The Fools in Town Are on Our Side Page 3

  “How much?”

  “For the watch or the expansion bracelet?”

  “For both.”

  He told me and it was fifty dollars more than I had paid Li Teh in Hong Kong, but that was what Hong Kong was for, among other things. Cheap watches. “All right,” I said. “I’ll take it.”

  “It’ll only be a minute or two,” the man said, picking up the watch and heading for the rear of the shop where the resident expansion-bracelet expert apparently waited. I turned and looked out the front window. The man in the brown suit stood before it, seemingly transfixed by the display that lay behind the plate glass which was imbedded with thin, gray, metallic strips that would sound an alarm if anyone tried a smash and grab with a brickbat.

  “Here we are,” the man said, returning a few minutes later with the watch, and as always, I wanted to say “where?” but there seemed to be no sense in it. I paid for the watch, checked to see that it was correctly set, and slipped it on to my left wrist. The shopowner started to put the black case that had contained the watch into a paper sack. I told him to keep it.

  “But it contains the guarantee.”

  “I don’t want that either,” I said.

  Out on the sidewalk I paused for a moment beside the man in the brown suit who still seemed mesmerized by the window display. I looked but could see nothing special other than some watches, several trays of junky rings, and a medium-sized clock with a small sign boasting that it was within three seconds of absolute accuracy. I glanced at my new watch and was vaguely pleased to see that it still kept the right time.

  “Fascinating, isn’t it?” I said to the man in the brown suit, turned, and started to walk back: toward Sutter Street and the Sir Francis Drake.

  He was a good tail when he wanted to be. In fact, very good. He made all the right moves, as if he had been making them ail his life, but now made them only out of habit, as if he didn’t care whether he was spotted or not.

  I stopped a few doors from the hotel in front of a bookstore on Sutter Street and inspected the latest crop of best-sellers. Through the diagonally placed window I could read the names of the authors and the titles as well as keep the sidewalk behind me in view through the reflection of the glass. I had heard of some of the authors but only two of the titles, but that’s what comes from not reading a newspaper for a hundred days or so. The man in the brown suit was walking toward me rapidly now that it was downhill and the going was easier.

  Almost fat, I thought. Overweight by twenty pounds, at least. Perhaps thirty. Around five-ten, probably forty-five or forty-six, but possibly a dissipated forty-two. The brown suit wasn’t shabby, just unpressed, and his black shoes needed a shine. The collar of his white shirt was too small and its points stuck up in the air. He wore a blue and purple striped tie and for a moment I wondered if he were color blind. When he was about twenty feet from me, I turned and watched him approach. He walked on his heels, bringing them down hard on the sidewalk. If his body was overweight, his face wasn’t. It was all planes and angles with a set of dark brown eyebrows that looked as if they should be combed. His hair was brown, too, but dotted with splotches of dirty gray as though certain spots of it had once been shaved and when they grew back, they had grown back a different color. Underneath the fuzzy brows was a set of eyes that regarded me fixedly as he approached. When he drew near enough I could see that one was brown and one was blue and neither of them contained any more warmth than you would find in a slaughterhouse freezer.

  He was about three feet away when he stopped and looked me up and down carefully with his two-toned eyes. “Your name’s Dye,” he said in a quiet, hard tone that made it more like a threat than a statement of fact.

  “My name’s Dye,” I said. “Why the tail job?”

  “I wasn’t sure it was you until you started back for the hotel. The desk told me you’d gone to the bank, but all I had was a general description. You fitted it pretty well, so I tailed you.”

  “I noticed,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t have if I’d been trying.”

  “But you weren’t.”

  “No.”

  “All right,” I said. “What’s on your mind?”

  “I’m with Victor Orcutt,” he said, as if that explained everything.

  “What’s he sell?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why me?”

  He reached into the pocket of his brown suit and brought out a package of Camels. He offered me one. I shook my head no. He lit it with a stainless steel Zippo, inhaled deeply and then blew some smoke up into the air. He seemed to have all the time that there was. He seemed to have almost as much time as I did;

  “He didn’t think you’d be much interested,” the man in the brown suit said.

  “In what?”

  “An invitation to go see him.”

  “He’s right,” I said. “I’m not.”

  His blue and brown gaze never left my face. “Like I said, he didn’t think you’d accept an invitation, so he told me to give you this.” He reached into his inside breast pocket and produced a square, buffcolored envelope which he handed to me.

  “You could have left it at the desk,” I said, pocketing the envelope, not looking at it.

  He nodded slightly, but not very much. His heavy, thick chin moved a half-inch down and then up. Twice. “I could have, couldn’t I,” he said, “except that Victor Orcutt told me to give it to you personally. He gets a little fussy sometimes so I like to do what he says. Makes for harmony, if you know what I mean.”

  “Only too well,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, still memorizing my face with his two-color eyes. “I bet you do at that.” Then he turned abruptly and walked on down Sutter Street without a goodbye or even a farewell wave of the hand. I noticed that he still came down hard on his heels.

  I didn’t open the envelope until I was up in the hotel room. The buff paper could have been made out of fine old linen rags and it crackled richly as I tore the flap open. Inside there was a single sheet of paper, folded once. Centered near its top was the name Victor Orcutt in discreet, squared-off, capitals and small capital letters. There was nothing else on the letterhead. No address, no phone number, no zip code. The name was printed in dark brown ink, the color of old mahogany, and I ran my thumb over the letters to make sure that they were engraved. The hand-written message, also in dark brown ink, was simple, knowing, and even polite:

  Dear Mr. Dye,

  I shall be calling on you late this afternoon (shall we say around four?) concerning a matter that should prove of mutual interest. I hope that your brief stay at Letterman General Hospital was both comfortable and rewarding.

  Sincerely,

  Victor Orcutt

  The handwriting was calligraphy really and it was so good that it almost made up for its air of affectation. It was a clear, bold hand, straight up and down, without an unnecessary whorl or flourish or serif. It was a studied, strangely economical style and I decided that it must have taken Victor Orcutt a couple of years of hard practice to perfect it.

  I tossed the letter onto a table, mixed a drink, and stood by the window to watch the fog roll in and think bad thoughts about Carmingler and his sealed-off suite and his Boy Scout security.

  They had chartered a C-130 to fly me the eight thousand miles or so to San Francisco. It had touched down only once on the way, at Honolulu International to refuel, and even then I wasn’t allowed off the plane. There had been only two passengers, Carmingler and myself, and it was Carmingler alone who had met me at that gray, crumbling ruin of a prison at midnight when I was released. He wore a hot tweed jacket with leather patches on its sleeves and insisted that there wasn’t time for me to change clothes, but that I should wear the pajamalike gray cotton uniform, the same one that I had worn continuously for three months.

  Aboard the C-130, I told him: “I’ve got lice.”

  “Really?” he said. “Oh, well, I suppose a great many people do. We’ll get rid of them for yo
u in a few hours. In the meantime, scratch if you like. I don’t mind.”

  We flew from Honolulu International to Hamilton Air Force Base where a private ambulance waited with its windows carefully blacked out. The ambulance whisked Carmingler and me to Letterman General and I wasn’t allowed outside the sealed-off suite except to go to the dentist. According to Carmingler, no one knew that I was at Letterman General. And perhaps no one did, except Victor Orcutt. So much for Carmingler’s security measures.

  He had talked little on the long flight back, except at Honolulu when we had refueled and he couldn’t smoke his pipe. “There’s been a bit of a flap, you know,” he said.

  “How bad?”

  “Bad enough, I’m afraid.”

  “So?”

  He took his dead pipe out of his mouth long enough to give me what I assume he thought was a reassuring smile. “We’ll get it straightened out. In San Francisco.”

  “How bad?” I asked again.

  Carmingler went through his coltish act. He rose awkwardly, balanced himself on his right foot, and knocked the empty pipe against the heel of his raised left shoe.

  “It’s bad enough,” he said, and his head ducked toward the pipe that he was pounding against his shoe. “Actually, it’s about as bad as it could possibly be.”

  CHAPTER 4

  I had been waiting for the go-ahead signal on Li Teh for more than a week when the childish message arrived instructing me to Cipher the Village Statesman. Translated, it meant that I was to subject Li to a polygraph or lie detector test. Despite his horror of most things mechanical, especially computers, Carmingler’s faith in the polygraph bordered on the mystical. It was the kind of faith that the clergy likes to call deep and abiding.

  I decided that it must have been a committee decision. Four or five or even six of them sitting around a table, covering their ruled, yellow legal pads with penciled doodles as they discussed Li Teh and whether he would be worth $3,000 a month to the taxpayers. There would be, of course, the suspicious one, perhaps an old hand, but more likely a new boy trying to make a name for himself. He would chew on his pencil’s eraser for a while, look worried, and then raise the question as to whether Li could really be trusted. You know. Really. After all, if he’s agreed to double, couldn’t he just as easily triple? Young Masterman might have something there, another of them would say, and cock an eyebrow to show the colors of a true skeptic.

  And Carmingler, sitting quietly, sucking on his aged pipe, would toss it out casually, as if he didn’t really care, but if they were really worried about Li, the lie machine could clear everything up nicely to the satisfaction of all. If you agree, I’ll get a signal off to Dye this afternoon. So they would all nod in agreement, with the exception of Li Teh, unrepresented, who could blow the whole thing with a farewell address delivered in his normal screech and interspersed with a few choice quotations from Chairman Mao. And there would go six months of work out the window or down the drain or even up the spout, depending upon which cliché I felt like using that day. I sighed and picked up the phone and buzzed Joyce Jungroth.

  “Put in a call to Shoftstall,” I said.

  “It might take quite a while,” she said. Joyce Jungroth disapproved of the extravagance of overseas calls.

  “Just put it through.”

  She caught the tone of my voice and said, “Yes, sir.” She called me sir at least three times a year. While I waited for the call I dialed another number and when Li answered, I said hello in English and then switched to rapid, fluent Mandarin. I know it was fluent because I spoke little else until I was nearly six years old.

  “There has been a change in plans,” I said.

  “They have refused my application?” Li said.

  “Not at all. It is only that the underwriters require a careful examination, a simple test, one might say.”

  “I have heard of such tests,” Li said.

  I bet you have, I thought. “It is only routine.”

  “Where will it be held?”

  I mentioned that island city-state that lies two thousand miles south of its half-sister, Hong Kong.

  “A far distance,” Li said. “I am no longer sure that I am even interested in the policy.”

  “There will be added benefits once you have received the examiner’s approval.”

  “When will the examiner be in attendance?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow evening, around nine.”

  “The place?”

  “That is yet to be decided,” I said. “However, a message will await you at the airline ticket counter.”

  There was a brief silence and I could almost hear the abacus that was Li’s brain adding up the advantages and subtracting the disadvantages. Finally, he said: “I trust that you, too, will be present.”

  “It would be remiss if I were not, considering the value of the policy.”

  Another silence was followed by a soft sigh. “I will make the necessary arrangements,” Li said and hung up.

  I had stumbled on to Li Teh by accident which, at base, is responsible for most intelligence coups as well as disasters. A Canadian journalist stationed in Peking had once met Li at a cocktail party in Hong Kong. Blessed with an unusual memory for names and faces, the journalist had grown curious when Li had entered the most forbidden government building in Peking, the Forbidden City of forbidden buildings. He waited for two hours for Li to reappear, but when he didn’t, the journalist made a note of the date and time. Our Tokyo office kept the Canadian journalist on a small retainer and when he made a routine report to them on Li they had just as routinely forwarded it to me.

  I had snooped around until I was positive that Li Teh was an agent and that his personal financial position was not as flush as it seemed. Threats of exposure or an appeal to his concern for the future of mankind would be met with either hostility or giggles, so I decided that immediate financial relief would be the most promising avenue of approach and I traveled up and down it so often that I almost began to think like what I assuredly was not: a life insurance salesman with the solid chance of a quick close on a million dollar annuity.

  So now that I had him doubled, I had to fly him two thousand miles and put him through a test of doubtful validity by a machine that probably had been thrown out of whack by the humidity. I remembered my own lie detector test, the one that they’d given me just prior to employment. It was just for the record, they’d said. First, there was the stream of innocuous questions: “Did you drive here this morning? Was the sun shining? Did you eat breakfast?” All yes or no. Then they slipped the shaft in: “Have you ever had a homosexual experience?” I had answered yes.

  My answer startled both the technician and the machine. The machine said I was lying and the technician insisted that we run through the whole set of questions five more times but the machine still said that I lied.

  “Look, fella,” the technician had said. “The thing says you’re lying about the homosexual bit.” I remember that everyone was using “bit” that year.

  “Then it’s wrong. I did have one. I was four and my consenting partner was five and a half.”

  “Aw, shit,” the technician said. “Just say no and let’s see what happens.”

  “Then I’d be lying, wouldn’t I?”

  “Just say no, fella. For my sake.”

  I said no and the machine registered nothing, not even a tremor. “Four years old,” the technician muttered. “Jesus.”

  While waiting for the overseas call to go through I thought about the new help that Carmingler had sent me. I lumped them together as the two smart boys from Illinois, making it Illinoyz for the sake of the rhyme. The first, the so-called polygraph expert, was Lynn Shoftstall from Evanston. The other was John Bourland from Libertyville. Both were recent graduates of what Carmingler referred to as “our new in-service training program” which only meant that you could start them out cheap at the bottom and keep them there until it was determined whether they could hack it as junior-grade spies. I though
t of the program as something less than a smashing success.

  Carmingler had sent them out to replace two of my former salesmen-agents, a seasoned pair, one of whom had been reassigned to Tokyo, a kind of a promotion, while the other had awakened in Bangkok one impossibly hot afternoon, suffering from a dreadful hangover which, among other things, had caused him to say to hell with it and catch the next plane to Sydney where, some said, he was writing a book. I hoped that it would make him a lot of money.

  Bourland was the linguist, fluent in both Thai and Mandarin. Shoftstall, not nearly so keen a language student, in fact, barely proficient, was a mechanical whiz. I was informed that he knew virtually all there was to know about such gadgets as phone taps, room bugging devices, and a host of other miniaturized marvels, most of which were anathema to Carmingler and a mystery to me, although some said that they could prove useful. Shoftstall was rated expert in the use of the polygraph, but it didn’t really matter whether he was or not. He had the only polygraph around and supposedly only he could peep into Li Teh’s mind by measuring the beat of his pulse, the rate of his breathing, the amount of sweat in his palms, and the flutter of his heart as the lies tripped over themselves in their haste to leave his tongue.

  My telephone rang and Joyce Jungroth informed me that my call to Shoftstall had gone through and that he was on the line.

  “How’s the truth business today?” I said after we said hello.

  “Beautiful.”

  “Tomorrow night,” I said.

  “On what?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Where?”

  “The usual place,” I said.

  “We’ll be there.”

  The usual place was a hotel that had been built a hundred years or so ago when they still built hotels with fine, thick walls. It enjoyed a worldwide reputation and now that it was air-conditioned, it even managed to give the new Hilton some stiff competition.

  “Check everything out by nine tomorrow night.”

  “You want it permanent?” Shoftstall asked. He meant taped.

  “Yes,” I said.