Angela Sloan

by James Whorton

  “Listen up,” he said. “We need a case officer, bad.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’ll have to be you.”

  “I don’t know how to be a case officer, Ray.”

  “Well, of course you don’t. Nobody knows how to be a case officer until he has been instructed in how to do it. Which was my job for some time, you’ll recall.”

  “Oh.”

  He laughed. “You have an excellent deadpan.”

  “Thanks, I guess.”

  “Did you know they gave me a medal when I retired?”

  “No, I didn’t know.”

  “We had a little ceremony where they showed it to me. Then they put it in a safe.”

  “I wish I’d been there.”

  “You didn’t miss much. Hey, Jumbo, where are my cigarettes?”

  I went looking in the bedroom, because that was the only other place I could think to look. I looked under the bed. Why? There was a sock under there, which I didn’t touch. It had an evil, hardened look about it. When I came up I felt compelled to wash my hands and face, and I did so.

  When I got back to Ray I found him smoking. “The jacket was on the floor behind the sofa,” he said. “Thanks for breakfast.” The sugar-smeared plastic sleeve that had held the one giant cinnamon roll was on the cushion beside him, empty.

  19

  “All of what I’m about to tell you is secret,” Ray began.

  I listened.

  “The case officer is the person who handles the spies, and there is a method to it. First, he has an intelligence requirement. He doesn’t just go out sniffing the air. He starts with some specific question. How many working fire trucks in Hanoi? The answer is a piece of information. That is number one.

  “Number two, he wants to identify a person who can get this information. Let me repeat that. Identify a person who has access to the information that will answer the intelligence requirement. Who could it be?”

  “The fire chief?”

  “Maybe so. Number three. The case officer is going to study that person. Study him. Here, you don’t know what will be important. Tell me your name again.”

  “Roberta.”

  “Good. This step of studying the person is often the step that will separate an effective case officer from an ineffective one. Some questions you might ask yourself regarding the prospective asset include, what is this person’s day like? What is a good day for him? What would be a terrific day? What would make his day very bad?

  “Does he wait with his kid for the bus in the morning? Do they talk, or do they just stand there? Does he turn away as the bus is leaving, or does he stay and watch it go? Watching it go is a sign of fear. Well, what’s he afraid of? Of course, you want to form some rough ideas about his money situation. You won’t necessarily need to see his bank account. A look at his shoes might be enough.

  “What you are seeking is a need or urgent desire that you are able to satisfy. Sometimes you will find it ready-made. For instance, a relative needs medical care. There are bills. You can help. Or you may induce the person to feel a need that he has not felt before. Here’s one. His oldest child seems bright enough—wouldn’t he like to send that child to private school? Ship her off someplace safe and plush like Switzerland?

  “When you have identified your person’s vulnerability is when you begin to develop him as an asset. You’ve met—now become friends. Ask him to do you a medium-sized favor. It ought to be something that causes him a certain inconvenience. And if he has to bend a rule to do it, so much the better. In return you will buy him lunch. Knowing the lunch is owed to him will help him enjoy it. You are developing an involvement, you see.

  “Soon he’ll have begun to figure some things out. But by the time he guesses what’s happening, he’ll find that he’s already involved and has been for a good while. Seeing you means something to him. You never part without having arranged your next meeting. Because he is involved, he wants you to succeed and be happy. And here is something very important: you want him to be happy as well.

  “Finally, you make the pitch. That’s all there is to it, really. Your first intelligence requirement is this: I want the names of all our neighbors in this wretched hotel.”

  He went into the bathroom and shut the door.

  20

  In the daytime the lobby of the Fletcher Hotel was seldom empty. Idle men filled it. One had the sense that these were men each of whom was between two things. It showed in a new set of freshly pressed secondhand clothes, or else in the way a man shaved and carefully wet-combed his hair, only to stand in one place all morning looking at the rug. Had his life come apart, and was he afraid to sit alone upstairs? Or maybe it was the reverse: his life had hardened into something he didn’t like anymore, and he was waiting for an idea of how to break it.

  I passed through the lobby at intervals of ninety minutes. I would wander down St. Paul for fruit, gum, or cigarettes, then come back through. The men watched me with a steady, low-grade attention. Around dark, things jumped. The quiet men, the time-passers, were replaced by those who wanted to talk and be seen. A giant in a leather vest and white cowboy hat held court inside the vestibule. In place of charisma he had a loud voice and the hat. The desk shift changed at eleven. I went to bed, setting the alarm for three.

  At five after three I was back downstairs. The lobby was empty except for the night clerk behind his grate, a heavyset male with big brown widely spaced eyes and a pink mouth. He wore a black turtleneck. His hair was thin on top, though he couldn’t have been past thirty. I introduced myself as Roberta Dewey from Room 33.

  He asked whether there was a problem with the room.

  “It’s no palace.”

  He stared at me, then went back to running his dull pencil over a page of notebook paper.

  “Do you work here every night?” I asked.

  “Every night.”

  “What is your day like?”

  He twitched on his tall stool. “I get up at eight to follow my jogging program. Then I mop the floor, and then I pray and levitate, and then I eat some whole grains and fruits. Then I come here.”

  I studied him. The black turtleneck couldn’t hide his soft cheeks and round chin. His color was poor, too. He was no fitness enthusiast. He had the face of a sad boy-king in a dungeon. The wide-set brown eyes gave him an amphibian aspect.

  “You don’t like your job,” I said.

  He laughed. “Who would?”

  “It seems easy enough. You register people and check them out. Call a cab now and then.”

  “Why are you here?”

  I gave him my cover story.

  “You’re his nurse?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’d say he likes watching you cross the room.”

  “Would you like to come out here and repeat that?”

  “Don’t get touchy!” he said.

  “Look. I’m fond of Mr. McJones, but it isn’t the way you think. He’s like an uncle to me.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  His voice had gone soft. I’d made a mistake in getting angry.

  “Tell me something,” I said. “What would be a terrific day for you?”

  “A day when nobody yells at me would be nice.”

  “Does the pay from this job meet your needs?”

  “I’ve adjusted my needs to fit the pay. The job gives me time to compose.”

  “Compose what?”

  His nostrils flared with contempt, but his eyes clung to mine. He spun the notebook and slid it through an opening in the grate. It was a cheap, school-style notebook. The wide-ruled pages held poem after poem in broad, dull pencil strokes. He pulled the notebook back. “They’re not for kids to read,” he said.

  “Who does read them?”

  He turned away from me, straightening stacks of paper behind his grate. His cheeks had big blotches on them now. He was blushing.

  I had identified his vulnerability.

  21

  Poetry wa
s never my thing, but on Monday morning at the Enoch Pratt Free Library I got myself a quick education. I even memorized a poem. It wasn’t hard.

  The night clerk’s newtlike eyes blinked at me when I let him know my intention of reciting a poem. “It will be a sonnet by Sir Thomas Wyatt.” I said it through.

  He wore a small, wry smile on his mouth. He raised his black eyebrows and let his head loll about like a heavy flower. “A medieval war poem,” he said.

  “Not at all.” I showed him how the poem described a lover attempting to hide his passionate feelings. The “flag” is the color that appears in his face, betraying his “position.” It was not a difficult business to work out. “Anyway, what is your name?” I said.

  “Henry” was all he gave me. I didn’t push for more. He was busy not seeming impressed. And yet he asked me to say the poem again. I did it.

  He frowned and appeared agitated. I let him think.

  He began scribbling. Soon he said, “Here’s one by William Shakespeare. I’ve written it out so I won’t mix the words up.”

  He read it to me. Toward the end of this short poem Henry began to whisper. Something in the poem moved him. But he read the final two lines out loud in an offhand way, as though to break the poem’s dangerous spell.

  I said, “What about an extra set of sheets, Henry? I’ve got Roy McJones in bed all day up there.”

  “But of course, my little friend,” he said, and he slid down from his stool. It was a long way down for him. There was something wrong with his legs.

  When he got back, he pushed a frayed but clean set of sheets across the counter.

  “Thanks, Henry. I’m aware that caused you a certain inconvenience, not to mention that you probably had to bend a rule.”

  “It’s no inconvenience. And you’re allowed to have all the sheets you want.”

  “Mm. I seem to have left my key upstairs.”

  “I can lend you one.”

  He opened a shallow steel cabinet and took a key from hook number thirty-three. There was one more key on that hook. I asked him to give me that one, too.

  “Sorry, I can’t. That is a rule.”

  “I want to tell you something in confidence, Henry. Roy McJones has got acute paranoia. That’s why we couldn’t stay in Bethesda anymore. He thought Mrs. McJones was putting antifreeze in his grenadine! If he should find out there is one extra key to Room 33 down here lying on a hook waiting to get borrowed so someone can slip into his room and poison or molest him, he will have us pack and go no matter what time of day or night it is.”

  Henry blinked softly at me. “But you’re not paranoid, are you?”

  “I see your point. I don’t have to tell McJones about the key. But I promised him that I would never, ever lie about duplicate keys. I like to honor promises.”

  With a shrug Henry handed it over. “Boss will have my skin when he sees that hook empty,” he said.

  “Put any spare key on there. Your boss won’t check the number.”

  He did as I suggested. There was my medium-sized favor.

  In return I let him read me some original verse from his notebook. Just as Ray had predicted, earning his favor had put Henry into a happy mood. He chattered brightly as he picked the yellow foil wrapper from a cube of chicken bouillon. He stood the cube on a page of his notebook and it waited there, naked, while the water in the electric kettle got hot.

  “You have a decent ear for poetry,” Henry said. “You’ll like this next one.”

  But it was time for the pitch. “Look here, Henry. I need a list of all persons registered on the third floor. McJones can’t sleep without it. Will you help me?”

  He blinked the big, moist eyes with their speckled irises. He showed me the guest register. There were fewer than two dozen names for the whole five-story hotel. I copied them down.

  “Okay, Henry. Read me the one I’m going to like.”

  Later that night, Ray and I considered whether we ought to seal the relationship with a small cash payment. It would deepen Henry’s involvement with us, but suppose the extra money led him to quit his job as night clerk.

  “There is often a temptation to give more than you have to,” Ray said. “A good case officer gets inside his agent’s world, finds the thing that is missing, and gives only that.”

  We agreed we had a better prospect in Henry if I simply kept listening to his poems.

  Ray looked over the list of names again. “It is your first recruitment and a good one,” he said.

  22

  Because of his cover as a paranoid schizophrenic shut-in, Ray wasn’t going out at all. I did the errands, such as buying paper dishware and a blue enamel dripolator at the Marquis Variety Store on Howard Street. I moved the Scamp once a day to keep it from getting ticketed. The idea was to lie low and let the week pass, then get our new IDs and drive west, maybe to Colorado.

  Ray didn’t seem to mind his confinement much. He took to it as though it were a natural phase. He worked the crossword puzzle in the World News Digest when the new one came out, and he read and reread each story relating to the arrests at the Watergate building. We saw HORSEFLY’S name on the front of The New York Times. His White House phone number—the same one he’d jotted on a corner of my place mat—had turned up in an address book carried by one of the burglars. The Times described him as the mastermind of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

  “The hell he was,” Ray said.

  I asked him what was the purpose of the break-in.

  “That’s like asking what is the purpose of seven thousand nuclear warheads in Europe.”

  “What is the purpose of seven thousand nuclear warheads in Europe?”

  “If a thing can happen, it’ll happen,” he said. “In fact, it probably has.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “I don’t, either,” Ray said. “This idea of electronic surveillance has really grabbed ahold of someone’s imagination. In the old days it was all about human assets. It’s true, the bugs are cleaner, because you don’t have that chain of personalities all groping each other. Bear in mind, this is an old man with a very bad headache talking.”

  “I’ll get some aspirin,” I said.

  “The problem is, we keep changing presidents. Each one has to prove himself. And it’s a shame, because democracy—well, you’d prefer to be in favor of it. But nowadays we change presidents so often, the fellows never get the chance to settle in. They get in there, you know, and naturally the first thing they have to do is try all the buttons out. ‘What does this button do?’ ‘Well, push it and find out, sir.’ Hell, I’d do the same if it were me. And then something happens, some real or imagined insult, and the President considers that sand has been kicked in his face. Hey, skinny, your ribs are showing. Therefore, you better believe some buttons are going to get pushed. Now, you take your average dictator or king. They do get mean as hell after fifteen or twenty years, but they settle, okay? They get to where they don’t have to prove anything, because they just don’t care anymore, which is in a way healthy. There is a pragmatism that comes with that. We haven’t had a president really settle down since Franklin Roosevelt.”

  “But what was the intelligence requirement? What was HORSEFLY looking for?”

  “That I don’t know. National security—it’s never good to ask a lot of questions. The cynics are calling it campaign hijinks, of course.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Well, viewing it from an un-nuanced outside perspective, they think Nixon was seeking some sort of election advantage.”

  I considered what he was saying. “Wouldn’t that be illegal?”

  “I think it would be, Jumbo.”

  I made out a shopping list. Aspirin, something for lunch. Ray’s two bottles of bourbon were long gone. I mentioned that.

  “I’ll try drying out awhile,” he said.

  “Is that a good idea right now?”

  “Why not?”

  I could tell he was surprised that I question
ed him on it. Half an odd smile slanted across his mouth. He was on edge, though, and chattier than usual, and somehow loose. He’d turned the linings of his pockets out. How long did he mean to leave them that way?

  I took a long walk to Lexington Market, where fish, hats, vegetables, knives, and candy were sold from the stalls. I bought some good-sized fried chicken thighs for forty cents apiece. Breasts were selling for fifty-five. It was fine with me because I prefer the thigh.

  When I got back to the Fletcher it was after one-thirty. I found Ray sitting on the sofa barefooted, tapping or rather slapping both feet on the wooden floor. There was an awful scorched smell in the room. He’d left the hot plate on under the dripolator and burned the pot dry.

  “I smoked up all my cigarettes, too,” he said.

  I had left a new pack in his windbreaker pocket, but I saw from the overflowing ashtray that he had already found that one. I got a pack from the machine in the lobby, then arranged the chicken thighs and some mashed sweet potatoes on our paper plates. Ray smoked a cigarette, and we ate our late lunch.

  “Thank you for this meal,” he said. He looked away when I looked at him. Something was wrong, but I couldn’t tell what.

  “I shouldn’t have you eating lunch so late,” I said.

  “I’m dizzy,” he said.

  I was on my feet to bring him a cup of water when a knock came at the door.

  23

  It was Henry.

  “What do you want?” I said. He’d surprised me, and my tone was off.

  “Are you coming to see me tonight?”

  “Of course, Henry. After I get Mr. McJones settled.”

  I stood holding the door. Henry wanted more from me. I could see him trying to bend his newtlike gaze past my arm to look inside.

  From behind me Ray said, “I don’t feel so good.” I twisted to see him standing over me, his chin shiny with chicken grease. “Who are you?” he said to Henry.