Smart Moves (3 page)

“I’ll be back,” I said.

“And I,” he said, looking out the window, his back to me, “will be here.”

The breeze played the early spring leaves like glass chimes. The street smelled clean and the check felt good in my pocket. I crossed the sidewalk, suitcase in hand, and waited for a Chevy coupe to pass before I strode the street and went up to the porch where I had seen the guy with binoculars. He wasn’t there now, but someone was behind the curtain to the right of the front door as I climbed the stairs.

2

Before I could knock, the door opened. The guy in front of me didn’t look like the FBI. He looked like a grey stork wearing a dark, pressed suit. He was too skinny for FBI, too old. He was almost bald, but the hair that was there was rapidly going grey. There were dark sacks under his eyes.

“Come in, Peters,” he said, pushing the door all the way and making a shoveling motion with his hand to hurry me along. The element of surprise was certainly not with me.

“You want a cup of coffee, a beer? We’ve got Rheingold,” he said, leading me into the living room. He stopped and turned to me with a smile that crept up the right side of his face. “Pepsi, you like Pepsi, right?”

“Right out of the bottle,” came a deep voice from a high-backed stuffed chair of faded yellow with big pink flowers embroidered on it. The guy in the chair stood up. He was about two inches shorter than I was and about the same age as the guy who opened the door. This one had more hair, all black, probably dyed.

“You don’t look like FBI,” I said.

“The gravy’s in the navy,” said the one who had answered the door. “We’re retreads, retirees brought back to do our duty. There’s a war on, Peters. The Japanese and Germans are trying to kill us and we’re trying to stop them. Simple enough?”

“Pretty clear to me,” I said. “Can I sit?”

“You may sit,” said the short one. “Whether you can or not depends on whether you have a sore ass or that bad back of yours is acting up.”

I put down my suitcase and sat on the sofa, which was just as yellow and pink and flowered as the chair. The whole room was a washed-out vase of flower patterns and faded yellows.

“Place belongs to an English professor named May,” said the stork who had let me in. “His wife went on vacation with him.”

“At your request,” I said, smiling.

“We politely asked him to leave or be considered a Nazi spy,” said the shorter one, turning his chair and sitting in it so he could face me. “It’s remarkable what you can accomplish during wartime by appealing to people’s sense of patriotism …”

“… and fear,” his partner added.

“You two had this act going quite a while,” I said.

“Hey,” said the skinny one, “we go back to Alvin Karpis. Remember Alvin Karpis?”

I was about to answer when I realized the question was part of the act.

“G-men,” said the shorter guy. “He called us G-men, gave us the name. Better than a million dollars’ worth of publicity.”

“Only Karpis never said it,” chirped the big guy. “Hoover made it up. A little bit of party chatter for you, Tobias. You’ll never get us to confirm it for you publicly though.”

“Never,” agreed the shorter one with a shake of his head. “You want that Pepsi?”

“Sure. Do you guys have names? Moran and Mack? Gallagher and Shean, Abbott and Costello?”

“Just call us Spade and Archer,” said the shorter one. “I’ll be Spade. He’s Archer.”

“He looks more like an arrow,” I said.

“I’m on a diet,” said Archer. “Spade, you want coffee?”

“I’ll have a Pepsi with Mr. Pevsner here,” answered Spade, folding his hands in his lap.

“What …” I started, but Spade put a finger to his lips.

“We wait for Mr. Archer before we begin,” he said. “We’re partners. A man honors his partner.”

So we waited. I hummed a few bars of “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” while we waited.

“Gershwin,” Spade said. “Can’t make up his mind whether he’s opera or Tin Pan Alley. Schizophrenic.”

“Who is?” asked Archer suspiciously as he returned to the room with two twelve-ounce Pepsi bottles. He handed one to me and one to Spade.

“George Gershwin,” said Spade.

“Don’t talk about anything, not even George Gershwin, till I get back,” Archer warned as he left.

Spade and I sat drinking Pepsi with only a slight belch from me to break the silence. Back with a cup of coffee in about thirty seconds, Archer found himself a seat to my right on a dark wooden chair with a padded flower-patterened seat and looked at me.

“Are we ready now?” I asked.

Spade took a deep gulp, examined the bottle, blew lightly on top to create a low hooting sound, and nodded. “Yes.”

“You came to us,” Archer reminded me.

“It didn’t seem to surprise you,” I said, wondering if it would be polite to ask the FBI for a second Pepsi.

“Well within your profile,” Archer said. “Impetuous.”

“Immature actions,” added Spade.

“… unwilling or unable to always examine the consequences of your actions.”

“Reckless.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” I got in before Archer could take his turn.

“Why are you watching Einstein?” I asked.

“He’s a national treasure,” said Spade.

“A national treasure,” agreed Archer after a sip of coffee.

“A national treasure that someone is saying nasty things about,” I tried. “A national treasure that someone might be planning to eliminate.”

“Kill,” said Archer. “You can say ‘kill.’ We aren’t sensitive. Our job is to keep Professor Einstein alive and out of trouble, to protect him from outside threats and from himself. He had been known to say indiscreet things.”

“Like me,” I volunteered.

“Big discreet things,” said Spade. “About pacifism, and the need for a Palestinian homeland for Jews.”

“Not wrong things,” Archer added, finishing off his Pepsi. “But indiscreet.”

“You want another Pepsi?” Archer asked.

I said yes and Spade said no at the same time.

“You know about the letters to Einstein.”

“Is that a question? If it’s a question, the answer is, what letters? If it’s a statement, I sit back and examine you emotionally,” said Spade, sitting back. “You want me to get the drinks this time?”

“I’ll get them,” said Archer.

“So,” Spade continued. “We, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, will sit back, watch, and, if necessary, lend a helping hand.”

We waited for refills all around and for Archer to get back in his chair before we resumed. There was a small chip of glass missing from the rim of the Pepsi bottle. The FBI wasn’t the perfect host it pretended to be. I didn’t give a damn. I was living dangerously. I drank deeply and realized I needed a bathroom, but I wasn’t about to delay the answers any longer.

“Einstein wants to hire a private detective, fly him in from Los Angeles, that’s fine with us,” said Archer. “Spade and I aren’t much for legwork. We’ll stay here and keep an eye on the Professor.”

“You want to know where I’m going from here?” I asked.

“We have a pretty good idea,” Spade said. “Don’t tell us. It makes us feel as if we’re doing our job.”

I finished my second Pepsi and looked around for some place to put the empty. Seeing my dilemma, Archer got up with a grunt and took it from me.

“Thanks,” I said. “Maybe I’ll be seeing you.”

“Maybe,” said Spade. “Maybe.”

There were no handshakes. I picked up my suitcase, and Archer, Pepsi bottle in hand, led me to the door.

I stopped before he opened it.

“You had a tail on Walker,” I said. “Either you followed him or had someone pick him up in Los Angeles. He led you to me. Someone called you with my bio before I got off the plane.”

“Tape,” whispered Archer. “We’ve got tape machines, the latest equipment. Have a good trip. There’s a cab stand two blocks right. Bus station’s about ten minutes away.”

“Thanks,” I said and went back out on the street.

A blond guy with a little blond mustache and an English accent sat next to me on the bus, complaining about synthetic rubber. “The military,” he whispered confidentially, “is using synthetic rubber tires now. In a matter of weeks—weeks, mind you, not months—we’ll all be riding on synthetic rubber tires. The government may tell me they are as good as rubber. B. F. Goodrich may tell me they are as good as rubber …”

“They’re as good as rubber,” I said, my battered face a fist away from his.

“Right,” he said. “There you have it then. They are as good as rubber.”

We didn’t converse any more on the rest of the ride to Manhattan.

3

In the bus station, I put on my tan windbreaker and got rid of a long-coated guy with a stringy beard who told me the end of the world was coming. I told him that any harebrain who could read the newspaper or listen to the radio knew that. I asked him what to do about the situation and he suggested that I repent. I told him the things I was sorry for were too small to make a difference. Was God up there worrying because I had overcharged a woman in Pasadena three bucks for finding her lost Muffin? The stringy guy was now confused. I explained that Muffin was a black poodle that looked a bit like stringy beard.

“Why did you overcharge the lady from Pasadena?” the stringy guy asked, now getting into the tale.

“Muffin bit me,” I explained. “This was back in ’thirty-eight or ’thirty-nine. Muffin bit me and I hadn’t had a case in almost a month and I didn’t much like the woman.”

“So you overcharged her?”

“Five bucks over. She was happy to pay. I felt guilty later and tried to repay three bucks …”

“Why just three?” asked Stringy, plunging his gnarled hands deeply into his pockets.

“It cost two bucks to get the hospital to sew up my leg from where Muffin bit me.”

“I see,” he said. “What were we talking about?”

“Repentance,” I said, handing him a quarter.

“God bless you,” he said, taking the quarter.

“Not till I repent.”

“Perhaps he’ll grant you special dispensation for your kindness,” said the confused saint, looking around for someplace to spend his quarter.

“Dispensation comes cheaper here than in Los Angeles,” I said, grabbing my suitcase before an anemic character in a zoot suit, who had been listening to us, could get his hand on it. Zoot Suit pulled his hand back as if the handle of the case were hot, flashing me an ivory grin not of apology but of embarrassment. He had almost been caught.

“I’ll bet you’ve got a lot to repent,” I said to Zoot Suit.

“Not me, mister,” he said pointing to himself. “I’m from Philadelphia.”

I left them and went out into the street. I knew vaguely where Seventh Avenue and Fiftieth was. I had been in New York a few times. The last time I had been there I had left two teenagers who had run away. I had gone back to Los Angeles and told their parents I couldn’t find the pair. The two kids had seemed a hell of a lot more adult than their parents, and I’d decided that they had a better chance together than back home with their battling clan. I had turned back part of the fee for that one. One less to repent in the few days before the world went under.

I walked up past Forty-fourth Street, where Todd Duncan and Anne Brown were playing in
Porgy and Bess
at the Majestic. I started to hum, “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” again. A trio of well-dressed women ignored me as I went humming past. Down Forty-sixth I could see that
Arsenic and Old Lace
was playing at the Fulton. Boris Karloff’s name was on the marquee. I had done a job for Karloff a few years earlier but I doubted if he would remember it or me and I didn’t have time to look up L.A. people. I had science to save.

A sign in a Marine recruiting station on Broadway and Forty-eighth said I could come in and get a Japanese Hunting License. “Free Ammunition and Equipment—With Pay!” It was almost lunchtime. I stopped at a stand-up corner hot dog stand, put my suitcase on the ground between my legs, and had a root beer and two dogs for a quarter. The root beer was just like home. The hot dogs were great. I had a third with extra onions and went the last block through the crowds of boys in uniform, women shoppers with sharp New York accents, and people I’d rather not touch along the highway of life.

A sign outside the Taft told me I could get
COCKTAILS FOR
25
CENTS
while I listened to amusing songs by Charlie Drew in the Tap Room. The doorman looked at me and my alligator suitcase and then went on talking to a hack waiting for a fare. I went up the stairs and into the Taft and headed across the busy lobby to the main desk on the right. Somewhere behind me in the Tap Room or some other interior saloon a piano played “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.” I didn’t want Berlin, I wanted Gershwin, and it made me uneasy.

A couple from the Midwest beat me to registration. Their accents said Iowa. The desk clerk said, “Reservations?”

The clerk wore a blue suit and blue tie. He didn’t need a shave. He didn’t need a haircut. His fingernails were trim and clean and he owned the world, at least this carpeted corner of it.

“Darrel Davidson and wife, Davenport,” the man said. He was short, missing a neck, and sweating. She was short with a vestigial neck, and very dry. The clerk found their reservation, signed them in on the register, and accepted a check from Darrel. Then the clerk rang the bell and an ancient bellhop arrived to take their bags, but not before Mrs. Davidson could ask, “What room is Hildegarde singing in?”

“I believe,” said the desk clerk, “that Hildegarde is at the Savoy-Plaza. That is on 58th and 5th.”

“I thought she was here,” said Mrs. Davidson, disappointed, as the old bellboy started for the elevator.

“We can go down to the Savoy-Plaza,” said Mr. Davidson. “Don’t let’s embarrass Ellie.”

Darrel looked to me for sympathy and understanding. I gave him all I could muster as he waddled after the Mrs.

The guy behind the desk looked at me, then at my mottled alligator bag from Hy’s, and asked the most sympathetic question he could come up with. “Are you in the Armed Services? There is a twenty-five percent discount to our men in uniform.”