Stone 588 (26 page)

The fourth mannequin was in a black dress. She was on the floor off to the right sprawled in a contorted position, her back to the street, her face not visible. Thousands of tiny faux rubies streamed from beneath her, creating an irregular crimson pool that spotlights made the most of.

Springer supposed the statement Audrey sought to make had to do with innocence and competition. She looked out to him for approval. He mimed applause. Having tried before, they knew it was impossible to hear through the window glass, so now Audrey exaggerated her lip movements, hoping he might be able to read her words. He couldn't. She gave up on it, resorted to a black felt-tipped Flair pen that she had in one of the deep pockets of her work apron. No paper handy, she printed directly on the window glass, printed backwards and in so doing made a few childish-looking errors.

WHAT ARE YOU UP TO? her letters asked.

Springer replied with sign language, said he was up to above the wanting-to-breathe level by indicating the bridge of his nose with the edge of his flattened hand.

YOU LOOK PISSED shc printed.

Springer scowled, nodded.

AT ME?

He smiled a fraction, shook his head no.

From another deep pocket of her work apron Audrey brought out one of those shiny .32-caliber pistols. She offered it grip first to Springer.

That broke him. He had to laugh. He pointed his first finger to his temple and worked his thumb several times like a pistol hammer.

Audrey printed hang on another hour.

The antics of this speechless conversation were disregarded if not unnoticed by those who happened to be passing by. Not because as New Yorkers they were blase or uninquisitive. Rather, they believed it was safer to give as little eye as possible to any stranger in the throes of acting strange.

There were, however, two men who were especially interested in Springer's every move. Across the street near the perimeter of the Plaza fountain, standing in the dapple of a plane tree. They'd been on Springer since that morning, when he'd entered the 580 Fifth Building. They had followed him to his meeting with Danny and would be staying on him.

Fred Pugh and Jack Blayney.

They were State Department, two of George Gumey's men.

Blayney was the taller and heavier. His round face and splotchy complexion gave him the look of a career bartender, the sort who might be pouring and drawing at P. J. Clarke's or O'Neal's. A couple of weeks ago Blayney had turned forty. That bothered him. His legs felt different, not as strong or dependable, and it occurred to him that the spots on the backs of his hands weren't actually freckles. He was nagged by the numerical recognition that he was no longer on the count up but the count down. Such thinking did cause a change in him. Made him meaner. The morning that Blayney woke up forty, at the very instant when he'd opened his eyes to forty, he felt something click sharply in him. His meanness was being turned up. He'd always been a bully during all his fifteen years with State, a lethal one; was now all the more so. He didn't look it, though. Surely didn't, standing there by the Plaza fountain sucking the syrupy flavor from a paper cupful of Italian ice he'd bought from a street vendor.

Pugh was more distinguishable.

Less than slight, Pugh's shoulders hunched inward, hollowing his chest, exaggerating his narrowness. He had an elongated face, very close-set eyes, and a sharply bridged nose. His meager mouth had a natural purse to it, seemed on the verge of whistling. All in all Pugh looked as though he'd been forced to suffer many of his thirty-eight years squeezed in a press.

Today Pugh was wearing a blue-and-white striped seersucker suit, a lemon-colored necktie and new, black, wing-tipped shoes with thick soles. There was nothing in bad taste about the shoes as far as he was concerned. The sales clerk at Florsheim had suggested white loafers with little fringed tassels and Pugh had tried them on and almost gone for them but decided they were faggoty.

"What's the asshole saying now?" Blayney asked.

"He's got his back to me," Pugh replied, as, like any tourist, he sighted through the viewfinder of the Canon 35 mm camera that hung from his neck by a woven plaid strap. The lens on the camera appeared normal, but it had been internally adapted to the telescopic power of a 500mm. Thus it served Pugh as well as a pair of binoculars while allowing him to focus unobviously on his subject from a distance.

Pugh read lips.

Seventeen years ago, when he'd started with Central Intelligence, he'd noticed that most of those people who were kept on for any serious length of time had things they were best at. Best at Middle Eastern disguises, inducing authentic heart attacks, Cambodian geography, things like that. Just being generally trained and loyal wasn't enough. Even the most nerveless sorts came and went.

What Pugh's specialty would be came to him in 1970 in Marbella, Spain. His assignment there was to snoop on an American NATO diplomat who had taken up with a limp-wristed Rumanian political strategist. The two men were suspected of selling secrets through one another and having a luxurious affair with the pooled proceeds.

That appeared to Pugh to be the case, though he'd observed nothing solidly incriminating, just the exchange by the two men of barely perceptible thrown kisses across their dinner table and, while on the beach, all-done pats to one another's ass cheeks after applying suntan lotion.

On the beach one afternoon Pugh watched them rise from their spread towels and walk to the surf. They waded out to deep water. Only their heads were visible, bobbing in the swells like a couple of children's playballs. Pugh sighted them with his binoculars and believed, according to the proximity of their heads, they were within easy reach of one another. No telling what their hands were busy at beneath the water. He'd probably know if he were able to hear what they were saying at that moment. He could see their lips moving. What an advantage it would be to know how to read lips!

It struck him.

A few days later the American and the Rumanian must have had a rending tiff. They took somber breakfasts at separate tables and that afternoon flew in different directions. Their case was placed in the inactive file and Pugh was ordered home.

He went right to developing his specialty. Spent every spare hour and all the time he could steal from Langley at the Library of Congress. He found numerous illustrated volumes that dealt with the positions of the lips and the corresponding facial muscles during speech. There was, he learned, a science of sounds in language called phonology, which, depending on dialect, included thirty to forty contrasting sound units. These units gave each word its particular shape.

Pugh was glad to know it was all so nicely arranged. He was encouraged  enough to think that learning to lip-read wouldn't be difficult. Then, for a while, he thought it impossible.

He kept at it, sought out a school for the deaf in Alexandria, and talked his way into being permitted to attend classes. For homework he watched television with the sound off. As he gained confidence he plugged his ears with the sort of malleable wax plugs that light sleepers use to shut out noise and tried to carry on conversations.

He got better and better at it.

After two years he let his superiors at Langley in on it. He claimed he was the best not-deaf lip-reader around. To demonstrate he had them listen with earphones to that day's episode of Days of Our Lives while he lip-read the dialogue.

He didn't miss a syllable or sob.

His superiors were professionally amused. He was given several other tests. His accuracy impressed them. He indeed had a specialty. It would, he was assured, be put to important use. For his incentive he was upped a grade.

Pugh's first assignment after that was in Santiago, Chile. It involved snooping on a troublesome leftist leader. The setup was ideal for Pugh. From the vantage of the building across the street he could see into the apartment where the leftist and his key people met. Powerful binoculars brought their faces close enough for Pugh to easily see the movements of their lips. However . . .

The fuckers were speaking in Spanish.

Pugh didn't know Spanish.

Nor for that matter did he know Russian, German, French, or Arabic.

Thus he was only a limitedly useful lip-reader.

On some of many tedious afternoons he would accompany his Langley bosses to Bowie racetrack over in Maryland. Before each race Pugh hung around the paddock area where the trainers gave last-minute instructions to their jockeys. He read the lips of the trainers and reported to his Langley bosses what had been said. Knowing the various strategies of a race gave them an edge. At the very least they would never waste a bet on a horse whose trainer had him running merely for the conditioning or experience.

Often the information lip-read by Pugh practically guaranteed a sure thing: when two or more horses were being sent out to try to go wire-to-wire with their speed, and in the rest of the field there was only one legitimate closing horse—hopefully a long shot. The front-runners burned up their energy staving off one another, the closer came on strong in the stretch, and the Langley people cashed in their winners.

Pugh resented having to put his hard-learned talent to such playful, luster-less use.

So in 1979, when George Gurney went over to the State Department to head up its Intelligence and Research Bureau, Pugh went with him.

That bureau was, of course, not as large or limelighted as the CIA. Never would be. However, Gurney intended to make up for lack of weight with shiftiness. His would be a cadre of people gifted with abundant sleight and little, if any, conscience — which was, after all, what intelligence work was all about, what had been lost under the years and years of politicking and the pile-ons for power. Ambitious to the bone, imaginative enough to put stock in leads others might dismiss as ridiculous, Gurney foresaw a time when his outfit would no longer be seated below the salt.

Fred Pugh liked working for Gurney. He felt Gurney honestly gave a damn, appreciated him. Gurney found consequential ways to utilize Pugh's lipreading, and at the same time he encouraged another dimension out of Pugh.

Pugh had never done any wet work, any killing. His psychological tests when he was indoctrinated into Central Intelligence had indicated he wasn't suited for wet work. However, under Gurney he'd killed five times, and after the first, as Gurney had predicted, he'd been hardly bothered.

In fact, Pugh was looking forward to the next.

There was Moe Bandy on the stereo:

"He's a rodeo Romeo,

Cowgirls and bulls are his life,

He loves what he does

And he does what he loves every night ..."

Audrey sang along with it and two-stepped improvisingly around the room. A crisp bob of her head, a reaching ghde, a tight turn — and, often, a stumble when the high heels of her maribou-covered mules caught in the pile of the rug. Other than the mules she had on only a pale green silk charmeuse teddy, loose and fluid, and a pair of briolette-cut emerald earrings.

She wasn't quite dancing alone. Her extended hands held a Brigette Deval doll that she had bought a month or so ago at Ludwig Beck. For $2,500. Not only the price made the doll more than a plaything. With its genuine ringleted hair, hand-stitched empire-style dress, and walkable patent leather shoes it was the closest thing to an adorable breathing two-year-old. Especially convincing was the poise of its lifelike fingers, the astonished expression on its paradoxically waifish, little-rich-girl face—and the lovesome way Audrey danced it.

"He'll hit the dance halls. Flashing the girls his best smile. He's burning both ends of the candle. Rodeo Romeo style. "

Springer appreciated Audrey with his eyes but his ears loathed her. Not even all that country-western twanging and picking could make up for how off-key she was. Why the hell didn't she leave the singing to Moe? Springer was tempted to convey as much by sticking his fingers in his ears. He didn't only because she was trying so to cheer him up.

She had tried all through their early dinner at Lutece. Ordered a bottle of Bollinger Tradition RD 1973, kissed his glass with hers, and said brightly, "To having been robbed." When he grunted, annoyed, she'd told him that she thought being robbed was probably the next most exciting thing to robbing, and anyway it didn't happen to one every day so it was sort of an event.

Springer begrudgingly drank to it.

He wasn't interested in his dinner, poked at it. They skipped dessert and coffee and went back to her apartment at the Trump. She urged him quickly out of his clothes and got him into a vinegar bath. Two cups of apple cider vinegar added to the bath water. To get rid of all the negative energy he'd picked up, she explained, and, by balancing his acid-alkaline ratio, put his body in a healing state.

Springer went along with it. He didn't say so but he felt bloodlessly wounded, in need of healing. When he was immersed up to his chin the vinegar fumes made his eyes run and stung the inside of his nose. To get thoroughly detoxified he had to soak for at least twenty minutes, Audrey said. For good measure she poured in what vinegar remained in the quart bottle, ignored his protesting moans. She didn't tell him time was up until a half hour had passed.

While they were both drying him off with big towels he remarked that he felt better after the bath because he was no longer in it. Audrey didn't rise to that, except to increase the pressure of her rubbing from brisk to harsh.

She had a lightweight cotton robe laid out for him. And a pot of peach-pit tea. Whenever they ate fresh peaches she saved the pits. Even when either of them had a peach out at a restaurant she'd wrap the pit in a napkin and tuck it in her purse. She placed the precious pits incongruously on her elegant window ledges to dry in the sun. With them she brewed up a vile-tasting tea that she claimed was a sure way to purify the blood and thus increase one's sense of well-being.

Over the months Springer had surreptitiously poured gallons of miraculous peach-pit tea down the sink or the toilet. This day he didn't give a look to the cup on the bathroom counter, went downstairs to the mirrored bar for some Usquaebach Scotch, neat, in a double old-fashioned glass. Usquaebach was his Scotch of choice. Very few bars stocked it, and Springer didn't like to ask for it out because he thought it sounded affected. Usquaebach ran about $60 a fifth and came in a glazed earthen jug, which was probably why it seemed to taste better.