Joseph Kanon - Defectors

It was their mother who decided to separate them. Frank was sent to St. Mark’s, a Weeks tradition, but the following year, Simon’s turn, his mother decided on Milton instead.

“It’ll be good for you, to be on your own. Think for yourself. Instead of listening to your brother all the time.”

“I don’t listen to him all the time.”

“A lot of the time then.”

Frank tried to be reassuring. “You’re the smart one. She wants you to concentrate on your studies.”

“You’re smart.”

“Not the way you are. Anyway, the headmaster’s a friend of Aunt Ruth, that’s how they know about the school, so he’ll be nice. Always good to have the top guy on your side.”

“Maybe she’ll change her mind.”

But Emily Weeks wasn’t in the habit of changing her mind, and the separation was permanent. She had been right—Simon thrived on his own—but years later he still felt the loss, like some finger that had been snipped off in an accident and never replaced. During the holidays it seemed almost the same, talking late into the night up on the third floor, the Weeks boys again. But inevitably they grew apart. They had never resembled each other—except for the Weeks jaw—but now, unexpectedly, even their voices began to differ, Frank’s a rich baritone with a boarding school drawl, Simon still Mt. Vernon Street.

Then they were together again at college. School was one thing, but Weekses went to Harvard.

“All this Weeks business,” Frank said. “Weekses do this, ­Weekses do that.”

“Well, Pa’s like that.”

“And getting worse. I thought, when he went to Washington—but no, now he’s back, it just gets smaller and smaller.”

“What does?”

“His world. You realize he can walk everywhere he goes? That’s how small it is. The office on State Street, the Athenaeum, the Somerset Club. He never has to drive. His whole world is in walking distance. Like a native or something.”

“There’s the Symphony,” Simon said.

“And he walks there. My point.”

Once a week on matinee day, as he had for years, up Commonwealth and back on Marlborough, a full-length wool cape against the cold, a walk so fixed it had become a Boston sight, like the swan boats.

For a while it seemed they were closer than ever. Frank enjoyed showing him the ropes—which lecture course to avoid, which seminar virtually guaranteed you an A, where to get your hair cut. And Simon absorbed it all—the right book, the right portion of gin, everything but Frank’s effortless ease. There were parties in Frank’s large suite in Eliot House, facing the boathouse, everything Simon had always imagined Cambridge would be. But that was the year things turned political, Frank loitering around the edges, then taking his first steps. At first just small statements of class rebellion—a refusal to join the Porcellian after they’d punched him, a disdain, usually comic, for the parties his roommates still gave, and almost inevitably, the prickly dinner arguments with his father. Francis Weeks had served in the Treasury, a reluctant New Dealer, and he was concerned about the fascist threat overseas and social justice at home, but it simply wasn’t in him to walk a picket line or demonstrate in rallies, both of which Frank now did, provoking more arguments. Simon watched from the sidelines, ready to take Frank’s side but dismayed to see his father looking suddenly older, wounded and puzzled, his safe, small world upended. It’ll pass, his mother said.

And then, in the summer before his last year, Frank volunteered for Spain, surprising everyone and making Simon feel left behind, conventional and cautious while Frank went out to slay dragons.

“How can he not finish his degree?” his father said. “Thank God you have more sense.”

“He’s right, though. To go. The fascists—”

“Oh, right. Watch he doesn’t get himself killed. You can’t get righter than that.”

“Francis,” Emily said.

“I know, I know. But it’s not a game. What’s Spain to him anyway?”

“It’s not just Spain. They’re using it as an exercise. A warm-up. If we don’t stop them there—”

“We’re not going to stop them there. Whatever Frank thinks. He’ll get himself killed for nothing.” No longer blustering, his voice suddenly breaking.

But he didn’t get killed. Instead he took a bullet in the shoulder and managed to survive sepsis in the field hospital, which took him out of the war and out of politics, cynical now about both sides, embarrassed to have ever been naïve enough to think that Communists, anybody, could claim the moral high ground. He became, predictably, his parents, but not quite—Spain had left some itch for adventure. He finished his degree, played at law school, floundering, at loose ends until the war finally gave him what he was looking for. The army wouldn’t take him with his shoulder, but Francis knew Donovan and it was arranged—the night train to DC, a job at the OSS. The first thing he did was recruit Simon as an intelligence analyst, pushing paper on Navy Hill while Frank practiced parachute drops in the Maryland countryside. But they were together, Washington another Cambridge, their oyster.

When the war ended, and the OSS with it, Simon moved with the other analysts to State, probably where he should have been all along. Frank hung on in the War Department, convinced Truman would have to replace Donovan’s group with a new agency. His guess was right. The following year he landed at the Central Intelligence Group, Office of Policy Coordination, a euphemism for overseas ops, and their Washington life went on as before, official meetings and unofficial lunches at Harvey’s, nights on the town, double dating. A special joint committee with the Brits to liaise with Baltic refugee groups and Ukrainian nationalists, Simon representing State and Frank the OPC, the heady pleasure of being in on things, part of something important, on their way.

And then, like a screech of tires, the headlines appeared one morning and everything stopped. Frank was gone. Just two steps ahead of Hoover, two steps ahead of treason. The Soviets’ most successful agent, gossiping over lunch, picking Simon’s brain, not just a leak at State, a spigot Frank could turn whenever he liked. Smiling, just as he had in the home movies. “You’re the smart one.” But not about Frank.

At the bottom of the stairs the military Russian introduced himself as Colonel Vassilchikov and with a quick nod dismissed the handler. Simon turned to say good-bye, then realized he didn’t know his name, had never known it or forgotten, already failing DiAngelis’s instructions: “Remember everything. Don’t write it down, remember it. Everything. Even if you think it’s nothing. Keep your eyes open.”

Already failing. A name he should have remembered. A black car he should have seen, just over the colonel’s shoulder—had it always been there? But in the curious half-light nothing seemed to have definition, the whole country somehow out of focus, behind a scrim.

“It is your first time in Moscow?” the colonel was saying, a standard courtesy, now oddly surreal. Did they see many repeat visitors, here on the moon?

“Yes, my first. That’s all right—I’ll keep that.” His briefcase, the colonel reaching out for it.

“Contraband?” the colonel said smiling, an unexpected joke.

“The manuscript. Frank’s book.”

“There are other copies, you know.”

“Not with my notes.”

“Ah. I will be curious to see that,” the colonel said, an insider, part of the editorial process. “What the CIA objects to.”

“They’re my notes.”

“They’d better be.” Another voice, behind the colonel, stepping out of the car. “The Simon touch.” A laugh in the voice now. “That’s what we’re paying for.”