The Talbot Odyssey (9 page)

Carbury turned abruptly into 54th Street. Abrams followed. Carbury was moving quickly beside the long garden wall of the Museum of Modern Art. Abrams kept well behind on the opposite side of the street. Ahead, at the intersection of Fifth Avenue, he saw Carbury cross to his side of the street, look up and down the crowded block, then mount the steps of a stately old granite building with a long gray awning. The University Club.

Abrams waited, giving it fifteen minutes, then proceeded to the intersection and entered a telephone booth. He called his contact at the Nineteenth Precinct. “Phil, what do you have?”

The detective told him, “Your man checked through customs at Kennedy two days ago. Gave the St. Moritz as his address, but he’s not registered there. It’s going to take time to phone every hotel in town. Besides, he could be using an alias or be staying in an apartment, a private club, or a place that isn’t required to keep registration records. If it’s urgent—”

“No. Thanks, Phil.”

“You owe me one. I want you to follow my wife.”

“She asked me to follow you.”

The man laughed. “How’s life treating you, Abrams? Got your Esquire yet?”

“Not yet.”

“What’s this all about?”

“Nothing criminal”—Abrams kept his eye on the doors of the building that Carbury had entered—“matrimonial . . . horseshit.”

“Well, you catch that sucker with his pants off and squeeze his nuts. Who’d travel across the Atlantic for a piece of ass these days? Christ, I wouldn’t cross the street for it.”

“Sure you would.”

“Why don’t you come around anymore? Never see you at P.J.’s.”

“Buy you one.”

“Not tonight. The President is going to be at the Seventh Armory. Secret Service and Bureau all over the fucking place. They got me on a goddamned roof. Jesus. Have to go.”

“Right. Look, don’t bother with the calls. I think I’ve got him.”

Abrams hung up and called Katherine Kimberly. He was told by her secretary that she was not available but that she expected him to call her later at the Lombardy. He called the Burke Detective Agency and told them to send the car to the northeast corner of 54th and Fifth.

Abrams crossed Fifth Avenue and stood at the appointed corner, where he had a good view of the building across the street. It had been a job well done, and he congratulated himself. He supposed that mounted police on punishment duty also congratulated themselves when they did a good job of shoveling the shit out of the stables.

He leaned against a lamppost and turned up his collar. He realized that Katherine Kimberly, if she was walking tonight, would most probably pass this way to get to the Lombardy. Why, he wondered, would he think of that?

Rush hour traffic flowed around him. He looked through the lighted windows in the building across the street.
Someone may
want to harm him.
Very heavy stuff. Carbury thought so too. Yet apparently no one had notified the police, which was suggestive of all sorts of things.

Patrick O’Brien, Katherine Kimberly, tuxedos and town houses, tax write-offs and investment tax credits. Money, power, and status. He had discovered that lawyers almost never took the law too seriously. There was hardly a law on the books, including first-degree murder, that wasn’t open to interpretation. They understood the complex society in which they lived and manipulated it from every seat of power in the land. The rest of the nation had to get by as best they could. Or, as a police captain once said to him, “A single lawyer is a shyster, two lawyers are a law firm, three or more are a legislative body.”

Abrams’ father, a great egalitarian—a Communist, actually—used to instruct him, “We are all pilgrims on the same journey.” True, thought Abrams, but some pilgrims have better road maps.

Katherine Kimberly walked down a deserted corridor on the forty-fourth floor, some distance from her office. The corridor ended at a steel door marked DEAD FILES.

She pressed a buzzer. A peephole cover slid open, then the door itself opened slowly on squeaking hinges. She entered a room that was badly lit and musty.

The room was stacked high with oak file cabinets of a type not seen in many years. At the end of an aisle of cabinets there was a single window, which was grimy, as windows tend to become when they are crisscrossed with steel bars. Raindrops beat against the window of the overheated room. She heard the door close behind her and turned.

“Hello, miss.”

“Good afternoon, Arnold.” She regarded the elderly Englishman as her eyes became accustomed to the bad light.

“Just making tea, miss.”

“Fine.” Not to accept tea was to get off on the wrong foot with Arnold, as she had discovered.

Arnold busied himself with the china tea service that was laid on a khaki-painted camp table.

“Do you know a Colonel Randolph Carbury?”

Arnold nodded. He switched on an electric hot plate on which sat a copper kettle. He motioned to a shelf lined with colored tins of Twining’s. “What’s your pleasure? I’ve got a bit of Earl Grey left.”

“Fine. Is there a file on him?”

“The Earl?” He laughed at his own joke. “Oh, Carbury. Indeed there is.” He pulled up a chair, and she sat.

She watched as he spooned the loose tea into the china pot. No, she thought, it was no accident that the firm of O’Brien, Kimberly and Rose had moved from Wall Street to this building in Rockefeller Center after the war. The wartime American intelligence organization where Patrick O’Brien had worked, the Office of Strategic Services, had kept offices in this building. And, as Carbury had reminisced, so had British Security Coordination, which had been headquartered in what was now the suite of the O’Brien firm. Nostalgia, karma, perhaps something else.

When the British had vacated their space on the forty-fourth floor, they had retained the lease on this one room. They had also left behind a good number of files and a caretaker staff, including their archivist, Sergeant Arnold Brin, who was now the sole remaining person. This room, and Arnold himself, were part of the flotsam and jetsam of a once farflung empire, left aground in the ebb tide of the realm.

Katherine once remarked to O’Brien about the expenditure for an intelligence facility that had seemingly been defunct for nearly forty years. He had replied, “It was a gift from them to us.”

“But who
pays
for it?”

“The monarch is given a discretionary fund by Parliament for royal functions. Some of this money finds its way into other types of functions.”

“Intelligence functions?”

“Yes.” O’Brien had smiled. “If you want to know a secret, Congress, during the Second War, set a similar precedent. They voted tens of millions of dollars in unvouchered funds to be used by General Donovan at his discretion. I’ll tell you about that some day.”

The copper kettle whistled, and Arnold poured the boiling water into the china pot. “Like it strong, do you? Give it a good five minutes.”

Katherine looked down the center aisle of the file cabinets. According to O’Brien, British intelligence occasionally paid a visit to the archives. But General Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services, with whom it was intended to be shared, had been unexpectedly disbanded after the war. Nearly two years later the OSS was reborn as the Central Intelligence Agency; but lacking the continuity of the British intelligence services, the CIA had apparently overlooked this facility, or asset, as they termed it. Patrick O’Brien and his OSS veteran friends, however, had not forgotten the British legacy and had inherited it by default—or by design. She was not certain which.

She also knew that many of the OSS’s own files had never passed to the CIA but were still in this building some floors below.

Arnold set a large teacup on the camp table. He produced a napkin and a teaspoon. “No sugar, no cream.” He poured the tea through a strainer.

“Thank you.”

Arnold disappeared into the gloom of the file stacks and returned shortly with a buff-colored folder. “Carbury, Randolph, Major. Same man, new rank, I should think.” He switched on a dusty green-shaded reading lamp, then extracted from the folder a small ID photograph. “Is that the man?”

Katherine stared at the old photograph. “I have no way of identifying him.” Why, she thought, would he assume she could, unless he also assumed that she had met Carbury? She looked at Arnold, and he seemed somewhat embarrassed.

“What I meant, miss, is have you ever seen a picture of him?”

“No.” She began to wonder if Carbury had been in this room before his meeting with her. But even if that were so, there was nothing inherently suspicious about that. He could have access to the files, assuming his credentials were in order. That, according to O’Brien, was a stipulation of the legacy.

Katherine leafed through the loose pages of the thin file. It was basically a personal file, very informally arranged, unlike the thick brown dossiers on Fascist agents who had worked in America. There were no details of operations, but there were code-numbered references to those operations on which Carbury had worked. Randolph Carbury, it appeared, was no whisky warrior; he had been highly regarded and highly decorated.

Katherine came upon an encoded Western Union telegram with the decoded text written in pencil below. The decoded signature caught her eye, and she read the message, dated 12 February 1945.

To Major R. Carbury: Again, I must press you for more specif
ics regarding the light shed by the Hunter’s Moon. It is due to
rise this year on 16 October, by which time Mars will have set,
decreasing the favourable conditions which now obtain for the
hunt. A martini is needed quickly. Churchill.

Katherine reread the message. Even en clair it was obtuse, a further guard against unauthorized eyes. Hunter’s Moon, she assumed, was the name of an operation. After reading enough oblique wartime communications, one got the hang of it. She looked back at the wrinkled telegram.
Light shed
—a status report was required.
Mars will have set—
the war will have ended.
De
creasing the favourable conditions
—wartime powers will also end, making the hunt more difficult, or something like that. So far, so good.

A martini is needed quickly.
Katherine ran her hand through her long hair and thought. The leitmotif was hunting and therefore followed throughout. Hunting and moon, with a mythological reference to Mars. Vintage Churchill.

She thought back to the Wingate letter, to Colonel Carbury’s acknowledgment that the letter had something to do with Wolfbane—the American wartime intelligence operation to expose a Soviet double agent highly placed in the OSS. It was just possible that Hunter’s Moon was the British code name for the American operation Wolfbane.

If this was true, then the last line became clearer.
A martini is
needed quickly
was not an offhand cry of frustration, which in any case Mr. Churchill handled with brandy. It was Churchill changing metaphors based on the word
Wolfbane.
American slang for a martini was a silver bullet. Who was to be the recipient of the quickly needed silver bullet? It was the mythological werewolf.

Katherine took it to the next logical step: The most infamous werewolf, portrayed by Lon Chaney, Jr., in the wartime classic motion picture, was Lawrence Talbot. And Talbot was the code name for the unknown Soviet double agent who was the object of the hunt named Operation Wolfbane, or Hunter’s Moon. She nodded.

So, assuming the last line was meant literally, Churchill was giving the order to kill Talbot—if he could be found. They were not to arrest him, not to attempt to turn him, not to bring him to trial, but to kill him outright, as you would kill a wild creature. And she thought she knew why. It wasn’t petty revenge. It was because Talbot was believed to be so highly placed that his open exposure would cause irreparable damage to public confidence and morale. It was also because espionage trials of Soviet agents were not politically or diplomatically prudent in those days of the war-time alliance with Russia.

Katherine sat back and sipped her tea. Talbot had never received that silver bullet. For years after the war he had prowled the collective memories and psyches of American and British intelligence; occasionally his bloody work had been discovered: a fresh kill lying at the bottom of a ravine. Then silence. There were theories: He had died a natural death, he’d finally been killed, or perhaps he’d simply retired. Or a more unsettling theory: He had ceased taking the normal risks of the double agent and become a sleeper agent, in order to insure his continued rise in whatever career he had chosen for himself.
A
well-known man who is close to your President.
A man who controlled his appetite for treason until he was in a position to satiate that appetite to the fullest.
Grave and foreboding.

Katherine turned her attention back to the file. She leafed quickly through the thin sheaf of memos, telegrams, and notes. She saw a long memo to Carbury from William Stephenson, the head of British Security Coordination in America, the man known as Intrepid and Carbury’s wartime boss. The memo seemed pertinent, and she made a mental note to read it later.

She scanned the remainder of the file, then looked at her watch. There was more here, much more, and she’d have to spend several days with it. She finished her tea and looked at Arnold over the rim of her cup. Arnold was reading a week-old copy of the London
Daily Mirror.
She closed the file. “Did you know Randolph Carbury personally?”

Arnold put down his newspaper. “Knew them all. Carbury stands out because he was more interested in Reds than Nazis. Had a different sort of job, if you know what I mean.” He winked in a way meant to underscore that meaning.

Katherine regarded Arnold in the dim light. The man was more than a vestige, more than an anachronism; he was a specimen forever imprisoned in the amber of the records room. Despite forty years in America, he retained an accent and manner that she imagined was that of a British noncommissioned officer of the war years. In the past he had spoken of a wife and grown child living in New York, but he hadn’t mentioned them in some time.