Babayaga

Will said.
    “Really? Okay.” Oliver winced, butting out his cigarette. “Though I have to tell you, I am deathly tired of questions.”
    “I know, but seriously, tell me this, what was the knife for?”
    Oliver looked curious. “The knife?”
    “Yes, that first night,” said Will, “you wanted me to bring the knife to that meeting with Boris and Ned. I figure you couldn’t have planned on blackmailing me that early on, you didn’t even really know who I was yet.”
    “Oh, yes. The knife.” Oliver nodded. “It sounds silly now but I had planned for us to do a little bonding together, a little ritual with a blood oath, something we boys used to do up at Camp Kinloch when I was young. It was only meant to be a bit of theater to show our commitment to the good fight, a bit of rah-rah.”
    “What were we fighting for?”
    “To remain here in Paris, of course, to stay on the agency dime. It was a time for serious action, Will, they were chopping funding, pulling the plug on us all. Now that de Gaulle’s back in, there’s no reason for them to stay. The local Communists have been neutered, the Russians are contained, and Germany’s quiet, which makes this conflict pretty much over. The big-theater stuff here is done, Washington has no need to keep funding it, which means all of us, the ad men, the journalists, the intellectuals, and even the poets, every single soul of us who’s been living on the company’s largesse, we’re all being cut off.”
    “Come on, there weren’t that many people working for the agency,” Will said.
    “Oh yes there were. You couldn’t throw a copy of Fodor’s across a Spanish Quarter café without hitting someone on their payroll. In the low season, pretty much every American you saw in this town was a penny ante spook of some sort. I’d rather hoped we could all rally together, all for one, one for all. Ridiculous, obviously, childish stuff, but that was another time, really. A whole other era.”
    “It was two weeks ago,” said Will.
    “Was it? Well, it seems like a lifetime, doesn’t it?” said Oliver. “Come to think of it, I suppose for Brandon it was.”
    “So, what about Brandon, what was he was up to?” Will asked.
    Oliver raised an eyebrow. “No one at the embassy offered any specifics, but it’s not too difficult to deduce. Clearly, his goals for those pharmaceutical experiments were not very different from what I was up to, ginning up the game so that he could stay here, overseeing wave after wave of hallucinogenic assaults against Ho Chi Minh’s godless hordes while sitting in the comfort of the Ritz bar. Ordinarily, he would have run that scientist’s operation through more proper channels, but doing it the right way would have eaten up too much time and he was desperate. He was going to be shipped out too; he had to rush. I think Brandon only wanted the same thing Ned, Boris, me, even you wanted. We all simply wanted to stay in Paris.”
    “Looks like you’re the only one who’s staying.”
    Oliver shook his head. “Not for long. I’ll probably ship home soon. I’ve got a friend at the Herald Tribune who’s offered me a spot at the sports desk. It’s not ideal. I’ll have to find some angle to make it interesting, but I need the job, right now the larder is pretty bare.”
    “Really? What about your family money?”
    Oliver smiled. “Here’s a little secret, Will: the money I come from is so old it’s dead. The great cod fortunes swam away some time ago. But that doesn’t matter, I’m always happy to work, I’ll be fine. What I’m curious about is what’s next for Paris? Look at this grand station, Will, think of this city, it’s been the eye of the hurricane for centuries, a firestorm of ideals, art, and philosophy, a place where fierce arguments became actual revolutions, which then exploded into bloody wars. Think about all that happened here, Pascal, Descartes, Voltaire, Napoléon, the barricades of the commune. This was it, the glistening pearl resting at the center of a grand transcendent battle for mankind’s soul. I wanted to be a part of it, to help in some small way to keep it going. But now it’s all over, the bullies and the bankers back home need a real war and what we’re doing here these days is far too subtle.”
    “What do you mean, subtle?” Will asked.
    Oliver shrugged. “Well, American factories need orders for jeeps and jets, and American politicians need full employment. A cold war doesn’t get