The Once and Future Spy (29 page)

But before she could follow him she had to find him.

She tried the Department of the Navy, Personnel Office, first thing in the morning, but was informed that it dealt only with
people on active duty. The chief petty officer Snow spoke to suggested she try the Veterans Administration. A civilian time
server there sent her around to the Office of Naval Reserve. “Sorry,” a woman wearing lieutenant junior grade stripes on the
sleeves of her uniform informed Snow. “We don’t give out addresses.”

“I don’t want to see the Admiral,” Snow explained earnestly. “I want to send him something. My husband admired Admiral Toothacher
enormously. He served under him when the Admiral was captain of a destroyer. My husband died in an automobile accident”-it
dawned on Snow that she was doing what the psychiatrist claimed Silas did, constructing a make-believe world using bits and
pieces of the real world-”I was driving … that’s how I got this.” With her fingertips she traced the thin scar over her eye.
The tears that brimmed in her eyes were real enough even if the story she told was part fiction.

“I’m sorry about your husband-”

Snow could see the woman was wavering. “Anyhow, he built this scale model of the destroyer, you see. In his will he left it
to Admiral Toothacher. That’s why I’m trying to get his address-so I can send him the model of the destroyer.”

The lieutenant screwed up her mouth, weighed the pros and cons, finally said, “Wait here a minute.” She went over to a computer
terminal and punched in a name. A dossier flashed onto the screen. The lieutenant copied off an address on a slip of paper
and handed it to Snow. “Your admiral retired to Guantánamo, Cuba, but he seems to have returned to Washington at some point.”

Snow thanked her profusely.

“Rules,” the lieutenant said, “are made to be bent.”

The address the woman gave Snow turned out to be a seedy apartment hotel on lower Wisconsin. Snow bought a tiny Minox in a
camera store, loaded it with very fast black-and-white film and installed herself in an all-night drugstore that had one long
window on the street and another separating the store from the hotel lobby. Sipping coffee at the counter, Snow had a good
view of the hotel’s giant revolving door and main desk. Night fell. Streetlights came on. Dozens of men came and went but
none of them fit the description Silas had given her of the Admiral. One elderly man with snow-white hair sauntered out of
the elevator around nine
P.M.
holding two white poodles on leashes, but he was too short and too fat to be called lanky. Snow ordered another cup of coffee,
her fifth, slipped two dollar bills onto the counter and told the waitress to keep the change. Outside a heavy rain began
to fall. The tired black woman behind the counter leaned across to Snow. “If you’re looking to turn a trick,” she said, “you
probably came to the wrong hotel.”

“I’m not looking to turn a trick,” Snow said. “I’m looking for a friend.”

The waitress obviously didn’t believe her. “No skin off my nose whatever you’re doing,” she said.

The hour hand on the clock in the lobby was just clicking onto ten
P.M.
when the elevator doors opened and a tall, lanky man emerged. Snow recognized him immediately. He was in his late fifties,
with a mane of chalk-white hair, a slight stoop, pasty complexion. The Admiral ambled past the drugstore window less than
three yards from where Snow was sitting, and she saw the aviator glasses and, behind them, the bulging eyes that seemed to
take in absolutely everything. Snow noticed that his sunken cheeks had a dab of rouge on them. A hulking man with close-cropped
pewter hair and ramrod straight posture came forward to meet the Admiral. They exchanged a few words. The Admiral nodded,
slipped a raincoat over his shoulders as if it were a cape, and followed the hulking man through the revolving door to the
street.

Snow grabbed her coat and darted out of the drugstore into the street. Outside the revolving door the hulking man had opened
a large black umbrella and was holding it over the head of the Admiral as he hustled him into the back seat of a blue Dodge
parked at the curb. Snow went over to the taxi stand to her left, jumped into the first cab on
the line. “You see the car pulling away from the hotel?” she asked the driver.

“Sure I see the car pulling away from the hotel,” he replied with a laugh. “If I didn’t see it I’d be blind. If I was blind
I couldn’t get a hack license.”

“Can you follow it?”

The driver, whose name according to the framed identification plaque was Ernest E. Rosencrantz, perked up. “You want that
I should actually follow that car?”

“Please.”

The Dodge with the Admiral in it joined the flow of traffic. Ernest E. Rosencrantz worked his windshield wipers and pulled
out behind it. “This ain’t for some kind of candid camera program?” he asked.

“It’s my husband,” Snow explained. “He told me he was going to play duplicate bridge. I don’t believe him.”

Colored lights ricocheted off the glistening pavement as the blue Dodge, weaving through traffic, drifted down “The Strip”
in Georgetown, then turned off M Street onto a side street, then onto another and pulled up in front of a door with a neon
sign sizzling over it that said CH CK’S. The taxi pulled up several car lengths behind. Ernest E. Rosencrantz pursed his lips.
“The
U
is missing. Been missing for months. Chuck’s is what it should say.”

The burly man came around to the sidewalk side of the Dodge, opened the umbrella and held it over the Admiral’s head as he
got out of the car and walked to the door. He pushed a button. A small window in the door opened, a face appeared in it. The
Admiral muttered something. The window closed, the door opened and the Admiral disappeared inside.

“Is that the bridge player?” Rosencrantz inquired.

Snow nodded.

“If you don’t mind my saying so, he looks a little on the old side for you.”

The burly man returned to the car and slowly cruised the street, hunting for a parking space. He found one near the corner,
walked back and disappeared in turn into Chuck’s.

Snow started to pay the driver. “Say, you look like an all right lady,” Rosencrantz said. “Maybe you should think twice about
going in there.” He smiled in a fatherly way. “Duplicate bridge is definitely not what they play at Chuck’s.”

“I need to see for myself,” Snow said.

Rosencrantz shook his head philosophically. “I think you’re in for a surprise.”

Snow held out some bills. “Life is made up of wounds and scar tissue, Mr. Rosencrantz.” She flashed the smile that held back
tears. “I’ve passed the wound stage. I’m working desperately on the scar tissue.”

Rosencrantz pushed her money away. “Pay me when you get back to the hotel,” he told Snow.

“You mean you’ll wait for me?”

The driver waved a hand in embarrassment. “Wounds. Scar tissue. I’ll be here when you come out.”

“You’re one in a million, Mr. Rosencrantz.”

“That’s not what the wife says,” Rosencrantz noted dryly. “I should get you to write me a testimonial.”

Snow ducked from the taxi and ran through the rain to the door with the neon sign sizzling over it. She pushed the buzzer.
The small window opened. A man with a pinched face peered out. He took in Snow and said, “You sure you know where you’re at?”

“I’m meeting a friend,” Snow told him.

The window closed, the door opened and she slipped in. The man with the pinched face took her raincoat and handed her a red
chip with a number on it. “There’s a twenty-five-dollar minimum per,” he informed her.

Snow pushed through a curtain of beads into the nightclub and looked around. A dozen or so couples-men with men, women with
women-were dancing to slow canned music on a mirrorlike surface in the middle of the room. Strobe lights flickering from a
large diamond over their heads made it seem as if the tent-shaped roof was in motion. There were booths along two walls filled
with flickering candles and dark figures, and a long mahogany bar off to Snow’s right with candles spaced along it every yard.
The Admiral was sitting on a stool near the middle of the bar, engrossed in conversation with an elegantly dressed gentleman
on the next stool. The hulking man who had held the umbrella for the Admiral was sitting farther down the bar nursing a drink,
toying with the melting wax of a candle, passing a forefinger with excruciating slowness through the flame.

Snow strolled past him. “This taken?” she asked him, nodding at the next stool.

“It is. By you,” he replied without looking up from the candle he was playing with.

Snow hefted herself onto the stool. The bartender hovered. “What do you recommend?” she asked.

“Here they usually ask me who I recommend,” he said with a suggestive smirk.

The hulking man laughed under his breath. The bartender said, “Nobody complains about my daiquiris.”

“A daiquiri, then.”

“Lime or lemon?”

“Lime.”

The bartender filled a large glass with crushed ice, rum, lime juice, tossed in several spoonfuls of sugar, capped it with
a metal cover and began shaking it to a cha-cha rhythm. He iced a glass and strained the liquid into it, popped in a straw
and set the drink down in front of Snow. Wiping the surface of the bar with a wet rag, he asked the hulking man, “Can I top
you off?”

“Later.”

“Tell me again,” the bartender asked the hulking man, “what makes a perfect number perfect.”

“A perfect number is perfect,” the hulking man explained wearily-he had obviously been over it before-”if it’s the sum of
its divisors other than itself. Take the number six. It can be divided by one or two or three, and it’s the sum of one and
two and three. Or twenty-eight. It can be divided by one or two or four or seven or fourteen, and it’s the sum of one and
two and four and seven and fourteen. It’s perfect.”

“Huxstep here,” the bartender confided to Snow, “has a thing about numbers. Go ahead, try him.”

Snow studied the profile of the customer sitting on the stool next to her. So this was the man who had tried to incinerate
Silas in the parking lot, who had worked one of the wrecking balls that had almost killed her. Another piece of the puzzle
was falling into place. Huxstep wasn’t a figment of Silas’s imagination either. She remembered Silas mentioning that Huxstep
could solve complicated mathematical problems in his head. Snow decided to put him to the test to make sure he was the same
man Silas had talked about.

“Do you have a pocket calculator handy?” she asked the bartender.

He took one from the drawer of the cash register and gave it to
Snow. She punched in some numbers, looked at the result, said to Huxstep, “Can you divide eight sevens by 368.7?”

Huxstep’s face screwed up, his eyes narrowed, his lips moved. Presently he said, “21095138.”

“Where does the decimal point fall?” Snow demanded.

“After the fifty-one.”

Snow said, “That’s amazing.”

“Don’t say I didn’t tell you,” the bartender said, beaming.

A short woman with gold-rimmed sunglasses drifted over and sat down next to Snow. She popped a filter-tipped cigarette between
her lips, angled her head toward Snow and asked, “Do you have fire, honey?”

The bartender held out a book of matches. The woman looked at him in annoyance. “Did I ask you for fire, Charlie, or did I
ask the lady here for fire?”

Charlie backed away.

“How ‘bout it, honey?”

Snow said she didn’t smoke.

The woman said with a laugh, “No vices?”

“I drink,” Snow admitted. She sipped her daiquiri.

“I’m relieved to hear it,” the woman said. She looked at the bartender. “Whatever she’s drinking, Charlie, bring two more.
And I’ll take your fire now.”

Around the curve of the bar the elegantly dressed gentleman sitting next to the Admiral left his stool and walked off toward
the booths. The Admiral leaned forward to catch Huxstep’s eye, batted both his lids in a conspiratorial double wink; Snow
had the impression that he was pleading for something. Huxstep slid off his stool and made his way to the edge of the dance
floor. He tapped a thin young man with shoulder-length bleached blond hair and a face that looked half-Indian, drew him off
the dance floor. He spoke to him for a moment, indicated the Admiral with his eyes, peeled off some bills from a thick wad
and gave them to the young man, who folded the money away in the rear pocket of his skintight leather jeans.

At the bar Snow fumbled for something in her pocketbook.

“Funny I never seen you here before,” said the woman who had bought Snow a drink.

“That’s because I’ve never been here before.”

“Uh-huh,” the woman said.

Huxstep, his eyes glued to the Admiral, returned to his seat. The young man who looked half-Indian eased himself onto the
empty stool next to the Admiral and began talking animatedly with him. Toothacher leaned over and whispered something in his
ear. The young man rewarded him with a high-pitched laugh. His shrill voice could be heard over the music. “I’ll bet you say
that to all the boys,” he exclaimed.

“No, really,” the Admiral could be heard protesting. “I knew the instant I saw you there was more to you than looks.”

The young man eased an arm over the Admiral’s stooped shoulders. The Admiral, beaming, leaned across the bar to catch Huxstep’s
eye and nodded once. Huxstep went back to his drink. “I think I’ll take that refill now,” he told the bartender.

“You earned it,” Charlie remarked.

“He’s a grand old man,” Huxstep muttered. “Salt of the earth.”

“He’s lucky to have you,” the woman next to Snow ventured.

“It’s me who’s the lucky one,” Huxstep insisted.

“Lost something in your pocketbook?” Charlie asked Snow.

“Not anymore,” she said, and she came out with her wallet and asked for a check.

“You only just arrived,” the woman next to Snow said in a hurt voice. “You haven’t drunk the daiquiri I bought you.”

“The real action doesn’t start for another hour or so,” Charlie added.