The Old Boys (23 page)

I watched the sailboat tacking in a twenty-knot wind—very good sailor at the helm and sheets. At last Ben stopped, turned around, and waited for me. When I reached him he said, “I see your point, but I also see big problems.”

“I knew you would, Ben. That’s why I need your thoughts. After all, it was you who gave me the idea.”

“Not me, pal.”

“Really? You do remember saying I couldn’t do it myself—that is, get close enough to Ibn Awad to lay hands on him? That was what began the train of thought.”

“I remember the words. But I don’t remember advising you to put your head in the lion’s mouth. You’re acting like Christopher.”

“There are worse role models.”

“Right. And look at all the happiness being Mr. Intrepid brought Paul,” Ben said. “Horace, this plan is pointless unless you
can tell us exactly where you are and stay alive long enough for the cavalry to arrive.”

“And if I could manage that?”

“We still wouldn’t have any cavalry. Are Harley and Jack and David and me—combined ages roughly three centuries—supposed to drop from the sky, slay the evil-doers, and rescue you and the maiden?”

“No,” I said, “but I’m not planning to be taken prisoner. I just want Ibn Awad to come closer or else give us a signal so that we can move closer to him.”

We stayed where we were, shivering, the wind snatching our words as they were spoken, while I told him what I had in mind.

At the end of the speech, he merely nodded.

I said, “Does that mean you’re on board?”

“I signed on for the whole voyage,” Ben said. “But you do realize that you’re shaking a coffee can full of old watch parts and hoping you’ll find a Rolex inside when you open the lid, don’t you?”

“Maybe. Do you have a better idea?”

“Any idea would be a better idea,” Ben said. “But I’ll pass the word that you have the Amphora Scroll, God help you.”

Technology is a friend to man. A case in point is caller ID. My satellite phone was equipped with it, and stored in its memory was the number of the telephone Kevin had used to call me on the stairway outside Mikhail’s Moscow flat. A dead giveaway of that kind is not so rare in clandestine circles as you might think. Long ago I had an asset in the bowels of the Chinese government who always wrote his true name and return address on the envelopes containing the reports he sent to me through the mail. A dyed-inthe-wool bureaucrat himself, he felt that the absence of a return address would be more likely to attract more attention from routine-addicted postal snoops than its unabashed presence in the upper left-hand corner of his treasonous communications. He must have been right, because he was never caught.

When I called Kevin’s number I got voice mail—no surprise— that asked me in a chipper female voice, in Russian, to leave a name and number. I said, “This is Horace Hubbard calling Kevin Clark with a fabulous one-time offer. Please call me back at the number you already know. Bye!”

I ate the dry sandwich and drank the bottled water that I had bought that morning at a gas station convenience store on the road to Belfast. I stood on a hilltop beside my tiny rental car on a tiny unpaved road in a place so lonely that it hardly seemed possible
that it could be hidden away on an island as crowded as Ireland. Nothing so wild and unpeopled existed in Xinjiang or among Russian birches. Apart from the road, there was no sign that the human hand had ever disturbed anything in eyeshot. Hundreds of untended black-faced sheep, wool beaded with rainwater, grazed like wild game. Birds fed on their droppings. Both sheep and birds were mute; cottony silence reigned. Moist green turf, hue intensifying as the sun found a rift in the perpetual clouds, covered the earth from horizon to horizon.

Satellite phone traffic among the Old Boys had dwindled as the novelty of the thing wore off. These were people whose life’s work had taught them not to trust telephones. Old spies like to work alone, in silence, watching the faces of their sources for telltale signs, such as greed and fright—sometimes even selfless idealism—that tell the practiced eye whether the all-believing ear is hearing truth or trash.

My satellite telephone rang. I thought,
That was fast, Kevin.
The phone was in the car, inside my canvas briefcase. It kept ringing till I unzipped the briefcase and answered.

Harley Waters said, “You’re still in Jerusalem?”

“No, I’m tending my flocks elsewhere.”

“Are you now?” said Harley. “Watch out you don’t get too lonesome. I think I’ve got somethin’ for you. Can you get to Budapest from where you are?”

His tone of voice told me that he was dying to tell me something that he could not tell me over the phone.

Madame Károlyi, the little goldfinch of an old woman whom Harley took me to meet in Budapest, talked about dark days as we sipped coffee and ate pastries in her parlor. It was a small dusty room above a narrow street: fringed lampshades, fringed shawls draped over the furniture, dark oblongs on the faded wallpaper where paintings formerly hung. She wore what looked like a Chanel suit from the sixties; it was pink with large glassy buttons. The skirt was short. Her stockings bagged at the knees.

“It was quite curious how trusting people were in sexual matters under Communism,” she said. “One believed that the only escape into privacy from the secret police was to get into bed with somebody. A love affair is something everyone knows how to keep secret—maybe that was why God spit into the handful of dust— so we believed that we were safe if we were naked with a lover. The Soviet occupation may have been the most erotic period in Hungarian history, which is saying a lot.”

She offered me another éclair. I regretted the interruption. It had been years, if ever, since I had encountered a woman who played the role of herself so beautifully. Every shift of tone, every gesture, her museum clothes, the coy angle of her ancient feet in their fetishist’s pink shoes, was a flashgun exposure of the beauty she used to be. You saw the invisible jewelry she once wore, the
haughty faces in the missing paintings. No wonder Harley, who had run her as an agent for twenty years, looked at her like a man hopelessly in love. He must have collected his reports from her in a four-poster.

“And the
dénouement!
” she said. “A Molnár play! It turned out, when the secret police files were opened up after the Communists were overthrown, that everyone—
everyone
—had been reporting to the secret police every word of pillow talk, every shiver of ecstasy, every political joke whispered by their lovers. And it wasn’t just the
cinq-à-sept
adulterers. Wives were tattling on husbands, husbands on wives. That, of course, was only to be expected. But tender lovers?
Quel chagrin!
Mass forgiveness and forgetfulness were necessary when it all came out or no one in Hungary would have had sex ever again.”

Madame Károlyi, Christian name Marie, bore one of the most ancient surnames in Hungary, though she married into the family after the arrival of the Red Army, too late to make much of a fuss about being a member of the highest aristocracy. In her own right, she was a remote descendant of Sigismund Bathory, who defeated the Turks at Walachia in 1595, and of the famous Blood Countess Elizabeth Bathory: “Of course you know about her; she bathed in the blood of virgin peasant girls as an aphrodisiac.” Madame Károlyi delivered this information in the same twitter of high amusement in which she had described the ménages à trois in which the AVH, the Hungarian secret police, was the one in the middle. As a young case officer in Budapest, Harley had been the third party in some of her affairs with prominent communists. Among these was a Soviet ambassador who went on to become head of the KGB. Also a puppet prime minister of Hungary who had been one of her lovers when she was a teenager and came back from Russia after the war in an altered state: the KGB had castrated him, a time-honored oriental technique designed to ensure his undying obedience. Madame Károlyi’s detailed eyewitness report to Harley on this man’s condition, delivered during the failed Hungarian revolt of 1956, had been regarded as one of the
more titillating intelligence coups of the time. There were others, some illustrated with photographs. By the time she was no longer a sex object, Harley’s deposits into her Swiss bank account had made her a rich woman by the standards of ruined aristocracy. She lived as she lived now, shabbily, because she knew better than to draw attention to herself. Those newly in power in Hungary thought that she had been a collaborator with the Soviets. She could hardly defend herself by revealing that she had done it all for Western civilization and the Outfit’s money. For Madame Károlyi this was the final irony in a life that she seemed to regard as one long joke.

Harley, who must have heard her stories many times, listened with a sparkle in his eye and a reminiscent smile that were reflections of Madame Károlyi’s own vivacious expression. Maestro that he was, he knew that his agent’s chatter was just her way of coming to the point.

The point was, she was Lori Christopher’s third cousin once removed. She provided the full genealogy—a Prussian greatgrandfather had married a Hungarian great-grandmother, I think. In 1942 Madame Károlyi had been a twelve-year-old countess named Marie Bathory who lived with her parents, siblings and various aunts, uncles and cousins on the family estate near the Czech frontier.

“The estate is no longer even in Hungary, but in Slovakia, but it was never really of this world,” said Madame Károlyi. “Three thousand hectares of land so poorly managed that not even the peasants could grow enough food to feed themselves. Of course they fed us first because we owned the land, and they worked without pay as servants in the house for the same reason. Their families were as old as ours and had always been in bondage to the Bathory family, so what else could they have done? If they had not done their duty, my family would have evicted them from the land. Social injustice? Unbelievable. But at that time no one, neither master nor peasant, had ever heard of the concept.”

In 1942 Hungary was not yet occupied by the German army,
although the country had a fascist government and was an ally of the Third Reich. The Hungarian army was fighting alongside the Wehrmacht on the Russian front and taking ruinous casualties. Marie’s family were trying to isolate themselves from the rightwing Horthy government, whose suspicion of aristocrats was almost as lethal as that of the German Nazis and the communists who came after them. The estate was about seventy miles from Budapest, well beyond the last railroad station, and for the second half of that distance could only be approached over footpaths or wagon tracks.

“No electricity, no telephone, no running water,” said Madame Károlyi. “Once a month all of us children took a bath together in a big wooden tub filled with tepid water heated over open fires by the peasants. On my twelfth birthday I was banned from the tub and after that washed merely my face and hands, crotch and armpits like the rest of the grownups. Time was a blank. Nothing happened, nothing. No card games, no hunting, no charades, no conversation, no walks in the woods except for purposes of incest. I ask you to imagine! The boredom was so intense that one of my cousins became a famous theorist of boredom. As a professor of philosophy in America, he wrote treatises explaining that boredom was the root of all evil, especially politics. In my opinion this was the most brilliant intellectual breakthrough of the present age, but of course no one paid the slightest attention.”

Another éclair? No, thank you. Are you quite sure? They’re delicious. Really, no. But how fascinating all this is.

“Fascinating?” said Madame Károlyi. “You would not have thought so if you never changed your clothes, never tasted a sweet, lived among people who had been perfectly charming in Budapest but were now a collection of sleepwalkers who never laughed and hardly ever even talked. They had lost their money, for them the same thing as losing their souls. It was beyond Chekhov, my dear man. It was pure Kafka! And then, out of nowhere, came this vision. Lori.”

Lori Christopher arrived, on foot, a pack on her back, in the
early winter of 1942. No one knew how she had found her way. She had spent a summer on the estate as a child. How could she have remembered the paths through the woods, how had she escaped rape, robbery, murder, being eaten by wolves? Yet here she was.