Sleeper Spy (31 page)

Just to be sure, and because she was not troubled by causing the impatient client some delay and slight discomfort, she put a plug in his left ear and ran an impedance test of middle-ear function. This required no verbal response from the patient, who was subjected to pressure changes and loud, popping sounds. The machine bounced sound waves off the eardrum and analyzed the return wave, in the manner of radar; his left ear’s reaction differed from his right.

“I need a hearing aid, don’t I?” he asked. Without waiting, he added, “The best. Price is no problem.”

She explained that she would prepare a report for his referring doctor in Atlanta, and he would then send the necessary double-negative letter—one stating there was no medical reason not to use a hearing aid. Kind of a backward prescription; she did not add her opinion that such paperwork of no disapproval was how doctors kept control of private patients and ran up fees.

“At the hearing aid evaluation next week,” she said, “I’ll show you what’s available.” She assumed he was a vain man, and would want the unnoticeable implant in the inner ear.

“Please—” he peered at the diploma—“Dr. Teeter, show me now.”

Ms Teeter told him she was a technologist, not a doctor, and laid out the three systems. One was a two-inch device that hooked over the ear to rest behind it; it was easily removable but was losing popularity because of its klunkiness. Another was a smaller in-the-ear device,
molded to the contour of the ear—noticeable but not obtrusive, the volume controllable directly by hand or by means of a hidden pocket unit. The third was an in-the-canal aid, all but invisible, but harder for the patient to reach and adjust. She assumed that the banker, who wore a rumpled designer suit that showed he cared about what he bought more than the way he looked, would choose the tiniest device, which was also the most expensive. He surprised her by choosing the midsized in-the-ear unit.

“I’m not vain, Dr. Teeter.” He was obviously impressed with her specialist’s degree, which she assumed required more regulation than afflicted his line of work. “I don’t intend to hide the fact that I’m hard of hearing. I just want to be able to turn it on and off easily. Would you send your report to my doctor by overnight mail and tell him I want him to send his letter of authorization to you just as quick as he can? Do I get a copy of your report from you or from him?”

She said she could ethically give it to the patient directly, when he came for the fitting of the aid. “But it’ll be in technical language that might upset a layman.”

“I won’t be upset no matter how alarming it looks, Dr. Teeter,” he replied, repeating her name as bankers do when they want something. “I want the specific measurement of my hearing loss all on the record. I like to face the truth.”

“It’s a trap. They all want me to look bad.”

“The bastards,” Ace agreed. Empathizing with a client was more than a talent; it was part of his way of life.

“I’m not ready yet. I’ll flop and they know it.” Viveca gulped her wine, topped off his glass, and refilled her own. “Why do they hate me so, the brass at the network? I’m like a toothache they like to bite down on.”

“They have no economic reason to want you to fail,” the agent offered, and when he saw her glare, covered his too-rational point with a hasty “It must be envy.” In her subsequent brooding silence, Ace added, “That was an excellent figure of speech, by the way. About the toothache.”

“I got it from Irving Fein, and that’s just the point: he’s original and I’m not. He’s been around forever and I’m new. He’s a heavyweight newsie and I’m a—oh, I don’t know what the hell I am.”

You’re a news presenter, Viveca, the agent said to himself, using the honest British term now making its way to America. The old term from radio days was “announcer.” Nothing to be ashamed of, unless you’re trying to pass yourself off as a hard-news journalist, in which case it is everything to be ashamed of.

“You’re the one that the vast video audience wants to be the source of their information,” he soothed. The young woman was an incipient star, and stars needed constant reassurance, providing which was another of his talents. Viveca Farr really was the perfect client for him, and her exposed-nerve vulnerability took the edge off her severe good
looks, making her all the more appealing. As the elder stateman Bernard Baruch used to say to the beautiful Jinx Falkenburg, borrowing a line from Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Ah, to be seventy again.”

“And you mustn’t undermine your self-esteem by running down your journalistic experience,” Ace cautioned, putting on a stern look. “Your performance under pressure the other day proved that.”

“No, it didn’t, dammit, just the opposite. Irving was carrying me, and I know it, and the network biggies know it too. That’s why they want to put us together. Don’t you see? He’s got a lifetime of reporting to draw on, I’ve got nothing. It’ll show.”

Ace saw it quite differently. The pairing of these two wholly opposite types, which had struck a chord with television audiences that night, was originally his own idea in the literary arena. He made a mental note to remind the world of that at the proper time. He would call it “virgule matchmaking”—novice/old-timer, female/male, face/byline, crisp/sloppy—a form of casting almost as natural as Beauty/Beast, though that last was hardly fair to Irving. Juxtaposition of contrary personalities separated by a slash or virgule presented the viewer with a living oxymoron. And what worked in crisis, Ace suspected, could work as well every day when cemented by economic necessity. The network’s suggestion was not all that off-the-wall, and the brass’s purpose was surely not to do their property in, no matter what Viveca thought.

He could not say that, of course. Because Viveca had come too far too fast, she was in a constant state of believing the ice beneath her was thinning, and was deathly afraid of a single fissure opening up and swallowing her. With this woman, career was all. Pity about that, in a human way, but in another way—from the point of view of a skilled agent, dedicated more to the persona than the person—her fear of failing was useful and usable. Her dread of humiliation made all the more necessary the contractual protection and manipulative mothering that came so naturally to him. And the key to persuading Viveca, Ace determined from long experience with the brilliant and brittle, was in the device of reverse-selling.

“I’ll tell the network you want to do exactly what you’re doing,” he said, “and to simultaneously deepen your journalistic background with an important book. They have to respect that.”

“ ‘Respect’ is the last thing I’ll ever get from those—” Her lips
formed a “p” but she stopped short of the word, he assumed out of respect for his years.

“Viveca, their reaction will be to say your collaboration with Irving on the air—with your professional ease and his likable awkwardness—would turn any book the two of you do into an automatic bestseller.” He paused as if to think it over. “That’s what they’ll say. I’ll brush that aside with the utmost scorn. How’s the book coming, by the way?”

She drained her glass. The wine seemed to have no effect on her. Ace presumed she was one of the delicate-looking but hollow-legged variety of no-problem drinkers.

“The researcher, Mike Shu, is on to something in the Bahamas,” she reported. “Irving is floundering, kind of—God, he’s a moody one. Is this the way he usually works, a lot of rushing around and then a blue funk?”

Ace winced inwardly. He knew what that familiar behavior meant: Irving was on the outer fringes of an emotional involvement, working inward. Such attachments did not augur well for his investigative spirit now, or down the line for his timely production of pages. Irving was a sucker for a vulnerable woman, and Viveca, despite her air of mastery on the tube, fairly exuded vulnerability in person, bringing out the protective quality in men susceptible to that sort of thing.

“Fortunately,” she added, “the banker we found to impersonate the sleeper is good. I’m sorry you can’t know him—he insists on absolute security. But he’s given a direction and a solidity to this thing. Weren’t for him—” She shrugged, then looked at the thousand-day clock on the mantel. “He’s coming for a dinner meeting tonight.”

Ace took that to be his escape hatch and bounded to his feet. “I don’t want to have to hide in the closet when he comes in the door. My French-farce days are over.”

Viveca walked him out to his limo, huddling her bare arms together in the cold, and extended her cheek. Ace took that to be an improvement over the firm handshake last time; she was apparently growing more confident of his trustworthiness, which showed good judgment. He gave her an appropriate peck and waited just a brief moment, to give her a chance for some Parthian shot.

“I’m glad you didn’t jump on this network offer as a way to promote
the book,” she said. “I suppose a regular spot on a prime-time show for the two of us would really make it a best-seller.”

“Not only that, my dear. If you read the small print in your contract, you will note a clause I inserted, to wit: each appearance on the
New York Times
best-seller list triggers a bonus of twenty thousand dollars.” He let that sink in before adding: “The sum doubles if the book is among the top three.”

“Wow. Better not tell that to Irving.”

“The only fine print he fails to read is in his own contracts.” Ace caught his own pun and hastened to make it seem intentional: “
Fein Print
would be a good title for an anthology of Irving’s works, wouldn’t it? His next one, after this best-seller. From your point of view, of course—” He stopped. “Look at you, poor girl, goose bumps—you’re practically turning blue. Go inside by the fire.”

She rubbed her arms briskly and took the bait. “From my point of view, what?”

“That sort of bonus would force the publisher into a huge second printing, which would mean many more books in the stores, with posters and dumps, and a tripled advertising budget, a hot paperback auction, the whole—” He made a circular motion.

“Megillah,” she concluded.

“What I had in mind was ‘nine yards,’ which someone once told me was the cubic content of a cement truck. Megillah? Your association with the likes of Irving Fein, my dear, is having its cultural impact.” He popped into the backseat with a jaunty wave, his reverse sale well made. He would await the call sure to come with her second thoughts.

She heard the sound of a heavy car crunching the gravel. Viveca went out into the cold to greet the banker, again without a jacket, running her hands along her arms. She liked the way that her flesh, exposed to cold, made men—all men, without exception, even the media execs who perversely wanted to bring her down—plunge into a protective mode.

But the gooseflesh trick didn’t work with Edward Dominick. He stood in front of the doorway for a long moment, looking back out at the view commanded from the height of the hill. “It’s beautiful here,”
he said quietly, mournful eyes ranging along the purple ridges. “Reminds me of home.”

After a while, she said, “You’re right, it is beautiful, and I’m freezing my ass off.” She took his arm firmly and drew him inside.

He spent the first few minutes as her father would have, examining the books lining the walls of her den. She poured the Saratoga water he asked for, grimly making another glass for herself, adding a dash of bitters to remind her of a real drink. “The books about intelligence work are on the middle shelf,” she said.

“I don’t read those,” he said, still browsing. “And I’m not going to become a secret agent overnight, with tradecraft, dead drops, cloak-and-dagger stuff.”

“If you’re going to impersonate the sleeper—”

“—I have to put myself inside his mind, think the way he does.”

“But he’s a spy.”

“No. He’s a banker. He’s secretly building a huge fortune. What spying has he done? None, for twenty years, as far as we know.”

“Edward, the sleeper’s whole life has been one long stretch of espionage.”

“Strictly passive, as far as we know. Spying, for him, has always been something he would have to do, one day in the distant future. Nor is he being called on for espionage now. They want a secret financial agent, not a real spy.” He ran his finger down her line of volumes about the clandestine wars. “You don’t have R. V. Jones’s books. He’s the only one that does us any good.”