“Hey, mistah, when you come pick up you shirts?”
“That’s the idea. When they call back-”
“I’ll give you the phone.”
“Good idea.”
At which point it rang.
She was reaching for it when she stopped herself, drew back, and nodded for me to take it. I picked it up and said, “Blue Star Hand Laundry,” but didn’t bother with the Charlie Chan accent.
There was the slightest of pauses. Then a man’s voice, uninflected, said, “You should look in the mailbox.”
He rang off.
“I should look in the mailbox,” I told Minna, and went down four flights of stairs only to climb back up again. I came back carrying a three-by-five index card. I suppose they must be obsolete now that people have databases.
I said, “Look what I found,” and handed it to Minna.
There was an address and suite number on lower Fifth Avenue, along with “9:15.”
“It’s after nine already,” she said. “Are you supposed to go there tonight?”
“It doesn’t say a.m. or p.m.,” I said.
“Maybe they’re thinking in terms of a twenty-four-hour clock.”
“He’d think that was European,” I said, “and hopelessly effete. If a.m. and p.m. was good enough for Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt, it’s damn well good enough for him.”
“Him?”
“The Chief,” I said. “Whatever this is, it can wait until tomorrow. I’ll show up at nine-fifteen in the morning, and if that doesn’t work I’ll try again twelve hours later.”
She thought about it. “Evan,” she said, “are you sure this is from the same people who called the first time? The man who told you to look in the mailbox never said anything about the Blue Star Hand Laundry. You were the one who mentioned it.”
“Turn it over,” I said.
“Turn it over?”
“The index card. Look on the back.”
And there it was, hand-stamped, the blue ink slightly smeared. A five-pointed star.
Chapter 5
“By God. Tanner. All these years I thought you were dead. Part of the game, of course. You get a man, and he’s good, and you rely more and more heavily on him. And then one fine day you learn that he’s dead. You remember Dallman?”
He thought Dallman had recruited me, and in a sense I suppose he had, handing off some documents to me in a pub in Dublin just before some players on the other side caught up with him and took him out of the game, wiped him right off the board. The Chief and I had raised a few glasses to Dallman’s memory.
“The better a man is,” he said, “the more he dares, and the greater the risk that he’ll be killed. They tell me it’s the same with hang gliding. When you become expert, you can fly much higher. But if the wind changes suddenly, all your skills don’t help you a bit. And you have a longer way to fall.” He ran a pipe cleaner through the stem of his briar, took it out, sniffed inquiringly at it. “Or so they tell me,” he said. “I’ve steered clear of hang gliding myself.”
“So have I.”
“It’s probably wise,” he said. “We’re neither of us getting any younger, Tanner. Although I have to say you look the same.”
“So do you, sir.”
“Ha! Decent of you to say so, Tanner, but that’s an awful load of cod wallop and we both know it.”
It was codwallop, all right. He was an older man when I met him the first time, perhaps the same age as the calendar said I was now, and he hadn’t had the benefit of a few decades in a frost-free Frigidaire. He had to be ninety, or close to it, and he looked about a hundred, with wispy white hair and a time-ravaged face. His tan suit looked expensive, but he’d lost weight since he bought it and it hung loosely on him. His shoes were freshly polished but down at the heels. His striped tie had been inexpertly tied, with the rear part longer than the front. His collar was frayed, and there were food stains on his shirt front.
But his mind was still as sharp as ever. I wasn’t sure just how much of an endorsement that was, because I was never entirely certain how much the Chief had on the ball in the first place, but it was reassuring all the same to see that he hadn’t lost it. Truth to tell, I was glad enough just to know he was alive.
“Where were you, Tanner? What the hell happened to you?”
“I was frozen,” I said.
I hadn’t planned on telling him. So far I’d only told Minna, and she’d kept it to herself. The Chief was hardly a confidant of mine – my reports over the years were sketchy at best, and often highly imaginative. But the words came out of their own accord, and before I knew it I’d filled him in completely.
“So that’s how the Scandinavians deal with spies and secret agents,” he said. “They put them on ice. Well, it’s a cold climate, isn’t it? I suppose ice is abundant in their part of the world.”
“I was in New Jersey.”
“Yes, and they didn’t literally use ice either, I don’t suppose. Still, you take my meaning.” He made a clucking noise. “We’re a pair, Tanner. They put you on ice and they stuck me in mothballs.”
“Mothballs?”
“The mothballs are metaphorical, the same as the ice. They put me on the shelf, Tanner. Tied my hands. Took my box of toys away from me. Cashiered me, man. Relieved me of my duties.”
“The bastards,” I said.
“First it was age,” he said. “Some nonsense about mandatory retirement. But I had them there. My whole operation was always unofficial, you know. Off the books, deep in the shadows. How do you strike someone off the books when he’s never been on them?”
He took out a handkerchief, coughed into it, and examined the result. Evidently satisfied, he said, “But they kept cutting my appropriation. Slashed my budget. Reduced my staff. Still, I held on. My boys are like you, Tanner. No names, no pack drill. Make their own way, write their own tickets, employ and develop their own resources. And often as not turn a neat profit in the course of things, so they’re not greatly troubled if there’s no money coming their way from Washington.”
What enabled them to ease him out, he went on, was success.
“The fucking Russians,” he said with feeling. “Who ever expected the sons of bitches to quit on us? They were the enemy, along with the damned Chinese, and damned if they didn’t plain fall apart. The whole Evil Empire collapsed like a pack of cards. Maybe we played a small part in it, and maybe we were entitled to a little bit of the credit, although I wouldn’t care to sit on a hot stove waiting for it.
“Doesn’t matter. The Soviet Union is gone and the Red Army’s soldiers are begging for food on Moscow street corners, or enlisting in the Russian Mafia, or standing around with signs – ‘Will Work for Roubles.’ Will work even harder for hard currency, I shouldn’t wonder. Russia fell apart and China ’s become a bastion of State Capitalism. Still the same rotten lot running things, and still the same repressive government, the iron fist in the bamboo glove. We’ll go up against them someday, mark my words, but just now they’re our good friend and trading partner. So’s Vietnam, for God’s sake. Men who fought there are going back with tour groups, taking pictures, buying souvenirs. You believe that?”
“I believe everything.”
“You might as well,” he said, “because sooner or later everything comes true. Just a question of sitting it out. And that’s what I had to do when the idiots at the top decided there was no threat to our security anywhere in the world. Except for Cuba, and if the refugees didn’t own half of South Florida the government would have made peace with Castro ages ago. No threats, nothing but peace and love, so that was it for me. Out you go, old fellow, and be a good chap and don’t slam the door.” He sighed heavily. “What did I just say? About sitting it out? I sat and waited, and along came Rufus Crombie. Ever hear of him?”