The Folks at Fifty-Eight (32 page)

“Don’t worry. I’ll see what I can do; see if we can’t find that son of yours and get him home.”

She wiped the tears and then looked at him with a mixture of gratitude and uncertainty.

“Thank you; thank you so much. How can I ever. . . ? I mean. . .”

He listened to her stuttered words and viewed her trepidation, then smiled and shook his head.

“One day, perhaps, but now I rather think my wife wants to finish what she started.”

As Angela watched him stride from the room, comforting fingers arrived. They brushed the hair from her eyes. They reached for a tissue and dabbed at the tears. They stroked at her cheeks and neck. They calmed, and caressed, and prepared.

They brought to mind a similar occasion from some months before, and she recalled the mixture of excitement and disgrace she had felt when Sarah and the Russian girl had plied her with wine, and then forcibly seduced her on that apartment floor.

This time, though, when Angela closed her eyes and allowed another woman to explore and arouse, there was no fantasy or delusion, no anger or feigned disgust, no screams of outrage to cover her shame, and no guilt of any description.

All she allowed herself to imagine was a world of gentle deviance and illicit pleasure. All she allowed herself to feel was a desire she no longer had any need or reason to deny.

The concierge told him as he collected his key. An agitated Marcus Allum sat waiting in the bar, with frown fixed and soda water untouched. Hammond sat down opposite his one-time friend and patently furious boss. Allum spat an accusation.

“What is it with you, Gerald?” Hammond shrugged and stared blankly back. Allum went on. “Carlisle told you, I told you, and now Chambers has told you. Stop chasing this girl. Why the hell aren’t you doing that?”

“I gave her my word.”

“You gave her your word? Jesus! I stuck my neck out for you. This is how you repay me?”

“How do you mean?”

“What the hell were you playing at, talking to Chambers like that?”

“I was doing the job you should have done.”

Allum’s fury was obvious, but the counter accusation had obviously caught him off balance. He looked confused. Hammond explained. Just where the hell did these people get off, ordering government officials around?

Allum raised his eyes to the heavens. He said he couldn’t believe it. Hammond was as bad as Carlisle. He glanced around the room. Not only were these people officially part of the government, but in many ways they ran the country. They were some of the most powerful men in the country, and Daniel Chambers was one of them. Hadn’t Hammond understood anything Chambers had told him?

Hammond glowered. He said the president and the people’s representatives ran this country, or they would, if someone smacked down people like Chambers once in a while.

Allum swore. Did Hammond honestly believe that politicians had a divine understanding of people’s opinions? Most people didn’t know what their opinions were until the press told them.

“Are you telling me these people run the media?”

“Of course.” Allum corrected himself. “Well, apart from the Times-Herald. That is. That’s Hoover’s personal attack dog. Don’t you understand, Gerald, these people run everything: politics, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, the police, the judges, the church, the academic communities, and not just here in the U.S.”

“And the people who make the rules meet in that house on Sixty-Eighth and Park?”

“Some of them do, yes.”

“Then maybe we should pull it down. . . preferably with them inside.”

“And who would replace them? Without these people, the west would fall into anarchy.”

“Did you say anarchy or democracy?”

Hammond considered he’d made a valid point. Allum disagreed. He said these weren’t bad people they were talking about. Hammond shouldn’t listen to the lunatic fringe. There was no big lie involved, no conspiracy to subvert democracy. On the contrary, there was a concerted effort to keep it on track. America was a capitalist country, the finest and most prosperous in the world. It was largely due to these people that it was.

When Hammond asked if he got that from the newspaper, the answer staggered him. Allum claimed the good of the country was too important to leave in the hands of people so easily manipulated. When Hammond spoke of democracy and elections, Allum scoffed.

He said elections were like going up to Yankee Stadium. People could shout and cheer and applaud, if they happened to like what they saw, or hiss and boo and whistle if they didn’t. But ordinary people didn’t get to play, and they didn’t get to pick the teams or decide the tactics. All they could do was decide which team to support, pay their entrance fee at the gate, make some noise, eat their hot dogs and watch the game.

“And what if I stop going to the game? What if I stop paying my entrance fee?”

Hammond set the features in determined pose. Allum was equally intransigent.

“You mean go back to the Little League and sit in the bleachers? Buttonhole the coach on his way out of the ballpark?” He looked exasperated. “Take a good look around. This is the only serious game in town. For every disenfranchised Joe who walks past the stadium, there are sixty-thousand waving greenbacks at the turnstiles. You turn those around and maybe you’ll make a difference, but how are you gonna do that? You don’t run the media. You can try stopping them in the street, but I doubt they’ll listen. Why should they, as long as they’re happy and their team wins one every now and then?”

Hammond found it difficult to disagree. Allum threw a further question.

“When was the last time you saw a change from Democrat to Republican or vice versa result in a true change in policy? I’m not talking about a few cosmetic changes. I’m talking about real sea change. Think about it, and you’ll find the answer’s never, because as soon as they get to run the team there’s somebody else telling them the rules they have to play by. That’s just the way it is. You might as well accept it.”

When Hammond asked how many people were members of the Council on Foreign Relations, Allum spoke of hundreds. Then he asked about the inner circle. At first Allum denied the existence of such a group, but then confirmed the truth. Hammond finally felt he was getting somewhere, but when he mentioned Conrad Zalesie, Allum spat a warning.

“Zalesie’s one of the most powerful of all. And a word of advice. . . You might get away with upsetting Chambers, but don’t ever upset Zalesie.”

“Why does everybody keep telling me that?”

“Because it’s good advice.”

“What about the girl?”

“Forget her.”

“I can’t do that.”

Allum shrugged in resignation.

“That’s what I thought you’d say.”

“So where is she?”

“More than my life is worth, even if I did know, which I don’t. But I will do something for you.” He nodded to the newspaper on the table. “There’s a number written inside, the number of a man who might help. His name’s Gabriel. He’s the best detective in New York. I’ve used him before. Assuming the girl’s still in New York, if anybody can find her, it’s Gabriel.”

Hammond looked closely at his old friend. He seemed worried.

“They’ve got you scared, too, haven’t they?”

Allum shook his head.

“No, just cautious. After your little chat with Chambers, they now know that Beria has a man in the State Department. If that’s true, there’s only a handful of people it could be; only a handful who knew about your trip to Germany.”

“So who did know about it?”

“Apart from the two of us? There’s Carlisle and Carpenter. Other people in the office knew some of it, but never all of it.”

“Nobody else?”

“Not in the Department, not that I’m aware of.”

“And outside the Department?”

“Zalesie, Chambers, and one or two people in Zalesie’s organization, whose names I don’t intend sharing.”

“What sort of people?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“What about Martin Kube?”

“We didn’t get to him until you’d left. He didn’t know anything about it.”

“So that’s what, six, eight, including us? What about the team in Germany?”

Hammond was desperately searching for alternatives. Allum shook his head.

“You said Paslov knew all about you. The German cell didn’t have that information.”

“So what happens now? What will these people do?”

“They’ll find him, and they’ll kill him.”

Allum stood ready to leave. For a few seconds he seemed undecided, but then posed another question, seemingly more in hope than expectation.

“You’re still hell-bent on chasing after this girl?”

“I have no choice. I gave her my word.”

“Then call the number I gave you. . . Gabriel’s the best there is.”

“Gabriel? You mean like the angel?”

Allum’s previously worried and angry features broke into a smile.

“No, not even close.” The smile broadened. “I think you’re probably gonna like him. For some reason I’ve never been able to understand, people do. But he’s not like any angel I ever heard of, and especially not that one.” Allum was still chuckling as he turned to leave. “In fact, Dawid Gabriel’s just about as far from angelic as it gets.” The chuckle faded. “But remember what I’ve said, Gerald. Find this girl, if you must, but after that you let it drop. You’re not equipped to take these people on. Nobody is.”

“So why are you helping me?”

“Because you were right. We may not be able to stop them, but sometimes people like Daniel Chambers need a quiet reminder that they’re not God, and they’re not infallible.”

“Seems like he got to you, too, huh?”

“He always gets to me.”

Allum nodded a curt goodbye before walking out of the bar and away. Hammond watched him go and then sat quietly assessing the many disturbing revelations about the clandestine group of power-brokers from Harold Pratt House. He similarly pondered Allum’s true motivation in offering support. Nothing came to mind.

He wandered over to the bar, ordered a large scotch and water, and then headed for his room. When he got there he found a note pushed under the door. It was from Davis Carpenter, and unusually succinct for the pompous bureaucrat. It ordered him to return to Washington. Hammond mouthed an obscenity, screwed it into a ball and threw it into the bin.

He ran through the list of suspects, turning over what he knew of each, and assessing their potential as Soviet agents.

He thought of his pompous boss Carpenter, the fat bureaucrat and State Department makeweight. Hammond thought back to late April of forty-four. He recalled the look of terror on Carpenter’s face when his team had first hit the Gestapo outpost in Rouen. He compared it to the bloated superciliousness that had greeted him in his office that day.

Carpenter was everything the Soviets looked for in an agent: weak and arrogant, self-indulgent and opinionated, lazy and cowardly. The State Department had passed him over for promotion and appointed Carlisle. They’d passed him over and appointed Marcus Allum before that. Carpenter would have to be a little bitter, a little vengeful. He’d be the ideal candidate.

Well, perhaps not ideal. Davis Carpenter wasn’t high enough up the State Department food chain to be of significant value to Beria, but he could be useful in minor ways.

Then he thought of another flaw in his logic. Beria didn’t do usual. Lavrenti Beria did anything but usual. He moved on. Alan Carlisle was a possibility, but why blackmail an agent already turned? It didn’t make sense. That left Allum.

Marcus Allum was devious enough, and vicious enough. He would turn, if it suited him, but how could the Soviets offer him more than he already enjoyed, and the risk was significant.

That left blackmail, but if the Soviets had already blackmailed Allum, why would they need to blackmail Carlisle? Anyway, he had known Allum since Princeton. Allum hated communists and he wasn’t the type. But if Allum wasn’t the type, who was?

Hammond drained his glass. Thirsty work, this spy catching. He left his room and wandered downstairs for a refill, then returned to his room and his contemplations.

He thought about the other candidates Allum had mentioned. He assumed they were defectors too, spymasters of some description, SS usually, but in Kube’s case, Gestapo. What if it was one of them, or both? Wouldn’t that be a coup for the Soviets? Two Nazi triple-agents, betraying the capitalist west to the Bolshevik east; it was the stuff of Lavrenti Beria’s dreams. Two Nazi war criminals, absolved for some of the most heinous crimes in history by unelected factions in the democratic self-righteous west. Two war criminals hidden from the tribunals and paid enormous sums of public money for providing a fledgling western intelligence service with lies and disinformation. The only man who would like that more than Beria was Hoover.

He recalled the pretentious Daniel Chambers. How would he explain that, when it echoed around the walls of 10 Downing Street and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Hammond didn’t know Lavrenti Beria, but he’d met Stanislav Paslov on two occasions. He imagined that such an embarrassment for western intelligence would hugely amuse the emaciated spymaster. But that was too fanciful, or was it? Wasn’t that a perfect example of the unexpected tactic with multiple strikes that had made Lavrenti Beria so revered by western spymasters in the past?

His mind moved on, to the hugely wealthy and powerful Conrad Zalesie. He knew about Hammond’s trip to Germany. He could be the one. Hammond hoped to meet him soon. Maybe after that he could better assess his potential as a Soviet agent. Now, though, it was late, and Hammond had finished another glass of scotch and water. It was time to sleep.