face. He was sympathetic to this need. Without Gordon to shepherd him through the early years, he, too, might have grown frustrated enough to do something stupid like stealing a document. Not that he wasn’t still wary of her. But as long as she kept coming up with new leads, they were better off working in tandem.
He hated long flights, but after the ordeal of the memorial service he had welcomed the idea of eight hours of enforced boredom. The muffled roar of the engines, the headset chatter of the in-flight movie-all of it helped him decompress. Grief wasn’t the problem. Viv’s tears, and his own, had been cathartic. The harder part had been enduring the hypocritical maundering from the podium and the unseemly congratulatory tone of his peers, who kept reassuring him with smug nods and arch asides that he had at last inherited the mantle of succession.
The day’s bright spot was Karen, who remained at his side throughout. She comforted him after his mess of a speech, which he rushed ungracefully and finished in tears. At the reception she helped ward off the supplicants who seemed intent on paying tribute. He supposed part of her reaction was simply a young person’s discomfort over a proximate death. She was also still a little spooked by the two hang-up calls she had received from Nat’s stolen cell phone, one of them only hours before Gordon’s passing-as if some angel of death had tuned in to her wavelength on its way north.
But she seemed most disturbed by the realization that this was the eventual fate of all aging scholars-done in by their passions, then relegated to postmortem dissection by tipsy peers at a dreary gathering around cold cuts and a punch bowl. Nat noticed her watching sympathetically as poor Viv was cornered repeatedly by the same colleagues who only weeks ago had been gloating over Gordon’s takedown in the Daily Wildcat.
“Is this all there is?” Karen asked, and he knew she didn’t mean the buffet.
“His work will be remembered,” Nat said, patting her arm, although he, too, worried for Gordon’s legacy. Soon the old man might be better known as a thief and a blackmailer, or even as some sort of blundering spy. Worst of all, Nat’s work for the FBI might play a big role in the revision.
“He never had children, did he?” Karen asked.
“No. I guess that’s one way I’ve already outdone him.”
He smiled, keeping it light, but she seemed grateful all the same. It had been nice, having her stay in his house the night before and knowing she would still be there in the morning, bleary-eyed by the toaster as they ushered in the new day. It made him feel like he had finally been readmitted to the fraternity of Fatherhood. After years of associate membership, he again had full rights and privileges, even if those included compulsive worry and constant concern.
He saw her look toward Viv with a tear in her eye.
“She’d love to see you if you could drop by while I’m away,” he said. “It would do her good.”
“Sure. But you’re the one I’m worried about.”
“Me? I’ll be okay.”
“Mom said it was hard enough when you lost him the first time, after the bad review. Now he’s gone for good, and you never won him back.”
“You keep forgetting the benefits of my field of endeavor. I’m a historian. I may find him yet, out there in some lost archive. With his help, even.”
“All that old stuff worries me,” she said. “Sometimes it’s more dangerous than it’s worth.”
“Let me guess. You came across some warning from the Belle.”
She nodded, but didn’t return his smile. This was serious.
“I’ll bet you can recite it from memory.”
She nodded again, solemnly, then obliged him, keeping her voice low so no one else would hear. It gave her words more impact, as if the poet herself were speaking through his daughter, a resurrected Cassandra:
The Past is such a curious Creature
To look her in the Face
A transport may receipt us,
Or a disgrace-
Unarmed if any meet her
I charge him fly
Her faded Ammunition
Might yet reply.
“That’s good,” Nat replied. “A little too good.”
“I thought so, too. Be careful.”
You, too, he wanted to say. But didn’t, for fear of alarming her. He hoped Holland’s men were still on the job.
THE JOLT OF JET WHEELS against the tarmac brought Berta’s head upright.
“Zurich?”
He nodded. Her scent lingered on his shoulder. They were finally in Europe, the place where all the old things hide best.
“Assuming they didn’t lose our luggage, we should make the 8:40 train to Bern,” he said. “What’s our plan of action?”
Berta had begun courting her archival source by telephone, hoping to finagle a look at the Swiss surveillance reports from the war years. She proposed to go see him right away, and Nat agreed. He would check them in at the hotel and stash their bags while she visited the archives. Then they would reconvene at the Bahnhof at 11:30 to pay a joint visit to the doorstep of Gustav Molden, the Swiss flatfoot who had been assigned to Gordon during the war.
In the meantime, Nat would get his bearings with a brisk walk through the medieval heart of the city. He wanted to shake off the jet lag, stop for a double espresso. Then he would begin collecting images to go with all the names and facts jammed in his head.
It was his favorite way of making old documents come to life, and the best part was that central Bern looked much as it had sixty-four years ago. That made it easier to imagine the young Gordon Wolfe slouching along the arcaded sidewalks, hands stuffed in the pockets of his leather bomber jacket as he headed to a meeting with Dulles, the pipe-smoking spymaster in a rumpled overcoat.
It was Nat’s imaginative powers that had eventually given him an edge over Gordon as a historian. In fact, Gordon’s envy of those powers had contributed to their falling-out. Nat could make the old characters from the archives live and breathe. It was one reason he enjoyed his craft. The more vividly he began to see an era, the easier it was to tease out its secrets.
They easily made the 8:40 train, and upon arrival Berta set out for the State Archives while Nat secured their rooms. Earlier he had decided that, like Gordon, they would stay at the Bellevue, the posh hotel on a bluff above the River Aare. During the war it was a notorious den of spies, which to Nat made it the perfect starting point. Pricey, but the FBI was paying.
Bern was named for a bear, as if the city had crawled out of a crease in the Alps to lie down on its horseshoe bend. Its bluffs sheltered a medieval grid of narrow arcaded streets marked by grand clock towers and cathedrals and lined by timbered buildings along bustling market squares. While the arcades gave the city much of its charm, they also lent a certain hooded aspect, a shadowy sense of concealment.
Nat set out for the town center. He tried seeing the place through Gordon’s eyes by thinking back to an item he had found in the archives, a Dulles memo to his mistress and Girl Friday, Mary Bancroft, which described how he had taken their newest operative out for an introductory stroll.
Gave 543 the grand tour. Christened him Icarus, seeing as how he literally fell to us from the sky. He finds it quite a lark being here in Shangri-la and comes across as a sharp tack. A Princeton man, and his German is first rate. We’ll start him slow and see how well he learns to walk-or fly, as the case may be with our Icarus. Let’s hope he doesn’t emulate all of his namesake’s destiny. The sun is very hot in our business.
Dulles described their progress stop by stop, and Nat followed their route. He proceeded with an odd sense that at any moment he might spot them up ahead or catch a whiff of pipe smoke. Reaching the Nydegg Bridge, he gazed down at the green river, swollen by spring melt, and then crossed to the city’s famed bear pit, where shaggy beasts loped in the sunlight, craning their necks toward the moms and children at the rim.
I told Icarus those bears were like us, hemmed in by every border, unable to roam. Yet see how everyone approves of their presence and smiles down on them? He, too, would receive such favorable treatment, so long as he lived by their rules and didn’t stray. Try breaking free and they would hunt you down. So work hard, but
