“Now you sound like an FBI agent.” I turned to face him. “Let me get this straight. You’ve got a fish on the line, a fish I’m working with, and you’re holding him out as bait for some bigger fish, but you want me in there swimming and spying on this Biological Clock fish, so you can move in and arrest the whole school of fish.”
“Put like that-since you’re in the water already-yes.” He pointed to the walk icon. We crossed to the south side of Santa Monica and took a left. Lucien’s bookstore was ahead. Open. On Thanksgiving. What a great neighborhood.
“How is this connected to Annika?” I asked.
“We approached Annika two weeks ago. The local operation tried to recruit her. Unsuccessfully. We picked this up on our surveillance and asked her to work for us, something similar to what I’m asking you. She declined.”
“Why?”
“She believed her mother in Germany would be killed if she did.”
I took a long, slow breath. “And then she disappeared.”
“Yes.”
I stopped again. He turned to face me and took off his sunglasses. A trio of men approached, arms around each other, and maneuvered around us on the sidewalk. “Kiss her, you fool!” one of them cried. I felt myself blush, but I kept eye contact. Simon didn’t flinch.
I said, “Did you-the FBI-have anything to do with Annika’s disappearance?”
“No.”
“You don’t know where she is.”
His eyes glinted. “I already told you I don’t.”
“Rico Rodriguez tried to talk Annika into something she didn’t want to do. Was it working for Little Fish?”
Simon said nothing.
I looked away. Cars passed. I pictured people driving to their grandmothers’, candied yam casseroles in their laps. “If I say no, where will I end up?”
“Look at me,” he said, and waited until I did. “You think we make people vanish?”
I thought of Michelle, the music mom. She’d said Annika wanted a lawyer, the kind that finds people who disappear. “Maybe.”
The glint in his eye was a flash. “If Annika had chosen to work with us, she’d be here today, because we take care of our own. But we didn’t arrest or deport her. She said no, she was free to walk away. Okay?”
“No, it’s not okay. Because what if she was harmed or kidnapped by the bad guys-these other people she wouldn’t work for?”
“That was a chance she took. I wasn’t going to force her to work for us. She was scared and she was in a tough situation. But it wasn’t part of my job to keep an eye on her. Had I known you cared to this extent, I might have.”
“What do you care what I care?”
“Take a guess, Wollie.”
I looked away again. He took my arm and we continued east on Santa Monica. “You’d sign a contract,” he said. “There’s some money in it, not much. You’re not an employee of the FBI, you’re not authorized to do anything illegal beyond what’s organized or sanctioned by your handler. That’s me. You’re what we call a cooperating witness, a CW. If you’re scared-”
“Should I be scared?”
“Yes.” The word, naked and unequivocal, hung in the air between us. “But you’re safer cooperating with me than not cooperating.”
I caught sight of Lucien in his shop, paused in the act of stocking books in the display window. He was looking at me. “And the man following me last Friday,” I said, “is that someone else I’d be ‘cooperating’ with? How many other goons will-”
Simon stopped, took my arm, and pulled me in close. I caught my breath. This was one big guy. This was not a guy you wanted to get physical with, unless-
“I don’t like the sound of that.” He spoke quietly. “You can tell me all about it in a minute, but I want to tell you something first: no one harasses you into working with us. Do it because you want to, or walk away. Your choice.” He let go of my arm.
Some choice. I was about to tell him to take a hike, but a memory stopped me. Weeks ago, on this very block, Annika and I had come from the movies. She’d grabbed my arm, just as he had, her small hand pulling on my sweatshirt, giving it a shake. “We will solve your math problems, Wollie. I promise. You won’t have to go through it alone.” This kid, reassuring me like she was my mother.
“I’ll help you catch your bad guys,” I said. “If you help me find Annika.”
His eyes were blue again. Not angry anymore. He let out a breath.
He said, “You’re on.”
29
I showed up to work at sundown, responsibility weighing heavily on my polka-dot-silk-clad shoulders.
Biological Clock had found a restaurant called Olga’s Kitchen willing to accommodate us on Thanksgiving, offering a prix fixe dinner of dark-meat turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and canned cranberry sauce for $9.99. A fair number of diners were taking advantage of this, including a party of fourteen, dressed for the holiday in everything from shorts and flip-flops to a T-shirt that said “I used to care but now I take a pill for that.”
I regarded them all with suspicion.
Once I’d signed on to be a CW, a cooperating witness, Simon and I had walked to West Hollywood Park to discuss the details. He wouldn’t identify the bad egg I was working with, referring to the malefactor as Little Fish. He admitted the illicit business was drugs only after I pointed out that an FBI-DEA joint operation was unlikely to be anything else. To tell me more, he said, lessened my value as a corroborating source and, later, a witness in front of a judge or jury. The thought of ratting out someone I knew in court was distasteful, but a bigger problem was secrecy. I couldn’t tell Joey or Fredreeq what I was up to. My best friends.
The FBI, Simon explained, had no best-friends exemption.
My assignment was relatively simple. I was to listen on the set for European accents, watch for people using pay phones, and report immediately the sighting of shopping bags from Hugo Boss, Fendi, or Ermenegildo Zegna. These shopping bags were used for dead drops, exchanges of drugs or money.
Then there was the quid pro quo. Simon agreed to assign someone to track down Annika. I imagined some low-level trainee making a token call to the LAPD, then tossing Annika’s file onto a “do later” pile. “Suppose I gave you a license number,” I said. “You could get me an address, right? Also, could you guys trace an e-mail, even if it’s no longer in service?”
“Whose?”
I told him about Marie-Thérèse, and then about the goateed man, the man who’d broken Bing Wooster’s fingers and talked about making someone disappear.
“Give me the license number and the e-mail,” he said, “and we’ll look into it.”
I shook my head. “Give me the addresses and I’ll look into it-”
“Really? You’ll find this guy and sketch him into submission?” He smiled at my reaction. “Your profession isn’t classified information. Which brings up another-”
“This isn’t what I agreed to, me feeding you information about Annika, and you-”
“Wollie, I don’t mean this unkindly, but you paint frogs for a living. Right now my concern is you. Tell me about the man following you on Friday.”
And that’s how it went. I’d steer the conversation one way, and he’d grab the wheel and do a verbal U-turn. No wonder he and the DEA were having “issues”; I was developing some myself. I had a childish impulse to call the whole thing off, but Annika’s fate was clearly tied to his operation, and if I was being asked to work with a paper bag over my head, at least I was on the inside. I’d just continue my own investigation parallel to his. Anyway, I’d signed a contract. He’d pulled it out of his pocket when I’d said yes.
So here I was at Olga’s Kitchen, made up, coiffed, and poised for espionage. It hadn’t mattered that I’d shown up a wreck. Fredreeq could get a corpse camera-ready, and as for my state of mind, everyone around me seemed more or less unhinged. Bing Wooster was as high-strung as an Afghan hound. But Bing was working his Betacam with two taped fingers and painkillers, which might’ve accounted for it. I asked Joey her opinion.