he makes it up.’ To think what you’ve saved me from.”
Janson’s old academic mentor was half-haloed in the cloud-filtered sunlight. His
face was etched with age, his white hair thinner than Janson had remembered; yet
he was still lean and rangy, and his pale blue eyes retained the brightness of
someone who was in on a joke—some nameless cosmic joke—and might let you in on
it, too. Now in his late sixties, Fielding was not a large man, but his
intensity gave him the presence of someone who was.
“Come along, dear boy,” Fielding said. He led Janson down a short hallway, past
the doughty, middle-aged woman who worked as his secretary, and into his
spacious office, where a large picture window gave a view of the Great
Courtyard. Plain white shelves on the adjacent walls were filled with books and
journals and offprints of his articles, the titles stultifying: “Is the Global
Financial System Imperiled?: A Macroeconomic View,” “Central Banks’ Foreign
Currency Liquidity Position—The Case for Transparency,” “A New Approach Toward
Measurement of Aggregate Market Risk,” “Structural Aspects of Market Liquidity
and Their Consequences for Financial Stability.” A sun-yellowed copy of the Far
Eastern Economic Review was visible on a corner table; beneath a photograph of
Peter Novak was the headline: turning dollars into change.
“Forgive all the bumf,” the don said, removing a stack of papers from one of the
black Windsor chairs by his desk. “You know, in a way I’m glad you didn’t let me
know you were coming, because then I might have tried to put on the dog, as you
Americans say, and we’d both have been disappointed. Everyone says I should fire
the cook, but the poor dear has been here practically since the Restoration and
I haven’t got the heart, or perhaps the stomach. Her entremets are agreed to be
especially toxic. She’s an eminence grise, I try to say—eminence greasy, my
colleagues riposte. The amenities, such as they are, have a curious combination
of opulence and austerity, not to say shabbiness, that takes some getting used
to. You’ll remember it from your stay in these halls, I daresay, but the way you
remember playing tag when you were a child, one of those things that were so
appealing at the time but whose point now seems utterly elusive.” He patted
Janson on the arm. “And now, dear boy, you’re It.”
The verbal flows and eddies, the blinking, amused eyes—it was the same Angus
Fielding, by turns wise and mischievous. The eyes saw more than they let on, and
his donnish volubility could be an effective means of distraction or camouflage.
A member of the economics faculty that produced such giants as Marshall, Keynes,
Lord Kaldor, and Sen, Angus Fielding’s reputation extended well beyond his work
on the global financial system. He was also a member of the Tuesday Club, a
group of intellectuals and analysts who had had, and maintained, connections
with British intelligence. Fielding had served a stint as an adviser to MI6
early in his career, helping to identify the economic vulnerabilities of the
Eastern bloc.
“Angus,” Janson began, his voice froggy and soft.
“A bottle of claret!” the college master cried. “A bit early, I know, but that
we can supply. Look out the window and you see the Great Courtyard. But, as you
may recall, there’s a vast wine cellar beneath it. It runs straight across the
courtyard, and underneath the garden owned by the college. A catacombs of
claret. A fluid Fort Knox! There’s a manciple with a great hoop of keys, and
he’s the only person who can let you into it, the jumped-up tosser. We’ve got a
wine committee in charge of selections, but it’s riven with factions, like the
former Yugoslavia, only less peaceable.” He called to his secretary: “I wonder
if we might get a bottle of the Lynch Bages eighty-two, I seem to recall there
was an unopened bottle left from last night.”
“Angus,” Janson began again. “I’m here to talk about Peter Novak.”
Fielding was suddenly alert. “You bring news from him?”
“About him.”
Fielding fell silent for a moment. “I’m suddenly feeling a draft,” he said. “A
rather chilling one.” He tugged at an earlobe.
“I don’t know what news has reached you,” Janson said tentatively.
“I’m not quite twigging … ”
“Angus,” Janson said. “He’s dead.”
The master of Trinity blanched, and stared at Janson slackly for a few long
moments. Then he took a seat on a harp-backed wooden chair in front of his desk,
falling into it as if the air had left him.
“There have been false rumors of his demise in the past,” the don said feebly.
Janson took the seat next to him. “I saw him die.”
Angus Fielding slumped back in his chair, suddenly looking like an old man.
“It’s not possible,” he murmured. “It can’t be.”
“I saw him die,” Janson repeated.
He told Fielding what had happened in Anura, breathing hard when he reached the
still-piercing horror of the midair explosions. Angus merely listened,
expressionless, nodding gently, his eyes half shut, as if listening to a pupil
during a tutorial.
Janson had once been one of those pupils. Not the typical apple-cheeked
boarding-school kid, wearing a backpack filled with dog-eared books and leaking
biros, pedaling a bicycle down King’s Parade. When Janson arrived at Trinity,
courtesy of a Marshall Fellowship, he was a physical wreck, sallow and skeletal,
still trying to heal his emaciated body and devastated spirit from his
eighteen-month ordeal as a POW, and all the brutalities that had preceded it.
The year was 1974, and he was trying to pick up where he had left off, pursuing
the study of economic history he had begun as an undergraduate at the University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The SEAL commando was repairing to the groves of
academe. He worried, at first, that he would not be able to make the adjustment.
Yet hadn’t his military training equipped him to adapt to his surroundings,
whatever they were? History texts and economic formulas replaced code-books and
graded-terrain maps, but he attacked them with the same dog-gedness,
determination, and sense of urgency.
In Fielding’s quarters at Neville Court, Janson would discuss his assigned
topic, and the don would seem to nod off as he spoke. Yet when the time came,
Fielding would open his eyes, blinking, and pinpoint the weakest turn of his
argument. Once Janson gave a yeoman’s account of the economic consequences of
Bismarck’s expansionism, and Fielding
seemed to rouse himself from his slumbers only after he’d finished. Then the
questions rained like arrows. How did he distinguish between expansionism and
regional consolidation? What about the delayed economic consequences of the
annexation of the Schleswig and Holstein duchies several years prior? About
those numbers he relied upon for the premise of his argument, the devaluation of
the deutsche mark between 1873 and 1877—they wouldn’t be from Hodgeman’s study,
would they, young man? Pity, that: old Hodgeman got the numbers all wrong—well,
an Oxford man, what could you expect? Hate to order you off your own premises,
dear boy. But before you build your edifice, be certain of the ground beneath.
Fielding’s mind was razor-sharp; his manner urbane, unflappable, even giddy. He
often cited Shakespeare’s phrase about the “smiler with the knife,” and though
he was no hypocrite, it aptly characterized his scholarly style. Janson’s
assignment to Fielding, as the don cheerfully admitted only a few months after
their tutorials began, was not entirely accidental. Fielding had friends in
Washington who had been impressed with the young man’s unusual profile and
demonstrated capabilities; they had wanted him to keep an eye out for him. Even
now, Janson was hard put to say whether Fielding had recruited him to Consular
Operations or whether he had merely gestured vaguely in that direction and
allowed Janson to make the decision that felt right to him. He remembered long
conversations about the concept of the “just war,” about the interplay of
realism and idealism in state-sanctioned violence. In prompting Janson for his
views on a wide range of subjects, had the don been merely exercising the young
man’s analytical skills? Or had the don been subtly redirecting those views,
prodding a shattered young man to rededicate his life to the service of his
country?
Now Fielding daubed his eyes with a handkerchief, but they still glittered
moistly. “He was a great man, Paul. It’s unfashionable to use those terms,
perhaps, but I’ve never known anybody like him. My God, the vision, the
brilliance, the compassion—there was something absolutely extraordinary about
Peter Novak. I always felt I was blessed to know him. I felt our century—this
new century—was blessed to contain him!” He pressed his hands to his face
briefly. “I’m babbling, I’m becoming an old fool. Oh, Paul, I’m not one given to
hero worship. Peter Novak, though—it was as if he belonged to a higher
evolutionary plane than the rest of us. Where we humans have been busy tearing