No One Rides For Free - Larry Beinhart (6 page)

"You know what the toughest thing is gonna be,"
I said, thinking out loud, "it's gonna be checking out those
Colombians. They had dipple plates. So when that Caddy goes home,
home is gonna be an embassy, or something like that. The thing to do,
normally, is to sit out front, take some pictures, show 'em around to
the kind of folks who might know something about them. So there I am,
me, my rental car and my telephoto, just relaxing on the street.
Except I'm outside the embassy. So embassy security will right away
notice me. Unless D.C. cops, cruising Embassy Row, find me first.
Then phones are gonna ring and here comes the FBI; and if the FBI are
there, can the CIA be far behind? Meanwhile, the ambassador is on the
red phone to the state department."

"We got a lotta money on this job, right?"

"Oh we surely do," I said, warmed by the
thought.

"
So don't be scared to spend some of it. Share
the wealth. Like for instance, you get a guy who is into
surveillance, someone who has a panel truck that says 'Shmuck the
Plumber, No Pipe Can Resist Us' like that, that can sit there.

"And you of course have someone in mind,"
which by then I knew he did, and I knew that whoever he recommended
would be Italian, have no imagination and have been doing whatever
they did longer than I've been alive.

"Yeah, I have someone in mind."

"And another good idea," I said before he
had to suggest it to me and make me feel stupid, "is that I get
someone to back me up when I go back to the farmhouse. "

"Yeah," he said, and gave me the names and
phone numbers he had in front of him.

Gene Tattalia's company was called Ace
Investigations, as imaginative a name as I expected. I sighed but
went to meet with him anyway. He proudly showed me a snapshot of the
truck he used for just this sort of situation. I was pleasantly
surprised. It looked exactly like a phone company van. When I found
out that it was a real phone company van that he rented from a phone
company dispatcher, I was genuinely impressed. It was something I had
to respect.

It took him less than ten minutes to discover that
the Coupe de Ville was registered to the trade mission. I agreed to
his rates, which were high, we shook hands and he promised to start
surveillance the next day.

I looked at the powder burn on the side of my head
and the small cuts from flying rock on my cheek in the hotel room
mirror, and I could see that the distance from life to death was
somewhat shorter than I usually like to think it is. When I called
home, Wayne answered.

"
It's E.T. , Mom," he screamed to wherever
Glenda was. She might have been no farther from him than the inside
of my skull was from the burn and he would still have delivered the
news at max volume. "He's phoning home."

"What," I asked him, "if it's not
E.T.?"

"Awww, who else could it be?"

"Maybe it's Dick Tracy."

"Mom, Mom, it's the dick tracer," he
yelled, giggling madly with the notion that he had said something at
least vaguely dirty.

Back in my early twenties all my friends were single,
except Don O'Malley. O'Malley lived with a cozy little wife, on a
cozy tree-lined brownstone street in Brooklyn Heights. They had two
kids at the rug-rat stage crawling and climbing over furniture and
guests with equal interest. His wife actually cooked home-cooked
meals and baked bread and made homemade pies. Whenever I visited, I
felt like a miner, fresh from the hasty wood shacks and frozen wastes
of the Yukon, coming in from the dirt, the muck, the cold. Into a
real home, made warm and bright by a woman's love, snug with
happiness and growing life.

I felt the same whenever I came home to Glenda and
Wayne. Even if she didn't bake and we split the cooking. She was
shelter from the storm.

My own marriage was only a two-year stint, but our
divorces coincided. We drew closer, as victims of similar disasters
do. Then I discovered that the cozy little place in the Heights was,
and had always been, filled with hostility, anger and sexual
frustration. O'Malley stuck it for ten years for the idea of marriage
and for the children. He visited prostitutes when the need for a
substitute for love overwhelmed him.

Glenda got on the phone. She asked me how it was
going. I told her I had spent the morning in the woods playing
cowboys and Indians.

"Wayne is more mature than you. I'm living with
two six-year-olds, not one."

"Five and a half and a quarter," I heard
Wayne yell, insisting on the precision that people do who have few
enough years behind or ahead to make those distinctions.

Glenda was not my wife, which I regard as a positive
statement. Emotionally intelligent, mature, she fought fair and was
sensible about more things than not. Generally she was as eager to
make love as I was, often more so. If she had a headache, she would
lie and say she felt fine.

She could not, however, stand the idea of my being
unfaithful. She didn't even like the idea that it might be difficult
for me to be faithful. She operated on a different emotional logic,
and for her fidelity was as natural and normal as lunch. Some people
think of that as a man-versus-woman thing. Maybe it is. Yet no woman
I've ever been involved with has treated it as a
philosophic-psycho-gender issue. Nary a one has said, "Oh well,
men are just like that, I understand." The dialogue is always
formed from curses and tears. This time I wanted the center to hold,
so this time I was trying it out their way, or her way. It was
working out OK, more or less.

Sandy could look at the powder bum on my head and my
chopped-up face and the nearness of my mortality, and together we
could use that as all the excuse we needed. We could make a sweet and
sweaty storm of thrusting, crying bodies. Would I feel better for it?
The voice inside said, "You bet." The voice was probably
correct and the hotel placed the phone right next to the bed. But if
I picked it up and dialed, it might be more dangerous to me than the
man with the gun.
 

7
XJ-I2

IN THE AFTERNOON
sun, it
was easy to read the signs on the twin pickups parked alongside the
suburban residence in Alexandria--Polatrano & Sons. The papa
Polatrano, an ex-cop named Franco, was waiting for me by the front
door. He had put in his twenty years, retired with a pension and
started a landscaping business. It kept his big body fit, made a fair
sum of money, and alternately soothed him with the pleasure of
growing things and bored him. So he free-lanced at a variation of his
old trade.

He carried a canvas bag, and when he got in the car
offered me coffee from the thermos inside.

"I favor a .38, standard police .38," he
said as we rode. "But every year, the punks, they get more and
more firepower. So I got me a rabbi."

He pulled a short, stubby machine gun, an Israeli
Uzi, from the same bag that carried his coffee and doughnuts,
offering it up for admiration.

"I call it Rabbi Begin. I respect that man. He's
tough. He was a guerrilla fighter against the British. They called
him a terrorist, of course. Well, this"—he patted it—"is
my own personal terrorist."

Gene Tattalia's stakeout had gone well; forty-eight
hours after our conversation I was looking at contact sheets of my
Colombian friends. A few hours after that, I had blowups of my
favorites. Now I had him doing two things, finding names to go with
the faces and keeping an eye on them to make sure they stayed in the
District while Franco and I went into Virginia.

I checked with Gene from a pay phone a few miles
before the farmhouse. The bad guys were still in town.

Still, I found a different parking place. It was a
two-mile walk, at least, but walking is healthy. Certainly as
compared to being shot at. The rain had finally blown out, the late
sun glowed and I noticed the trees were beginning to bud. Ah, spring.

Brodsky worked Wood during the day. Wood did not seem
like the type to cook for himself, so I guessed that he would go out
for dinner most nights, if not every night.
 
When
we arrived, the Rabbit, boxy and bright in yellow, was beside the
Jaguar, so low and sleek in British racing green. Each was a definite
fashion statement.

Franco and I settled in behind a screen of brush to
wait. If Wood left, I would go in, Franco would guard the outside. If
Wood stayed, we would return the next night, then the night after,
until the way was open.

When Mel left, Edgar escorted him to his Rabbit. In
the stillness I could hear Wood asking, obviously again, for Brodsky
to join him for dinner. Brodsky refused, citing the wife and babies
waiting in Gaithersburg.

Wood stood and watched the little diesel drive off,
his face dead. When he turned and looked at his own car his
expression changed.

One night, several years ago, I had been in bed with
Simonet, a high-fashion model. When she had four or five good reasons
to assume that I was too exhausted for anything but a sleep as sound
as death, she slipped from the bed and moved silently to her living
room. It was her favorite place, an unobstructed wall covered with a
mirror. I watched her watch herself. She examined her skin for pore
size and her flesh for tone, missing nothing from her toes to the
underside of her buttocks; pirouetting and pouting, gloating and
biting her lip, she went around, back, and beneath, stroking the
sleekness of belly, tentative at the danger zone under the chin,
proud of the purity of her inner thighs. It was as if she was
watching her past, present and future all at once. Which she was.
Nothing that had happened in the hours between the sheets had aroused
the intensity that her mirror reflected. Which was how, with less
grace and drama in his gestures, Edgar Wood looked at his automobile.
Mud marring the British racing green was a personal insult, smudges
on the interior finish were faults of character.

He went back into the house. When he came out, he had
changed from his suit to chinos and an old shirt. He carried a flight
bag in one hand, a vacuum cleaner in the other, and an extension cord
trailed behind him.

He placed a towel on the ground, then pulled his
cleaning equipment from the bag—mink oil, furniture polish, saddle
soap, rags, whisk broom, dust pan, brushes, chrome polish, sponges,
buffing pads—like he was preparing for surgery. I sighed with
impatience. This was going to be as tedious to watch as it was to do.
Franco offered me some coffee from his thermos. It was laced with
Sambuca. It was good. Wood spent almost three hours, just on the
interior. I thanked God that the sun was almost completely gone and
he wouldn't be able to do the exterior.

He went inside. We waited. We sipped the last dregs.
At last he emerged. Even from a distance I could tell that his
clothes were custom-made. Probably on Savile Row, where they create
the same kind of understatement that Rolls-Royce creates. A simple
announcement that nothing in the world costs more. His face had a
hint of pink from reshaving and his shower-fresh hair was neatly
combed. He stood for a moment and spoke to the air. "Oh, to be
in England," is what I think he said.

When at last he started the car, he sat and listened,
head cocked, to see if all twelve cylinders were in tune. It sounded
good to me, all that money just ahummin' away. Wood eased it down the
driveway. When he reached the road we could hear him bear down on the
accelerator, and the car roared off into the distance. The sound
died. I stood up and went into the house.

It was a piece of cake. A kitchen window was open and
I didn't even have to play games with locks. I opened the plate over
a light switch; the transmitter clipped to the A.C. where it could be
a power parasite. The mike went where a screw had been.

My recording system was a pair of Panasonics put
together so that when the tape ran out in the first it started the
tape in the second. Both were sound-activated, and both were modified
to rim at one-fourth normal speed. A C120 cassette, which normally
ran sixty minutes per side, now gave me four hours per side. They did
not flip automatically, but that still gave me an eight-hour run. The
debriefing sessions seemed to run no more than six hours, so even
with the starts and stops of garbage noise I figured it would do the
job. A backup battery pack was attached so that both machines could
pull from it. The arrangement meant that someone would have to come
once a day to change the tapes and, as needed, the batteries. It was
cheaper and less conspicuous than setting up a full-bore listening
post with a full-time attendant. We checked the rig with me in the
farmhouse and Franco outside. It worked. We put it in a waterproof
box, buried the box in a shallow grave with a topping of dead leaves
and ran a wire up a tree as an antenna.

Then we strolled out of the woods to our car, where
no one was waiting with a gun or some other form of ugliness. There's
nothing like a walk in the woods on a cool evening to build up a
man's appetite. We had spotted a restaurant in a small shopping
center. It was called Scotch & Sirloin. I liked the name because
both items require so little preparation that I could reasonably
expect the place to serve at least one of the two without screwing it
up.