“Grant, I guess you should take over here. We’re a little out of our depth,” he said, with pleasing gruffness.
As heads at the table shifted in curiosity, Lederer felt the warmth of their interest bear him to new heights. He began speaking at once. Modestly.
“Well hell, I mean I see this whole thing as Bee’s achievement and not mine. Bee is Mrs. Lederer,” he explained to an older man across the table from him, then realised too late that it was Carver, Head of London Station, never a Lederer fan. “She’s Presbyterian. Her parents were Presbyterian too. Mrs. Lederer latterly has been able to reconcile her spirituality with organised religion and has been attending regularly at the Christchurch Anglican church, Vienna, known as the English church, and frankly just the sexiest little church you ever saw. Right, Gary? Cherubs, angels — more like a religious boudoir than a regular church at all. You know, Mick, if anybody’s name is going up in lights at Langley over this, I guess it should be Bee’s,” he added, still somehow not quite able to get to his story.
The rest came out faster. It was Bee after all and not the surveillance team who had managed to slide out into the aisle after PHZ and stand in line right behind him as he and Mary queued for the Sacrament. It was Bee who from a distance of maybe five feet had watched as PHZ leaned forward and whispered real words into Mary’s ear, and watched again as Mary first leaned back to catch them, then went ahead with her devotions as if nothing in the world had happened.
“So I mean it was actually my wife, my helpmate throughout all of this long operation, who witnessed the spoken contact.” He shook his head in marvel. “And it was Bee again who, the first moment the service ended, raced back to our apartment to phone me right here at the Embassy and describe the whole amazing occurrence, using the domestic codewords the two of us had hashed out together for just such a contingency. And I mean Bee did not even know that an Agency surveillance team was present in that church at all. She just went because Mary was going, as much as anything. Yet she scooped SISURP single-handed by like six hours, more. Harry,” said Lederer a little breathlessly, finding Wexler as he put the finishing touch to his narrative, “my only regret is that Mrs. Lederer never learned to lip-read.”
Lederer had not expected applause. It was in the nature of the community he had joined that there should be none. The pregnant silence struck him as a more fitting tribute.
Artelli the cryptographer was the first to break it. “Here at the Embassy,” he repeated, not quite as a question.
“Pardon me?” said Lederer.
“Your wife called you here at the Embassy? From Vienna? Directly after the happening in the church? On the open phone from your apartment?”
“Yes, sir, and I took her news straight upstairs to Mr. Wexler. He had it on his desk by nine a.m.”
“Nine-thirty,” Wexler said.
“And what were these domestic codewords that she used, please?” said Artelli while he wrote.
Lederer was happy to explain: “Well really what we did in fact was borrow the names of Bee’s aunts and uncles. We have always considered there was a similarity in the psychological profiles of Mary Pym and Bee’s Aunt Edie. So we kind of worked it up from there. ‘You know what Aunt Edie did in church today?’. . Bee is very subtle.”
“Thanks,” said Artelli.
Next Carver spoke, and his question did not seem entirely friendly.
“You mean your wife is conscious to this operation, Grant? I thought the Pym case was strictly a no-wives thing. Harry, didn’t we make a ruling on that a little while back?”
“Strictly it is no wives,” Lederer agreed handsomely. “However since Mrs. Lederer has effectively been out in the field with me on this one it would be somewhat illusory to suppose she would not be aware of the general level of suspicion in relation to the Pyms. Well, to Magnus anyway. And I may add that it was always Bee’s contention that somewhere at the bottom of this heap we are going to find Mary playing a very deep and laid-back rôle. Mary is a rôle-player.”
Carver again. “Is Mrs. Lederer also conscious to PHZ? He’s a pretty hot addition to the cast, Grant. He could be a big fish. But she’s in on that, huh?”
There was nothing Lederer could do to stop the colour rushing to his face, or his voice developing its strident edge: “Mrs. Lederer had an instinct regarding that encounter and she acted on it. You want to censure her for that, Carver, you censure me first, okay?”
Artelli again, with his damned French drawl. “What was your domestic codename for PHZ?”
“Uncle Bobby,” Lederer snapped.
“But then Bobby is more than instinct, Grant,” Carver objected. “Bobby is an agreed thing between you. How could you have agreed Bobby if you hadn’t given her the story on Petz-Hampel-Zaworski?”
Wexler had taken back the meeting. “Okay, okay, okay,” he growled unhappily. “Cope with that later. Meantime what do we do? SISURP splits and stays with the both of them. PHZ and Mary. That right, Gary? Wherever they go.”
“I’m calling for fresh horses right now,” said Gary. “Should have two full teams by this time tomorrow.”
“Next question, what the hell do we tell the Brits and when and how?” said Wexler.
“Looks like we told them already,” said Artelli, with a lazy glance at Lederer. “That’s unless the Brits have given up tapping U.S. Embassy telephone lines these days, which I tend to doubt.”
* * *
Justice lives, but justice, as Grant Lederer discovered before morning, also dies. His health was found to have suffered a sudden lapse, his appointment in Vienna terminated for him in his absence. His wife, far from receiving the commendations Lederer dreamed of, was ordered to follow him back to Langley, Virginia, at once.
“Lederer overheats and overrelates,” wrote one of the Agency’s ever-expanding team of house psychiatrists. “He requires a less hysterical environment.”
The prescribed calm was eventually found for him in Statistics, and it drove him nearly mad.
CHAPTER 13
The green cabinet stood in the centre of Pym’s room like a discarded fieldpiece that had once been its regiment’s pride. Its chrome was peeling from the handles, a heavy boot or fall had stove in one corner, so that the slightest touch could set it trembling and worrying. The chips had rusted into sores, the rust had spread to the screw holes and underneath the paint-work, causing it to lift in humiliating pimples. Pym walked round it with the awe and loathing of a primitive. It has arrived from Heaven. It is destined to return there. I should have put it in the incinerator with him so that he can show it to his Maker as he intended. Four dense drawers of innocence, the Gospel according to Saint Rick.