Money for Nothing

by Donald E. Westlake

  What he entered now was small, dark, and hot; you wouldn't expect much by way of air-conditioning from Good Rep. Posters of previous productions, along with professional shots of the actors involved, filled both side walls. Ahead, over a lumpy black linoleum floor, a box office window was at the right, a closed black door on the left.

  Josh went over to look through the box office window at an empty shelf, a kitchen chair, and a black wall. Moving to his left, he tried the door, but this one was locked.

  Knock, or shout? He tried both, knocking first and then, getting no answer, moving over to lean down and call through the arched hole in the window, “Hello! Hello?”

  Nothing. He looked around, and on a small table just inside the entrance was an open cardboard box full of throw-away sheets describing the current production, with copy on only one side. He took a sheet, folded it with the print inside, and used the little ledge in front of the ticket window to write his note:

  Dear Mitchell Robbie,

  My name is Josh Redmont. I too have been getting United States Agent's checks the last seven years. If you haven't

  “Box office opens at five.”

  Josh looked up, and in that narrow space back there had materialized a short very thin narrow-faced man with black hair slicked straight back. He wore a black turtleneck and black jeans and a red-and-white bandana knotted gracefully around his throat. He nodded briskly, having delivered his information, and started to sidle away.

  Josh said, “Mitchell Robbie?”

  Deep suspicion creased the man's face into a walnut shell. Peering intently at Josh, he said, “Does he know you?”

  “No, but I need to—”

  “About what?”

  Josh met him, suspicious gaze for suspicious gaze: “Are you Mitchell Robbie?”

  “I could take a message.”

  “I, too, have been receiving those checks every month from Uni—”

  “What?” The man actually jumped up on tiptoe as he frantically patted the air downward with both hands. “Are you crazy?”

  “Did they activate you?”

  “I have absolutely—” More bewildered face-crinkling: “What?”

  Josh said, “Did Mr. Levrin come here? Did he activate you?”

  “I have no idea what you're talking about,” the man—who Josh was now certain was Robbie—said, “I think you want professional help, but you won't find it here. I suggest you leave.”

  “Take a look at this,” Josh said, and slid the Van Bark clipping through the slot in the window.

  Robbie didn't want to look at it. He didn't want to have to do anything about anything, but clearly he understood he had no real choice. Leaning far back, as though to lessen the possible contamination, gazing down along the line of his nose and his fully extended right arm with the fingertips on the shelf, he read the clipping, and partway through it his face crinkled with distaste. “What an ugly thing,” he said. “But what is it to me? I mean, no man is an island, but he's an island, you certainly don't think I know that person.”

  “Three of us get the checks, every month,” Josh told him. “For seven years. A thousand dollars a month. You, and Robert Van Bark, and me. I never knew why. You never knew why either, did you?”

  “I still don't know what you're talking about,” Robbie said. “What checks?”

  “We don't have time for this,” Josh told him. “Ten days ago, they activated me, and I was just lucky, I didn't say the wrong thing. Then they went to Van Bark, and I guess he did say the wrong thing. And pretty soon Andrei Levrin is gonna come here, and from the way you're acting, you're gonna say so many wrong things you'll be dead in ten minutes. Which would be very bad for me.”

  A false nervous smile played over Robbie's mobile features. “I see what it is,” he said, “it's an audition. You have a play, and of course you want to star in it, and this is how to attract—”

  “Van Bark is dead,” Josh said.

  Robbie shook his head, drawing his shoulders up like a matron in a comedy. “I have never heard of the man.”

  “He cashed the checks. Every month.”

  Robbie cast around, this way, that way, for some other reaction to offer, something to make this scene go away. At last, he merely sighed, and looked Josh head-on, and said, “What do you want?”

  “Let me in there,” Josh said. “I'll explain the whole thing. Maybe we can help each other.”

  Robbie thought it over. Then sudden suspicion hardened his face again, and he said, “Are you wired?”

  “What? Oh, you mean carrying a recorder? Of course not.”

  “Or a transmitter,” Robbie told him. “Any little gadget.”

  “I'm not carrying anything,” Josh told him.

  Robbie nodded. “Strip,” he said.

  “Strip?” Josh couldn't believe it. “Here? In the lobby?”

  “No one will come in. If you're clean, I'll let you in and you can tell me your story, whatever it is. Up to you.”

  He was this far into this situation, Josh told himself, he might as well go through with it. “Oh, all right,” he said, and peeled off his shirt. “Okay?”

  “Everything,” Robbie said.

  Josh frowned at him. “What do you mean, everything?”

  “I mean everything,” Robbie insisted.

  “Oh, the hell with you!”

  “Goodbye,” Robbie said, and turned away.

  “All right! All right!”

  The next part of the experience was grim enough. Pirouetting starkers in front of Robbie's intense gaze, Josh said, “I suppose you've played a doctor on TV.”

  “Not yet,” Robbie said. “I'll unlock. Come in when you're decent.”

  20

  INSIDE, THE THEATER WAS narrow but deep, like a shoebox, with the stage at the far end. Facing it were two stepped wooden platforms with an aisle between them from the entrance, and on the platforms were rows of black metal folding chairs.

  No curtain covered the stage, where the set was as minimal as possible. To the left were a bed covered with scratchy-looking throws and a battered dresser with a candle on it, unlit. To the right, a green settee and a mirrored dressing table, fronted by a round piano stool. On the dressing table stood a large framed photograph of Robbie, in a doorman's uniform. Centered, upstage, was a doorframe connected to nothing, with a door open back toward a tall narrow painting of a snowy mountain. Beyond that, the rear wall seemed to be sheets of plywood painted flat black.

  Robbie, also in flat black unlike his photo, led the way to the stage, saying, “Take the settee, it's more comfortable than it looks.”

  It would have to be; and it was. Josh sat on it, facing all the empty chairs, and Robbie sat on the piano stool, leaning his back against the dressing table. “Those checks have meant a lot to me,” he said, “over the years.”

  Josh said, “Did you ever try to find out where they were coming from?”

  “Called the phone number on the checks a few times, never got an answer.” Robbie shrugged. “I don't know about you, but for me, an extra thou a month is a godsend.”

  “Not from God, though.”

  “All right,” Robbie said. “So now I'm gonna find out about the money. Does this mean it stops?”

  “Let me tell you the story.” Casting around for a starting point, Josh said, “Did you used to hang out in a place down here called Uncle Ray's?”

  “On Sixth Street?” Robbie nodded. “Sure. What about it?”

  “The bartender there,” Josh told him, “was a man whose real name is Nimrin. He's actually a spy.”

  Robbie frowned, crinching his face up. It was really a very mobile face, throwing expressions that could have hit the back wall of a space much bigger than this theater. “What do you mean, a spy?”

  “A spy. For the Soviet Union or somebody back when. I don't know who after that.”

  “He was spying in Uncle Ray's?”

  “He was collecting us,” Josh said, and sketched in Mr. Nimrin's scheme and their obliv
ious position in it, followed by his own removal from the plot, so that the beards actually got the money. And now the piper was here, ready to be paid.

  Robbie was a good listener, watching Josh's face intently, almost never blinking. When Josh finished, Robbie let a little silence go by and then said, “That's crazy, you know. That's completely crazy, all that story.”

  “Getting a thousand dollars a month for seven years with no explanation isn't crazy?”

  “I wouldn't plot it this way,” Robbie told him. “You have to at least make a stab at believability”

  “What don't you believe?” Josh asked him. “The money?”

  “I mean, spies,” Robbie said. “Come on. I could believe somebody stashed stolen diamonds down in here a hundred years ago and now his grandson is coming looking for them, and you and me, we're in his way. That I could believe.”

  “United States Agent,” Josh told him, “is not looking for missing diamonds. You are a deep cover sleeper spy, in the pay of a foreign country for the last seven years, and now they're on their way to activate you.”

  “No,” Robbie said. “I don't want to be activated.”

  “I guess Van Bark didn't, either,” Josh said.

  Robbie's eloquent face twisted into an expression of almost physical agony, as though he had fleas. He said, “You're raining on my parade, buddy. A grand a month, no questions asked, and I can live in this shithole, my pals and I can put on our low-rent little productions. Do you know we have not once, in eight years, got a review in the New York Times?”

  “Well, this is pretty far off the beaten track,” Josh suggested.

  “BAM is farther.”

  Josh shook his head. “Bam?”

  “Brooklyn Academy of Music,” Robbie said. “Brooklyn is farther from Times Square than here.”

  Josh said, “Wait a minute, you're switching things around. I'm not here to talk about your theater troubles, I'm here to talk about your Levrin troubles.”

  Robbie cracked his knuckles, thinking hard. The reports bounced off the walls. He said, “He's the activator, huh?”

  “In my case,” Josh said. “In Van Bark's case, more the terminator.”

  Robbie said, “Ugh. So what are you saying? Time to lower my standards and go to the Coast?”

  “I've thought about running away,” Josh said, “and maybe I could. My wife doesn't think so. And you know, to tell the truth, it isn't that easy these days to completely disappear. Not and still be alive.”

  “But what you're telling me,” Robbie said, “is now I gotta go along with these people, and really do a Benedict Arnold number. I mean, for real.”

  “Maybe they won't ask you to do much,” Josh said. “I've just had some people staying in my place, when I wasn't there, and I'm kinda storing stuff for them.”

  Robbie's keen eyes bored in. “What stuff?”

  “Well…guns.”

  “Oh, no!” Jumping to his feet, pacing the stage like Hamlet, Robbie said, “I don't like guns, man, I even have trouble with the props on the stage, I try to stay away from Mamet, I don't like any of that stuff, maybe you should just go away and—”

  “Wait, wait,” Josh said. “You can't just pretend this isn't happening, because it's happening. Levrin is gonna show up, because he obviously still needs somebody, because Van Bark didn't work out—”

  “Ugh.”

  “If you can't make him believe you've been part of the sleeper thing all along,” Josh said, “honest to God he's gonna kill you. Same as Van Bark. And then he'll come get me, because he knows the truth. And then Mr. Nimrin.”

  “This Nimrin sounds like—”

  “Hello!” yelled a voice from offstage; from the lobby, in fact. “Anybody here?” yelled the voice, and Josh recognized it, the accent, the intonations.

  Suddenly on his feet, he hissed, “It's him! It's him!”

  Robbie gaped at him. “The terminator?”

  “Hello!” Rattling of the locked door.

  “He'll break it down!” Josh said, in a shrill whisper. “You've gotta go out there, talk to him!”

  Robbie stared up the aisle. “T alk to him?”

  “Hello! What's the matter with this door?”

  “You're an actor!” Josh whispered, frantic with haste. “Act!”

  “Act? But—” Robbie waved his arms, acting frazzlement. “What's my—what's my throughline?”

  “You're a spy!”

  “Anybody there?” More door rattling.

  “Answer him, before he breaks in.”

  “Be right out!” Robbie yelled.

  “Mitchell Robbie?”

  “Be right there!”

  Robbie started to move, but Josh grabbed his arm. “Where do I hide?”

  “Behind the stage,” Robbie said, distracted, and called again, “Here I come!” Instead of which, he did three quick deep kneebends, then straightened, having become somehow taller, thicker. “Be right there,” he called, in a considerably deeper voice, and marched up the aisle.

  21

  ICOME FROM MR. NIMRIN. Of course, you remember Mr. Nimrin.”

  “Yes, of course. How is old Nimrin these days?”

  Hide behind the stage. Behind the stage?

  “Retired. Enjoying his retirement. I am Andrei Levrin.”

  “Among his roses, eh? Good for old Nimrin,” Robbie said, his voice becoming more upper-crust English with every sentence. “Come in, old chap, come in.”

  But the back wall was blank black plywood. How could he—?

  “Not much comfort in these digs, I'm afraid.”

  The voices were so close. And there, at the right rear corner of the stage, on the plywood wall, a round black wooden knob, the same color and texture as the wall, almost impossible to see. Push, or pull?

  Push; which was why no hinges showed. Josh stepped through into a different kind of darkness, and the voices just kept getting nearer.

  “I suppose you thought the call might never come.”

  “One stands ready. As the poet says, one also serves. Take the settee, why don't you, you'll find it more comfortable than it looks.”

  “Thank you. But first let me—”

  “Ack!”

  “Mitchell? What's the matter?”

  “Nothing, not a thing, I wasn't certain what you were reaching for, I didn't want you to miss your footing on the—What's this?”

  “Per our arrangement.”

  He's looking at the bankbook now, Josh thought, as he himself looked around at where he was hiding. Robbie's quarters, it must be, the living space that made it possible for Good Rep to get insurance.

  It was a fairly large room, very messy, overcrowded with furniture, boxes, lamps, paintings, posters. It appeared to be a living room plus bedroom plus theatrical storage room, with two filthy windows in the far wall through which the remnants of daylight diffidently oozed, not helped much by the walls, which were painted in the pale grayish color variously known as landlord white or cockroach white, because it goes on the walls dirty and therefore it's very hard to know when it should be repainted. An open doorway in the left wall suggested an even grungier kitchen beyond.

  But Josh's attentions were all behind him, on the conversation taking place just beyond this thin sheet of plywood, its hairy surface on this side also landlord white. Josh touched it with a palm, leaned close, and listened.

  “Quite a lot of money.” Robbie now sounded like a strangled Englishman.

  “That was the agreement with Mr. Nimrin, as you recall. You do recall”"

  “Yes, of course. Memory like a steel trap.”

  “You are now, what this means is, activated.”

  “Yes.” Thoughtful now, in control, no longer strangling. “One understood the situation at once, of course. What are my orders? Oh, and by what rank shall I refer to you?”

  “Rank?” Josh could imagine Levrin frowning through lowered brows at Robbie. Don't overdo it, he begged. Don't get into the part too much.

  “Well, Majo
r, Colonel, whatever. One likes to do these things properly.”

  “Oh, I see.” Wonderful; there was no suspicion in that voice at all. “Very considerate of you, but no, we don't do military ranks, we aren't that sort of group. In the old days, we might have said ‘comrade,’ but that doesn't seem to have the…ring it once had.”

  “So shall I call you Andrei? No cover name? Or possibly that is your cover name.”

  “Andrei will do very nicely,” Levrin said, sounding just a bit nettled. “And you? Mitchell, or Mitch?”

  “Oh, Mitch, Mitch is fine. But now to the assignment.”

  “You seem eager, Mitch.”

  “Well, it has been a long time between drinks, as the Governor of North Carolina said to the Governor of South Carolina. Or was that the Gov—”

  “It's very simple, really.” Levrin seemed in more of a hurry than before. “All you're going to do is rent a car.”

  “Rent a car? Is it a, is it a long journey?”

  “No, no, not even out of the state. Can you take a note?”

  “A what?”

  “Write a note. Write the information.”

  “Oh, yes, of course, I'm sorry”—the voice getting even closer—“I'll just get a pen and—” another sudden strangled noise, an inch from the plywood. “No no, what am I thinking, silly me, pen and paper in the box office. I mean, ha ha” moving away—“where else would it be? Half a sec.”

  The voice faded and jounced, as though Robbie were leaving at a dead run. Josh waited, ear to the plywood. Was that the sound of Levrin, up and around, moving about the stage? Bored, at loose ends, noticing that discreet little wooden knob, all in black?

  Silent and swift as the headless horseman's horse, Josh slalomed through the collected junk, noticing along the way there would be no escape through those smeary windows. Bars could be dimly seen on the outside, and an alley between the end of this building and the side of the first one on the cross street. Forgetting the windows, Josh angled through that side doorway into a kitchen where all the shelves were empty because the deep broad sink was full.

  “Here we are, here we are. Sit down, Andrei, we don't stand on ceremony here, all set, ready for the drill.”