1
When I married, late and surprised, I hadn’t heard from the old man for about two years. I knew his assistants went through fallow periods, only to be suddenly summoned back into service. Having heard nothing formal, I considered myself retired rather than dismissed, but in truth I didn’t know what to think. No contact was possible between me and my former peers, and to have simply shown up at the offices unbidden, out of the question. From my own time with the old man, I sensed some people simply aged out of service; others died, of course, and not only because the old man’s career had spanned decades.
For most of those inactive months I believed he kept me in mind yet didn’t need my specific talents. Perhaps what he’d termed “the Work” had progressed, though the world seemed just as fraught with troubles, even as the Cold War staggered to its undramatic close. Stories still surfaced about him; not front-page matter as had been the case mid-century. His exploits faded behind the conjoined twins of popular news—terrorism and celebrity, which seemed to me, trained in the study of human cultures, only exaggerated aspects of the same mortal vanities: the need to make a mark; the belief that you alone matter.
What allowed me to marry, in fact, was a growing sense that I’d invented the old man. Some three dozen adventures I’d had with him over ten years, but often I’d not known my own purposes, and sometimes the center of action proved to be several thousand miles from where I and other assistants were engaged. During that decade, the world appeared to be a gigantic machine, every human action tied to another and watched over by the old man, who seemed always intent on saving the planet, or some part of it, from destruction. The distance of years gave me a different impression: everything I’d done was either tangential or utterly beside the point. On quiet, solitary nights, scenes from that life came to me vividly; the rest of the time, real life obtruded. I had, after all, no artifacts from those events except, on soggy days, a left leg that ached—and quarterly dividends from several South American mining companies.
And so love, personal intimacy, a household: these seemed saving graces—for Claire and me, if for no one else. When the sun swelled and drowned the inner planets, or when our fragile world with all its weapons went under in its own fires, there would at least have been our simple joys for a little while under the sky.
The morning after the wedding, Claire and I went through the presents at my Brooklyn apartment. Seated on the sofa, my legs stretched onto the coffee table, I jotted down each gift and giver as she reported them. She knelt on the other side of the room among the boxes.
“No name on this one,” she said. Once, when my life bubbled with mysteries, that would have caught my interest, but I merely said, “Hm” and waited for her to say more. The wrapping paper was a flat silver; she tore it off and held up, so I could see, a brown box. The lid unsecured, she opened it and peered inside. “What are you?” she asked.
“What.”
She pinched her brows together, then plucked out a bent piece of metal about the size of a cheese knife. Claire twisted her hand to change the angle. “It’s signed,” she said. “Or inscribed.”
“What’s it say?”
“Come see. My legs are numb.”
I made a face and grunted to standing. I thought to say something about being old and hating to move, but the decade gap in our ages didn’t seem like the best subject on such a day.
She held it out to me. I saw what she meant: a cryptic signature inscribed into the metal; above it, the word “Believe” stamped in block letters, followed by a date from ten years before. My eyes rolled upward to track the day, and I remembered the fallacious alien invasion, meant to conceal a program of human trafficking, and the craft we’d blown to blazes—mostly for our own satisfaction—in the desert outside Tempe. “Believe” indeed.
My wife asked, “Why are you smiling?”
2
In my first years of teaching, I played racquetball on courts near my department’s offices in the city, always conscious that, as I struck and sweated, other men my age and younger, soaked in tropical humidity and damp fear in a foreign land, fought an indefatigable enemy for causes uncertain and obscure. Like most academics then, I pronounced my politics to my students; since the majority of students and faculty held the same views, this was hardly bravery, and might even have been a form of cowardice. Only once did I have the chance to truly perform something like a selfless act, and I suppose it was this as much as my considerable scholarship that brought me to the old man’s attention.
I’d been lecturing to first-year anthropology students in a cold room of beige brick. The windows, most of them missing their blinds, were old and let in the winter; often, my eyes watered from all the white light behind the students, who sat in curved tiers.
I noticed the unfamiliar young man at the back because it wasn’t that large a class.
Lecture done, he lingered, stepping down from each tier so gradually it was evident he was waiting for us to be alone.
“Can I help you?” He wasn’t looking at me, but at the next step. “Young man?” His head came up.
He dawdled down the stairs until the last students were out the door and I’d gathered my satchel and gym bag from my chair.
“I’m here to deliver a message, Professor Lanagan.”
“Is that so?”
“Really,” he said, and held out a piece of paper. “My . . . boss likes people to connect in a personal way.” He blinked at me as if he’d lost the right words. “Otherwise he’d have just sent you a letter.”
The paper was folded twice. “What is this?”
“Please just read it.”
I did. Twice. “Why would I take this seriously?”
“I also have information to deliver verbally,” he said. “Last year, a student entered the offices of the financial aid department carrying an explosive device.” Muscles in my midsection clenched. “You happened to be there at the time, having seen him arming the device while in the bathroom. You stopped him before he could proceed any farther, contained him, and contacted the police. You asked the authorities to keep you out of the story, which they did.”
“How do you know that?”
He nodded at the paper, which I’d kept open. “Who else would know?” For the first time, his bland visage cracked: he gave a wry smile and tilted his head slightly toward the shoulder that shrugged. “He just knows everything. Anyway, that’s the place and time, and there’ll be other people to meet. So.” He hesitated. “Nice to talk with you,” he said, and left me standing there.
I stayed like that until I found myself looking at the paper’s blank side—as if it contained a hidden message telling me how to proceed.
I never felt comfortable saying his name; such intimacy seemed less than appropriate. The nickname some of the early assistants, and the newspapers, applied didn’t seem to suit him. Instead, I adopted the term employed by most of the assistants I’d met: the old man.
Stories—the pulpy ones I read as a teen, passed to me by my father, and the news pieces the wire services ran in our more global age—had provided me a picture, but actually being in his presence made the stories seem like hand shadows, cast dimly on a wall, aimed at telling tales of the gods.
Before he emerged, though, I met many of those who would be my compatriots.
“Slim Jim” Rogers introduced the others, all of whom sat on the arms of the chairs in the office, which looked like a library with a tremendous inlaid desk at one end. Slim Jim stood a few inches taller than I, and I was six feet. I noticed his long fingers, too, when he shook my hand.
“I’m mostly a language guy,” he said, “but the military taught me some things about electronics and combat, so that’s why the old man keeps me around.” He opened his big hands flat.
“I see,” I said, in the absence of a better response.
“You did some terrific work on the Tergen.”
I looked at his mouth, then in his eyes again. “You’ve read those papers?” The rainforest-dwelling Tergen spoke one of the nearly nine hundred discrete languages particular to Papua New Guinea. Like many of their neighbors, the Tergen held tight to a language lacking antecedents connecting it to other Papuan languages, but even among the regional tongues it sounded unprecedented; theories about the Tergen’s distinct development and origins abounded, some more in the realm of science fiction than philological or anthropological speculation. I had focused on their use of natural sounds in the construction of their language: clicks and whistles that came from animals, a sound like rushing water on verbs of motion, and one phoneme like trees rubbing together. They were the most obscure people I’d studied. The work had come somewhat as an accident; I’d signed up with two other anthropologists tracking malarial propagation and treatment in the region.
“Not all, but enough,” Slim Jim replied. “The old man has done some work there himself.” He leaned toward me in mock confidentiality. “Nothing he’s published, of course.”
“Of course . . .”
“His father lived among them for a while, I’m told.”
“. . . Really . . .”
“Panzer here—” he began, indicating a short-haired blond woman waiting to greet me.
“Christ!” she said. She had a German accent. “Can’t someone learn my real name first?” Firmly shaking my hand, she hit Rogers on the shoulder with the open palm of her other hand. “This place is too much like a boys’ club,” she said.
By longstanding tradition nearly everyone was known by a nickname. Gerta “Panzer” Pruner, whose father had, not coincidentally, commanded a tank division in the war, never failed to roll her eyes or punch the speaker in the shoulder, hard, whenever her unwelcome moniker was applied. Weapons expert Arthur “Tice” Tizzarelli would later train me so that I could cause impermanent though disabling damage with our unique non-lethal firearms. He was the only companion from those times whom I saw outside of a mission, our few meetings arranged by the old man. Wu, the only one present that night who lacked a nickname, was a chemical engineer, as was his father, a victim of the Cultural Revolution.
I didn’t know Panzer long. On our third mission together, she failed to open her parachute and plummeted into the heart of a dark forest. Nothing was wrong with the equipment. It had been an unlikely mistake, especially for someone trained by the East Germans, and I wondered, given her moods, whether she hadn’t chosen the time of her demise.
“Mairzy,” Mary Czekaj, joined a few months after that first meeting, and I unsubtly harbored a bit of a crush on her. If we’d seen each other more often, maybe it would have developed into something. I knew that my attraction was largely the result of shared intense experiences, so I felt mature in dismissing my feelings which, in addition, seemed improper.
As for “the old man”—by the time I’d come along, someone had turned it into an acronym, “Tom.” Wu and Tice had, rarely, taken to calling him that. The first time I heard Tice do it, the old man didn’t even blink, so it must have already been established. His real name surfaced on occasion. Often, strangely, there was no need to address him personally; you began to speak to him and found him looking at you already.
Evidently, information about me had been broadly disseminated in advance. Panzer asked about some papers of mine the State Department had put to use, and my answers were unforthcoming not from humility but surprise that anyone would care.
I was starting to ask Wu about the library’s availability—I’d spotted some volumes in my own field—when Tice said, “Evening, old man.”
It unnerved me, how someone that large could have entered without my feeling the air displace; an opening at his back, just to one side of the desk, slid shut before I got anything more than a glimpse of yellow light on a wood-panelled wall. His mildly furrowed brow made me think he already wondered why I’d been selected for his team; later, I’d realize this wasn’t a look of worry, but of focus. Once our eyes locked, he held me only for a moment. It would be a commonplace to say the moment lengthened. It did not; rather, it deepened, and I plummeted and had to steady myself. I suppose I felt myself tumbling into an unguessed-at future.
Though the old man wore only trousers and a loose beige shirt, sleeves rolled, showing the massive though magnificently tapering forearms, in my patch-elbowed corduroy jacket I felt underdressed for the occasion, and my hair, nearly to my collar in those years, seemed a horrible breach of etiquette. His own hair was nearly colorless, though it was hard to tell, so closely was it cropped, the bronzed tone of his head predominating. From what I knew of his history, he must have been around seventy, but except for wrinkles that looked to be the result of sun exposure, he appeared middle-aged.
Relatively speaking, I suppose he was.
His voice rumbled, “You’ve met the others,” though he barely opened his mouth. I stared at his lips and didn’t answer. A punch on the shoulder woke me, and I looked at Slim Jim, who barked a laugh and tilted his head as if to say, “Now you see how things are.”
The old man hadn’t moved an iota. “Yes, sir,” I said.
“They’re quite a group.” His eyes flicked about to touch on them all, with some bemusement, I thought, and everyone laughed lightly and stepped closer to the desk.
“You know something of what we do,” he said.
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“Do you think you’d want to work with us?”
I hesitated. Slim Jim tilted close. “Don’t worry about the details, Lanny.” And so my own nickname was set. “Everything’s taken care of from here on out. Trust me. Well,” his head bobbled, “trust him.”
I managed to say, “I’ll do what I can.”
Now the old man moved, smoothly, in a way that didn’t match his size, to slide a fat brown volume from the wall of books behind his desk. He settled the book while opening it, then quickly found the proper page. I’d noticed the fountain pen in its holder; with his left hand, he snatched the pen and tested it on the desk’s blotter. In letters somewhat like print, but joined together, he noted something in the unlined pages of the book; propriety kept me from studying it closely. I thought I saw the letters of my name.
He looked up, sweeping the group into his gaze. “Let’s discuss our next mission. Time is short.” He slid the pen back into its sheath.
3
Much of what the least credulous believed to be untrue about the old man’s adventures was, instead, true. The old stories, though injected with excess melodrama, nevertheless made some of the strangest adventures seem less strange. Only the mundane details were wrong, altered because the old man’s companions—or whoever passed on those stories—knew enough to shield such details from the common eye. What if the old man’s actual headquarters had been discovered? What if the press traced us to our jobs? What if the beneficiaries of the old man’s attentions were named and made the subjects of official focus—when official action had already proven useless or unavailable? And so a quotidian substructure of lies supported an utterly authentic architecture of the fantastic.
And for all the arcane weirdness most people associated with the old man, even our most bizarre cases had rational explanations—though I must say that my idea of “rational” expanded profoundly while in the old man’s service.
A flag on a nondescript building visible from my apartment informed me of my first few meetings. The flag at half-staff meant I was summoned. A bit morbid, I thought. My compatriots found out in other ways: a copy of an out-of-town newspaper delivered; a drape drawn in a nearby window. The old man couldn’t have done all this himself; he’d tasked others, and since the methods changed every few months, both in venue and style, and in the complexity needed to carry them out, he must have had a host of people upon whom to call.
In time, I appreciated what this meant. Engaged in secret activities that took me across the globe, I thought myself to be among a special breed. I was not. Whereas at first I’d passed along the city streets or ridden the subway with a feeling of detachment from those around me, later I looked at my fellows as if any of them might hide secrets of equal magnitude.
Maybe we were all in on it.
How people with problems found their way to the old man remained something of a mystery. He didn’t advertise. Although some of our cases gained public notice and you could catch glimpses of us in grainy photos, in the age before the internet, we remained private, if not truly hidden. When we’d get summoned for a case, more often than not someone was waiting with the old man in the office. She or he would repeat a summary of events, then the old man would ask a few questions, send the guest to the outer office, get our reactions, and propose a plan of action. Then one of us would usher the person back to the elevator. In the earlier building, we had a private lift and our own floor; the gold plaque outside our entry said “Azimuth Enterprises: Search and Salvage,” but in the lobby, the name didn’t appear on the black felt. Later, in Tower Two, we shared the floor with some other offices and met in more modest rooms behind an unmarked door.
There must have been people out there whose sole job was to listen, to attune themselves to the sound of a human in need. They’d home in on the direst signal and push the person in the old man’s direction. Yet how did he choose which cases to take? Surely the wail of suffering must have reached those high offices even without the aid of others. And of course, he walked among us. He’d studied, near as I could tell, in every field of human endeavor. (He even had a fine singing voice, displayed once in my hearing at a party in Monte Carlo that ended with the host hog-tied and a kidnapping foiled.) It was as if time functioned differently for him. How else to explain his breadth of knowledge, his resources, his many involvements? He lived at a different speed; he lived between seconds like a man pausing a reel of film to consider every frame. He had all the time in the world—all the time and all the world.
But were we really doing all we could to stem the tide of evil? It was on this question that my own awful decision would finally turn.
A few times, we went into situations armed. Small caliber weapons only, some loaded with rubber bullets; the old man didn’t want any avoidable deaths, but violence in self-defense—enough violence to stop someone—was expected. As for himself, he never used a gun. A master of disabling the most solidly built enemy with a single blow, the old man believed in the nobility of the human spirit but saw the human body as a machine rife with “off” switches.
I expressed my amazement once, only to have the old man fix me with a look and say, “Want to know how it feels?” His wit was so dry, I’m not sure it’s right to label it wit. I declined his offer, and he bent as if the question hadn’t been asked, gathering from the concrete floor the saboteur who’d meant to bring down a nuclear plant.
Not much more than a year after I’d married, in the city to attend a lecture and have lunch with a former university colleague, I ducked into a used book store to get out of a pounding late-afternoon rain that kept whipping under my frail umbrella. Not wanting to appear merely mercenary in my use of the shop—and certainly open to the possibility of a purchase—I strode with feigned assuredness to the rear of the store. There, the smell of rain seemed to have gathered, so that the farther in I went, the closer I seemed to get to the source of the storm. I passed between rows of shelves that reached nearly to the ceiling, then turned toward a back corner.
There he stood, the old man, raindrops marking his steel-gray trench coat, his bulk and stillness mastering the tight space. He held a small book open in one hand.
“Hello, Lanny,” he said without looking up, possibly without moving his mouth. That famed ability to throw his voice—did he practice it even when he wasn’t about the business of confounding some villain?
“Sir,” I said, even after all our time together.
Then, shutting his book, he gave me his full attention. “Ever read any Anselm?”
“I don’t believe so.”
He waved the little volume before slipping it back into a space in the shelves. “To some people, the unseen world is just as present as the visible world.” He passed me a faint grin. “One needs reminding.”
I wondered whether he meant only himself, since he’d been doing the reading, or whether he meant me—any of us who neglect the life of the spirit. In my silence, I heard the rain on the street—the door to the shop was open all this time—and I felt that the visible world was full enough.
The old man asked after my wife, told me to take care, and then left. I forgot to thank him for his gift. I wondered if the volume he’d held contained a message, but then I couldn’t find the spot where he’d replaced it, and perhaps it hadn’t been a volume of Anselm in any case, but a writer referring to Anselm, or someone who reminded him of Anselm. The old man’s thinking had always been a mystery.
I thought of that shop a decade later when the towers came down. Living hours from the city, I watched from the safety of my sofa as the collapse pushed a gray cloud of debris down that very street; I read later that the shop had been one into which people had fled from the terror. How sharply that connection resurfaced when the authorities came to me for help in tracking down the old man.
4
Our town has a little sandwich shop where I often stop on my morning walks. Cold days, sloppy days, I put on boots and a coat and head there while Claire stays dozing or sits in bed reading. I usually pocket something to read in my coat.
Mid-November, on a morning hazy with fog, I’d just started in on Camus when a man dragged over a chair to join me at my minute table.
“Mind?” he asked. He set down a gray homburg, which heightened both my curiosity—who wore a hat these days?—and hostility—why didn’t he leave the chair at the other table? He took in the face I presented him with and squinted around the whole diner. “Pleasant,” he offered by way of evaluation. His trench coat came off next, and I saw that it was unlined, a coat for warmer climes. I turned to look out the front glass and saw a car in one of the angled slots at the curb, squarish and American; I believe the man in the passenger’s seat looked back at me.
I let my book close, assessing the situation as I had not done in years. “What’s this about?”
He had trouble finding the right distance from the table for his chair. It rumbled back and forth on the tile, and until he got it right and seated himself, he didn’t answer. I had put down Camus and tensed my legs. The only hard object within reach was the sugar dispenser, three-quarters full, which would do. The chairs stood on runners rather than legs and could be easily flipped by a push at the front. Then there was the man in the car to consider . . . but my companion already had one hand in the pocket of his suit jacket. The jacket was open and fit loosely, so I could see that what he began to withdraw wasn’t a weapon.
“I’m with the National Security Agency,” he said, producing a wallet. He used both hands to open it. I read his credentials; his name was Ruxby. “Or I was. Really I’m with another department that hasn’t been officially formed yet. It’s a changed world, Mr. Lanagan.”
“Is it?”
He frowned at his wallet. “I think so, yes.”
“I don’t.” I judged him about thirty-five. “A young person’s memory isn’t much to go on.”
He finally met my eyes. “I appreciate what you’re saying.” He half stood and used one hand to scoot his chair forward, then sat again. “But people’s . . . people’s faith in things, that’s been shaken. That’s changed. Our sense of being safe.”
“What is it you want from me?”
He nodded. “We want to contact your former employer.”
I gave a half smile. “I was never employed by him.”
“Okay,” he said to the table. “Okay. We both know you’ve been compensated in some way, but okay. The thing is,” and here his head came up, “we think he could be an enormous help to us at this time.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Well, that’s our thinking. Would you know how to contact him?”
“No, I wouldn’t. And no,” I continued, anticipating his next obvious question, “I wouldn’t tell you if I did, but it’s the truth.”
His gaze shunted back and forth between my eyes, as if comparing them.
“Do you have some reason to distrust your government, Mr. Lanagan?”
“No more than anyone else,” I said.
“All right,” he said, too soon, and picked up his hat by the crease. “Well, if you have some idea where he might be, or if he contacts you, please let me know.” He produced a card that he pressed to the table. I didn’t touch it. He rose, his chair grinding back, then lifted his coat from the wall hook. “Maybe I’ll see you again.”
“The world is full of wonders,” I said, and he gave me the look I wanted, one with a hint of pique.
Only after that car had pulled away did I pick up his card. My coffee was cold, and I couldn’t summon the energy to open my book again. On my way out, I crushed the card and dropped it in the trash...
