Money for Nothing (2 page)

"Ah."

"Fortunately," the man went on, "the Americans don't go in much for torture, at least not when there's a public light on things, so Mr. Nimrin never had to worry about
that
."

"Good," Josh said.

"So when I assure you," the man said, "that he never mentioned you, I can go further. Through it all, he never mentioned anyone or anything."

"That's good," Josh agreed.

"Well, you know Mr. Nimrin," the man said. "He's like a rock."

"A rock," Josh said.

"But I should introduce my own self," the man said. "I am Levrin, and I am now your control. Well, I have been for some time, of course, but you wouldn't have known it."

"No," Josh agreed, and saw that people were getting on the ferry. "My ferry's going to leave," he said.

"Oh, you mustn't miss it," the man told him, jumping to his feet. "Now more than ever, you must not deviate in your patterns. Just give me your keys."

Josh, in the process of rising, stumbled a bit. "My keys?"

"I have to make copies, obviously," Levrin told him. "Now, don't miss your ferry. Give me the keys. I'll leave them with the cashier where you parked your car."

For one mad second, Josh thought this whole thing was an elaborate scam to steal his car, the Toyota Land Cruiser parked a long block from here for the weekend, but of course it was not, he knew it was not. To begin with, the Toyota wasn't worth eighty-four thousand dollars.

One hundred twenty-four thousand now, according to this little book clutched in his left hand.

"Come on, come on," Levrin said, hurrying him with quick little gestures. "The last people are getting on the ferry."

"Yes. Yes, of course."

Panicked, frightened, completely without a will or a plan of his own, Josh fumbled his keyring from his pocket and gave it to Levrin. All his keys in the world, his car, his apartment, his apartment building mailbox, even his desk at Sewell-McConnell. Everything, his whole life, going into that man's fleshy palm; his olive fingers closed over it.

Josh ran — and just made the ferry.

EVE WAS AMONG THE CLUSTER of people on the Fair Harbor dock, waving as the ferry approached, she a vision of reward in her bright red bikini. He waved, and waved.

The first weekend, he had started to wave enthusiastically from well out in the channel when he'd seen her in her bikini — green, that week — and then, as the ferry slowed and turned toward the slip, had realized he was waving at the wrong woman, that Eve in
her
bikini — light blue — was a bit to the right, and he had immediately made the tiny shift in direction.

He didn't think Eve had noticed that error, and he had scrupulously avoided looking toward the green bikini throughout the docking process, and so had no idea which of his summer neighbors had a tall lithe body so like Eve's. And since then, he'd waited to be absolutely certain which of the half-dozen bikini-wearing women waving from the dock was Eve before he started to wave back.

Today, he had so much on his mind he almost forgot to wave at all. That hard squarish bankbook was a foreign intruder in the pocket where he usually carried his keys. Would the keys be there at the parking lot, as promised, on Monday morning, or would he have to take the train to the city, deal with the Toyota dealer, get another set of keys, train back out on Tuesday or Wednesday, having found the apartment stripped bare on Monday night?

How could he have given his keys away, just like that, to a perfect stranger, in return for this bankbook that could so easily be a fraud? Probably a fraud.

Well, not probably. He had seven years of checks to suggest that United States Agent was
something
, whether or not he could figure out exactly what, or even approximately what. Levrin had talked and acted with such assurance that Josh felt he had to believe him, even if he didn't know what it was he was supposed to believe. Safe house. People passing through. No fingerprints.

"At the moment," Levrin had said, "only a safe house." At the moment? And then what?

Bump
— the ferry met the dock — and the passengers off-loaded, and the smiling Eve folded him in her arms, his hands on the sleek curve of her waist. This summer vacation was good for her, freeing her from the ordinariness of ordinary life, making her more eager for enjoyment, for diversion.

And this was what he was putting at risk. But what else could he do?

"Jeremy's at Winchell's," she whispered in his ear. "Until we go get him."

"Ah," he said. "Good." Though it wasn't good, not really.

Mrs. Winchell was an older woman, whose weekend-only husband was something in New York City government and whose children were grown and gone away. She provided baby-sitting and day care in her home up by the beach, and Eve had taken to leaving Jeremy there before Josh's Friday arrivals, so they could, as she said, "get acquainted again."

Usually, his heart and so on leaped up at the idea of an hour or two alone with Eve, re-creating their pre-Jeremy relationship, but not today. Today he had too much on his mind.

And one thing more to plague him: He couldn't tell Eve about this, either. Having hidden the checks from her all this time, how could he tell her about this? "I've loaned our apartment to some foreign spies or something, I don't know who they are or what they're doing." He couldn't open that can of worms, not at this point, it was far too late. He was going to have to be a spy himself, for the weekend, protecting his secrets.

Eve put an arm around his waist, her eyes sparkling, and they started the walk to the rental, a little two-bedroom bungalow half a block from the beach. As they walked, Eve told him the gossip of the week, and for the first time in his life Josh thought: Will I be able to perform?

The weekend was not a disaster. He kept up his part, as it were, or so he thought. Everything seemed normal and fine. On Saturday, at the beach, he and Jeremy spent a few hours playing the game they seemed to have invented, in which first they made a village, by upending pails of wet sand and shaping their tops to be the houses and poking fingerholes into their sides to be windows and doors, and then watching as a giant — Jeremy — with many a, "Ho ho ho," and, "Har har har," tromped through the peaceful village, destroying it and, presumably, all of its peaceful villagers.

Josh had never minded this game before, had known that other little boys up and down the beach were also taking the opportunity of summer in the sun to improve their skills as homicidal maniacs, but today, after United States Agent had made him "active," he found himself regretting that it was too late to train Jeremy in the ways of pacifism.

Not that Jeremy was at the outer extreme of homicidal mania among two-year-old boys. He was basically a sunny kid, agreeable and friendly except when tired, and from the beginning Josh had been amazed at the depth of the bond he felt with this new life. He looked for signs of himself in Jeremy's movements and reactions, and at times he thought he caught glimpses, but more often the boy reminded him most of Eve. Not in an effeminate way, of course, but in a kind of hurtling grace, an almost off-balance surge into life, that reminded him of certain things about Eve.

So, what with playing one way with Eve, and another way with Jeremy, and seeing their friends out here in the evenings, and lazing Sunday away with the
New York Times
, it seemed to Josh he was behaving with his family exactly like someone who had not been made active. But then, Monday morning, as they walked toward the 11:10 ferry, Eve pushing Jeremy in the stroller their son was aching to grow out of, she said, "Phone me tonight."

"Sure," he said. They always talked on the phone once or twice a week, but she hadn't ever made it a request before.

"Call me every night," she said. "Will you?" And then he realized he must not have been perfect this weekend after all. His distraction had been noticed. She's beginning to wonder, he thought with astonishment, if I'm having an affair, separated in New York with her stuck way out here.

How to deal with that? The worst thing, he knew, would be to deny an accusation that had not been directly made. That would confirm her in her belief. He said, "Sure, I will. But, you know, you ought to do it."

She raised an eyebrow at him. "Do what?"

"Make the call," he said. "I wouldn't want to call, and Jeremy's just about to go to sleep, or something like that. You could call, any time after I get home. I'll always be there." He grinned at her, stroking her shoulder. "I'd like you to call," he said. "I miss you."

Her smile was sunnier. "You'd better miss me," she said.

The keys were waiting for him at the parking lot cashier's shack. When the woman handed them out to him through the window, he felt immediate almost astonished relief — Levrin
had
been telling the truth — followed by almost as immediate depression: Levrin had been telling the truth. "Tourists" had been in the apartment all weekend, not leaving fingerprints.

In New York he kept a monthly outdoor parking space in a vast lot in the West Sixties where some day another huge building would rise, but not in the foreseeable future. It was an eight-block walk home, during which he tried to think of courses of action. Tell the police; phone his mother and father in Muncie, Indiana; grab the forty thousand dollars and Eve and Jeremy and run for Canada; plot to be here next weekend to
catch
the tourists, see who and what they were. But finally he realized that inaction was his only possible move. Wait and see. Hope things wouldn't turn very bad.

His Monday routine this month was to have a sandwich and a cup of coffee at home, then get to the office by two-thirty, around the time everybody else would be getting back from lunch. But today, before going into the kitchen, he searched the apartment for signs.
Had
anybody been in here while he was gone? It wasn't really possible to stay in a residence and leave absolutely no trace at all, was it? But he searched the foyer, the living room, his and Eve's bedroom, Jeremy's tiny room, the bathroom, and there was nothing, just nothing, not an area rug scuffed, not a washcloth out of place.

Had there
been
nobody in here? After all that mystery, all that tension — all that money — had this apartment
not
become a safe house?

He went into the kitchen last, to make his lunch, and it was in the kitchen that he found it. He and Eve kept their cups and glasses upside down on the shelves, so their insides wouldn't get dusty. Two water glasses, on the shelf just above eye level, were precisely in their places, right side up.

He didn't eat lunch that day.

"FORTUNATELY THE AMERICANS don't go in much for torture, at least not when there's a public light on things."

Levrin's words never did say very much, as Josh remembered them, or tried to remember them, but they hinted at a great deal. A public light on things?

After a sleepless night, he spent Tuesday morning not engaged in Sewell-McConnell's affairs, though he was using their computer, in the terminal at his desk. Nimrin. Was that the way it was spelled? No other combination looked right, so that was the name he inserted into data banks at the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post
, the
Boston Globe
, and the
Los Angeles Times
. Whatever it was that had shed a public light on things, presumably it had happened sometime in the last seven years, because, at least at the beginning, according to Levrin, Mr. Nimrin had been his "control," another word from spy movies, all those glum Le Carré characters dragging themselves out of their Tartarean beds every morning. Or afternoon.

He found it in the
Washington Post
, because it was in a federal court in the District of Columbia that the public appearance had taken place, almost a full seven years ago, on August eighteenth. This Ellois Nimrin — surely Levrin's man — seemed to be nothing but a minor walk-on in an industrial espionage case. The question was, had or had not advanced computer technology been illegally exported by this agglomeration of beetle-browed moustachioed men with strange-sounding names lined up at the defendants' table here?

Ellois Nimrin didn't appear in the body of the news story, nor in any of the other items on the case Josh scanned, but was only a name in a photo caption: "Defendants" — and then three difficult names, and then — "Ellois Nimrin" — and four equally difficult names, under a photo of the eight seated at the defense table, bunched together shoulder to shoulder, almost moustache to moustache, and looking as glum as any character in Le Carré.

Mr. Nimrin, as Josh still thought of him, following on Levrin's respectful references, should be fourth from the left. The photo wasn't that clear, and its reproduction on the computer screen didn't help much. Josh had an impression of a burly man, hawknosed above the moustache, with a high gleaming forehead and eyes that, even in this poor reproduction of a side-view medium-distance shot, seemed to glare in unrepentant rage and contempt in the general direction of the bench.

All the other defendants, to one extent or another, seemed cowed by their circumstances. Mr. Nimrin seemed energized. It was hard to believe he wasn't a principal in the case, was just another spear-carrier, but judging from the news pieces that did seem to be the situation.

As for the case, Josh couldn't make heads nor tails of it. Laboratory technicians had been bribed or coerced, allegedly. Secrets had been stolen, allegedly. Diagrams and other documents had been smuggled out of the country, allegedly. These eight defendants were somehow part of the plot, allegedly.

But this was where it got tricky. The government lawyers, in presenting their case, asserted that national security was an issue here, and that much of the evidence against the defendants was too sensitive to be revealed in public; some was too sensitive to be revealed to a jury or to the defense attorneys; and some was so sensitive it couldn't even be revealed to the judge.