Money for Nothing (11 page)

He found a not very good breakfast and ate not very much of it, then went on to the office, arriving early, and tried to concentrate on what he was supposed to be doing here, the statistical breakdowns on the results of the new campaign in selected parts of the country. Generally it was doing well in the southwest, poorly in the southeast, so-so in the northwest. Why? Why these regional differences? Why didn't people just stop making trouble? Everybody go out and buy the same thing and stop making us
think
about you.

At ten-thirty his phone rang and it was Eve: "Got him," she said.

"What?"

"You know what we talked about."

And then he did. "Oh, right! You got it? Really?"

"And truly. I told you Dick Welsh could find out. His address is 856A East Second Street."

"Not a great address," Josh said. Already he didn't like the idea of going there.

"It's a theater," she said.

Again he was lost. "And he
lives
in it?"

"This is where Dick is so wonderful," she said. "The company couldn't get insurance, for all their lights and sets and costumes and things, because they're such a marginal operation, not unless somebody was living there. So they got all kinds of variances from the city, and put in a little apartment, and Mitchell lives there, behind the stage, and that way they can get insurance. No wonder your friend couldn't find him."

"Let's hope nobody else can," Josh said.

The Good Rep Classic Theatrical Company was in half of the bottom of an old tenement on the Lower East Side, the part of town that has been the first home in America for immigrants from all over the world for nearly two hundred years. This southern end of the island of Manhattan is one of the two parts of town that extend east farther than the numbered avenues can accommodate. Uptown, east of First Avenue, there's York Avenue, a pretty good neighborhood, with the Mayor's residence, Grade Mansion, toward one end and the Kamastan Mission to the United Nations at the other, but downtown the eastern bloat is more pronounced, creating, east of First Avenue, a new Avenue A, then B, then C, and even D before the East River puts a stop to it.

Alphabet City, it's called, and as a neighborhood it could not be more mixed. The remnants of the waves of immigration can still be seen, fused with newer arrivals. Parts of the area have become more valuable, but it still contains plenty of pockets of poverty.

Poverty and art have always been more than nodding acquaintances, so another part of life in Alphabet City has a certain LaBoheme atmosphere, with coffee shops and performance artists and poetry bars and the most minor of publications and the most marginal of theaters. Good Rep fit right in. It was in a corner building, six stories high, the tallest you can erect a building without an elevator in New York City, with a crumbling stone outdoor staircase leading up to a wide entranceway that looked as though it had been gnawed for many years by giant rats, which was probably true. To the left of the stairs, toward the corner, was a bodega crowded with inexpensive food in very bright packaging, and to the right of the stairs, with a marquee the size of a Honda hood, was Good Rep.

It was one slate step down to the tiny forecourt of the theater, which featured an enormous handmade poster for
Arms and the Man
, in which the gaudy uniforms, meant no doubt to be Ruritanian or Graustarkian, struck Josh as uncomfortably Kamastanish. There was no doorbell to be seen, so he tried turning the knob, and the door opened, just like that.

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 throwaway 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 turtle-neck 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."

INSIDE, THE THEATER WAS narrow but deep, like a shoe-box, 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 oblivious 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."