Money for Nothing

by Donald E. Westlake

  When he phoned, after first drinking a long glass of water to calm himself, she said, “There you are! Where are you?”

  “Home,” he said, still searching for an invention, and suddenly thought of Jack Crisp. “I was having a beer with Jack Crisp,” he said. “You remember him.”

  “He's somebody at the agency,” she said, sounding confused. “But you don't like him.”

  “I don't dis like him,” Josh said, which was sort of true. “And, turns out, we're in the same boat.” Which was absolutely true, and the reason, he suddenly realized, that Jack Crisp had come into his mind in his moment of need. All at once, he liked Jack more than before.

  “In the same boat?” He could almost see Eve turn to look out the window, seaward, for a boat.

  “His family's away this month, too,” Josh explained. “At the beach. He's commuting weekends, same as me.”

  “Oh. Out here?”

  “No, the Jersey shore. Down around Barnegat Bay. I think it's an easier commute.”

  “I wouldn't like the Jersey shore.”

  “No, neither would I,” Josh agreed, thinking, good, we're changing the subject.

  But she stayed with it a bit longer: “So you were two abandoned husbands, having a beer together.”

  “That's it.”

  “Are you going to do that all the time?”

  “No, I don't think so.” Josh forced a laugh that he certainly hoped didn't sound forced. “He is kind of boring, to tell the truth.”

  “So you'll probably be home at the regular time tomorrow.”

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “You know, if nothing unforeseen comes up.”

  8

  NOTHING UNFORESEEN KEPT him from going straight home on Wednesday. The something unforeseen was already in his living room, and it was Levrin. He had made himself a drink, with ice cubes and what looked like watered scotch, and he was seated in comfort on the sofa, leafing through the New Yorker that had been on the coffee table. He smiled pleasantly at Josh, lifted his glass in a toast, and said, “Hello.”

  The pleasant smile and the easy pose did nothing to soften the sudden dread that gripped Josh's chest, squeezing it like a rubber ball. “What is it?” he asked, and imagined himself doing a U-turn, sprinting for the elevator. No, the stairs; no waiting for the elevator.

  “Oh, one or two things,” Levrin said, and lifted his glass again. “Do you want to get yourself a drink first?”

  “Yes,” Josh said, and went to the kitchen to fall apart, shaking and trembling all over, gripping the sink, staring out the window at the apartment building across West End Avenue. When at last his breathing calmed, and he felt he could let go of the sink without falling over, he got a bottle of beer from the refrigerator, opened it, and carried it to the living room, where Levrin had the New Yorker open on his lap and was smiling at a cartoon. He looked up when Josh entered, and said, “I understand about half the cartoons in this magazine, and they are usually very good.”

  “Yes, they are.” Josh sat in his armchair and rattled the beer bottle onto the side table.

  “If I lived in America all the time, I would understand more of them.”

  “Sure.”

  Levrin tossed the magazine onto the coffee table, put his glass on the end table to his left, and reached for something on the floor. Josh tensed, and Levrin came up with a thick briefcase, black, scuffed. The snaps opened like pistol shots, and Josh kept thinking of Mr. Nimrin's description of this man. Levrin reached into the briefcase, and Josh stared at that forearm, forgetting to breathe. Levrin brought out a large self-closing plastic bag, about the right size for a head of lettuce, and Josh saw that in a way it did contain lettuce; money, cash, American bills. Levrin held it up for Josh to see, and then, as he put it on the sofa beside himself, said, “I'll ask you to hide this somewhere until you leave on Friday, and then put it under your pillow. It will be gone next week, when you return.”

  “It looks like a lot of money,” Josh said.

  “Ten thousand dollars,” Levrin told him, smiling fondly at the package. “And the other thing,” he said, as he focused on Josh again. “I don't want you to be startled, so I thought I should tell you.”

  Startled, Josh said, “Yes?”

  “There will be some matériel, when you return next week. Temporarily stored here, but not for long.”

  “Matériel?”

  “Yes, not a lot.”

  “Bombs?” Josh was instantly sorry he'd asked.

  In any event, Levrin looked at him in surprise. “Of course not,” he said. “We don't want you blown up or this apartment.”

  “Good,” Josh said.

  “The things will be here for just a little while,” Levrin assured him. “Gone before your family comes back from the ocean.”

  “Good,” Josh said.

  9

  THIS WAS THE FIRST YEAR they'd tried this kind of summer vacation, and the first year on Fire Island. Before Jeremy, they'd automatically done everything together, and the first year after Jeremy's arrival they did nothing. Now, it had become necessary to plan some sort of summer vacation that would get the increasingly active Jeremy out of the apartment for at least part of the season. Josh would take his own vacation time in midwinter, as usual, and the family would do something in the Caribbean, but that meant this summer had to be their first extended separation.

  They'd chosen Fair Harbor because it was a summer beach community, supposed to be good for kids, and because they already had some links to the place, two couples who regularly summered there, the Frasers, who were childless, and the Welshes, with daughters, four and six. It was enough of a nucleus so Eve wouldn't be lonely out at the beach during the week. Not as lonely as Josh in town.

  Usually, the trip out from the city on Friday afternoons was a simple pleasure, no matter what the traffic or the weather, because he was on his way to a reunion with Eve. But today everything was different—anxious and unnerving. Today was the day he'd tell her everything, and try to decide, with her, what to do about it all. Driving out, he tested various fantasy conversations in his mind, but everything he imagined himself saying sounded awkward and false.

  “I'm being asked to be a traitor, and if I don't do it they'll kill me.” No, he'd have to ease into the story from some other direction, if he didn't merely want to sound like a lunatic. But he had no idea what, neither in the car nor on the ferry.

  There she was on the dock, as usual, waving. He could recognize which bikini was hers by now, and so he could start his own waving from farther out in the channel, and as he did so he realized that telling her his problem could not be the first thing he did out here this weekend. It would have to be the second.

  Yes. She kissed him, and smiled with her eyes that certain way, and said, “Jeremy's with Mrs. Winchell until we pick him up.”

  “Good,” he said.

  “The Welshes invited us for dinner,” she said. She'd just come out of the shower and, naked, stood in the middle of the bedroom to pummel her wet hair with a large green towel.

  He was half-seated, half-sprawled on the bed. “Tonight?”

  “Yes, of course.” She let her hair alone long enough to peer out at him from inside the towel. “What's wrong?”

  “Wrong. Well…” He couldn't tell her like this, in this situation, but if they were going out to dinner with other people he had to tell her soon.

  She shook her head, lowered the towel, and said, “We'll talk later. I can see something's bothering you. Take your shower and I'll go get Jeremy.”

  “No,” he said. “Don't get Jeremy, not yet.”

  She looked at him. “Why not?”

  “We do have to talk,” he said, getting up from the bed. “Just wait. I'll take a quick shower, and then we'll talk.”

  Dressed in khaki shorts and a blue T-shirt, he went out and found her on the back deck, in white shorts and a green halter. She was drinking iced tea. She pointed at it, and said, “Want some?”

  “Maybe later.”<
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  He sat at the rusted white table with her, and looked out at the scrub pines that incompletely hid the neighbors. The houses were too close together here and the vegetation too scrubby, but people made up for it by leaving one another alone. There were people in the houses all around them, but no one could be seen, and nothing could be heard except somebody's electric saw half a block away. The owners did their own carpentry all summer. The rising and falling shush of the ocean sounded in a different way, hardly a noise at all, but always present.

  Eve watched him, a little worried. “You have something to tell me,” she said.

  “I've been trying to think where to start.” It was easier if he looked at the bits of white clapboard siding he could see past the scrub pines. He said, “I think maybe I should start with the checks.”

  “Checks?” She was utterly baffled. “Josh? What is this about?”

  “Seven years ago, before I met you—”

  “Josh!”

  “Please,” he said, “let me figure out how to tell this.”

  “I won't say a word,” she said, and folded her arms, which meant, he knew, that as soon as she had it straight in her mind what she should be mad at, she intended to be very mad.

  Much safer to look at the white clapboard. “Seven years ago I got a check in the mail for a thousand dollars. No explanation, nothing. From something called United States Agent.”

  “You get envelopes from them,” she said. “I've seen them sometimes.”

  “Every month. A check for a thousand dollars.”

  “But—”

  “Let me tell it, Eve. It's hard enough anyway.”

  “I won't say a word,” she said, and unfolded her arms.

  “Seven years ago,” he told the white clapboard, “I was broke, I needed the money, I thought maybe it was government somehow, something to do with the army. I deposited it, and it cleared, and the next month I got another one. And ever since.”

  “And you never knew who sent them or why?”

  “Not until now.”

  “Something happened,” she said.

  “Oh, boy.” He shook his head. “I tried to find out who they were, years ago, but their phone never answers, and the address just says K Street, no house number.”

  “In Washington,” she said. “I thought they were something to do with the government.”

  “So did I, at first.”

  “But they're not. What are they?”

  He said, “Here's where it gets weird. It turns out, there's this guy, I don't know, he's Russian or Ukrainian or something, I'm not sure what, but he's a spy.”

  “A spy,” she said, in a flat voice, and he knew, if he were to look away from the clapboard he would see skepticism on her face.

  “It's true,” he said. “It's just as true as the checks. Nine years ago, this man started a scam to steal from his government or his spy funds or whatever—for when he'd retire. So he pretended he'd recruited these people to be what they call sleepers, deep cover spies they could activate if they ever needed them, and he pretended to pay them each a thousand dollars a month, but he was actually keeping it all for himself.”

  “But you are getting it.”

  “Because he got involved in a spy trial, I read it online in the Washington Post, you could read it, too. And it meant, he lost that job he had, and somebody else got that desk, who thought the sleepers were really sleepers and started sending them the money.”

  “Including you.”

  “Including me.”

  “You mean,” she said, “for seven years you were being paid to be a spy.”

  “And never knew it.”

  “But now you do.”

  He sighed. “They activated me,” he said.

  There was such silence from his left that he had no choice; he had to look at her. Her face now was a study in complexity, or abstraction, or something. Like a person eating a Fig Newton for the first time? Or a person not sure if that dog is friendly.

  He said, “It's serious, Eve. Take a look at this,” and drew the bankbook from his pocket, to slide it across the rusty table to her.

  She looked at it for ten or fifteen seconds before picking it up, as though not sure she wanted to be a party to this thing. But then she did pick it up, studied the cover, studied the first page, studied the second page, and then, holding it open, frowned at Josh. “It says you have forty thousand dollars there.”

  “And I do,” he told her. “I went to their website, and it's real. The money's there.”

  She studied the bankbook some more. “Opened on July fourteenth,” she said.

  “The man who activated me,” Josh said, “gave it to me last Friday over in Bay Shore. While I was waiting for the ferry.”

  Her frown deepened. “You knew about this for a week?”

  “I didn't know what to do,” he said. “I knew I was in some kind of trouble, but I didn't know what kind, and then the man who started the scam came to see me this week, and told me about it, and it's big trouble. So I have to tell you about it.”

  She turned the bankbook this way and that. “What do they want you to do?”

  “I'm not sure yet. Last weekend, they had people staying in our apartment, I don't know who, I never saw them. And right now there's a bag with ten thousand dollars in cash under my pillow, that's supposed to be gone by the time I get back. And—”

  “Under your pillow?”

  “That's where he told me to put it.”

  “The man that started the scam.”

  “No, there's two of them.”

  “I'm not getting this,” she said.

  “The man that gave me the bankbook is my control,” Josh explained. “His name is Levrin. The other one, that started the scam, is Mr. Nimrin. And he says, if Levrin finds out I was never really a sleeper at all, his people will kill us both, Mr. Nimrin and me, him for punishment and me for security.”

  He watched her, expecting a reaction, astonishment, fear, something, but all she did was watch him back, as she took another bite out of that Fig Newton. Slowly, she lowered her frown to the bankbook in her hand. She turned it over. She riffled its pages. She read every word and every number on every page. She raised her frown to focus on him. “Did you have the graphics people put this together, at the agency?”

  “What?” He couldn't believe it. “No! For what?”

  “As a joke.”

  The finger he pointed at the bankbook trembled. “That's no joke,” he said. “Go on their website. Read the Washington Post.”

  “I could, you know.”

  “Do! Do!”

  She considered him, considered the bankbook, then said, “These people are real.”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “And there were people in our apartment last weekend.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you put a bag of money under your pillow.”

  “I suppose it's still there,” Josh said.

  She thought about it. For quite some time, she communed with the clapboard. Then she sighed and faced him and said, “You can't have anything to do with those people.”

  “But if I don't,” he told her, “they'll kill me. I mean, Mr. Nimrin was very clear on that.”

  Stubbornly, she shook her head. “I believe you, you somehow got into this mess—”

  “Just stupid, I was just stupid.”

  “You wouldn't do anything this elaborate, just for a joke.”

  “Of course not!”

  “But you can't do it,” she said. “They can make threats all they want. You just can't help them.”

  “That's what I've been trying to think about,” he said. “What are my choices? What can I do? I thought, maybe take the forty thousand dollars out of that account, and the three of us go to Canada and change our names. I bet I could get an ad agency job in Toronto.”

  “No, Josh,” she said. “You're not somebody who lives on the run. You're not a fugitive, you're not the type.”

  “Then what else do I do?�
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  “Go to the police. The FBI.”

  “Mr. Nimrin says I'm being watched, so they'd probably grab me before I could get to the police, or the FBI. And if I do go to them, what do I say? There are spies in New York. Everybody knows there's spies in New York. What are they doing? I don't know. Mr. Nimrin says the FBI would probably think I'm just a turncoat trying to turn back, lost my nerve after I was activated.”

  “But you can tell them the truth!”

  “What's the truth?” he asked her. “I cashed the checks for seven years. Are they going to believe I never found out who was paying me, never worried about it, just cashed the checks?”

  “It really wasn't very smart,” she said.

  “It was the easiest thing to do,” he said. “For seven years, it was easy. Money for nothing.”

  She shook her head. “But why you? Why did they pick you?”

  “I have no idea,” he said, because the one thing he couldn't tell her was his early history as a loudmouth barroom radical. “Just the luck of the draw,” he said.

  She thought about it. Now she, too, studied the white clapboard across the way, while Josh studied her face, realizing how important that face was to him, how important their life together was, how little he'd really needed that thousand dollars a month over the years, and how abruptly and unexpectedly he'd put everything from their life at risk. Including life itself.

  “All right,” she said at last, and looked at him. “Here's what I think you should do.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Well, you're part of the decision-making, too,” she said. “Don't put it all on me.”

  “Tell.”

  “All right. What I think you should do is open a file in the laptop here, and put in it everything you told me, and put the date. The people's names, and what you did, and what they told you. And say in there, you're afraid for your life—”

  “I am.”

  “And I think you're right,” she said. “So you say in there, you're afraid, and that's why you'll go along with those people unless they ask you to do something really illegal or wicked, and you'll keep that file as a diary, and tell it everything that happens. Then, if the time comes that you have to go to the police, or they come to you—”