“What do I do?” I said to the old man.
“You make circuit boards,” he said.
Now I spotted the billiard-table green of a stack of circuit boards on the workbench.
“Those are all dead,” he said. “Fix the ones you can. Then make copies of the ones that are working.”
So I worked in the shop every Tuesday for two months, with a stack of circuit boards growing at my elbow. I was paid well for this work, suspiciously well, and in cash. By January, when the consultant finally appeared at the shop without warning one afternoon, I had an idea of where this was going.
“You’re doing well here,” he said jovially.
My elbows and back were sore. I had cuts on my fingers, dabbed up with Mercurochrome. “Is my audition over?” I said.
He sat down on the other side of my bench. His expression shifted. The fluorescent smile changed, became slightly more ordinary. He regarded me across the bench, and for the first time I saw the intelligence in his eyes, like a flicker of static electricity.
“I mean,” I went on, faltering now but trying to brazen it out, “you’re one of those CIA men, aren’t you? Or State Department?”
A jazz DJ at the station had told me months ago that the men in suits who sometimes visited the business office were propagandists from the CIA, a claim I had dismissed until I observed them for a while myself and noticed the news stories we ran after they visited. I had been thinking about this moment for weeks, wondering if it would come, telling myself periodically that I was crazy. It was possible that the job might simply be what it claimed to be. But as time went on I had become more confident that I was being recruited, and it was making me edgy, distracting me on the long rides home after work in the dawn hours, setting me off on reveries during the slow nights at the station. What would it mean if it were true? A secret life, I thought. Independence. More money than I needed. I hoped for all that. I couldn’t quite bring into focus what I would lose. It would be dangerous. But I was twenty-two years old and couldn’t take any danger to my person seriously.
“The intelligence services have roles for women,” he said. “You understand electronics. You speak Spanish and French.”
“How do you know that?”
He kept smiling calmly at me, as if I had asked a rhetorical question.
“You’ve been looking at my school records?” I said.
“My boss was concerned about the Maryland Youth Center,” he said. “But I pushed for you.”
“Where did you get my records?”
“The next theater of war is Latin America,” he said.
He said this the way a person might say, “On Fridays the cafeteria serves fish.” A car in the street outside was failing to start. It coughed and whined. Dust motes floated in the air above his head.
“Cuba?” I said.
“Central America, South America, the Caribbean.”
“What are we talking about?” I said.
“Surveillance.”
I cleared my throat. “Are you offering me a job?”
“Yes, a job,” he said, smiling more brightly. “That’s a good way to think of it.”
I was confused. “How else could I think of it?”
“A life,” he said.
We studied each other. I said, “People get killed doing this kind of work.”
“Yes,” he said. “The CIA would do everything possible to protect you. You see what’s happening in the Eastern Bloc. What they did to the students in Hungary. Cuba is just the beginning. The jails in Havana are full of political prisoners. The Soviets are behind them with ballistic missiles. We’re at war.”
I said nothing. I had seen photos of the uprising in Hungary, students who were later shot. I was thinking of how helpless I had felt on the phone with my mother when she called about the missiles.
“What’s keeping you here?” he said finally.
SEPTEMBER 1966
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA
The day after I saw the man in the gray raincoat outside of the nightclub, I embarked on my plan and went to see Victoria in the evening. I hadn’t slept; I’d lain awake all night imagining the police breaking down the door of the apartment. My appetite was gone, and when I passed a mirror in the lobby of Victoria’s building I was surprised by my own white face.
Victoria seemed fresh and at ease. She was happy to see me. She sat on her cherry-red love seat, smoking, her hair so newly pressed that I could still see the creases from the hot rollers. A Brazilian rock band played on the radio. School papers were strewn across the floor.
“Román told me you were leaving town,” I said.
“Tomorrow. We have a friend who’s a pilot,” she said. “We chartered a ranch plane from an airstrip out in the country. It’s safer that way, if we don’t have to go through Ezeiza Airport. They might be watching us.”
She wouldn’t look at me, and then she wouldn’t look away, smiling like a moll trying to distract a cop. “It’s not safe here, you know that,” she said. “Not for people like us.”
“Like—us?” I said.
“Me and Román,” she said.
I remembered the party again, the scuffle by the bathroom door. She always seemed to be both insinuating and withholding, the two held in tension in a way that baffled and angered me and made me feel stupid. She was looking at me now as if she were also remembering the party, and at the same time as if I were a stranger who had wandered too close to her on a subway platform.
“It’s not safe for me either,” I said.
She scoffed. “You’re fine. You’re Canadian.”
“I can’t get a visa. A group of French students were arrested last week for subversion, did you see that in the paper? It’s not safe to be foreign here now.”
She looked at a stack of paperbacks on the floor in front of her. Several crumbling editions of Erich Fromm. “It’s a complicated time.”
“I have to leave Buenos Aires,” I said. “I want to come with you to Ushuaia.”
She looked shocked. She laughed and shook her head. “Absolutely not. Absolutely not, it’s not possible.”
I was making no effort to hide my desperation, because I thought it would move her, but she didn’t care. From Ushuaia I could find a tanker that would take me through the Strait of Magellan and around to the Chilean side of the Andes. It was the only way I could get out of Argentina without showing papers.
“You have to let me,” I said.
“This is ridiculous. God, everything . . .” She waved her hand at the living room. “I hardly know you. You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“Why have you flirted with me all this time?” I said. I didn’t mean to say it, it burst out, and then I was ashamed. I sat down abruptly in a chair. “You were playing some stupid game. Do you think I’m a child?” My face was burning. “Try your tricks on someone else.”
She sat up straight in surprise, her cigarette drifting close to her Lustre-Creme-scented hair, all innocence. I doubted myself again, it was so persuasive.
“I’ve only tried to be your friend,” she said.
“Then be my friend, carajo,” I said. “Let me on that fucking plane. Or I’ll tell Román you made a pass at me.”
She turned white. Her gaze was flat and miserable.
“You don’t understand,” she said, and her eyes welled up with tears. She got up and came over to me, crouched on the floor beside my chair, and gripped both my elbows. Her touch felt hot and sticky, as if it might leave a residue on my skin. I pulled away.
“That would be a mistake,” she said. “That would be for nothing. I can’t let you come with us. Please don’t tell Román. But I can’t let you come. I’m sorry if it’s dangerous for you here, I am, I really am. I want you to be safe. But this thing you’re asking for, I can’t do.” She stood up. “Román is coming. He’ll be here in a few minutes. You have to go. I’m so sorry, so sorry. Please don’t be angry.” She hunched over me, stroking my hair. I ducked away. “Please,
please,” she said. “You have to go. There’s no choice.”
Out on the street I had to collect myself, breathing deeply and pretending to search for something in my purse. It was a cold night despite the distant approach of spring. A mist in the air was becoming rain. I had no choice either. I would have to get on the plane. It would mean a scene; it would mean, perhaps, digging Nico’s pistol up out of its hiding place. I stood in a bus shelter, my hands and feet slowly going numb. The bus didn’t come. I walked back to the apartment on Calle Riobamba.
In the hall outside the door I stopped and listened to the warm crackle of Billie Holiday. James had a lot of jazz records I didn’t like much, jostling abstractions that I suspected him of not liking very much himself. He would put them on and sit frowning on the sofa with a glass of whiskey, as if he were receiving bad news. But the Billie Holiday records I liked, and Sarah Vaughan, and the libidinous Etta James, which I sometimes put on myself when he was out. I liked the way she scratched and pushed. James was usually in a good mood if those records were playing. And I could smell seared beef. He would be cooking and drinking wine. He had a bachelor’s self-sufficiency.
I pulled a mirrored compact out of my purse and stood under the hall light. My eyes were red, my skin pale from fear in a way that made me look yellow; I brushed on rouge and combed and re-pinned my hair. You are tired but feeling well. You have been shopping on Rivadavia for a new raincoat all afternoon but you couldn’t find anything you liked.
He had left the door unlocked for me. I stepped inside, hung up my coat and hat, strode into the kitchen.
“Steaks?” I said.
“They were cheap today,” he said.
I went into the living room and sat down. I tried to pet the cat but she darted away. I sat for a moment with my hands on my knees and looked out through the uncurtained windows. We were so visible in here. James said he wasn’t embarrassed by anything, and anyway he didn’t know how or where to buy curtains, how to cut them to measure, how to stitch the hems. So interesting that a person could live that way. That both his needs and his skills could be so different from mine. I watched him through the doorway of the kitchen. He was humming to himself.
The thing that was wrong with me was that the intimacy and safety of this apartment felt real to me even though it was false. I was duping and manipulating him, and still somehow I felt I deserved his tokens of affection, his small gestures of protection and care, this steak he was cooking now to my specifications, more well-done than he liked his own. I was so easily taken in by my own illusion, so quick to accept the generosity I tricked out of others. If he found out who I really was and how I had lied he would be shocked and betrayed and he would be right. And yet I would be startled and put out, if it came to that. Because it felt all right to me, all of this. It felt nice.
From the street outside I must look very small, I thought. The ceilings were high. There was so much wall behind me.
He was in a talkative mood. He had gotten another letter from home. He could do a funny impersonation of his father, who had a Mexican accent broadened and slowed by his decades in Texas, and he quoted bits of the letter in this accent. His father wanted him to come home, always. James was burdened by this. He hated leather. He hated Houston. He had never had an ambition for himself that hadn’t been chosen by someone else. He wanted to know who he might be if he were left alone.
“Does your mother get at you to come home?” he said.
“No,” I said. I laughed. “No, she doesn’t.”
“Do you hear from her?”
“Not often.”
He was looking at me curiously, but I didn’t look back. “She doesn’t approve of you?” he said.
“No.” My mother with her long beaked nose and delicate hair. Tall and broad across the shoulders, impressive in her best suits in a way that unnerved people, that unnerved me, a woman like a tree, resisting any effort to scale her down, even in my imagination.
“Every girl I’ve ever been with thought her mother was a monster.”
I didn’t like it when he acted knowing like that. I was probably not meant to like it. “My mother had me put in jail when I was seventeen.”
Billie Holiday filled up the short silence that ensued. I thought my anger might be spent with that, but no, there was some left. “Not everyone has an empire to go home to,” I said, and then it was all gone and I deflated in my chair.
He was generous. He let it go by. “Why did she do it?” he said finally.
“She beat the hell out of me and I ran away in her car. She had me arrested for stealing it.”
“You look sad.”
“I’m just tired,” I said.
“A long day?”
“I was looking for a new raincoat on Rivadavia,” I murmured, “but I didn’t find anything I liked.”
FEBRUARY 1963–JANUARY 1966
CARTAGENA, COLOMBIA / ACAPULCO, MEXICO / TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS / MARACAY, VENEZUELA
My first assignment was a trade convention in Colombia in February 1963, a small thing, a long weekend in the field, using a few vacation days I had saved up at the station. For this long weekend, I was paid a thousand dollars in cash. My yearly salary at the station at that time came to two thousand dollars.
I was put up in the conventioneers’ hotel in Cartagena and had to train myself not to blush and stare at the floor whenever I found myself in an elevator with a man wearing a conference badge. I was booked into a room between the Finnish delegation and the French delegation, and I spent four days crouched on the floor eating sticky grapes and listening to conversations about nightclubs and cab fare in French while my recording equipment hissed unattended over the Finns on the other side of the room. The consultant had done the booking; he referred to himself now as my handler. I had to transcribe the French conversations, and they were of a towering dullness that began to approach comedy as the nights in the hotel room wore on. I have not called my wife. The international rates are a crime. There is an insect in the bathtub. An insect in the bathtub? Yes, I saw it. This city is filthy. But have you seen the churches on the square, very lovely. Yes, very lovely, but there are insects in the bathtub and we are served instant coffee.
The rooms were easy to set up, in that hotel. My handler had spent a long time training me, giving me exercises. It was a pretty small-bore operation, overall, and if any real intel came out of it, I never heard. But I was wild with excitement anyway when I returned to New York. I felt like a girl in a movie. I felt like my life had begun.
I was in Mexico when President Kennedy was shot. I was staying in a tourist hotel by the water in Acapulco, and I came back from the beach to find the lobby filled with stunned and weeping Americans, a TV hastily set up on a dinner cart in the corner. My handler ended the assignment two days early, and I sat in the departures lounge at the airport with a handkerchief pressed to my face, leaking tears.
The level I operated on was small. My assignments were orderly trips with little risk to me, conferences where I spent a few days making recordings and then returned to New York, and when I got back home I could resume my life again as if I had never been away. Everything was small until Buenos Aires.
My handler pitched it to me in January 1966, in a diner where he liked to meet on East Fifty-Second Street. The Argentine president was weak, there could be a coup anytime, and KGB activity had picked up in Buenos Aires. I would have to do infiltration work as well as surveillance. I would be gone indefinitely, months or a year, and I would have to quit my job. For this they would pay me thirty-five thousand dollars.
“This is what you’ve been waiting for, isn’t it?” Gerry said. He slid a new passport across the table, a Canadian one this time. “Something big.”
I stared at the passport. He put his hand on mine. “Think about it,” he said. “But not too long.”
I was distracted that night at work, and I hardly slept after my shift was over. It had been a bitterly cold January, and I lay listening to the radiator c
lang until midmorning. Finally admitting to myself that I wouldn’t sleep, I pulled on a sweater and heavy coat and went for a walk down the icy parkway. My feet quickly went numb. It had begun to snow, a whispering light snow that I knew would stick. I turned into Prospect Park. The snowy trees formed a white lace against a soft gray sky. The great lawn was empty except for a distant figure with a dog.
I imagined my life if this work wasn’t in it anymore. The excitement and sense of purpose that I had felt coming back from those long weekends, gone. Scraping by forever on thirty-eight dollars a week.
Three days later I stood in the departures line at LaGuardia, holding a one-way ticket with AEROPUERTO EZEIZA printed across it in heavy black type and clutching the new passport, which gave my name as Anne Patterson.
SEPTEMBER 1966
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA
I sat up late listening to the radio, thinking I wasn’t going to be able to sleep anyway. After James went to sleep I packed my few things into the brown suitcase and left it by the door, hidden under my overcoat. I smoked three of the cigarettes he always kept in a silver box by the window, listening to an orchestra play. A woman’s voice trilled up ahead of the band from time to time. I had seen couples dancing the tango in the bars in San Telmo, and was struck by the way they handled each other, as if they were made of bone china. They didn’t look at each other much. They kept their eyes down, looking at their hands or the floor, as if lost in separate thoughts. They sometimes leaned on each other, and sometimes pulled apart, examining each other’s faces briefly and then pressing close again.
At two o’clock in the morning I went into the bedroom and climbed in beside James. He stirred but didn’t wake.
Who Is Vera Kelly? Page 15