Authors: True Believers
I’d found James Bond and Felix Leiter.
They were headed in my direction. I grabbed the Blinker Code-Lite from my purse and aimed it away from Lake Michigan, vaguely southwest, then pulled the trigger fifteen times to flash the signal into the dusk: five long, pause, five long again, pause, two long and three short—
007.
Chuck knew Morse code, and for the mission, he’d taught us a few letters and numbers. I was a little surprised and totally thrilled when Alex signaled back and I understood—dash-dash-dash, dash-dot-dash,
OK.
Leiter opened the trunk of a car—a
convertible
! (not a Bentley, just a Ford, but
still
)—and they put the Q Branch attaché and rifle inside. Bond took a pint bottle from his jacket pocket and offered a swig to Leiter, who laughed loudly before taking a drink.
So perfect.
Alex was supposed to signal Chuck, and then they would get close enough to fire kill shots, but not so close that the men would be aware of two boys with toy guns pretending to murder them.
Bond and Leiter started walking up toward the road, toward Alex and, presumably, Chuck. I was still holding my Blinker Code-Lite, so I pointed and signaled again—dash-dot, dash-dash-dash, for
NO
—then put it away and began walking after the men. They passed Peacock’s and went into Luigi’s, the hot dog stand everybody called Red Hots.
I stood right behind them in line and saw that Leiter had an earpiece connected by a wire to a device in his jacket pocket. He announced to Bond, “New York is
done.
”
This verisimilitude almost scared me. Then he continued his report.
“Cubbies six, Mets three, bottom of the eighth.”
Alex and Chuck arrived at Red Hots together, both panting. They stood in the doorway, looking at me, then at each other, then back at me. I nodded toward the men, who were ordering. Alex touched the tackle box, and Chuck put his hand over his heart—over his pistol. I shook my head. I had a new plan.
“Small onion rings and a small cherry Coke,” I said to the girl behind the counter. I didn’t really want the rings, but I needed my order to take a little time and come out after Bond and Leiter got theirs. At the condiment station, I slipped the cellophane wrapper off my cigarettes and poured one gram of a white chemical into the wrapper.
I sat down on the stool next to Bond’s. Alex and Chuck had gone back outside but stood only a few feet away on the other side of the wooden half-wall, looking in through the screen and eavesdropping as they pretended to ignore us. Alex was smoking, but I could see the Luger gripped in his other hand.
Bond, speaking with an American accent in order to remain incognito, was talking to Leiter about ductwork construction schedules and air change rates—clearly a discussion of some secret poison gas system.
I ate an onion ring and took the first sip of my drink. Then I turned away—the boys could see what I was doing, but not the two men—and poured the powder from the cellophane packet into my drink, stirring it with the straw. I took another sip and affected a look of quizzical surprise, smacked my lips, shook my head.
“Excuse me? Sir?” I said to Bond, holding my cup toward him. He turned to me. “I ordered a cherry Coke, but I think they maybe gave me a vanilla one instead. Would you mind tasting it?”
He took a gulp and cringed. “No, that’s cherry, all right, but gosh, it does taste funny. Way too sweet.”
“Yeah, I thought so, too,” I said as I stood up. “Thanks.” I carried my purse and the drink in one hand, the onion rings in the other, and headed for the door. Perhaps the men found it strange that I didn’t ask for a replacement Coke. But before they saw through my ruse, Commander Bond would be on the floor of Red Hots, trembling, paralyzed, suffering respiratory failure, seconds from death—thanks to the dose of a poison a hundred times more lethal than cyanide that I had just tricked him into swallowing.
“Double-oh-seven,” I said to Alex and Chuck as we waited to cross Sheridan Road, “has been terminated. We’ll deal with Agent Leiter some other time.”
Alex was so excited about what I’d done that he stepped out of character, huffing and puffing and jumping around like a marionette.
“Holy
crap,
Karen, you
talked
to the guy! What was it you put in the Coke?” His voice was cracking.
“Tetrodotoxin. From the Japanese pufferfish. In
Doctor No.
”
“No,
actually.
”
“Sweet’N Low?”
“That took guts,” Chuck said.
In their eyes, I had, in one stroke, turned into a different person—no longer just the slightly argumentative girl who read the same books they did and got good grades, but unpredictable, cunning, brave, perverse,
exciting.
For the first time, I felt like a woman—a modern woman.
We sped down Michigan Avenue, our hair and clothes flapping in the wind, looking at the vastness of the darkening lake and sky to our left, feeling masterful and free, filled with the joy of living dangerously. Of course, the actual deadly risks we were taking—the cigarettes, biking at night without lights or helmets—did not even register as dangerous.
We followed Alex as he swung right into the circular driveway of the Michigan Shores Club, and left our bikes near a tree by the tennis courts. Alex put the Luger back in the tackle box. Chuck borrowed my compact mirror to fix his tie and asked if he could use my brush to neaten his hair.
“Jesus,” Alex said, “don’t be such a homo. You look fine.”
I’d been to Michigan Shores once before, to drink mulled cider and watch a performance of
A Christmas Carol
in which Alex played Tiny Tim. “I know it’s a
club
and everything, and seems all stuck up,” I said to Chuck, “but it’s really not that big of a deal.”
Alex took some offense. “It’s the best private club on the North Shore.” Then he patted Chuck on the back. “Tiny Tov is just worried they’ll be mean to him because he never believed in Santa.” Tiny Tov of Torahville was the star of a Sunday-morning kids’ show produced by the Chicago Board of Rabbis.
“Well,” Chuck said, “they don’t let Jews join the club, do they?”
“Is that true?” I asked, whispering as we approached the door.
“It used to be,” Alex said, “but not anymore, I don’t think.”
“Yeah,” Chuck said, “
right.
”
“Eat me, Levy. They wanted Hollaender’s dad to join, didn’t they?” This was a clever, complicating argument on Alex’s part: Chuck’s mother suspected that my Danish father, having survived a Nazi camp unscathed, must be Jewish passing as gentile. “My parents aren’t anti-Jewish—why do you think they decided not to buy that house in Kenilworth?”
“Because it cost eighty-nine thousand dollars,” Chuck said.
Jews did not live in Kenilworth, the next village up. My father referred to Kenilworth as “our adjacent Republican ghetto” and never pronounced the town’s name without ridicule,
Kane-ul-verth,
as if he were saying “Berchtesgaden.”
Despite my reassurances to Chuck, the Michigan Shores Club was a daunting place, all gray stone and leaded windows, wood paneling and dim sconces, the furniture upholstered in brass-studded leather. The fact that three unaccompanied teenagers were nicely dressed made people smile at us. We went to a small dining room where Alex ordered authentic Bond meals—for himself, soft-boiled eggs, he instructed the waitress, “cooked for three and two thirds minutes,” and scrambled eggs for the two of us, asking if they could make them with “fine herbs,” which he believed to be the English pronunciation of
fines herbes.
The waitress said they came with parsley. “And Gala?” Alex said, turning to me. “Anything else for you?”
“No, thank you …”
I waited for the waitress to leave.
“… James.”
We had shifted identities. Alex was now Bond, Chuck was Felix Leiter, and I was Gala Brand of MI5. After supper we took a tour of the club and wound up sitting in a small parlor with a fireplace. Nearby, two men were rolling dice from a leather cup, and at the table closest to us, two couples were playing cards.
The three of us smiled and shared a glance:
bridge
and
backgammon,
just like in
Moonraker.
I doubt if a group of middle-aged suburbanites playing bridge had ever before struck teenagers as sexy.
For this part of the mission, we were to kill whichever villain, Goldfinger or Drax, we spotted first. Both had red hair, so the practical challenge was to find a short man (Goldfinger) or one with a scarred face (Drax). A few minutes later, the older of the two backgammon players rose and shuffled toward the door. He was stubby, but he had gray hair slicked straight back.
Alex stood. “It used to be red,” he declared, and followed Auric Goldfinger out of the room.
A moment later, Alex returned. Goldfinger had not.
“I followed him to the W.C.,” he told us.
“And then what?” Chuck was smirking. “You left the Luger outside with the bikes.”
Now Alex smirked back. “I certainly did,” he said, and pulled from his jacket pocket—surprise—a two-foot length of piano wire to which he had attached short Lincoln Logs at either end. “Garotte.
Silence
is golden. For Mr. Goldfinger.”
Before we went home, Alex wanted to show Chuck the indoor swimming pool. It was deserted except for a woman doing laps and a muscular man lying prone on a chaise, with a towel wrapped around his bottom and a newspaper open on the floor beneath his face. We stood on an unlit mezzanine walkway, looking down.
“It’s Red Grant,” Chuck whispered. “At his villa in the Crimea.” That’s the SMERSH executioner in
From Russia with Love
’s opening scene. The antique tiling and old-fashioned light fixtures, the echoes of splashing water in the empty room as big as our school gym, the humidity and chlorine stench, the absence of chatter: it did seem foreign and somber, maybe even Russian. Alex and I smiled and nodded.
Alex led us to a spiral staircase, and we tiptoed down to the pool level. We were still in the shadows but now just ten yards from our Red Grant, aka Krassno Granitsky.
Chuck looked around, both furtively and mock-furtively, to see if anyone was watching, then drew the machine pistol from his shoulder holster. Back then kids held toy pistols like gunslingers in Westerns, one-handed, elbow bent—not like the movies subsequently taught children to shoot, in a two-handed combat stance or else with the arm fully extended and the gun sideways, gangsta-style.
He aimed the gun at the man and then, as he pretended to fire, very softly vocalized the standard gunshot sound—“
Pkew!
”—and then another—“
Pkew!
”
Then Chuck fired the gun.
The boys had forgotten to remove the ring of plastic caps from the machine pistol, so when Chuck pulled the trigger, he automatically fired five shots, five distinct explosions of gunpowder over the course of a second or two. No typographic rendering, not
bang-bang-bang-bang-bang
or
pop-pop-pop-pop-pop,
does it justice. The cavernous room, all flat surfaces of ceramic and concrete and glass, amplified the explosions and echoes, and our absolute surprise turned it into an experience of shock and terror beyond decibel measurement. (In 1968, when I fired a real handgun for the first time, I learned that the powder in toy caps is designed to maximize the bang—in other words, toy guns can be louder than the real things.)
Immediately, the frenzy of incoherent noise got even worse. I screamed. Alex screamed. The man shouted. His wife, still in the middle of the pool, began splashing and yelling.
Chuck had dropped the cap gun when it fired, and as he scrambled to retrieve it, he accidentally kicked it toward the man, who had leaped to his feet and now screamed as the pistol and Chuck hurtled across the tiles in his direction. When the man made a move to run—toward us? away from us?—he slipped on the newspaper and his towel fell off and, as he stumbled into the pool, I saw that he was, like the SMERSH killer in the novel, naked. His was the first penis I’d ever seen other than my father’s and little brother’s.
I’ve wondered ever since if the couple were more or less frightened than we were. Or maybe their fear and our fear were apples and oranges. But it was the most terrifying instant of my life up to that point.
Five minutes after the shooting, however, after we’d walked at a strenuously normal pace out the front door, and as we pedaled west and north as fast as we could, our shock and terror cooled into mere anxiety—maybe the man had sprained a wrist or broken an arm when he fell, maybe he or his wife had recognized Alex, even though we’d stayed in the shadows. Chuck thought the guy looked familiar.
“You definitely got the gun?” Alex asked Chuck for the second time. He worried that if the club had the toy pistol, they might show it to all the members and his parents might recognize it—or, less plausibly, dust it for fingerprints. But yes, Chuck had the pistol in his pocket.
Five minutes after that, as we arrived at Alex’s house, out of breath, sweaty, we already considered the episode hilarious and wonderful.
“I realize who that guy was,” Chuck said. “I’ve seen him at the RC field.” RC was what he called his radio-controlled airplanes. “He’s got this really beautiful, really big biplane.”
“We can’t tell
anyone
about this,” Alex said.
“No shit, Sherlock,” Chuck said.
The Macallisters were out to dinner in Chicago, so we went to Alex’s basement and mixed several celebratory cocktails of vodka and 7-Up in plastic Flintstones cups, and recounted the highlights of the mission. I had never gotten drunk before. The third or fourth time Alex played the 45 of “Twistin’ the Night Away,” we all got up and danced the Twist together, which, each of us confessed, we had secretly learned and practiced at home, watching
American Bandstand.
What I most clearly remember about the night of our first mission is the clatter and chaos and terror of the swimming-pool shooting and the sulfurous smell of the caps. I find that memory heartbreaking because at the time it didn’t contain even a whiff of tragedy.