“It’s just like Monte Carlo,” I’d said to Alex and Chuck. “The lake is the Mediterranean Sea, like in Casino Royale. And Spanish Court”—an old (that is, thirty-five-year-old) shopping mall with red tile roofs and a bell tower—”is sort of Monaco-an.”
“The word is ‘Monegasque,’” Alex corrected.
Chuck smiled and shook his head and suggested Los Angeles instead. Bond goes there in Diamonds Are Forever. “I think Spanish Court is really more Californian.”
Given the lakefront, I proposed, we could also imagine we were in Geneva, where Goldfinger captures Bond. “But Monaco or Los Angeles or Switzerland,” I said, “come on, what’s it really matter? It can be any of them. I mean, it’s not real.”
“No, no, no,” Alex insisted, “it’s got to be specific. Mr. Hendricks says good acting is all about specificity.” Jerome Hendricks, the head of the drama department at New Trier High School, also ran a theater program for “gifted” younger children, and Alex had been one of his star pupils since fifth grade. Alex regarded him as a mentor not just in theatrical matters but also in fashion (turtlenecks), music (Bob Dylan), and general demeanor (supercilious). “It’s especially important,” Alex added, undoubtedly quoting him again, “since we’re doing an improvisation.”
Alex had his heart set on the mock-Tudor Michigan Shores Club, where his parents were members and which, he said, “might as well be Blades,” the fictional Mayfair club to which several Bond characters belong.
I proposed we could be serially specific, that our first mission could have two different settings on two different continents. So on that Saturday in June at the golden hour, we were heading to both, one after the other.
I adored No Man’s Land, the twenty-two acres as well as its name and peculiar history. By suburban standards, it was disheveled and disorderly. It had no nice big houses or nice neat yards and very few trees. Instead, there were a few dumpy three-story apartment buildings; no one we knew lived in an apartment. There was a barbecue restaurant where we’d once watched a drunk man stumble out the door and pass out on the sidewalk. And yet it wasn’t a slum. The Spanish Court had a movie theater, the Teatro del Lago. Altogether, No Man’s Land was the most urban, foreign-seeming place we could reach easily by bike, both raffish (a word I’d learned in English class) and louche (a word I’d learned from my father).
Alex handed Chuck the cooler of the two toy cap guns—the machine pistol that fired five times with each trigger squeeze and spat out plastic shell casings. Chuck stuck it in his leather shoulder holster. Alex put one of the two Blinker Code-Lites and the smaller pistol, a Luger, into the metal tackle box. On the lid of the box was a monogram, raised white letters on a shiny little red plastic strip—ESB, short for Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the head of SMERSH in Thunderball—that he had made with a Dymo LabelWriter.
“Check this out,” Alex said, pointing to a russet-colored splotch the size of a silver dollar inside Chuck’s tackle box. “Blood.” Perch or smallmouth bass blood, but a nice touch nonetheless.
I stuck the other Blinker Code-Lite into my pink vinyl handbag, from which I pulled an unopened pack of cigarettes I’d bought a week earlier from a machine—Chesterfields, Bond’s brand whenever he visited America. As I dug around for matches, Alex pulled a Zippo from his pants pocket. No one had ever lit me before. I grinned as I exhaled, but Alex remained absolutely straight-faced.
He lowered his eyelids a millimeter and his voice a half-octave. “Miss Lynd?” For a thirteen-year-old, he did come across as pretty steely.
“Yes, Number One?” I was Vesper Lynd, the Soviet double agent who works for MI6 in Casino Royale.
“Double-oh-seven and his CIA friend are nearby. I’ll remain to your southwest at all times.” The Blinker Code-Lites had little compasses built in to their pistol grips.
Nodding, I took another drag on the cigarette, then tossed it to the ground with as much world-weary élan as I could muster. Chesterfields were unfiltered, unlike the Winstons I occasionally swiped from my parents, so I was feeling a little dizzy.
And we were off, headed in separate directions, the idea being to spread out but to make sure Alex could see me and Chuck could see Alex. After I found James Bond and the CIA agent Felix Leiter, we would keep them under surveillance and then, in an hour, meet up near the bike rack—that is, as Chuck said, we would “rendezvous at the drop point at nineteen hundred hours.” Then we’d kill them.
I walked away at half-speed, swinging my handbag, toward the Teatro box office. I was modeling myself on the character Tuesday Weld played in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.
“When does Hatari! let out?” I asked the lady in the glass box.
She pushed her button to speak. “Quarter past. Price goes up to a dollar at six-thirty, y’know.”
“Yup, thanks.” I shouldn’t have said “yup.”
“Real cute dress, honey.” She smiled and raised her eyebrows in that annoying grown-up way. “Expecting somebody?”
“In a way, I suppose, yes.” Now I was attempting British locution—Hayley Mills?—without the accent. “But I’m afraid I don’t know for certain where he is.”
The smiling ticket lady pursed her lips and shook her head. “Boys,” she said through the tinny speaker.
I sat down on a bench facing the lake. I took out my compact and started applying lipstick. Rather, I gingerly touched the pink tip to my lips and pretended to apply it, using the compact’s little mirror to look behind me. And it worked: I found Alex, thirty yards away, leaning against the opposite corner of the theater. I put away the mirror and lipstick, checked my watch, and took out the newspaper—a month-old copy of the London Guardian. Another compromise: Bond reads the Times, but through her Hadassah chapter, Chuck’s mom had just bought a special commemorative pack of international front pages with articles on Adolf Eichmann’s execution in Israel, and the London Times hadn’t covered it.
I read the Eichmann story and thought of my father. Despite his Danish accent, it was always hard for me to believe, really believe, that my own dad—this chuckling gray-haired suburban man who could juggle tangerines and wore colorful neckties and took the train every day to an office in Chicago—had watched Nazi soldiers shoot people he knew and threaten to shoot him. The war had ended only seventeen years earlier, but it seemed like an event from another epoch.
I put away the newspaper and stared up at the freestanding five-foot-high cursive neon letters that spelled out Teatro del Lago, resisting the urge to trace them in the air the way I did when I was little.
As people started pouring out of the theater, I turned to pay attention, making a clandestine examination of dozens of young and middle-aged men in order to find a suitably single, rugged, handsome one—Bond. I was frustrated in the attempt, since every one of them who looked to be in his late thirties (except for Benny, the Locust Junior High janitor, who didn’t see me, thank God) were accompanied by children or wives.
Giving up, I crossed Sheridan Road and entered a different existential zone. Partly, it was a function of proximity to the lake itself, which you could suddenly hear and smell, and the sandy lakefront soil. But the lake side of Sheridan was also much sketchier than anywhere else on the North Shore.
On the beach were the foundations of a couple of failed private clubs and casinos from the Depression and the charred remains of a Jazz Age roadhouse that we called the Ruins, one-off fast-food places with hand-painted signs, and a penny arcade to which I was explicitly forbidden by my parents to go alone. As I entered the arcade, I found myself smiling and had to force myself to stop. The atmosphere—the racket of shouts and flippers and springs and bells and steel pinballs and wooden skeeballs, the smells of burning popcorn and molten sugar and cigarettes—was sensational. I thought of the first sentence of Casino Royale: “The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.” I pushed my dark glasses up to the top of my head, as I’d seen women do.
Although I wanted to play a horse-
racing machine, in the spirit of the mission, I headed for a gun game that involved shooting a bolt-action rifle at a hopping kangaroo. After each game, as I took another dime from my rubber coin purse, I looked around. I was the only single female in the place. I saw a couple of ninth-grade boys I recognized, which wasn’t good, and a lot of greasers.
The man at the next machine was as old as my dad, but he was too fat and poorly groomed to be Bond or Leiter. And every time he swung his right arm to pound the side of his machine, I got a gust of BO.
“You’re a good shot,” the smelly man said to me as I finished what I decided at that instant was my last game.
“Fair to middling,” I replied. It was a phrase of my mother’s that I’d never spoken. It seemed British-ish.
As I approached the door, I saw Alex, outside, abruptly turn and run back across Sheridan, just barely ahead of a car that sped past, its long fading honk Dopplered into an after-the-fact reprimand. Almost like a European siren! And a moment of actual physical jeopardy!
I kept walking up the road and glanced over at the construction site on the lake where the town’s first high-rise apartment building was going up. I noticed the light in a construction trailer go off, and two men stepped out. The older one, dark-haired and maybe thirty-five, was wearing a tie, and the other, a little older with a crew cut, had on a denim jacket. The one in the necktie carried a briefcase, and the other held a thick tube several feet long under his arm. An attaché, like the ones all 00 agents carry. And the tube? A rifle case, obviously.
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.
True Believers Page 4