Not that I’m a total screwup — don’t get me wrong. If I were a total screwup, the Bureau would have terminated me (not with prejudice, just the old pink slip) a long time ago; the Bureau doesn’t suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. But it’s true I have made a few errors along the way and had luck turn against me, and so on, which in fact was why I was on this stakeout detail in the first place.
All of us. The whole crew, the whole night shift, seven guys in seven cars blanketing three square blocks in the Meridian Hills section of Indianapolis. Or was it Ravenswood? How do I know? — I don’t know anything about Indianapolis. The Burger Whopper was a long drive from the stakeout site — that’s all I know.
And we seven guys, we’d gotten this assignment, with no possibility of glory or advancement, with nothing but boredom and dyspepsia (the Burger Whopper is not my first choice for food) and chills and aches and no doubt the flu before it’s over, because all seven of us had a few little dings and dents in our curricula vitae. Second-raters together, that’s what we had to think about, losing self-esteem by the minute as we each sat alone there in our cars in the darkness, waiting in vain for Francois Figuer to make his move.
Art smuggling: has there ever been a greater potential for boredom? Madonna and Child, Madonna and Child, Madonna and Child. Who cares what wall they hang on, as long as it isn’t mine, those cow-faced Madonnas and fat-kneed Childs? Still, as it turns out, there’s a lively illegal trade in stolen art from Europe, particularly from defenseless churches over there, and that means a whole lot of Madonnas und Kinder entering America rolled up in umbrellas or disguised as Genoa salamis.
And at the center of this vast illegal conspiracy to bore Americans out of their pants was one Francois Figuer, a Parisian who was now a resident of the good old U.S. of A. And he was who we were out to get.
We knew a fresh shipment of stolen art was on its way, this time from the defenseless churches of Italy and consisting mostly of the second-favorite subject after M&C, being St. Sebastian — you know, the bird condo, the saint with all the arrows sticking out of him for the birds to perch on. Anyway, the Bureau had tracked the St. Sebastian shipment into the U.S. through the entry port at Norfolk, VA, but then had lost it. (Not us seven — some other bunch of screwups.) It was on its way to Figuer and whoever his customer might be, which is why we were there, blanketing his neighborhood, waiting for him to make his move. Meanwhile, it was, as my goofy new friend had suggested, a good night for a steak out.
Seven men, in seven cars, trying to outwait and outwit one wily art smuggler. In each car we had a police radio (in case we needed local backup); we had our walkie-talkie; and we had a manila folder on the passenger seat beside us, containing a map of the immediate area around Figuer’s house and a blown-up surveillance photo of Figuer himself, with a written description on the back.
We sat in our cars, and we waited, and for five days nothing had happened. We knew Figuer was in the house, alone. We knew he and the courier must eventually make contact. We watched the arrivals of deliverymen from the supermarket and the liquor store and the Chinese restaurant, and when we checked, they were all three the normal deliverymen from those establishments. Then we replaced them with our own deliverymen and learned only that Figuer was a lousy tipper.
Did he know he was being watched? No idea, but probably not. In any event, we were here, and there was no alternative. If the courier arrived with a package that looked like a Genoa salami, we would pounce. If, instead, Figuer were to leave his house and go for a stroll or a drive, we would follow.
In the meantime, we waited, with nothing to do. Couldn’t read, even if we were permitted to turn on a light. We spoke together briefly on our walkie-talkies, that’s all. And every night around nine, one of us would come here to the Burger Whopper to buy everyone’s dinner. Tonight was my turn.
Apparently everybody in the world felt thick fog created a good night to eat out, to counteract a foggy night’s enforced slowness with some fast food. The line had been longer than usual at the Burger Whopper when I arrived, and now it stretched another dozen people or so behind my new friend and me. A family of four (small, sticky-looking children, dazed father, furious mother), a young couple giggling and rubbing each other’s bodies, another family, a hunched fellow with his hands moving in his raincoat pockets, and now more in line beyond him.
Ahead, however, the end was in sight. Either the Whopper management hadn’t expected such a crowd on such a night, or the fog had kept one or more employees from getting to work; whatever the cause, there was only one cash register in use, run by an irritable fat girl in the clownish garnet-and-gray Burger Whopper costume. Each customer, upon reaching this girl, would sing out his or her order, and she would punch it into the register as if stabbing an enemy in his thousand eyes.
My new friend said, “It can get really boring sitting around in the car, can’t it?”
I’d been miles away, in my own thoughts, brooding about this miserable assignment, and without thinking I answered, “Yeah, it sure can.” But then I immediately caught myself and stared at the goof again and said, “What?”
“Boring sitting around in the car,” he repeated. “And you get all stiff after a while.”
This was true, but how did he know? Thinking, What is going on here? I said, “What do you mean, sitting around in the car? What do you mean?” And at the same time thinking, Should I take him into protective custody?
But the goof spread his hands, gesturing at the Burger Whopper all around us, and said, “That’s why we’re here, right? Instead of four blocks down the street at Radio Special.”
Well, yes. Yes, that was true. Radio Special, another fast-food chain with a franchise joint not far from here, was set up like the drive-in deposit window at the bank. You drove up to the window, called your order into a microphone and a staticky voice told you how much it would cost. You put the money into a bin that slid out and back in, and a little later the bin would slide out a second time with your food and your change.
A lot of people prefer that sort of thing because they feel more secure being inside their own automobile, but us guys on stakeout find it too much of the same old same old. What we want, when there’s any kind of excuse for it, is to be out of the car.
So I had to agree with my carrot-topped friend. “That’s why I’m here, all right,” I told him. “I don’t like sitting around in a car any more than I have to.”
“I’d hate a job like that, I can tell you,” he said.
There was no way to respond to that without blowing my cover, so I just smiled at him and faced front.
The person ahead of me on line was being no trouble at all, for which I was thankful. Slender and attractive, with long, straight, ash-blond hair, she was apparently a college student and had brought along a skinny green loose-leaf binder full of her notes from some sort of math class. Trying to read over her shoulder, I saw nothing I recognized at all. But then she became aware of me and gave a disgusted little growl, and hunched farther over her binder, as though to hide her notes from the eavesdropper. Except that I realized she must have thought I was trying to look down the front of her sweater — it would have been worth the effort, but in fact I hadn’t been — and I suddenly got so embarrassed that I automatically took a quick step backward and tromped down squarely on the goof’s right foot.