Money for Nothing

by Donald E. Westlake

  “No, I know,” he agreed. “We don't have anything.”

  “Only these awful networks. Why are you so behind the times? I expected more from a New Yorker like you.”

  “We never watch television much,” he said. “We didn't think it was worth it.” I'm apologizing to a foreign spy femme fatale for not having HBO, he told himself. I don't believe this. I don't believe any of this.

  And this is a decided change from the glass of champagne and the silver sheath from a few hours ago, isn't it? Once she isn't going to seduce me, she doesn't have to pretend to be a nice person anymore.

  With a disgusted look at the television set, which again laughed at her, she offed it with the remote and said, “You had a nice evening?”

  “I went to a reading at a bookstore,” he said, understanding that he was now reporting to her, “and then to a restaurant.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Sure.”

  She nodded, then got to her feet, a tall lithe woman, graceful without emphasizing it. “I have spent some time on this piece of furniture now,” she said, with a little dismissive wave at the sofa, “and I have decided it would not be comfortable for me for the night.”

  “Oh.”

  “It would be too short, for one thing.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “I shall sleep in the bed,” she told him, “in the bedroom. You shall sleep wherever you wish.”

  “I guess I get the sofa,” he said, thinking that it would also be too short for him.

  She smiled, in a wintry way. “Faithful husbands are so relaxing,” she said. “You may wish to get some things from the bedroom.”

  So he did.

  18

  THE LIVING ROOM WAS NOT perfectly dark. Amber streetlight-glow angled upward through the windows, around the edges of the shades, to make long diagonal convict stripes along the ceiling, reflecting down to give a hazy dark honey-tone to everything in the room. Lying on his side on the sofa, knees bent in a not completely comfortable way because the sofa truly was too short, Josh looked out at his muffled sidewise living room, listened to the far clatter below of late-night traffic on West End Avenue, and thought, I'm losing my life. Not death, not being killed, the loss of my life. The life I've constructed for myself.

  Everything he looked at now, turned ninety degrees, swelled with his life. The furniture choices he'd made with Eve, the pictures they'd chosen to put on the walls, even the inadequate television set, whose very inadequacy helped to define his life, his and Eve's lives together, all of these things were at risk, now at risk.

  No, he was at risk. The objects of his life were safe, but he was not. Driven from his normalcy, now even driven from his bedroom, pushed into this horrible parallel universe where all the decisions were monstrous and none of the roads led anywhere, what was he to do? How could he somehow clamber back onto the raft of his real existence?

  I am privy to something I shouldn't know, he thought, inner workings that a little guy like me isn't supposed to have even an inkling of, until after it's all over and we proles can safely be told about it on the evening news. When you're one of those who is out of the action, when every bad thing that happens in the world has been muted by the safety of distance and time and your own unimportance, when the horrors are all done and over with before you know anything about them, then you can stand the particulars of the news, absorb them like a form of entertainment, forget them, get on with your life. The newscaster will describe this plot, after the events, these villains with their evil designs, and it will all make perfect sense, because after all there are villains in the world, and they do plot, and our only job, we crowd-extras, spectators, is to know about it afterward.

  I'm a rabbit, Josh told himself, and I'm running with the wolves.

  The first hour of tonight's insomnia was spent in variants on this self-pity, mourning the loss of himself as though the loss were already complete, as though the living room he gazed at edgewise already belonged to some new tenant, that the furnishings were fading in the faint light, to be replaced by someone else's objects, someone else's taste.

  After an hour, the increasing ache in his knees made Josh try another approach to the sofa, rolling over onto his back, stretching his legs out—aaahhh—and resting his ankles on the sofa arm. This position tried to bend his knees the opposite way, downwards, which they couldn't do, but it was better at least for a while, so he lay there, now looking not askant at his possessions but upward at his light-striped ceiling; a different view.

  Which somehow gave him a different view, as well, of his situation. He'd been bemoaning his fate, on the basis that outrageous things did not happen to ordinary people, but now, focusing on those long narrow strips of yellowy light from the outside world below, bars of butter across the dark ceiling, he reminded himself that anything could happen to anybody, and that only science contains impossibilities: Time does not reverse, for instance, the apple does not fall up, the sun does not circle the earth.

  He had been careless. He had lived his life as though there were no consequences. If he could forgive his seven-year-younger self for cashing the checks, back when he was footloose and single and broke, what excuse could he find for going on with it as his life had changed, as he had taken on responsibility and maturity? It had just been passivity, from the very beginning. As the years went on, he could tell himself he'd tried to find United States Agent in the beginning, he'd done what he could, and the checks had always cleared, there had never been a consequence. So why change?

  Because now he had a life worth protecting.

  The ankles on the sofa arm didn't work. The sofa arm was too firm, it cut off blood to his feet. Also, the downward pressure on his knees never relented. Finally, he shifted again, staying on his back but bending both knees, the left knee upright and leaning against the sofa back, the right knee down to the side, hanging off the edge of the sofa cushion. That position was acceptable, at least for a while, and once he'd settled into it he started another line of thought.

  Responsibility. If, in the past, he'd been careless about his responsibility to his own life, he now had to acknowledge that a brand-new responsibility had arrived, thrust horribly upon him. A responsibility to all the intended and collateral victims of Levrin and Tina Pausto and their assassin friends.

  What could he do about it? Going to the FBI, or the New York City police, or any other authority figure, it seemed to him, would be both pointless and dangerous. Even if he got through, if he eluded Levrin and who knew how many others, even if he managed to tell his story as completely and honestly as he could, what then? Where was his proof? Come to that, where was his knowledge?

  “We turned out to be Ukraine,” Mr. Nimrin had said, “surprising many of us.” Which meant, it seemed to him, that Mr. Nimrin was not Ukraine. Russian? Some other onetime Soviet Socialist Republic? What were they all? Moldava. Belarus. There must be more.

  Come to think of it, he didn't suppose he could really exclude Finland. Or the three Baltic States, What'sitsname, What'sitsname and What'sitsname.

  And what sort of name was Nimrin? Or Levrin? Or Pausto?

  The point was, what could he give the authorities that had any heft or weight? The AK-47s? Maybe, if he could actually get through to an official somewhere, tell his story, be believed, and be checked on before Levrin and company had whisked the evidence back out of the apartment; unlikely.

  Lying there, knees splayed, toes increasingly uncomfortable against that damnably firm sofa arm, Josh tried to create the dialogue of his confession—no, no, information—to some receptive police ear: “The people who've paid me all this money over the years, that I never questioned and never tried to track down, are from somewhere in what used to be the Soviet Union, or maybe one of its satellites.” (Hungary, Bulgaria…) “They intend to kill Fyeddr Mihommed-Sinn of Kamastan, though I have no idea why, nor for whom. The one who was in trouble seven years ago on an illegal technology-exporting case that never came to tri
al, Mr. Ellois Nimrin, says he lives in a safe house somewhere on Long Island. The others…I have no idea how many of them there are, I've only seen two of them face to face, but others have been moving through my apartment the past two weeks, and I'm holding uniforms for four of them, and I have no idea where they're staying in the United States. I don't know the details of the murder plot, but I could tell you what Mr. Nimrin says is the way he'd do it if he were in charge, but he isn't in charge.”

  Should he mention Harriet Linde? That seemed unfair, somehow; she had even less to do with the situation than he did. Well, yes, a lot less; nothing, in fact. But on the other hand, if he were going to make a clean breast of it all, how could he hold anything back? What if they later found out there were things he hadn't mentioned?

  The muscles on the insides of his thighs were feeling the strain of his spread-legged position, and his toes against the sofa arm were beginning to cramp. Maybe it would be better if he slept on the floor. It had a carpet, anyway.

  Reluctantly, aching in many joints, Josh sat up and pushed the coffee table out of the way, then transferred his pillow and the sheet he was sleeping on and under to that part of the floor. He lay down on his back, legs stretched straight down, arms over the sheet, hands folded on chest, and it was amazing how much farther away those stripes on the ceiling looked. He contemplated them for a while, trying at last not to think about his problems, to think about the comforts of sleep instead, and gradually came to the realization that the hard floor hurt his back. It grated against his shoulderblades, and left a gap at his waist that made his skeleton warp slightly.

  I can't start all over again on the sofa, he told himself, and turned painfully over onto his right side, back to the sofa. There, three inches from his eyes, stood a narrow wooden leg of the coffee table. He gazed at it, and something about the rigidity of that leg, its narrowness and its verticality, changed his mood yet again.

  It's up to me to make things right, he told himself. I took their money, incurious as to whose money it was or what it meant, and now I'm suffering the consequences. And one of the consequences is that it's up to me to stop this mad assassination from taking place.

  Could it even happen without him? If Levrin and the others and their superiors had not believed they had three sleeper spies fixed in place in New York City, ready to provide a base and support for their operation, could they have assembled the operation anyway?

  He couldn't know, not really. So it was possible they couldn't do it without him, and that possibility meant he had to assume that, without him, and without Robert Van Bark, and without Mitchell Robbie, these people would not have been able to plan and put together this monstrous assault. Van Bark had paid for his carelessness, and Mitchell Robbie might yet do so (or might have already), so it was down to himself, to Josh Redmont. He was going to have to do something.

  All right, what? Wide awake, he stared at that coffee table leg, waiting for inspiration. If he couldn't go to the police, what could he do?

  What about reporting the situation to the Kamastaners? Kamastanis; whatever they were. What if he were to go to that place of theirs on York Avenue and tell them, listen, some people intend to kill your premier when he comes to the States, so maybe you should warn him and tell him not to come to the States, what if he were to do that? After all, if Premier Mihommed-Sinn didn't leave Kamastan, the assassination wouldn't take place.

  They're watching the Kamastan embassy, mission, whatever it is. That's for sure. If there's one place in New York City that Levrin's group is keeping a close eye on this week, it's the Kamastanish outpost on York Avenue. I'd never get to the door.

  All right. What else?

  Sabotage. Louse them up some way. Steal their bullets or pack sand in their AK-47 barrels. Something along those lines.

  And run his own investigation, so he could learn the things the police would find useful. Who these people really are, where they're really from, who they work for, where they're hiding in New York. Other than my apartment, of course.

  But how to do that? Befriend Tina Pausto, for one thing. Not sleep with her, no, no, still not that, but talk to her. Be friendly with her, drink with her—regardless of Mr. Nimrin's warnings—get her to tell him more about the plot and her co-conspirators. The same with Levrin, next time they met. And find Mitchell Robbie.

  He couldn't go out to Fair Harbor this weekend, he realized, though he was supposed to be there to help pack for the end of the rental. But he couldn't leave New York, not with this unresolved. Eve would understand.

  So he was to become a spy himself. A counterspy.

  Sure. An over-the-counter spy, he amended his thoughts, and offered that coffee table leg a rueful smile. But at least—at the very least—he had an idea now of something to do. Clutching tight to that thought, more or less comfortable at last lying on his side on the floor, he dropped, with a silent thud, into troubled sleep.

  19

  WHEN HE WOKE, HIS HEAD was under the coffee table. The reason he awoke is, he'd set his travel alarm, and where he'd set it was on the coffee table. The vibrations from the alarm found some sort of harmonic in the wood of the coffee table, and the result was to give him some idea what it would be like to live inside an amplified guitar. He only hit his head slightly while getting out from under, but then eased his feelings by hitting the alarm clock's head very hard.

  He struggled to his feet, stiff in many joints, and hobbled into the bathroom. Back in the living room, he found his clothes on the chair where he'd put them last night, and dressed, ignoring as best he could the sand behind his eyelids.

  He'd hoped Tina would be up, so he could start his campaign of worming his way into her confidence (and nothing else), but she was still asleep, or at least still in bed, those long legs, that long lithe torso, that long and beautiful face framed on the pillow by waves of thick almost-black hair. So he left home early instead, planning to have a diner breakfast somewhere along the way.

  He walked quite a while, wanting the exercise, needing to work his mistreated body as well as his overloaded mind. As for his body, he found that everything eventually loosened up except the tense muscles across the top of his shoulders and the back of his neck, as though a wooden hanger had been surgically implanted there while he slept. While he dozed. And as for his mind, last night's conclusions—take responsibility, spy on the spies, see it out here in the city instead of spending the weekend at the beach, stop the assassination—still seemed to him right, though perhaps not quite as easy as, lying on the floor, he might have thought.

  He found a not very good breakfast and ate not very much of it, then went on to the office, arriving early, and tried to concentrate on what he was supposed to be doing here, the statistical breakdowns on the results of the new campaign in selected parts of the country. Generally it was doing well in the southwest, poorly in the southeast, so-so in the northwest. Why? Why these regional differences? Why didn't people just stop making trouble? Everybody go out and buy the same thing and stop making us think about you.

  At ten-thirty his phone rang and it was Eve: “Got him,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You know what we talked about.”

  And then he did. “Oh, right! You got it? Really?”

  “And truly. I told you Dick Welsh could find out. His address is 856A East Second Street.”

  “Not a great address,” Josh said. Already he didn't like the idea of going there.

  “It's a theater,” she said.

  Again he was lost. “And he lives in it?”

  “This is where Dick is so wonderful,” she said. “The company couldn't get insurance, for all their lights and sets and costumes and things, because they're such a marginal operation, not unless somebody was living there. So they got all kinds of variants from the city, and put in a little apartment, and Mitchell lives there, behind the stage, and that way they can get insurance. No wonder your friend couldn't find him.”

  “Let's hope nobody else can,
” Josh said.

  The Good Rep Classic Theatrical Company was in half of the bottom of an old tenement on the Lower East Side, the part of town that has been the first home in America for immigrants from all over the world for nearly two hundred years. This southern end of the island of Manhattan is one of the two parts of town that extend east farther than the numbered avenues can accommodate. Uptown, east of First Avenue, there's York Avenue, a pretty good neighborhood, with the Mayor's residence, Gracie Mansion, toward one end and the Kamastan Mission to the United Nations at the other, but downtown the eastern bloat is more pronounced, creating, east of First Avenue, a new Avenue A, then B, then C, and even D before the East River puts a stop to it.

  Alphabet City, it's called, and as a neighborhood it could not be more mixed. The remnants of the waves of immigration can still be seen, fused with newer arrivals. Parts of the area have become more valuable, but it still contains plenty of pockets of poverty.

  Poverty and art have always been more than nodding acquaintances, so another part of life in Alphabet City has a certain LaBoheme atmosphere, with coffee shops and performance artists and poetry bars and the most minor of publications and the most marginal of theaters. Good Rep fit right in. It was in a corner building, six stories high, the tallest you can erect a building without an elevator in New York City, with a crumbling stone outdoor staircase leading up to a wide entranceway that looked as though it had been gnawed for many years by giant rats, which was probably true. To the left of the stairs, toward the corner, was a bodega crowded with inexpensive food in very bright packaging, and to the right of the stairs, with a marquee the size of a Honda hood, was Good Rep.

  It was one slate step down to the tiny forecourt of the theater, which featured an enormous handmade poster for Arms and the Man, in which the gaudy uniforms, meant no doubt to be Ruritanian or Graustarkian, struck Josh as uncomfortably Kamastanish. There was no doorbell to be seen, so he tried turning the knob, and the door opened, just like that.