The Once and Future Spy (16 page)

W
earing washed-out jeans tucked into ankle-length leather boots and the mackinaw that smelled of camphor, carrying a leather
knapsack filled with cameras and lenses slung over one shoulder, Snow strode with the peculiar gait that was less than a limp
and more than a hesitation toward the Weeder’s car. “Morning,” she said, climbing in on the passenger’s side. “Sleep well?”

“Not really,” the Weeder said. He detected the odor of camphor and realized that in the space of one day he had come to associate
the smell with her. “I had that weird kind of insomnia where you keep dreaming you’re awake.” He shifted into drive and started
down the dirt road toward the main road.

“What you need to do,” Snow explained, setting her knapsack on the floor of the car between her legs, “is brew yourself up
some herb tea last thing before going to bed. Besides making you sleep like a baby, it’s good for memory, broken nails and
your sex life.”

The Weeder glanced sideways at her to see if he was being teased, but she seemed deadly serious.

“I’m glad to get a ride into Boston,” Snow announced. “When I’m on my own I never seem to get to where I started out for,
at least not on time.”

“You get distracted,” the Weeder guessed. He turned onto the main road heading toward Concord and studied the rearview mirror.

Snow noticed him peering into the mirror but didn’t think anything of it. “It’s not a matter of distractions,” she said. “It’s
a matter of me. Before he died, my husband”—she flashed the smile that kept the tears at bay—”used to say I reminded him of
late roses. What he meant was that I had an addiction to lingering.”

The Weeder asked quietly, “How long have you been a widow?”

“Forever. At least it seems like that sometimes.”

“I didn’t mean to pry.”

“My husband was killed in a car accident four years ago this spring. I was driving at the time.”

“I think I see,” the Weeder said.

She turned to him almost eagerly. “What do you think you see?”

“I think I see what ambushed you,” he told her.

“I never thought of it as an ambush,” Snow said. She brought a fingernail to her teeth and began nibbling on it. “When I could
help it I never thought about it at all.”

“That may be one of your problems,” the Weeder suggested.

“Dime store psychology,” Snow snapped.

They rode in silence for a long while, Snow absorbed in avoiding her thoughts, the Weeder absorbed in his driving and the
rearview mirror. He turned onto the ring road that led to the Turnpike and downtown Boston. Remembering another trick from
his countersur-veillance course on the Farm, he slowed down and drove in the right lane. Through the rearview mirror he thought
he saw another car slow down and pull into the right lane half a mile behind him—or was he imagining it? He speeded up, switched
to the middle and then the left lane and passed several dozen automobiles before settling back into the right lane again.
He studied the rearview mirror but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

“You have a curious way of driving,” Snow commented.

“Where are we going?” the Weeder asked.

“First stop is a gallery near the docks in downtown Boston. I’m having a show of some of my ‘Invasion’ photos. It’s my last
chance to check the lighting.”

“What are ‘Invasion’ photos?”

“I did a series I call Invasions of Privacy. You saw one on my wall last night. Nudes, mostly, seen through doors that are
open just a crack, through slightly parted curtains or venetian blinds. What I’m getting at, in my way, is that we live in
a world of invasions—
countries invade other countries, governments invade our bedrooms, men invade women, television invades our homes, punk rock
invades our culture. And so on. It’s a long list. We spend our days listening to the details of the latest invasion and wait
our turn. What’s changed is that in the old days we knew when we were being invaded and could make a stand. Nowadays the invasions
are more subtle—sometimes we don’t even know they’re taking place.”

Snow’s photographs, in thin silver frames hanging on whitewashed walls, made the Weeder squirm. They were invasions of privacy,
and more. At the heart of each photograph was an intimacy, a wound. There was a series of three photos of old women, naked,
seen through bathroom doors ajar a few inches. One was powdering her body. The second was shaving with a safety razor. The
third had caught a glimpse of her reflection in a full-length mirror and was studying herself with a sad, unbelieving expression
on her wrinkled face. There were several photographs of a slender young woman or, more properly, vertical slivers of her glimpsed
through a partly open door; the third in the series, hanging directly opposite the photograph of the old woman who had caught
a glimpse of herself in the mirror, showed the young woman with her head cocked, studying with a critical eye her naked body.
It was clear from her expression that she liked what she saw. There was another series, taken through parted venetian blinds,
of a naked middle-aged man with a cigarette dangling from his lips, watching television. In one photo he stared at the screen
as if he had heard a joke but didn’t get it.

“So?” Snow asked. They were back in his car, heading along the Fitzgerald Expressway toward the North End, where Snow planned
to photograph squatters in an abandoned building earmarked for demolition. “What did you think of my Invasions?”

“Some of them embarrassed me.”

“They were supposed to. Anything that’s really good—that cuts deep—is embarrassing. Sometimes I think that all art involves
an invasion of privacy—in the case of a novel, I suppose the author more often than not is invading his own privacy. Listening
to Callas is an invasion of her privacy in the sense that she permits you into parts of herself so private you are embarrassed
to be there.”

“I always thought she let me into parts of
myself
I’d never been to before.”

“That too,” Snow said. She studied the Weeder with interest.
“What is it you do for a living? Are you one of the invaders of privacy or an invadee?”

“I work for the government,” the Weeder said vaguely.

Snow said, with obvious irritation, “That puts you on the side of the invaders.”

“I guess it does.”

“If you are one of the invaders,” Snow asked, “why do you keep staring into your rearview mirror?”

“I like to keep track of the cars behind me.”

“You’re not very convincing when you lie. Take a left here. Park next to the fence. We’ll walk the rest of the way. I don’t
want the squatters to see the car and get frightened off.”

The building that loomed ahead, six stories, stood alone in the middle of a pile of rubble from surrounding buildings that
had already been demolished. Except for two enormous cranes with teardrop-shaped wrecking balls dangling from their raised
arms, the lot was deserted. A hand-lettered sign over the entrance to the building read: No Entry—Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.

Snow took a Leica from her knapsack and fitted a telephoto lens onto it. “There was an article a few days ago about squatters
occupying the building and refusing to move unless the city provided them with cheap housing,” she explained.

The Weeder studied the building. “If there are people around, they’re keeping a low profile.”

Snow stopped to stare at the gaping holes where the windows had been. “I once saw a beehive with one wall made of glass. You
could watch the bees making honey. Imagine if one wall of an apartment house was made of glass.”

“Another invasion of privacy,” the Weeder said.

“Another invasion of privacy,” Snow agreed. “We’re all fascinated by the things we fear.” She started for the door. “Wait
here if you like.”

The Weeder caught up with her. They exchanged looks. He raised an eyebrow in a shrug. She smiled the first real smile he had
seen on her face since he met her and ducked through the door into the shell of the building. The Weeder took a careful look
around the lot. Satisfied that it was deserted, he followed her.

With Snow leading the way they climbed a staircase littered with trash and debris. At each floor Snow put her head into the
hallway
and listened for a moment. On the sixth floor she began to explore the apartments. Some of the walls had already been demolished,
sinks and bathtubs pried loose, toilets shattered with sledgehammers—probably, Snow noted, by the demolition people to prevent
squatters from using them. The windows had been ripped out and an icy wind cut through the gaps. Snow kicked in frustration
at a heap of empty sardine tins; there had been squatters here after all but they appeared to have left. The tins went clattering
across the naked planks of a kitchen floor where the linoleum had been pried up. “I guess I brought you out of your way for
nothing,” she said.

From outside came the sound of tires crunching on debris. The Weeder edged over to a gaping hole in a wall. A light snow had
begun to fall and the crystals slanted in through the hole into his face. Squinting into the snowflakes, he looked down.

Six floors below a dark-colored four-door sedan crept to a stop in the middle of the lot. Three of the four doors opened.
The Admiral, the rail-thin woman with the veil masking her eyes and the burly man with the handgun held at present arms emerged.
The woman and the burly man trotted off and disappeared from view. The Admiral, his back arched into a parenthesis, looked
up at the building, saw the Weeder and waved cheerily. He might have been coming to take tea.

Snow started toward the hole in the wall but the Weeder pushed her roughly back into the room. “We’ve got to get out of here,”
he announced in a voice so laced with fear that Snow instantly understood that their privacy was about to be invaded—and brutally.

The Weeder started for the stairwell. From the lot came the pulsating scream of a hand-cranked siren, then the muffled backfires
of two crane motors spurting into life. At the staircase the Weeder leaned over the railing and looked down.

“Why are we running?” Snow asked in a frightened whisper.

“There are people outside who want my money
and
my life,” the Weeder replied.

At that moment one of the teardrop-shaped wrecking balls exploded through a wall into the building one story below them. An
instant later the second ball burst through another wall, pulverizing everything in its path. The floorboards on which they
were standing vibrated violently. A cloud of debris and dust drifted up in the stairwell, obscuring the Weeder’s vision, making
it difficult to breathe. Snow, thoroughly terrorized, pulled a bandanna from her pocket and
held it over her mouth and nose. The Weeder covered his face with a handkerchief and, pulling Snow along with him, backed
away.

“What are you doing?” Snow cried through her bandanna. She tried to slip out of his grasp. “We’ve got to get down the stairs.”

“There’s no staircase to go down,” the Weeder told her. “That’s what the noise was—they’ve demolished the staircase between
floors.”

“You mean we’re trapped up here?”

The Weeder dragged her back into a room and pushed her into a corner. Below, the motors of the cranes raced. And then a teardrop-shaped
wrecking ball bit cleanly through the wall directly across the room from them and arced up to the ceiling before falling back
through the wall and disappearing. The second wrecking ball exploded through the wall into the room behind them. The air turned
opaque with dust. Snow screamed. The Weeder, his eyes tearing, located her from the scream and got a grip on her mackinaw
and pulled her through a doorway into a hallway. They stumbled down the hallway into another room as one wrecking ball, and
then the other, burst through outer walls behind them.

“They’re trying to bury us alive,” Snow cried.

“They’re going to destroy the floor above the break in the staircase,” the Weeder said. He looked around wildly. “We’ve got
to get to a lower floor.”

Outside, the two wrecking balls pummeled the building, exploding into it in brutal one-two punches every fifteen or twenty
seconds. Each pair of explosions seemed louder and nearer than the previous ones as the giant teardrops worked closer and
closer to where the Weeder and Snow were huddled.

Snow sank to her knees and pressed her palms to her ears to ward off the explosions. “Do you know the people who are doing
this to us?” she sobbed.

The Weeder settled down beside her and put an arm over her shoulder. “I know them,” he admitted bitterly. “I’m an idiot for
getting you involved.”

One of the wrecking balls reached the room next to them with a terrible smashing sound, followed by the peal of plaster raining
down. The wall against which Snow had her back trembled. Snow was trembling too and the Weeder’s description of Nate flashed
into his head: like Nate, she was dancing leaf to gusts. There was another explosion in the next room, more violent than the
previous one. The
Weeder knew time was running out on them. He tried to move but his feet felt leaden. In his heart he knew there was no hope
now, and no way out. Their crushed bodies would be discovered by a bulldozer driver clearing away the mountain of rubble.
With a great effort the Weeder tried to pull Snow to him. She resisted. Angrily. She pounded on the floor with the palm of
her hand. The pencil line scar over her eye turned livid. Tears streamed down her cheeks, leaving tracks on her dust-stained
skin. The Weeder brought his mouth close to her ear and shouted out something he had just discovered. “I would have liked
to love you.”