"Is it ticking?"
"Michael, I'm not stupid."
That was true. But she was frustrating. "Does it smell like cordite?"
"It smells like a manila envelope, Michael."
"They leave any instructions?" These days, it was hard to tell who might drop by, good guys or bad guys.
"Yes," she said. "They said that they were bringing something to Nate's house, too, but that they'd wait to hear from you first."
"Nate?"
"They seemed to know him," she said. "Are you two working together again? It's always so nice when you include him. You know, he told me last week that he really feels close to you now. Isn't that nice?"
Fiona pulled up in front of my place. There was already a line of people waiting to get into the club and it wasn't even dark out yet.
"Where is the package now, Ma?"
"I put it in the bathtub… just like you taught me last time."
My mother, full of surprises. "I'll be there," I said. "Don't touch it."
If you ever happen to become a spy and then happen to get burned and are forced to live in one town under threat of death, try not to make it the same one your mother lives in. In the event that is unavoidable, at some point ask your mother to unlist her phone number and cancel, finally, the subscription to Highlights that still comes to her home in your name. See about getting her to move permanently into an assisted-living facility that doesn't allow smoking or outside phone calls. See about getting your brother to leave town, too, particularly if he happens to be named Nate. See about asking the people who are burning you if, respectfully, they could drop you in Walla Walla, Washington.
"I'll make dinner," Mom said. "Why don't you ask Fiona if she'd like to come?"
"I don't know where she is," I said.
"I'll call her," Mom said and hung up.
I closed my phone and got out of the car. Stood on the sidewalk. Stared up at the sun. Surveyed the people lined up under my window. I could hear rap music coming from inside the club, a song about never being caught riding dirty. I tried to think pleasant thoughts.
Sam unwound himself from the backseat and stood beside me on the sidewalk. Fiona? She was still sitting in the front seat of the Charger. Seems she'd received a call.
"That was my mother," I said to no one in particular.
"Nothing says you have to answer," Sam said. "A little self-control, Mikey, it will save you heartache."
"She was visited by Communists today," I said.
"They're like cockroaches. You see one, there's another hundred meeting somewhere."
"I don't think that's true anymore," I said.
"The Red Menace would surprise you, Mikey."
"This Natalya thing," I said. "I've gotta get around that, it seems."
"I saw something interesting today," Sam said. He flipped open his phone and scrolled through the photos until he found the one of Longstreet's map of operatives. South Beach looked like a conflict zone.
"Well," I said, "that is interesting." Particularly, I noted, the cluster surrounding the Hotel Oro. I thought about the meat guarding Natalya. I thought about the morons parking cars. I thought about maybe seeing just how much they'd like seeing their pictures in Palm Life.
Fiona popped out of my car then. She was still talking on the phone. "Pot roast it is," she said. "I'll bring some potatoes."
7
If you're at home and don't have access to the bomb squad, the best way to open an envelopethat you think might contain an explosive charge is to not open it at all. Throw it in a tub filled with water or stick it in your toilet. Within two or three minutes, you'll be able to see precisely what is inside of the envelope.
If you see wires, a stick of TNT, hundreds of ball bearings, nails, a blasting cap, the odds are someone wants to kill you.
Don't open your letter.
If on the off chance the person you think wants to kill you was smart enough to send you a bomb in a waterproof, plastic-lined cardboard mailer, and you still have a latent desire to know for sure if someone wants you dead or disfigured, all you need is a piece of wire and some string, strong nerves, and a few yards of space between you and the envelope.
People who build letter bombs are big on bangs, particularly if they happen to be in the vicinity of the person opening the letter. The sound of the explosion, the flying limbs, the burned corpses, that's their thing. That means they leave the creativity to the bomb itself. The trigger is an afterthought. 80 percent of letter bombs are activated by opening the top flap of the envelope. 15 percent go off when the materials are removed. 5 percent never go off at all, because if you send someone a letter bomb, you're crazy and crazy people sometimes forget important steps in the building of bombs.
Ex-KGB? Not so much. So, as I stood in my mother's bathroom and stared at a wet plastic-lined cardboard mailer that revealed only that the persons who dropped off this package for me knew the same things I did, Fiona stripped apart a length of coaxial cable until she had a span of sharp wire about a foot long. She carefully inserted the cable through the bottom of the envelope and then threaded it back out and looped it around a piece of yarn that my mother swore she couldn't part with, since she intended to use it to knit me a winter scarf, but which I told her I'd replace with a whole ball of yarn if I accidently blew up her bathroom.
I then placed a frying pan on one end of the envelope, fastening it in place on the bathroom floor.
Fiona and I backed slowly out of the bathroom, keeping the yarn slack as we walked down the hall, back toward the kitchen, where the smell of pot roast still hung in the air an hour after we'd eaten.
My mom walked up with a cigarette in her mouth, lighter at the ready. "Be careful, Michael. I just redid that bathroom," she said.
"That was in 1996," I said. "And if you like the way it looks, you'll maybe keep the open flame away."
"I've been smoking all day and nothing happened," she said. "I don't know when you decided you had all the answers, anyway."
"Ma," I said, "you might have noticed that I'm a little involved with something here. Maybe keep back? In case it blows?"
"Don't use that soothing voice on me," she said. "Your father used that voice. It's unbecoming. I don't know how you stand him, Fiona."
"I can't," Fiona said. This got a chuckle from Mom. It was like I was trapped in a surrealist painting, surrounded by melting clocks and such-that's about how much sense it all made.
"Ma," I said. "Please. Go outside. If you see flames leaping from the windows, call nine-one-one."
For approximately the third time in her life, my mother actually did what I asked her to do.
"You could be nicer to her, Michael," Fiona said. "She made you a lovely dinner."
"If nothing blows up," I said, "I pledge I will spend the rest of my life trying to be a better person. Could we get this done?"
Once we were a reasonable amount of space away, Fiona gathered up the yarn until it was taut. She yanked the yarn and split the envelope in half. Nothing went bang. We waited another thirty seconds, in case there was a secondary trigger set to a timer, and when nothing happened we went back into the bathroom. I bent down and picked the package up and pulled the contents-wrapped a second time in plastic, most likely because they knew I'd try to submerge the package in water first-out through the bottom. I then shook the package out over the toilet, just in case there happened to be a dose of anthrax for my troubles.
I opened the package up. There were several glossy, professional-quality photos and a stack of black-and-white photos as well. Today, if you can't get a decent photo of someone from surveillance, you either have early onset Parkinson's, which causes you to shake uncontrollably, or you like kicking it old school with a Polaroid, just to show technology isn't needed if you're savvy, which makes you a useless dinosaur who should be burned versus those who do their job, do it well and lose everything anyway.