7 Victor
June 4th
Monday
WHEN HERMANN WOKE, he knew it had rained before he knew anything else. He became conscious of the fact first, and its cue second—it was the sound of wheels slicing through water on the street below.
The light from outside was bright gray, the implacable London shade that obfuscates the time. It could have been morning, early evening, high noon. But it was 7:00 AM. He’d hardly managed four hours of sleep. The bed next to him was empty, but there was a small spot of blood on the pillow, extinguishing his last hope that it had all been a dream.
For another moment he lay there. He felt completely unequal to the task of rising. There was too much before him, and too much behind. He could never surmount it all. From the other room, he heard morning kitchen sounds—the click-clack of the coffee machine, the springs of the toaster, the murmur of the wireless. Newton was humming to himself (Take a Walk on the Wild Side).
Hermann got up.
After forbidding Newton from leaving the apartment or destroying it from within, he left for work alone. The train was crowded. In front of Century, the wind chased scraps of newspaper down the stone steps. It felt nothing like June—it felt like September. A church bell chimed the half hour, then eight chimes. A second bell joined in on the fourth note and chimed its own time, delayed.
Hermann’s plan was simple; so simple it was not even a plan, really. He would execute a normal work day (easy), dodge any questions about Newton (unlikely), then slip into the registry (under a pretense) and ferret out the file whose number Newton had recited for Hermann three times (until Hermann could repeat it back). The Greenwich file.
At 8:40 AM he entered the lab apprehensively, peering around the corner for his labmate—but Wesley’s desk was empty. No sooner had Hermann hung up his jacket than he heard a voice from next door:
“All right, Dr. Gottlieb?”
A head was poking out of the office attached to their lab. It was his boss.
“Gottlieb—is that you? Yes—I thought so. All right? Nice weekend? Restful? Awful weather, isn’t it?”
“Rather,” said Hermann perfunctorily. “It hardly seems like June.”
“Hardly,” agreed Hal Weeks. “Though I did hear this morning that it’s supposed to let up tomorrow. Should be gorgeous. Would you come in here, please? Is that the Times? May I—?”
Hermann approached his boss’s office apprehensively. He held out his paper for him.
“Thank you,” said Weeks, taking it, refolding it. “Didn’t have time to read mine this morning. Got an early call. Do come in.”
Hermann walked in through the door that Weeks, still fussing with the paper, held for him, and found himself the victim of an ambush. A slender neck twisted and dark eyes locked on to him from behind rimless spectacles.
“Good morning, Dr. Gottlieb,” said Victor.
Hermann’s first impulse—to snatch his paper back from Weeks and swat him with it—was lost in Victor’s headlights. It must have been the first time Victor had looked him in the eye in years, because Hermann felt like he had fallen into a subway tunnel and a light was rushing towards him.
Hal Weeks was an unassuming man, tall and tippy. He had a tuft of sandy-red hair, retreating on his scalp from all sides, and he dressed well. He liked Hermann, which was odd, because Hermann did not like him. And he had never disliked him more than he did this morning.
Weeks sat behind his desk, so tall he seemed to be hovering behind it. He worried the corner of the closed file on this desk. Hermann sat on the other side, next to Victor but at an awkward angle. Victor was smoking. Hermann declined his offer of a cigarette. He felt like he and Victor were waiting to start an extremely tense tennis double.
“Well,” the Vice Chief said, in a friendly tone, slightly hoarse. “Thank you for coming in.”
Victor had a curious way of appearing to belong in every room, as if he had furnished the place himself and invited you in as his guest. He had dark hair, and large, heavy-lidded eyes. His jaw was crooked, which gave him an approachable asymmetry and a permanent, slight grimace. Legend had it that he’d gotten his jaw broken in a fight during his residency in Istanbul after the war, when the trio established itself as a force: Bowen and Victor running the Turkish networks, point-man Rennie twisting arms for them. The jaw surgery had been haphazard; it had never realigned properly.
Victor’s father had been the youngest son of a duke, an heir to wealth but no title. When Hermann had met him nearly twenty years before, at the beginning of his career, Victor had had a full, open face and small, thick-framed glasses. All that had drained away now—he had hollowed cheeks and frameless specs. The change was extraordinary; it was like accelerated decay. He had long since abandoned the eccentric, flamboyant style of dress that Bowen had made fashionable in the service. He dressed in dark, old-fashioned suits. With his high white collar, he looked like an undertaker.
“Of course, sir,” said Hermann stiffly.
“Awfully good of you,” offered Weeks.
“I do work here,” said Hermann.
With the graceful aristocratic condescension of times gone by, Victor ignored their exchange. “I’ve come to check on our friend Orpheus, Dr. Gottlieb,” he said, leaning forward to pocket his cigarette case. “What progress have you made?”
That was obviously not the reason for his visit, when he could have just sent Preston Blair. Hermann nervously hesitated trying to think of a polite way to say “none whatever.”
Weeks rushed into the vacuum of his unfortunate pause: “I don’t suppose Hermann had much time to run the numbers on Friday. And he didn’t come in this weekend. Did you?”
“No. I didn’t.”
“No progress, then?” said Victor, still perfectly friendly.
“None, sir,” said Hermann. “Sorry.”
“Of course, Dr. Gottlieb,” said Victor, crossing his legs.
On top of the alien friendliness, the honorific irritated Hermann. His irritation was sharpened by the memories, unexpectedly vivid now, from a decade before—all the times in Victor’s office or in his club when he had proudly introduced Hermann to important people, all on the frank, first-name basis he had with everyone. Hermann didn't like being on a first-name basis with most people. But he liked when Victor called him Hermann instead of "doctor." He remembered the first time they met, when Victor crossed his legs and leaned forward to finally make the offer, and his trouser cuffs had slid up to reveal irreverent orange socks. How Hermann had adored Victor. He’d admired his wisdom, his easy way with people, and even that silly umbrella he’d always carried, back then.
“But it’ll be top priority this week,” Weeks was saying, talking anxiously into the silence. Hermann studied the buttonhole on Victor’s suit lapel. “Not to worry, sir. We’ll have something for you before you know it.”
“I know you will,” said Victor. “The gears never stop down here. I do admire that about your department,” he said, and it was unclear whom he was addressing. “But the same is true of our enemies, as you well know. And in fact, while you were both enjoying your weekends, Signals intercepted a new Orpheus transmission.”
“Oh,” said Hermann dumbly.
“And could you guess from where, Dr. Gottlieb?”
Hermann did not need to feign the expected wonderment and confusion: “No, sir, where?”
Victor tapped his cigarette on the rim of Weeks’s ashtray and said, “A little ways west of Norwich, East Anglia.” His voice flicked upwards like a hound flipping a rabbit on its back.
That was the risk in harnessing your actual confusion to mask what you knew and did not: it could expose your actual throat. Hermann had forgotten that.
“Near the Estate, sir?”
“Oh, my, well,” said Weeks, starting some sentence and then dropping it.
“Exactly. As you know, Dr. Gottlieb, we are in the middle of an important ten-day conference with the Americans. You probably know it is being hosted at the old training estate. I know these things get around.”
Victor tipped his chin back slightly, taking a pull from his cigarette, and looked over the framed pictures on Weeks’s wall—naval prints from the golden age of sail. Hermann wrestled with his instinct to sit perfectly still and make himself as small as possible.
“The Americans are overtaking us,” Victor said mildly. “When I got started, before the war, they were our little protégés. But the scales tipped, when it was all over. Or perhaps sometime shortly after. They’ve simply got more money, and more manpower. We’ve lost face over the years. Everyone knows it.”
Hermann was frowning, hiding his mounting fear. Was Victor about to talk about Bowen?
But he was not: “I don’t believe the Chief has any hope of recovering our prestige. Nor does Whitehall, most likely. They’re perfectly happy with his solution, which, it seems, is to simply ride the Americans’ slipstream wherever they’ll let us fly.”
His cigarette was dwindling. The only crack in the veneer of civility was the way he pronounced the word—Americans. There was a violent disdain in the second syllable. Without that, Hermann might have trusted this apparent display of frankness.
“It’s an ugly war, this,” Victor went on, still addressing the prints. He massaged his jaw slowly. “Still—there’s a lot the Americans don’t understand, I think.” His eyes, darkly pensive, flicked to Hermann’s. “They fight from hatred. They hate the reds. They fear them. They haven't got loyalty to a cause. You see? They don’t do it for queen and country. They do it for themselves.”
Hermann frowned, evincing skepticism.
“But,” said Victor, exhaling some smoke, “Misery, strange bedfellows, and all that. There were suggestions of interference at the conference beforehand, which I rather recklessly ignored—” (There were the first outright lies Hermann had detected, for he knew Victor had dreamed up all those suspicions himself, and that the chances of his doing nothing were close to zero)— “and now it seems we are going to pay the price.”
“Interference, sir?” said Hermann, taking the first step out onto the tightrope.
“When was the last time you saw Dr. Geiszler, Dr. Gottlieb?” said Hal Weeks, surprising him from the right.
Hermann turned.
“Dr. Geiszler?”
“Yes.”
Hermann paused the length of a breath for thought. “Thursday morning, in the office, I believe. Probably the same time you last saw him. Sir.” Hermann forced himself to turn back to Victor, so as not to be seen averting his eye. “He told me he was going to the conference.”
“He was,” said Victor. “He’s missing.”
Hermann raised his eyebrows.
“Missing, sir?”
“Yes. He disappeared from the Estate last night.”
Hermann’s lungs contracted quick and tight. He was not a good liar, not outright. But he had learned something from his training, in which Victor had played no small part. The trick was not to lie; it was to believe in your role as completely as you believed in whatever pair of shoes you were wearing that day.
“What happened?”
“He simply vanished, it seems,” said Victor, with a cheerfully upturned inflection that betrayed extreme English anger. He looked at Weeks for the first time in the whole meeting. “He was last seen at dinner, last night. All of his things were left in his room, and his... motorbike is also still in the garage. I’m letting you in on these details, Dr. Gottlieb, because it’s very important that we find him. If he contacts you. Has he?”
“No, sir,” said Hermann.
“I know you two are friends,” Victor said, somewhat carelessly, eyes elsewhere. “Despite it all. You can imagine how this will look to the Americans, if it gets out. He’s misbehaved in front of them before. They weren’t happy then either.”
This allusion to Newton’s East Coast crisis two years earlier was unexpected, and agitated Hermann.
“I’m sure it’s... much the same, this time,” he managed.
“You know about that, then?” Victor said mildly.
Hermann and Weeks exchanged an unusually frank look. “Yes, sir, it was... difficult,” he said. He cursed the man mentally—for his inexplicable week-long disappearance and his undignified return with his undignified motorcycle.
The incident would have been easier to explain if Hermann actually understood it.
“My colleague is quite... He has a rather unusual mind,” said Hermann. “This is not news to anyone. His sense of proportion is perfectly balanced in analytical matters. In emotional matters, it is... not.”
Hermann glared at the corner of Weeks’s desk for a moment. He was collecting himself. He was careful not to offer a concrete explanation. When he met Victor’s eyes, he did so wearing a rendition of the frustration he genuinely felt.
Victor nodded slightly.
“He seems difficult to work with,” Victor said, and Hermann knew he’d had him.
Hal Weeks exhaled a laugh of agreement. “You could say that, sir,” Weeks said.
Hermann only nodded. Victor’s face loosened into something brighter, an allusion to a sympathetic smile. Hermann began to relax.
“It’s just that Dr. Geiszler is not the only thing missing from the Estate, you see,” said Victor, suddenly sitting forward and snubbing his cigarette out on Weeks’s ashtray in a single movement. “Several documents and an extremely valuable piece of equipment have also gone missing, Dr. Gottlieb.”
An irrational rage shot through Hermann—Dr. Gottlieb, Dr. Gottlieb—and for a moment he hated Victor for tacking that honorific on like the butt of the gun he'd pistol-whipped him with. He wished with stupid longing to be home lying on his carpet, listening to Newton play the piano, and with an almost equal longing to be back in time, fifteen years younger, sitting across from Victor at his club. He wished for those days—the days when Victor had lit his way up the stairs at the Division, and confided in him about his family life, his difficult divorce. Hermann even knew his surname, knew it still. Hermann remembered it all, and he remembered the end—the terrible December day in the soundproof conference room off the Chief’s office, and the look on Victor’s face when Hermann had told him that Charles Rennie was dead.
“Oh dear,” he managed. “What’s missing?”
“Documents,” said Victor. He leaned back with his arms folded, as if daring Hermann to interpret him as relaxed. “Some equipment the CIA brought in to show to us, and the documents we are presenting in exchange. It’s all gone.”
“What sort of equipment, sir?” Hermann said.
“I’m afraid I can’t say."
“Do the Americans know?”
“Not yet,” said Victor. “But they will by the end of the week. That’s when the higher-ups arrive. Once they arrive to negotiate terms of the exchange, I’m afraid it will be impossible to hide the truth—that the goods on exchange have all vanished.”
Hermann’s mind was racing. So the blueprints were missing too. The second man did take them.
“And you suspect Dr. Geiszler has made off with these… with all this?” he said.
“As soon as we realized the equipment was missing, we alerted our people and made inquiries. The Americans had a sign-in sheet in the building where they were keeping the equipment. The last name on it was someone called ‘Neilson Garrett.’ We made an emergency search of the campus last night. Turned up nothing. The only person unaccounted for was Dr. Geiszler.”
Hermann watched Victor light another cigarette. He deposited the match in the ashtray.
“Oh, pardon me, two people were unaccounted for.”
Hermann prayed silently that the second was Becket.
“Mr. Garrett was also nowhere to be found.” Victor exhaled some smoke. “His name was also missing from our conference rosters.”
Hermann nodded slowly. “I see.”
“I’m telling you all this so you can help.” Victor looked him in the eye. “If you have any information, this is the time to share it.”
Hermann shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir.”
“Or if you hear anything,” said Victor. “From Geiszler, or from other sources. You haven’t heard from Geiszler?”
“No, sir,” said Hermann, again.
“If you do,” said Victor, “tell him to come directly to us. Maybe he saw something and ran. Maybe he’s having troubles of his own, completely unrelated to the treaty. I want any undue suspicion cleared up as soon as possible. We’ve got to focus our attention on the right person.”
Victor stood up suddenly. Weeks jumped to his feet, and Hermann rose more slowly, reaching for his cane.
“Needless to say—no mention of this outside this office. Geiszler’s on vacation again, if anyone asks. And Orpheus is top priority. The sheet, please, Weeks?”
“Sir, of course,” said Weeks, as Victor snubbed out his second barely-smoked cigarette in Weeks’s tray and held out his hand. He handed Victor the file on his desk, and Hermann watched it pass, cursing himself for not looking it over when he had the chance. It was unlabeled, and very thin.
“Thank you,” Victor said. “Dr. Gottlieb.”
“Sir.”
Victor left.
“Gottlieb, a moment?” said Weeks, before Hermann could follow.
He sat back down with silent relief. There was an agreed-upon pause until they heard the sound of the lab’s outer door closing.
“Sir, how exactly are we concealing the theft from the Americans?”
Hermann did not feel he had to play his hand as closely with Weeks, because he did not consider him very astute. In fact, he considered him quite foolish.
Leaning back, Weeks replied, “I don’t know for certain. If they had been the ones to find it missing, then we’d have been in trouble.”
“Who was it?” Hermann asked.
“Victor. That’s why he actually came down here in person.” Weeks leaned back even further, a seemingly impossible angle without tipping. “I think that’s why Vic’s been able to keep it under wraps. He personally searched the place, requisitioned the Americans’ sign-in sheet, and took the first train back this morning. He was in my office when I came in. Rather a shock, actually. Wanted me to take a look at the sign-in sheet and see if I recognized the handwriting.”
“Which handwriting?”
“This Garrett fellow,” said Weeks with a combination of mystification and resignation. He took out his anachronistic pipe and sat abruptly forward. He tapped it on the edge of his desk.
Hermann was full of dread. “And did you?”
“Afraid not,” said Weeks, opening a drawer and searching inside. “I even showed him some of Geiszler’s handwritten reports, for a comparison. It didn’t match. Not that it means much.”
“That was the file you had, then?” Hermann dared to ask.
Weeks nodded, taking his bag of tobacco out. He told Hermann Victor’s timetable as he packed his pipe.
Victor, Becket, and the American liaison had been in a meeting until 9:15 PM. After the meeting, Victor had gone to the barn where the “equipment” was being stored.
Victor had signed in with the American guards. The last name on the sheet was Neilson Garrett. Never having heard of this person, Victor asked the guards who he was. They described a short, dark-haired CIA agent. (No glasses.) Garrett had said he’d just arrived, and wanted to check up on his equipment.
Garrett had signed in at 8:45, out never, Weeks reported from his look at the sheet that morning. Above Garrett on the sheet was Raleigh Becket: in at 8:20, out at 8:31. Below him was Victor, in at 9:20 and out at 9:26. Victor went into the room, he said, and found it empty.
In his head, Hermann was tabulating the story against the one Newt had told him last night. It all matched up, but he felt no relief.
“That was all he said about Dr. Geiszler?” Hermann asked. “There was nothing else to implicate him, aside from his absence?”
Weeks was trying and failing to light his pipe. He shook his head.
“Nothing else, nothing else. Vic said he last saw him at dinner, ‘round 7:30. After that, nothing.”
He cast the burnt-out match onto the table and lit another.
“Gottlieb, I have no doubt this is just—bad timing,” he said, pipe between his teeth. “Geiszler will be all right. He’ll come back.”
“I’m sure, sir,” said Hermann stiffly. He watched Weeks fail with the second match as well.
“Have you really not heard from him?” Weeks said, looking up. He shook the extinguished match. “You can tell me the truth, Dr. Gottlieb. I won’t tell Vic. I want Geiszler to turn himself in, too.”
Hermann, a little lightheaded from the adrenaline comedown, felt a sharp disgust at this heavy-handed invitation into Weeks's confidence. He wasn’t certain how much Weeks really knew about their relationship, but in that moment he resolved he would tell him nothing. Nothing, ever.
Weeks dropped his eyes back to his matches, apparently unwilling to pursue the point. “Until Geiszler comes back,” he said, “just focus on Orpheus. Cross-reference away. Don’t worry about this conference, don’t worry about Geiszler. He’ll show up—I’m certain of it.”
The third match was the charm. He clamped the pipe between his teeth, puffing triumphantly, and swept the matches into his palm. He reached far across his desk to deposit them in his glass ashtray, which Victor had left on the distant edge. Unaccountably, Hermann remembered the first time he had met Robert Bowen, sometime in the 50s. He too had smoked a pipe. He had also carried an umbrella, just like Victor. With a deflating sense of pity, young Hermann had recognized the reason Victor carried that silly umbrella. He even dressed like him.
With a final nod and thanks, Hermann left Weeks’s office.
When Hermann opened the door, he started—someone was outside. But it was just Wesley. He was trudging by with his three-bag mug of tea, heading towards his desk.
“Dr. Wesley,” said Hermann. “You startled me.”
“Hermann,” Gus Wesley said, smiling hello with uneven teeth. “Newt in yet?”
“Not yet,” said Hermann. “I don’t believe he’s coming in today.”
Wesley nodded, eyes darting to Weeks’s shut door. “Shame,” he said, in his uncomfortably loud voice. “Some June this is, eh?”
“Indeed.”
“I like it cold, myself,” Wesley said. “Everybody hates the long winter, but I like it.”
Hermann had no response to offer, and no interest in prolonging the interaction. There was a pause while Wesley looked at him.
“I hear it’s meant to break,” Wesley finally said.
“So everyone keeps telling me,” said Hermann.