Angela Sloan (7 page)

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.

P
oetry was 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.

B
ecause 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 questioned 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.

I
t 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.

“I'm the one who's showing her the guest register.”

Ray groaned.

I stepped out into the hall and shut the door. “I should have explained something, Henry. It is important that we not be seen together except at the front desk. Someone could get the wrong idea about our relationship, or rather the right idea, if you follow me.”

“I have a new poem to read you tonight.”

“I'll be there. I look forward to hearing this poem.”

“All right. McJones looks kind of crazy.”

“Because he is.”

Henry gave me a long, wondering look before moving away carefully down the dirty stairs. He held tightly to the banister.

I went in all ready to congratulate Ray on his crazy act but found him stretched out on the sofa, hugging his stomach. “Something bad, bad, bad was in that chicken,” he said.

I rinsed out a handkerchief to wipe his face. Within an hour things were much worse. He paced, hunched almost double, then stretched out on his back twisting, and then began to mutter about birds and turtles. I gave him some aspirin. He chewed the tablets, then spit them on the floor and lunged into the bathroom.