the alert for as I continue with my inquiry.”
“I’m not going to ask you what for. If you’re vouched for by the right people and you fought hard for your country, then I’ll take you at face value.”
“I would tell you if I could. Thanks for not making me cook up a lie.”
“If it’s about the war, then I can tell you Hugh was against it, that I know. I heard him arguing quite explicitly with Dad. He’d been over there early; I’m guessing he was involved in the plotting against Diem, so Hugh was definitely a good guy.”
“See, I didn’t know that. Very interesting,” said Swagger, thinking, That’s one for the bastard. He may have killed Kennedy, but he tried to keep me alive. “Anyhow, as a result of my investigations, I’ve come upon some indicators that Hugh might be alive but underground for one reason or other.”
“Yes. A man like Hugh made a lot of enemies.”
“He can clear up some things if I can get him to talk.”
“If Hugh doesn’t want you to catch up with him, you won’t be catching up with him. He’s that clever. Maybe in his old age, he’d spill his secrets. And they’d be many and interesting. He does know a lot about Vietnam – he tried to stop it, failed, and then waged it hard as any man. Any man except possibly you. He had three tours in heavy danger. He was a wanted man. And the two of you – boy, I’d like to be a fly on the wall during that conversation!”
“I’m just an Arkansas farm boy. I wouldn’t say much.”
“Sure. Anyhow, Dad. How would Dad proceed in building a legend? That’s the issue, right?”
“Yes sir.”
“It depended on whose influence he was feeling most keenly. He was remarkably sympathetic, picking things up from the air, it seemed. A movie would stimulate him, and he’d draw on images from it. Something would happen in the news that would set him off, he’d learn a new name, it would buzz around in his head until he found a way to use it. A painting could do it, and he was an inveterate museumgoer. He was a stimulus junkie, needed provocation to work. Do you have a time frame?”
“I’m guessing – middle seventies, early eighties. Vietnam’s over and done, no one wants to think about it. China’s coming up.”
“Dad was not one they’d go to for something Chinese.”
“It could be American.”
“It could be. But again, not Dad’s forte. He was classic himself, old espionage. Ohio State, but he could hold his own with the snooty Ivies.”
“Russia, East-bloc countries, the Cold War. The old standbys.”
“The eternal enemy. Okay,” said Harry Gardner. “That would be Dad. Got it. One word: Nabokov.”
Bob blanked, and knew his eyes registered emptiness.
“Nabokov, the writer, the genius.”
“Well, sir,” said Bob, “one of my embarrassments is how poorly educated I am. I have tried to catch up, but a day doesn’t go by when I don’t humiliate myself by exposing my ignorance. I never heard of any Nabokov. I even had to look up Boswell to figure out what it meant.”
“Vladimir Nabokov. White Russian, born at the turn of the century. St. Petersburg. Lost it all in the Revolution, and the family fled to Paris, where all the White Russians went. Cambridge education. IQ 353 or something like that. Spoke English, French, and German as well as Russian, spoke ’em all brilliantly. Wrote intricate, troubling books, usually about intellectuals, with always an undercurrent of dark sexuality and violence. Probably regarded humans as another specimen to be mounted on a needle and studied. He was a butterfly collector too.”
“Your father was an admirer?”
“A devotee. As was Hugh. They’d rather sit in this room and argue Nabokov and smoke and drink and laugh than almost anything. So whether it was conscious or unconscious, I’m betting that any work product Dad turned out was touched by Nabokov’s influence. And what would that be?
“Nabokov loved all the candy corn of prose, puns, allusions, cross-linguistic wordplay, wit for wit’s sake. I’ll give you an example. You’ve heard of
“Old man, young girl. Dirty as hell, that’s all I know.”
“Believe me, it’s the cleanest dirty book ever written. But the bad guy is a TV writer named Clare Quilty, Q- U-I-L-T-Y, who ultimately steals Lolita from Humbert and uses her for his own purposes. Nabokov loves to play games with the names and at one point has Humbert muse in French something like ‘that he is there,’ and in French it’s
“So a Boswell work name would have a pun in two languages?”
“This is literature, not physics, so nothing is definite. It would be a hint, a shade, a ghost of a meaning subtly brushing against a word. If the name were a Russian name – this is a real simple example – Dad might have come up with Babochkin. That means ‘butterfly man,’ and Nabokov was known as a world-class butterfly collector. So anyone looking for a giveaway who happened to know that Dad, in his Nabokovian phase, was the author of the legend and spoke fluent Russian might look at a list of names, and immediately, Babochkin would stand out. It would be a dead giveaway. Of course, that’s the principle as enacted at a primitive level. If he were doing it for real, it would be much subtler and go through a batch of meanings and languages before it gave up its final meaning. It would bounce-bounce-bounce all over the place. And no one would ever get that last meaning because you’d have to know such a broad range of disciplines, languages, cultures. That was the sort of thing he liked to do.”
“I think I got it,” said Swagger.
“Would you like to see Dad’s office? I kept it the way he had it when he died. I think it’s a kind of portrait of the way his mind worked. You might enjoy it.”
“Great. That’d be very helpful.”
“Okay, come this way.” Harry took Swagger up a narrow, creaky back staircase, down a crooked hallway, and into a room off to one side, with a window staring at nothing except the vines on the house next door. Bob looked: this was the mind of Niles Gardner, creator of legends, who always brought ’em back alive.
“This is where Dad tried to write his novels,” Harry said. “I’m afraid it never worked out. He was a brilliant beginner, but whatever it is that brings the writer back to the chair week after week and month after month, Dad lacked. He didn’t have it in him to finish. By the time he was halfway through with anything, he’d changed so much intellectually that he no longer recognized the person who began the story and had no sympathy for him and the characters he’d created. A lot of geniuses never finish their novels, I guess.”
“It’s too bad,” Bob said. “He must have had a lot to say.”
The wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor shelves were crammed, spine out, with books, books, more books, arranged alphabetically. Many were foreign, and of the ones in English, Bob recognized no titles except some Hemingway and Faulkner. A couple of incongruities stood out. For example, there were four ceramic bluebirds on one of the shelves, papa, mama, and two babies. There was a surprisingly sentimental picture, or more of an illustration, of six green elms against a countryside. The oddest thing of all was on the desk, piled with pages of typescript. An old Underwood typewriter, battleship – gray and weirdly tall and complicated, stood in the center. On the desk were jars of paper clips, pens – and a pistol.
“I see what you’re looking at. Yes, for some reason, Dad glommed on to this old thing and wouldn’t let go of it.”
Harry picked it up carelessly by the barrel, and Bob recognized it as a C-96 Mauser, commonly called a “Broomhandle,” for it carried that shape in a grip that plunged almost at 90 degrees from the intricately machined receiver. The handle was freed up to be unique because it had no responsibilities for containing a magazine; the magazine was contained in a boxlike structure ahead of the trigger. The barrel was long, the whole thing oddly awkward and beautiful.
“I’m sure you know more about these things than I do,” said Harry, handing it over.
Bob pulled back the bolt latch on the receiver – it was so early in the evolution of semi-automatic technology that it didn’t have a slide – to expose the chamber, revealing the gun to be empty. “Mauser Broomhandle,” he said.
“Yes, exactly. Winston Churchill carried one in the cavalry charge at Omdurman in 1898, when it was the latest newfangled thing. I think Dad kept it around because it reminded him of classical espionage. You know, Europe in the thirties, Comintern, the Storm Petrels, the recruitment of the Cambridge Four, the Gestapo, Gauloises,
