Angela Sloan

by James Whorton

“Are you sick?”

  “No, I’m drunk.”

  I set about putting the pizza together while Ray laid his head on his arms. I added a can of mushrooms to the top of the pizza to dress it up, but Ray wound up not eating any. When the pizza came out of the oven he was on the sofa, and I didn’t choose to wake him. Around ten I went upstairs and got in bed with my radio on and the window open.

  It was not yet daylight when someone pounded on the kitchen door from the alley. I ran down and let HORSEFLY in. He was pale and agitated. His eyes were a wreck, squinting and bleary. He stared at my hands as I measured coffee into the percolator.

  Ray came into the kitchen in his socks. They spoke as though I were not there.

  HORSEFLY: You and I have both got to get out of town, Ray.

  RAY SLOAN: What’s up?

  HORSEFLY: Five of the boys from Miami have been arrested. They’re in jail. The D.C. police arrested them at the Watergate.

  RAY SLOAN: What happened? Did they set off an alarm?

  HORSEFLY: No, there was no alarm. I don’t think so. Where were you?

  RAY SLOAN: Have some coffee.

  HORSEFLY: My ulcers. Have you got some milk?

  RAY SLOAN: Usually we do.

  HORSEFLY: Some scotch?

  We didn’t have scotch, so HORSEFLY mixed a small shot of bourbon with his milk.

  RAY SLOAN: I was ill, so I came back here.

  HORSEFLY: I see. No one was watching the stairs, then.

  RAY SLOAN: Where were you and GRISTLE?

  HORSEFLY: We were monitoring the radio in the hotel room. One of the men managed to signal us that they were being arrested, and then we bugged out.

  RAY SLOAN: You cleaned out the room?

  HORSEFLY: Pretty much.

  RAY SLOAN: They can’t connect you to the men they’ve arrested, then. The men will know to say nothing, correct?

  HORSEFLY: I’ve got a lawyer on his way down there. There’s a possibility one of the men was carrying a key to the room.

  RAY SLOAN: Oops. That’s a blunder. Where’s my crossword?

  HORSEFLY: I was hoping you had it.

  RAY SLOAN: Please don’t tell me you’ve left my crossword in the hotel room, Howard.

  HORSEFLY: There’s a possibility I left it in the wastebasket.

  RAY SLOAN: My name is on the subscription label.

  HORSEFLY: I’m glad you’re feeling better now, Ray. We could have used you by the stairs. The boys had to tape the locks.

  RAY SLOAN: What a screwup.

  HORSEFLY: GRISTLE is very concerned that we not let this spread.

  RAY SLOAN: So you make some calls from your White House phone and shut it down.

  HORSEFLY: Right. I’m not too worried about it, but GRISTLE takes more of a kamikaze approach. He’s raised the idea—well, I hesitate to say it in front of your girl, Ray.

  I left but listened from the other side of the kitchen door.

  HORSEFLY: GRISTLE has raised the idea of our all being shot on a sidewalk.

  RAY SLOAN: What good would that do?

  HORSEFLY: It would end the thing and contain it. He’s worried the thing will get back to the campaign committee or even the President.

  RAY SLOAN: Nonsense. GRISTLE wants to be shot as well?

  HORSEFLY: He’ll shoot himself last.

  RAY SLOAN: And you believe him?

  HORSEFLY: I watched him hold his arm over a candle once, just to frighten a secretary. You could smell it, Ray.

  RAY SLOAN: I see. So you’re leaving town.

  HORSEFLY: You and I served in the big war. We’ve been down enough dark alleys. This would be a stupid thing to get shot over.

  RAY SLOAN: Where are you intending to go?

  HORSEFLY: I’m not going to tell you. It’s a bugout. Just leave.

  10

  Ray and I left by the front door at nine in the morning. I had on my cranberry tunic dress with a ribbed white mock turtleneck under it, white socks with small dog heads on them, and my black oxford shoes. Ray wore his usual outfit, except that he’d put on a necktie under his windbreaker. We set out across New Hampshire Avenue at a stroll pace.

  The sidewalks were busy with sightseers. We stopped at a bench in Lafayette Park while Ray smoked a Raleigh cigarette. The sunflower knapsack was packed to bulging on my back, causing me to perch at the front edge of the bench. I watched a man in a blue business suit kneel to pick up a quarter that had been lying heads-up on the sidewalk nearby. He glanced at me, then looked away.

  “It is Christmas morning,” Ray said.

  In other words he felt that we were being surveilled. Ordinarily in clandestine work, when you discover you’re being surveilled, you abort the operation and go home. But this was something different. I asked Ray what we were going to do.

  “Let me think a minute,” he said.

  I felt eyes all over me, like flies on my skin. Across the street, by the White House fence, a tribe of hippie kids sat in a half circle knocking on drums. All were barefooted, with soles like tarpaper. Then the drumming stopped, and a boy in a brown corduroy suit began to read off a speech about Cambodia. He didn’t think we should be bombing the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong who were headquartered there, he said. Someone in the crowd took his photograph. A few people wandered away, and the others closed in tighter.

  Someone called out to the boy, “Didn’t I see your face in the post office?” That won a couple of sour laughs.

  Ray sat very still.

  From the crowd there came a sudden shuffling of shoes. Up by the fence, one of the female hippies had brought out a gasoline can. There was a chorus of groans as she doused the head of the boy in the corduroy suit. People backed into traffic, and cars slid and stopped short. A woman ran, swinging her child by the length of his arm. It was the way you might swing a bag of laundry if for some reason you had to run away with it.

  The boy in the corduroy suit sat straight and still, cross-legged and barefoot. His mop of hair was stuck flat to his skull, and the corduroy was dark where it had been soaked. The other hippies had backed their drums away to a safe distance. The girl set down the gas can and presented the boy with a book of matches.

  I grabbed Ray’s arm. “That boy is about to burn himself,” I said. I was on my feet, but Ray held me back.

  The boy produced a pipe from the pocket of his corduroy suit jacket and stuck it in his teeth MacArthur-style. He struck a match and brought the flame to the bowl, puffing at the stem as though kissing it. He worked up a good tall plume of white tobacco smoke. He snuffed out the match on a wet sleeve.

  It must have been Kool-Aid in the gas can, or maybe fruit punch. The hippies were passing the can now, sipping from the spout, letting the red drink dribble down their necks.

  A woman with her husband and child cried shrilly, “Is nothing serious?” To which the boy in the corduroy suit replied in a dreamy spaceman voice, “Everything’s equally serious, baby.”

  I studied Ray’s straight-nosed profile. I suppose he had guessed right away that the self-immolation scene was a bluff. Sizing up a situation fast is a skill clandestine officers live by. I saw that I would need to learn it.

  Ray leaned close and said some instructions in my ear. I said them back and he nodded once, a kind of checkmark he made with his head. He stood on his cigarette.

  We walked south, alongside the White House. In an upper window of the Old Executive Office Building, I saw someone in a white shirt turn his back. We cut across the Ellipse and joined the crowd on the National Mall. The atmosphere under the June a.m. sun was festival-like. A thousand human beings were on the grass, or on the straw that covered the mud, taking in the United States capital.

  We had walked fully past the Natural History Museum before Ray touched my arm. We turned back and climbed the steps. Inside, several hundred small voices shouted in no particular direction. The bodies streamed in through turnstiles and eddied at the rail by the stuffed bull elephant, under the rotunda. Ray tugged me by my wrist throug
h the churning crowd. We didn’t go fast. He wanted whoever he thought was following us to keep up a little farther.

  I never saw who was following us, but I am confident someone was. Ray’s judgment has to be trusted on this. He taught surveillance and surveillance detection at the Farm for seven years. I believed him and still do.

  In the Ice Age exhibit, a wax Cro-Magnon family stood together in furs on a hump of hard sand. The mother pressed a baby to her shoulder while the father, in a half crouch, watched into the distance. A sad, confused-looking youngster was nearby. Whoever had painted the whites of the youngster’s eyes had gone outside the lines onto his eyelids, and I think that was what made him look so nutty and destitute. It was as though a sentence had begun to form inside his head. His way of life was changing, and he was unprepared.

  The gallery was long and narrow. People bunched up around the signs that explained the Cro-Magnon diet and so forth. Ray grabbed me by the armpits and lifted me off the floor. He pushed me into and through the crowd. A woman gave a yelp when I kneed her. When Ray had muscled us through to the end of the gallery, he dropped me to my feet and I ducked my head.

  “Arkansas,” I heard him say. That was a signal meaning diverge.

  I veered left like a shot down the winding staircase. The slick leather soles of my oxford shoes clicked cleanly on the dished-out marble steps.

  11

  Special hazards exist for a female in clandestine work, and one of them is the tendency of women to talk in the ladies’ restroom. Back in Williamsburg, out on drills with Ray, I would sometimes go disguised as a boy or as a series of boys, and I know from experience that a nine-year-old can walk into a men’s room stall with red hair and come out with his hair dark brown and no one will say a word to him or even notice, because that’s how a men’s room operates. A girl by herself in a ladies’ room, however, is community property.

  At the ladies’ room on the ground floor of the Museum of Natural History, every stall was occupied and the line went out the door. I had been standing there not two seconds when a woman broke off conversation to ask me what was wrong, and four others turned to look. You see what I mean.

  The point was to keep moving. I peeled the tunic dress over my head and with nine women staring got into a set of green denim overalls. I shook out a canvas shoulder bag and shoved the dress and knapsack into that, and I tucked my hair into a blue beret. I’d found the beret in a drawer of one of the ivory and gold vanities. It was ugly, but it was something I could get all my hair into. Then I left the ladies’ room and slipped out the rear exit of the museum onto Constitution Avenue.

  It was bright out, dazzling.

  I took a cab to the Capital Hilton and passed through the cool, dim lobby. The people in chairs were inattentive, lulled by the air-conditioning. On sixteenth Avenue, where the cabs line up, I told a driver to take me to Capitol Hill. That took twelve minutes.

  I walked some blocks along the row houses. The sidewalks weren’t busy. If GRISTLE were to find me here, perhaps I’d be in danger, but I needed a place like this to verify that I was alone. I stopped to examine the hen-and-chick plants in someone’s brick planter, then turned and walked back the way I had come, checking the few faces I passed.

  I felt certain now that I had not been followed. From the corner of Second and F, I jogged to the front of Union Station. I bought a ticket, got on a train, and put my face in a copy of Newsweek that someone had left on the seat.

  As the car filled, I counted heads. When the train moved, there were twenty-six people in it, the same as the number of letters in the alphabet.

  From the knapsack I brought out a flattened wax-paper package containing a lettuce-and-baloney sandwich with mayonnaise. Somewhere in D.C. there was another one, without mayonnaise, which I hoped Ray Sloan was eating.

  12

  I made the mistake of letting my thoughts wander. Where was Ray? Suppose he got held up. A person could be knocked down by a taxi while crossing the street on the way to a reconvergence, as happened to Deborah Kerr in An Affair to Remember. I imagined Ray hurt and myself alone in an unfamiliar city. Saliva pooled on my tongue.

  I shut my eyes and breathed in a steady and deliberate fashion. I tried to think of my body as a machine that would do what I asked it to, so long as I managed it correctly. I made myself bite into my lettuce-and-baloney sandwich and chew. The vinegary smell of the mayonnaise helped me to feel better. I always bought Hellman’s mayonnaise, never the store brand.

  I thought the problem through. If either Ray or I did miss the re-convergence, one would signal the other by means of a simple coded message in the classified section of the World News Digest. Some years ago Ray had set up a prepaid account with their editorial offices in Sarasota, Florida, and I knew the phone number by heart. The World News Digest was available in the checkout line at any supermarket in the country. The method was reliable and secure.

  I squeezed the wax paper from my sandwich into a hard ball, like a peach pit. I must have gone into a trance after that, because I jumped when the conductor touched my shoulder. “Charm City,” he said.

  From the platform I ran up an iron stairway to the station lobby. I found a ladies’ restroom, empty this time except for two girls somewhat older than me who stood at the mirrors. One girl brushed her hair, while the other observed her dreamily. I shut myself into a stall.

  The girls spoke. One had plans to buy a goldfish, and she was trying to choose a name. “Bubbles,” she said. It was not a very bright idea, seeing that goldfish do not especially give off bubbles as far as I am aware. Think about that. The other girl suggested the name “Helen Sanchez,” which caused them both to gasp and scream. My, but it was awfully funny to them. They were still howling and bent, clawing at each other’s sweaters, when I slipped out of the stall and pushed the green overalls into a wastebasket along with the ugly beret. I was happy to be back in my comfortable red tunic dress. The hairbrush lay on the sink rim. My own hair could have used brushing.

  Like a machine built for one purpose, I walked my body across the station, dodging families and hills of luggage. I emerged into sunlight in the city of Baltimore, Maryland.

  The cab at the front of the line was green. I didn’t like that. The others were yellow. But you can’t make them go out of order. I took the green cab downtown, then switched to a yellow one that brought me back up North Charles. I paid the driver and hopped out as he slowed for a red light. The city was new to me, but I matched up what was around me to the map in my head. I walked seven blocks in what would have looked on the map like a stairstep pattern. I passed a storefront with the words Golden Monkey Restaurant in cursive on the window. Next door was Lucky Bus Tour, and beyond that, an out-of-business tailor shop. I turned back. The block was empty of traffic. The time was somewhat past two in the afternoon.

  Inside the Golden Monkey Restaurant I was met by a wiry, dark, mean-looking Chinese girl. She said something loud and short and had to repeat it before I understood. The phrase she kept saying was, “How many!”

  I told her I was here to meet a gentleman. She led me past a carved wooden screen and some potted philodendrons to a corner where Ray sat with his back rounded and his right eye swollen almost shut.

  13

  “I walked into a door edge,” he said. “Were you followed?”

  “No.”

  “Good. I had my little mother with me for another half hour after we diverged. Did you see her by the elephant? She had one of those crying radio babies.”

  The old radio babies never cried but were little more than department-store baby dolls stuffed with batteries and electronics. There was a box full of them at the Farm. The new radio babies will cry and writhe.

  “She handed me off when I came back onto the Mall. Then she picked me up again at the National Gallery.”

  “How did you finally lose her?”

  “I had some cabs waiting. It was pretty easy. These people have the resources of professionals, but they don’t stick on
you like professionals.”

  There had been dozens of babies in that museum, but the only one I’d paid attention to was the Cro-Magnon baby made of wax. I was about to ask Ray who “these people” were when, from around the carved wooden screen, the mean-looking Chinese girl shot out and set a glass of beer in front of him. She gave me a hard, silent appraisal, turning away just as I was asking for a Pepsi. I felt the insult to be deliberate.

  She fit in pretty well with the seedy ambience of the Golden Monkey. The floor was gritty, and the heart-leaf philodendrons were dying of thirst in their pots. It takes some serious negligence to kill that plant. Anyway, we were there. Ray was sweating a lot. He dabbed at his forehead with a red cloth napkin, using care around the swollen eye.

  “Here is the point,” he said when I finally got my question out. “Anyone we know, we must avoid. Friends and former colleagues, neighbors, everybody. But especially GRISTLE. Can we let it go at that?”

  “I know GRISTLE wants to kill us,” I confessed.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I heard it through the door. He wants us shot on the sidewalk so we can’t tell about the Watergate.”

  Ray shook his head. “Jumbo,” he said.

  “You didn’t tell me not to listen.”

  “First of all, nobody wants to shoot you. He might want to shoot me, but—”

  “That’s worse!” I started to break up at this point, against my will.

  “It’s not going to happen,” Ray said. “It won’t happen. We’re safe, okay? This joker was trained by the FBI, for heaven’s sake.”

  “You’re not afraid of the FBI?”

  “Oh, no. Not in the least. Go to any post office and look at the slobs they have on the most-wanted list. If they can’t catch a bunch of hippies who bombed the Pentagon, how are they going to catch us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, they’re not. Tell me you’re not scared.”

  “I’m not scared.”

  “Good. And if you do see GRISTLE, run the other way.”