The Once and Future Spy

  The sun was hovering over the rooftops of Charlestown when the Weeder squeezed into a telephone booth, fed some coins into the slots and dialed the Concord number again. It rang four times. A female voice came on the line.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Silas Sibley. We spoke on the phone three weeks ago. You said I could come up and talk to you about a project I’m working on.

  “Didn’t you get my letter?”

  “Your letter? No. I left New York last week. I was doing some research in New Haven.”

  “I wrote you that I’d changed my mind.” The voice on the other end of the line hesitated. “Can I ask you a question?”

  The Weeder said, “Please.”

  The voice changed pitch slightly. It was interested instead of defensive. “What sign were you born under?”

  “I’m a Capricorn.”

  “What’s your ascendant?”

  “To tell you the truth I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “What’s your birth date?”

  “I was born the same day as Elvis Presley, January eighth.”

  The response seemed to alter the chemistry of the conversation. “Ah,” said the voice on the other end of the line. Then, reluctantly, “Come if you must.” She gave him directions. Did he know the road that ran past the North Bridge? Seven and a half miles after the bridge he was to turn right. There was a mailbox. Painted bright red. The road was unpaved. Eventually it forked. He was to stay left. The road ended at a house. The voice on the phone suggested a time. The Weeder eagerly agreed. He started to mumble his thanks but the line went dead.

  Back in his car, the Weeder’s thoughts drifted to the Admiral. He would have discovered the scorched Volkswagen parked on a side street near Yale by now. He would have guessed that the Weeder had switched to a rented car and started asking around. He might have gotten a description of the Hertz car the Weeder was driving; might have asked the state police, on a pretext, to look out for it. Searching his memory, the Weeder recalled a lecture at the Farm about avoiding surveillance. “Change cars, change trains, change buses, change hotels,” a one-time station chief had advised. “Change clothing, change routines, change habits, change anything you can possibly change.”

  “How about wives?” the Weeder, always ready with a quip, had asked innocently.

  The class had laughed. The instructor had said, “If you can change wives it wouldn’t hurt, but it’s probably easier to change cars.”

  With three hours to wile away before the rendezvous, the Weeder decided to cover his tracks. He drove through rush hour traffic to Logan Airport and abandoned his Hertz Toyota in the long-term parking area. He hopped an airport shuttle to the terminal, waited in line for a taxi and asked the driver to take him to an Avis office in downtown Boston. The taxi driver studied his passenger in the rearview mirror. “You can get a bus over to the Avis place here at the airport,” he said.

  The Weeder shook his head. “I’m superstitious about renting cars at airports.”

  Muttering something about different folks having different strokes, the driver swung his car into traffic.

  At the Avis counter the Weeder made a point of asking directions to Cape Cod and even had the agent trace the route on a map for him. Then he headed out the Massachusetts Turnpike toward Concord. He got to the post office just as it was closing and retrieved the pawn ticket he had put in an envelope and addressed to himself care of General Delivery, Concord. He stopped for a hamburger and french fries at a diner, lingered over two cups of coffee to make time pass, finally started toward the house where the woman who called herself Snow lived.

  He turned off the main road at the red mailbox and bounced along the unpaved road full of potholes, his headlights playing on snowbanks from a storm the previous week, on fallen trees, on what was left of an old fence. Around a curve the headlights picked out the weathered planks of a one-story house set in a clearing. Light from several candles flickered in a window. The Weeder killed his headlights and walked up to the door.

  It opened before he could knock. A woman wearing corduroy jeans and a loose-fitting flannel shirt stood in the doorway. She held a candle in a holder with a reflector that directed the light onto the Weeder. Her own face was lost in shadows.

  “I’m Silas Sibley,” the Weeder announced.

  “You don’t look like a Capricorn,” the woman observed.

  “What do Capricorns look like?”

  “Generally speaking, they don’t look frightened. They’re more open, more seductive. You really didn’t get my letter?”

  He shook his head. “I must have left New York before it arrived.”

  The woman said, “What’s done is done. You might as well come on in. My friends call me Snow. If you become one you can too. Until then you can call me Matilda.”

  The Weeder closed the door behind him, stamped his feet on the mat, threw his overcoat across the back of a wooden chair and installed himself in front of a fire crackling in the chimney that formed the center of the house. He held his hands toward the flames and rubbed his fingers together.

  The woman named Snow set her candle down on a small table. She glanced in annoyance at the Weeder’s overcoat, decided she didn’t like where he had thrown it and hung it from a peg on the back of the door next to a mackinaw. Watching her, the Weeder thought: What she cares about she is fanatic about.

  Snow appeared with a glass and offered it to the Weeder. “Prune cider,” she announced. “Homemade, it goes without saying. When’s the last time you saw prune cider in a supermarket? Drink it—it’s good for the digestion, ingrown toenails, warts.”

  The Weeder took his first good look at Snow. She was younger than he had expected. She had incredibly pale skin and dark straight hair cut short and parted in the middle, with wisps curling off negligently from her sideburns. There was a pencil-line scar over her right brow. Her fingers, curled around the glass she offered him, were long and thin, her nails bitten to the quick. She seemed more tangible, more down to earth, than he had imagined she would be the two times he had spoken to her on the phone. It came as a relief to him that he would not have to invent her.

  Taking the prune cider from her, the Weeder looked around the cabin, or what he could see of it in the flickering light of the chimney and half a dozen candles. It seemed to be an echo of her: spare where she was gaunt, solid, no-nonsense furniture to match her solid, no-nonsense clothes. An assortment of cameras and lenses and tripods was heaped on a long scrubbed oak table in a corner. A high, narrow framed black-and-white photograph of a nude hung on one wall. The woman in the photo, seen through a partly open door, masked her face with her fingers and peered through them at the camera. Her eyes conveyed shyness or sadness—or all of the above. The photograph was illuminated by a candle set on the floor. In the photo the nude was illuminated by a candle set on the floor at her bare feet.

  The house smelled of freshly baked cookies, which the Weeder spotted cooling in a tray on a window ledge above a wood-burning stove. It also smelled of camphor.

  “The camphor,” Snow said, reading his mind, “comes from the mackinaw over there. I found it yesterday in a trunk filled with camphor balls.” Walking with a limp so slight it seemed more like a hesitation, she crossed the room and sat down in a rocking chair. She rocked back and forth, toying with a gold wedding band as she sized up her invited, then uninvited, then reinvited guest. The Weeder seemed mesmerized by the photograph of the nude. “You are wondering whether the woman in the photograph is me, but you are too conventional to ask,” Snow guessed. “The answer is yes. Kundera has a character somewhere who talks about a girl’s face lighted by the nudity of her body. That’s the effect I was trying for.” She twisted in the chair to look at the photograph, studied it for a moment. “In the end, clothes are a form of mask,” she observed, thinking out loud. Turning back to the Weeder, she waved a hand toward his clothes. His trousers were rumpled, his sport jacket frayed at the sleeves, his shoes scuffed. There
was a suggestion of irony in her voice as she asked, “Is this how you normally go calling?”

  The Weeder grinned sheepishly. “Thoreau, who came from this neck of the woods, said you should distrust any enterprise that required new clothes.”

  Snow flashed a strained smile that the Weeder immediately recognized; it was the smile people used when they wanted to keep from crying. He had seen it on his mother’s face at the funeral of his father; had seen it in the mirror the day he came home from work to find his wife had taken his son and left for good.

  “What is it you want from me?” Snow asked.

  “What I want,” the Weeder told her, “is polite intercourse.”

  “That’s a strange way of putting it.”

  “Why did you change your mind about seeing me after I phoned from New York?”

  “I figured I had enough to worry about without adding your problems to my list.”

  The Weeder thought of the nails bitten to the quick, the strained smile thrown up like a barrier against tears. He realized that she had been ambushed—though by what, he couldn’t say. “What do you worry about?” he asked her now.

  “I worry about urethane in the wine, about acid in the rain, about parasites in the sushi, about radon in the potato cellar under the house. I worry about too much ozone in the air damaging my lungs. I worry about the earth overheating. I worry about a new ice age. Only yesterday I read that our galaxy is heading for a collision with the Andromeda galaxy.”

  “That won’t happen for billions of years,” the Weeder said. “The sun will have burned out by then.”

  Snow nibbled absently at a cuticle. “I worry about that too. Just because the sun sets at night is no guarantee it will rise in the morning.” She leaned back tiredly in her rocking chair. The Weeder, remembering Nate, thought: People who are afraid are more interesting than those who aren’t. Snow must have been reading his thoughts because she snapped, “I don’t worry to be interesting. I worry because I’m lucid.”

  “Lucidity,” the Weeder remarked, “is the enemy of passion. You’re always aware of yourself being aware of yourself.”

  Snow regarded the Weeder as if she were seeing him for the first time. After a moment she said, “Aside from polite intercourse, what do you really want from me?”

  “Snowden’s your married name, isn’t it, Matilda? Your maiden name was Davis. Your father was one of the Acton Davises, a direct descendant of Isaac Davis, who was killed leading the Acton Company against the British at the North Bridge in Concord in 1775.”

  The Weeder put his glass down on the edge of the chimney and settled into a high-backed wooden chair facing Snow. “Isaac Davis was married to a second cousin he met on Long Island. Her name was Molly. In those days a girl’s father picked her husband for her—it had to do with uniting families and farms, not love. When Isaac fell in love with Molly, he asked her father for her hand in marriage and was flatly refused. So Molly got herself pregnant by Isaac to force her father’s hand—he could risk a scandal or let them marry and hush things up. A great many girls did this in those days. It was the only way they could have a say in whom they married. Her father gave his consent and the young couple married and moved to Acton. The baby died a few days after it was born and the death was recorded in the Acton town ledger. Isaac was killed at the North Bridge. Molly was given her widow’s third, which consisted of a slave named John Jack, who was valued at a hundred and twenty pounds sterling, a horse and a cart and some cash—and sent packing by her husband’s family, who had enough mouths to feed. She returned to Long Island and wound up keeping house for a great-aunt living on a small farm in the village of Flatbush. Her child, your ancestor, was born on that farm.”

  “I don’t see where all this is leading,” Snow said. “I don’t see what you want of me.”

  “I’m coming to that. Molly’s maiden name was Fitzgerald. She detested the British with a passion. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do to get at them. She became an ardent, outspoken patriot, championing the rebel cause at town meetings, which—if you read the minutes of the meetings—rubbed some of the town elders the wrong way, since women in the Colonies weren’t supposed to meddle in politics. Isaac, on the other hand, seems to have been very proud of her. When the British threatened to march on Concord, Molly organized the women into groups that made cartridges and rolled bandages. After she was widowed and exiled to Long Island, she wrote an acquaintance of her late husband attached to the Commander-in-Chief’s staff offering her services to the rebel cause. Two days ago I discovered an unpublished letter from this acquaintance, whose name was A. Hamilton, indicating he took her up on the offer. A spy sent out behind the British lines made his way across Long Island to Molly Davis’s farmhouse in Flatbush. She helped him scout the British positions in Brooklyn.”

  The Weeder, drained, settled back in his chair.

  Snow rocked forward in hers. “And then what happened?”

  “That’s just it. I don’t know. The trail ends with Molly Davis. A week later the spy was caught by the British and hanged at an artillery park in Manhattan on what’s now the corner of Third Avenue and Sixty-third Street. What happened during the missing week is a mystery.”

  “How can I help you solve it?”

  “There’s a hint in a letter Hamilton wrote to the spy’s brother that Molly Davis kept a diary. The answers to my mystery must be in its pages.” The Weeder studied Snow’s face. “The answer to your mystery too.”

  Snow didn’t understand. “What mystery is my mystery?”

  “The baby conceived out of wedlock by Molly and Isaac died soon after birth. Isaac was killed at Concord in April 1775. Molly’s baby—the great-grandfather of your great-grandfather—was born in Flatbush in 1777. Which means Isaac Davis wasn’t his father.”

  “I’ve always heard that Molly was pregnant when Isaac was killed, that whoever recorded the birth made a mistake when he copied off the date in the ledger.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What does ‘Maybe’ mean?”

  “It means maybe. And it implies ‘Maybe not’.”

  Snow let the rocking chair glide back again. “My grandfather sometimes went on for hours about the Revolution and Isaac and Molly. He could talk a streak once he started. To me it was all spilled milk, though I admit I used to wonder what she was like.”

  “She was strong-willed,” the Weeder said. “You could see that from the way she got herself pregnant so she could marry the man she loved. She was supposed to have been a great beauty. At least that’s what Isaac Davis said, but he may have been prejudiced. I came across two references to her in diaries written by other Acton women. That’s how I know about her. Even in the puritanical Colonial times, girls tended to pretty themselves up to attract men. But Molly seems to have toned herself down. Her hands were rough and blistered from working on the farm; she is said to have worked the fields like a man. Her hair, for practical reasons, was cropped short. She favored loose-fitting clothes …” The Weeder’s voice trailed off as he realized he could have been describing the woman sitting across from him in the rocking chair. “I’m guessing,” he continued carefully, “but behind her bold gaze must have lurked a shyness, a sadness. She’d been ambushed by grief. She’d lost a baby at birth, a husband. That kind of thing leaves its mark on the eyes.”

  The Weeder’s story, his ardor in recounting it, seemed to weigh on Snow. “If you’ve come to me for the diary, I don’t have it,” she said. She noticed the disappointment in his face and added, “Maybe you’ll have better luck at the local historical museum—they have a collection of Revolutionary diaries.”

  “I’ve been in touch with the museum. I’ve been in touch with the library. You’re my last hope. Are you sure there isn’t an old trunk somewhere? That’s where you find this kind of document.”

  Snow shook her head.

  “I suppose your grandfather must be dead?”

  “Long dead and long buried.” A thought occurred to her. “He used
to show me photographs in an album.”

  The Weeder said, “Photographs won’t help me—”

  “I remember,” Snow said, “that he kept the album in an old wooden sailor’s chest with an enormous padlock on the outside. I always suspected there were other things in the trunk beside the photo album.”

  “Where is the chest now?”

  Snow thought a moment. “I suppose everything Granddad had went to his wife, who was younger than he was. When she died, she was living with my grandfather’s sister, Esther, who’s my great-aunt. Esther’s still alive. She sold the house and moved to Boston a few years ago.”

  “Will you give me her address?”

  “It won’t help you any. Esther’s become a recluse. Since she lost all her hair she won’t let anyone she doesn’t know come calling.”

  The Weeder asked in a low voice, “Will she see me if you’re with me?”

  “She might.”

  He smiled at her. “How about it, Matilda? Will you help me solve our mystery?”

  Snow ran the ball of her thumb across the scar over her eyebrow. “I’ll make you a deal,” she said suddenly. “I don’t drive anymore and I need a ride into Boston tomorrow. You drive me in and hang around while I do a couple of errands, and I’ll take you over to meet my great-aunt Esther.”

  6

  Wanamaker missed the beginning of the call because of a burst of static. “Say again,” he demanded once the line had cleared.

  Huxstep, who had shoehorned his bulky body into a public telephone booth in Concord, said, “You-know-who told me to call you.”