“Put in a call to Shoftstall,” I said.
“It might take quite a while,” she said. Joyce Jungroth disapproved of the extravagance of overseas calls.
“Just put it through.”
She caught the tone of my voice and said, “Yes, sir.” She called me sir at least three times a year. While I waited for the call I dialed another number and when Li answered, I said hello in English and then switched to rapid, fluent Mandarin. I know it was fluent because I spoke little else until I was nearly six years old.
“There has been a change in plans,” I said.
“They have refused my application?” Li said.
“Not at all. It is only that the underwriters require a careful examination, a simple test, one might say.”
“I have heard of such tests,” Li said.
I bet you have, I thought. “It is only routine.”
“Where will it be held?”
I mentioned that island city-state that lies two thousand miles south of its half-sister, Hong Kong.
“A far distance,” Li said. “I am no longer sure that I am even interested in the policy.”
“There will be added benefits once you have received the examiner’s approval.”
“When will the examiner be in attendance?” he asked.
“Tomorrow evening, around nine.”
“The place?”
“That is yet to be decided,” I said. “However, a message will await you at the airline ticket counter.”
There was a brief silence and I could almost hear the abacus that was Li’s brain adding up the advantages and subtracting the disadvantages. Finally, he said: “I trust that you, too, will be present.”
“It would be remiss if I were not, considering the value of the policy.”
Another silence was followed by a soft sigh. “I will make the necessary arrangements,” Li said and hung up.
I had stumbled on to Li Teh by accident which, at base, is responsible for most intelligence coups as well as disasters. A Canadian journalist stationed in Peking had once met Li at a cocktail party in Hong Kong. Blessed with an unusual memory for names and faces, the journalist had grown curious when Li had entered the most forbidden government building in Peking, the Forbidden City of forbidden buildings. He waited for two hours for Li to reappear, but when he didn’t, the journalist made a note of the date and time. Our Tokyo office kept the Canadian journalist on a small retainer and when he made a routine report to them on Li they had just as routinely forwarded it to me.
I had snooped around until I was positive that Li Teh was an agent and that his personal financial position was not as flush as it seemed. Threats of exposure or an appeal to his concern for the future of mankind would be met with either hostility or giggles, so I decided that immediate financial relief would be the most promising avenue of approach and I traveled up and down it so often that I almost began to think like what I assuredly was not: a life insurance salesman with the solid chance of a quick close on a million dollar annuity.
So now that I had him doubled, I had to fly him two thousand miles and put him through a test of doubtful validity by a machine that probably had been thrown out of whack by the humidity. I remembered my own lie detector test, the one that they’d given me just prior to employment. It was just for the record, they’d said. First, there was the stream of innocuous questions: “Did you drive here this morning? Was the sun shining? Did you eat breakfast?” All yes or no. Then they slipped the shaft in: “Have you ever had a homosexual experience?” I had answered yes.
My answer startled both the technician and the machine. The machine said I was lying and the technician insisted that we run through the whole set of questions five more times but the machine still said that I lied.
“Look, fella,” the technician had said. “The thing says you’re lying about the homosexual bit.” I remember that everyone was using “bit” that year.
“Then it’s wrong. I did have one. I was four and my consenting partner was five and a half.”
“Aw, shit,” the technician said. “Just say no and let’s see what happens.”
“Then I’d be lying, wouldn’t I?”
“Just say no, fella. For my sake.”
I said no and the machine registered nothing, not even a tremor. “Four years old,” the technician muttered. “Jesus.”
While waiting for the overseas call to go through I thought about the new help that Carmingler had sent me. I lumped them together as the two smart boys from Illinois, making it Illinoyz for the sake of the rhyme. The first, the so-called polygraph expert, was Lynn Shoftstall from Evanston. The other was John Bourland from Libertyville. Both were recent graduates of what Carmingler referred to as “our new in-service training program” which only meant that you could start them out cheap at the bottom and keep them there until it was determined whether they could hack it as junior-grade spies. I thought of the program as something less than a smashing success.
Carmingler had sent them out to replace two of my former salesmen-agents, a seasoned pair, one of whom had been reassigned to Tokyo, a kind of a promotion, while the other had awakened in Bangkok one impossibly hot afternoon, suffering from a dreadful hangover which, among other things, had caused him to say to hell with it and catch the next plane to Sydney where, some said, he was writing a book. I hoped that it would make him a lot of money.
Bourland was the linguist, fluent in both Thai and Mandarin. Shoftstall, not nearly so keen a language student, in fact, barely proficient, was a mechanical whiz. I was informed that he knew virtually all there was to know about such gadgets as phone taps, room bugging devices, and a host of other miniaturized marvels, most of which were anathema to Carmingler and a mystery to me, although some said that they could prove useful. Shoftstall was rated expert in the use of the polygraph, but it didn’t really matter whether he was or not. He had the only polygraph around and supposedly only he could peep into Li Teh’s mind by measuring the beat of his pulse, the rate of his breathing, the amount of sweat in his palms, and the flutter of his heart as the lies tripped over themselves in their haste to leave his tongue.
My telephone rang and Joyce Jungroth informed me that my call to Shoftstall had gone through and that he was on the line.
“How’s the truth business today?” I said after we said hello.
“Beautiful.”
“Tomorrow night,” I said.
“On what?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Where?”
“The usual place,” I said.
“We’ll be there.”
The usual place was a hotel that had been built a hundred years or so ago when they still built hotels with fine, thick walls. It enjoyed a worldwide reputation and now that it was air-conditioned, it even managed to give the new Hilton some stiff competition.
“Check everything out by nine tomorrow night.”
“You want it permanent?” Shoftstall asked. He meant taped.
“Yes,” I said.
“Consider it done. By the way,” he said, “I’ve been experimenting with a new kind of—”
“Later,” I said and hung up.
Li and I ignored each other on the Philippine Air Lines flight to the island city-state whose Chinese premier, armed with a double first from Cambridge, was still groping for a formula that would make his tiny Republic a viable, thriving, unaligned community. It could scarcely be called a nation.