Angela Sloan (9 page)

“What?”

He shook his head. The ring with the Scamp keys on it hit me in the chest.

“You're sick, Ray,” I said. I took his arm.

He wrenched the arm loose. Somehow I tripped on my own feet and found myself on the floor. He bent down close to me.

“Yes, I am sick. Come through for me, Jumbo. Code word Idaho.”

He left. I heard his shoes clatter down the stairs, and then from the window I saw him come out from under the front awning onto the sidewalk. He caught himself on the hood of a parked green station wagon. He crossed St. Paul, and then he went away up Madison Street, gone.

I
wanted to climb out the window and down the side of the building after him.

But I couldn't. He was sick, but Idaho meant something. I knew what it meant. Spacious, queasy-making thoughts expanded in my brain, but I pushed them down. Close, practical thoughts must be my only thoughts. I ran to get the buttermilk carton with Ray's fingerprints smeared across it. I don't know why—our fingerprints were everywhere. I dumped a hill of his cigarette butts into a paper grocery bag and pushed all my clothes into my knapsack.

There wasn't much to pack. While scanning the room, I noted a set of gouges high on the wall. It seemed that Ray had swung the hot plate into the wall by its cord, or maybe thrown it. He must have had some reason to suspect that a listening device was inside. It was a perfect hiding place—that hot plate was so filthy, we had touched it as little as possible.

I left with my arms full. At a bend in the stairs, I stopped to look for Henry. There he was in his cage, head in his hands. I climbed back up a flight and slipped out the back stairs. No paper match was needed this time, because I wouldn't be back.

Some children were wrestling at the curb near the Scamp. “Hey, chickie,” one of them said to me. I got in the Scamp and cranked it, and when it lurched forward those children hopped aside.

I drove for some time, an hour or more. I don't know how. Later, when I stopped, I had no recollection of any streets I had driven through. All I seemed to be able to think of was Ray in his soaked shirt telling me to come through for him.

I had stopped alongside a parking lot. The sun was low, and the glare was such that all of the dozens of cars appeared the same steely white. I thought of something that I had seen earlier, but which hadn't
registered at the time. I got my red radio out of the knapsack. The leather case had been pulled off of it and the corner of the radio crushed as though it had been stomped on. The radio could have been opened simply enough with a small screwdriver, but we didn't have one of those.

I tried turning it on—nothing.

I drove till I found a dumpster half out of sight behind a veterinarian's office. I pitched in the remains of my beloved red shortwave set. I also tossed the bag of cigarette butts and a stack of tourist brochures that I had gathered, idiotically, from a rack at Lexington Market. Time to pitch it all. Idaho was our code word meaning diverge and wait for instructions. He had told it to me on that bench in Lafayette Square, back on that Sunday when we left D.C.—the Sunday after the arrests at the Watergate. Father's Day, as a matter of fact. You can check the calendar. Idaho meant bug out, and that he said it in our code was proof that he knew what he was saying.

Could it be, really, that Henry had placed a bug in our room? The thought was ridiculous, but then in my mind the picture of him shifted, and I found I could imagine it. He'd been an easy recruitment for me. Too easy, perhaps. If a child could recruit him, why not the FBI?

For some reason I was dropping the brochures into the dumpster piece by piece, looking over them again—one for the Poe House, one for Pimlico, where I'd intended to visit. A brown envelope was in the stack, and inside the brown envelope were fourteen stiff hundred-dollar bills.

A light rain started. I drove a long, narrow street that was lined with two- and three-story rowhouses. Each house had its stack of front steps and its square of yard only big enough to hold two lawn chairs or a planter made out of a tire. I parked and locked the Scamp's doors.

The city bus stopped at the corner. A man pushed himself up the street in a wheelchair. Someone called hello to him.

Porch lights were lit, and people sat out on their steps. Windows flickered blue where television sets were on. Now and then came a laugh, a shout, or a siren. No one seemed to notice me. It was dark inside the Scamp, and I was small. Before I could sleep I seemed to sit awake on the white vinyl seat for half the night, only looking out the windows of the Scamp and thinking, thinking, thinking.

W
hen I woke the air in the Scamp was stale. The windows were fogged, and my mouth and eyes were gummy. I wiped the windshield with my hand. The streetlights were still on, and the sky was a murky, sunless blue. I found an open donut shop and scrubbed my face and neck in the bathroom. The girl in the mirror appeared childish and lost, an urchin whose stringy blond locks you wouldn't like to touch.

I ate a donut, and it was good. Let me say that again. I like a plain cake donut, no glaze, no sprinkles. Other things went out of my head while I ate this donut. The outside was crisp and toasty with a tallowy aroma and hints of nutmeg. The yellow interior was soft and dense. I stood in line for a second one and enjoyed it almost as much. The name of this shop was Mister Donut.

In the middle of eating my second donut an observation came that struck me as so important, I almost wrote it down. I didn't, for security reasons, but I have kept it nearby in my mind. The observation was that, the night before, in the Scamp, I had nearly despaired. I had wanted to ball up and hide, a useless feeling from which nothing good can ever come. And I'd made a bad decision, sleeping in the car on a neighborhood street. Any police officer knocking on the glass could have ruined everything for me and Ray. It was time for me to rise to the business at hand.

I needed to get out of Baltimore. Philadelphia was not a far drive. I also needed to make a call to the classified department at the Sarasota offices of the
World News Digest.
I would put in a signal to Ray to tell him that I was safe and awaiting instructions.

I went into the glove compartment for a map and pulled out a slip of paper I didn't recognize. It was a carbon from a restaurant ticket. The figure $200 was on there twice in ballpoint. That didn't sound
like any meal that Ray or I would have ordered. There were other pen scratches I couldn't read. It was Chinese: the receipt for our Tennessee driver's licenses. They were to have been ready today. We had forgotten.

I had two donuts in me now and intended to do the smart thing, as soon as I figured out what that was. Here was my first thought: a driver's license would be awfully useful to me. It was already half paid for, and also, the licenses had our pictures on them. I remembered those melancholy faces spread out on the desktop, and I did not want ours to be among them.

Here was the other side of it. Idaho meant
bug out,
not
leave and come back the next morning.
Why have a plan if you're not going to follow it?

I thought it over for a long time.

A black bird walked on its stick legs in the Mister Donut parking lot. Three cars arrived together, and the bird jumped up and shot away. The day was beginning. The people who had slept in beds were coming out for breakfast and to see what was going on. It was time for me to move, time to grow up, time to do the next thing.

I
made my call to Sarasota, then went to Sears and Roebuck. I was there when they unlocked the doors. In the dressing room I pulled on a set of magenta Toughskins with stiff reinforcing patches on the insides of the knees. I added a plaid shirt, and my hair went up in a golf cap with a medallion on the peak. It was that or a football helmet.

I drove to the alley behind Lucky Bus Tour. Spicy smoke crept out the rear door of the Golden Monkey Restaurant, along with clatters and shouts. The door was propped open with a chair. I'd been watching for two minutes, waiting for I don't know what, when the simpleminded Chinese girl hauled a bucket out and eyed me dully.

She emptied her bucket of kitchen scraps into the garbage. Idly I wondered what she could possibly be throwing out. It was my understanding that the Chinese chefs used everything, down to and including the claws.

When she'd gone I walked the twenty steps to the rear door of Lucky Bus Tour. My knock was answered by the man with the tassel beard. I had interrupted his lunch. He held the door open with the toe of his slipper and continued slurping noodles while he peered at me. I showed the receipt, then removed the golf cap. He let me in.

“Two hundred dollars,” he said.

“Let's see what you've done.”

He brought two cards from the desk drawer. The picture of Ray gave me pause. I didn't dwell on it just then, however.

“So, you are nineteen,” he said. “If you ever need some work, let me know. Great pay, short hours.”

“I will need that receipt back plus the original,” I said.

“What original?”

I was reminding him how carbons work when a bell dinged up
front, followed by a shout in Chinese. I followed him up the corridor. Another Chinese man grabbed his arm. Out in the street, through the glass, I saw the simpleminded girl run past silently, black braids flying.

The two men hadn't seen her. They exited to the left, leaving me by myself.

I went back and opened the top drawer of the desk. The original of my receipt was there on top of the pad. Simple enough. I tore it out, the carbon paper as well, and folded them in my pocket. I couldn't help noticing half a dozen U.S. passports also in the drawer. One had belonged to a woman born in 1956. I was tempted to help myself to it but didn't. It would be stealing. A person need not become a criminal, just because she is being hunted by the FBI. I laid two hundreds in the drawer, pushed my hair up into the cap again, and went out the way I'd come in.

Because the alley was one-way, I had to go out the other end and wound up driving the Scamp back in front of the Golden Monkey Restaurant. It appeared the whole restaurant had emptied into the sidewalk and street. At the center of the commotion Mr. Wang, the cauliflower-cheeked man, held his hand up wrapped in a towel. The front of his shirt had a goodly amount of blood on it, I mean about the amount you would get from a few long squirts of a squeeze-type mustard container. Not a life-ending amount of blood, but more than you want to see. He was crying. His gray-haired mother darted about inside the crowd, brandishing a long cleaver and shrieking at a birdlike pitch. The cleaver blade was a dark, heavy-looking chunk of steel that would have been well suited for severing pigs' joints or even taking down a small tree. I eased the Scamp by. Mother Wang met my eyes and seemed to tilt the blade at me.

I had put two blocks behind me before I looked again at the picture on Ray's license. I was distressed because he looked awful in it. He hadn't shaved, and that softness on his jaw which I'd hardly noticed in person made him appear haggard in the small portrait. Worse than haggard. His hair was a fringe across his forehead, and his neck wasn't straight. The gaze coming out from under the eyebrows was wary and dark.

I had watched him stand for that picture, but I hadn't really
seen
him. He'd been sick for some time, and now he was sick and alone.

That was a low moment, when I was looking at his picture in the Scamp.

I had to remind myself that I was driving. I checked my hands on the wheel—ten and two—and I checked my speed. I raised my hand to the rearview mirror to adjust it. There in the back seat, looking back at me in the mirror, was the simpleminded Chinese girl.

I
about jumped out of my Toughskins. I whipped the Scamp to the curb. There she was, skinny as a pup and looking very worried, but stationary.

“Get out, Chinese,” I said.

She twisted to look out the back window.

“Out of my car now!” I said.

She slid down in the seat, then farther down, so I couldn't see her.

I went around to the back passenger door. The slow girl was knotted up on the floor, showing only her backside and the red rubber soles of her shoes. I got my hands around one hard brown ankle, but I might as well have been trying to pull a boxwood shrub out of the ground.

A lady police officer came to stand beside me. “Is something the matter here?” she said.

“Of course not.”

“You are parked in front of my fire hydrant.”

It was true. I had even banged my leg on her fire hydrant while pulling the Chinese girl's ankle.

“I'll move the car,” I said.

“You'll move it after I write you a ticket.” The lady police officer flipped open her pad and clicked a pen.

“Please don't.”

“Sorry, Charlie.” She took a step backward and sideways to see the tag.

That wouldn't do. I snatched the pen from her fingers and threw it as hard as I could down the sidewalk.

She hadn't expected that. Quickly I got behind the wheel of the Scamp again. I snatched it into drive and kicked the accelerator, and we shot through a red light, just missing a Honda motorcycle.

I had memorized my route out of town. The farther this Chinese girl rode with me, however, the farther I would be traceable. The thing to do was to pin five dollars to her shirt and call her a cab, if I could only extract her from the back seat.

I saw her face in the mirror again. She wasn't a kid. She might have been twenty-five, though it was hard to tell. “Why are you in my car?” I asked.

“Wang mother try to
keyhole
me,” she said.

The way she spoke was strangely effortful, as though the words were objects to be removed from her mouth. “I don't know what that means,” I said.