“That wasn’t built yet. This building was completed in 1913. Only the Eiffel Tower was taller, but that doesn’t count.”
“Do planes ever crash into the tall buildings?”
“Once in a while,” Baumann said. “A plane once crashed into the Empire State Building. And I know that once a helicopter trying to land on the roof of the Pan Am building broke apart, killing a lot of people.”
“A helicopter! Helicopters can land on the Pan Am building?”
“No more. They used to, but since that horrible accident, helicopters can only land in officially designated heliports.”
He brought them up to the main entrance on Broadway, with its ornately carved depressed arch, and pointed out the apex of the arch, the figure of an owl.
“That’s supposed to symbolize wisdom and industry and night,” Baumann said. He had always been an architecture buff; his time in Pollsmoor had given him ample time to read architectural histories. As a cover it was natural.
“How come those are empty?” Jared asked, pointing at two long niches flanking the portal.
“Excellent question. A well-known American sculptor was supposed to carve a statue of Frank W. Woolworth for one of those spaces, but for some reason it never got done.”
“Who was supposed to be in the other one?”
“They say Napoleon, but no one knows for sure.”
In the lobby, Baumann pointed out a plaster bracket near the ceiling, which he called a corbel. Jared could see only that it was a figure of a man with a mustache holding his knees, coins in both hands.
“Who’s that, do you think?” Baumann asked.
“Some old guy,” Jared said. “I don’t know. Weird-looking.”
“It is sort of weird-looking, you’re right. That’s old Mr. Woolworth,” Baumann said, “paying for his building with nickels and dimes. Because he paid all cash for the building. Mr. Woolworth’s office was modeled on Napoleon’s palace, with walls of green marble from Italy and gilded Corinthian capitals.” Jared didn’t know what Corinthian capitals were, but it sounded impressive.
“Where do you want to eat supper? McDonald’s?”
“Definitely,” Jared said.
“What do you know about the Manhattan Bank Building?” Sarah said suddenly.
Baumann was suddenly very alert. He turned to her casually, shrugged. “What do I know? I know it’s second-rate. Why do you ask?”
“Isn’t it designed by some famous architect?”
“Pelli, but not good Pelli. Now, you want to see good Pelli, take a look at the World Financial Center in Battery Park City. Look at the four towers-how, as the buildings rise, the proportion of windows to granite increases until the top is all reflecting glass. You can see the clouds float by in the tops of the towers. It’s amazing. Why are you so interested in the Manhattan Bank Building?”
“Just curious.”
“Hmm.” Baumann nodded contemplatively. “Say, listen,” he suddenly exclaimed, putting a hand on Jared’s shoulder. “I’ve got an idea. Jared, do you think you could teach me how to throw a pass?”
“Me? Sure,” Jared said. “When?”
“How about tomorrow afternoon?”
“I think Mom’s working.”
“Well, Sarah, maybe I could borrow Jared for the afternoon, while you’re at work. We could go to the park, just Jared and me. What do you say?”
“I guess that would be all right,” she said without conviction.
“Yeah!” Jared exclaimed. “Thanks, Mom!”
“Okay,” she said. “But you promise me you’ll be careful? I don’t want anything to happen to your head.”
“Come on, don’t worry so much,” Jared said.
“Okay,” she said. “Just be careful.”
Late at night, the phone rang. Startled out of a restless, anxious dream, Sarah picked it up,
“You fucking some guy?”
“Who is-”
“You fucking some guy? Right in front of my son?”
“Peter, you’re drunk,” Sarah groaned, and hung up.
The phone rang again a few seconds later.
“You think you can take him away for the summer?” Peter shouted. “That’s not the arrangement. I get him on weekends. Yeah, you thought I wouldn’t track you down, did you?”
“Look, Peter, you’ve had too much to drink. Let’s talk in the morning, when you’re sober-”
“You think you can get away with it? I got news for you. I’m coming to visit my son.”
“Fine,” Sarah said, depleted. “So come visit.”
“He’s my little boy. I’m not going to let you take him away from me.”
And he hung up.
In a tiny apartment a block away, Baumann listened on the phone.
“Fine. So come visit.”
“He’s my little boy. I’m not going to let you take him away from me.”
Sarah’s ex-husband hung up, and then Sarah hung up, and then Baumann, intrigued, hung up too.
People say things over the phone they should never say, even the most suspicious people, even professionals who know what can be done with a telephone these days. The personal conversations Sarah had were sometimes useful to Baumann, but it was the business chats that had been most informative.
Baumann had heard everything Sarah Cahill had said on the telephone ever since the day after they slept together. Her ex-husband had called once. A few female friends from Boston had called, but she seemed not to have many friends. When she used the phone it was usually for work. Jared had had long, rambling, trivial conversations with a few of his buddies; Baumann never wasted his time listening.
It is not easy to tap a phone or bug an apartment. Placing the tap is easy-that isn’t the problem. The problem is the technology.
If you plant a bug in the walls of a room, or in a phone, or even in the A-66 connection panel on the floor of the apartment building, you must stay very close at hand, because most bugs broadcast on VHF, which stands for “very high frequency.” You must have an apartment nearby, or remain in a van within a few hundred yards, and that was not possible in this case. Once there was a vogue for something called the “infinity transmitter” or “harmonica bug,” but it ties up the phone line and is easy to detect and doesn’t work all that well, anyway. The CIA met with its inventor and said sorry, but no thanks.
For a while, intelligence agencies were excited about something called the laser microphone-the watchers try to bug a room by shooting a beam of light on the room’s window from the outside. The sounds in the room make the window glass vibrate, and the vibrations of the glass in turn vibrate a small glass prism attached to the outside of the window, which redirects the light beam back toward the watchers. You look at that shimmering spot with a telescope equipped with a photocell, which converts the light to an electrical signal, which is then amplified and converted back into sound.
Nature and architecture and logistics, however, tend to get in the way. Traffic sounds almost always interfere, as well as noise from TV and radio, even water moving in pipes. And you must find a vantage point directly opposite the room in question, which is not always easy to do in the city. The technology is very impressive, but except in the most ideal circumstances it works poorly.
So you spend a little money-ten thousand dollars, in fact-and you act the jealous boyfriend. You go to a private detective and say you’re convinced your girlfriend is fucking around, you’re sick of this shit. I want you to hang a wire on her, you say. I want it to come to me. Once it’s in place, you tell the detective, you’re out of the loop.
Private investigators are asked to do this kind of thing all the time. They have contacts at the telephone company’s central station, cooperative guys, guys they know they can do business with.