Fellowship of Fear

“All right. Do I speak to anyone in the registrar’s office, or must it be to the registrar himself?”

“Herself. Mrs. Swinnerton. No. All you need to do is leave the message with the clerical unit.”

“Is Mrs. Swinnerton in on this, then? Is she one of your agents?”

“Classified information.   Need-to-know principle. You wouldn’t want me to go around telling other people you’re in on it, would you?”

Gideon nodded. “Okay, what happens after I call?”

“Then you hang up and wait and see.”

“At the telephone?”

Marks had already smoked down his cigarette. He exhaled heavily and, with a large gesture as if he were turning the handle on a meat grinder, he stubbed it out. He stifled a yawn. His eyes moved to the memorandum he’d been working on. “No,” he said, “just go about your business. We’ll contact you. You’ll know it’s us because we’ll make some reference to your roster.” He pulled the tablet into writing position. Gideon was being dismissed, and rather more peremptorily than he liked.

In an undergraduate psychology class, he had once taken a projective test consisting of a series of cartoons. Each cartoon showed a little man saying something irritating to a second person. You were supposed to be the second person, and you took the test by filling in two blank comic strip balloons above his head. In the balloon drawn with solid lines, you wrote your spoken response. In a second balloon with dotted lines you wrote what you were really thinking. Since then, he had often found himself mentally filling in the second balloon when he dealt with annoying people. It kept him from saying things that got him in trouble—sometimes, anyway. Now he wrote in the imaginary box: pompous little fart.

Aloud he said, “All right, I guess I’ve got it.”

“There is one more thing, of paramount importance,” said Marks. “This whole thing is strictly between us.”

“I understand that.”

“You understand, fine. But I mean strictly. You, me, Delvaux. That’s all.”

“I heard you, Mr. Marks.”

“That excludes Fu Manchu.”

Gideon got to his feet. Cold stares were not his forte, but he managed what he thought was a fairly good one. “I beg your pardon?” Inside the dotted lines he wrote: nerd.

“Fu Man Lau. Nummah One Son.”

“Look, Marks—”

Marks pretended to read Gideon’s anger as-confusion. “I had the impression that you and Lau were getting on fairly well. I just want to make sure you understand. You, me, and Delvaux.”

“You don’t even tell your own people?”

“John Lau isn’t one of our people. He’s in the safety side of the house; we’re in counterespionage. I told you, we operate on the need-to-know principle. In this line of work, the fewer people who know what you’re doing, the better for you and for them. The branches don’t tell each other what they’re doing.”

“Apparently Lau or someone else in safety told you what happened to me last night.”

“I needed to know. I thought it might have some bearing. It doesn’t.”

“You’re awfully sure of that. Do you know something about it that I don’t?”

“You don’t need to know what I know,” Marks said with an unappealingly arch smile. “Now, if there isn’t anything else, there are some very important people waiting for my recommendations.” He gestured at the memorandum.

Gideon made a final entry in his imaginary balloon: self-important twirp. Then he politely said good-bye and left.

4

TYPICALLY, HE WAS A worrier, but the somber, beautiful castle ruins and the grand sweep of the terraces put out of mind the fantastic happenings of the last fifteen or twenty hours. Solitary and relaxed, he roamed over the grounds until dusk.

For dinner he went to a sedate weinstube that had been in business, according to a plaque outside, since the 1600s; its dark, polished wooden tables might have been its original furnishings. He made a richly satisfying meal from a bottle of Mosel wine and a plate of weisskdse, a creamy cheese served with heavy rye bread and small dishes of paprika and raw onions.

At the hotel, he half-expected Frau Gross to refuse him entrance, but she seemed almost friendly. She wouldn’t go so far as to return his smile, of course, but she did give him his key— which had been found under the bureau— and wished him a good night.

He had a moment’s nervousness when he opened the door to his room, looking into the alcove and bathroom before closing it. The impulse to peek under the bed, however, he resisted, drawing a firm line between sensible precautions and outright paranoia. He set the alarm for 7:00 A.M. so he could get an early start on the military red tape involved in making travel arrangements for Sicily. By 8:30 he was happily, dreamlessly asleep.

The great stone eagles on either side of the entrance had once gripped laureled swastikas in their talons, but those had long ago been chipped away by young GIs laughing into the newsreel cameras, so that now they did duty as American eagles, guarding the headquarters of USAREUR—United States Army Europe— the heart of America’s military presence on the Continent.