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The old Simon & Garfunkel song, ‘America,’ is one of my favorites; but for years I’ve wondered about ‘the man in the gabardine suit’ who is briefly mentioned in the third verse. Who was he? Why was he on that bus? What was his story? And since the song wasn’t going to answer those questions, I decided to answer them myself – and to honor the original inspiration by setting the story on that Greyhound bus…
– Lauryn
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The Man in the Gabardine Suit
Lauryn Christopher
The man the Agency referred to as ‘Conrad’ got on the bus in Chicago.
A folded newspaper poked up from the seat pocket in front of him. He glanced at the masthead. Cleveland Press, Wednesday, June 11, 1959. A couple of days old, a bit crumpled, and with grease stains from being wrapped around a previous passenger’s lunch. But a free paper was a free paper.
He flipped to the sports section. He was a White Sox fan himself, but the paper’s spotlight was all about the Indians’ winning season, and Colavito – the team’s current darling – hitting four home runs against the Orioles the night before.
He held the paper open wide as he pretended to read, discouraging other boarding passengers from taking the vacant seat next to him; surreptitiously watching them over the top of the paper as they made their way past him. When everyone was seated and the bus finally pulled out of the station and he hadn’t been dragged off in cuffs, he relaxed. But only a little.
It had gotten too hot to stay in Chicago. But New York – yes, New York was a good city to get lost in.
# # #
Lloyd had chosen a spot about halfway back in the big Greyhound Scenicruiser. It was one of the newer buses – the fabric of the seat cover wasn’t frayed, and the vinyl trim around the edges hadn’t yet turned dry and brittle. The floor had only a handful of sticky spots, but the lingering smell of tobacco told him that it had already seen more than a few miles’ worth of passengers, as did the undertone of sweat that caught his attention.
He’d ridden in worse. Rickety old buses, the best he could afford for three summers straight, when he worked just long enough in one place to buy a one-way ticket to the next small town. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for enough money. He’d ridden in open-air cattle trucks and buses with cracked windows that only stayed closed if you wanted them open and trucks with holes rusted right through the floors. Extra ventilation, a driver said once. And on a hot, dry day like today, the dirt kicked up by the tires would filter into the bus, coating everyone with a fine layer of dust; mud splashing up through the floor on rainy days.
No, the combination of buses and sweat and tobacco were all-too familiar. As the Greyhound pulled out of the station, Lloyd fished the packet of Lucky Strike cigarettes from the inside pocket of his dark blue gabardine suit jacket
“Mind if I smoke?” he asked the man across the aisle from him.
The man looked up from his newspaper. “Go right ahead,” he said. “If you do, no one will mind when I light up.”
The two exchanged a laugh.
Settling back into his seat, Lloyd lit up, the smoke curling up to the ceiling and hovering there for a moment before spreading out and joining the thin layer of dingy film already beginning to tint the slick plastic.
He had no luggage, just the slim black briefcase that rested on the vacant seat next to him. That and the off-the-rack gabardine suit he wore created the illusion that he was simply one of many businessmen who periodically commuted between the larger cities, choosing to travel affordably – if slowly – by bus, and saving the pricey air travel for more pressing matters.
In truth, Lloyd would have preferred to take the train – and if he’d actually been a commuting businessman, that’s exactly how he would have traveled. But he’d received a tip that the traitor he was seeking had purchased a ticket on this bus, so here he was.
He lifted his briefcase to his lap and opened it, grateful for the high seat backs which helped keep the contents private from prying eyes. He opened a manila folder he’d been given along with the tip about the bus – all the information the Agency had been able to gather about the suspected traitor – who they’d code-named “Conrad” – contained on two sheets of paper.
The first page listed the information Conrad was presumed to have passed along to his Soviet contacts. Lloyd reviewed it, finding nothing he hadn’t been briefed on previously. A hastily-scribbled note at the bottom of the page indicating that whether Conrad was a Soviet spy or a turncoat American was still an unanswered question caught his eye and he shook his head in disbelief. Six months chasing him, and they still had so little to go on. It didn’t bode well for their ability to catch him.
Lloyd turned to the second page and studied the hand-sketched likeness, committing it to memory. It was the only image they had of Conrad, and it was so vague that the drawing might have been replaced with the words ‘white male, mid-forties, average height and weight, receding hairline,’ for all the use the sketch provided.
He looked at the picture and then at the man across the aisle who was still reading his newspaper. He perfectly matched the description.
Problem was, so did Lloyd.
# # #
The businessman across the aisle made Conrad nervous. He seemed polite, but not overly friendly, and after their brief exchange they had ignored each other – him pretending to read his newspaper while the businessman busied himself with the paperwork in his briefcase.
Maybe it was the suit.
He immediately dismissed that. Half the men on the bus – himself included – were wearing suits. Most of them had removed their jackets and stowed them in the overhead racks with their luggage.
He’d kept his own jacket on in spite of the perspiration forming at the back of his neck and under his arms. If he didn’t take it off, he wouldn’t be delayed by having to retrieve it if he needed to leave the bus. A bus trip might be a slow way to travel, what with all the small town stops to take on passengers, refuel the bus, and give passengers time to eat and relieve themselves, but if it came to it, he could simply walk away at the next stop. You couldn’t do that on a plane. On a plane, he would have been trapped for the duration of the trip, with no opportunity to escape.
A bead of sweat formed at his temple, and he brushed it away, pushing it back into his thinning hair. He’d waited too long. He should have left Chicago weeks ago, when he first suspected that the Agency was getting close to catching him. But when he told his new handler of his fears, the cheeky Brit had simply told him that he’d been watching too many spy movies and needed to buck up.
So he’d gritted his teeth and ‘bucked up,’ and turned himself into a nervous wreck in the process. No surprise, that, him working in the Agency’s regional headquarters in downtown Chicago and surrounded by agents at every turn. But the Brit was right, analysts were the invisible drudges of the spy world, and he’d slightly altered the data about the mysterious Conrad to render it useless, even as he continued funneling classified information to the Brit to pass along the chain to his Soviet contacts. He was right under their noses, and the smug-suited spies hadn’t blinked an eye.
And then the Brit failed to answer him for over a week, and he knew it was time to move.
Conrad looked across the aisle at the businessman in the suit, who had closed his briefcase, finished his cigarette, and was now looking out the window. He didn’t recognize him from the Agency. There was no telltale weapon bulge visible under the dark blue gabardine. So if he wasn’t hiding a weapon, why hadn’t he removed his jacket?
He shook his head. Maybe the Brit was right about his imagination getting the better of him, too, and he just needed to buck up for a few more hours. He leaned back in his seat, bracing his shoulder against the window, and closed his eyes, hoping the rolling rhythm of the bus would soothe his frayed nerves.
# # #
Lloyd stared out the window at the blur of refineries and factories as the Greyhound stretched its long legs, taking them out of Chicago, around the lower shores of Lake Michigan, and turning east, the lake view shifting to the industrial district that seemed to represent most of Gary, Indiana. With the change in scenery, the smells coming in through the ventilation changed from simple auto exhaust to the biting chemical scents of the steel mills, and Lloyd’s thoughts turned inward, on Conrad and how to catch him.
He contemplated his options. He was no Sherlock Holmes, but a large part of being an agent was about being observant, and he considered his powers of observation to be reasonably well-developed.
Assuming the sketch was even the least bit accurate, there were seven men on the bus who fit Conrad’s description.
He ruled himself out, leaving six possible traitors.
The man seated six rows behind him, who had boarded the bus with a woman of comparable age and two school-aged children – presumably his wife and family – was an unlikely suspect. Not that a family man was incapable of betraying his country, or that a spy couldn’t pull the wool over the eyes of those closest to him – Lloyd knew just how possible that was, his own Eleanor still happy in the belief that he was a traveling salesman for a farm equipment manufacturer in their home town of Kansas City.
But the family man seated behind him was too relaxed, with none of the watchful, guarded habits of even a deep-cover operative. He played with his children – whose chatter provided details about the family trip to visit cousins in Pennsylvania – argued with his wife about the undesirable aspects of extending a reciprocal invitation to the aforementioned cousins, and gave off a convincing air of having few worries beyond those of the average man about to spend his summer vacation with the in-laws.
Lloyd would continue to watch him – until he had Conrad in custody, he couldn’t be too sure – but crossed the family man off his mental list of suspects.
Of the remaining five, the bus driver was an equally unlikely candidate. Not that someone in his position wasn’t often privy to information they shouldn’t have had – just as he was listening to the conversations around him, and had already formed opinions of the two women three rows ahead of him who had chattered nonstop about their shopping trip ever since they boarded, or the sullen young man several rows back who was clearly contemplating a way of avoiding the draft – the bus driver would have ample access to information.
But the type of information he would glean driving back and forth across the country was seldom likely to be of any interest to the Soviets.
That left four.
The now-sleeping newspaper-reader in the seat opposite him had the pale complexion and slight softness of someone who spent most of his days in an office. Depending on what kind of office he worked in, it was possible he might have access to information the Soviets would think useful. Besides, he’d spent several minutes pretending to read the same page of his newspaper before folding it up and stuffing it in the seat pocket in front of him. He was nervous and twitchy about something, and would bear further watching.
Lloyd left him on the list, along with the other three Conrad-candidates, who he hadn’t yet had a good chance to study.
It was going to be a very long bus ride.
# # #
Conrad had never intended to become a traitor. In fact, it had actually started out quite innocently – accidentally, even. He’d stopped by a bar for drinks with a friend after work one evening last summer, only his friend hadn’t shown up – he later discovered he’d gone to the wrong bar, but by then the damage was done. Over multiple pints of beer, his tongue had loosened, and soon he was telling the bartender all about concerns in the intelligence community about plans to transport freight from Turkey to Iran.
The next thing he knew, someone put a hand on his right shoulder while an accented voice whispered in his left ear, “If you hear anything else of interest, let me know.”
He never saw the man, only his hand as he placed a small card with a phone number on the bar in front of him. But a few weeks later, when the evening news announced that an Army transport plane had been shot down and the crew members were being held by the Russians, his gut twisted in a knot and he barely made it to the bathroom before he was violently ill.
Had he caused this?
As if in answer to his unspoken question, his telephone rang, and the voice on the other end of the line – the same one from the bar – informed him that the crew members would be released unharmed if he would agree to provide useful information on an ongoing basis.
Nine men’s lives.
Of course he agreed. And every time he called the number, or the next, or the next, as he was passed to different handlers, Conrad thought of the nine crew members whose lives he’d saved.
He refused to think about how many deaths he was responsible for.
# # #
They pulled into Pittsburgh just after sunrise on Saturday morning. Lloyd thought the sleeping city seemed almost peaceful, and regretted the hustle and bustle of everyday life that would soon disrupt the early morning stillness.
The family man got off the bus, together with his wife and children. Lloyd noted their departure, along with that of one of the other Conrad-candidates – a factory man, judging from the heavy fabric of his short-sleeve shirt and trousers and the thick-soled work boots he wore. He walked with a slight limp, the knuckles of his leathery hands turning white as he clutched the rail on his way down the steps and off the bus.
It wouldn’t be the first time an operative had adopted a physically challenged persona to help him hide in plain sight. Lloyd kept his eye on the factory man as he collected his large duffel from the Greyhound’s luggage compartment, shouldered it awkwardly, and limped away, heading down the street rather than into the bus station. Lloyd watched him until he turned the corner and was out of sight, but the man never broke character, never resettled the duffle more comfortably on his shoulder, never slipped into a normal stride.
Lloyd crossed him off his list.
# # #
The young couple got on in Pittsburgh.
Conrad noticed them – how could he not, when they squeezed their way down the aisle, laughing and stumbling, arms wrapped around each other as though the thought of allowing the few inches of separation that walking single file would require was somehow unthinkable to them. They practically fell into the empty row behind him, apologies for jostling his seat mixed in with their own giggles.
He shifted in his seat and considered glaring at them, but all that would accomplish was to fix him in their memory, and he preferred to be invisible, unnoticed, forgotten. So he did his best to ignore them as they prattled on in hushed whispers and giggles about their grand cross-country adventure.
Belatedly, he thought he should have simply changed seats, but by the time the idea occurred to him, the every row was occupied, less than a third holding only a single passenger, like his.
So he stayed where he was, wishing as the bus ate the miles between Pittsburgh and New York, that the giggling newlyweds would just shut up.
# # #
Lloyd followed one of the Conrad candidates when he got off the bus at the gas station just outside Harrisburg. He’d watched him at a previous stop as well, and after gleaning nothing of interest from eavesdropping on the man’s telephone call to his wife from a pay phone inside the station, Lloyd crossed him off the suspect list. To maintain the pretense that he’d been hovering nearby waiting to make a call of his own, he slid a dime into the pay phone’s slot, and placed a collect call.
“You’re sure the information is good?” he asked when the director of the Chicago office got on the line.
“As sure as we can be. This guy’s been slippery.”
“Anything else you can give me to help me identify him?”
“None of the passengers match the sketch?” the director asked.
“That’s the problem. Too many of them do,” Lloyd replied. “I’ve eliminated some of them from suspicion, but I’m going to need backup when we arrive in New York.”
“I’ll make the call.”
“Thanks. Gotta go.”
Returning to the bus, Lloyd considered his options. He was left with two possible suspects – the man across the aisle, and one seated near the back of the bus, who he’d had little opportunity to study.
Both of the suspects had slept through much of the trip. Both appeared to be white-collar, office workers, and wore suits very similar to his own off-the-rack gabardine; though of the three of them, he’d been the only one to keep his own jacket on, rather than remove it in deference to the warm June weather. It wouldn’t have been a good idea to let his quarry – or anyone else on the bus – know that he carried a small revolver in a shoulder holster tucked up under his left arm, and a pair of handcuffs clipped at the back of his belt.
There was more than one way to have backup.
# # #
Now the couple behind Conrad were playing a game. One of them would pick another passenger and make up some story about them – ‘she’s an actress,’ ‘he’s a pilot,’ and other similar silliness.
They were just passing Newark when he heard the woman say, “He’s a spy.”
He looked back, through the small gap between his seat and the empty one next to him, and saw that she was pointing at the man in the dark blue gabardine suit.
“Watch out for the camera in his tie,” her husband said.
The couple again dissolved into a fit of giggles, but their laughter roared in Conrad’s ears. And then, as though in slow motion, he found himself turning his head and looking at the man in the suit.
Looking at the agent, who was sitting right across the aisle.
Looking at the agent, who was looking directly at him.
# # #
“Hello, Conrad,” Lloyd said, his voice low, his eyes fixed on the man seated opposite him.
He was moving even before he’d finished speaking, sliding forward, out of his seat, across the aisle, and into the empty seat next to the traitor.
“Who are you?” Conrad asked. “Why are you following me?”
“You know perfectly well why I’m following you, Conrad.” Lloyd said, putting extra emphasis on the code name.
Conrad shifted, as though to put up a fight, but Lloyd jabbed him in the ribs with his elbow. “You don’t want to be making a fuss,” he said. “It would be a shame if I had to shoot you before your trial. The United States government would so miss the opportunity to execute you for treason.”
“I know all the agents in the Chicago office,” Conrad said petulantly, trying ineffectually to push Lloyd away. “You’re not one of them.”
“Kansas City,” Lloyd said. “Special assignment.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his battered Lucky Strike packet, letting Conrad get a glimpse of the butt of his revolver. He held the packet over toward Conrad. “I’ve only got two left. Want one? It might be your last.”
# # #
Conrad accepted the cigarette, holding it between trembling fingers as the agent lit it for him. They were so close, only minutes before the bus dove down into the Holland Tunnel, crossed the Hudson River, and then came up into New York. He’d been looking forward to that part of the trip since he was a boy, and even more so now.
He’d almost made it.
He took a long drag on the cigarette, filling his lungs and holding the smoke in for a moment before exhaling, trying to steady his nerves. Okay, so he was sitting next to an agent. That was bad. And the agent had a gun. That was also bad. He wasn’t great with guns, but if he could get it away from the agent – maybe while they were in the tunnel, and everyone was distracted by the novelty of the passage – maybe then he’d have a chance.
Because after that, there wouldn’t be any more chances. The Agency would have men at the station and they would take him away and execute him, and as much as he didn’t want them to do it, they would be right to do so.
But right now, there was only one agent.
He had to try.
# # #
Lloyd had expected more from Conrad. At the very least, he’d expected the traitor to put up a struggle – more than the half-hearted squirming and whimpering when he’d first slid into the seat next to him. But the desk-bound turncoat had just collapsed into himself, and now sat there, quietly smoking, his hands shaking so bad he could barely keep from dropping the cigarette.
As the bus descended into the Holland Tunnel, some of the passengers – from the sound of their voices, Lloyd identified the young couple behind him, and a scattering of tourists – let up a cheer. He supposed it made sense, it was something of a novelty after all.
And then his leg was burning.
“What the…!” he swore as he looked down.
The idiot, Conrad, had dropped his cigarette into Lloyd’s lap, and it was burning a hole in his slacks. Lloyd slapped the offending cigarette from his leg, and only then realized that Conrad had taken advantage of the distraction to reach across him, and was in the act of drawing his revolver from its holster.
He grabbed at Conrad’s hand, and the two of them struggled for several seconds, each fighting for control of the weapon as the lights from the tunnel flashed past. Conrad was holding onto the gun with his left hand and was awkwardly trying to transfer it to his right hand without letting Lloyd get it away from him.
“Bad idea,” Lloyd growled, wrapping his own hand around Conrad’s, and twisting the revolver’s barrel until it was facing the traitor. “When you’re told to ‘buck up,’ that’s not the time to go to pieces. If you’d held on just a little longer, we’d have gotten you out of there. But the Agency will more than likely give me a commendation for catching you, so I win either way.”
Conrad’s eyes widened, “You—” he began.
But whatever he was about to say was lost in the roar of the gunshot.
– End –
The Man in the Gabardine Suit © 2018 by Lauryn Christopher. Originally published in Fiction River: Editor Saves (WMG Publishing). Reprinted by permission of the author.