Once a spy dc-1

by Keith Thomson

  “And nothing compares with the cherry blossoms.”

  There would be no cherry blossoms for months. The four-hour drive was worth it anyway, Charlie thought. D.C. was to spy agencies what Milwaukee was to breweries. And, if nothing else, as each pair of approaching headlights seemed to be saying, it was a good idea to get away.

  5

  The Fairview Inn was the type of motel once predominant on American roadsides, two stories of bricks, shaped like a brick itself, each upper-level room with an iron-railed balcony and each room on the ground floor opening onto a parking space. There were only four cars in the parking lot now, including a beat-up Toyota Cressida in the Reserved: Management spot behind the office. The Motel 6 on the other side of the New Jersey Turnpike had just two cars. And the Best Western Charlie and Drummond passed before that had had only a solitary RV. Evidently the holiday crowd had gone home, and business travel had yet to recommence. It was possibly the worst night of the year to be a fugitive, Charlie thought.

  He brought the Buick to a stop beside the beat-up Toyota, out of sight of the Fairview Inn office. Over the rumble of the highway, he begged a sleepy Drummond, “Hang here for just a minute?”

  Against his better judgment, he left the engine running so Drummond might stay warm, then he climbed into the stinging seventeen-degree night.

  He rounded the corner to the side of the building that faced away from the highway. At the head of the row of ground floor rooms was a tiny office. The lights were on, but no one appeared to be inside.

  Charlie rapped on the sliding window. Up popped a squat, middle-aged man, his doughy face flattened from sleeping against his desktop. His small eyes snapped to alertness, he smoothed the stripes of hair into place across his balding pate, straightened a clip-on tie bearing the Fairview’s mountain peak logo, and slid the glass open an inch.

  “Good evening, sir,” he said. With a glance at his antique pocket watch, he added, “Technically, I should say, ‘Good morning.’”

  According to the letters packed into the placard, this was NIGHT MANAGER A. BRODY. Although other managers shared this desk, Charlie had no doubt that the meticulously trimmed miniature Christmas tree on the sill was A. Brody’s work. Charlie usually felt a kinship to the A. Brodys of the world, miles below the station in life befitting their intellect. Now Charlie was far more interested in getting out of the cold.

  “Hi, I’d like a room, please,” he said. To diminish the chance of his being identified, he stayed at the outermost limits of the office’s fluorescent haze.

  Brody plucked a registration card from atop a neat stack, set it on his desk blotter, aligned it, and then tweaked it until it was exactly parallel to the edge of the desk.

  “May I have your name, please, sir?” he asked finally.

  “Ramirez,” Charlie said, and, as soon as he did, cursed himself. His friend Mickey’s last name, the first that had come to mind, was common enough around here. But even in the dark, with the bill of a Yankees cap pulled down to his eyes, Charlie was no Ramirez.

  Indeed, Brody raised an brow. “And how many adults in your party, Mr. Ramirez?”

  Charlie considered that the FBI bulletin might have reached the furthest outposts of civilization by now. “Just me.”

  Brody’s brow stayed put, quieting Charlie’s anxiety. “That will be fifty-nine dollars and eighty cents, please, sir.”

  Charlie paid with three twenties and received two dimes and a key card.

  “Have a wonderful stay,” Brody said with, Charlie thought, inordinate cheer.

  Room 105 smelled of bathroom cleanser in combination with the flowery spray used to mask worse smells. The walls trembled each time a truck passed. Although worn, the beds were clad in crisp, clean sheets that promised sleep. And Charlie was starved for sleep.

  “But how can we go to bed?” he asked as he paced the frayed carpet, careful to stay away from the window. Drummond lay on the less concave of the two beds. “Any second they could burst through the door with guns drawn. Then what?”

  Drummond sagged against his headboard. “That would be trouble?”

  Charlie recognized that danger had preceded both of Drummond’s episodes of lucidity. Hopefully the threat alone would do the trick now. “How about this? Say a sharpshooter takes a crack at us from out there?” He waved at the window. The spotty vinyl shade filtered passing headlights so that they appeared on the inner wall of the room as giant, spidery shadows.

  Drummond was captivated by the shadows.

  “Dad, if you could just remember a name. Even a phone number could make a difference in whether or not we have a tomorrow.”

  Drummond fluffed his pillow. “Maybe if we got some sleep?”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve remembered who you work for?” Charlie asked, on the remote chance that his tactic had had some effect.

  Drummond yawned. “Perriman Appliances.”

  “And what’s your job?”

  “Deputy district sales manager for the North Atlantic Division. I demonstrate the appliances in the showroom, then go on-site with building owners to-”

  “So you said.” Charlie sighed.

  He turned away from Drummond, continuing to pace in hope that the motion would stir up a new idea. Helen might have one. He yearned to call her-apart from his predicament. He had long accepted the horseplayer tenet that all of life is six-to-five against-until the moment she asked him out for a beer. The problem was that almost certainly he and Drummond had been followed after meeting her: In all likelihood, Drummond was right about the Department of Housing worker on the sidewalk outside the senior center. And if Lenore was under surveillance…

  In any case, Helen already had told Charlie that there was no sure way to stimulate lucidity. Back at the senior center, she likened lucidity’s random occurrence to a basketball player of middling ability sinking four consecutive shots from three-point range. If there were an explanation, no one knew it. Sometimes, however, strong mental associations triggered latent memories. In this respect the Alzheimer’s sufferer was like the Vietnam veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder-show him a helicopter, he’s back in Saigon. Because the Alzheimer’s sufferer’s memory could be damaged, inoperative, or gone, however, finding such a precise mental association was a crapshoot, at best.

  But a crapshoot was far superior to Charlie’s other idea-doing nothing. He resolved to reel off the names of every United States president in office since Drummond’s birth, the major events in history during that time, and anything else Drummond might associate with government work.

  Charlie took a deep breath, spun back at Drummond, and exclaimed, “Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”

  Drummond was fast asleep.

  Frustration joined the exhaustion and angst already blackening Charlie’s mind. He wanted to fly at Drummond and shake his memory back into operation.

  Rest at least had a track record, he reminded himself.

  Drummond was curled into the fetal position. Charlie would have bet that the old man slept on his back in the classic coffin pose, arms crossed at right angles over his chest. Careful not to jostle him, he slid the comforter out from beneath him. Close proximity to his father had always given Charlie something of a full-body itch. But no longer, for some reason, or at least not now. Gently, Charlie covered him. He twisted the knob on the nightstand lamp in slow motion so the snap wouldn’t wake him, then he tiptoed to his own bed. The springs whined as he lowered himself onto it, but not so loud that Drummond could have heard.

  Drummond sat bolt upright, eyes bulging with terror.

  “What is it?” Charlie asked, catching the panic himself.

  “Beauregard!” Drummond cried.

  “You mean the dog?” After Charlie left home, Drummond took in two retired dog track greyhounds, John-Paul Jones, who lived two or three years, and Beauregard, who lasted about a year longer.

  “We forgot to get someone to look after him while we’re away!”

  “No, no, it’s fi
ne. Beauregard is-” Charlie stopped short of saying, “dead,” seeking to soften it. He was clumsy with euphemisms. “Beauregard’s with Mom.”

  Drummond’s face twisted in mystification. “Now how would Beauregard have gotten all the way down to Monroeville?”

  It sounded awfully Alzheimer’s-y, but Charlie had a feeling it was a major clue. The envelope with the first of his mother’s Social Security checks had borne a forwarding label; originally the check had been mailed to Monroeville, Virginia.

  He got up and paced some more, trying to make sense of it.

  He’d been a month shy of four when she died. He remembered a woman with the grace of a princess, the grit of a tomboy, and a whimsy all her own. She liked rain. No matter how cold the water was at Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach, she let out a whoop and plunged in. The two of them never went on mere errands, they went out in search of adventure. And found it-at the time, Charlie believed riding in the shopping carts at FoodLand compared to the Paris-Dakar Rally.

  He couldn’t recall her funeral-just Drummond sitting him at the kitchen table and soberly relaying the details of the accident. Charlie’s theory was either time had eroded the recollection or he’d blocked it out.

  Tonight he developed a new theory: She never had a funeral.

  “She’s still alive, isn’t she?” he asked Drummond.

  “Who?”

  “Mom.”

  “How could that be?”

  “If she didn’t in fact die.”

  “She was hit by a bus in San Francisco in eighty-three, killed instantly,” Drummond said. His delivery was pat, much the same as when he detailed his duties at Perriman Appliances.

  6

  In a dark bedroom only slightly larger than its full-sized bed, Mickey and Sylvia Ramirez slept.

  The telephone changed that.

  Mickey looked first to the clock. 5:56.

  Usually he slept until the alarm buzzed at 7:05. Then he needed three cups of coffee to dissipate the haze of semiconsciousness. Adrenaline made coffee superfluous now. Good tips often came early, before word could spread and odds could plummet.

  “Fucking horseaholics,” Sylvia groaned.

  Mickey was well aware that people had trouble believing he had a wife at all, let alone a beauty like Sylvia. Olive skinned, with leonine features and a chute of lustrous black hair, she reminded everyone of the queens and princesses on the canvases of El Greco or Velazquez. A few minutes with her, though, and everyone realized Mickey was no luckier in love than at the track.

  The phone was just inches from his pillow, atop the stacked milk crates he used as a nightstand. Sylvia always insisted on answering, her aim being to prevent other horseaholics from putting ideas into his head. By the numbers, he admitted, she was justified. So far. But it was only a matter of time, he believed, until the big score that would bring the apartment of her dreams-“the one with separate bedrooms,” she liked to say.

  As was their custom, he rolled out of the way and she swung wildly at the phone. Once she got a handle on the cordless handset, she answered with an indignant, “Hello?”

  The entirety of her face bunched furiously toward her nose, telling Mickey who was on the line. In Sylvia’s mind, Charlie was to gambling what the Devil was to sin.

  “Like the rest of the fucking world at this hour, he’s asleep now,” she said. “But just one thing before you go, Charlie Horse: Fucking thanks a lot for Great Aunt Edith. That money was supposed to be my sofa.”

  Mickey could hear Charlie’s pleas as she plunged the handset toward the cradle. He grabbed it in time to save the connection.

  “Man, how many fucking times I gotta tell you not to call here?” he said. This was for Sylvia’s benefit, which Charlie would understand. He wouldn’t have risked stirring Hurricane Sylvia, especially so early, unless something big was up.

  Taking the handset, Mickey shot off the bed and out of the room. Sylvia was content to roll back to sleep, thank goodness.

  The linoleum in the narrow hallway froze his bare soles. He entered the compact living room, which also served as his office, and pulled the door shut delicately, so the click wouldn’t wake four-month-old Alfonso-the living room also served as the nursery.

  “The less you know, the better,” Charlie was saying, “but I need you to help me get hold of my mother or Grudzev’s going to be the least of my problems.” It did not sound like the man was calling with any sort of tip. It did sound like he’d been at the bottle.

  “Your mother?” Mickey whispered for the sake of the baby, four feet away. “Wouldn’t you be wanting a lady with a crystal ball to get hold of her?”

  “Listen for five seconds, please?” Charlie said, as sober as Mickey had ever heard him. “The first of her Social Security checks was forwarded to me from general delivery, Monroeville, Virginia. And last night, my father said something that led me to believe she’s actually still there.”

  “So, you’re thinking, what? Your mom, who’s rich enough that she doesn’t give a shit about seventeen hundred bucks a month, can solve your problems?”

  “For our purposes, that sums it up.”

  “I’m guessing you tried calling four one one?”

  “Every permutation of Isadora VanDeuersen Clark I could think of. The closest I got was an Isaiah Clark in Arlington, which isn’t in any way close. I know if anyone can find her, it’s you.”

  “Directory assistance operators are amateurs,” said Mickey, the once and future PI. He lowered himself into his swivel chair at the computer table that, lately, doubled as a diaper-changing table. He toggled a switch and set his hard drive purring.

  “Fasten your seat belt,” he said to Charlie. “I know a back way into the online databases the directory assistance operators use. Unpublished numbers they can’t access, I can, with just a click of the option key.”

  His browser opened. A mouse click and three keystrokes and he was in the national master directory. A few more keystrokes and he relayed, “Nothing listed or unlisted for her. But, relax, we haven’t even gotten started.”

  Placing his icy feet onto the radiator, he accidentally knocked a rubber bath duck from its perch atop the diaper pail. It squeaked softly on impact with the rug. Baby Alfonso awoke in full-on wail.

  “Hang on,” Mickey said to Charlie.

  He stuffed a hand through the crib slats and rubbed the crown of Alfonso’s head. As usual, the baby was back asleep in seconds. But now Sylvia was marching down the hallway.

  “Hey, man, can you call me a little later at the office?” Mickey asked Charlie.

  “I might not be able to, actually, because I might be dead.”

  Mickey didn’t take this lightly. Charlie had been calm in comparison when detailing Grudzev’s cup-of-sand threat. “Okay, okay,” he said, mouse-clicking his way to the board of elections Web site. Its information-rich database was available only to qualified election officials. Mickey could access it thanks to a guerrilla Web site that generated functioning election official pass codes.

  “I thought we were through with this shit, Moby Mick,” Sylvia yelled from the other side of the hollow plywood door. She maintained it was thoughtless to speak inside the nursery while the baby slept.

  “Charlie, hang on one more sec?” Mickey said.

  He balanced the handset atop the hard drive and stepped out of the room, head lowered. The appearance of supplication usually helped.

  “It’s not the horses this time,” he said.

  Her eyes were hot coals. “I don’t care if it’s the weather. You said you don’t want your son knowing you associate with the likes of that dead-beat.”

  Mickey winced. Charlie probably had heard her. This was gracious, though, compared to things she’d said before to his face. Mickey’s concern was Alfonso.

  Indeed, the baby began to cry again.

  “Nice work,” Sylvia said, as if it were Mickey’s fault.

  Mickey rushed back into the nursery, simultaneously picking up poor Alfonso and t
he handset. He saw that, in his absence, the board of elections site had linked to and automatically opened a PDF of the elaborate paperwork required, in light of all the Social Security benefits fraud, for a change of address. It requested that Isadora VanDeuersen Clark’s checks be forwarded to Charles Clark at 305 East 10 Street in New York City. The original address was General Delivery, Monroeville, Virginia. No news there. But the form stated, in oversized bold caps, that if the original address were a post office box or general delivery, the applicant needed to supply a physical address below. So to learn Isadora VanDeuersen Clark’s actual whereabouts, in theory, all Mickey had to do was scroll down.

  “What’s going on?” asked Charlie and Sylvia, almost in unison.

  “Just a sec,” Mickey told them both.

  Sylvia stomped into the room. Mickey’s back was to her. Still, her look made him wither. “One more second, please,” he begged, scrolling furiously toward the address.

  “Okay…” She eyed the ceiling for about one second, then seized the computer’s power cable, shifting her weight toward the outlet, to pull the plug with maximum dramatic effect.

  “Stop, please!”

  She did. But only to twist the knife. And what could he do? The crib stood between them-not that he could overpower her if he wanted to. He knew of no way to persuade her. Out of spite, she usually denied even his simplest requests, like “Pass the salt?”

  “Tell her you’re trying to help me find a place in Virginia,” Charlie said.

  Sylvia heard. “Really?” she said with enthusiasm. She relaxed her grip on the power cord.

  Mickey’s own look of mystification gave up the game. Sylvia reared back and jerked the power cord as if starting a lawn mower. The plug whipped past him, a prong grazing his cheek. The hard drive fizzled. As the screen faded to gray, however, he was able to make out Isadora V. Clark’s street address.

  7

  With the address firmly in his memory and corresponding bounce in his step, Charlie hurried from the parking lot pay phone and down the still-dark breezeway. Night Manager A. Brody sprung out of the vending machine room, directly into his path.