Dear Sirs: The enclosed document might interest you. The entire set will be offered for thirty million. Will you bid? Someone who understands the situation and has complete authority will be available for a meeting in San Francisco. Place and time of the meeting will be furnished to you next Wednesday at 10 a.m. Have your telephone operator expect a message with the code name “Rotors.” The deal must be concluded by Friday of next week.
He mulled over whether he should address the letter to “Dear Sir or Madam” or just “Dear Sirs,” and whether the code name “Rotors” was good enough, but both issues were unimportant. Beneath the address, he simply wrote “Re: Attack Helicopter.” He put the letter and the prepared copy in the envelope, addressed it to the Soviet embassy in Washington, and on Wednesday evening dropped it in a mailbox. He did this in the dead of night with Jill on his arm. He sat for a long time in front of a lamp with the negatives Fran had brought, trying to assess their authenticity and completeness. When he rolled them up again and stuck them in the cans, he wasn’t much the wiser.
On Saturday he booked a flight to San Francisco for himself and Jill. He wanted to meet the Russians on Wednesday, but wanted to talk first with Buchanan, Benton’s contact at Gorgefield Aircraft. But before that, he wanted to find a place where he could meet with the Russians. He would need two days to prepare.
After Fran gave up hope of changing Georg’s mind, she tried to stay out of his way. He was prepared to respect that, but it was hard to do in the small apartment. They didn’t utter a word as they sat opposite each other, or when they met at the door between the living room and the bedroom or in the hallway, letting the other go first or passing each other, barely touching, with Fran lowering her eyes: a withered intimacy that made Georg sad. But sometimes he was reminded of girls in ancient or distant cultures who have been promised to a man and are only allowed to show themselves to him after the wedding. Fran was again sleeping in the living room. Days ago, after their initial arguments, when she had aroused him but still had not been able to make him give up his plan, she made a point of sleeping in the living room.
On Friday evening he greeted her according to the ritual of the past week. In the morning he had gone shopping with Jill, also to accustom himself again to the outside world, and had spent the afternoon in the kitchen. He prepared a Cucuron dinner: tapenade on toast, duck Provençale, and chocolate mousse. She was withdrawn and taciturn, and avoided his glance. Later she didn’t come to him in bed. But in the morning he found in his suitcase a baby sling with which he could strap Jill to his chest.
41
AT THE BEGINNING OF THE FLIGHT Jill screamed. She fell asleep when her screaming no longer attracted the other passengers’ sympathy, but their exasperation. A little four-year-old girl tried to interest Jill in picture books and chocolates. An elderly woman gave Georg advice about bringing up children, especially young ladies. The stewardesses brought blankets, kept diapers handy, warmed bottles, and said “coochy-coo.” They spoiled Jill, and they spoiled Georg.
In San Francisco they were picked up by Jonathan and Fern. A friend from Georg’s student years in Heidelberg had studied at Stanford and shared an apartment in San Francisco with Jonathan, who was a painter, and when Georg had phoned his friend with his request, the friend had arranged for him to stay in Jonathan’s apartment. Georg hadn’t wanted to stay in a hotel with Jill. Besides, Jonathan’s girlfriend Fern, an actress, was between jobs and was willing to look after Jill whenever Georg was taking care of his business. She took charge of Jill even before Georg wanted to let her go.
It had been raining in New York when they left, but in San Francisco the sun was shining in a clear blue sky. He left Jill in the renovated warehouse in which Fern and Jonathan were living with a cat and a Doberman, near the bay. The afternoon was before him, and he wanted to start looking for a place to rendezvous with the Russian.
It was clear what kind of place it should be. He wanted to be able to see whether the man was coming alone, so the place had to be open. Georg wanted to be sure that the man couldn’t follow him, so he would have to be able to disappear into a crowd near the place, or be able to reach a parked car on a lightly traveled street. He would drive off, and, if he didn’t see in the rearview mirror a car following him, he would take one of several detours and lose himself in the tangle of streets. That was how he imagined his getaway. Or, alternatively, that he would disappear into the crowd and get to a public toilet and disguise himself again. It would have to be sufficient to shake off one or more Russians. If the Americans had intercepted his letter and listened in on his phone call on Wednesday, and sent hundreds of men and helicopters after him, he wouldn’t have a chance anyway.
He rented a car, got a map of the city, and drove off. At first he drove aimlessly, wherever the flow of traffic or the signs and one-way streets took him. He drove through long streets with two- and three-story apartment buildings. They were of brightly painted wood and adorned with bay windows, gables, and little towers. Business and neon signs suddenly jutted out between the first and second stories, advertising delis, Pepsi-Cola, antiques, dry cleaning, auto-repair shops, breakfast, self-service laundries, real estate, restaurants, picture framing, Budweiser, shoes, fashions, Coca-Cola, and more delis. The businesses and signs disappeared just as suddenly, followed by one apartment block after another. Georg drove through residential streets, shorter than those in Manhattan, the architecture more daring, the streets cleaner and emptier, and the small bits of nature greener. He drove over the hills of the city as excited as if he were on a roller-coaster ride. The topography didn’t match the grid imposed on it, so they pointed up at the sky or down onto other streets. One moment he would be looking down at water, container ships, sailboats, and bridges, and another moment at the silhouettes of skyscrapers merging together at one end of the city, and the many arms with which freeways reached out over and between the buildings, over and under each other. He had the window open and the radio on, and let music and wind whistle about his ears. Sometimes he stopped, and stepped out like a tourist wanting to take a picture. But he only looked to see whether a small place was open enough, or a street lonely enough, or whether a staircase leading down from a steep, hilly street led only to a building or to the next street below.
On Sunday Georg forbade himself to look at the city map. He tried to get a feel for the city and its streets without it. He would have noted a suitable place on the map, but didn’t find any. Still, by evening he had an idea of the peninsula, the ocean to the west, the bay to the east, the Golden Gate Bridge to the north. And he had an idea of how the city had originally grown up in the north, on the bay, and later proliferated over the rest of the peninsula.
On Monday morning, with the city map, he proceeded systematically. He drove through the parks and then along the coast of the Pacific. He found isolated places in Golden Gate Park, but their isolation could only shield them from surprise by a hiker, not a purposeful pursuer. The ocean beach stretched out long and open; gray clouds under a gray sky, gulls beating in the wind, a few joggers, a few hikers, a surfer who never got beyond the first wave, a yellow dredger piling up or carting off sand. But in front of the wall separating the road and the beach there were too many cars parked with people sitting in them. He went to an isolated hot-dog stand, and when the man fished the hot frankfurter from the pot of water the steam rose up in a dense cloud. It was cold here; in the morning Georg had started out from the building on the bay under a blue sky, and in the center of the peninsula had driven into the fog covering the Pacific Coast.