Quest scratched at her scalp through her rust colored hair. “I am definitely not going soft, Director—soft is not my style. I ran him when he was operational. Fact that he came in from the cold, as that English spy writer put it, doesn’t change anything. As far as I’m concerned, I’m still running him. As long as he doesn’t remember what happened—as long as he keeps his nose out of this Samat business—there’s no reason to revisit that decision.” She listened again, then said, coldly, “I take your point about unnecessary risks. If he steps over the fault—”
The man on the other end of the phone finished the sentence for her; the wallah at the wheel could see his boss in the rear view mirror nodding as she took aboard an order.
“Count on it,” Quest said.
The line must have gone dead in her ear—the Director was notorious for ending conversations abruptly—because Quest leaned forward and dropped the telephone onto the passenger seat. Sinking back against the door, staring sightlessly out of the window, she started muttering disjointed phrases. After a while the words began taking on a sense. “Directors come and go,” she could be heard saying. “The ones who wind up in Langley through their ties to the White House aren’t the keepers of the flame—we are. We man the ramparts while the Director busts his balls working the Georgetown dinner circuit. We run the agents who put their lives on the line prowling the edge of empire. And we pay the price. Field agent drinks too much, controlling officer gets a hangover. Field agent turns sour, we curdle. Field agent dies, we break out the sackcloth and ashes and mourn for forty days and forty nights.” Quest sighed for her lost youth, her femaleness gone astray. “None of which,” she continued, her voice turning starchy, “would prevent us from terminating the son of a bitch if it looked as if he might compromise the family’s jewel.”
Martin’s bedside alarm went off an hour before first light. In case Fred had managed to plant a microphone after all, he switched on the radio and turned up the volume to cover his foot falls and the sound of doors closing. Still in his tracksuit, he climbed to the roof and worked the bellows of his smoker, sending the colony of bees in the second of the two hives into a frenzy of gorging on honey. Then he reached into the narrow space between the top of the frames and the top of the hive to extract the small packet wrapped in oilcloth. Back downstairs, Martin opened the refrigerator and stuck a plastic basin under the drip notch. In the faint light that came from the open refrigerator, he unfolded the oilcloth around the packet and spread out the contents on his cot. There were half a dozen American and foreign passports, a French Livret de Famille, three internal passports from East European countries, a collection of laminated driver’s licenses from Ireland and England and several East Coast states, an assortment of lending library and frequent flyer and Social Security cards, some of them brittle with age. He collected the identity papers and distributed them evenly between the cardboard lining and the top of the shabby leather valise with stickers from half a dozen Club Med resorts pasted on it. He filled the valise with shirts and underwear and socks and toilet articles, folded Dante Pippen’s lucky white silk bandanna on top, then changed his clothing, putting on a light three-piece suit and the sturdy rubber soled shoes he’d worn when he and Minh had hiked trails in the Adirondacks the year before. Looking around to see what he’d forgotten, he remembered the bees. He quickly scribbled a note to Tsou Xing asking him to use the spare front door key he’d left in the cash register to check the beehives every other day; if there wasn’t enough honey in the frames to see the bees through until spring, Tsou would know how to brew up sugar candy with the ingredients under the sink and deposit it in the hives.
Carrying the valise and an old but serviceable Burberry, Martin made his way to the roof. He locked the roof door behind him and stashed the key under a loose brick in the parapet. Looking up at the Milky Way, or what you could see of it from a roof in the middle of Brooklyn, he was reminded of the Alawite prostitute Dante had come across in Beirut during one particularly hairy mission. Leaning on the parapet, he surveyed Albany Avenue for a quarter of an hour, watching the darkened windows across the street for the slightest movement of curtains or Venetian blinds or a glimpse of embers glowing on a cigarette. Finding no signs of life, he crossed the roof and studied the alleyway behind the Chinese restaurant. There was motion off to the right where Tsou Xing parked his vintage Packard, but it turned out to be a cat trying to work the lid off a garbage pail. When Martin was sure the coast was clear, he backed down the steel ladder and then carefully descended the fire escape to the first floor. There he untied the rope and lowered the last section to the ground (through runners that he’d greased every few months; for Martin, tradecraft was the nearest thing he had to a religion). He tested the quality of the stillness for another few minutes before letting himself down into Tsou Xing’s backyard heaped with stoves and pressure cookers and refrigerators that could one day be cannibalized for spare parts. He slipped the note for Tsou under the back door of the restaurant, crossed the yard to the alleyway and headed down it until he came to Lincoln Place. Two blocks down Lincoln, on the northeast corner of Schenectady, he ducked into a phone booth that reeked of turpentine. The first faint smudges of metallic gray were visible in the east as he checked the number written on his palm. Feeding a coin into the slot, he dialed it. The phone on the other end rang so many times that Martin began to worry he’d dialed the wrong number. He hung up and double checked the number and dialed again. He started counting how many times it rang and then gave up and just listened to it ring, wondering what to do if nobody answered. He was about to hang up—he would go to ground in a twenty-four hour diner on Kingston Avenue and try again in an hour—when someone finally came on the line.
“Do you have any idea what time it is?” a familiar voice demanded.
“I have decided I can’t live without you. If you still want me, I think we can work something out.”
Estelle Kastner caught her breath; she understood he was afraid the conversation was being overheard. “I’d given up on you,” she admitted. “When can you come over?”
He liked her style. “How about now?”
She gave him an address several blocks down President Street between Kingston and Brooklyn. “It’s a big private house. There’s a door around the side—the light over it will be on. I’ll be waiting for you in the vestibule.” On the off chance the phone really was tapped, Estelle added, “I’ve never had a relationship with someone whose sign isn’t compatible with mine. So what are you?”
“Leo.”
“Come on, you’re not a Leo. Leo’s are cock sure of themselves. If I had to guess, I’d say you have the profile of a Capricorn. Capricorns are impulsive, whimsical, stubborn as a mule in the good sense—once you start something, you finish it. Your being a Capricorn suits me fine.” She cleared her throat. “What made you change your mind. About calling?”
She caught Martin’s soft laughter and found the sound curiously comforting. She heard him say, “I didn’t have a change of mind, I had a change of heart.”
“Fools rush in,” she remarked, quoting from an old American song she played over and over on the phonograph, “where angels fear to tread.” She could hear Martin breathing into the phone. Just before she cut the connection, she said, more to herself than to him, “I have a weakness for men who don’t use aftershave.”
1994: MARTIN ODUM GETS ON WITH HIS LIVES