Tool of the Trade (16 page)

We brought in the FBI, and they confirmed that the place had been “cleaned” by experts. Not a fingerprint, not a hair. No human skin had ever touched the sheets or pillowcases.

They said it was unlikely that one person without special equipment and training could have done so thorough a job. They suggested that if we really wanted to get in touch with Roberta Bender, we should inquire through the Soviet embassy.

So we have to assume that everything we know about Foley, the KGB knows as well. Plus whatever they’ve managed to extract from Mrs. Foley.

I gathered all the staff into the meeting room, and we compared notes. It wasn’t very helpful. We all agreed he had looked exactly like Robert Redford, and that was about all anybody remembered.

I called Langley and talked to his section chief, who also recalled that he looked exactly like Robert Redford. Of course they had a photograph on file; he would call Personnel and have them send a copy to us. Then he called back a few minutes later to say that the photograph was missing from their records. Somehow that didn’t surprise me.

I called the Society for Ethical Hypnotism and got the name of the best forensic hypnotist in New England, Laura Wentworth. We pushed through a Secret clearance for her and told her enough so that she could appreciate the need for absolute silence on the matter. Then she put me into a hypnotic state and interrogated me.

She said I was a good subject; I could recall events of the past days and months with remarkable accuracy and completeness. But when it came to Nicholas Foley, a.k.a. James Norwood, we got nowhere.

She went through the same questions while my hypnotic state was deepened with drugs, and the answers were essentially the same, if harder to understand. About all I could remember was that we had had dinner together, the conversation being mostly small talk about Boston, and he stayed in the office the next day studying the Foley files and talking with the staff. And he looked just like Robert Redford.

Nick wanted to drive us to the airport, because it would take forever to get a cab. If we waited too long, the place would be bristling with armed spies of every stripe. I vetoed him. We hadn’t gone through all that just to die in a pileup in Washington traffic. Besides, all the really dangerous spies were incapacitated—handcuffed or unconscious or dead. The cab only took twenty minutes to get to us, anyhow.

At National, Nick managed to find me a skycap with a wheelchair, and we got aboard the plane without incident. He was doubly nervous in the airport for not being able to reach his guns, but he relaxed once the plane started moving. I couldn’t. I alternated between fitful sleep and nauseated wakefulness all the way. Somehow I managed to keep down the sardines he had fed me and even ate the inside out of a ghastly Eastern Airlines mystery-meat sandwich. Hunger is the best sauce.

The main trick was to try not to think about the recent past. House plans and decorating ideas, course outlines and old erotic fantasies—anything but that evil man and his handcuffs and razor blade, the constant pain and weariness and anxiety, the sudden explosions of blood and… think about anything else. I read the first paragraphs of many magazine articles.

My vision of Florida was a mosaic of gaudy commercialism, rapacious overdevelopment, adolescent sexuality, senescence, crime, racism, sunburn, and cheap orange-blossom perfume. I’d been there once and wasn’t happy about the prospect of a second time.

This time, though, the weather contrast was almost enough to make me glad to be there. To go in a couple of hours from a slushy blizzard nightmare, cars playing Dodg’em for keeps, to palm fronds swaying in a warm breeze against a cobalt sky, can make up at least for orange-blossom perfume.

Nick installed me in a coffee shop with a pile of carbohydrates and went off in search of a paper. I was starting to get some strength back; didn’t need a wheelchair so long as I could hold his arm.

It was good to be able to hold him again. But he had a lot of explaining to do.

“Here you go.” He handed me the classified section of the
Herald
and sat down with a tabloid advertiser. “See who can find the cheapest room.”

“And a job for me.”

“When you’re up to it. I can chance a job where I don’t come in contact with the public.”

“Or need identification. A police check would be interesting.”

We read in silence for a minute. “Here’s a job for you,” he said, smiling. “God, there must be thirty of
them. ‘Girls wanted, no experience necessary. Escort service. Twelve dollars per hour guaranteed.’ Blow jobs extra.”

I laughed, a new sensation. “Come on.”

“You think I’m kidding?” He showed me one ad that asked for British, French, and Greek girls. “You believe it’s nationality they’re talking about?”

I looked at the section. “You know, this is an idea. They must have clients who want older women.”

He frowned at me. “You’re not serious.”

“I am indeed.” I lowered my voice. “I don’t mean
fucking
them. It’s an escort service, after all. I get dolled up and let some poor old guy squire me around for a few hours, and when he pops the question, I say no. Hell, I can take care of myself.”

He nodded slowly. “You know, you may be right. They certainly wouldn’t expect you to work under your real name. Probably the best pay either of us could get, under the circumstances.”

That was true, because “the circumstances,” although I hadn’t yet discussed this with him, included keeping Nick absolutely out of sight until he had his power back. Not even grocery shopping. Nick certainly had some idea of how thorough they could be in searching for someone. But I was the authority on what they could do if they found you.

Most of the men were likable enough, older fellows too shy or too busy to go through the slow excruciation of senior-citizen dating. A few had some unusual ideas about the way of a man with a maid, but it’s hard to shock an abnormal-psychology professor, or even a normal one. About half of them really just wanted someone to talk to; someone who would listen respectfully. The half who wanted to get their
rocks off were satisfied with quick masturbation, which I could do almost as dispassionately as a massage. I never mentioned that to Nick, though. He’s more reasonable than most men, but he’s still a man.

It only took two weeks to get a thousand dollars ahead. (All the income I’ve lost, teaching in college!) That was my arbitrary cutoff point. I bought a soldering gun and a sackful of components at Radio Shack and then picked up kits for wave generator, preamp, simple oscilloscope, and a small amplifier at a Heath-kit shop. Then I got some aloe ointment at the drug-store, since I’ve never soldered for a day without being burned at least once, even without poor clumsy Nick as my helper/holder.

We did collect a few burns a day, but in one ninety-hour week we got everything assembled. Just in time. The rent was due, and I didn’t want to go out manhandling for it.

Nick turned on the machine and asked me to stand on my head and whistle Dixie. I did a credible job, for a forty-five-year-old indoor woman who can’t whistle (he mercifully cut me short after a couple of bars). We asked the landlord to come in, and he not only forgave us the rent but insisted on giving us twenty dollars for groceries. That was fun. Greasy slumlord.

But we did have a problem. The apparatus took up as much room as a large stereo component set. We couldn’t really plug together a bunch of extension cords and haul it down to the sidewalk, so our victims were limited to people who could be enticed into our lair.

I have to admit that the first solution that occurred to me was a thoroughly immoral one. I could go back into the hand-job business and enveigle the customers
up to our apartment. A lot of them were well-heeled family men who wouldn’t miss a few hundred bucks, or at least wouldn’t try to track it down. Instead, I came up with a technological “fix.” Good old American know-how.

Sound waves can be reflected, refracted, and focused just like light waves. I remember how, in high school physics club, we made a “sound magnifier” out of a balloon filled with carbon dioxide. My approach would be a little different.

Various firms make “remote microphones,” which are just plain microphones braced in front of a reflecting bowl. The bowl, which is a paraboloid, focuses onto the microphone all the sound waves that are coming from whatever direction you point it. They sell the things for bird-watching, supposedly. No harm done if a chatty neighbor gets in the way, right?

It occurred to me that you could reverse the thing—replace the microphone with a sound generator, and you would get the sonic equivalent of a searchlight! It could send a beam of ultrasonic whine for blocks, along with whispered commands.

I called up Edmund Scientific in New Jersey and had one of the things sent C.O.D. We scrounged another couple of hundred from the landlord to pay for it and keep us going in the meantime.

It came in three days and only took an hour to set up. It worked beautifully. Nick would sit down on the stoop, in view of our window, and wait until a prosperous-looking person came by. (In our neighborhood, that meant dope dealer or pimp.) Nick would ask him for a light, which would immobilize him long enough for me to line up the searchlight on him. Then Nick would ask whether the guy could spare a couple of bucks. If he reached for his wallet, we
knew the machine was working, and we’d clean him out, erase the memory, and send him on his way.

On the third day, we stopped a handsome black dude who had a specially made thick wallet that produced seventeen thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. Nick asked whether he had any more money on him, and from various pockets he produced five shrink-wrapped packages of ten thousand dollars each. We decided it might be healthy to move across town that afternoon.

With over seventy-five grand to work with, we could easily have hired out the job of miniaturizing the signal generator and hiding it inside a watch. But the person who made it might wonder about its function. So we had to be a little circumspect.

We found a small firm in Fort Lauderdale, Suncoast Micro-engineering, that would probably be able to make the watch. I rigged up the searchlight device to work with a cigarette-lighter rectifier, and we rented a van without windows. Backed up to the place so I could get a bead on the front door. Then Nick went inside and engaged the president of the firm with a line of convincing bullshit (was that a talent he learned at KGB school? MIT?) and invited him to lunch. They stepped out the door, and I snared him; we found out from him who would be the best technician for the job and then snared
him
. In ten days, Nick was wearing a Svengali Timex on his wrist.

All this time we’d been making plans—or rather,
Nick
had been talking about the future, and I had been listening. I guess I was waiting for him to come up with something I could live with. But he never did.

What Nick wanted was for both of us to undergo radical plastic surgery—an unpleasant prospect, but
one that I agreed was probably necessary. We parted company very profoundly on what to do after that, though.

Nick wanted us to find a hidey-hole, some country place or idyllic island, where we would go to ground and hide for the rest of our lives. All right; I could see that eventually.

But first there were some things that had to be done.

I told Valerie the truth about the two Bulgarians and the shootout with Tarakan, who I could almost honestly say was the first person I’d ever killed. I couldn’t tell her about all the desperados I’ve talked into killing themselves, obviously—though in fact it hadn’t occurred to me at the time to mention them; I don’t think about them in that context.

The idea of the magic watch fascinated her. She’d had the process halfway figured out from what Shilkov had revealed with his questions, combined with her own memory of the pivotal undressing experiment. She didn’t question my saying that I’d never used it for professional advancement, which was true, or for personal gain, except while I was “on the lam.” I admitted having been tempted to turn the thing on to encourage sexual favors, but had so far resisted the temptation. I’m not sure she believed me about that, about resisting, but it didn’t seem very important to her.

Our real falling out came over what to do with it
now
. I was ready to retire from the spy business, and you’d think she would be triply ready. But no; she wanted me to go out with a real bang.

Our new apartment, after I’d hit the dope dealer for $67,000, was a furnished penthouse in western Miami, nowhere near the ocean. From our twenty-fifth-floor balcony we had a fine view of a hundred square miles of urban sprawl and hot, low smog. It was on that balcony, while I was grilling shrimp and scallops
en brochette
, that she divulged her grandiose, if nonspecific, plans for my future. I had to admit that I didn’t find the idea completely unattractive.

“We can’t just use this thing to get a grubstake and go to some island to play Gauguin or Robert Louis Stevenson,” she said.

“I’m not suggesting anything that bucolic,” I said. “We can’t afford to be conspicuous, wherever we go. Has to be a place with lots of Americans or Europeans.”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean we can’t just use the watch to make money, get security, and then put it away in a safe deposit box. We should use it to
do
something!”

“I think I know what you’re getting at.” I turned the skewers and started brushing the seafood with lemon butter. “I wonder whether you’ve thought it through in as much detail as I have.”

“Maybe not. But it seems to me you could get next to any politician, even the president of the United States, you know, put a bee in his bonnet. Cooperation with the Russians, world peace… something.”

“Sure. And have you considered what would happen if I got caught? If any government got hold of this, even a so-called free one, it would destroy the
social contract forever. No need for that government to give any rights to the governed—you just tell them to do what you want them to do. For their own good, of course.” I picked at a scallop with a fork; not quite done yet. “In a matter of months, every government in the world knows the ‘secret.’ Can you imagine Stalin with a tool like that? Hitler? Make Genghis Khan look like a social worker.”