Lawrence Block: The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

“My country?”

“The United States of America. That country.”

“My services?”

“The very sort of services you rode down to Washington prepared to perform. I think we both know what sort of services I’m talking about.”

“I could argue the point,” Keller said.

“You could.”

“But I’ll let it go.”

“Good,” Bascomb said, “and I in turn will apologize for the wild goose chase. We needed to get a line on you and find out a few things about you.”

“So you picked me up in Union Station and tagged me back to New York.”

“I’m afraid we did, yes.”

“And learned who I was, and checked me out.”

“Like a book from a library,” Bascomb said. “Just what we did. You see, Keller, your uncle would prefer to cut out the cutout man.”

“My uncle?”

“Sam. We don’t want to run everything through What’s-his-name in White Plains. This is strictly need-to-know, and he doesn’t.”

“So you want to be able to work directly with me.”

“Right.”

“And you want me to...”

“To do what you do best, Keller.”

Keller ate some salami, ate some eggs, drank some coffee.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’m not interested,” Keller said. “If I ever did what you’re implying, well, I don’t do it anymore.”

“You’ve retired.”

“That’s right. And even if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t go behind the old man’s back, not to work for someone who sent me off on a fool’s errand with a flower in my lapel.”

“You wore that flower,” Bascomb said, “with the air of a man who never left home without one. I’ve got to tell you, Keller, you were born to wear a red carnation.”

“That’s good to know,” Keller said, “but it doesn’t change anything.”

“Well, the same thing goes for your reluctance.”

“How’s that?”

“It’s good to know how you feel,” Bascomb said. “Good to get it all out in the open. But it doesn’t change anything. We need you, and you’re in.”

He smiled, waiting for Keller to voice an objection. Keller let him wait.

“Think it through,” Bascomb suggested. “Think U.S. Attorney’s Office. Think Internal Revenue Service. Think of all the resources of a powerful — some say too powerful — federal government, lined up against one essentially defenseless citizen.”

Keller, in spite of himself, found himself thinking it through.

“And now forget all that,” said Bascomb, waving it all away like smoke. “And think of the opportunity you have to serve your nation. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought of yourself as a patriot, Keller, but if you look deep within yourself, I suspect you’ll find wellsprings of patriotism you never knew existed. You’re an American, Keller, and here you are with a chance to do something for America and save your own ass in the process.”

Keller’s words surprised him. “My father was a soldier,” he said.

Keller closed the book and set it aside. The lines of Sir Walter Scott were quoted in a short story Keller had read in high school. The titular man without a country was Philip Nolan, doomed to wander the world all his life because he’d passed up his own chance to be a patriot.

Keller didn’t have the story on hand, but he’d found the poetry in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and now he looked up “patriotism” in the index. The best thing he found was Dr. Samuel Johnson’s word on the subject. “Patriotism,” Dr. Johnson declared, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

The sentence had a nice ring to it, but he wasn’t sure he knew what Johnson was getting at. Wasn’t a scoundrel the furthest thing from a patriot? In simplest terms, a patriot would seem unequivocally to be one of the good guys. At the very least he devoted himself to serving his nation and his fellow citizens, and often enough he wound up giving the last full measure of devotion, sacrificing himself, dying so that others might live in freedom.

Nathan Hale, say, regretting that he had but one life to give for his country. John Paul Jones, declaring that he had not yet begun to fight. David Farragut, damning the torpedoes, urging full speed ahead.

Good guys, Keller thought.

Whereas a scoundrel had to be a bad guy by definition. So how could he be a patriot, or take refuge in patriotism?

Keller thought about it, and decided the scoundrel might take refuge in the appearance of patriotism, wrapping selfish acts in the cloak of selflessness. A sort of false patriotism, to cloak his base motives.

But a true scoundrel couldn’t be a genuine patriot. Or could he?

If you looked at it objectively, he had to admit, then he was probably a scoundrel himself. He didn’t much feel like a scoundrel. He felt like your basic New York single guy, living alone, eating out or bringing home takeout, schlepping his wash to the laundromat, doing the Times crossword with his morning coffee. Working out at the gym, starting doomed relationships with women, going to the movies by himself. There were eight million stories in the naked city, most of them not very interesting, and his was one of them.

Except that every once in a while he got a phone call from a man in White Plains. And packed a bag and caught a plane and killed somebody.

Hard to argue the point. Man behaves like that, he’s a scoundrel. Case closed.

Now he had a chance to be a patriot.

Not to seem like one, because no one would know about this, not even Dot and the old man. Bascomb had made himself very clear on the point. “Not a word to anyone, and if anything goes wrong, it’s the same system as Mission: Impossible . We never heard of you. You’re on your own, and if you try to tell anybody you’re working for the government, they’ll just laugh in your face. If you give them my name, they’ll say they never heard of me. Because they never did.”

“Because it’s not your name.”

“And you might have trouble finding the National Security Resource in the phone book. Or anywhere else, like the Congressional Record, say. We keep a pretty low profile. You ever heard of us before? Well, neither did anybody else.”

There’d be no glory in it for Keller, and plenty of risk. That was how it worked when he did the old man’s bidding, but for those efforts he was well compensated. All he’d get working for NSR was an allowance for expenses, and not a very generous one at that.

So he wasn’t doing it for the glory, or for the cash. Bascomb had implied that he had no choice, but you always had a choice, and he’d chosen to go along. For what?

For his country, he thought.

“It’s peacetime,” Bascomb had said, “and the old Soviet threat dried up and blew away, but don’t let that fool you, Keller. Your country exists in a permanent state of war. She has enemies within and without her borders. And sometimes we have to do it to them before they can do it to us.”

Keller, knotting his necktie, buttoning his suit jacket, didn’t figure he looked much like a soldier. But he felt like one. A soldier in his own idiosyncratic uniform, off to serve his country.

Howard Ramsgate was a big man, broad-shouldered, with a ready smile on his guileless, square-jawed face. He was wearing a white shirt and a striped tie, and the pleated trousers of a gray sharkskin suit. The jacket hung on a clothes tree in the corner of the office.

He looked up at Keller’s entrance. “Afternoon,” he said. “Gorgeous day, isn’t it? I’m Howard Ramsgate.”

Keller supplied a name, not his own. Not that Ramsgate would be around to repeat it, but suppose he had a tape recorder running? He wouldn’t be the first man in Washington to bug his own office.