'You need some help?'
But he was already eager to go, not wanting contact, involvement, with this cokehead, this junkie. He was, you understand, no more like an opposition agent of any kind than Mickey Mouse, and it had just happened that we'd been moving at about the same speed along the street. It happens all the time.
'No.'
No help.
But he'd already gone, and I stood there with my head bared to the overwhelming weight of the sky and knew that I couldn't in fact shrug off all responsibility, because that would indeed lead to the mortuary and the formaldehyde, but oh my God you can have no idea how far it was to the telephone at the end of the block, how many desperate encounters were played out as the insubstantial figures leapt from nowhere and from everywhere, how many times they came for me, squealing for my blood as they dragged me to the hangman, the stink of fish sickening to the stomach, his madman's inane grin, go for the single chicks, they're cheaper, lurching on my nerveless legs to the end, all the way to the end of the block with oysters this big as the sky crashed at last across the roaring chasm of the street and I reached the phone-box, smashing away the flimsy aluminium panel with my shoulder to break the momentum, digging for a quarter and forcing it into the slot, a pale girl with pimples staring for a little time before she hurried past, so that I buried myself against the phone-booth, into it, in it, my back to the street and the people, hunched like a pariah dog, like a leper 'Yes?'
Ferris.
1330 West Riverside Way. At any time before midnight. Not later than that.
'Yes?'
Those are your instructions.
Of course. Put the phone down, make the rendezvous. Of course. Without question.
'Who is that? I am listening.'
I tell you I had to use physical force to keep the phone pressed to my head while the other force did everything it could to pull it away and slam it across the hooks. I remember that very clearly.
'I need – ' the breath blocking in my throat.
'Yes? You need?'
Force countering force while I waited in limbo for the outcome, the sweat drenching my body as the street reeled, roared, swept over me.
'I need to debrief.'
Clinging to the broken booth like a drowning man to a raft. '1200 block and Riverside Way. West Riverside Way. Hurry. For God's sake hurry.'
Chapter 7: DEBRIEFING
Four men.
The clock – a jade clock in a gilt frame, standing on the desk – snowed 11:56. A little before midnight. 1330 West Riverside Way, not later than midnight, so forth. No longer important.
One of the men was Ferris.
It was a big room, ornate, in a way. Dark heavy furniture, velvet curtains, a pile carpet, all very substantial, reassuring. I felt reassured. I felt as if -let's get it absolutely straight – I didn't just feel as if. I had, in fact, come through something and reached the other side, and the other side was here, the here and now, the true reality. But dear God it had left me weak, punch-drunk.
Greenspan was another of them. He was the only one standing up.
'Did you pee in the jar?' he asked me.
Ferris was in one of the deep leather chairs, a thin leg draped over one of its arms.
'What? Yes.'
'Great.'
'And what is so fucking great,' I asked him, 'about peeing in a jar?'
He watched me quietly. No one spoke. It had helped, a little, the rush of anger, but had left me exhausted again. In a moment I said, 'I'm sorry.'
'No problem,' Greenspan said. 'What is so great about it is that you remember doing it. And we took a little blood, right?' The Chaplinesque eyebrows lifting.
'Yes.' Needle in the arm, out there in the hall, I think.
'Very good. Your memory's fine.'
'My memory?'
'You bet.'
'Why shouldn't it be fine, for Christ's sake?'
'Well I guess – ' a shrug, a glance across Ferris – 'you've kind of had a busy day.' A hand on my shoulder, 'Feel okay now?'
'I have never,' I told him carefully, 'felt better in my life.'
'Well I can take a hint,' Greenspan said brightly. 'You don't need me around here any more.'
He fetched his bag from the desk, leaning across Ferris for a moment, saying something; then he slapped my arm with an excessive amount of good cheer and left us. It occurred to me that I wasn't quite straightened out yet, too aggressive, too defensive; but then he was damned right – it had been a busy day.
I shut my eyes for a while, less than a minute, and the firework show died down behind the lids and left mostly black. Then I opened them and saw Ferris watching me.
'What's this place?'
'A safe-house,' he said.
I looked around the room again. Big geographical globe, a glassed-in case of ivory elephants, massive tomes on dark mahogany shelves, Existential Psychotherapy, Noyes' Modern Clinical Psychiatry.
'It's a what?' I got up and looked at the shelves, at some of the other titles. 'Is this a psychiatrist's office?'
'Yes,' Ferris said. 'It's also a safe-house. That's why we're here.'
I had an urge to walk out and slam the door but a certain degree of reason stopped me. A Bureau safe-house can be anything and anywhere – there's one in the basement of the British Consulate in Marseilles and there's one in Madame Labhouet's bordello in Abidjan on the Ivory coast and there's one in the Horacio Escobar Clinic for Enteric Diseases in downtown Santiago – so a psychiatrist's office in Miami, Florida, wasn't untypical.
Jade clock: midnight, the gilt hands together at the top of the dial in a prayer of thanksgiving. Rendezvous aborted.
It is also a sacrosanct rule that once the opposition has made contact with the executive in the opening phase of a mission he is not to approach his director in the field at that director's base, since it risks exposing him. The DIF can only function from an ivory tower, controlling the shadow from a distance and keeping clear of the action. Directors in the field, by their nature, amass an infinite store of intelligence data every time they go out, and their value to the organisation is beyond the price of pearls. Most retire after sixty and take up golf; most shadow executives are dead before thirty-five, or if not, uninsurable.
So it was entirely reasonable that Ferris had ordered me brought here from the 1200 block on West Riverside Way for debriefing. Entirely reasonable.
'What's his name?' I came away from the bookshelves and dropped into the armchair again, a dead weight.
'Whose?'
The shrink's.'
'Dr Xavier Joachim Alvarez.'
'Are you going to have him check me out?'
'Only if you ask.'
The quietness came back into the room. Everyone seemed to be listening. 'I'm in first-class condition.' Said it straight to Ferris, carrying the weight of it in my eyes, the shadow executive formally reporting to his DIP that he was able to take on any kind of action if the need arose. 'He didn't put anything in, did he?'
Ferris turned his head a fraction, and I realised I was tending to talk in ellipses, my thoughts jumping ahead. 'Again?' he said.
'Greenspan. I mean he only took some blood, is that right? He didn't give me any dope. Sedative or anything.'
Quietly, 'Would you like a sedative?'
'No. What the hell for?' Be warned: this was the second time it had happened. A minute ago I'd thought they were going to have me checked out by the shrink but it'd only been in my mind, not theirs – Only if you ask. And now it had been in my mind that they might have wanted to sedate me and I'd been wrong, dangerously wrong, putting ideas into their heads. Did I really want a shrink, sedation, but didn't have the guts to ask for them?
Paranoia. Relax. I was much better now, less scared about what was happening to me. It was going to be all right.