Джон Макдональд - Get Thee Behind Me...

In January he was George Cooper, doing a quiet job in a quiet way, thankful for these quiet years after the bad years — the very bad years. And then in March he was driving a big raspberry convertible down Route 19, through Tarpon and Clearwater, heading for St. Pete and the Bradenton ferry, and he wasn’t George Cooper any more. His name was Allan Farat and the states of Illinois, Ohio and Michigan were all interested in his whereabouts.

He sat slouched behind the wheel in the expensive and too-sharp suit, staring ahead at the narrow asphalt of Florida, tinged green by the ovoid sun glasses. He felt excited, uncomfortable, afraid and almost entirely unreal.

Abelson had put it to him nicely. You had to give Abelson that.

“Understand, Cooper. We can’t order you to do this. We’d like you to do it. If you feel you can. It’s going to be hot and it’s going to be dirty. We’d rather use somebody who has their hand in. But we can’t find anybody who looks even remotely like Allan Farat. But you... you could be Farat’s brother. You’ll get the right dye job on your hair and we’ll have a good man put a scar on the bridge of your nose and you’ll be Farat. Look at the picture again. Go ahead.”

The glossy print had been placed on his desk. A strange feeling to see yourself, even to the way you hold a cigarette, sitting in an unknown nightclub with a blonde you never met. “It’s weird, Abelson.”

“Weird enough to jump at. We know this. We know Rocko Kadma, after all these years of staying nicely deported, is on his way back. We think Allan Farat helped with the arrangements. We know that they’re so cute that we can’t get near them. But you can, Cooper. You can go climb in their pockets.”

“Nice,” George had said, “but what about Farat? A little awkward if he shows up, isn’t it?”

“He won’t. He’s dead. We trapped him, alone, outside of St. Paul three weeks ago. He made a fuss. Somebody shot for the gun shoulder and hit him in the throat instead. It’s been kept under cover. We’ve got his car and his clothes and his luggage and his rings and a dossier a foot thick. But we can’t demand that you do it, Cooper. That’s up to you. Don’t answer right now. Think it over.”

Abelson had been cute, and Abelson had known right from the beginning what the answer had to be. Big paternal Uncle Sam had been paternal long enough. George had been OSS in the Far East. A rough boy. A big, fast, rough, smart boy. The kind you can stick behind Jap lines for eighteen months and hope for the best. Seventeen would have been all right. Eighteen had cracked one George Cooper open — right down the middle. Eighteen months had turned him, for a time, into a retrogression case. Back in the sixth grade, he was. And worrying about Geography Regents when they air-snatched him out. One intensively trained intelligence agent ruined by those last four weeks.

Nobody blamed George. He knew that. Eighteen months was just a little too long without relief. And, of course, the malaria, yaws, chiggers and a touch of amoeba hadn’t helped a bit.

But Uncle Sam is paternal. Shift the boy to another agency when the OSS fades out of the picture. Keep him under the wing because somewhere along the line he lost the willingness or ability to make decisions.

And so the quiet years. Put this paper in that file and write a letter based on form 3000Z. Check in at nine and out at five and take your thirty days leave. Live in a room and lock the door at night and move away from people who don’t like those three A.M. screams that come along sometimes when you dream that they’ve brought in a regiment and cut you and your Kachins off from the mountain hideout.

Abelson laid it on the line without saying so. He said, “You’re the only one we can use. Think it over. You’ve been trained to think on your feet.” There was something unsaid, like, “You’ve had a free ride for five years, boy. Here’s a chance to earn your keep. If you pass it up, you’ll be let go one of these days.”

Abelson said: “Being a single guy you can drop out of sight this way.” He didn’t say, “This is one where we wouldn’t want to send a guy with a family.”

That was in January. Think it over on Sunday, George. So he thought it over. He thought of being frightened. Genuine fright isn’t a harmless expression. It does something. It churns up through your guts day after day and keeps exploding in your brain until at last something has to give.

He thought it over until the sweat soaked the sides of his pants at the beltline where it had run from his armpit. He didn’t know the file on Farat. He knew a lot of files on Farat’s buddies. Nice playmates. Nothing blatant. Just the quiet sense of mercy and justice that you would expect in a hooded cobra.

Get off your back and earn your keep, boy. The free ride is over.

Driving south through Florida, along the gulf coast, Cooper thought that it would be less confusing to change from Cooper to Farat if there had only been one Cooper. But there were two Coopers. One was the pre-eighteen months Cooper. Ready to eat the world like a crisp red apple. Then the post-war Cooper. The one with no taste for apples. The quiet one in the quiet years.

He had gone to Abelson and said, “I’ll do it.”

Three words that were like a fuse. In seven weeks you have to unlearn somebody named George and learn somebody named Allan.

Where were you at Christmas time in 1942?

What was your number in Atlanta? Who was your cell-mate? What time was mess?

How do you sit in a chair? What’s your favorite drink? Where did you buy the pinstripe? How many miles on the convertible? Where is Alice? What’s your pet name for her? How do you like your steaks? Do you play the horses? How do you bet? How much do you tip a barber?

Abelson gave him the final briefing. “You’re good, Cooper. You are Allan Farat. Enough to give me the creeps. I’ve talked to Farat. Now you’ve got it. His car and his clothes and his guns and his snotty expression and his cocky walk. Here’s your roll. Sixteen hundred. We found a letter on him. Here it is. It doesn’t tell much. Just that Kadma’s going to arrive at the Hutcheon place on Catboat Key near the end of March and he wants to thank you. We’ve got a completely negative report on the possibility of keeping the place under observation.

“Your job is this. Go in there. Find out who wants Kadma back in this country. Find out who financed it. Find out what they want him for. Get all the dope and get out. Memorize this paper and destroy it. It tells you how to get in touch with two good men we’ll plant in Sarasota. We have every confidence in you, Cooper. Tonight you’ll be picked up and taken to where the car is hidden. Take any route you want. Stay out of trouble on the way down. If you get in a spot where it will help you to prove your association, you’ll find credentials tar-taped to the underside of the lid of the air filter in the car.”

And the convertible droned south over the asphalt, rolling through the scrub country.

He could feel it in the way he was treated. The hotel desks. The clerks dared show only the very faintest contempt. Service was quick and good. And when the room doors were closed and he looked in the mirrors, he knew why. The surgeon had been good. He’d added that tiny extra bit of fullness to the outside corners of the upper eyelids. The scar on the nose matched the scar on the corpse to the last milimeter.

A tall black haired hood with lazy eyelids and two hundred dollar suits and an air of amused insolence and a habit of calling all strangers “Luke”. Women looked at him in the way they had once looked at the pre-war George Cooper.