by Bill Granger
“Not the first day.”
“A journalist. What about your code of ethics?”
“Don’t use words you don’t know the meaning of.”
“You won’t be such a smart-ass, honey, when we get through. Star reporter and loyal agent in Uncle’s intelligence service. Give that to the New York Times and see what they do with it.”
“I don’t work for the Times.”
“You won’t work anyplace. This is not an idle threat.”
She waited. What were they going to threaten her with that she hadn’t lived with? She had helped Devereaux because there was nothing else to do. She loved him. Had loved him? It didn’t matter. They weren’t there when the two Bulgarians came up the mountain road that day, when she and Devereaux lay in a trench at the edge of the woods, when Devereaux fired that shotgun. She still heard it in her dreams. She saw their bloody faces. They had buried them on the mountain in the darkness.
“He slipped yesterday morning.”
“Where?”
“What difference does that make?”
“Where was he?”
“Shit,” said the one at the window. He got up. He walked across the room and stood in front of her. “Honey, why do you think we’re going to put up with this shit?”
She stared up at him. “Because you look like you’ve been eating it all your life.”
When he hit her she expected it, but not the pain. She vomited on herself and on him. He pushed her out of the chair. He kicked her then, hard, with the side of his shoe, across her ribs. She blacked out, just for a moment. She opened her eyes and she was on the floor, on hands and knees. He pulled her red hair and she was upright, on her feet. “You want more of this shit, you want to talk to us?”
“Where is he, Miss Macklin?” said the other one. Morgan. He hadn’t moved out of his straight chair.
“Tell me…” Her mouth was choked with phlegm and vomit. She shook herself away from the cadaver, went to the sink in the kitchenette off the living room. She took a glass from the drainboard, filled it with water, rinsed. She wiped her mouth on a paper towel. God, she was a mess. She turned, braced herself on the sink. “Tell me where he was. Maybe I can tell you where he’s going.” Softly.
Morgan smiled. The cadaver, his trousers flecked with vomit, did not move.
“Chicago. He tell you about Chicago?”
Once he had. Briefly. After he said a name in one of his horrible nightmares. He had told her so little.
“He told me about Chicago,” she said. “Was he visiting his aunt?”
“Great-aunt.”
“That’s it.” She considered the question carefully. “And he knew you were coming after him?”
“After him? We had him for eleven months. We were the babysitters for him, throw them off the trail. They picked up the trail again. We had a couple of watchers—”
“What?”
“Agents. Went to Chicago. To watch out for him.”
“You tapped my phone, bugged this place. You know he didn’t contact me.”
“That was before. We didn’t have anyone here after we pulled them off.”
“He hasn’t called me,” she said. “That’s the truth.”
Morgan stared at her, deciding.
The cadaver said, “What do you think?”
“Rita,” Morgan said. “We’re Uncle. We don’t hurt people. We want to help him. Give him a home, a new name.”
“That’s what he said.”
“When?”
“The last time I saw him. Nearly a year ago.”
“That the truth?”
“The truth.”
“Don’t forget. We’ve got shit on you.”
“I haven’t seen him.” Dully, muted, the coda to the symphony, the soft restatement of themes.
After they left, she closed the door and chained it. Big deal. The chain, she realized again, was not very substantial; the door had a hollow core. Safety depends on the civility of others.
She shoved the armchair in front of the door. She got a bottle of Lestoil from the kitchen counter and paper towels and mopped the vomit from the rug. Then she took off her clothes and went into the bathroom and took a long shower. Standing under the shower, letting the water clean her, she thought of him. No past, no future for them, he said.
“Dev.”
She had promised not to say his name. She couldn’t control her dreams but she could control her waking life. She wouldn’t let herself think of him.
In a towel, in the living room, she sat with a tumbler of Red Label on ice and let herself think of him.
Why had he slipped his traces, exposed himself, exposed her?
Hitters. Morgan had said they were still after him. They never gave up. And maybe they were after her as well. Kill her after she led them to Dev, after she was useless to them.
She leaned over, turned on the television. News, news, news. And an old movie, Richard Widmark and John Wayne.
She reached for the phone to call someone and let her hand rest on the mouthpiece. She had friends awake at midnight but what was she going to tell them? I’m afraid. Two spooks came and beat me up and said they were going to protect me.
She smiled, sipped the Scotch.
But she wouldn’t go into the bedroom. She wouldn’t turn the lights off. She left the television set on.
She stretched. Her ribs ached.
She thought about him. Accidental lovers in the beginning. She wanted the old priest’s secret in Florida and so did he. He said he worked for a wire service. He used her. He used her to get the secret. She trusted him, slept with him, loved him. And when she found out, when she hated him, he saved her life as casually as if this thing happened all the time to him. And then he said it was no good, that what he did stopped them from having a life together. Something like that. Words and words, all the clichés of loving and then parting. She wanted him so much.
She shivered. She got up, crossed to the bedroom, turned on the light, and took a white terrycloth robe from the closet and slipped it on.
She thought it was over. The nightmare part of the last year and all that went before. It was really over with him, with the whole strange world he existed in. She had decided to take a week of vacation, go back to Wisconsin and see her mother. Her mother wasn’t getting any younger; Rita was all she had left.
Now she would wait. In case he needed her.
She curled up in the armchair that blocked the front door and wrapped her long fingers around the tumbler of Scotch.
A year ago, by accident this time—real accident—she had crossed paths with him in Helsinki. Again he had used her but they both knew it from the beginning; no tricks, Rita, he had said. And when the business was over, he had resigned and she had taken leave from her job and they were going away, they were never going back. They were free.
Except people are never free, are they?
Two assassins. And then they realized they were safe only if he went back to the Section. Away from her. Drawing the trail away, back into the safety of the government service.
Nearly a year. She put down the glass.
Dev.
Thin sunlight through the windows, a cold cast to morning, frost drawn on the panes. Rita Macklin opened her eyes and shivered. She felt cold. She had fallen asleep in the chair in front of the door. She stretched, felt pain, remembered the men waiting for her. She got up, pulled a comforter from the couch, and sat again in the chair and wrapped the comforter around her.
She rubbed her eyes. An electric clock on the wall of the kitchenette read quarter past eight. She yawned and felt as tired as if she had not slept at all.
Then she heard the knock.
Him.
She got up quickly and pushed the armchair aside. She hesitated then.
The knock again.
But he wouldn’t come here. They were watching the building, they had the phone tapped. He would know that.
She unhooked the chain and glanced through the peepho
le. She saw the distorted image of a woman waiting on the other side of the door.
She rehooked the chain and opened the door against it.
“Yes?”
“My name is Elizabeth Redford,” the other woman said. She was older than Rita, elegantly dressed, a tall woman with a certain bearing that comes more from style than clothing. “May I come in?”
Rita frowned, felt a little frowzy around the edges, shut the door, unhooked the chain, patted her hair, and then gave up and opened the door wide.
Damn. She was well dressed. Perfume. Rita shoved her hands in the pockets of her terrycloth robe in a tough-guy way and waited.
The woman wore a fur coat over her silk dress. She glanced around the apartment quickly, as though accustomed to sizing up things rapidly. She stared at Rita oddly for a moment and then stepped inside and closed the door behind her. Then she did a very strange thing. She placed her forefinger to her lips and winked.
Winked.
Rita blinked and stared back at her.
“Who are you?”
“I’ve tried to reach you. You were out,” Elizabeth Redford said.
“I was out?”
Again she put her finger to her lips.
She reached in her purse and took out a piece of paper. Rita looked at it. It was from him. Tears blinded her a moment. She staggered. She felt the other woman’s hand on hers.
The woman led Rita to the kitchenette and turned on the tap water and bent close to the sink. She looked under the kitchen cabinet, felt along the molding, and pulled out the bug. It was quite small. Elizabeth held it under the tap water for a moment and then threw it in the wastebasket next to the sink.
“I knew him a long time ago,” Elizabeth whispered. “Before you met him. He explained to me what this was about. He could trust me, you see.”
“I don’t see.” Rita paused. “Where is he? What’s happened to him? Is he all right?”
“He thinks you’re in trouble. Terrible trouble. So is he. He wants to see you. Now.”
“But where is he? Is he hurt?”
“No. He’s all right.” She looked oddly at Rita.
“What trouble?” Rita felt afraid suddenly; for a year she had lived at the edge of fear, reliving the nightmare of that last moment on the mountain, trying to make herself believe that the horror of it would never happen again. And now it was happening.
The woman spoke in a low voice, close to the sound of the water running out of the tap. “Two men downstairs in a white Pontiac. I don’t know if they have one car or two. They don’t seem terribly undercover. Maybe they’re just supposed to watch you. But we have to shake them.”
“Who are you?”
The other woman frowned. “I told you. I knew him. I worked for the Section. A long time ago.”
“But not anymore.”
“Do I look like I work anymore?” Said a bit archly, with just some bitterness at the edge of the words. “In Ireland. Six, seven years ago. I owed him. He knew it. He always knows the use of leverage. Last night, Richard was out—my husband. He came to our house—”
“Where?”
“In Georgetown. He told me—”
“What? Where is he?”
“Here. In D.C.”
“Those are spooks out there.”
“I suppose so.”
“Why would you do this?”
“He asked me.”
“What are you, a Samaritan?”
“What do you want me to say? He asked me.”
Said as simply as Rita would have said it. She understood and felt terrible suddenly. Did he use you, too? Does he use everyone?
She could suddenly see him clearly, staring at her with gray eyes, answering: Yes. Sometimes.
“What am I supposed to do?”
Elizabeth stared at her almost wistfully for a moment. “You’ve got the fun part, I’ve got the hard part. I get you out of here, in my car, and I lose them. And you find him.”
“You don’t have to take that chance. I’ll go alone.”
“You couldn’t lose them, Rita. I can.” And Rita believed it.
Twelve minutes later they were in the Cadillac, pulling onto Old Georgetown Road, heading toward Wisconsin Avenue. The morning traffic noise was sealed out the moment they slammed the doors.
Rita looked behind them through the smoked rear window. The Pontiac dipped out of the parking lot. A second car followed but she couldn’t see the make.
“Two of them,” she said.
“At least,” Elizabeth said. “A good tail, you need five cars. But not if you aren’t too concerned about being followed yourself. Or fingering the person you’re following.”
“I don’t understand,” Rita said.
Elizabeth smiled. “I just know what it says in the Manual of Instructions.”
“Were you married when—”
She glanced sharply at Rita and then back to the road. She turned right into Wisconsin. Bumper-to-bumper traffic, all the way down the sloping hill to the District line.
“No. My name was Campbell. I got out of the business after Ireland. I found out I wasn’t strong enough for it. No one is, I think, it’s just a game of pretense. Men live more in fantasy so they can stay at it longer. They see it as a game.”
“He doesn’t.”
Elizabeth smiled, her eyes on the rearview mirror. “Is that what you think?”
Damn her for pretending to know him better. Rita’s face flushed. Rita had taken the time to put on earrings, not for herself, not for him; for this other woman.
“Why did he come to you?”
“He said he didn’t have many old friends he could count on.” She smiled still, a ghostly, sort of sad smile. “Poor Devereaux. He smiled when he told me that, about old friends. It was a joke, like everything. But he meant it. He told me you were in trouble, that you both were in trouble. I said to him, ‘Do you love her?’ He said, ‘Perhaps.’ ”
“Bastard,” Rita said.
“I said, ‘No, you can’t get away with that. You have to tell me.’ And he said, ‘If I tell you, will it make you happy or sad? Will you help me better if I tell you?’ ”
Despite herself, despite the fear settling around her, Rita smiled at that. “Arrogant bastard.”
“He is, isn’t he? God, this is so serious and yet it seems fun to me. I told him that. ‘You bastard, you think I’d be jealous?’ He said, ‘No.’ Said it the way he says lies, with perfect insincerity. He doesn’t even care if you know he’s lying. Then he smiles. Damn heartbreaker. But that makes me a fool, doesn’t it? Here I am.”
Rita realized she wanted the other woman to tell her all about him, the way she saw him, what he said to her. But she bit her lip. She stared behind them again and saw the white Pontiac in the traffic stream.
“Why did he come here?”
“He said it was trouble. Nothing else. He said I didn’t want to know too much. The good agent.” She paused. “They’ll probably pick me up. After.”
“What will you do?”
“Tell them to call my husband. Richard is a commodities broker. He’s been in Manhattan the last three days. He’s worth four million at the moment if the sowbellies or whatever they are don’t go bad. It’s exciting in a way, I suppose, what Richard does.” Softly. “I like him very much. I was saying, he’s worth four million, which doesn’t make him J. Paul Getty but does make him slightly more powerful than some GS-14 in a spook agency. I’m not worried.”
“I’ve got to get money out of the bank.”
“No. He said that’s the first place they’d watch after we do our act. He said there’s a bar and grill on Fourteenth Street.” She gave her the address. “Be there by noon but come in through the alley entrance. On foot. He said to keep looking over your shoulder.”
“Jesus,” Rita said.
“Yes. It sounds bad, doesn’t it?”
“How are we going to… to do our act?”
“There’s a carwash on M in Georgetown. This’ll be
fun. A drive-through.”
The Cadillac swayed into M Street, down another hill toward the river. The carwash loomed. Elizabeth wheeled the big vehicle right over the apron and pushed down the power button on the window.
She handed a black man a ten-dollar bill.
“You want a wax, too?”
“I guess so.”
“Wax is two dollars extra.”
“All right.”
He went to the wall, pushed two buttons, returned with change, and passed it through the window to Elizabeth Redford. She closed the window and guided the car to the track.
The car lurched forward, wheel hooked on the chain. The first brusher came and pounded at the hood, yellow brushes at the sides, the whole car suddenly coated with soapy water.
“The unpleasant part is about to follow,” Elizabeth said.
“Damn,” Rita said. “I’ll be soaked.”
“Not if you’re fast enough. After the wax, the blower turns on to dry the car. They’re either behind us or waiting out on the street. I’ll bet the street. In any case, get out. There’s a door to the left where the wash boys have their warm room, keep the towels. I don’t know what else is in there. Wait there. Be amusing, they don’t often get female company.”
Rita smiled.
“When I pull out, I’m pulling out fast. If he’s on the street, he’ll be right after me. If he’s behind us, in the wash, all the better. He won’t be able to see a thing until he gets clear of the dryer. Now!”
Rita pushed open the door. The dryer nearly knocked her off her feet. She ran around the front of the dripping Cadillac, her hair gone wild in the artificial wind. She pushed against the door and went inside.
Two black men were smoking cigarettes wrapped in yellow paper. “Say. Miss. You come in the wrong door.”
“Say maybe the right door.”
“Shit, Todd.”
She ignored them. She waited at the door and watched through the glass. The Cadillac lurched past the men who were wiping it down and hit the street, bouncing on soft springs, turning into the line of traffic down the hill. She saw the Pontiac shoot across the apron after it. A moment later a second car, a black Ford, was after the first. She waited.
The two black men stared frankly at her but couldn’t think of anything to say. Finally, Rita opened the door.
