Nowhere (3 page)

My bum—who incidentally even in close-up seemed to have genuinely bad skin and bleary eyes, unless it was a masterpiece of makeup—said: “I think you know that sort of thing is never spelled out, really as a matter of taste or style, not because of any need for great secrecy. After all, everybody knows that when some agency goes unnamed, it must be what you think it is and not the Department of Agriculture.”

I must say I was relieved. “Ah, you’re the—”

“Firm,” he said quickly. “Or sometimes the Bunch, or even the Troop. Less often the Pack, but sometimes, jocularly, the Gang. And then—”

The man in the headset broke in querulously: “I’m late for my break, Rasmussen!”

“All right, so go already,” Rasmussen replied, in the idiom everyone, even secret agents, picks up when in New York. He took the earphones from the other man and put them across his own crown. He then sat down on a little stool before a panel that was an electronics extravaganza, and switched off the interior lights while the other man slipped out the rear of the van.

When the lights came on again Rasmussen said: “Now then, let’s have your story.”

“If you’ll tell me why you are wearing the headset.”

He cocked an eye at me. “I must warn you, Wren: there’s no tit for tat in covert work.”

“You know my name?”

He looked as though he might have blushed, had his complexion not already been too variegated to show more color. “All right, call me guilty of an indiscretion. I suppose you’d find out anyway, soon enough. We live in a time when it is unfashionable to keep secrets: this is especially true of undercover operatives. Wilcox, there, who just went out for coffee and Danish: I happen to know he sells everything he hears in this job to Sylvester Swan, the muckraking columnist.”

“That’s neither here nor there,” said I. “I demand, under the Freedom of Information Act, to hear what you know about how I was bombed out of house and home this evening, and who that really was who called me and identified himself as the Sebastiani Liberation Front, and how I narrowly escaped before the building blew up, and why the cops and TV people dismissed my efforts to tell them what happened.”

Rasmussen was looking at me with a sly smile. “Wren, my dear fellow, you’ve lots to learn. I suppose you don’t realize that you have just fecklessly spilled all the beans in your possession. You have withheld nothing with which to bargain. Suppose you were in the enemy’s hands at the moment? Your goose would be well done!”

“Come on, Rasmussen, I’m not playing a game.”

“But
we
are, old boy, as you would know if you read any blockbusting thrillers. We’re having the time of your lives, and— Wait a minute!” He adjusted the earphones and fiddled with some knobs. His smile became a grin that grew dirtier. “This is rich,” he whispered. “His boyfriend just came back from the ballet, three hours late. They’re in bed now and having quite a set-to. Somebody’s going to burst into tears in a moment, and somebody’s going to have to atone.”

I winced. “Is it really useful to do that sort of eavesdropping, Rasmussen? So some Russian diplomat is an invert: is that really scandalous nowadays?”

“Russian?” he jeered. “This is——.” The name he gave, which of course I suppress here, was that of a leading American statesman.

“Good gravy, that’s worse! How can you possibly justify that sort of thing as legitimate information-gathering?”

Rasmussen scowled. “Don’t get pious on me, Wren. Do you want your country to be run like a queer bathhouse?” But his face soon returned to a prurient smirk, in response to what he was hearing. “I can’t wait to see the videotapes.”

“You’ve got a hidden TV camera in there?”

“Over the bed,” he gloated. “In a phony air-conditioning vent. And of course it’s
our
boy in there with that old queen.”

“Is there no limit to your swinishness?” I asked in disbelief. “I don’t know that I even approved of the Abscam entrapments, and they played only on the natural greed of all men. But sex!”

He stared suspiciously at me. “You’re clean in that area, I hope.”

“I certainly am! But what’s that got to do with—”

“Wren,” Rasmussen said, taking off the headset, “sit down here.” He gestured at a nearby floorbound coil of cable. I did as he suggested, having nowhere better to go.

He found a pipe somewhere and filled it from a pouch. He lighted up deliberately. “We’ve had an eye on you for a while,” he said at last, spewing some smoke down at me. “You’ll be pleased to know you passed every test.”

“Test?”

He smiled in that superior, benevolent fashion of the man who has done something disagreeable to you for your own good—doctor, schoolmaster, policeman. “It won’t do any harm at this juncture to reveal that Ben Rothman works for us.”

“In his deli? By selling pastrami and corned beef?”

Rasmussen took the pipe from his lips and exhaled in a torrent of thick smoke. “And the man who gave you a dollar, outside the French restaurant.”

“Oh, come on, what was the purpose of that?”

“Take a look at the bill.”

I fished it from my pocket, where it had lain doggo during the attack of the small girls. I uncrumpled and examined the face of the dollar, expecting to find George Washington replaced by the head of a rhesus monkey or the like, but not so.

“Turn it over,” said Rasmussen, directing more smoke my way. “Look at the reverse of The Great Seal.”

This is the circle to the left, in which is depicted a truncated pyramid surmounted by an eye inside a triangle over which, on a proper bill, is arched the Latin phrase
Annuit Coeptis.
Below the pyramid, on a curved scroll, should properly be
Novus Ordo Seclorum.
On the one I held, the words
Omne Animal
hung over the pyramid, while underneath one could read:
Post Coitum Triste.

“Very funny,” I said sullenly. “All right, you’ve proved you can make contact with me so delicately that not even I know it. But what’s your purpose?”

While I was off guard he snatched the dollar from me, claiming it as the property of the Firm. Sucking on his pipe, which gurgled repulsively, he buried the bill in his pocket. He resumed. “At the moment of greatest emergency, namely when the bomb was about to go off, you not only saved yourself but had the presence of mind to carry that little hooker out of danger.”

“Don’t tell me Bobbie was still another of your people?”

He shook his head, emitting smoke. “ ’Fraid not. She’s just a whore so far as we know—unless she works for the Competition. I hope not, because on occasion I’ve used her services, and I’d hate to think that in the violent transports of lust I might have disclosed some information from classified material.”

“I take it I will eventually hear an explanation of why you posed these challenges to me. Frankly, it had better be plausible.”

The rear of the van, which was sealed off from the front seat by a solid partition, was filling with smoke, though seated on the floor as I was, I was still below the worst of it.

Rasmussen asked, “What do you know about Saint Sebastian?”

“Was not the person of that name, if indeed he existed at all, so pierced with the arrows of his enemies that he subsequently became the patron saint of pinmakers?”

Rasmussen scowled. “The Saint Sebastian to which I refer is the little country of that name—”

“Ah! The Sebastiani Liberation Front!”

He closed his eyes in chagrin. “I’m afraid this will get nowhere if you interrupt continually.”

“But that’s what the voice said on the phone. The only reason I was able to escape the building before it blew up was a call I got about a minute before the explosion: a man with a heavy accent, Slavic perhaps, but with also a bit of the German and God knows what else. On the other hand, I suppose it could have been faked.” I peered sharply at Rasmussen: he or one of his colleagues would certainly have been capable of it.

“No news to us,” he said disdainfully. “Naturally we had your place wired. That call was made by a member of an underground movement known as the Liberation Front of Saint Sebastian. These people are in the United States at this moment, on a fund- and sympathy-raising campaign for their cause.”

“They have chosen a mightily ingratiating means of doing both,” said I, showing my teeth. “How dare they come over here and blow up things and ask for
help
! Don’t we have enough homegrown scum to do that sort of thing?”

Rasmussen leaned back and displayed a faint derisive smile. “Aren’t we becoming a wee bit stuffy, Wren? Wasn’t it our own Tom Jefferson who said the tree of liberty should be watered with the blood of tyrants?”

“But who chooses the tyrants? And how many tyrants are found in Irish working-class homes, London department stores, Israeli kindergartens, and a highway junction near Nyack, New York? All of these have been the sites of unspeakable outrages by terrorist hyenas in the service of some cause for which perhaps some reasonable argument
might
be made, but to murder strangers in its name?”

Rasmussen shrugged. “It’s all in a day’s work to a pro, Wren. If I got into a tizzy over every little massacre, I’d never get anything accomplished.” He grasped the bowl of the pipe and gestured at me with the stem. “Let me fill you in on Saint Sebastian. It’s a little principality, tucked away in a kind of side pocket between Austria, Germany, and Czechoslovakia.”

“I’ve
never
heard of a little country in the place you describe. There’s Liechtenstein, of course, but isn’t that near Switzerland? And San Marino’s in Italy—”

“Shut
up,
Wren!” Rasmussen said coarsely. “In covert work we speak only when we have information to impart, never to be sociable.”

He used the mispronunciation “coh-VERT,” habitual with government types, but I decided to let that go for the moment.

He proceeded, “The place is ruled by one Prince Sebastian the Twenty-third, an anachronism, a dinosaur, an absolutist of the kind you don’t nowadays find nowhere, nohow.” He had turned folksy without warning: perhaps there are people who find that charming. “He has got away with it probably only because who cares about a tiny state of maybe seventy square miles, say thirty thousand souls, no raw materials of a strategic sort, and furthermore not on the main route to anyplace anybody would want to go, enclosed by high mountains. I mean, this is a little place time forgot, buddy-boy.”

While wincing at his meaningless familiarity, I reflected that the same phrase had been uttered by me, on occasion, with reference to my hometown, a dreamy upstream Hudson hamlet where no doubt still today the village officials wear their pants an inch too short.

Rasmussen went on, after having sent my way a burst of smoke so noxious it might have come from the tailpipe of a city bus, “This prince is supposed to be some kind of nut, according to the few informants we have been able to find, a handful of tourists who have visited Saint Sebastian, and an old newsman, a stringer for some wire service, named Clyde McCoy. McCoy has apparently stayed there for years, due to the low cost of living and his high capacity for alcohol, cheap in Saint S. He’s not exactly a trench-coated swashbuckler, I gather, not to mention that there’s never been much that could be called noteworthy news from the place.”

“
I
certainly have never heard of it,” I iterated, though well aware that I would be annoying Rasmussen in so doing.

He glared at me briefly, pulling his lips back slightly from the pipe, to display two rows of rather spiky teeth: he was probably of that breed who eventually gnaw a hole in the hard-rubber stem. I seem to part with the rest of the human race in my instinctive distrust of a pipesmoker. “But then, how much do we hear of San Marino and Andorra?” he asked the ceiling of the van—in which incidentally I could spot no much-needed air vent. “Then these bombings began suddenly, as of last month, in certain American cities. I refer to those for which credit has been claimed by the Sebastiani Liberation Front, and not those others that have been the self-proclaimed work of the various other terrorist groups, though one or two explosions are in doubt, being boasted of by two organizations who have apparently no connection with each other, for example, when a series of small charges blew the genitalia off the nude male statuary in the National Gallery, credit was publicly taken by both the Amazon Army, whose cause should be obvious, and the Testosterone Society, an aggregation of militant macho men who performed the mutilation of marble, they said, to highlight society’s daily severing of real gonads.”

Rasmussen had the execrable taste to grin at this point: I suspected that the last example was apocryphal, his feeble essay at wit. I snorted, and he resumed.

“You can pooh-pooh terrorism in the interests of some schoolboy slogan about the perfectibility of man, but the fact is that violence is just about the only thing that will make you sit up and take notice. We’re all in pretty much of a coma nowadays, wouldn’t you say, what with mainlining, speedballing, herpes lesions, fear of getting AIDS from a handshake with a kid brother, dioxin-contaminated barbecue pits, over-the-counter medicaments dosed with poison by embittered loners.” He produced an anguished gasp: apparently he took modern life as hard as any of us. “Hell, man, it
takes
an explosion to cut through all that shit!”

I wondered again, as I had in the past, whether we were getting the finest types of men for our government bureaus or whether they were going instead into the much more lucrative field of pornographic videocassettes.

“Rasmussen,” I asked, “would you mind opening a door or turning on a fan?” I coughed and beat my hands. “Your pipe is asphyxiating.”

“Aha,” said he, “you reveal a weakness.”

“Yes. I’m afraid I breathe air.”

He sighed and propped his pipe against a panel of switches and dials. “My point is, if the Sebastiani Liberation group thinks it worth their while to come all the way over here and blow up a dump like the late building in which you made your squalid home, perhaps we should return the favor and examine what it is they are protesting against. Then we might throw our weight to whichever side looks as though it’s going to win, instead of getting entangled in ideologies, which is always a sucker’s game. What I say is, let’s take a look at this bozo close up, this Prince Sebastian. What makes him tick? Maybe if Sebastian comes up clean, it’ll bring back the divine right of kings. World could use a new angle on the whole political ball of wax: a rerun of old-fashioned benevolent despotism might be the answer we’re all looking for. On the other hand, maybe it will make more sense to fund this Liberation bunch, which might favorably impress various oil-rich fanatics in the Middle East.” Rasmussen snatched up his pipe and puffed rapidly. “Well, Wren,” he said around the stem, “you’ll have a chance to pursue the answer to these questions.”