I blinked. “I’m sorry? What?”
“I want to recruit you.”
“You want me to—join the FBI?”
“No. I want you to leave town. But you’re stubborn, and it’s illegal for me to kidnap you. So I want you working for me.”
“For the FBI.”
“Try to rein in your excitement.”
“Me. You want me. I’m sorry, I’m having a hard time—I can’t even do sit-ups. I’m afraid of guns, I don’t wear suits, I—”
“You have access to an organization it would take us weeks to infiltrate.”
“What organiz—?” I asked, then stopped. “Biological Clock?”
“I don’t have weeks. I have days.”
“My God. Biological Clock—are you serious? My cheesy TV show? You’re putting me on, right? This is government humor.”
“No, I’m funnier than that.” He touched my elbow, indicating we should walk. He spoke casually, looking straight ahead. “It’s not uncommon for us to use civilians. It’s not my first choice right now, but it’s necessary.”
“You’re saying you want me to spy? On Biological Clock? On my friends?”
“They’re not all your friends.”
A chill went through me, despite the sun beating down. It was one thing to hypothesize with Joey and Fredreeq about corruption on the show, and another to hear this from a federal agent. “What is it you think I could do?” I asked.
“Watch. Listen. Possibly wear a wire.” He took my arm and we crossed Santa Monica, a boulevard so wide pedestrians were supposed to wait in the grassy median for the next light. People often jaywalked. We didn’t. “Our sources indicate an imminent merger between the party you associate with and a larger organization we’ve been targeting for some time. This is good luck for us. We’ll move in when the two parties interface. Meanwhile, we need to identify ancillary members of the smaller organization.”
“Now you sound like an FBI agent.” I turned to face him. “Let me get this straight. You’ve got a fish on the line, a fish I’m working with, and you’re holding him out as bait for some bigger fish, but you want me in there swimming and spying on this Biological Clock fish, so you can move in and arrest the whole school of fish.”
“Put like that—since you’re in the water already—yes.” He pointed to the walk icon. We crossed to the south side of Santa Monica and took a left. Lucien’s bookstore was ahead. Open. On Thanksgiving. What a great neighborhood.
“How is this connected to Annika?” I asked.
“We approached Annika two weeks ago. The local operation tried to recruit her. Unsuccessfully. We picked this up on our surveillance and asked her to work for us, something similar to what I’m asking you. She declined.”
“Why?”
“She believed her mother in Germany would be killed if she did.”
I took a long, slow breath. “And then she disappeared.”
“Yes.”
I stopped again. He turned to face me and took off his sunglasses. A trio of men approached, arms around each other, and maneuvered around us on the sidewalk. “Kiss her, you fool!” one of them cried. I felt myself blush, but I kept eye contact. Simon didn’t flinch.
I said, “Did you—the FBI—have anything to do with Annika’s disappearance?”
“No.”
“You don’t know where she is.”
His eyes glinted. “I already told you I don’t.”
“Rico Rodriguez tried to talk Annika into something she didn’t want to do. Was it working for Little Fish?”
Simon said nothing.
I looked away. Cars passed. I pictured people driving to their grandmothers’, candied yam casseroles in their laps. “If I say no, where will I end up?”
“Look at me,” he said, and waited until I did. “You think we make people vanish?”
I thought of Michelle, the music mom. She’d said Annika wanted a lawyer, the kind that finds people who disappear. “Maybe.”
The glint in his eye was a flash. “If Annika had chosen to work with us, she’d be here today, because we take care of our own. But we didn’t arrest or deport her. She said no, she was free to walk away. Okay?”
“No, it’s not okay. Because what if she was harmed or kidnapped by the bad guys—these other people she wouldn’t work for?”
“That was a chance she took. I wasn’t going to force her to work for us. She was scared and she was in a tough situation. But it wasn’t part of my job to keep an eye on her. Had I known you cared to this extent, I might have.”
“What do you care what I care?”
“Take a guess, Wollie.”
I looked away again. He took my arm and we continued east on Santa Monica. “You’d sign a contract,” he said. “There’s some money in it, not much. You’re not an employee of the FBI, you’re not authorized to do anything illegal beyond what’s organized or sanctioned by your handler. That’s me. You’re what we call a cooperating witness, a CW. If you’re scared—”
“Should I be scared?”
“Yes.” The word, naked and unequivocal, hung in the air between us. “But you’re safer cooperating with me than not cooperating.”
I caught sight of Lucien in his shop, paused in the act of stocking books in the display window. He was looking at me. “And the man following me last Friday,” I said, “is that someone else I’d be ‘cooperating’ with? How many other goons will—”
Simon stopped, took my arm, and pulled me in close. I caught my breath. This was one big guy. This was not a guy you wanted to get physical with, unless—
“I don’t like the sound of that.” He spoke quietly. “You can tell me all about it in a minute, but I want to tell you something first: no one harasses you into working with us. Do it because you want to, or walk away. Your choice.” He let go of my arm.
Some choice. I was about to tell him to take a hike, but a memory stopped me. Weeks ago, on this very block, Annika and I had come from the movies. She’d grabbed my arm, just as he had, her small hand pulling on my sweatshirt, giving it a shake. “We will solve your math problems, Wollie. I promise. You won’t have to go through it alone.” This kid, reassuring me like she was my mother.
“I’ll help you catch your bad guys,” I said. “If you help me find Annika.”
His eyes were blue again. Not angry anymore. He let out a breath.
He said, “You’re on.”
29
I showed up to work at sundown, responsibility weighing heavily on my polka-dot-silk-clad shoulders.
Biological Clock had found a restaurant called Olga’s Kitchen willing to accommodate us on Thanksgiving, offering a prix fixe dinner of dark-meat turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and canned cranberry sauce for $9.99. A fair number of diners were taking advantage of this, including a party of fourteen, dressed for the holiday in everything from shorts and flip-flops to a T-shirt that said “I used to care but now I take a pill for that.”
I regarded them all with suspicion.
Once I’d signed on to be a CW, a cooperating witness, Simon and I had walked to West Hollywood Park to discuss the details. He wouldn’t identify the bad egg I was working with, referring to the malefactor as Little Fish. He admitted the illicit business was drugs only after I pointed out that an FBI-DEA joint operation was unlikely to be anything else. To tell me more, he said, lessened my value as a corroborating source and, later, a witness in front of a judge or jury. The thought of ratting out someone I knew in court was distasteful, but a bigger problem was secrecy. I couldn’t tell Joey or Fredreeq what I was up to. My best friends.
The FBI, Simon explained, had no best-friends exemption.
My assignment was relatively simple. I was to listen on the set for European accents, watch for people using pay phones, and report immediately the sighting of shopping bags from Hugo Boss, Fendi, or Ermenegildo Zegna. These shopping bags were used for dead drops, exchanges of drugs or money.
Then there was the quid pro quo. Sim
on agreed to assign someone to track down Annika. I imagined some low-level trainee making a token call to the LAPD, then tossing Annika’s file onto a “do later” pile. “Suppose I gave you a license number,” I said. “You could get me an address, right? Also, could you guys trace an e-mail, even if it’s no longer in service?”
“Whose?”
I told him about Marie-Thérèse, and then about the goateed man, the man who’d broken Bing Wooster’s fingers and talked about making someone disappear.
“Give me the license number and the e-mail,” he said, “and we’ll look into it.”
I shook my head. “Give me the addresses and I’ll look into it—”
“Really? You’ll find this guy and sketch him into submission?” He smiled at my reaction. “Your profession isn’t classified information. Which brings up another—”
“This isn’t what I agreed to, me feeding you information about Annika, and you—”
“Wollie, I don’t mean this unkindly, but you paint frogs for a living. Right now my concern is you. Tell me about the man following you on Friday.”
And that’s how it went. I’d steer the conversation one way, and he’d grab the wheel and do a verbal U-turn. No wonder he and the DEA were having “issues”; I was developing some myself. I had a childish impulse to call the whole thing off, but Annika’s fate was clearly tied to his operation, and if I was being asked to work with a paper bag over my head, at least I was on the inside. I’d just continue my own investigation parallel to his. Anyway, I’d signed a contract. He’d pulled it out of his pocket when I’d said yes.
So here I was at Olga’s Kitchen, made up, coiffed, and poised for espionage. It hadn’t mattered that I’d shown up a wreck. Fredreeq could get a corpse camera-ready, and as for my state of mind, everyone around me seemed more or less unhinged. Bing Wooster was as high-strung as an Afghan hound. But Bing was working his Betacam with two taped fingers and painkillers, which might’ve accounted for it. I asked Joey her opinion.
“Whatever the reason, he’s more peevish every day, and he’s started smoking. Elliot says he’s welcome to have a nervous breakdown, as long as he keeps bringing in episodes on time and under budget. He’s a mess, but they’ll never fire him.”
“Peevish?” Fredreeq said. “He’s mad as a hatter. These Vegas saboteurs have a gun to his head, making him rig the show. He’s in their pocket. I’m sure as I can be about this. And TV Guide may be in on it too, giving Savannah an inside photo.” She applied mascara to my already encrusted eyelashes. “You share the cover with thirty-two contestants from eleven other shows; she gets a quarter-page photo, two paragraphs, and they mention her horse. Her horse got more coverage than you. She’s in bed with TV Guide. I can’t prove it, but I feel it.”
“You know,” I said, trying to sound casual, “I’m thinking of coming in on my nights off to see how Savannah and Kimberly do things. I’d be like a customer. Sit in the back.”
Fredreeq stepped away from me and stared. “The back of what?”
“Of whatever restaurant the show’s shooting in.”
“You want to see how they do things, why don’t you just watch the show?”
“Because then I’d have to look at my own face and also, there’s a big difference between what Bing shoots and what shows up on TV after it’s edited.”
Fredreeq turned to Joey. “You think they’ll go for that, Wollie lurking?”
“I’ll be in disguise,” I said.
Fredreeq looked baffled. Joey said, “Working undercover, Wollie?”
I turned so fast that Fredreeq’s mascara wand raked across my cheekbone. Fredreeq shrieked. In the mirror I saw black stripes adorning my face. “I can’t comment on that, Joey,” I said. “But if you guys were to guess what I was up to . . .”
Joey nodded. She made sure I wasn’t wearing a sound mike, then told Fredreeq I was probably a rat for the DEA. While this was neither flattering nor accurate, it dovetailed closely enough with Fredreeq’s Vegas theory that within minutes they’d joined forces, discussing disguises for me to wear on my night off.
“Here’s mirrors,” Fredreeq said. “You and Carlito check your teeth whenever Bing says ‘Cut’ and every hour, do lipstick. You up to it? ’Cause I can blow off Francis’s family—”
“Don’t be silly. It’s a holiday. You have kids. I can powder my own nose. Go home.”
My Thanksgiving date was Carlito Gibbons. We sat side by side in a booth, more attentive to our mirrors than each other. I wondered how actors fall in love on movie sets, given the self-absorption of this work, not to mention the crew hanging around and sound guys listening to conversations on their headsets. Which led me to wonder how actors kiss each other when they’re not in the mood, which led me to wonder how Savannah, Kimberly, and I were going to kiss Carlito, Henry, and Vaclav all through Week Seven, as the show’s promos indicated. Week Seven, I realized, started shooting Monday.
“Let’s move to the guest expert,” Bing yelled. “Paul! She here yet? Noel Whositz?”
“Not her. Him,” Paul said. “‘Nole,’ not ‘No-Elle.’ Professor Wiederhut. In the john.”
“Whatever. Get him.”
Carlito picked at his molars with a fork. I offered him a toothpick, but he plucked a strand of hair from his head and set about flossing. How . . . resourceful. Could Carlito be Little Fish? I couldn’t see him in charge of a drug operation, but I could see how a paralegal on the team could be useful. Also, why had Annika approached Michelle, the music mom, rather than Carlito, if she was looking for a lawyer? She saw Carlito more often. And the set, with its long hours and endless downtime, was more conducive to that sort of conversation. Hmm.
“Lovely, lovely!” A gnomelike man approached, escorted by Paul. He wore a striped turtleneck, bringing to mind a black-and-yellow poison-arrow frog, Dendrobates leucomelas. “I so love your American Thanksgiving. Cornucopia, rich in metaphor. Vessel and phallus all at once. The fertile turkey. No coincidence there, what?” His accent was delightful. European?
“Yo. Nole. No-elle,” Bing said. “However you say it. No turkey talk once we roll.”
“Hullo, what?”
“This show isn’t live. When it airs, Turkey Day’s history. So don’t refer to it. Go again. Action.” Dinner plates appeared before us. Carlito and I delicately chowed down. Professor Wiederhut held forth. Bing filmed.
“I’m a Celtic neo-Jungian,” the professor said. “I applaud your program’s iconoclasm. Not easy to challenge this country’s conservative culture, yet this road you travel is not without precedent. Footprints! I speak in metaphor, the language of myth, to—”
“Don’t. Speak in English,” Bing cut in. “Dumb it down. Go again.”
“Hullo? Ah, yes. In a nutshell, then. Parenting as Life Path in mandatory conjunction with Sacred Partnering is a construct imposed from without by a society that paradoxically—”
“English!” Bing screamed.
The little gnome face turned to me with a pained look.
“American,” I said softly.
“Indeed. Some people are gifted at raising children. Others, at sex—phenomenal, lustful, playful, erotic, adventurous, dirty, imaginative, dangerous, mysterious, mystical sex, year after year, decade after decade with the same partner in a long-term intimate relationship.” Noel severed off a forkful of gelatinous cranberry sauce and tried to get it to his mouth. He was not successful. It slid onto the table with a quiet plop. “The problem is that modern society demands that each of us be both.”
Celtic. His accent was certainly Euro, but would Little Fish be one of the weekly experts? Unlikely. Joey booked the experts. Besides—
The professor was still talking, reminding me that I was on camera too. “. . . onerous professional responsibilities requiring total dedication,” he concluded. He tried the cranberry sauce again, but it fell onto his mashed potatoes.
Carlito piped up. “So your contention is, it’s okay to go have kids and not get married.”
“Wollie designs greeting cards,” Carlito said. I was touched that he remembered.
The professor nodded. “Lovely. I am not denigrating greeting cards, I merely—”
“Denigrate,” Bing said. “Go ahead. Liven things up.”
“No. Design is art. Artists are sacred storytellers. They carry the psychic wound, transform it, and bring it forth as symbol. They are to be revered.” He took a sip of his wine.
From inside my purse, my phone rang.
“Oh, Christ!” Bing put down his camera. “It’s probably the network, canceling us. Anyone got a Xanax?” He walked off toward the back of the restaurant.
I found my phone, embarrassed that I’d neglected to turn it off. It better not be my mother, I thought. “Hello,” I said, discouragingly.
“It’s Simon. Bad time?”
“You mean you don’t know? The water glasses aren’t bugged?” I walked to a quiet corner of the restaurant, lowering my voice. “Tell me something. Can you figure out where I am by me using my cell phone?”
“Does the technology exist? Yes. Are we doing it to you? No.”
“But other parts of my life have been bugged, right? In the last week or so?”
“I’m more concerned with who’s listening to this conversation right now.”
“You mean your own agency is bugging you?”
“No. I mean on your end.”
I looked around. Carlito was checking his teeth. Professor Wiederhut was sniffing the stuffing. Diners were dining. Bing was sulking. Isaac was stepping out for a smoke. No one was looking at me. “I think we’re safe.”
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