Tool of the Trade Read online

  “It’s still straight out of James Bond. I’m not worried about being able to prove you’re a spy. Coffee?”

  “Sure.” We stepped into a crowded cafe, the one we had mentioned in his office, and found an isolated table in the back.

  I pressed him further. “Look. All I have to do is pick up the phone and call the FBI. They won’t even give you time to pack. You’ll be deported by Thursday.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “We don’t like to do things that way. The FBI’s way. You’d be replaced, and it might take us years to track down your replacement. We’d much rather make an arrangement with you.”

  “Turn me into a counterspy.” He said it with droll gravity. “A Double… Agent” “In essence. Just keep us informed; make monthly reports as to your activities.” He smiled. “They would be short reports. If you’ve done your job at all well, you must know that” He was quiet while the waitress poured our coffee. “I’m not sure what I know that would be of the slightest interest to you. The only spy I know by name is named Jacob.”

  My father, who’s a union negotiator, taught me that sometimes the best way to get someone to make a concession is to remain silent. Let the other man open his mouth and hope that he traps himself. Someone must have taught Foley that, too. For about a minute we looked at each other, sipping coffee.

  Finally he leaned back in his chair and looked up to his right. That either meant he was about to tell the truth or he knew that people who are about to lie tend to look left. He spoke softly.

  “I’ve sometimes wondered how it is in real life. With spies, I mean. Suppose I said all right, I’ll go along with what you want, and then I go straight to my KGB contact and tell him or her what’s happened. So he or she gives me false information to pass on to you. And so maybe I turn around and tell you. Or maybe I’m feeding you some prefabricated line. How can either you or the KGB contact trust anything I tell you?”

  “We have ways of checking,” I said. “Besides, we can punish you for lying. Throw you in jail or deport you.”

  He nodded. “I still don’t think I’ve done anything you could jail me for. And as for deportation… I suspect the Soviets would treat me well, allow me to continue my research.”

  “And your wife? She would go with you?”

  He hesitated just a moment too long. “Yes. I have no doubt.”

  “Well, you may have the opportunity to find out very soon. Unless you cooperate.”

  “Yes, of course.” He frowned. “I have to think. You’ve been fairly open with me, Jacob; I’ll return the favor. My first impulse is to say the hell with it and let you deport me—while I’m still not in any serious trouble with you or the KGB. You must see the logic of that.”

  I had to admit that I did. “There are a few problems with that course, though,” he continued. “Mainly Valerie. She’d have to learn Russian, the life as well as the language. Very difficult. Also, although I suppose I’m technically a Soviet citizen, I grew up an American and am used to this life. Attached to it.

  “Finally, it has belatedly occurred to me that you may not be what you say. You could be a KGB agent investigating my loyalty. The only way I can really test your identity is to force you into some overt action. Like having me deported.”

  “No, I can prove that I am who I claim to be.”

  “Of course you can—but would that finally prove anything? By your own testimony, the fact that you work for the CIA doesn’t mean you don’t also work for the KGB. Right? And maybe the British and Belgian and Bolivian secret services as well.” He laughed. “What a complicated world you must inhabit.”

  “No, wait. You’re setting up a zero-sum game for yourself. The only way you’ll trust me is for me to perform an act that takes you out of the picture? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “On the contrary, it makes a great deal of sense, if my primary motivation is to protect my own skin. Suppose you were a double agent, and I agreed to turn against the KGB. Wouldn’t some assassin with a silenced Uzi come after me?”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “You’re right. They’d make it look like an accident; push me onto the subway tracks.”

  “Come on.”

  “Inject me with a tiny bead of radioactive thallium. From an umbrella.”

  I paused at that. “You must know better.”

  “They did that once, didn’t they? I should say ‘we.’ That’s what the newspapers said.”

  “Not here. The Soviets haven’t killed an American since 1941, at least not on American soil.”

  “Ah.” He was suddenly serious. “But I’m not an American.” He stood up abruptly. “As I say, I have to think. Perhaps I have to screw up my courage and discuss it with Valerie.”

  “I could give you a day. Don’t discuss—”

  “Two days. I’ll meet you here at noon on Thursday.” He turned and started to walk out, then came back and put two quarters by his cup. “See you Thursday.”

  Our tail, Roberta Bender, had been nursing a beer at the counter. She walked out just in front of him. I waited for a few minutes to see whether there might have been another tail, a KGB one, but no one else left the diner immediately. Maybe they followed me out.

  I remembered feeling apprehensive lest he try something suspicious. I didn’t want to lose him; he seemed like a good man, and I felt that working with him would be interesting.

  It was going to be more than interesting. Terrifying.

  CHAPTER FOUR: NICK

  The first time I used it to kill somebody, it was almost an accident. A mugger.

  For nearly five years now, I’ve been wearing a miniaturized signal generator built into my wristwatch, which I “convinced” one of my more gifted students to cobble together for me. I used it a few times, trivially, to make sure it worked, and then more or less forgot about it. I didn’t want to get in the habit of using it for trivial things.

  I try to keep my weight down, without dramatic success, by relying on a bicycle for transportation as much as possible. That was how I managed to run into a mugger.

  There’d been a reception for a guest speaker at the Institute, and it was almost eleven when I got on my bike and headed home. About halfway, the thing gave a crunch and a lurch and the back wheel locked up. In the dim streetlight I could just discern what had happened: The rear derailleur had slipped off its mount and gotten wedged in between the spokes and the frame. The bike was going no farther that night. I locked it to the nearest parking meter and started walking home. (The nearest T stop was almost as far away as my flat off Central Square.) I followed the advice of all the newspaper articles and walked briskly, looking straight ahead, right hand in my jacket pocket. Wrapped around the deadly granola bar I’d forgotten was there.

  He wasn’t dressed like a hood and he wasn’t black, and his eyes didn’t burn with junkie fire. He was probably working his way through college.

  He stepped out of a doorway and presented an effective argument: a long-barreled.44 Magnum revolver à la the Clint Eastwood folk hero. “Give me your wallet,” he said, an unnecessary refinement.

  I had my hands in the air and was about to tell him that the wallet was in my inside coat pocket—obviously, I didn’t want to reach for it—when he said, “The watch, too.”

  I reached for the watch and pushed the button. I took a step toward him.

  “Stay there.” He hauled back on the hammer, cocking it with two clicks: soft, loud. “I’m not fucking around.”

  “Take the pistol,” I said, “put the muzzle in your mouth, and pull the trigger.”

  He shook his head slowly and whispered, “No.” Then he put the muzzle in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  The report was so loud it stung my face like a slap. The bullet shattered the glass transom of the shoe store behind him, setting off the burglar alarm, and spraying the entrance alcove with blood and brains and chips of bone. The pistol clattered to the sidewalk, and he took one lurching step toward me, curious slack e
xpression on his face, and then folded up like an abandoned marionette. His legs twitched as if he were trying, to run away. Blood geysered from an artery embedded in the fist-sized exit wound. I watched the fountain slow to a trickle. Smiling.

  After forty years I had returned to the territory of my childhood. But this time the one suddenly beyond help, suddenly meat, was not a friend or relative or fellow traveler—but someone who deserved it. Who had asked for it and got it. I recognized the grisly elated feeling, a very specific memory: In the spring, after the siege had lifted, we were playing in the forest outside of the city and came upon the dry old corpse of a Nazi soldier. My older friend, Yuri, had a camp ax, actually a small, blunt hatchet, and we took turns hacking away at the weathered remains. Laughing like a family of hyena cubs. Finally rolling around in the mud helpless with gleeful horror. Over the next few months we combed the woods carefully, repeating the experience many times. The Nazis had left in a hurry, no time to bury all their dead.

  A police car screeched to a stop at the curb. I didn’t turn around, but could see the drama reflected in the glass of the shoe store’s display window. The driver piled out of the car and took refuge behind its hood, his pistol in a two-handed grip aligned steadily on me. I thought it prudent to raise my hands. The other officer swarmed out of the passenger seat into a rather vulnerable kneeling position, with a riot gun aimed at the small of my back. They were shouting simultaneously, very hard to understand with the siren going wow-wow-wow, but the gist of it was clear. I was not to move or try anything funny. I was to keep my hands, my fucking hands, in the air and turn to face them, slowly. I obeyed.

  The driver rushed around the car’s hood and put the muzzle of his gun under my chin while he patted me in the obvious places. The other one played a flashlight beam on the remains of the mugger and then bolted for the curb and vomited.

  The driver walked me roughly toward the corpse and pinned me up against the glass. I could hear his sharp gasp as he surveyed the damage.

  “What the fuck. Point-blank in the mouth. Drug deal?”

  “No, it was suicide.” No harm in approximating the truth. “He started to mug me and then turned his weapon on himself.”

  “Yeah. And I’m Mary Tyler Moore.”

  “It’s true. The pistol should be somewhere near him on the ground.”

  His partner turned off the siren and returned, smelling of gastric juices. “Let’s get an ID.”

  “Yeah. Who are you?”

  “Miranda,” his partner said tightly.

  “That’s right. You have the right to remain silent—”

  “No, that’s okay,” I said, assuming the watch would work without the siren’s interference. “Trust me. Put your weapons down.” They did, and I lowered my hands. “Did either of you gentlemen mention me on the radio?”

  They looked at each other. “No,” the driver said, “we didn’t know you was here until the headlights picked you up.”

  “All right. Then just forget you ever saw me.” They nodded seriously. “Oh. There’s a disabled bicycle locked to a parking meter a couple of blocks away. You will not connect that in any way with this incident.” They both nodded again. I walked away, ducking down a side street just in time to avoid being seen by the Rescue Squad ambulance.

  That night I had complicated dreams, but then woke feeling purged. Two weeks later I did it again. Valerie was out of town, so I went down to the Combat Zone and made myself conspicuous well after midnight. “Trolling for trouble” was the phrase that occurred to me. I killed a pimp and a mugger in ways that appeared to be suicide and accident.

  It became a sort of ongoing hobby. I stopped counting after the thirteenth, for luck.

  I went back to the office after talking to the spy Jacob and spent most of the afternoon attempting to refine a computer model that was supposed to relate various demographic and personality factors to seven distinct patterns of language-acquisition resistance. It was a waste of several hours; my mind kept wandering. I was really just putting off going home. Valerie doesn’t go to school on Tuesdays, and I neither wanted to rush home and confess that I happened to be a spy for the Evil Empire nor sit around the house and stew about it. So I went home at the usual hour and we followed the usual routine: a drink and a chat before I prepared dinner (simple carbonara and salad), then eat and retire, Valerie to her drawing board and me to the “library,” an extra bedroom full of books and journals. I poured a glass of brandy and lit a cigar, I suppose as an unconscious signal.

  Valerie tapped on the door, opened it, and leaned on the jamb. “All right,” she said, “what’s bugging you?”

  It’s interesting how a man can be articulate and even eloquent in front of a classroom and yet be reduced to tongue-tied confusion when confronted by the woman he lives with and loves. “Uh,” I said and completed the thought with a spastic gesture.

  “The last time you smoked during the week was when they threatened to make you department head. The time before that was your little undergraduate. You’ve also been as sociable as a grumpy reptile. So what is it this time?”

  “Not an undergraduate.”

  “Moving up in the world?”

  “Not sex at all. Nor office politics.” I sighed and patted the seat next to me. “It is politics, though. Sit down. It’s a long story.”

  She listened without comment for a good half hour, while I told her the truth about Leningrad and Rivertown and Iowa and my subsequent twenty-year career as a semispy. I did not mention the wristwatch hypnotic device or the freelance social work to which I applied it. I told her about Jacob.

  “This is all true?” she said finally.

  “Yes. I’m sorry.” To that she laughed nervously and took a sip of my brandy. Then she stood up and went over to look out the window.

  “I just don’t know what to say. I understand? Is that what I’m supposed to say?”

  “I’m—”

  “Please don’t say you’re sorry again.” She turned and sat back against the window ledge. “Look. I’ve known for almost two years that something strange was going on. I found your gun, the one with the shoulder holster. I didn’t think it was for coaching the pistol club.”

  I met her stare but didn’t say anything. She looked down at the floor. “I was ashamed about snooping, I guess, and…I mean, who could imagine? I thought it was just a piece of male silliness, like those knives. I mean, you’re such a calm and rational guy.” A tear started. “So mild and… sweet—”

  “Sounds like a cigarette ad,” I said. “Firm and fully packed?” She laughed and dabbed at her eyes with a knuckle.

  “I’m the left-wing nut of the family,” she said. “You’re not even political.”

  “No, I’m very political. Have to hide it, of course.”

  She shook her head, nibbling her lower lip. “But the gun. You say you don’t do that kind of spy stuff.”

  “I suppose it is about ninety percent macho aberration. I told myself I had to be prepared for any eventuality.” I let a little truth leak through: “My childhood, the terrors, that’s all very close to the surface even now. The world is a dangerous place, full of sudden, random death. Even for law-abiding citizens. Like me.”

  “You choose the laws you want to abide by, though.”

  “Like everyone,” we said simultaneously, and then laughed.

  “This is a hell of a forty-fifth birthday present,” she said, smiling. “Learn Russian at my age?”

  “You would go?”

  She looked at me for a long time, perhaps parsing out a dramatic reply. Finally she just nodded, hard, and began silently crying. I held her for a long time. We changed venue, to the bedroom, and had some fine, slow hours.

  CHAPTER FIVE: JACOB

  For more than a year we’ve had a listening device in Nicholas Foley’s library (and living room and bedroom). It finally paid off in a small way. A negative way. We know we can’t play his wife against him.

  Something has come up that rather c
omplicates the Foley situation. It may not be important at all, but we all have a “feeling.”

  The first hint of it was his mail. His journals. Twenty years ago he had a brief flirtation with hypnosis and even published one paper on the subject. Then he apparently dropped it completely; at least he’s never done any formal work in it again. Yet he not only still subscribes to the hypnosis journals he took back then, but he also picked up the subscriptions to two new journals that started in the seventies and eighties.

  Maybe nothing more than a hobby; his department doesn’t pay for the subscriptions. But it’s not the only thing that’s a bit odd. In the course of an interview, without any coaching, one of his student subjects related a strange incident: Twice Foley asked him to do absurd things that had nothing to do with the business at hand—one time it was to whistle “Silent Night” (in July) and the other was to pretend to be riding a bicycle. On a third occasion Foley asked him to go back to the dorm and fetch a particular pencil. He refused; Foley claimed to have been misunderstood. He was not asked back.

  Those do sound like the sort of things that stage hypnotists use to demonstrate their skills. Maybe he was innocently experimenting with the monotony that accompanies foreign-language vocabulary lessons—that was the context, which is why it surprised the student enough for him to have remembered it twelve years later—but if that were the case, why didn’t he simply tell the subject why he had made the request, rather than try to misdirect him?

  I wished we could have transcripts for the past year’s bugs, to see whether anything about hypnosis had come up between Foley and his wife, but of course there was no budget for that. I fast-ran through several days’ tapes, but there was no hint of anything in that direction. They did work together with it a long time ago, before they were married. But a check of her office bookshelves at Boston University reveals nothing interesting. Within a day or two we should have a listing of all the books she has checked out of the university’s library since it’s been computerized. I don’t expect any surprises. (There were no real surprises in the list of Foley’s borrowings we got from the MIT library computer system.) You can never tell, though.