Short Story Sunday: The Quiet American

He wears a mud brown cap out of habit. It was something he picked up when he lived in Munich in the '70s. It was a way to shield his eyes from the sun and blend into the crowd. 

His last partner teased him. "You look like you're wearing it to hide a bald patch."
"I'm actually hiding my hair so the baldies don't get jealous." He misses the laughter that followed.

He always orders the same thing: a glass of dry white and a side of green olives. Today he's reading Baudelaire. Not because he has to, but because it's likely to make more sense once he's halfway through the wine. The couple at the next table are arguing. He shifts his seat to catch the shade cast by the umbrella. He glances at her from behind his sunglasses. She looks like the head of department he had in Munich, back when the Cold War was in full throttle and he spent his days decoding Russian intel.



"Your new name is John McEwan. Here's your biography. Memorise it. We don't need some new recruit bleating to the Reds. Note the instruction at the top." It said, 'burn after reading'.
The room felt close and his shirt collar chafed his neck. He would have complained about the humidity, but he was used to it.
"What's my assignment?" He'd arrived in Munich in an unmarked aeroplane with nineteen others. They weren't allowed to talk unless spoken to. His mouth was dry with the effort of asking the question.
"You're being posted back to school, son. We expect you to succeed."
He was shown to his room, a glove compartment compared to the bedroom in his parents' house in Florida. The window looked out onto an alley with dumpsters. It was also the meeting place of the neighbourhood cats.

The school, if it could be called that, was in an apartment block that was full of the trappings of modern architecture: glass, concrete and Formica. His teacher was a defector of the Soviet Union who wore thick glasses and lumberjack shirts with enormous collars and corduroy bell-bottoms in mustard, oxblood and brown. It was as though the teacher was trying hard to distract him from the complexities of Russian grammar with garish outfits. 

The lessons were for eight hours on every weekday for a year. After a while he stopped noticing the smell of boiled potatoes and always said yes -- and then "Prost" -- to a glass of vodka, neat, at the end of the day. He realised that he was beginning to think in Russian and, the more he learnt, the more he personally identified with Dostoyevsky.

"Well done, you passed." He was back in the airless room. "I'm told you're the best in your class." 
He merely nodded. He'd never seen any of the other students.
"Your new assignment begins Monday." She slapped a file on the table and the bulb hanging above them shuddered. "Read this now. Memorise it. Leave it here on your way out."
He stared at the closed door and took a deep breath before opening the file. It was full of pages stamped with big red letters declaring the contents classified.

He pored over the information. Then he began to skim. Much of it wasn't that interesting. In fact, the Carter-Ford election campaign reports provided more riveting reading. It resembled the script of a soap opera like The Young and the Restless. There was a lot of he said, he said (no shes to speak of, unlike in Charlie's Angels) and a few instances of suspected movements of Agent A or B tracked by Agent X or Y. Most of it led to dead ends, and he thought about the hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars used To Protect Our Freedom. He sighed and closed the file. His job would be translation and transcription. At least now he understood why he needed Russian. Da, spasibo.

He was allowed one phone call a week to his mother. He told her about the weather, the football and the choir of cats outside his apartment. She told him he needed to eat more. He said German food was the wurst. She laughed, thinking that if he had a sense of humour then it couldn't be all that bad.

He bought a set of headphones and listened to David Bowie until the tape threatened to stretch out. Sometimes he went to the club down the road and drank a glass of weißwein, trocken, with his cap pulled low over his eyes. Sometimes he caught someone's eye. They never caught his; he just kept listening, glancing over the top of the dog-eared copy of whatever he was reading. That day it was Montaigne.

"How long have you been here?" The voice had the vowels of an American accent.
"About an hour." He peered at the speaker.
"I meant in West Germany."
"Oh, I'm just passing through."
"For the past eighteen months, evidently." He sat down and lit a cigarette. "Relax, we're on the same side, 'John McEwan'."
He shut Montaigne and stared without staring. His companion looked like young Rock Hudson with facial hair.
"Look," he said, blowing smoke above their heads, "you're going to get a document tomorrow with intel that could make the Manhattan Project look like sparklers on a kid's birthday cake."
He was still trying to place the accent.
"You need to sit on it until you hear from me."
He began to open his mouth.
"Don't ask why. I know you're the best in the department. So here's what you do: you transcribe it as a phone conversation between a woman and her daughter. Make shit up. Whatever women talk about. Clothes and cooking. I don't care. Then put the original in a folder marked Civilian and leave it on the shelf above your desk. You only, and I repeat only, transcribe it correctly when you hear from me." He stubbed out his cigarette and left Marks on the table. 

The scent of the man's cologne reminded him of jasmine and fresh snow. He still couldn't work out the accent. That night, his brain wrestled with it instead of letting him sleep.

He arrived ten minutes early for work and scanned the pile of documents on his desk. He placed a cup of coffee next to his jotter, aware that his hand was shaking. The morning's work was the usual smorgasbord: locations, planned meetings, decoy meetings and commentary on what music NASA planned on sending into space. He began to relax after lunch. Perhaps it had all been a mistake.

"Hurry, hurry!" The call came from the radio room. The operator flicked the switch and they all stood around the speakers, listening.
Why did you do it?
I didn't!
You bastard. I know you told them.
Told them what? I'm being framed. Vygotsky and --
Leave them out of this!
They heard the click of a revolver hammer.
No, please. I swear, it wasn't me. Please!
Nobody dared breathe. There were three shots and the sound of retreating footfalls. He covered his mouth. 

"All right, everybody. Back to work. The excitement is over."

When he arrived back at his desk, a stack of papers held together with a red paperclip waited for him. He picked up his blue pencil and began to read. He reached for his cold coffee and realised his hand was shaking again. He struggled to hold the pencil.

"What are you working on?" It was his department head, the one who wore too much eyeliner and not enough deodorant. 
"It looks like a telephone conversation between two women."
"Anything I need to know about?"
"Well, so far it's an argument about who is cooking the next Sunday roast."
"Get back to me when you have something."
"Oh, I will."
At the end of the day, he filed the original, cringing at the sweaty fingerprints he left on the folder.
"What a day, right?" It was Dickie Ogilvy.
"Which part?"
"The gun shots, man. That was heavy."
"Oh. Yeah. It was."
"See ya, John."

He could not eat. Jimmy Carter won the election, the UN General Assembly condemned Apartheid in South Africa and his brother's latest postcard said he's found a girl he wants to marry. Three days later, he is at his usual hangout, nursing a glass of wine. 

"So I was right to have faith in you." Rock Hudson's doppelganger appeared, the cigarette already lit. "You look like shit. Relax, kid. It's not that big a deal. And history will remember you. My man tells me you wrote a hell of a telephone conversation. Your talents are wasted in transcription; you should be working in our propaganda department." He slid an envelope across the table. "I've recommended that you get a month off. Go somewhere nice. I hear Greece is cheap as chips this time of year."

"Excuse me? Excuse me! Are you using this chair?"
"No," he says. Baudelaire is balancing on his knee. The glass of wine is perspiring on the table and the olives are all but gone. The arguing couple have been replaced by two women and a mewling pram. He spots a man in a trilby reading a newspaper across the restaurant and the headline snags his eye.

EXPLOSIVE SOVIET DOSSIER REVEALED

He squints to read the byline, but the paper shifts. It's older Rock Hudson. He lets Baudelaire fall. The facial hair is gone, and he's hiding his baldness under his hat. Rock Hudson toasts him with a cup of espresso, downs it and comes to join him.

"Good job, McEwan. How was Greece?"
"Cheap. How'd you find me?"
"I know where to look."
He nods at the newspaper under his arm. "What now?"
"You'll never be implicated, don't worry."
"Who are you?"
"Your biggest fan."
"Why?"
He laughs. "In some circles, we call you 'The Quiet American'. You served your country well. Thank you."
It hits him, just then. "You're Max Panholzer. I transcribed the conversation you had with the other agent... Your colleague; the one who defected. I heard the shooting. We all did."
"You have no proof, McEwan."
He lifts the band of his cap and pulls out a yellowed page. "You think I didn't make copies?"
Panholzer pales.
"That's the one good thing about the training we got. I learnt how to memorise a lot of information fast. Most of what they showed me was irrelevant, but this... I've never forgotten it." He tucks the page back into its hiding place. "I'm glad I can finally put a face to the name. Your accent is good by the way. You almost sound American."
"You will excuse me now," says Panholzer, standing. "I don't think I need to tell you..."
"I am 'The Quiet American', remember?"

Panholzer chucks a pile of Euros on the table, and crosses the street to get into a nondescript sedan. It is only when the waiter comes to check on the table that they realise he's dead.