Chapter One

 

    From behind, the man’s head resembled a fence post with ears. It was oddly flattened on each side, as if it had been squeezed in a vice. The effect was not mitigated by a ‘50s-style flat-top haircut. He sat in the third pew from the front, on the aisle, waiting in the empty cathedral.

    “You’re late.” The man’s voice rang out in a surprisingly deep baritone that shocked the silence, but no more than it shocked Attila Betts, who froze in mid-step. He had been exquisitely careful to make no sound as he entered from the back of the cathedral and crept down the center aisle toward that odd-shaped head. Now, as so often in the past, he cursed his lack of skill in the surreptitious arts. 

    “Damn you, Betts!” he hissed to himself.

    He moved forward smartly then, letting the heels of his shoes have their way with the stone floor, hoping to impart an impression of confidence which he did not feel, and slid into the pew behind the man, resting his arms on his knees.

    The Fence Post turned toward him revealing a pair of rimless glasses on a flatish nose, blue eyes gleaming behind the lenses, an unshaven chin, and a mouth too large for the unnatural narrowness of the face. 

    “So you’re him. You’re Betts,” the F.P. said.

    “Well yes, I suppose I am.”

    “Yeah. You’re him all right. I was warned about you. Hand it over.”

    “Certainly. Certainly. But might I just inquire, did you hear the doors open? Because to be honest with you, I was so sure I’d entered silently, I’d be disappointed if it was the doors. I’ve asked—I’ve begged—for more training in these areas, you know, the surreptitious arts if you will, but—-”

    The F.P. reached over the back of the pew and gently but firmly took a handful of Betts’s tie and pulled his face close, producing a tableau of Siamese twins connected by a single nose.

    “Don’t try that stuff on me, pal, you hear me?” To this, Betts offered the only response that seemed appropriate. He blinked. “Now hand over the item.”

    With just the slightest disturbance to the elegant symmetry of their living tableau, Betts managed to slip an envelope from his coat pocket and offer it up to the F.P. with great dignity, as befitted the environment if not the recipient.

    Releasing his tie, the F.P. took the envelope, stood up and walked away down the aisle without a look or a word.

 

                    * * * * *

 

    Later, back in his fourth-floor walkup, Attila Betts stood at the big narrow window looking down on 71st Street.  With his hands in his pockets, his shoulders sloped in dejection, he was softly humming ‘Va pensiero’ and feeling a deep affinity to the oppressed Jews, strangers like him in a strange land.

    Another assignment completed. Another unsatisfactory denouement. And adding to his dejection, any minute now the after-op phone call with Carlos. 

    He took a deep breath and determined that this time he would allow no clever evasion, no fancy side-stepping. He would press Carlos, force him to explain, pin him to the wall like a butterfly, telephonically speaking. 

    Attila Betts sighed. He already knew this strategy would fail, having tried it so often before, but momentarily it relieved his heavy heart. He turned from the window and found himself facing the large framed mirror that sat atop the mantel. 

    “There,” he said, “you see the problem.”

    What he saw was a long, straight, thin nose, sunken cheeks like deep grey bogs, high forehead beneath a corral reef of thick curly brown-black hair, and two disturbing powder blue eyeballs that sapped his own confidence whenever he looked into them. He was tall and thin--‘weedy’, in his own self-disparaging estimation--a dead-ringer for the wide world’s stereotypical intellectual.

    And then the phone rang.

    “Hello Carlos.”

    “See? That’s what they love about you, Bettsy.”

    “And what’s that?”

    “Your gift for pre-cognition.”

    “I don’t have a gift for pre-cognition.”

    “Well, call it an acute sensitivity, then.”

    “Or Caller ID. Do you want my report, Carlos?”

    “Not really. You met the guy, you handed over the item, finis. But of course, not finis. They want--and therefore I want--the famous Betts-ian insight. You know, the read. Just let it flow, Attila, just let it flow.”

    Betts always found that just letting it flow was never the effortless exercise these others and Carlos imagined it to be. In fact, it was always stressful and invariably left him feeling drained and even more inadequate than normal.

    “He was just a messenger. Why do they care?”

    “Didn’t ask. Couldn’t say.”

    “Thanks a lot.” Betts closed his eyes. “He was a messenger but, I think, something more.”

    “There! See? Wonderful.”

    “Please don’t interrupt. Not much more. A messenger but also perhaps a minor actor. Somehow, he felt not entirely irresponsible. Not a flunky. He has some interest in this thing, whatever it is--why can’t they ever tell me more--”

    “Bettsy Boy, don’t go there. You know that’s not how it works. Just the flow and nothing but the flow, thank you very much.”

    Betts took a deep breath and closed his eyes again.

    “That’s all, I think. I mean, there is something but I can’t focus it. I don’t know. It’s very probably nothing. If I knew more it might help me--

    “Oh my God you’re like a little kid. Can’t take no for an answer. It ain’t gonna happen, ok? Do your magic trick and everything will be dorey hunky. Trust me. Now, flow.”

    “I can’t flow; I’m plugged up. All I can say is, they’re right to suspect him. He should be watched. That’s all I can say.”

    “All right. I’ll tell them. You go back to your monastic existence until you hear from us again. Ciao for now.”

    “No, wait.” 

    “Betts, what am I going to do with you? You know there’s nothing I can tell you that you don’t already know.”

    “I don’t believe you.”

    “Me neither. But there it is. Now go. Be fruitful and multiply.” And Carlos hung up.

    Betts dropped down into the leather reading chair he’d been standing beside. 

    “That went well,” he said. Oddly, he did in fact feel that something had perked him up.

 

                    *  *  *  *  *

    It had been a chair much like this one in which he’d been sitting that day, three years before, when it had all begun, this ridiculous, hidden, lonely and melancholy life. Professor Runkle had, quite unexpectedly, asked him to stay behind--”A moment, Betts, if you would”--after dismissing the six other students who had gathered in the Professor’s room for the regular Thursday seminar in Russian Cultural Antecedents 411. Runkle was a large, soft, rumpled mess of a man, a Caucassian Ali-Baba, Betts liked to think, whose specialty was the history of the aboriginal South Ossetian tribes prior to their disappearance into the Muscovite maw. He was originally from somewhere in Wisconsin, one of those Northern state dissenters from the Vietnam War who had fled to Canada and washed up on the steps of the University of Toronto, the flotsam and jetsam of a wrecked generation. Over the years, his anti-war ideology had soured and curdled into a rancid religion whose god was Canada and whose anti-American tenets could be summed up in three words: “Fuck ‘em all.” 

    Betts himself had gravitated northward in a more conventional manner: his mother was a Canadian citizen who had met and married an American on this very campus. He therefore was a dual citizen and entitled to the best nearly-free education in the Western hemisphere.

    “Tell me, Mr. Betts,” Runkle had said after the others had left, collapsing heavily into his beat-up desk chair. “Why are you in this class?” He’d said it as casually as if he’d been asking why Betts had worn brown shoes instead of black. 

    “Sir?” Betts had answered, not very intelligently.

    “Well you see, Betts, you are also enrolled in Professor Myshnam’s ‘The Grail and It’s Counterparts in World Religions’, are you not?”

    “Yes.”

    “And Professor Henry’s ‘Astronomy and Astrophysics’.”

    “Yes sir.”

    “And this class?”

    “Well, yes.”

    “And Rogeraux’s ‘Medieval European Economics’?”

    “Yes.”

    “You see, Betts, I have the list right here.” He held up a sheet of paper. “Odd. Very odd.” 

    “Yes, sir, I suppose it is, now that you mention it.”

    “You yourself have never thought of it as odd, then, this curious curriculum?”

    “No, sir. I suppose I follow my interests.”

    Professor Runkle, lightly waving the page back and forth in front of him, peered over his reading glasses at Betts. A moment or two later, the waving ceased but Runkle did not lower his arm, merely held it still and slightly away from his body. And peered. And continued to peer. Betts had actually begun to worry whether the Professor had suffered some form of instant catatonia.

    “No plan. No goal. No strategy. That it?” he asked finally.

    “I’m afraid so, yes. Or, a, no..I mean--”

    “You’re American, that right?”

    “Yes.”

    “Planning on returning down there? Some day?”

    “Oh yes.”

    The Professor finally lowered his arm and placed the list on his desk. He pushed it slowly across the desktop. When its leading edge reached the edge of the desk, Attila Betts leaned forward and picked it up. 

    “I lied,” Professor Runkle said. “As you can see, it is not a list of your classes. It’s something rather different.”

    “Yes, I see that.”

    “Call it a contract.”

    “Yes. I see that too. It’s a contract between me and the United States Government in the person of its representative, Profess—“

    “What’s the matter Betts?” the Professor asked. 

    “You…you hate America.”

    The Professor did not move or speak.

    “You…you hate America and everything it stands for. You’ve said so many times, in my hearing.”

    The Professor sat immobile, unmoved.

    “You hate America and Americans.”

    From the Professor, still nothing. 

    Betts smiled broadly. “Which, of course, has been a pretense all along.”

    “Oh yes?”

    “You are fifty-nine years old, you’ve never married but you aren’t gay, you expound a vicious anti-Americanism which smells slightly too much like play-acting, at least to my nose, and nobody in the Administration or in the College has the foggiest idea where you disappear to every end-of-term.”

    “Could describe half-a-dozen tenured pedants around here.”

    “Yes, I suppose.”

    The Professor stood up. 

    “You suspected me, then?” His voice wavered.

    “I did, yes. Don’t worry, though,” Betts hastened to explain. “I told no one, even as I became rather more certain when I saw you entering the American Embassy last summer.”

    The Professor literally jumped back against the window casement. If he’d been standing an inch to his right, he might have gone through the window.

     “And I think I can say with complete confidence,” Betts continued in a reassuring tone, “that no one besides myself has the least inkling. I know you must be anxious on that point, but I beg you not to be. Your situation is quite safe. You’ve done a remarkably good job of hiding in plain site, Professor.”

    “I went in through a back door that had been hidden behind a pine tree specially planted to obscure it from view,” the Professor breathed.

    “Ah,” said Betts.

    “So you were following me.”

    “Well…yes.”

    “Right now,” the Professor began in a voice that lacked every vestige of its practiced bombast, “I very much want to walk out of this room and disappear. Thanks to you, Betts, I will never sleep again—“

    “Oh Professor, please—“    

    “Shut up Betts! Fifteen years I have lived this life. I like it, I have grown very accustomed to it, I don’t want to do anything else, I don’t want to change, Betts! 

    “Yes sir, of course. I understand that completely.”

    “But do you understand what will happen to me—-now—-if you do not sign that paper? I will be seen to have made a very serious, very, very serious, miscalculation. I am not allowed to make miscalculations, Betts. That’s why I am still here after fifteen years. Because I do not miscalculate. I do not miscalculate, Betts!”

    “Yes, sir. I’m sure you don’t. And you haven’t. I’ve been expecting this with keen anticipation for some time. You see, I rather did have a plan. And it has come to fruition.”

    “But…how?”

    “I felt it. I feel things. I felt you weren’t who you were supposed to be. And of course you weren’t. A few data points confirmed it, and my doubts melted away, and here I’ve sat, week after week, waiting for it to happen. I’m sure your previous, ah, recruits needed a bit of assurance and convincing but I won’t. I’m already assured and entirely convinced.”

    “Then you will sign it?” the Professor asked in whispered disbelief. “Now?”

    Betts signed the contract in three places and slid the paper back across the desk.

    “Oh. Well then. And that’s all there was to it? You felt it? Um, me?”

    “Yes. That’s why I signed up for your course and the others you listed. Frankly, I’m not much interested in any of them, but I thought the collection would stand out and bring me to your attention.”

    “Well then,” said the Professor. “Well. That’s fine. That’s fine, Betts.” He folded the paper and slipped it in the top drawer of his desk. “I feel as if you’ve recruited  me. But all’s well etcetera.”

    “Will we be working together, sir?”

    The Professor was startled. 

    “Good lord, no. You are no longer a member of this class, or even a member of this University, Betts. You have become a different species from the rest of us. From now on, you will be living on a different plane of existence, apart from everything you’ve known heretofore. You’ve just signed your life away, Betts. They own you now.”

 

                      * * * * *

 

    At first, he mightily enjoyed living on this new plane of existence. It was not much different than university, with courses in the mornings and the afternoons, pounds of reading and homework every day, and random tests administered by silent stalking lab assistants who never uttered a word, let alone provided explanations of what the tests were designed to uncover. He was being taught many interesting things, but was particularly looking forward to his training in ‘the craft’—the surreptitious arts as he romantically referred to them—that had captured his imagination. In truth, he felt competent, actually more than competent, in the intellectual demands of his new life, but always sensitive regarding his weedy persona, dreamed of becoming the secret icon of all intellectuals: James Bond, David Craig version. 

    His dream was interrupted early on, within the first week in fact, when he was culled from the small herd of trainees and shunted into a building at a secluded site some miles away from the campus. And for the next month he became the sole subject in a set of psychological tests around a concept the instructors called “protocognitive auditioning”. In these tests, Attila Betts sat amidst different groups of volunteers at various sites around the campus made up to resemble coffee shops, who talked amongst themselves for two hours about nothing in particular while ignoring him entirely. He was then asked very odd questions about what he had heard discussed by certain people in the volunteer groups. For instance, the trainers asked him: Do you think the woman in the bright orange dress on Friday really believed what she said about Robert? Or again: What did the young man sitting behind you two weeks ago last Thursday, talking with the girl in ripped jeans, order from the volunteer who played the waiter? (To which, it may be reported, Attila Betts had answered; “No” and “Two lemonades with honey”.)

    As interesting as Betts had found these exercises, he nonetheless felt cheated when, as the month drew to a close and no one had made the least allusion to any further training in the surreptitious arts, his handler, a redheaded woman named Carlton, told him to ‘pack a small bag’. 

    In the last eighteen months, he’d been sent on seven missions: Oberlin, Ohio; Peltz, New Mexico; Davidson, South Carolina; Naples, Florida; Antioch, Illinois;    Conway, New Hampshire; and Rochester, New York. Each one, like today’s, nothing more exciting than a delivery at an inconspicuous location to an even less conspicuous recipient. He had begun to believe that these so-called missions were in reality no more than training runs, intended to test his ability and willingness to take inane orders seriously. And each time he had returned to his apartment to await the call from Carlos who’s only interest was in ‘the read’. Though his frustration was growing, he had believed in his value to ‘them’, minimal as it must be.

    Today, however, he had failed.

    A failure of craft, and a failure of nerve. (How could he have allowed himself to be manhandled without so much as a menacing ‘Hey, let go of my tie!’?)

    It was as he sat in his deep chair, wondering why, given the sourness of his mood, his stomach was twitching with excitement verging on elation, that it suddenly struck him.

    Slapping the chair arms, he bounced to his feet. In less than a minute he had pounded down the stairs and out the front door, vaulted down the steps to the sidewalk, and was now panting hard as he raced through the Park, back to the Cathedral. 

    He pushed through the iron gate and bent over to catch his breath. Then he entered through the same door he had used earlier. The great space was empty, cold and silent. Ever aware of 'their' disinterest in providing him the training he felt he lacked and therefore the need to improve his skills on his own dime, he determined to move across the stone flags with the stealth he’d failed to achieve earlier. This time he succeeded, reaching the third pew noiselessly. 

    Pleased with himself, he stopped in the aisle and went down on his hands and knees to peer the length of the floor beneath the pew. And there it was, the thing that had made the small, light, clink he had barely heard when the F.P. had reached over the back of the pew to grab his tie. He slid along the pew and scrambled over the kneeler, reaching for the small circular object. In his hand, he saw that it was a pin, a gold pin about the size of a quarter, with an odd shape inscribed on its face: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    “Well,” Betts whispered to himself. “Well, well, well.”

    Just then, the door in the far transept, across the nave from where he sat, slammed closed. Someone had entered and was walking quickly through the cold, empty space. Instinctively, Attila Betts knew who it was and his stomach twitched joyously. Finally, after all this while, he was beginning to feel like a real operative. He crawled across the outer aisle and into the nearest confessional. Proudly, excitedly, he waited. 

    Through the fine mesh grating in the door, Attila Betts watched as the Fence Post pushed into the pew he had just abandoned, then with groaning effort slid onto his hands and knees and began crawling over the kneeler, searching the entire length of the pew for his lost pin. At the end of the pew, he rose and stood with his fists pressed against his sides, breathing hard. Not more than three feet away from where he sat hidden, Attila Betts heard the Fence Post growl, “That sonofabitch. They warned me and I didn’t believe them. Damn. Damn.” And he marched off back toward the side entrance.

    Attila Betts watched until he heard the side door slam signaling that the Fence Post had left the church. He assumed the tail he’d recommended to Carlos would be in place by now, but what if he was wrong? Had ‘they’ had time to put someone on the man? If not, what? Let him go? Feeling that fate was prepared to use him with greater purpose than his employers seemed inclined to do, he scrambled out of the confessional and flew across the flagstones. He opened the side door wide enough to slip through and let it close silently behind him. 

    Where was the F.P.? Which way had he gone? Then he caught a glimpse of the flat-top heading down Madison. He skipped down the steps and fell in behind the target about half a block ahead. The after-work crowds swelled the sidewalks making it difficult to keep him in view, but on the other hand, were the Fence Post to take it into his head to turn around, Betts’s own face and figure would be rendered functionally invisible by the sheer number of pedestrians. So it was with a start that he felt a hand on his arm and heard a voice in his ear: “Do not make a scene, Mr. Betts. Please, just come with me.” And he was ushered down a cross street and into a waiting Lincoln Town Car. The door closed behind him and he was alone in the back seat

    It was obvious what had happened. ‘They’ had placed a tail on the F.P. as he had recommended through Carlos and the tail had spotted him and complained up the ladder. Now he was being taken in to be reprimanded for overstepping his non-existent authority to trail contacts.

    Though it was odd to be told not to make a scene. What did they fear he would do, scream for the police? And why didn’t the man who’d accosted him get into the car with him? And then there was the driver. He was crushing a cell phone up to his right ear to which he seemed to be listening with extraordinary intensity. Moreover, Betts had noticed as he got in that the man had shifted his weight against the driver’s door, as if to put as much distance as possible between them. Attila Betts attempted to catch the man’s eye in the rearview mirror, even waved at him and said “Excuse me” twice before concluding that the driver had been instructed to have no communication with him. Why?Then he noticed the knuckles of the man’s right hand. They gleamed white with the tension of holding the phone, and the hair above his ear was drenched with sweat. 

    And suddenly Attila Betts understood. The driver wasn’t listening to someone on the phone, he was hiding behind it, using it to shield himself from, of all people, Attila Betts!

    “‘They’ didn’t send you. I mean, MY ‘they’ didn’t send you,” Attila Betts said more to himself than to the driver. “YOUR ‘they’ sent you. Which means I’m on the wrong side of the street, so to speak. And no one knows I’ve crossed over.” On an impulse, he reached into the pocket of his sports coat for his phone and discovered it missing. “Ah,” he said. “Well, this is just dorey hunky.” He leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes. They’re afraid of me, he thought. Me! 

                      

 

                    

 

 

 

 

 

                    Chapter Two

 

 

    The town car turned on 79th Street, crossed Park then Lexington then 3rd and finally bounced off the curb in front of a dingy building on the corner of 2nd Avenue where it stopped with a jolt.

    The driver, hunched and cowering, lowered the arm holding the phone and fired it outward three times, indicating the passenger side door. Attila Betts interpreted this as an invitation to put himself on the other side of the door. 

    As he did so, two men approached him with the caution of novice lion tamers. They had been waiting for him at the entrance to a boarded up restaurant that occupied the street floor of the building. It had a faded and rusted sign above the window: The Debrechen Cafe. An odd sort of place, Betts thought: Debrechen…Debrechen…hmm. Through a chink in a warped board he could see the inside was dimly lit. He could just make out shadowed figures arrayed around several tables, sitting in the dimness. He was herded delicately and with great deference to a spot just inside the entrance where his escorts stopped him. With grunts. They had not touched him as he exited the town car and had kept their distance from him, acting less like bodyguards than royal retainers. He stopped and allowed his eyes to adjust to the dim interior.

    In front of him six round tables were packed into the small space and around each sat three or four people, all men. They seemed to be about the same age, forty to sixty, some wearing suits and ties, some jacket-less with open-neck dress shirts, one or two in short sleeve shirts. None of them spoke or moved. All eyes were locked on his face.

    Slowly, Betts surveyed the scene. 

    There was a long bar immediately in front of him that ran down the length of the left wall into darkness but was lit at this end by a single candle which made it possible--just--to make out the faces of most of the men. The candle, Betts noticed, was a short fat yellowish affair with a colorful inlaid pattern that ran around its girth. It looked brand new. There was something sacramental about it, as if it's purpose was only incidentally to supply light. Betts thought it might be intended to confer a blessing on the gathering, or in some way to signal that the men here represented a special kind of authority. And there was something else too. Betts sensed a presence there behind the bar, behind the light. Someone was watching him.

    To his right, the opposite wall was buried in layers of every kind of flyer and poster, evidently collected over many years and affixed there by people who, judging by the faded Cyrillic writing, must have been Russians.

    Suddenly a man at the table furthest from him stood up. Rather he popped up, launching his chair with a crash against the wall behind him. In alarm the others at his table reached for his shirt to bring him back into his seat. The man struggled against them nearly losing his balance. In the dimness Betts could see that he was a big man wearing a short-sleeve shirt. Oddly for someone who even in semi-shadow appeared powerfully built, he was holding his heavy arms out in front of him as if to ward off a spell or a blow. 

    "Meester Betts," the man's thick voice boomed, “we want to know simple question. Is history over or is history repeat itself.” His friends had righted his chair and now he collapsed into it.

        “We want to know, Mr. Betts,” another voice from a table to his right, more authoritative, less heavily accented, but also carrying a note of apprehension. “We want to know how you feel about that question.”

    “How I feel? Please, gentlemen, what is this? I’m just—-“

    “No, Mr. Betts. You are not ‘just’,” the same voice corrected. Now the man stood. He was older than the first man, slight of build, with long grey hair that covered his shoulders. He pushed his chair in to the table with one hand and stood behind it. He held then other hand up in front of him, as if in apology. “We know about you. We have been sending out our messengers to find you. And today, when our efforts were finally successful, we moved to bring you back to us. You see, Mr. Betts, our cause has become more desperate in recent days. We have no time for the niceties. We must act. You must act.”

    Betts, now more bemused than apprehensive, addressed the room. "Gentlemen, you baffle me. You see, sir, whoever you are, I am exactly 'just'; that's exactly who I am. 'Just' a low-grade operative, so low-grade in fact that if my employers could hear me refer to myself in that way, as an operative of any grade, they'd positively howl with laughter. So please. Whoever you think I am, that person is still out there. You are wasting your precious time with me. And so, I hate to be rude after all the trouble you've gone through to bring me here, but I think I'll be leaving." 

    The room was silent. Betts suspected they would not try to stop him and they didn't. He walked out, back onto 79th Street, and turned briefly to the shuttered window, curious to see whether he could detect between the slats any movement to come after him. It was then that he noticed it and wondered that he could have missed it--the 'a' in the sign for the Debrecen Cafe above the window.  

    

 

 

    He turned and began walking back toward 3rd Avenue but he hadn't progressed very far when he heard a voice behind him.

    "Betts goddamit."

    Betts turned. "Yes. Of course. It was you after all. I thought as much. Where were you? I didn't see you. Directly behind the candle I imagine? I was actually quite hoping you'd come after me. It's very exciting, isn't it, whatever it is? How are you involved? And, how have you been by the way?"

    Professor Runkle stood on the sidewalk, his hands on his hips, his head pushed out toward the man who had been his student just three years ago.     He was breathing and sweating heavily and his thin disheveled hair was matted across his forehead. 

    "Forget how I've been. Miserable and anxious. Look at me. I've gained 40 pounds," he spread his arms wide then dropped them to his sides, as if he no longer had any use for either of them. "God help me, I knew it had to be you when they first told me about it. Who else could it be? Especially after our experience together. And to think, I was the only one who knew the person they were frantically trying to find was you. I ask myself every day, every day!, why did I have to open my mouth? Why? I could have walked away and now I'd still be laughing over it. Instead here I am."

    The Professor yanked a handkercheif out of his back pocket and toweled off his dripping face with both hands. 

    "OK, anyway, that's all water and so on. Come back inside now." Professor Runkle turned back to the restaurant but stopped on the threshold. Glaring down at Betts, he said, "I've been crazed trying to find you. They've been holding it over me, you know. Very unpleasant. Oh yes, these are serious people. Listen to them. Whatever you think of their plans, trust me: your answer cannot be 'no'."

    He turned to the men in the room. "Anton. If you please. Mr. Betts has reconsidered and he is..uh..interested after all, aren't you Attila?"

    "Yes, gentlemen. Yes, indeed. How can I help you?"