Later that night, after she and Joshua had turned off the lights in their third-floor walk-up, something made her go to the window and peek between the blinds. There, just across 141st Street, a Ford was parked, a 1942 model, she guessed, made before the production of civilian automobiles had been halted for the duration. Inside, she could see the glow of a cigarette. Car like that, new as cars were going to get for sometime, people didn’t just park at the sidewalk. A fact she pondered as she went back to bed.
3
He was waiting for Mary when she walked into the hotel’s rear entrance ten minutes before she was due to report for work. Short, stocky man with a jowly face that reminded her of a bulldog.
“FBI,” he said, peremptorily showing her a badge in a wallet as he took her by the arm.
“I needs to get to work,” Mary protested. “’Sides, I answered questions yesterday.”
“This won’t take long.” the man assured her, his grip on her arm tightening.
A few minutes later, they were back in the doctor’s suite. For the hundredth time, Mary noted how bare it was of personal effects. No photographs, no framed certificates, nothing but furniture placed there by the hotel, furniture that definitely had become a little shabby. Thankfully, the bed was freshly made and empty.
A closer look around showed drawers pulled out, drawers of the bureau, drawers of the two bedside tables, drawers of the two side tables in the sitting room. A quick glance into the bath showed a yawning-open medicine cabinet. There was no trace of toilet articles, the safety razor, shaving brush and mug, toothbrush, or tube of toothpaste, all of which were usually aligned on a glass shelf under the mirror above the sink. The door of the closet also hung open. It was completely empty of the rows of suits with shoes lined up beneath.
There were two other men already in the sitting room, one of whom stood, offering one of the two club chairs to the jowly man. Mary sensed an air of deference toward him, like he was the boss. No one offered Mary a seat, so she remained standing.
The jowly man sat and removed his hat, placing it carefully on a table. His dark hair, brushed straight back, glistened with some sort of pomade.
“Mary,” he said in a voice much more friendly than she had heard yesterday, “look around. You see anything different?”
She did as she was told. “Yes, sir. All his things are gone.”
“All?”
“Far as I can see, yes, sir.”
“Did he have any special place, a sort of hiding place?”
“Not that I know of, no, sir.”
“Maybe a place to put documents, papers.”
“I don’ know nothing ’bout any missing papers.”
He jumped to his feet so suddenly, Mary took a step back. “Aha!” he exclaimed, pointing an accusatory finger. “Who said anything about missing papers?”
Mary looked from the jowly man to the other two men and back again. “They weren’t missing, you wouldn’t be asking me ’bout them.”
The man who had given up his chair made an unsuccessful attempt to hide a smile and drew a glare from Mary’s interrogator.
The questions, most of which had been asked yesterday, lasted another fifteen minutes before the man looked at the other two. “Anything you can think of?”
As one, both shook their heads.
The man pointed to the door. “You can go for now, but we might want to talk to you again, so don’t go anywhere. Understand?”
Mary nodded. “Yes, sir. I ain’t going nowhere.”
“Good.”
As she took the elevator down to the basement to collect her cleaning supplies, a number of thoughts spun through her mind: She had become inured to the rudeness of some white people, like Mr. Bulldog back there. It no longer bothered her. But the doctor must have been somebody besides the quiet-voiced, meek, little man with a funny accent whom Mary had known. What kind of papers would he have that would interest the FBI? A spy for the Nazis? She smiled at the thought of the mousy little man carrying a gun and taking pictures of… what? The Brooklyn Navy Yard? But then, weren’t spies supposed to look like something else?
Then a thought came out of the blue and popped into her head, a thought so engrossing she didn’t hear the uniformed elevator operator the first time he announced the basement. He had to repeat himself before she remembered where she was.
The jowly man. She had seen his picture before, both in the papers and at the Apollo Theater when movies with newsreels replaced live entertainment. The blocky figure, the swept back hair. But most of all, the bulldog face. That was him, she was sure.
But why would the head of the FBI come all the way from Washington to question her?
4
Charlie Sherman had been with the mujahideen too long. He was beginning to hallucinate. Maybe it was the food. Qabili palau, a sort of rice pilaf with caramelized vegetables, at every meal was enough to get to men far saner than Charlie. It had been so long since he had tasted meat, he had begun to fantasize about the scrawny goats that bleated in every village. Maybe it was the cold. Maybe he had been insane to begin with, volunteering to liaison between the CIA and the natives resisting Russian invasion.
Whatever. He knew the facts: A month ago, a Russian force had been defeated trying to open up the road winding through the valley below. There were still a number of what he guessed were Russian bodies. Natural decomposition despite the near frigid weather made it hard to tell. Decomposition, plus the quaint local custom of stripping the dead of anything useful, including uniforms.
But that wasn’t what had Charlie questioning his own sanity.
Charlie’s Afghan guide and translator, Aarif, whose name meant “understanding,” wasn’t understandable at all. He had kept pointing to the rusting hulk of a T-72. Like most Russian tanks he saw these days, it had a couple of large holes in it, the result of multiple RPG hits. This one, though, didn’t mount the usual turret gun. Instead, it had a blunt-nozzle sort of apparatus. Charlie had heard the Ruskies were experimenting with various gases, but there wasn’t enough left of the seared interior to tell what sort of weapons it had carried.
Strange but not weird.
Then Aarif had led him into a cave cut into the rock of the hillside. The walls were easily one or two meters thick, far too thick to be penetrated by the 85-millimeter shells fired by Russian tanks. Charlie switched on his flashlight. The cave was full of dead people, mujahideen fighters. Not only did they look as though they had simply gone to sleep — no decomposition, no stench of rotting flesh — the bodies were barely over a meter in length. Unless the Afghans had enlisted a brigade of midgets, there was something really strange there.
Aarif’s English left a lot to be desired, but if Charlie had understood him correctly, he said the tank had fired something that had come through the walls of the cave. But there was no damage Charlie could see.
“Gas,” he said, “the tank fired gas into the entrance?”
The Afghan shook his head adamantly, no. “Came through!”
Weapons that break through solid rock leaving no hole, fighters the size of small children that don’t deteriorate…
Yep, Charlie had been in Afghanistan too long. On the upside, once he reported all this, he wouldn’t be there much longer.