Keith Thomson - Once a spy

Perriman had had to move its midtown Manhattan office, where Drummond supposedly worked, to Morningside Heights, inconvenient to clients and prospective clients. But space there was ten to fifteen dollars per square foot cheaper than midtown. Charlie had always thought that Drummond had the brains for better; his issue was people skills.

“Tell me again what it is you do there?” Charlie said.

“You know: I demonstrate the appliances in the showroom, then go on-site with building owners and property managers to ensure that their specifications and measurements are met.”

“Right, but that’s just your cover, right?”

“Cover?”

Charlie exhaled in an effort to dispel his exasperation. It didn’t work.

“How about this? When you’re on all your sales trips, do you ever do any work on the side for, like, the CIA?”

“Not that I’m aware.”

Which didn’t rule it out.

“The NSA?”

“Not that I’m aware.”

“I could get a list and call every place in Washington with a clandestine operations division, but if what we’ve seen so far is any indication about the resources of who or whatever’s after us, odds are it’d probably be a case of the mouse calling the cat. So it would be really swell if you could remember anything.”

Drummond sat up. “I think there is something about Washington.”

In his excitement Charlie found himself mirroring his father’s posture. “Yeah?”

Drummond massaged his temples, trying, it seemed, to stimulate the works within. “Something.”

“You did go there on an awful lot of sales trips.”

“A good percentage of North Atlantic Division’s building owners and property managers are there. I go on-site to ensure that their specifications and measurements-”

“Oh, right, of course,” Charlie said. But he was willing to bet that building owners and property managers had nothing to do with Drummond’s trips.

“And nothing compares with the cherry blossoms.”

There would be no cherry blossoms for months. The four-hour drive was worth it anyway, Charlie thought. D.C. was to spy agencies what Milwaukee was to breweries. And, if nothing else, as each pair of approaching headlights seemed to be saying, it was a good idea to get away.

The Fairview Inn was the type of motel once predominant on American roadsides, two stories of bricks, shaped like a brick itself, each upper-level room with an iron-railed balcony and each room on the ground floor opening onto a parking space. There were only four cars in the parking lot now, including a beat-up Toyota Cressida in the Reserved: Management spot behind the office. The Motel 6 on the other side of the New Jersey Turnpike had just two cars. And the Best Western Charlie and Drummond passed before that had had only a solitary RV. Evidently the holiday crowd had gone home, and business travel had yet to recommence. It was possibly the worst night of the year to be a fugitive, Charlie thought.

He brought the Buick to a stop beside the beat-up Toyota, out of sight of the Fairview Inn office. Over the rumble of the highway, he begged a sleepy Drummond, “Hang here for just a minute?”

Against his better judgment, he left the engine running so Drummond might stay warm, then he climbed into the stinging seventeen-degree night.

He rounded the corner to the side of the building that faced away from the highway. At the head of the row of ground floor rooms was a tiny office. The lights were on, but no one appeared to be inside.

Charlie rapped on the sliding window. Up popped a squat, middle-aged man, his doughy face flattened from sleeping against his desktop. His small eyes snapped to alertness, he smoothed the stripes of hair into place across his balding pate, straightened a clip-on tie bearing the Fairview’s mountain peak logo, and slid the glass open an inch.

“Good evening, sir,” he said. With a glance at his antique pocket watch, he added, “Technically, I should say, ‘Good morning.’”

According to the letters packed into the placard, this was NIGHT MANAGER A. BRODY. Although other managers shared this desk, Charlie had no doubt that the meticulously trimmed miniature Christmas tree on the sill was A. Brody’s work. Charlie usually felt a kinship to the A. Brodys of the world, miles below the station in life befitting their intellect. Now Charlie was far more interested in getting out of the cold.

“Hi, I’d like a room, please,” he said. To diminish the chance of his being identified, he stayed at the outermost limits of the office’s fluorescent haze.

Brody plucked a registration card from atop a neat stack, set it on his desk blotter, aligned it, and then tweaked it until it was exactly parallel to the edge of the desk.

“May I have your name, please, sir?” he asked finally.

“Ramirez,” Charlie said, and, as soon as he did, cursed himself. His friend Mickey’s last name, the first that had come to mind, was common enough around here. But even in the dark, with the bill of a Yankees cap pulled down to his eyes, Charlie was no Ramirez.

Indeed, Brody raised an brow. “And how many adults in your party, Mr. Ramirez?”

Charlie considered that the FBI bulletin might have reached the furthest outposts of civilization by now. “Just me.”

Brody’s brow stayed put, quieting Charlie’s anxiety. “That will be fifty-nine dollars and eighty cents, please, sir.”

Charlie paid with three twenties and received two dimes and a key card.

“Have a wonderful stay,” Brody said with, Charlie thought, inordinate cheer.

Room 105 smelled of bathroom cleanser in combination with the flowery spray used to mask worse smells. The walls trembled each time a truck passed. Although worn, the beds were clad in crisp, clean sheets that promised sleep. And Charlie was starved for sleep.

“But how can we go to bed?” he asked as he paced the frayed carpet, careful to stay away from the window. Drummond lay on the less concave of the two beds. “Any second they could burst through the door with guns drawn. Then what?”

Drummond sagged against his headboard. “That would be trouble?”

Charlie recognized that danger had preceded both of Drummond’s episodes of lucidity. Hopefully the threat alone would do the trick now. “How about this? Say a sharpshooter takes a crack at us from out there?” He waved at the window. The spotty vinyl shade filtered passing headlights so that they appeared on the inner wall of the room as giant, spidery shadows.

Drummond was captivated by the shadows.

“Dad, if you could just remember a name. Even a phone number could make a difference in whether or not we have a tomorrow.”

Drummond fluffed his pillow. “Maybe if we got some sleep?”

“I don’t suppose you’ve remembered who you work for?” Charlie asked, on the remote chance that his tactic had had some effect.

Drummond yawned. “Perriman Appliances.”

“And what’s your job?”

“Deputy district sales manager for the North Atlantic Division. I demonstrate the appliances in the showroom, then go on-site with building owners to-”

“So you said.” Charlie sighed.

He turned away from Drummond, continuing to pace in hope that the motion would stir up a new idea. Helen might have one. He yearned to call her-apart from his predicament. He had long accepted the horseplayer tenet that all of life is six-to-five against-until the moment she asked him out for a beer. The problem was that almost certainly he and Drummond had been followed after meeting her: In all likelihood, Drummond was right about the Department of Housing worker on the sidewalk outside the senior center. And if Lenore was under surveillance…

In any case, Helen already had told Charlie that there was no sure way to stimulate lucidity. Back at the senior center, she likened lucidity’s random occurrence to a basketball player of middling ability sinking four consecutive shots from three-point range. If there were an explanation, no one knew it. Sometimes, however, strong mental associations triggered latent memories. In this respect the Alzheimer’s sufferer was like the Vietnam veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder-show him a helicopter, he’s back in Saigon. Because the Alzheimer’s sufferer’s memory could be damaged, inoperative, or gone, however, finding such a precise mental association was a crapshoot, at best.