Sleeping Dogs (7 page)
He stared out the window at the flat green countryside sweeping past, and strained for something to give her, like a present. “I’m going to tell you something that’s absolutely secret. Very few people even inside the Western intelligence community have heard it, and I’m not cleared by your government to be one of them. There’s a special room inside a building near Whitehall. It’s a big room in a basement, and outside the door there are always two sergeants of the Royal Marines, fully armed and at attention on two-hour shifts. Inside the room are hundreds of identical black-velvet boxes, with little gold plates on them engraved with the names of the heroes of the secret wars. When a member of England’s intelligence services does something spectacular, there’s a quiet ceremony where he’s given a medal. Because who he is and what he did must be kept secret, the medal is put inside the little velvet box and kept in trust by the government. But years later, when the man dies and the secret is no longer crucial to national security, the Queen invites his family to the Palace for an audience and gives them the box. But it’s not just for professionals. A lot of the boxes in that room are set aside for people like your friends, just regular citizens who maybe got involved by accident, or performed some service when the need arose. For the moment their families and friends are going to think that Jimmy and Peter were killed by robbers or something—whatever story the government puts out for the press. But someday they’ll get a little printed invitation to come visit the Queen, and then they’ll know.”
Margaret stared at him, and in her eyes he could see that she wanted to be able to tell the story, to go to Peter’s sister or Jimmy’s mother in some private room of the gigantic old country houses they lived in and whisper the lie he had offered her. Then there was no telling where it would go, and he knew it wouldn’t hold up. “You’ve got to keep that to yourself,” he said. “If it ever got out, the Russians would do anything to get into that room and read the citations—the ones for the last fifty years, anyway.”
“But you know, and now I know,” she said. “Michael, if I could tell just one or two people … and after all, it’s their secret, theirs and mine, not yours.”
He wavered as he thought about her. If she told it, she would probably make up lots of details that would make it sound more authentic, but he couldn’t chance it. “It’s a deep secret. None of them would ever have told an American, even one who’s been here for years trying to protect their country.”
“Then, how do you know?”
He sighed, as though he were giving in against his better judgment. “A few years ago, a man from MI6 managed to get inside a Soviet communications post in Afghanistan. How that happened, and how he got out, I can’t go into. But he ended up with me. He’d seen some things: the specification plates on the equipment, written texts on the computer screens and so on. The problem was, he didn’t speak Russian. He’d looked at them, but there was no way he could remember them because they meant nothing to him; just gibberish. His own people tried hypnotism, locking him in a sensory-deprivation chamber, everything. But they knew that we’d experimented with certain drugs. I can’t name them, but chemically they’re several generations beyond truth serums.
“This Englishman came to my house and met a doctor we’d flown in from Langley. The doctor shot him up, and he started to draw. He drew for days. He drew the Russian letters he’d seen on the computer screens, and made diagrams and maps. He saw everything all over again, and traced it on paper. But he also started to talk. It was endless, compulsive talk about all kinds of things that he’d kept secret. He told me about sexual experiences, childhood lies and things his parents hadn’t caught him at, secret fears and worries that he’d never resolved. It turned out he was from an old family that had been involved in British secrets for generations. The way it sounded, they were recruited by their fathers about the time they left Eton for Oxford, so they’d be sure to study hard and read the right books. Anyway, one thing he told me about was the room with the velvet boxes. When he’d been in the service only a few months, they called him in and showed him around. There were boxes in there for his father, who had helped crack some German code, and his great-grandfather, who’d done something or other in the Boer War, and I think somebody was in the Crimea. He kept raving on about the medals—the Victoria Cross, the Distinguished Service Order and I don’t know what else.
“The whole thing seemed to bother him a lot. At first I thought it was because when he got the tour he was so green. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, and seeing all those medals made him think he could never amount to anything compared to all of his ancestors. After the drug wore off, I asked him about it, and he said that wasn’t it. By now he had a few medals and citations in a box of his own. It was the secrets that bothered him. A lot of the things from a hundred years ago are still current: secret family contacts in Russia and East Germany, for instance, that have been kept up for generations. If those got out, the Russians would have whole families put up against a wall. Things change on the surface, but not underneath, in the world where spies live. It all seemed to him like a string that might unravel. If one thing came out, it could be traced to something else, and so on.”
“But this is different,” she muttered. “What can it possibly hurt to give their families something to hold on to?”
“It’s not different,” he said. “Knowledge is dangerous. You’d be doing them no favors.” He wondered if he had sounded ominous enough, but it made her stop asking, and he had to be satisfied with that.
As the train rattled on toward London, he stared out at the grass and trees. He wondered if he detected in himself some annoyance at her for luring him out into the world where they could find him, but decided he did not. She had made such a small, innocent offer, and the consequences had been huge and abrupt. It wasn’t even a problem she could have imagined. But now he had to work his way out. He had done exactly what he had promised himself he would never do. He had become lazy and comfortable and forgetful. It had been so stupid that it now struck him as a kind of miracle. For some time, maybe for years, he had kept up a few hollow rituals and observed a few minimal precautions, but it was only out of habit.
He remembered a day nearly fifteen years ago in New York, when he had waited for a man named Danny Catanno to come home from a night at the theater. He had sat in the dim light the man had left burning in the huge living room and contemplated the nature of human beings. This man no longer called himself Danny Catanno. He had been an accountant for a friend of the Castiglione family in Chicago, changing a few dollars into apartment houses and putting particular people on the payroll as managers or handymen or gardeners. But one day Danny Catanno had bought himself a BMW and paid for it in cash. Somehow the IRS had gotten curious about it because it had cost sixty thousand dollars that had not come through a bank account. Within a few days Catanno was sitting in a room somewhere that was full of men who could not afford BMWs but were good enough at arithmetic to prove to Danny that he couldn’t either.
Years later—maybe seven—somebody had seen Danny Catanno in New York. The Castiglione family, by now run by the son and his two sons since the old man had retired to the Southwest, had quietly made inquiries. It wasn’t that he had done any real damage to the family reputation. The name had been famous since before the son was born. And the family friend had gotten off with a small fine and a wordy warning about fraudulent business practices and shady connections, because he had never been arrested before and had other friends besides the Castigliones. But the Castigliones were curious about the same thing that had attracted the IRS—the BMW that wasn’t attributable to any of Danny Catanno’s personal bank accounts. Danny was a thief.
A contract had been offered for Danny Catanno as soon as he had disappeared, but it had produced no satisfaction. After he had been spotted, the Castigliones had decided to hire a specialist.
Schaeffer had known that the Justice Department had some kind of agreement with Castoria College, which granted degrees to people on the basis of oral examinations given in courtrooms thousands of miles from its campus in New Hampshire. The government lawyers also gave their graduates false birth certificates and driver’s licenses and social security numbers, and then they said, “Good-bye and good luck.” All he had to do was to keep checking Danny’s mother’s mailbox for a month to see that Danny was beginning to forget his troubles. About once a week there was an envelope from a brokerage in New York with a check in it. When he had gotten to New York, all he’d had to do was to pick up a little brochure the company put out advertising the qualifications of its brokers. Among the dozens of brokers who had gone to places that meant nothing to him, he had found David Cutter, an honor graduate of Castoria.
He had looked around the apartment a bit while he waited for David Cutter to come home. It was the sort of place that cost a million or more up front, and another half-million that had to be paid to decorators, furniture dealers and art galleries. In the antique writing desk he had found a pile of credit-card receipts for expensive restaurants. He had been astounded. The man had even gone on a trip to the Bahamas a month before. People had a way of pushing things out of their minds, like the ones who built fancy houses in the floodplain of the Platte River, or on top of fault lines in California. It was a miracle that a man like David Cutter had lived as long as he had. He had gone to restaurants where he couldn’t help but sit next to people who would do anything to gain favor with the Castiglione family. He had spent his days betting large sums of money for people, a lot of whom had gotten it in ways that must have brought them into contact with acquaintances of the Castigliones. What did this man think? When he had made his reservations for the Caribbean, didn’t he Wonder who might be sitting next to him on the plane?
Schaeffer had looked in drawers and closets, bookcases and backlit cabinets, thinking about human folly. All the time he was planning. If ever in his life he had to disappear, he would submerge without a ripple and never come up again. He would never allow himself to become so comfortable and mentally lazy that he forgot he wasn’t the man he was pretending to be. That night he had made the decision to begin the preparations for his own disappearance. He would put money in safe-deposit boxes in towns he never visited. Often in his career he had found it prudent to use false names on credit cards and licenses. But now he would do it in earnest, start to build up a few identities and never use them, so that they would be old enough and deep enough on the day when somebody began to look for him the way he had looked for Danny Catanno.
Eddie Mastrewski had raised him to abhor mistakes. It was better to stay home than to make a mistake, better to pass up the money than to take a chance. The police could be as stupid as cattle, spend the day stumbling over their own feet, but in the evening they could go home, pop open a beer and sleep like stones. But people like Eddie and the boy got to make only one mistake. That was true of people like Danny Catanno too, only Danny didn’t seem to know it. He had accepted an identity as Cutter the stockbroker, and somehow he had forgotten that he wasn’t Cutter the stockbroker. The money and respectability that protected people like Cutter couldn’t protect him.
Before he had satisfied his curiosity in the apartment, he had found Danny Catanno’s gun. It was hidden in a little pop-out compartment in the wall beside the bed. The gun was lying under a pile of gold cuff links, a couple of watches and some hundred-dollar bills. It would have taken Danny thirty seconds in bright light to fumble around for it. It looked as though it had been placed there a long time ago and forgotten. When he examined it, he found it hadn’t even been cleaned and oiled lately. But he found it worked well enough when Danny Catanno came home from the theater. The police told the reporters the next day that David Cutter was a lesson to others: an unlicensed firearm was just as likely to be used by a burglar as by its owner.
Now Schaeffer wondered how he had forgotten about Danny Catanno. He had managed to set aside enough money, and he had nurtured the identities until they had sufficient patina on them to obscure their flaws, but he hadn’t done the rest of it. He had put off getting the plastic surgery, telling himself at first that he needed to get a feel for the country before he could be sure how to go about it. Surgery would involve spending a lot of time in London being photographed and examined by doctors who might wonder why a man with perfectly regular features would want something expensive and painful done to him in a foreign country. Then later, when he had learned to move around comfortably in England and was confident he could have accomplished it, he had developed other reservations. People in Bath knew him by now, and would wonder why he would suddenly do such a strange thing. He had put it off so long the dangerous time was probably past. If anybody had traced him here, they would have gotten him by now. And certainly all that time must have changed him as much as surgery would.…
The truth was that hiding had made him reluctant to obliterate his face, because it was the last thing left that was part of who he really was. He had already destroyed or relinquished everything else. He would never have run out of excuses to put off the plastic surgery. For the first time he understood Danny Catanno.
It was late afternoon. The southern outposts of London began to pass by the train, and brown brick buildings appeared that reminded him of the ride from Kennedy Airport through Queens. Then it struck him that the similarity wasn’t the reason he had thought of it. He was going back. As the train pulled slowly into Victoria Station, he calculated: assuming the police had found all five bodies by now and were questioning everybody at the racetrack, it would still take them a couple of hours to find out that the Bentley had stopped to let out a man and a woman. They would take still longer to satisfy themselves that the man and woman were no longer in Brighton, and that the only place that made any sense if they wanted to hide was London.