Money for Nothing

by Donald E. Westlake

  Riverside Drive, high over the Hudson, is peaceful but windy, even in July. The cab stopped at one of the tall broad apartment buildings placed here to take advantage of the view, and Mr. Nimrin impatiently clambered out while Josh paid the fare. Then he levered himself out, the cab fled, and Mr. Nimrin said, “Well, come along.”

  There was a doorman, who saw them coming and opened the door. Mr. Nimrin ignored him, so Josh did, too, and followed Mr. Nimrin at a left oblique across the gold lobby, not toward the elevators. Mr. Nimrin walked like a man pleased to deliver bad news; a flatfooted heavy tread, arms moving a bit more than necessary at his sides, eyes and face following that eagle beak in a straight line, implacable, ignoring everything to left and right.

  On the left wall of the lobby was a door, darker gold, with two white marble steps and a delicate wrought iron railing that led up to it. Mr. Nimrin mounted the steps, pushed open the door, and stepped through, not looking around to see if Josh were still in his wake. He was, and heard a bell ring faintly, somewhere farther ahead, when the door was opened. It sounded again when he let the door snick shut behind himself.

  This was a waiting room, windowless, in calming grays and pale greens. Two gray vinyl sofas at right angles faced a square wooden coffee table on which magazines were lined in orderly display. Floor lamps flanked the sofa, beaming gentle illumination upward. Reproductions of Hudson River school paintings were grandly framed on the walls. The carpet was a curly light green that looked like Velcro's gentler cousin.

  “Sit there,” Mr. Nimrin said, with a shooing gesture at the righthand sofa, while he himself headed for the one on the left.

  As they sat, Josh said, “What is this place?”

  “A psychiatrist's office,” Mr. Nimrin told him. “No one knows I know her. We will not be spied upon here.”

  Josh said, “So you can tell me—”

  “One moment,” Mr. Nimrin said, again raising that warning finger. “She will be coming out.”

  He looked past Josh at the interior door, which obediently opened, and a woman leaned out. She was about sixty, stocky but striking looking, with thick waves of gray hair around a strong-featured face. She wore a high-necked bulky gray sweater and black slacks. She peered past Josh and said, without surprise, “It's you. Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” he told her. He was curt, but not as though he meant to be insulting.

  “I'm with a patient,” she said.

  “We will be brief,” he assured her, which sounded to Josh like a dismissal.

  To her, too. “Take your time,” she said, smiled meaninglessly at Josh, and left, closing the door.

  “Now,” Josh said, “you can tell me what's going on.”

  “That I cannot,” Mr. Nimrin corrected him. “What I can tell you is that it all depends on you.” He looked more stern than ever. “What you do,” he said, “over the next days and perhaps weeks, will determine whether or not we are both terminated.”

  6

  YOU DON'T MEAN FIRED,” Josh said.

  “Fired at, perhaps,” Mr. Nimrin told him. “In any case, dead.”

  “But…why?” Josh made vague hand movements. “Why am I even in this?”

  “I must accept some of the blame for that,” Mr. Nimrin said.

  “Really?”

  “You shouldn't be in it at all,” Mr. Nimrin said. “It was very stupid of those people to activate you. What's the point? You're an amateur. You have no training. You're a lamb led to slaughter.”

  “Oh, God.” Josh pressed his palms onto the vinyl sofa seat on both sides of himself, praying for balance. A lamb led to slaughter? Mr. Nimrin didn't look like a man who made jokes.

  “If it were only you,” Mr. Nimrin went on, “I would never concern myself. Let them embarrass themselves, having put some babe in the woods through the meat grinder.”

  Meat grinder—it was getting worse. Josh said, “Mr. Levrin didn't seem—”

  “Mister Levrin?” Mr. Nimrin snorted. “Levrin is an idiot,” he said, “as even you probably noticed, but he is also savage and ruthless and merciless. I have seen him at his bloody work.”

  “Oh, have you?” Josh said. This is a nightmare, he told himself. I've fallen asleep at my desk. If I don't wake up, I'll be in trouble.

  Big trouble.

  “Levrin,” Mr. Nimrin was going on, “is capable of the kind of cruelty only possible to those with absolutely no imagination.”

  Trying to remember back to that encounter at the ferry terminal, trying to remember Levrin's face and words and manner, Josh said, “He didn't seem like that kind of person.”

  “Of course not,” Mr. Nimrin said. “If he seemed like that kind of person, he'd be no use to anyone at all. It's because he can seem like no more than the idiot he is that he is effective.”

  “But—” Floundering, Josh tried to find firm footing somewhere in all this. “You said, you're partly to blame, for me being in whatever this is.”

  “Well, of course.” Mr. Nimrin shook an irritated head. “I'm the one who recruited you. But no one was ever supposed to make actual use of you.”

  “What do you mean, you recruited me?” Here at last, surprisingly enough, there was firm footing. “I've never seen you before in my life.”

  “Well, yes, you did,” Mr. Nimrin said. “You wouldn't remember. I was in disguise.”

  Disguise? Josh almost laughed. How could a powerful presence like Mr. Nimrin disguise himself? Fake beards and beauty marks, humpbacks. He already had an accent.

  But then the urge to laugh faded, to be replaced by a fresh fear. Why were they in this psychiatrist's office, who “they” didn't know Mr. Nimrin knew? Was he just crazy, after all? Was this some paranoid fantasy? But if so, whose?

  Mr. Nimrin caught the unexpressed thoughts and said, “You know nothing about disguise, that's obvious. Nothing is easier than disguise.”

  Josh had to ask: “What were you disguised as?”

  “A bartender.”

  “A what?”

  “This was nine years ago,” Mr. Nimrin told him. “There was, at that time, on Sixth Street in the East Village, a bar known as Uncle Ray's.”

  “Oh, sure,” Josh said.

  “It is no longer there,” Mr. Nimrin said, “but at that time it was popular with NYU students. You were there as well sometimes, though I don't believe you were an NYU student.”

  “I was there to pick up NYU students,” Josh said, remembering, with some nostalgic pleasure.

  “I was there for a similar reason,” Mr. Nimrin told him. “To collect young people. You were one of the ones I collected.”

  “What do you mean, collect?”

  Mr. Nimrin sat back on the sofa, frowning at the coffee table. He seemed all at once not quite so certain of himself. He said, “At first, I wasn't going to tell you your part in my scheme, but then I realized, if they're interrogating you it won't matter what you give them because I'm doomed either way. Whereas, if you have a clear idea of the situation, it will certainly encourage you to do your best not to become an innocent victim.” He looked at Josh. “Believe me,” he said, “you do not want to be an innocent victim.”

  “I believe you,” Josh said.

  “Very well. We must go back,” Mr. Nimrin said, “to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The confusion, I would even say devastation, created in the intelligence communities in the east by that disaster was beyond belief. Before, there had been easy alliances, cooperation, a world of known friends and known enemies. Suddenly, it was as though we'd entered a world of warlords, none of us secure in our territory. Who did we work for? Who did we report to? Who would provide our funding? Who was with us, and who against?”

  Mr. Nimrin sighed and shook his head. He adjusted himself on the sofa. Clearly, these memories were painful ones. He said, “It took years, I must say, before the situation was sorted out, even a little. We turned out to be Ukraine, surprising many of us, and linked to Naval Intelligence. The so-called Russian navy, you see, is mostly
in the Ukraine, the Black Sea having been the Soviet Union's primary access to open water.”

  Josh said, “What do I have to do with any of this?”

  “Nothing!” thundered Mr. Nimrin, suddenly enraged. “That's the aggravating thing of it!” Calming himself, he said, “I could see that our future, in our new Ukrainian guise, was extremely unstable. It seemed to me that I should first feather my nest and then retire, before things got worse. This is where you come in.”

  “I do?”

  “One of the things that carried over to the new order,” Mr. Nimrin said, “was the sleeper fund, moneys to be spent on deepcover operatives, maintained on standby wherever in the world we might have an interest. These sleepers were mostly a joke, as we in the field knew. Our dread was always that we might have to wake one of them and depend on his help in an emergency. So the sleepers were not wakened.”

  “Is that me?” Josh asked. “A sleeper?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “But I've been wakened.”

  “That's the infuriating part of it!” Mr. Nimrin said, pounding his knee. “I have no idea what this operation can be. How could they be so stupid as to activate you? What can they have in mind?”

  Josh said, “What did you have in mind?”

  “What, me?” Rage gone, Mr. Nimrin smiled at his former self. “I was quite clever,” he said. “I arranged to become a recruiter of sleepers, each of whom would be paid one thousand dollars a month while on standby, then more, of course, if ever activated. I needed people who would look plausible to my superiors, who would vet them once and then never think about them again. Rootless young men, single, with a reputation for radical politics.”

  “I wasn't in radical politics,” Josh protested.

  “You forget,” Mr. Nimrin said, “I was your bartender. I heard the loose talk around that bar, and you were very much a part of it. One of my first candidates, in fact.”

  Josh sank back on the sofa, trying to remember how much of an idiot he'd been in those days—then, trying not to remember.

  Mr. Nimrin went on, “My goal was to accumulate twenty sleepers, and of course I would divert their payment checks to myself, because none of them would ever know he'd been recruited. Twenty thousand dollars a month, two hundred forty thousand dollars a year, for ten years. I felt I could maintain the fraud for that long, and then, with two and a half million dollars US., I could very easily disappear. Buy an island, for instance, in the Caribbean. There were many choices.”

  Josh said, “I was one—” and the inner door opened again. This time, what came out was male, short, skinny, about forty, with a face speckled in acne and a nose like a can opener. He wore a New York Mets cap, a New York Knicks T-shirt, baggy dragging green running shorts, white tube socks, and large white sneakers. He scuttled across the waiting room, not looking in their direction, pretending he was alone, his pocked cheeks twitching. He fumbled in panic with both hands on the knob of the lobby door, finally managed to pull it open, and scuttled away, the door snicking shut in his wake.

  After this apparition had gone, Josh got back to the topic at hand: “I was one of the people you pretended to recruit. But I got the money.”

  “This was absolutely unforeseeable,” Mr. Nimrin said. He sounded very irked. “Less than two years into the project, I became caught up in a ridiculous case of industrial espionage.”

  “I read about the trial,” Josh told him.

  “There was no trial,” Mr. Nimrin said. “It was all ludicrous.” Then he gave Josh a keen look. “You read about it? Very enterprising. In the Washington Post? You saw that photo.”

  “You had a moustache then.”

  “The only public picture of me extant.” Mr. Nimrin sounded bitter about that. “Forced to make a change, I did away with the moustache. In any event, that farrago cost me my position with the agency. My desk was taken over by others, who of course had no idea what I'd been up to. I'd only managed to insert six of my false sleepers into the system, including yourself, and now all six of you began to receive my money.”

  “Every month.”

  “Infuriating,” Mr. Nimrin said. “Three of the six never cashed their checks, so it was assumed they'd had a change of heart and were dropped from the program. But the other three, including you, have done very well off me the last seven years.”

  Josh said, “You couldn't take charge again?”

  “They no longer trusted me,” Mr. Nimrin said. “A secondary effect of that ridiculous federal case was that certain things came out that made my employers suspicious of me. That's why I'm still in this country. They've taken my passport so they won't lose me. I have fine quarters at a safe house in nearby Long Island, and they're waiting to find out what I've done. I have developed ways to elude them temporarily, as I have done today. Until now, I've been safe, if bored. But now! Now they've activated you!”

  “Yes, they have,” Josh said.

  “You! A guileless naif! An artless witling! An unskilled, untrained, unqualified marplot! A—”

  “Hey,” Josh said. “Enough.”

  Mr. Nimrin lowered a brow at him. “Do you disagree?”

  “No, not really. But you don't have to rub my nose in it.”

  “But I do,” Mr. Nimrin told him. “I have to make certain you understand the part you are now to play.”

  “I've been activated,” Josh said.

  “Yes, that's all well and good,” Mr. Nimrin said, “but the part you have to play is someone who has been an undercover mole all these years. A willing traitor.”

  Josh sat up. “Traitor?”

  “You took our money,” Mr. Nimrin pointed out.

  “I didn't know it was yours, I didn't know what it was.”

  “You do now,” Mr. Nimrin told him, “and let me tell you what you must do about it.”

  Go straight to the authorities, Josh thought, but kept the thought to himself.

  Or did he? “If you try to go to the authorities,” Mr. Nimrin said, “who wouldn't believe you anyway, or would believe you were an actual turncoat trying to turn back—”

  Josh moaned.

  “And you have nothing real to tell them anyway,” Mr. Nimrin added. “But if you did make the move, you would almost certainly be stopped. They are watching you. If they think you're betraying them—”

  “They think I'm betraying America!”

  “Yes, exactly,” Mr. Nimrin said. “And your only salvation, and mine as well, is to keep them thinking that. You sold out your country nine years ago, you've never had doubts, you've taken the agency's money, and you are now prepared to be activated and to serve your foreign masters in any way they see fit.”

  “Oh, Jeez,” Josh said.

  “Yes, indeed,” Mr. Nimrin agreed. “If for any reason they begin to doubt you, of course they will kill you, to protect their own security. But before they kill you, your mild friend Levrin will torture you to find out what you know, and you'll get to see what he's really about. If we had not had this conversation, and you continued to know nothing, that would soon come out under torture, and then they would come for me. Now we have had this conversation, and it, too, would soon come out under torture, and once again they would come to me.”

  Mr. Nimrin leaned back, the better to survey Josh. “You are my only hope for survival,” he said. “I can't say I'm encouraged.”

  7

  NEITHER WAS JOSH. ALL THE WAY home in the new cab, Mr. Nimrin's story kept circling in his brain, and he could find nowhere in it a way out for himself.

  Was the story true ? Well, the checks had been true, and the Cayman Islands bank account was true, and Levrin's appearance on the ferry dock had been true, and Mr. Nimrin looked exactly like the only extant public photo of himself, absent moustache. So it was undeniably true that he was caught up in something, but who knew what? It was like one of those dreams that begin in the middle: you're running, something's chasing you, and there's a cliff dead ahead.

  I'll have to tell Eve this week
end, he promised himself. I can't carry this by myself, and who else is there to tell? I've been betraying my country for seven years without knowing it, and now they want me to do something, I don't know what, and if I don't do it, or if I let them even suspect the truth about me, they'll kill me. After torturing me, let's not forget that part, because they won't.

  Will it be possible to pretend to go along with them, and yet not actually do anything? Anything, uh, treasonous.

  Too late, he realized. I've already done something. I've provided a safe house for foreign agents coming into America to do something America won't like.

  He overtipped the cabby, to start the belated process of becoming a good guy, and went up to his apartment, where of course there was a phone message from Eve: “Josh? It's six thirty. Can you still be at the office? I'll try you there.”

  Well, no, she wouldn't find him there, and the time was now seven-forty, so where had he been all this time? He fully intended to tell her the truth this weekend, somehow or other, but he couldn't possibly tell her any truth at all now, not on the phone.

  He wasn't used to lying to Eve, had never lied to her except about birthday presents; that he wasn't going out to buy her one, that he liked the one she'd bought for him, things like that. It's true he hadn't told her about the checks, but that hadn't been a lie. He hadn't made anything up in that instance, he'd merely left something out.

  Now, he would have to make something up. When Jules Verne was asked what he thought of the science fiction writings of H. G. Wells, he'd indignantly said, “Il invent!” Why did he now remember that one little item from college, when he'd forgotten almost everything else? Whatever; he would now have to reach down and find that inner H. G. Wells. Time to invent.