Work Text:
1970
Not until Emily Pollifax’s plane had taken off and Carstairs was on his way back to Langley did he think about what he had just set into motion. Rather, he had avoided thinking too much about the implications of sending Mrs. Pollifax into Istanbul at this particular moment.
She had pulled several rabbits out of her hat the previous year when he had picked her as a courier, and he could only hope she was able to pull out another. He allowed himself a moment to remember the young woman he had worked with years ago in Occupied Paris.
1943
Alice Dexter-White was beautiful, but more, her face was memorable. Bill Carstairs knew that he would never forget those arresting eyes and the face that surrounded them, and that meant she was a certain type of agent.
He was not. With his crewcut, he looked like any other young man in Occupied Paris in those days. A change of clothes, a new accent, perhaps a different hat to alter his profile and he could walk by somebody a second time and they would never notice it was the same man.
So as they planned operations, he had her hide by being precisely who she appeared to be, with a French accent of sorts. Alice Blanche was capable of ensnaring men and learning their secrets, but always remained detached.
Only once did he question her professionalism, and that was with another agent, a British soldier. But she had a daughter in the Soviet Union and a brilliant career in espionage ahead of her, so Carstairs set up the mission that sent Alice Blanche to her apparent death in one of Hitler’s death camps, then made one of the others in the unit inform Ramsey of her death. Not long after that, Carstairs was shipped to North Africa to recover after a mission gone bad. He never saw either Ramsey or Alice again, and that was the way it had to be.
Human connections were the one thing that could get a spy killed, and if that meant never getting close to anybody, it was the price of serving his country.
1970
As Bishop brought in ever-more disturbing news from Istanbul, Carstairs began drafting notes he hoped to never use.
He had a stack of similar ones from Mexico last year, but those were easier. Mrs. Pollifax had gone to Mexico and her family knew that. He could create a death that wouldn’t be questioned because it had happened in a foreign country and all the research they had done into the Pollifax children suggested that Jane would blame her mother for being too adventurous, but would suspect nothing. The lawyer son might suspect, but the phone tap they had arranged to hear her pre-departure conversation with Roger suggested that if he did believe there was more to the story, he also would take it somewhat in stride.
However, this time Roger would certainly notice that people in New Jersey believed his mother had been in Chicago helping Roger’s wife. And if Jane heard that detail, she would make a fuss, and that could lead to questions that Carstairs would not, could not answer.
This was why he had no attachments, why Johnny and Bishop only had strings of women passing through their lives, why Mornajay and the rest of the Upstairs contingent were solo icebergs floating in a sea of espionage: silent, deadly and isolated.
Mrs. Pollifax had children and grandchildren, neighbors and friends and others like her karate teacher. And it was the karate teacher that worried Carstairs the most. Roger would almost certainly wonder why his mother had taken up karate at her age, especially since she apparently had made quite a lot of progress in the past year.
“A red belt, sir,” Bishop had said when he reported the latest addition to the Pollifax file. “So she has enough training for self-defense.”
“A karate chop is hardly going to help when the other side has guns,” Carstairs had replied, his tone dry.
And yet, as he thought about how they would cover up her death and make it palatable to her family, he hoped that those karate skills were sufficient to keep her alive.
He deliberately had not stayed in touch with Ramsey, but it didn’t matter — the man thought the woman he knew as Alice Blanche had been dead for decades.
But this time, he would not shirk his duty. Whatever cover story they concocted, he would find a way to be the one to tell the Pollifax children, especially Roger. It was the least he could do.
This was why Mrs. Pollifax was so thoroughly unsuited for espionage, because she had connections to many people. And yet he could not imagine her succeeding otherwise.
1945
North Africa proved to be less a rest cure and more a different kind of danger. Still, it wasn’t until Carstairs felt the bone in his leg snap as they were trying to escape Tripoli before the bombs went off that he thought this might be his final mission.
And then Sidi Tahar came back for him and carried him out of the ammo dump and Carstairs found that he could not keep this man at arm’s length. Not after he had risked his own life to save Carstairs.
For the first time, when he was assigned elsewhere, he made sure to exchange contact information.
1970
Twenty-five years after North Africa, Sidi Tahar remained one of the few people Carstairs considered a close friend, and even he was affiliated with the Agency through Atlas. His parents were dead, and he’d lost track of his one remaining sibling. Cousins and old friends had been kept at arm’s length for so long they probably didn’t remember a man named William Carstairs. It was the only way to survive in this business, the only way to avoid living a lie or endangering people about whom one cared.
And yet as he listened to Mrs. Pollifax tell her tale of a trip through Turkey, of gypsies and lost loves and friends in unlikely places, he sometimes wondered what his life would have been like if he had allowed connections to flourish instead of pulling them up at the roots the way Mrs. Pollifax did with weeds around her geraniums.
He made a note to write a letter to Sidi Tahar and figure out how to route it to Morocco without it appearing to be a letter in English from the West to anybody who saw it before his old friend received it. He would have to be circumspect in what he wrote, but when a man has known you as long as Sidi Tahar had, reading between the lines was was easy as reading an unencrypted message.