Nate stared at Ves, who considered carefully for a minute. “I cannot tell you who we are working for,” he told his guest. “That would be breaking confidence. But I will let you examine photocopies of the only two, ah, documents we have as yet uncovered.”
“Fair enough, sir.” The stranger flipped the coin over to Ves.
Ves picked two sheets of paper from the coffee table in front of him, turned them right side up, and handed them to his guest. One contained a front and back view of the Mexican coin, and the other a likeness of the one disme stamp.
The stranger stared at them. ‘This?” he asked. “These are your documents? You jest, sir, surely you jest.”
“I told you that I didn’t think I had anything that would interest you,” Ves said. “That’s it. We may, of course, receive any number of documents in response to our ad. If you’ll tell me what in particular you are interested in discovering, perhaps I could call you if we find out anything.” He pocketed the coin.
“I assumed you knew, sir,” the stranger said. “The tenor of your advertisement… is it possible that you are unaware? Does the term ‘prime time’ mean anything to you?”
“You mean TV?” Swift asked.
“TV?” the stranger repeated, as though it were a completely foreign term.
“Yes, the networks—”
“Exactly!” The stranger pounced on the term. “The network—prime time; you do know. I thought you must. Well, sir, I am the Great Antagonist.”
He stood there in the center of the room, a little puffed up, waiting for the proper response. The look he saw on the faces of the two men must have satisfied him. “I see you are surprised, eh? Never thought to meet me, eh? Well, I’m human, gentlemen; I’ll tell you that. I’m human. And your little advertisement intrigued me. Pure luck that I’d happen to see it, of course. But I just happened to be here. Won’t be for long, though; have to travel elsewhen soon.” He paused and thought for a second.
“If you do find anything,” he continued, “I’ll leave a number that will eventually reach me. Remember: my pay is liberal. And if you can ever find it in your ethical heart to reveal who employs you and why, I should be most fascinated. Most.
“I must take my leave. You can reach me here.” He scribbled a number onto a pasteboard card and twirled it onto the table in front of Ves. “I thank you for your time, gentlemen.” He bowed slightly and exited abruptly. A second later they heard the front door open and close.
Swift went suspiciously into the hall to make sure that their guest had, indeed, departed. When he returned, Ves had fished the gold eagle from his pocket and was examining it under the light.
“Well?” Nate demanded. “Whose picture is on this one?”
“A lady with a turban,” Ves said. “Name of ‘Liberty’, it says here. Get me my handbook of U.S. Coins, will you? In the reference shelf over there—toward the bottom.”
Nate retrieved the indicated book and Ves flipped through it. “Here we are,” he said. “Hm. Hmm.”
“What?”
“It’s a real coin, so says the book,” Ves said.
“That’s a relief,” Nate said.
“Dated 1797,” Ves said. “Very common thing to carry around.”
“Eccentric,” Swift said.
“According to the handbook,” Ves said, “this little circle of gold goes for over two grand these days.”
“What?”
“Two thousand dollars,” Ves said. “I’ll buy dinner. Except that we’ve already eaten dinner. Tomorrow I’ll buy dinner.”
“Crazy,” Swift said. He bent over and picked up the pasteboard the stranger had left.
“I have the faint glimmerings of an idea,” Ves said, “but it’s too nebulous and too insane to discuss just yet.”
“Perhaps this will help,” Swift said, holding the pasteboard card up before Ves’s eyes.
A phone number was neatly printed in ink on the back. On the front:
ALEX: HAMILTON
Attorney
CHAPTER FIVE
The winds were sudden and off the sea: cold, snippy winds that blew up your pants leg and tugged at your greatcoat. They seemed to be omnidirectional. Wherever you stood they found you; whatever you hid behind, they whipped around in playful little cold spurts. It was time for taking in the brass monkeys, for covering the pool tables. And it wasn’t quite winter yet Winters in Washington tend to be mild, but the last spurts of autumn can be pretty fierce.
Swift stood concealed in a doorway, stamping his feet, keeping his hands crossed under his arms, and wishing he’d worn two extra sweaters. Across the street, in the brownstone he was watching, nothing was stirring. It was almost ten a.m., and the house was as mute and dark as it had been at five. Or, for that matter, at four. Both hours Nate remembered very well.
It had been three o’clock in the morning before Ves, Nate, and the President had been able to get the address that matched with the phone number written on the back of Alex: Hamilton’s card. It would have been faster if they had asked the FBI to get the address from the phone company, but the President wouldn’t ask the FBI for anything. They would only have insisted on knowing what it was for. Ever since Watergate, they’d been funny that way, the bastards.
So Ves Romero, Nate Swift, and the President of the United States went painstakingly through the Metropolitan Washington, District of Columbia Section phone book until, with a cry of “eureka”, and a sweeping gesture that knocked a cut-glass bowl full of macadamia nuts off the table, Ves announced that he had found the number. It was listed as a Mrs. Buffie O’Gorman at an address on V Street, Northwest.
While searching their thirds of the phone book, they had discussed what Alex: Hamilton’s visit had meant, and who he really was. It was a conundrum more complex than the ancient riddle of who shaved the barber, but the answer was the same: follow him around and see. And so, at four in the morning Nate took up his station across the street from the house hopefully holding both Mrs. Buffie O’Gorman and Mr. Alex: Hamilton.
It had been cold at four, but Nate knew that as the sun’s rays came up, the air would warm up. Nate was wrong. It got colder during the morning, and Nate felt as if the hairs on the back of his hand would shatter and fall off if he closed his fist. The brightly-shining morning sun was a sham, a million fireflies in an ice-cold jar, rising slowly above the frigid towers of Washington office buildings in the distance.
And the V Street brownstone, haughtily drawn up to its full three stories, glared down at him through icy upper windows, daring him to approach its front steps. Or, perhaps he was just a bit light-headed from too many hours spent standing in the cold.
A car cruised past him, and Nate recognized Ves’s profile as the car turned the corner. A minute later, Ves rounded the corner and walked up the steps to the doorway Nate was loitering in. He paused and studiously examined the names on the mailboxes. “Anything?” he whispered.
“Where the hell have you been?” Swift demanded, carefully looking disinterestedly away.
“Getting things set up,” Ves said. “Any motion?”
“Neither fish nor fowl,” Swift said. “I’m freezing. And I’m starting to hallucinate. I think I just had an argument with the building across the street. It doesn’t like me loitering here. Come to think of it, I don’t, either. I go home and go to sleep now, right, Big Brother?”
“Not yet,” Ves told him, “but soon, soon. We have to get someone to relieve you.”
“What about the Secretary of State?” Nate growled.
“You think that’s funny?” Ves demanded. “The President wanted to come out here himself.”
“I won’t stop him,” Nate said. “Although he could never keep awake in school. We’d double date, and he’d fall asleep coming home.”
“The girls must have loved him,” Ves said.
“We all did,” N
ate said. “Most of the time, he was doing the driving. Still, if the President is anxious enough to want to relieve me here, I think it would be in the National Interest.”
“I wouldn’t let him come,” Ves said regretfully. “But I would love to have seen it: the bulletproof limousine around the corner with the Marine sergeant chauffeur huddled up in the front seat trying to keep warm. The President sitting on a camp stool in this doorway, with a camp table in front of him, warming his hands over a cup of cocoa. Two Secret Service men loitering inconspicuously in front of the house; two more dangling from the roof. The President’s mobile information post set up in the ground floor front apartment, much to the bewilderment… no, strike that—the tenant would have been evacuated by the Secret Service. And the crowd of newsmen back on the other side of the police line which they’d have to set up. Or, perhaps they’d just blockade the street at both ends. Luckily, none of this is anything that Alex would notice.”
“I love it when you get sarcastic,” Nate said. “You sound just like W.C. Fields.”
“Yes, yes,” Ves said. “Here, take this.” He handed Swift what looked like a brown map-pin without turning around.
“What is it?” Nate asked.
“Communications device,” Ves said. “The President dug up a few of them. Stick it behind your lapel, or somewhere within half a meter of your mouth. Now, take this small spot bandage and press it firmly to the skin behind your ear.”
“Which one?” Swift asked.
“I don’t suppose it matters,” Ves said. “Now all you have to do is touch the button to send a message to me. The receiver is on all the time, of course.”
“What’s the range on these things?” Swift asked, trying to look natural as he massaged the spot behind his left ear.
“A little over a kilometer if conditions are just right; a lot less if they’re not.”
“FBI?” Swift asked.
“Don’t be silly.”
“CIA?”
“Department of Fish and Game,” Ves told him. “Use them to track partridge or talk to trout, or some such.”
“We don’t have anything like this over at the Bureau of Weights and Measures Observational Branch,” Nate said sadly. “But then, the B.W.M.O.B. doesn’t speak to many trout.’”
Just then, there was a flash of movement behind the glass front door of the brownstone. Alex: Hamilton, immaculate in homburg, cutaway gray jacket, vest, pleated gray pants with six-inch cuffs, and gray spats over patent-leather black shoes, strode out. “Quick,” Ves said. “You follow him. I’ll interrogate the landlady while he’s out.”
“I don’t know if I’m up to it,” Swift said. “I haven’t had much sleep.”
“I’ll get a relief man to you as quickly as possible,” Ves assured him. “Just don’t lose him.”
Nate plodded inconspicuously after Alex:, and Ves went down the street to a luncheonette to call the President. Then he called his son at Romero Associates to arrange relief for Nate—his son promised him an operative by two in the afternoon—then Ves sat down and ate a small breakfast: poached egg, toast, and a glass of low fat milk. Then he went back up the block and rang the bell of the brownstone.
A short, dumpy woman with startlingly orange hair, wearing a passion-pink housecoat, appeared out of one of the side rooms and came to the door. Clutching a broom firmly in her left hand, she peered through the glass panel at Ves. “Yes?” she mouthed through the door.
“Mrs. O’Gorman?” Ves asked politely. “I wonder if I might ask you a few questions?”
“What?” she mouthed. He couldn’t hear her, and it was clear that she couldn’t hear him.
“A few questions!” Ves stated loudly at the door.
The lady mouthed something more, in obvious agitation, and waved the broom up and down a few times for emphasis. Ves couldn’t hear a sound from inside the door.
“Open the door,” Ves said, carefully moving his lips to the pattern of the words, “open the door.”
“Arb grab aaab!” the lady mouthed firmly from behind the closed door. Finally however, seeing that none of this was driving Ves away, she did open the door to the extent permitted by her chain lock. “No more rooms!” she announced firmly, squeezing as much of her face as she could into the crack.
“Information, not a room, I want,” Ves said hurriedly and ungrammatically, before she could slam the door. “I’ll pay!”
“Pay?” The word caught her attention. “How much? What do you want to know? Let’s see the money.”
Ves took a ten-dollar bill out of his pocket and waved it in front of her. Her little eyes lit up, and she took the chain off the door. “Come in,” she said.
“I’d like some information on your tenant,” Ves said. “The gentleman who left about an hour ago.”
“Come, sit down,” the lady said. “Have a cup of coffee. What do you want to know?”
Ves came into the kitchen with her and accepted a rose floral cup of a watery brown liquid he couldn’t identify. “Anything you know about him,” Ves said. “How long he’s been here, what he does during the day, any visitors he has had; is there anything at all unusual about him.”
“A week tomorrow,” the woman told him. “I don’t know what he does, but he brings home books and magazines and papers all the time. No visitors and nothing unusual. Is that worth ten bucks?”
Ves handed her the bill. “Nothing else?” he asked. “Nothing out of the ordinary?”
“Very quiet man,” the landlady said. “Gave me rent a week in advance. In gold.”
“Gold?” Ves said, his voice betraying his fascination with this bit of news.
“It’s legal,” she said. “I checked.”
“A coin?” Ves asked.
“What then, a nugget?”
“Mexican?” Ves asked.
“I wouldn’t take no foreign money,” the landlady declared with patriotic virtue, fishing out the coin and displaying it in the stubby fingers. It, indeed, was not foreign. An eagle, minted in Philadelphia in 1833, it was as American as the president whose face was on the front: Alexander Hamilton.
“Hamilton never was President of the United States,” Ves said, half to himself.
“That’s what you say. That’s my coin and you give it back right now!” she exclaimed. And forthwith she reclaimed it.
“Ves! Can you get over here right away?” the patch behind Ves’s ear asked in Nate’s voice.
“Where?” Ves asked, touching the button.
“What?” asked the landlady.
“There’s a Turkish bath on North Dakota and Y,” Nate’s voice said.
“Y?” Ves asked.
“Why not?” the landlady demanded. “Gold always has to go up in value because there isn’t enough of it to make earrings, now that pierced ears are coming back. You can’t use tin because it will rot your earlobe off.”
“That’s right, Y,” Swift said. “I’ll meet you in front.”
“Okay,” Ves said.
“I should think so,” the landlady said. “My stepdaughter-in-law told me that. And she should know: she’s in training to become a beautician.”
“Thank you, Mrs. O’Gorman, you’ve been a big help,” Ves said, preparing to take his hurried leave.
“Also silver, but not as much,” she said, taking the cup from his hand. “Come again.”
CHAPTER SIX
Swift followed Alex: as easily as a trailer follows a truck. The man strode down the street as disdainful of cars or pedestrians as though he had written assurance of a place in the hereafter. He never glanced to the right or left, and if the world behind him had been dismantled and crated as soon as he passed he would not have known it. Nate could have dressed in a clown suit and rode on the neck of an elephant three paces behind, and Alex: would still have marched on obliviously. Which was a good thing: in Nate�
��s present state of exhaustion, the subtler methods of tailing would have been beyond him. But he was able to stagger on, maintaining a more-or-less steady ten meters behind his subject.
Alex: went into a branch library. Nate checked for other possible exits and, finding none, settled down happily on a bus stop bench to await Alex’s return. The only problem was that as soon as Nate sat down, he felt himself drifting into the euphoric pre-sleep state where the eyes close of their own volition and fantasy and reality erase their common border. Nate stood up to stamp his feet and stop from going to sleep, but just then Alex: Hamilton came out of the library.
He had changed clothes while inside, and was now wearing a brown frock coat with wide lapels and matching vest, a white silk cravat, brown knee breeches with white stockings, and leather slip-ons with great brass buckles. He carried a cocked hat under his arm and wore a white periwig on his head. He walked by muttering, “I’m late, I’m late, the General will have my head.” Nate tried to follow him, but found that he couldn’t move, seeming to be frozen in one spot. He tried to move, he willed himself to move, he strained to move, then his head fell forward onto his knee and he woke up.
This time he did jump to his feet and stamp around. He pinched himself in the lobe of the ear to make sure that he was really awake, and hoped that Alex: had not left the library in the minute or so that he had dozed.
Luck was with him, and two minutes later Alex: emerged, trotted down the front steps, and strode down the street. Swift took up the pursuit.
A few ground-eating minutes later Alex: arrived at the VENUS-ADONIS Turkish Bath and entered. “Who would have believed?” Nate thought, as he settled down outside to wait. The problem was finding a comfortable position that wouldn’t put him to sleep. After a few minutes of fidgeting, he decided that any position would put him to sleep; the only hope was to keep in motion. He walked back and forth in front of the VENUS-ADONIS’s front door, trying not to look like a shy fan or a process server. He shifted to the bank across the street, walking back and forth in front of its massive doors until he noticed a man with a formal mustache, thin, humorless lips, and a nervous, jumpy gaze peering at him suspiciously through the open blinds in the bank’s front window. Then he moved back to the VENUS-ADONIS.
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