve never heard it. Then I spent two days with Matthias, a duty visit, really.”

“You were close … are close.”

“I told you, we go back a long time. He was there when I needed him; he understood.”

“What about those two days?”

“Less than zero. I only saw him during the evenings when we had dinner together—two dinners, actually. Even then, although we were alone, he was constantly interrupted by phone calls and by harried people from State-supplicants, he called them—who insisted on bringing him reports.” Havelock stopped, seeing a sudden tight expression on Salanne’s face, but continued quickly, “No one saw me, if that’s what you’re thinking. He’d confer with them in his study, and the dining room’s on the other side of the house. Again, he understood;
we agreed not to display our friendship. For my benefit, really. No one likes a great man’s protégé.”

“It’s difficult for me to think of you that way.”

“If’d be Impossible if you’d had dinner with us,” said Michael, laughing quietly. “All we did was rehash papers I’d written for him nearly twenty years ago; he could still punch holes in them. Talk about total recall, he has it.” Havelock smiled, then the smile faded as he said, “It’s time,” and reached for the telephone.

The lodge in the Shenandoah was reached by a sequence of telephone numbers, the first activating a remote mechanism at Matthias’s residence in Georgetown, which in turn was electronically patched into a line a hundred and forty miles away, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, ringing the private telephone of the Secretary of State. If he was not on the premises, that phone was never answered; if he was, only he picked it up. The original number was known to perhaps a dozen people in the nation, among them the President and Vice-President, the Speaker of the House, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary of Defense, the president of the Security Council of the united Nations, two senior aides at State, and Mikhail Havlíček. The last was a privilege that Matthias had insisted upon far his
krajana
, his
spolopracovníka
from the university, whose father in Prague had been a colleague in intellect and spirit, if not in good fortune. Michael had used it twice during the past six years. The first time, when he was briefly in Washington for new instructions, Matthias had left word at his hotel that he should do so, and the call was merely social. The second was not pleasant for Havelock to recall. It had concerned a man named Ogilvie who Michael felt strongly should be removed from the field.

The Antibes operator offered to ring him back when the call to Washington, D.C., was put through, but experience had taught Havelock to stay on the line. Nothing so tested the concentration of an operator as an open circuit; calls were more swiftly completed by remaining connected. And while he listened to the series of high-pitched sounds that signified international transmission, Salanne spoke.

“Why haven’t you reached him before now?”
“Because nothing made sense, and I wanted it to. I
wanted to give him something concrete. A name or names, a position, a title, some kind of identity.”

“But from what I’ve heard, you still can’t do that.”

“Yes, I can. The authorization for dispatch had a source. Code name Ambiguity. It could only come from one of three or four offices, the word itself cleared by someone very high at State who was in touch with Rome. Matthias reaches Rome, has the incoming logs checked, talks to the receiver, and learns who gave Ambiguity its status. There’s another name, too, but I don’t know how much good it’ll do. There was a second, so-called confirmation at Costa Brava, including torn pieces of bloodstained clothing. It’s all a lie; there were no clothes left behind.”

“Then find that man.”

“He’s dead. They say he died of a heart attack on a sailboat three weeks later. But there are things to look for, if they haven’t been obscured. Where he came from, who assigned him to Costa Brava.”

“And if I may add,” said the Frenchman, “the doctor who made out the death certificate.”

“You’re right.” The singsong tones disappeared from the line, replaced by two short, steady hums, then a break of silence, followed by a normal ring. The electronic remote had done its work; the telephone in the Shenandoah lodge was ringing. Michael felt the pounding in his throat and the shortness of breath that came with anxiety. He had so much to say to this
přítele;
he hoped to Christ he could say it and so begin the ending of the nightmare. The ringing stopped; the phone had been picked up.
Thank God!

“Yes?” asked the voice over four thousand miles away in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a male voice, but not the voice of Anton Matthias. Or was the sound distorted, the single word too short to identify the man?

“
Jak se vám daǐí?
”

“what? Who’s this?”

It was not Matthias. Had the rules been changed? If they had, it did not make sense. This was the emergency line, Matthias’s personal phone, which was swept for intercepts daily; only he answered it. After five rings the caller was to hang up, dial the regular telephone number and leave his name and whatever message he cared to, aware that confidentiality was far less secure. Perhaps there was a simple explanation,
an offhand request by Matthias for a friend nearer to the ringing phone to pick it up.

“Secretary of State Matthias, please?” said Havelock.

“Who’s calling?”

“The fact that I used this number relieves me of the need to answer that The Secretary, if you please. This is an emergency
and
confidential.”

“Mr. Matthias is in conference at the moment and has asked that all calls be held. If you’d give me your name—”

“Goddamn it, you’re not listening! This is an emergency!”

“He has one, too, sir.”

“You break into that conference and say the following words to him. Krajan … and bouře. Have you got that? Just two words!
Krajan
and
bouře
. Do it now! Because if you don’t, he’ll have your head and your Job when I talk to him!
Do
it!”

“
Krajan
,” said the male voice hesitantly. “
Bouře
.”

The line went silent, the silence interrupted once by the low undercurrent of men talking in the distance. The waiting was agony, and Michael could hear the echoes of his own breathing. Finally the voice came back.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to be clearer, sir.”

“
What?
”

“If you’d give me the details of the emergency and a telephone number where you can be reached—”

“Did you give him the message? The
words
! Did you say them?”

“The Secretary is extremely busy and requests that you clarify the nature of your call.”

“Goddamn it, did you
say
them?”

“I’m repeating what the Secretary said, sir. He can’t be disturbed now, but if you’ll outline the details and leave a number, someone will be in contact with you.”

“Someone? What the hell
is
this? Who
are
you? What’s your name?”

There was a pause. “Smith,” said the voice.

“Your name! I want your
name
!”

“I just gave it to you.”

“You get Matthias on this phone—!”

There was a click; the line went dead.

Havelock stared at the instrument in his hand, then closed
his eyes. His mentor, his
krajan
, his
přítel
, had cut him off. What had happened?

He had to find out; it made no sense, no sense at all! There was another number in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the home of a man Matthias saw frequently when he was in the Shenandoah, an older man whose love of chess and fine old wine took Anton’s mind off his monumental pressures. Michael had met Leon Zelienski a number of times, and was always struck by the camaraderie between the two academics; he was happy for Matthias that such a person existed whose roots, though not in Prague, were not so far away, in Warsaw.

Zelienski had been a highly regarded professor of European history brought over to America years ago from the University of Warsaw to teach and lecture at Berkeley. Anton had met Leon during one of his early forays into the campus lecture circuit; additional funds were always welcome to Matthias. A friendship had developed—mostly by way of the mails and over chess—and upon retirement and the death of Zelienski’s wife, Anton had persuaded the elderly scholar to come to the Shenandoah.

The Antibes operator took far longer with the second call, but finally Havelock heard the old man’s voice.

“Good evening?”

“Leon? Is that you, Leon?”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Michael Havelock. Do you remember me, Leon?”

“
Mikhail!
Do
I remember
! No, of course not, and I never touch Kielbasa, either, you young baranie! How are you? Are you visiting our valley? You sound so far away.”

“I’m very far away, Leon. I’m also very concerned …” Havelock explained his concern; he was unable to reach their beloved mutual friend, and was old Zelienski planning to see Anton while Matthias was in the Shenandoah?

“If he’s here, Mikhail, I do not know it. Anton, of course, is a busy man. Sometimes I think the busiest man in this world … but he doesn’t find time for me these days. I leave messages at the lodge, but I’m afraid he ignores them. Naturally, I understand. He moves with great figures … he is a great figure, and I am hardly one of them.”

“I’m sorry to hear that … that he hasn’t been in touch.”

“Oh, men call me to express his regrets, saying that he
rarely comes out to our valley these days, but I tell you, our chess games suffer. Incidentally, I must settle for another mutual friend of ours, Mikhail. He was out here frequently several months ago. That fine journalist Raymond Alexander. Alexander the Great, I call him, but as a player he’s a far better writer.”

“Raymond Alexander?” said Havelock, barely listening. “Give him my best. And thank you, Leon” Havelock replaced the phone and looked over at Salanne. “He hasn’t time for us anymore,” he said, bewildered.

He had reached Paris by eight o’clock in the morning, made contact with Gravet by nine and, by a quarter past eleven, was walking south amid the crowds in the Boulevard St Germain. The fastidious art critic and broker of secrets would approach him somewhere between the Rue de Pontoise and the Quai St. Bernard. Gravet needed the two hours to seek out as many sources as possible relative to the information Havelock needed. Michael, on the other hand, used the time to move slowly, to rest—leaning upright against walls, never sitting—and to improve his immediate wardrobe.

There had been no time for Salanne’s wife to buy him clothes in the morning, no thought but to get to Paris as quickly as he could, for every moment lost widened the distance between Jenna and himself. She had never been to Paris except with him, and there were only so many options open to her; he had to be there when she narrowed them down.

The doctor had driven for three and a half hours at very high speed to Avignon, where there had been a one o’clock produce train bound for Paris. Michael had caught it, dressed in what could be salvaged from his own clothes, in addition to a sweater and an ill-fitting gabardine topcoat furnished by Salanne. Now he looked at his reflection in a storefront window; the jacket, trousers, open shirt and hat he had
purchased off the rack in the Raspail forty-five minutes ago suited his purpose. They were loose and nondescript. A man wearing such clothes would not be singled out, and the brim of the soft hat fell just low enough over his forehead to cast a shadow across his face.

Beyond the window was a narrow pillar of clear glass, part of the merchandise display, a mirror. He was drawn to it, to the face in the shadow of the hat brim.
His
face. It was haggard, with black circles under the eyes and the stubble of a dark beard. He had not thought of shaving even when he had been shopping in the Raspail. There had been mirrors in the store, but he had looked only at the clothes while concentrating his thoughts on the Paris he and Jenna Karas had known together: one or two embassy contacts; several colleagues-in-cover, as they were; a few French friends—government mainly,
whose ministères
brought them into his orbit; and three or four acquaintances they had made at late-night cafés having nothing whatsoever to do with the world in which he made his living.

Now in the St. Germain the ashen face he saw reminded him of how tired and racked with pain he was, how much he just wanted to lie down and let his strength come back to him. As Salanne had said, he needed rest badly. He had tried to sleep on the train from Avignon, but the frequent stops at rural depots that were farmers’ points of delivery had jolted him awake whenever he dozed. And when awake, his head had throbbed, his mind filled with a profound sense of loss, confusion, and anger. The one man on earth to whom he had given his trust and love, the giant who had replaced his father and had shaped his life, had cut him loose and he had no idea why. Throughout the years, during the most harrowing and isolated times, he was somehow never alone because the presence of Anton Matthias was always with him. Anton was the spur that drove him to be better than he was, his protection against the memories of the early terrible days, because his
přítel
had given them meaning, perspective. Certainly no justification, but a reason for doing what he was doing, for spending his life in an abnormal world until something inside him told him he could join the normal one. He had fought against the guns of Lidice and the arbiters of gulag termination in whatever form he had found them.