31 May, 1973Thursday
IT WAS HERMANN GOTTLIEB’S POLICY that as long as he continued to behave as normal, any out-of-the-ordinary situation would resolve itself. If something was amiss in the system, it was because somebody else had done something untoward. The usual suspects were foreign agents, retail clerks, small committees high up in national government, and his partner. But none were any match for Hermann’s routine, and the doggedness with which he could stick to it.
So on this Thursday he left Century at 5 PM, as if it were a normal weekday evening. There were several reasons why it was not.
“Vice Chief Victor believes there is a mole among us.”
The words echoed in his mind as he descended the Lambeth North staircase with the rest of the crowd. They had been spoken in Weeks’s office a few hours before, and they would have impressed Hermann more if he hadn’t heard them every few months since 1963.
The train arrived crowded and Hermann boarded it with everyone else. All the seats were occupied by the time he got on, and only one person looked up. The stranger’s eyes flicked up to Dr. Gottlieb’s cane, up to his bent middle, and then to his face. He bestowed upon Hermann an openly hostile look before reopening his newspaper. Hermann’s face twitched angrily, and since he was distracted when the train started to move, he stumbled sideways. He bumped into an older woman in an overcoat, who steadied him and asked if he was all right.
“Quite,” he snapped, taking hold of a pole.
The woman turning away in a huff would have been astonished to learn that the man spreading waves of irritation throughout the subway car was a valuable asset to British intelligence. Hermann Gottlieb was a tallish, thinnish man with a cane and a vague continental anonymity. He was professorially dressed and professorially hunched. His face was strangely geometric, like it had been sculpted by an art student who only had access to sharp-angled tools. If you asked his family, he worked for the Treasury. His neighbors were aware that he worked for ‘the government.’ A stranger would have taken him for an accountant, a teacher, or a mathematician. The former was true, if you asked his labmate; the latter was true if you asked his bosses. Hermann was one of the foremost minds in British cryptanalysis, and had been for almost twenty years.
“We—” Weeks had stumbled on the pronoun, eyes darting sideways to where Victor’s assistant stood in the corner, out of his eyeline—“We, uh believe Orpheus is a serious threat. We’re upgrading him to top priority.”
Weeks had called Gottlieb into his office that afternoon to nervously relay this message, apparently brought by Victor’s assistant Preston Blair, a pint-sized bulldog in a well-fitted suit. It seemed the further Victor retreated into his files, the more Hermann saw of Preston, and the further Victor’s reach grew in the service. In fact, he didn’t think he’d seen Victor in person since the new year. He was becoming as reclusive as the Chief.
“Top priority, sir?” Hermann shot Preston a suspicious glance. “We’ve been picking up these Orpheus transmissions for nearly two years.”
The train jerked, and Herman winced as his back bent with the effort of staying on his feet. He straightened up, sighing through his nose. He did not look down at the people sitting placidly in their seats, and they did not look up at him. Though born in Germany, he was long assimilated into the codes of English discourtesy. He put his free hand on his hip and tried to keep it still. It was beginning to ache insistently.
The Orpheus transmissions had started appearing at irregular and intense intervals in radio traffic two years ago. Among hundreds of routine Razvedka signals from fixed positions, Orpheus broadcast at irregular times from irregular locations. They were distinguished by their unusual encryption, which did not appear to be OTP or any other conventional Razvedka cipher.
Hermann and the coding bays had not spent much time on the Orpheus transmissions because they were infrequent and had always been graded low-priority—until now.
Victor believed Orpheus was a mole somewhere in the British secret services, and that the transmissions were coded messages between himself and his handler. Coming from anyone else, Hermann would not necessarily have dismissed the possibility out of hand, but it was harder to buy, coming from the man who cried mole.
Someone stood up for her stop, and, as if she hadn’t noticed Hermann before, gestured to her empty seat. Hermann shook his head, excessively deferent, and said, “My stop’s next.” His hip ached in protest. She passed by him, and he, gripping his cane, let someone else sit down instead.
“Orpheus is top priority, Gottlieb,” Preston had said. “The ‘why’ is unimportant to you. Only the how. I’ll need your files.”
“My files?”
“The Orpheus records,” Preston snapped. “I’m taking them upstairs.”
“Victor can come get them himself if he wants them,” Hermann was tempted to say, but did not. Victor had avoided Hermann for the last ten years—today would be no different.
“When will I get them back?” Hermann asked instead.
The intercom announced his stop, Wheaten Street, coming up next. Hermann heard it without much relief. Normally, he left his work at work. At home, he was a regular person, with regular hobbies, regular hopes, regular secrets. But as the train slowed and stopped, work clung to his thoughts: the unreadable transmissions, the unknown mole, even the absent Victor’s ever-present cold shoulder.
And normally, he did not eat dinner alone. But tonight, he would. His habitual guest had left town.
Hermann emerged into the sun and turned up Wheaten Street. He looked up at Newton’s building as he passed it, eyes climbing to his third-floor window. The light glared off it, shielding it from his eyes, and for a second in the evening sun he felt dislocated from time, terribly out of place. Something was wrong, he thought, something was horribly wrong. Then the light moved as he did, and he saw that the curtains were drawn, just like always.
And anyways, nobody was home.
Hermann turned a corner, walked another block, and turned onto his street, Airedale Street.
On the stairs inside of his building, he heard music. For a moment he thought a neighbor was listening to Liszt at a disrespectful volume, for those were the unmistakable bars of El Contrabandista. But as he reached the top step, the notes stumbled.
Something like a smile disturbed the blunt lines of his face. Hermann took out his keys quietly.
The heavy opening motif plunged down again before stopping abruptly. The player restarted a few measures back.
Hermann unlocked and opened the door softly, and the playing continued at full volume. It was dark in the front hall—the first blue shadows of night were falling in from the kitchen doorway at one end, and the front balcony door at the other. Warm light came from the living room doorway, because someone had turned on a lamp.
Hermann slipped off his shoes and stepped into his slippers. He closed the front door with care, but as soon as the bolt clicked home, the song abruptly changed.
“Liszt giving you difficulty?” said Hermann, emerging into the light and leaning against the living room door frame.
“Liszt? Me?” Newton, sitting at Herman's upright piano, made a scoffing sound. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Strange,” said Hermann, beginning to unbutton his shirt cuffs. “I thought for certain I heard someone practicing El Contrabandista as I came in.”
“Now why on Earth would I do a thing like that?” said Newt. He made as if squinting at the sheet music, while continuing to sound out In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida with his fingers. “First of all, the Contrabandista is outrageously difficult. Even Liszt couldn’t play it. Second, it’s nowhere near as badass as Iron Butterfly. And third, I don’t ‘practice.’ I’m just good.”
“Is that so?” said Hermann, switching to his other cuff.
“Yes. And if I did have to practice,” Newt said, finally looking up at Hermann, “I certainly wouldn’t allow anyone to witness it. I have to maintain my pristine reputation for effortless genius.”
The prodigal engineer was a short but leggy man, dressed for work in one of his unprofessional patterned shirts, no tie. He had thick-framed and thick-lensed glasses. His large forehead was accentuated by a high sweep of hair, one he maintained carefully even as it passed out of style. He peered at Hermann with heavy-lidded green eyes.
“I would not call your reputation in this flat ‘pristine,’” Hermann said.
“But you would call it genius?”
“I would say,” said Hermann, approaching the piano, “that anybody who can play El Contrabandista will be eligible for consideration for such a title.”
“Hmm. Doesn’t sound worth the hassle,” said Newt. “What’s your policy on Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2?”
He played the opening bars.
“I like El Contrabandista,” said Hermann, leaning on the piano. “It sounds like an argument.”
“Can’t possibly imagine why that would be appealing to you,” Newt said. But he was unable to keep from smiling as Hermann leaned in and kissed him on the cheek.
“I thought you’d already left for the conference,” Hermann said, crossing the living room and going into his bedroom.
“Decided to go tomorrow morning,” Newt called to him as Hermann opened his closet. “But I went to the station this afternoon and sent my things ahead.”
“Sent ahead so you could...?”
“Yes, so I could go up on the Bonneville. You think I'm going up to the countryside in June and not going riding? Come off it.”
Newt played a few more measures of Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.
“God, it’s been years since I was up at the Estate,” Newt said. “I didn’t even have the Bonneville back then.”
Hermann hated Newton’s motorcycle. He chose on this occasion not to comment.
“How was work?” Newt called. “Everyone miss me already?”
“Wesley does,” Hermann answered. Wesley was their older labmate, a strange, friendless engineer with a couple of consuming obsessions. “Weeks sent him to my desk, to divide the labor on Orpheus, and all he wanted to talk about was—”
“Fermat?”
“Fermat.” Hermann sighed frustratedly.
“Never gets old, does it?”
“I wish someone would solve that blasted theorem so I would never have to hear about it again,” Hermann said, reemerging from his room in a sweater. “If he would just choose something useful to devote himself to, like Poincaré, or even something just interesting like the Riemann—”
“Hey, don’t you get him started on Riemann,” Newt said, breaking off his playing to point at Hermann as he passed. “I’m going to get that bastard myself.”
“If you really still think a machine is going to solve the Riemann hypothesis, you’re a romantic,” Hermann said, going into the kitchen.
“Guilty,” said Newt.
“In any case,” Hermann said, as Newton resumed with something more melancholy, “Wesley finally stopped talking long enough to ask where you were. I told him you’d be gone until Tuesday.”
“Did he say he’d miss me?”
“He said, ‘It’s always so quiet when Newt is gone,’” Hermann replied, imitating Wesley’s deeper voice. “And I agreed.”
Newt made a face. He resumed Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.
“So Weeks has you back on Orpheus? What, has it been a slow week?”
“Actually—Victor,” called Hermann, violating his minimal-work-talk-at-home rule due to stress. “Preston the watchdog came down and told us it was top priority, all of a sudden. Victor wants full traffic analysis, cross-referenced with travel records of active personnel.”
“For who?”
“Ops and officers. He gave us an enormous list.”
A stumble on the keys, and a correction.
“Preston took all my Orpheus files upstairs. I’m sure Victor’s in his office poring over them right now.”
“He didn’t come down himself?”
“He never does.”
Newt paused, and then started playing the opening of the Contrabandista again.
“Why Orpheus now?”
“Preston wouldn’t say,” Hermann replied. He took out a pot and began filling it with water. “He thinks it’s a mole.”
“Ah. Typical.”
Hermann made a noise of assent and shut the water off.
Newt’s hands slowed down, playing lightly.
“He could be right, though,” he offered. “I mean, this is exactly how the Americans finally caught Bowen.”
“Found him out,” Hermann corrected.
Newt rolled his eyes. “Well they nearly caught him.”
With a click-click-click the burner turned on.
“And imagine if they—or we—had,” said Hermann, not archly enough to disguise a genuine bitterness. “Maybe Victor would be tolerable.”
“Maybe he would tolerate you,” Newt said.
“Doubtful,” said Hermann, putting a lid on the pot.
The notes tumbled over each other. Then abruptly, they stopped.
“But how did they lose him?”
“Bowen?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you mean?”
The piano lid shut. Newt appeared in the kitchen doorway, massaging his left wrist. Hermann was sitting at the table peeling potatoes.
“Do you really think they knew? At the Estate?”
“Newton, what do you—”
But Newt was distracted by the appearance of Laplace. “There he is!”
Hermann turned and watched his cat lumber into the kitchen.
“Leave him alone,” Hermann said pointlessly. Newton was already pursuing the cat into the pantry. Laplace was extremely fat and unpersonable, and staunchly resistant to Newton’s advances. From the pantry came a predictable hiss and predictable cry.
“Hermann,” said Newton plaintively, reemerging into the kitchen.
“He hates everyone.”
“But I’m not everyone. I saved him. I gave him to you.”
Newton had found the bedraggled cat on his balcony a few years before. He was unable to keep it, because he kept birds, and the cat had a hunger in its eyes.
“Who is this ‘everyone,’ anyway?” said Newt. “When has he met another human being? Who have you been bringing round to harass the cat? I just don’t understand why the Estate people let Bowen stay there after the warrant was issued,” he said, swerving between topics without pausing for breath.
The Division’s infamous former Vice Chief, deep cover Soviet spy Robert Bowen, cast a long shadow—a shadow ten years long. Hermann had known him, through Victor, though they had never worked closely together. Bowen had been just as charming as his reputation, just as finely and eccentrically dressed, with his one drooping eyelid and his attentive smile. No one with their head on straight would have accused him of being anything as outrageous as a Razvedka agent.
But he was. And when, after more than twenty years undercover, the Americans discovered his treachery, Bowen fled. He hid out at the Estate, the Division’s training ground in East Anglia.
Headquarters issued a warrant for his arrest, and a red-alert to all employees. But, inexplicably, he did not flee the country right away. He stayed at the Estate for two days. Even more inexplicably, the Division employees who worked there—teachers, trainers, and support staff—let him. They hosted him, did not tell London he was there, and then, when he announced that he was leaving, they did nothing to detain him. Somebody drove him to the train station, and he rode the last hundred miles to Great Yarmouth Port, where a Scandinavian merchant in the U.S.S.R.’s employ picked him up, and smuggled the mole away via the Baltic to freedom.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” Hermann said, looking back down at the potatoes. “You used to work at the Estate. You knew those people.”
“Used to,” said Newt. “And almost everyone was fired.”
“Ask Caitlin.”
“She was fired too,” Newt said, as if Hermann didn’t know that.
“You’ll see her next week, won’t you?”
“At our gig? Yeah.”
Newt wandered to the stove and opened the pot.
“I see her every week, Hermann. That doesn’t mean she wants to talk about it.”
Newt shut the lid.
“I just don’t get it,” he said. “After all these years, I still don’t.”
“As I understand it, the Americans found transmissions corresponding to a mole in the British service. They matched the locations, times, and dates to his travel patterns, then brought the evidence to Whiteha—”
“No, I understand that,” Newt said, sitting down across from Hermann. “It’s the Estate thing I don’t get.”
Hermann handed him a paring knife.
“I don’t understand why he even went there at all,” said Newt, picking up a potato and beginning to peel. “So the Americans tell us on Friday. Someone tips him off. He skips town. Goes to the Estate. But he stops there. Then on Saturday, the scandal breaks. And he stays.”
“Yes.”
“Until Sunday.”
“Yes.”
“That’s what I don’t get. Why did he stop? Why didn’t he leave? It’s not that far from the port. He could have left the country on Friday, before his photo was sent out to every border crossing in Western Europe. Why did he wait?”
“I’ve no idea,” said Hermann frankly.
“It’s not how I would have done it,” Newt commented, putting a potato in the bowl.
Hermann said nothing.
“Maybe he had misgivings about defecting,” Newt said. “I mean, it’s one thing to serve the Raz at a comfortable distance for twenty years. It’s another thing to actually live under Soviet rule.”
“Perhaps,” said Hermann.
Something in his voice made Newt glance up at him.
“What I really don’t understand is the Estate staff,” Newt said, looking back at his potato. “Why didn’t they rat him out?”
“He might have interfered with the alarm call somehow,” suggested Hermann. Newton frowned. Engineering and circuitry genius he may have been, but the human intricacies of operational spycraft never came easily to him.
Hermann put a peeled potato in the bowl of water and started on the last one.
“The thing is,” Newt said finally, “I don’t even think any of the Estate staff were actually turned. They weren’t his agents. I knew them back then,” he said. “And I saw the reports, afterwards. During restructuring. None of them were on the lists. They weren’t traitors.”
“It would only take one,” Hermann pointed out. “One traitor to take the alarm call, to cover for him.”
Newt just frowned and shook his head.
“I don’t know,” Newt said. “I think he just... talked them into it.”
This vexed Newt for some reason. It vexed Hermann too. It vexed Victor, who had been a great friend of Bowen’s. Victor, Robert Bowen, and Charles Rennie—they were the famous trio, Victor and the ‘Twins.’ Nobody had been taken in by that Bowen charm like Victor had, and no one had been more blindsided. Except perhaps for Rennie; but he was dead.
Hermann put the last potato into the bowl of water. “It’s certainly strange,” he said, standing up.
“I’ll never understand it,” Newt said, as Hermann took the potatoes to the stove.
“Well, I don’t think it’s likely to come up this weekend.”
“Bowen always comes up,” said Newt, putting his feet on Hermann’s vacated chair. “If we don’t bring it up, the Americans do. Honestly, they were so pissed about Bowen, you’d think it was them he double-crossed. Like, it’s been a decade. Get over it.”
“I think that’s the hope,” said Hermann. “At least from the way Weeks talked about it.”
“Ugh. Weeks.” Newt was slicing the potato peelings into smaller and smaller pieces. “He’d lie down in a puddle and let the Americans walk right over him if they told him they didn’t want to get mud on their shoes.”
“Frankly I think he would let any authority figure do so,” Hermann said, giving the potatoes one last stir and shutting the lid.
Newt laughed.
“Strong words, coming from you.”
Hermann dried his hands primly on a dishtowel. “Exactly.”
“Maybe the mole will strike again this weekend,” said Newt. “Send some frantic messages from the conference. Maybe Orpheus is Bowen, Mark Two. Bowen, son of Bowen.”
“I certainly hope not,” said Hermann.
“Can you imagine Victor’s face?”
“I doubt that he would survive another Bowen,” said Hermann honestly.
But that was impossible anyhow—Victor had no one left to betray him. He had made sure of that.
They ate dinner and retired to the living room, where Hermann tried to catch up on his reading and Newton made unappreciative comments about the Debussy record Hermann had put on specifically to irritate him. Newton was rereading The Fellowship of the Ring, as he seemed to do annually, with his feet tucked under Hermann’s thigh.
“This is my record player, Newton, if you take issue with my record selection, you can go home. To your record player.”
“I’ll beat you at chess next weekend,” said Newt, turning a page. “Enjoy your two-week reign while you can.”
“Your belief that beating me at chess gives you legal claim over the music selection—”
“Not legal claim, but it does give me veto power—”
“—is almost as pathetic as your belief you are better at chess than I am—”
“All flukes,” Newt said, turning another page rebelliously.
“Right. Whatever helps you sleep at night. Speaking of which...”
Hermann glanced meaningfully at the wall clock.
“Yeah. I’ll go soon,” Newt said, making no movement to do so. His eyes wandered across the curtained windows behind Hermann’s head.
“Are you thinking about the conference?”
Newt shrugged. “Are you thinking about Orpheus?”
“It’s nonsense,” Hermann murmured, trying to see if he believed himself.
Newt stared at the curtains.
“The conference will be fine,” Hermann said.
“Yeah,” said Newt. “I’m just curious about this new CIA gadget. That’s all.”
Hermann frowned a little at Newt. Usually, the man’s curiosity translated into excitement, but he seemed preoccupied.
“Weeks hasn’t told you anything?”
“Not really,” said Newt. “He might not know anything. It’s a high-level thing. It might even be a Victor thing. I heard there’s going to be a treaty, the works.”
Something, some chord in his voice, suddenly woke in Hermann the idea that Newton was lying. He was hiding something. The idea came from nowhere, like a brick flung through a window—but now the window was smashed, and there was the brick. This was their life, after all; for all its comfortable routine, ordinary tiffs, and other shared intimacies, the world they lived in together was a world of secrets. There were some secrets Hermann could not share.
Hermann had a long-held superstition that there was something inside him which needed protection. Something that needed protection from external intercession, or perhaps something from which the world needed protection. This superstition was what had drawn him into the world of secret intelligence in the first place—not the intelligence, but the secrets, the guarding of secrets.
If his heart was an ocean, like anyone else’s, Newton had charted it. There was one last anchor Hermann guarded. He guarded it not for what it held, but for the security of its untouched existence.
Did Newt know that he was holding back? Hermann averted his eyes from Newton’s own pockets of secrecy—his dark labyrinthine flat, the experiments he did there. Hermann did not ask. Not out of consideration, but self-preservation.
So all he said was: “Are they even going to let you look at this ‘gadget’?”
“Do not disguise your envy as disparagement,” said Newt. “It’s very unattractive.”
Hermann rolled his eyes.
“Officially, according to my schedule, no. I’m just running workshops. The usual how-to shtick. For locals and my fellow Americans.”
When Hermann closed the journal a half an hour later, Newton was dozing with his head on Hermann’s lap. When he said softly, “Go home, don’t fall asleep here,” Newton murmured, “Uh-huh.” Some time later, when Hermann was settled in bed on his good side, one pillow between his knees and one behind his back, the bed creaked and Newt crawled in beside him. In the morning, he was gone.