Angela Sloan (6 page)

“This place is kind of small for hiding things,” I said.

He closed his eyes.

I hid the bottle in my knapsack. Then I rinsed out the sink and brushed my teeth with a lot of toothpaste. I got in the bed.

I had brought the shortwave radio, and I managed to pull in a few minutes of the Voice of America. Americans are not meant to hear it, since the government is not supposed to propagandize its own citizens, but sometimes you can hear it anyway, depending on the sunspots. The program I heard was a course in English. A woman and man were demonstrating how to have a conversation about the contents of the newspaper. For example,

MAN:
Did you see today's headlines?

WOMAN:
Yes, I saw today's headlines.

MAN:
Tomorrow is Election Day. Have you chosen your candidate?

WOMAN:
I will vote for the candidate from the Blue Party.

MAN:
Beef is on sale at the Robinson Market.

WOMAN:
The Robinson Market has good beef.

It was a modest sort of propaganda. Pro-voting, pro-beef. The voices were furred over with soft static. Sometimes a long whistle echoed up from the bottom of a well.

Later I woke to footsteps. The bedroom door was open, though I thought I remembered closing it.

An egg of light moved low against the baseboard and onto the pocked gray linoleum. It shot up to the ceiling and stopped there, jumping in place just slightly.

“Ray?”

He stepped in. I couldn't see him well behind the flashlight he carried, but I knew his sigh.

He moved the light down the wall to the foot of the bed. The batteries were getting low. He ran the light over the bedspread until it glowed in my face.

“The bottle is in my knapsack,” I said.

He didn't respond to that. With a flick he made the egg of light snap across the ceiling.

“Like that,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“That is how they moved,” he said.

He did it again, snapping it from one end of the ceiling to the other. The egg halted weightlessly against one wall then the other. Ray seemed to study it in a purposeful way.

Then he turned the light onto himself. He was holding the blade of his sodbuster pocketknife alongside his throat. “Don't let me do it,” he said.

I jumped out of bed and grabbed his arm. I managed to pry a couple fingers open and shook the knife to the floor. “Wake up,” I said.

He shook his head at me.

“You're asleep!” I said. “Wake up!” I steered him to the sofa and sat him down. “You were walking in your sleep, Ray!”

I sat with him and he closed his eyes. He was quiet. Then he got up and ran into the bathroom. An awful croaking noise came out. He was throwing up.

“You need to drink some water,” I said through the door.

“Go to bed,” he slurred back at me.

We didn't have even a paper cup to put some water in. I told him to cup his hands at the faucet and drink some water.

I heard splashing, so maybe he did what I said.

He came out and lay back on the sofa. “Dear God,” he said. “I'm falling apart.”

There was honking on St. Paul, and a gray metallic light came in at the window. The street was lit all night, and the blind was broken and wouldn't stay closed.

“You shouldn't have to be a part of this,” Ray said.

“It's all right. We're in close quarters for a while.”

“It's not all right. I have let you down badly, Jumbo.”

“You haven't let me down
in the least,
” I said.

I touched his forehead. It was hot and dry. There were about a hundred things I wanted to tell him—mostly things I had guessed that I wasn't supposed to have guessed, or things I remembered that I don't think he knew I remembered. I wanted him to know that I was sturdy, and that he needn't protect me from the truth.

“Rely on me,” I said.

He made an odd noise. A squeak. I couldn't see his face well, and half a minute went by before I understood that he was crying. It startled me, because I'd never seen him cry before. I went all to pieces, then, and had to go to the other room. I was crying so hard I was wheezing. My bare foot hit Ray's pocketknife. I closed it up and pushed it under the mattress. The flashlight was dead. I pinched myself on the legs.

I ran back to Ray. “We're all right!” I said. “Let's get things in order. We need some paper cups! We'll cover that window. Also, you need some pajamas. You're sleeping in your clothes! No wonder you're up at night. Did you drink from your hands like I told you to?” I went on fussing over him in this way while sniffling. “I'm going out right now to find some paper cups,” I said.

“You won't find them this time of night.”

“Where's that empty bottle? You can drink from that.”

“I'll be sick again,” he said.

I rinsed out his handkerchief and folded it over his forehead. “I know you'll feel better in the morning,” I said.

“Maybe. You should go back to bed.”

But I stayed. I sat on the edge of the sofa while he lay there taking shallow, quick breaths. I held his hand, which was not a thing I often did. I can't think when I had done it before. His hand was big. I held it in both of mine.

E
ventually he slept. Where does a person go, when he's asleep? It's a pointless question, but I felt he had left me and gone somewhere else. Yet I wasn't quite alone, because there was traffic noise from outside, and the occasional raised voice or door slam reached my ears from somewhere else in the Fletcher Hotel. I stepped around the room just taking things in. It was night and the lights were off. The off-white walls were off-blue in patches of glare from the street. The room was weirdly large and barren with Ray on his back on the low green sofa, and the flimsy card table adrift in the middle of the floor.

I went to the bedroom and lay down.

When I woke up again it was daylight and Ray was still asleep. I was hungry, so I went out by myself to find food. I made a childish blunder at a place called Carrelli's Market on St. Paul. I had a dollar and change in the pocket of my knapsack and had calculated the amount to be sufficient for two coffees and two large cinnamon rolls sealed in crisp plastic. When I got to the counter the girl gave me a total that was somewhat over that. I had left out the sales tax, and I had to put back one of the cinnamon rolls. It's the sort of thing that takes you down a grade or two in your own mind. It bothered me even though they were great big cinnamon rolls. Too big, really. We could split the one.

The emotional scene from the night before had knocked me off my balance. Ray and I really were not given to that kind of eruption. I put it behind me. On the street, white sunlight filtered through a pillowy haze. Sand had washed over the sidewalk from a construction site. Trucks were making deliveries, drowning out the birds.

When I let myself into the room, Ray was sitting up.

“Where have you been?” he said.

“I brought breakfast,” I said.

“What's your name?” He meant my cover name—the new one.

“Roberta Dewey.”

“Who's the old guy you're staying with?”

“Roy McJones.”

“‘Roy McJones.' Why are you with that old guy?”

“I'm his private nurse.”

“You attended nursing school where?”

“I'm not a
registered
nurse. I look after Mr. McJones.”

“What's wrong with him that he needs a private nonregistered nurse looking after him day and night? Can't he wipe his own nose?”

“Would you like your nurse to go around describing your medical conditions?”

“I see. All right. Anyway, you look awfully young to be someone's nurse. You say you're nineteen?”

“Maybe it
is
a stretch to say I'm nineteen, Ray.”

“Not at all.” He touched his hurt eye carefully. The swelling was mostly gone. “You do need to have some patter ready, though.”

“My growth was stunted by a disease in childhood,” I improvised.

“What disease in childhood?”

“Compound complex anemia.”

“We'll work on it.”

He rubbed his fingers together now, looking for a cigarette. They were in his jacket pocket, but we couldn't find the jacket. It was a big mystery, since the room was a nearly empty box.

“Listen up,” he said. “We need a case officer, bad.”

“Okay.”

“It'll have to be you.”

“I don't know how to be a case officer, Ray.”

“Well, of course you don't. Nobody knows how to be a case officer until he has been instructed in how to do it. Which was my job for some time, you'll recall.”

“Oh.”

He laughed. “You have an excellent deadpan.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

“Did you know they gave me a medal when I retired?”

“No, I didn't know.”

“We had a little ceremony where they showed it to me. Then they put it in a safe.”

“I wish I'd been there.”

“You didn't miss much. Hey, Jumbo, where are my cigarettes?”

I went looking in the bedroom, because that was the only other place I could think to look. I looked under the bed. Why? There was a sock under there, which I didn't touch. It had an evil, hardened look about it. When I came up I felt compelled to wash my hands and face, and I did so.

When I got back to Ray I found him smoking. “The jacket was on the floor behind the sofa,” he said. “Thanks for breakfast.” The sugar-smeared plastic sleeve that had held the one giant cinnamon roll was on the cushion beside him, empty.

“A
ll of what I'm about to tell you is secret,” Ray began.

I listened.

“The case officer is the person who handles the spies, and there is a method to it. First, he has an intelligence requirement. He doesn't just go out sniffing the air. He starts with some specific question. How many working fire trucks in Hanoi? The answer is a piece of information. That is number one.

“Number two, he wants to
identify a person
who can get this information. Let me repeat that.
Identify a person
who has access to the information that will answer the intelligence requirement. Who could it be?”

“The fire chief?”

“Maybe so. Number three. The case officer is going to
study that person.
Study him. Here, you don't know what will be important. Tell me your name again.”

“Roberta.”

“Good. This step of
studying the person
is often the step that will separate an effective case officer from an ineffective one. Some questions you might ask yourself regarding the prospective asset include, what is this person's day like? What is a good day for him? What would be a terrific day? What would make his day very bad?

“Does he wait with his kid for the bus in the morning? Do they talk, or do they just stand there? Does he turn away as the bus is leaving, or does he stay and watch it go? Watching it go is a sign of fear. Well, what's he afraid of? Of course, you want to form some rough ideas about his money situation. You won't necessarily need to see his bank account. A look at his shoes might be enough.

“What you are seeking is a need or urgent desire that you are able to satisfy. Sometimes you will find it ready-made. For instance, a relative
needs medical care. There are bills. You can help. Or you may induce the person to feel a need that he has not felt before. Here's one. His oldest child seems bright enough—wouldn't he like to send that child to private school? Ship her off someplace safe and plush like Switzerland?

“When you have identified your person's vulnerability is when you begin to
develop
him as an asset. You've met—now become friends. Ask him to do you a medium-sized favor. It ought to be something that causes him a certain inconvenience. And if he has to bend a rule to do it, so much the better. In return you will buy him lunch. Knowing the lunch is owed to him will help him enjoy it. You are developing an
involvement,
you see.

“Soon he'll have begun to figure some things out. But by the time he guesses what's happening, he'll find that he's already involved and has been for a good while. Seeing you means something to him. You never part without having arranged your next meeting. Because he is
involved,
he wants you to succeed and be happy. And here is something very important:
you want him to be happy as well.

“Finally, you make the pitch. That's all there is to it, really. Your first intelligence requirement is this: I want the names of all our neighbors in this wretched hotel.”

He went into the bathroom and shut the door.

I
n the daytime the lobby of the Fletcher Hotel was seldom empty. Idle men filled it. One had the sense that these were men each of whom was between two things. It showed in a new set of freshly pressed secondhand clothes, or else in the way a man shaved and carefully wet-combed his hair, only to stand in one place all morning looking at the rug. Had his life come apart, and was he afraid to sit alone upstairs? Or maybe it was the reverse: his life had hardened into something he didn't like anymore, and he was waiting for an idea of how to break it.

I passed through the lobby at intervals of ninety minutes. I would wander down St. Paul for fruit, gum, or cigarettes, then come back through. The men watched me with a steady, low-grade attention. Around dark, things jumped. The quiet men, the time-passers, were replaced by those who wanted to talk and be seen. A giant in a leather vest and white cowboy hat held court inside the vestibule. In place of charisma he had a loud voice and the hat. The desk shift changed at eleven. I went to bed, setting the alarm for three.