“It seems to be an eastern city,” Teddy said. “Or southeastern? I can picture the sun coming up—”
“He’s on a submarine,” Maureen said.
Dr. Eldon looked up. “Pardon?”
Maureen’s eyes were closed. “Right now. He’s on a submarine, deep underwater. Near the Arctic Circle.”
The professor glanced toward the one-way mirror, then addressed Maureen more formally. “Perhaps you’d like to concentrate a bit more. Teddy, do you sense anything else?”
Her eyes snapped open. “I told you where he is,” she said before he could answer. The doc sighed, and started scribbling in his notebook. “Small room, curving metal walls. And above him, an expanse of snow and ice, which is why I said the Arctic. Though I suppose it could be the Antarctic.”
“Fine,” Dr. Eldon said. He wrote all this down reluctantly, like a man signing a confession. “Arctic or Antarctic. Anything else?”
Maureen closed her eyes, then opened them again. “He’s gone now. I think I scared him.”
“What?”
“He saw me. I think that’s why I honed in on him so easily. Are you looking for another psychic?”
“No, I’m not—at least I don’t think so. Can we please get back on track?” He should have been more excited, but instead he seemed shook up. Nervous. “Teddy, what did you see?”
“It was a metal room I saw, too,” Teddy said. “And I sensed the difference between the surface. I thought he was up high, in a skyscraper or something, but down low would make sense, too.”
Teddy did not dare glance at Maureen, afraid that she was glaring at him.
Dr. Eldon ran a hand through his thatch of hair and told them to take a recess. He said they’d resume in twenty or thirty minutes.
“Submarine?” Teddy said, as they walked arm in arm. “Submarine?”
She suppressed a smile.
“You have to admit, that’s a ridiculous answer,” he said.
“You certainly hopped on the bandwagon,” she said calmly.
“You gave me no choice! Next time, don’t say crazy stuff like that. Like that business about him being another psychic! Say probable things, likely things, and, most important, vague things. You don’t tell somebody their grandmother’s missing locket is, I don’t know, on top of Mount Kilimanjaro, being held by Winston Churchill.”
“Oh, Mr. Telemachus,” she said. “Why don’t you trust your own gift?”
“I do trust my gift. Which includes knowing when to let the mark fill in the details.”
She shook her head. “You just insist on doing everything the hard way.”
When they returned to the observation room, Dr. Eldon was gone. Standing in front of the desk, arms straight at his sides, was a man in a black suit. His face seemed to consist entirely of a square jaw and a high-top haircut.
Cop, Teddy thought. Pure cop.
“Where’d the doc go?” Teddy asked.
“Please, have a seat,” the man said.
“And you are?” Teddy asked. He was not about to sit, and neither was Maureen.
“I’m your new supervisor,” he said.
“Excuse me?” Maureen asked.
“Four weeks ago, the man in that picture boarded K-159, a nuclear submarine of the Soviet North Fleet. The boat is on a three-month tour that we believe will cross under the polar ice cap.”
“Who the hell is we?” Teddy said, though he was getting a pretty good idea. His stomach had gone cold. Scamming an egghead professor out of his grant money was one thing, but this? These people could look up his records.
“The man’s presence on the submarine was top secret, known only to a handful of people. Well, a handful of people outside Russia.”
“There’s something I need to explain,” Teddy said.
“Shut up,” Maureen said quietly.
“We have important work for you to do,” the stranger said.
“Sure, sure,” Teddy said. He patted Maureen’s arm and turned to go. “You’ll do swell, kid.”
“Both of you.” He held out his hand. “My name is Destin Smalls, and your government needs you.”
The problem with getting old was that each day had to compete with the thousands of others gone by. How wonderful would a day have to be to win such a beauty contest? To even make it into the finals? Never mind that memory rigged the game, airbrushed the flaws from its contestants, while the present had to shuffle into the spotlight unaided, all pockmarked with mundanities and baggy with annoyances: traffic fumes and blaring radios and fast-food containers tumbling along the sidewalk. Even an afternoon such as this, spent cooling his heels in a well-appointed park, under a sky as clear as a nun’s conscience, was chock-full of imperfections that disqualified it from top ten status. Why were the children on the soccer field so fat? Why couldn’t people keep their dogs on leash? Why did these moms insist on yelling so much?
Waiting made his fingers itch for cards. Before the accident he never went anywhere without a couple of decks in his pockets. He spent endless hours at diners and bars running through his repertoire—the second strike, the bottom deal, the Greek deal, the family of false cuts and false shuffles. The trick was not to make them look like tricks. Do anything that looked like a “move” and you were asking for a beating.
These days he was lucky he could still button his shirt. His hands had turned to claws. There’d been a few good years after the accident when he thought he was getting it all back, full recovery of motion, but then the arthritis kicked in, and his fingers developed a stutter that made him afraid to sit down at a poker table. Started popping Advil to keep the pain and swelling down. One morning a couple of years ago, he woke up and his right hand was frozen, as if it didn’t belong to him at all. He massaged it back to life before breakfast, but the freeze-outs became more common, then started creeping into the other hand. Post-traumatic arthritis, the doctor called it. Someday, maybe soon, he’d wake up with both hands turned to sticks like a God damn snowman.
And yet, and yet, the day might still become a runner-up. Because at this moment, the woman he was waiting for stepped out of her Mercedes E-Class wagon. Her youngest son had already jumped out of the backseat and was running for the field. She called him back (Adrian, that was his name), put a water bottle in his hand, and sent him off again.
Teddy took a breath, feeling as nervous as the first time he’d asked Maureen for a date. Then he rose from the picnic table and removed his hat. The motion, as he anticipated, was enough to get her to glance at him.
She looked away, then turned toward him again, squinting.
“Hello, Graciella,” he said.
She didn’t answer. It wasn’t possible that she didn’t remember him, was it? He started toward her, and was relieved when she didn’t jump into her car and floor it.
“Do you have a grandchild playing?” she finally asked.
“I have to come clean, my dear. I came here only to see you. I thought we should talk.”
“How did you—have you followed me here?”
“When you say it like that, it doesn’t sound entirely respectable,” he said.
“I’m going to watch the game,” she said. She opened the back of the wagon and reached in for something. “You have a good day, Teddy.” Clearly dismissing him, but all he could think was: She remembered my name!
“It’s about Nick,” Teddy said.
She went still, like a woman who’d drawn a spade that sabotaged her diamond flush, but was determined to play it out. He felt terrible for disappointing her. If there was any doubt that he knew about Nick Junior and his murder trial, he’d just removed it.
She straightened. “I’m not talking about my husband. Not to you, not—”
“Nick Senior,” Teddy said.
“What?”
“There are some things about your father-in-law you should know.”
Several emotions moved across her face, fast as wind whipping across wave tops. Just as quickly she mastered herself, loo
ked at him down that strong Roman nose.
“Such as?” she asked.
“I can explain. You mind if I watch the game with you?” he asked.
She studied his face for a long moment. Then she shook her head, not so much agreeing to his request as resigning herself to it.
—
Eight-year-olds playing soccer, Teddy decided, was a lot like a pack of border collies chasing a single sheep, except that the dogs would’ve used more teamwork. Graciella’s son was somewhere in the red-shirted faction of the mob. All the boy-tykes looked alike, however, and all the ponytailed girl-tykes looked alike, so the best he could do was sort the mass into subsets of indistinguishables.
“Good job, Adrian!” Graciella yelled. Teddy couldn’t tell what that job might have been. But he did notice that none of the other parents had come over to talk to her. They formed their own clumps, talking among themselves, or else exhibiting a laser-like focus on the game that prevented them from even making eye contact with Graciella and, by extension, him.
“So you’ve got a lot of friends here,” Teddy said.
Graciella spared him a glance. “These people aren’t my friends.”
“Afraid of the mobster’s wife, eh?”
“As far as they’re concerned, Nick’s already convicted.”
“But you’ve got hope.”
If she’d been a pale woman she would have blushed, he was certain of it. “I shouldn’t have written that down,” she said. Meaning her third wish: NOT GUILTY. “I don’t know what I was thinking, talking about that stuff with strangers.”
“Strangers? I’m a harmless old man.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” she said. “The harmless ones don’t try so hard to pick up women at the grocery store.”
He laughed. “True enough, true enough.”
“You knew who I was, didn’t you? Before you even walked up.”
“No! Hand to God, I had no idea. It wasn’t until I saw a story about the trial that I put two and two together.”
She wasn’t ready to believe him. He started to explain, and then several nearby parents shouted at once; exciting things were happening on the field, evidently. Graciella stood up and he sat back, content to watch her watch the kids. He used to do the same thing with Maureen. When the act was on the road, they’d be at some hotel pool, and she’d be on alert, keeping them (well, Buddy mostly) from drowning, and he’d be watching her. God she’d been beautiful.
“So how do you know Nick Senior?” Graciella said finally.
“I used to play cards with him,” Teddy said, which was not a lie. “And some nights I’d bring his pizza home to the kids.”
“I’ve heard about that pizza,” she said. “Nick Junior said his dad wouldn’t let him or his sisters eat in the restaurant, but sometimes he’d bring home leftovers.”
“That sounds like him,” Teddy said. “I used to see how he treated little Nick. Back in the day, it was fine to spank your kids. Beat them even. But sometimes Nick Senior—well, I wouldn’t be surprised if your husband grew up hating him.”
“He doesn’t hate his father,” Graciella said. She put a spin on the word “hate” that made it seem as if several other options were available.
“That’s good, that’s good,” Teddy said. “Fathers and sons, that’s tricky business.” He considered what he wanted to say. He was glad they were having this conversation with lots of noise to cover it and no one too close, yet in sight of lots of people, so that she’d be reluctant to slap his face. Finally he said, “I saw in the papers that your Nick’s going to take the stand. Testify in his own defense.”
“Maybe. According to his lawyer.”
“So he’s not?”
“I’m not talking about this with you, Teddy.”
“Because I’d be awfully relieved if he didn’t.”
This made her raise an eyebrow.
“You know what everybody’s saying,” Teddy said. “A lot of speculation about what he’s going to say, and who he’s going to say it about.”
“My husband’s going to say whatever he wants to say to defend himself.”
“Of course he will, of course he will, that’s perfectly—”
“Why the hell do you care what he says?”
Damn. He’d made her angry. “Graciella, please. I don’t want to step out of line. But I wanted to offer some advice.”
“You want to offer advice,” she said icily. “To me. About my family.”
He forged ahead. “Tell your husband not to do it.” She opened her mouth to object and he said, “Please, trust me. Your husband may not want to go to jail, but if he does this thing, I’m afraid of what Nick Senior will do.”
“He won’t be doing anything,” she said. “The police have a lot of security around my husband.”
“I mean to you, Graciella.”
She stared at him, and he couldn’t read her expression. Fear? Anger? Some cocktail of them both? He pressed on.
“The police can’t help you. Witness protection won’t help you. Read the papers. Reggie Dumas, the last guy who testified against the Outfit in the eighties? He was in WITSEC. Two years later, they found his body in his backyard—in Phoenix. It took them years, but they got him, all the way out in the desert.”
“I’m such an idiot,” she said, almost under her breath.
“Don’t be hard on yourself,” he said. “Not everyone—”
“You work for him, don’t you?”
“Pardon?”
Looking at him now, her mouth a hard line. That cocktail was at two parts anger, one part fear. “Is this about the fucking teeth?”
“Teeth? What teeth?”
She stared at him.
“Graciella, please. I just wanted to warn you. I don’t think you understand what Nick Senior’s capable of.”
“Oh, I know he has a temper,” she said.
“A temper? The things I’ve seen him do. Do you know what degloving is?” He raised a hand. “Never mind. I shouldn’t have brought that up. The point is, your father-in-law’s a sick S.O.B.”
“Are you done talking about my family?”
“It’s your family now. But if your husband sells out his father on the witness stand, you’re not the family anymore, not as far as Nick Senior is concerned.”
Graciella stood up. “Get out of here,” she said.
He pulled himself out of the chair. “Please, I only came because—”
“Get out.”
Now the parents were looking at her—and, by extension, him. He straightened the Borsalino and lowered his voice.
“You have no reason to believe me,” he said. “I’m a cheat and a storyteller. I used to make my living conning people out of their cash. But I promise you, I’m telling the truth. I don’t work for Nick Senior. I’m just here to help.”
He held out a playing card. “I’ve written my number on this. If you need me, call.”
She refused to take it from him. He placed it on the lawn chair, tipped his hat, and walked toward his car. Behind him, a shout went up on the field, and red-shirted children celebrated and green-shirted children despaired, or vice versa.
In the months after he and Maureen were recruited and packed off to Maryland, their romance accelerated on its own, like a bike going downhill. It wasn’t only that they spent so much time together—working side by side every day at Fort Meade, taking the same bus back to Odenton, going home to neighboring apartments. The move itself had changed Maureen. Finally outside her mother’s influence, as she said, she’d blossomed. She laughed more easily, seemed less careful about every sentence she uttered, no longer seemed to worry what strangers on the street might think of them holding hands. And at night, Mo lit up like a kerosene torch. By spring they were making love with the lights on.
He wouldn’t have traded these months for anything, but he had to admit that the daily routine bored him, made him feel like he was working a straight job, something he’d vowed never to do. He also had to
admit that for a straight job, it was pretty bent. Most days the work consisted of lying on couches talking aloud, while a fellow psychic recorded his “observations.” Later, Smalls would evaluate the observations for “hits.” Maureen and Teddy, the two stars of the show, had scores that were about the same but for opposite reasons. Maureen’s observations were highly specific, so that when she hit, her concrete statements came off as undeniable facts. Teddy’s answers, however, were artfully vague, so that it was near impossible for him to be completely wrong.
For some reason, Smalls had not recruited Clifford Turner, who had demonstrated some actual psychic ability—and that reason was that Turner was black. Smalls had let his prejudice do his thinking for him and had hired instead two white men who were self-deluded yahoos. Bob Nickles was a retired electrician who claimed to be an electricity douser; Jonathan Jones was a young man who’d been “discovered” by two Stanford professors after scoring high in a series of guessing games. Their primary qualifications seemed to be (a) luck, now run out; and (b) their golden-retriever-like enthusiasm. Nickles and Jones would babble on about whatever came to mind, often subconsciously riffing on whatever cues Smalls had let slip about the assignment. A stray mention of “sand” was enough to send them conjuring camels and Arabs all afternoon. What bothered Teddy was not that these two nimrods honestly thought they were having psychic experiences, but that Smalls did, too. Some days the G-man rated their results higher than Teddy’s or Maureen’s.
The rampant gullibility seemed to permeate all levels of government, fueled by fear of the Russians. The Soviets were pouring money into psi research, and the U.S., Smalls explained, had no choice but to respond in kind. All the intelligence organizations and every branch of the military were financing parallel secret programs. Some of them were focused on mind control, others on mind reading. Smalls’s team was in charge of remote viewing. He’d been given a dusty barracks building at the fort, enough money for a secretary, a junior agent, and four psychics, and all the office equipment he could scavenge from INSCOM and other army detachments. The program had no name, so everyone just called it “the program.”
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