Angela Sloan

by James Whorton

  4

  One bad habit that I did have was that I sometimes slipped out of school early. But on Wednesday, May third, I stayed to the bell. I walked home and found Ray in the kitchen with his head on the table. He sat up abruptly, blinking.

  “Where have you been?” he said.

  I told him about staying to the bell.

  “Good move, Jumbo,” he said. He snapped his fingers. “I’m also trying to better myself today.”

  “How?”

  He wouldn’t say, but later I found a half-full pint of bourbon in the kitchen wastebasket.

  We watched some of Let’s Make a Deal, and then we played Scrabble with an old set of Mrs. Edel’s that was in a brown box. Ray’s hand twitched, brushing some tiles onto the floor.

  “Are you out of cigarettes?” I said.

  “Yes. But I don’t have to rush out the moment the cigarettes are gone.”

  “Okay.”

  His knee was bobbing, and he was squinting at the ceiling.

  “Let’s go get some cigarettes,” I said.

  He popped out of his chair and hit the front steps at a jog. We crossed Virginia Avenue, and Ray got two orange and gold packs of Raleighs at the grocery under the Watergate. He lit a cigarette in the plaza.

  There is a sharp smell that issues from a newly lit cigarette which I have always enjoyed. I don’t know why it smells different at first. Ray grimaced as he drew the smoke in, and a change came over him. The edginess lifted away. He smiled at his mistake. “I shouldn’t try to do two things at once,” he said.

  He meant giving up the two habits. He was right, I thought.

  I was holding a bag with two cans of SpaghettiO’s in it, but we decided not to dirty up the kitchen. We crossed Virginia Avenue again and had taken our usual booth at the Howard Johnson’s when a man came in, a person of medium height or a little less, dressed in a business suit. I had not seen him before. He sat at the counter, and I saw him peering around the restaurant, scrutinizing faces. The waitress pulled a chrome knob to fill a glass with milk for him. Because we were regulars there I can tell you the waitress’s name: Audrey. Any of these details can easily be checked with her.

  The man in the suit stared at Ray for a long while. Finally Ray gave him a tiny nod. This was the man we would later refer to as HORSEFLY.

  HORSEFLY approached our table and requested in a loud voice to borrow some butter pats. Quietly he added, “Watch me, Ray.” He went away into the men’s room and came out with a sore grin on his mouth. He limped past our table with his head stuck down. The collar of his shirt stood away from the crinkly white backside of his neck.

  He made a loop in the Howard Johnson’s dining room. His limp had a store-bought look to it. It seemed fake and self-inflicted.

  “See how I’m walking,” he hissed when he passed close to us again.

  We ate our meal. For Ray, it was chicken salad and soup. For me, a hamburger with mayonnaise. The man lingered over his milk until some customers had left, and then he sat beside me on the booth seat. “I am wearing a gait-altering device which I donned just now in the men’s room,” he said.

  “No kidding,” Ray said.

  “It’s in my shoe. It came from the place. You know what place I’m talking about.” HORSEFLY swept his gaze across the restaurant again.

  I ought to have mentioned his age before now. He was Ray’s age, late fifties. Another retired Agency man.

  I pretended to be absorbed in a connect-the-dots puzzle on the back of the paper place mat. HORSEFLY advised Ray that he was setting up a small shop in town for the purpose of handling sensitive domestic matters. “I need a man with operational experience and a boatload of discretion. Someone like yourself. What do you say?”

  “Thanks, but I’ve retired,” Ray said.

  In my mind I approved of that answer. There was something I didn’t like about this man.

  HORSEFLY looked at me and nodded hello, as though he had just now noticed that yellow-haired gargoyle on the far end of the booth seat. He wrote out a number on the corner of my place mat and tore it off. “If you change your mind, you can reach me on my secure phone at the Ite-whay Ouse-hay. You heard me right.”

  HORSEFLY limped back to the men’s room to remove his painful gait-altering device. Later without a glance at us he glided out the door.

  5

  Ray pushed the scrap of paper into his windbreaker pocket. He scarcely blinked as he smoked one cigarette, then another down to the filter. We walked home under a drizzle.

  In the kitchen Ray cracked a tray of ice on the counter and asked me to put the Scrabble set away. When I came back he was standing in front of the television with the cold bottom edge of a glass of bourbon pressed against his eyelid. He’d sent me out of the room so I wouldn’t see him take the bottle out of the wastebasket.

  I went upstairs. The bedroom I used had been decorated by Mrs. Edel for her twin granddaughters. There were twin wrought-iron beds, twin vanities with flip-up mirrors in them—twin everything. All the furniture was painted in ivory and gold, and the bunched-up white drapes matched the bed ruffles. I sat up there like an insect in a jar of cotton balls. I attempted to read The Scarlet Letter.

  At some point I discovered my mouth had been hanging open so long that the inner walls of my cheeks were dry. I was thinking about HORSEFLY. I set the book down and examined my hands, front and back. I had a cut on one of my knuckles where I had knocked it on the edge of a bulletin board. I flipped up a vanity mirror to have a look at my own face, and I noticed for the seventh time that my eyebrows were too heavy. My nose was rudimentary, somehow, like the nose on a face card.

  I raised the window and drew in a long breath from the rain-splattered alley. At the Farm when it was wet like this you would sometimes come across mobs of frogs, I mean hundreds of them, tangled together and struggling with their slippery legs.

  My thoughts were here and there until I heard the rip of the weather-stripping on the alley door below. Whenever that door opened it sounded like splitting wood. Then it shut, and I heard the smack of shoe leather against the wet pavement in the alley.

  6

  In the morning I found Ray at the kitchen table asleep with his head on his arms, still dressed in his clothes from the night before. The salt-and-pepper hair was ropy on top of his head. He’d been rained on.

  I emptied the beanbag ashtray and started some coffee. The percolator gave a slurp, and Ray sat up with a line in his cheek from his jacket cuff. He rinsed his eyes at the sink.

  “Let’s forget I wasn’t here last night,” he said.

  “All right.”

  I led him to the scratchy velvet sofa in the front room, and he stretched out with his ankles on the armrest. I got his shoes off. I went to school.

  School that day was a special chore. I worried about Ray, and Mr. Tinker’s Henny Youngman routine in Ancient Civilization was hard to sit through. To distract myself, I was taking my pen apart and putting it back together. Tinker’s allergies gave him sneezing fits, only he didn’t like to sneeze in front of the class, so he stifled his sneezes. “Tink! Tink!” That’s the sound his sneezes made, trying to erupt.

  When I felt I’d had enough, I went to the front of the room and told Mr. Tinker I needed to see the nurse. “I don’t feel so good,” I explained.

  “Nobody does.”

  “I may throw up,” I said. I purposely let some dribble show at the corner of my mouth.

  Tinker wrote me out a pass.

  I didn’t go to the nurse’s office but slipped into the empty lunchroom. The floor was wet from mopping, and my sandal soles left milky tracks. No matter. Outside, the janitor sat on a school chair from which the backrest had been sawed off. He was having a smoke. He stepped himself around in a half circle to show me his back.

  It was a quick trot from my school to the alley behind I Street. I found Ray at our kitchen table, working the World News Digest crossword. He was in a talking mood.

  “You must have gathered t
hat I have come unretired. You know what that means. There will be some nights out. We’ll also need code words for persons we might refer to. Look here.” We chose cryptonyms at random from the crossword answers.

  We decided to eat in that night. I drained a can of artichokes and combined them in a glass bowl with half a small jar of mayonnaise and a quarter spoonful of celery salt. I baked it, and then we ate it with Captain’s Wafers. After that we went out for cigarettes and wound up walking all the way to the Tidal Basin, where the cherry trees seemed to have thrown off their blossoms all at once, fluffing the surface of the water near the shore. It was pretty out.

  When we got home Ray polished our shoes. In spite of my worries, it was good to see him unretired.

  7

  Of the business itself, leading up to the Watergate break-in, I didn’t observe much. What I did see only confirmed my poor first impression of HORSEFLY.

  The next time I saw him was a Saturday, the sixth of May. Ray and I took a cab to Georgetown, where we did some sidewalk technique. Here I am referring to ways for a person on foot to discover whether he is being followed. It was a practice Ray had taught at the Farm, and I knew something about it myself, having gone along with him often for those exercises in Williamsburg, Newport News, and Richmond. When we knew we were clean, we had a second cab drop us alongside a bright, squirming clot of hippies at Dupont Circle.

  A crowd of hippies is a centerless thing. A number of them were facing a girl who stood on a bench declaiming, but I saw they weren’t listening, only waiting in line for corn on the cob. The girl was preaching over their heads. She was dressed like Hiawatha except for the green water pistol in her belt.

  We circled the park until we encountered HORSEFLY and another man to whom we afterward referred by the cryptonym GRISTLE. Both were dressed all in white as though just off the tennis court. GRISTLE was a former FBI man with a stiff black mustache.

  “I see you brought your girl,” HORSEFLY said.

  GRISTLE looked me up and down several times. “I won’t mind having her along,” he said. “That way we don’t seem to be casing the joint.”

  We walked along Massachusetts Avenue. GRISTLE gargled out the orders. “Appear to be tourists! View every detail. Look here, this fence post has a tiger head on it. Let’s all stand here viewing this tiger head.” His long, theatrical laugh startled me. HORSEFLY fell in with a ga-gaga kind of sound. Ray shaded his eyes.

  We stopped again in front of a certain embassy. If you’re reading this, you’ll know which one.

  “We will never get in through the front,” HORSEFLY said.

  GRISTLE told me to run off down a side street. “Pretend you are chasing a puppy.”

  “There is no puppy,” I said.

  “Pretend you saw a duck.”

  I did what he asked. First I called out, “A duck!” Then I ran off down the side street and into the alley behind the embassy building.

  GRISTLE came after me alone.

  “The duck got away,” I said.

  He directed me to tie my shoes. I was wearing my sandals, but I took one off and shook some imaginary gravel out of it. GRISTLE wasn’t done inspecting the building, so I did the other sandal, too. I followed him back to where the others were, and the four of us walked on.

  “There is a service entrance with an alarm system,” GRISTLE said. “I will need to shoot out the streetlights.”

  “We go in one week from today,” HORSEFLY said.

  He and GRISTLE got into a cab and were gone.

  Ray shook his head. Their tradecraft was embarrassing. I hesitate to even call it tradecraft. Ray and I didn’t discuss it, however. We took a cab, a walk, and another cab home to I Street.

  Ray was gone all of the following weekend. He came home early Monday morning, the fifteenth of May. A person can draw his own conclusions. If you read the Post that afternoon, you saw that there’d been a burglary at the Chilean Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. What HORSEFLY could have wanted from there, I don’t know. The paper said a couple of radios were missing and some drawers had been gone through. It looked to be the work of petty thieves.

  8

  Also on that Monday, George Wallace was shot. I will give you what I have on that, though you’ll know most of it already if you have talked to Mrs. Edel.

  Having the landlady next door is not an arrangement I would recommend to anyone involved in clandestine operations. She was an observer, and she liked to pop in when Ray was away on his “business trips.” She asked whether it did not frighten me to be in the house alone. Really she was talking about herself, I guess. “People don’t know what work it is to go the whole day with no conversation,” she said. “You must knock on my door anytime you want company.”

  “I’ll do that,” I promised.

  On the Monday I’m referring to, she popped in around nine in the morning. Ray had been gone all weekend, as I said, and I’d stayed home from school to wait for him. To pass time I’d been drawing a floor plan on a sheet of graph paper. I showed it to Mrs. Edel. The plan was for a fanciful kind of house with a barn connected to it. Horses could enter the living room to munch hay or simply stand there, as they wished.

  “How delightful,” Mrs. Edel said. “You should call your creation ‘Hoof House.’”

  I wrote it along the bottom of the sheet.

  Mrs. Edel pointed out that I was not at school. I asked her to give me a piano lesson. She was leading me through some scales when Ray came in.

  His forehead was like wet plaster, and his hair stuck out as though he had slept against a car seat. He had a fresh cigarette on his lip, not burning.

  “Good morning to you,” he said to Mrs. Edel. He lunged past us into the kitchen. I heard him crack an ice tray on the counter.

  Mrs. Edel became flustered. “It’s time for Dialing for Dollars,” she said. She left.

  When I got to Ray he was trying to close a dish towel around a pile of ice cubes. The ice was for his wrist, which was swollen so badly he couldn’t close his hand. The cubes slid off the counter and over the floor. I gathered them into the towel and helped him to get the pack in place on his wrist. The right hand, the one he held the ice with, was shaking badly.

  “Could you strike me a match?” he said.

  He tightened his mouth to hold the cigarette straight while I lit it.

  “All’s well, Jumbo,” he said around the cigarette.

  I asked him if he wanted some breakfast. I said I would fry him an egg. Then there came a hammering at the front door. It was Mrs. Edel again.

  “I am sorry to keep disturbing you and your father, but you might like to know that Governor Wallace has been shot.” She leaned in to look past me. “Turn on your television.”

  As the three of us stood watching it in the kitchen, the phone rang—one long ring, then no more. “How strange!” Mrs. Edel said. HORSEFLY had some way of making that happen as a signal.

  I took Mrs. Edel by the arm and led her out the front, across five feet of sidewalk, and up the steps to her own door. The image of Mrs. Wallace covering her fallen husband in the shopping center parking lot had frightened Mrs. Edel. “Try to settle down,” I said. “The people in charge know what to do.”

  When I got back to the kitchen, Ray was attempting to fill a pocket flask. Bourbon was pooled across the countertop and had soaked the front of his pants. “I’ve made a mess of this,” he said.

  “You ought to lie down,” I said. But he said he had to keep moving, so I carefully filled the flask for him, wiped it, and slid it into his left trouser pocket, where it clanked against his pocketknife.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You know what to do now, don’t you?”

  “Just go on as usual,” I said.

  He touched me on the top of my head and left out the back.

  9

  A Turdus migratorius, common name robin, made a twig nest on the light fixture outside the alley door and laid four blue eggs in it. I could see them from my window upstairs. I stuck a piec
e of tape across the switch so we wouldn’t forget and turn the light on.

  That was spring. Ray continued to be gone a lot. On May 19, the birthday of Ho Chi Minh, a bomb went off in a ladies’ room at the Pentagon. I remember the date because it happens to be my birthday, too. Ray gave me a shortwave radio, a red portable set in a brown leather case. It was the best gift I have ever received, for you can hear a great variety of surprising things on the shortwaves. I scraped some ivory paint off one of the bed rails and clipped a piece of wire to the iron, and that was my auxiliary antenna. It made the static worse, but I heard my first Chinese opera. To my ears it was a lot of screaming over plinks of tin can banjos, yet it meant something to someone, and therefore I tried to follow it awhile. Then there was the woman who read out sets of numbers in Spanish for minutes on end. That meant something to someone, too.

  At times the reception was better if I licked my finger and placed it on the clip. I made up a story in which my fiancé took back his proposal upon finding out that I had used my body to gather electromagnetic signals.

  Ray started sleepwalking. It seemed like nothing serious. Once he let the bathtub overflow. A neighbor passed away, and some hippies got arrested for building a campfire on the sidewalk. These were some of the odds and ends of that spring on I Street.

  I have said that Ray had virtually nothing to do with the fiasco at the Watergate, yet it was the reason we had to leave D.C. when we did, and in the way that we did. Here’s what happened.

  On the evening of June sixteenth, a Friday, Ray came home earlier than usual. He dropped a box of Chef Boyardee pizza mix on the kitchen table. “I’m taking tonight off,” he said.