Scott Turow - Personal injuries

"How come the cutest girl's always holding the flag?" he asked her. She was African-American, with a broad face and wide eyes and lovely, peaked cheekbones that plumped with an enormous grin while she flagged him on.

"How do you know her?" Evon asked as the Mercedes spurted ahead in the traffic.

He looked puzzled. "I don't."

"And you just say that to her?" "Sure. Why not?"

"Because she might mind."

"Did it look like she minded?"

"But what's the point? Can I ask? What's the point of saying that?" Her tone was careful, hoping not to be incendiary. But she'd always wanted to ask his kind of man this question.

"She's cute," he answered. "You think it's easy to look cute in a construction helmet? I don't. You think it's an accident she looks cute? I mean, she got up in the morning. She tied that bandanna on her head, even though she'd be wearing a hard hat. She looked at her tush in her jeans. Who was she doing that for?" On the morning ride, he drove in without a topcoat, and he laid the long hand with which he'd been gesturing on his bright tie. "For me. A million guys like me. And so I say thanks. That's all."

"That's all?"

"Maybe I'll come through her intersection again someday. Maybe the light turns red. Maybe she's just getting off for lunch. I mean, I can imagine anything. But right now, it's thanks. That's all."

That was Feaver. He wasn't a mouth-breather, not the kind of jerk always hopping along on his erection as if it were a pogo stick. He had some style. But he was still on alert, a heat-seeking missile shot through the sky and waiting to lock on. He stood too close when he was speaking. His wife lay at home, dying by the inch each day, and he did not wear a wedding ring. Falling into his car each morning, Evon almost gasped at the sickly mix of sweet smells from his eau de cologne, hair spray, fancy shaving cream and body lotion. He was his own most deeply prized possession and he liked to advertise this, as if the sheer power of his vanity might overcome a woman.

When she'd met McManis the first time in Des Moines, he'd warned her.

`Our c.i.'-confidential informant, he meant, a polite term for snitch-`apparently has a big rep as a ladies' man. You're gonna have to act the part, and he's the type who might want to blend fact and fiction.' Jim had given her three rules. First, don't put up with anything that bothered her; they'd back her completely. Second, don't be offended, because she wasn't going to change him.

`And third,' McManis had said, hesitating long enough that she knew this was the important one, `don't fall for it.

No chance of that, she'd answered. So far, there hadn't been many problems. One time in his office, she'd gotten a sly, sidewise look as he asked, almost offhandedly, when it was Bonita was supposed to stumble upon them going at it on his leather sofa, a portion of the scenario that Evon was still hoping to skip. She'd stiff-armed him with a quick look and had heard no more about it.

But there wasn't a woman in the office who wouldn't have warned her. The female employees gathered for coffee breaks and lunches in a narrow interior area that was referred to as `the kitchen,' a place where a male never visited for a period longer than half a minute to retrieve coffee or the brown sack containing his lunch. Setting her cover, Evon had casually mentioned how kind Robbie had been, stopping for her each morning. Oretta, one of the file clerks, had hooted.

"Girl." she said. "you get in his taxi. sooner or later he'll be askin for the fare." Shrill, lascivious laughter from each woman reverberated off the steel cabinets. But later, as Bonita was filing, she made it a point to catch Evon in the corridor.

"You know, when I started in here, I was single, you know, we partied some." She did not use a name but glanced over her shoulder and tipped the teased-up tufts of jet hair toward Robbie's office. Bonita would not have gotten through the interview without catching Robbie's attention. She wore all her clothing a half-size too tight, her pleasing contours well displayed. "But pretty soon, I went back in to seein Hector. And you know, you've got a relationship or somethin, he'll flirt a little, but he won't push or nothin, if you really mean it. He wants you to like him. That's how he is. Like a little kid." Bonita slammed the long white file cabinet back into its recess in the wall. "And you'll like him," she said. Within the raccoonish circles of shadow, Bonita's dark eyes glimmered with the penetrating light of conviction. Then she moved off, leaving Evon with a momentary feeling akin to fright.

The jealous ruler of all the blinking equipment housed in the conference room cabinet was an electronics expert detailed to Petros named Alf Kiecker. Alf was a happy pirate, burly and pie-faced, with more curly reddish hair than I would have thought the FBI tolerated. Klecker, as I came to learn, had spent many years in D.C. as a 'black-bag guy,' who'd done the surreptitious break-ins when a judge had approved installing a bug. He was renowned in the Bureau for having remained more than a full twenty-four hours in a janitor's closet in the U.S. Senate Building in order to avoid being detected during ABSCAM.

Immediately before this assignment, Alf had dwelled on the `black world' side of the Bureau, working what the agents called FCI, foreign counterintelligence. He arrived on January 27 to prepare Robbie for his first recorded encounter with Walter Wunsch, carrying a bagful of gizmos that were only now being released for domestic use. Tape recorders, he said, were out. And the standard radio transmitter c.i.'s usually wore, the T-4, was dangerous these days, when any kid with a police scanner could stumble on the signal. Instead Alf had brought a device called a FoxBIte. It had been developed by a retired Bureau tech guy, who'd licensed the design to his former employers for a fortune. It was about half the size of a package of cigarettes, was less than an inch thick, and weighed only six ounces. It did not contain enough metal to set off the courthouse magnetometers and it recorded not to tape but to memory cards, which were downloaded to a computer for replay. To provide an ear on what was happening, and a backup in case the FoxBIte failed, Robbie would also wear a slightly larger transmitting unit, `a digital frequency hopper,' as Alf called it, which would broadcast an encrypted signal across a randomized series of channels. A field playback unit, programmed to receive and record the FoxBlte's signal, would be housed in a surveillance van parked near the courthouse.

Robbie shook his head as he hefted the two units.

"I got a pen that records to a microchip," he told Kiecker.

"Son," Alf said, `you let a defense lawyer loose with the kind of fidelity your microchip gets and there'll be twelve people nodding when he claims the defendant was saying `honey,' not `money.' No offense, George."

None taken, I replied. The five of us-Evon, Robbie, McManis, Alf, and me-filled the small conference room. The design of McManis's suite had made this the most secure meeting place, since it was not visible from reception. The furnishings were somewhat spartan, a long rectangular Parsons-style conference table surrounded by black vinyl barrel chairs on casters, a contrast to the lavish improvements left by the prior tenant. McManis's personal office and the conference room each had two walls wainscoted in the same red oak as the entry. Expensive, rosy Karastan carpeting softened sound throughout.

"This puppy gives you the highest fidelity possible," Alf said. "You can tell what kind of heels a perp's got on his shoes. No joshin."

Klecker showed Robbie the Velcro holster which he'd secure on Feaver's inside thigh to hold the equipment. The lead for the tiny omnidirectional mike, black and smaller than the nail on my little finger, would come out the top of his zipper, hidden under the flap on his trousers. Feaver had been told to wear a dark suit for that reason. Holding the two units against his thigh, he remained dubious.