The Gordian Knot (24 page)

“Embassy of the USSR, can I help you?”

“I would like to leave a message under the code name ‘Rotors.’ Have your man in San Francisco take a cab to the corner of Twenty-fourth and Third streets, then walk east on Twenty-fourth all the way to the end. Have him wait there for a motorboat that will appear at eleven. Did you get all that?”

“Yes, but …”

Georg hung up. It took him ten minutes to get back home. He didn’t hurry; it would take a good fifteen minutes for the embassy in Washington to contact its man in San Francisco and tell him where to go. Fern and Jill were at the Golden Gate Park, and Jonathan barely looked up from a new painting he was working on as Georg went over to the desk. “If you want some paper, it’s in the top left-hand drawer,” Jonathan said. Georg took the gun out of the bottom right-hand drawer. It was still unclear what Jonathan’s new picture was to be of.

By twenty past ten Georg was lying on the roof. Illinois and Twenty-fourth streets were quiet. From time to time he saw a van,
trucks with or without containers, construction machinery, and delivery vehicles. For ten whole minutes there was no car, then at ten-thirty a police car drove slowly up Illinois Street, made a U-turn at the intersection, and slowly drove back down. At ten-thirty-five a big, squat Lincoln turned onto Twenty-fourth Street from Third. Its exhaust pipe rattled and its springs groaned as it drove over the rough pavement of the intersection. The Lincoln came to a halt at the end of Twenty-fourth Street. Nobody got out. Dense traffic was rumbling on Third Street and on the highway beyond.

Georg was nervous. The police car. The Lincoln. What he needed was two pairs of eyes so he could watch both the intersection in front of him and the Lincoln behind him. He kept asking himself whether the Russians were playing along, or whether they thought all this was just a prank—or a trap. “Wait and keep cool,” he said to himself. “What kind of a prank could this be, or what kind of trap? The Americans could hardly corner a Soviet agent waiting by the bay for an unknown man.”

To his relief, Georg saw the Lincoln backing up onto Twenty-fourth Street and then turn at the intersection and drive away along Third. It was quarter to eleven.

At ten to eleven a cab stopped at the corner of Third and Twenty-fourth. A man got out, paid through the open window, and looked around. Having gotten his bearings, he walked toward the intersection. With every step Georg could see him more clearly. He wasn’t one of those Soviet musclemen with white blond hair and Slavic cheekbones, but a thin, balding, older man in a dark blue suit with a blue-and-white striped shirt and a patterned tie. He walked carefully, as if he had recently sprained his ankle.

There were no backup men following him, stealthily hiding behind parked cars. Georg could hear the man’s footsteps as he walked past the terrace, one foot with a strong tread, the other
with a light shuffle. He saw him go to the end of Twenty-fourth Street and disappear behind the berm. Again Georg’s eyes scanned the streets, the parked cars, the wrecks, but he didn’t see anything suspicious. It was five to eleven.

He climbed down from the roof onto the terrace, grabbed his jacket, in which the pistol lay heavily in a side pocket, and hurried down the stairs. He opened the front door a crack and peered out at the intersection one more time. There was no sign of the distinguished-looking gentleman.

Georg walked down Twenty-fourth Street and up the berm. The man was standing on the shore looking out on to the bay. Georg put his foot up on the berm, rested his elbow on his knee, and waited. After a while the man turned and looked back, saw Georg, and came up to him. As they stood facing each other Georg noticed that his tie was covered with a host of tiny white garden gnomes—standing, sitting, lying—all wearing pointed red hats.

“Shall we stay here?” the Russian said, eyeing Georg over the rimless spectacles perched on his nose. He looks like a professor, Georg thought.

“Yes, here’s fine,” Georg replied. He took his hand with the pistol out of his pocket. “May I?” He frisked the “professor,” who stood there shaking his head. Georg found no weapon.

“Doesn’t one do this sort of thing?” Georg asked with a smile. “I’m not up on the etiquette of this kind of meeting.” They sat down. “I’ve brought along the merchandise,” Georg continued, taking out the can with the negatives and giving them to the professor. “There are, altogether, fourteen rolls of film.”

The professor took the negatives out of the can and held them up to the sky. He slowly eyed one frame after another. Georg looked at the sailboats. When the professor was finished with the first roll, he handed it back without comment and Georg gave him the next. Two boats, one with red sails and one with blue, were
racing past. A ship with an array of brightly colored containers on its deck came by, then a fast, gray warship. Georg kept handing him can after can. The sun glittered on the shivering waves.

“What price are you asking?” the professor inquired in a thin, high voice, pronouncing the words with a clipped British intonation.

“My party prices them at thirty million, and anything over twenty is mine. If it’s under twenty, I’ll have to check back with my party.”

The professor carefully rolled the last roll of film tighter and tighter, until it would have fit into the can five times. He slid it into the can and held it there with his finger. “Tell your party that we have been offered the same negatives for twelve million, and that we find even that price too high.” He let go of the roll, and it expanded to the confines of the can with a hiss.

Georg was struck dumb. What the professor had just said was unthinkable. What did it mean? What if it was true? What if it wasn’t? “I will inform my party. But I don’t see them believing that there is another offer—they will see that as a ploy on your part to lower the price.”

The professor smiled. “The matter is more complicated than you seem to realize. Were you to view the matter from our perspective, with the premise that the first seller does in fact exist, you will see that just as you have doubts about the existence of the first offer, we have reason to doubt the existence of a bona fide second offer that you are presenting. Not to put too fine a point on it, the crux of the matter not only hinges on the contingence you have surmised—that a potential buyer who has two offers might pitch them against each other—but a seller for his part can also influence the negotiations to his advantage by stepping up to the negotiating table, so to speak, and donning the garb of yet another seller.”

How could anyone formulate such sentences! The logic behind what the professor was saying was as immaculate as his grammar.

“Why don’t you simply decide what the designs are worth to you and name a price?” Georg said.

Now the professor laughed. “You must admit there is something ironic in the idea that someone like me should be called upon to explain the capitalist law of supply and demand and the connection between demand, price, and value. But let us shed light on another aspect of this matter. Let us suppose that you are requesting for your private use any moneys that exceed a sum that, as you inform us, your party sets at twenty million, but which, circumstances being what they are, should realistically be set at fifteen. And if we also take as a premise that you will not be able to count on our closing a deal with a sum beyond twenty-one million, as you yourself have, in a sense, intimated, then I put it to you that you are facing a personal profit in the range of one to six million dollars—a sum, I might add, that doubtless is far more manageable. Do you follow me?”

“It was hard to follow, but I find it’s worth the effort. I see you like balancing ‘ifs’ with ‘thens.’ Is that just in speaking, or in action as well?”

“Do you know the story of Alexander the Great and the Gordian knot?” the professor said.

“Why do you ask?”

“Well, in the Gordian fortress one day, Alexander the Great happened upon a great knot that no one had ever managed to unravel. The upshot was that Alexander simply took his sword and cut through the knot. Logic, you see, is a matter of unraveling chains of thought and meaning that in our everyday communication become tangled, and as the links in these chains are the ‘ifs’ and ‘thens,’ then this very game of ‘ifs’ and ‘thens’—as you have it—serves to unravel as opposed to cutting through such tangles.
By extension, it also has as its focal point talking and thinking as opposed to acting. If you will allow me to point the moral of that story and regard it through the prism of you, me, our interested parties, and the merchandise in question, then our aforementioned deliberations place you in the role of Alexander the Great who is faced with the knot and the alternative of attempting, like so many prior visitors to the Gordian palace, to unravel it or simply cut through it with the swipe of his sword.”

“Those are your aforementioned deliberations, not mine.”

The professor had lifted the can, holding it between his index and middle fingers, and with his last words had dropped it into Georg’s open palm. The professor shrugged his shoulders. “My deliberations, our deliberations—by now, I would say, these deliberations have taken root in your mind too, and are consequently as much
your
deliberations as
ours
.”

“Do you know the other seller?” Georg asked.

“Do I know him?”

“Have you seen him, or spoken to him? Do you know who he is?”

The professor shook his head. “He didn’t leave a calling card, nor did he show us his passport.”

“Any hunches who he might be?”

“Ah, the breaking through the borders of knowledge by hunches—indeed, one could describe our trade in those very terms. We most definitely have hunches, and our hunches, like all hunches, would be worthless if we had nothing to base them on. If the issue at hand is that you are uncertain about the loyalty within your faction, then I would like to assure you that I understand your position. But as I am not responsible for garnering the hunches particular to this case, I can only say that I will make inquiries and inform myself of the current state of hunches.”

“I didn’t say that I have any issues of loyalty with my party.”

“Indeed you didn’t,” the professor replied.

“I might have asked you this question purely in order to clarify my party’s interests.”

“Indeed.”

“So, under no circumstances would you pay twelve million, but would definitely pay six. Am I right?” Georg asked.

The professor took his time answering. “Your party, to whom you must decide how much or how little of this conversation you will report, is urging us to close by Friday. That’s the day after tomorrow. The other seller is not as impatient. I don’t wish to intimate that a quick closure is out of the question—in fact, it might very well be the most apt solution. But as we have already touched on the issue of competition, we should also touch on the time factor. Let me put this in refreshingly direct American terms: the sooner you want to see cash, the less cash you’ll see.”

“Will you be in town until Friday?” Georg asked.

“I most certainly will.”

“Where can I reach you?”

“Call the Westin St. Francis, and ask for room 612.”

“You’ll hear from me,” Georg said.

The professor nodded and left. Georg watched him until he disappeared around the corner of Third Street. Then Georg made his way through the underbrush, reached the cover of the parked cars, and got to Fern and Jonathan’s front door. It was a quarter to twelve.

The other offer that the professor had mentioned kept going through Georg’s mind; was Georg trying to get Joe entangled in an affair in which he had long been involved? If the other offer was real, then all the facts pointed to Joe. Furthermore, the professor’s proposal that Georg close the deal with a few million and bail out was working irresistibly on his mind. Should I quit trying to expose Joe? The money issue had always been at the back of
Georg’s mind. His dream had been that at the end of all this Joe would be finished and he would be rich: all’s well that ends well. How he could get his hands on the money was unclear, though how he could finish Joe off was very clear indeed, and Georg had set his priorities accordingly. But now suddenly both goals seemed within reach. Or is it, he said to himself, that I want it all, as Fran pointed out the other day, and hence want too much?

He drove to Golden Gate Park and looked for Jill and Fern. He couldn’t find them. He drove to the shore and went for a run along the beach. He ran with wonderful lightness, until his legs practically gave way and he fell onto the sand. He lay there until he felt a chill. By evening he knew that he wouldn’t risk the money just to settle accounts with Joe.

GEORG WOKE UP AT FIVE
in the morning. The house was rumbling and shaking. He went to the window. A long freight train was rolling by. The engine’s eyes threw white light onto the tracks, which Georg had seen from the street but not paid attention to. A pulsating red signal lit up the abandoned cars and trucks along the roadside. The train rattled past beneath his window, black and heavy. A worker stood on the platform of the last car, swinging a lamp. Georg leaned out and saw the lights of the train grow smaller and fainter, and heard the deep, dull warning signal the locomotive emitted at every crossing grow softer.

Jill was asleep. He lay down next to her and watched the brightening dawn. The phone in the kitchen began ringing and wouldn’t stop. As Jill grew restless, he got up and answered.

“Hello?”

“Is that you, Georg?”

“Fran! How the hell did you …”

“Your friend in Germany told me where you were. You had jotted down his number on a pad and I called him. He told me where you are. Listen, Georg, you’ve got to get out of there. Joe wants to … Joe realized that the negatives were missing. He looked in
the safe and they weren’t there, so he knew that I had … What could I do but tell him what I did? I had to tell him everything. He says he’s going to get Jill and bring her back. Are you there, Georg? He’s on his way to the airport. He swore he wouldn’t do anything to you, but he was so mad and looked so crazy. Georg, you’ve got to get out of there! Leave Jill where she is, please don’t take her with you. But you have to get out! All night I’ve been wondering if I should call you, or if you’d use my call against me. You must leave Jill and me alone. I can’t handle this anymore. I don’t want anything to happen to you, but I want Jill back. I’m really scared.”