Keith Thomson: Once a spy

Brooklyn was booming. Elsewhere. Drummond Clark’s block was still packed with boxy, soot-grayed houses, some settled at odd angles and all so close together they looked like one long soot-grayed building. At holiday time, the patchy displays of festive lights accentuated the cracks as much as anything.

On this bitter Christmas Eve, Drummond stood hunched in his small kitchen, alternately green and red in the reflection of a neighbor’s tree, struggling to open a can of soup for dinner. He wondered how all the years had come to this. No friends, no family. He couldn’t remember the last time one of the neighbors had invited him in.

Granted, a longtime widower wasn’t much of a fit in an increasingly young and family-oriented neighborhood. Also the world was increasingly elitist and materialistic, and his station lacked luster: He’d worked in sales at a middling appliance manufacturer for thirty years. And, he acknowledged, he lacked luster-in sixty-four years, one gets the message. But none of that quite accounted for tonight.

He knew that there was another explanation. A glaring one.

“What is it again?” he asked himself.

He couldn’t put a finger on it. He hoped the effort of getting his creaky can opener to do its job would jog his memory.

It didn’t. But at least he got the can open. A cylinder of chicken and stars slid out and plopped into the pot.

Hunger and anticipation kept him by the stove. When the soup came to a boil, he lifted the pot from the burner and hurried to the worn butcher-block table. His bowl, napkin, and soup spoon waited in a neat row.

He bypassed the table and emptied the soup onto the waist-high plastic fern by the side door.

An electronic sputter burst over the pair of miniature speakers in the attic three doors up the block. The tenants in the house were four clean-cut young men who claimed to be Brooklyn Polytechnic grad students. The one who went by Pitman didn’t know what to make of the noise. Sitting at the other end of the Ping-Pong table the “grad students” used as a desk, Dewart appeared equally puzzled. Like “Pitman,” “Dewart” was a pseudonym, probably chosen at random. Pitman liked to think it had been inspired by Dewart’s resemblance to Jimmy Stewart.

Glancing at his monitor, Dewart said, “Whatever the hell it is, it’s coming from number six. Which is six again?”

“Checking,” said Pitman. He pass-coded his way into a roster of electronic surveillance devices. “Probably one of the fiber-freaking-ops.”

The fiber-optical microphones each operated using light waves transmitted by a cable thinner than a human hair, and they wonderfully defied metal and nonlinear junction detectors. But they were famously temperamental, with polymer lithium batteries that needed changing every nine days-best-case. On this job that meant sneaking into Drummond’s house when he was out, which had been seldom since his disability leave began.

Ordinarily Pitman would have sent the devices in and out of the house’s ventilation system fitted to crawlers, robots the size of a common cockroach. Or he would have used mikes that drew power from the house itself, wired into the back of a light switch wall plate, for instance. A pinhole video camera concealed behind a mirror would have been nice too. The problem with such “simple” devices here was their relative ease of detection.

“Yep, fiber-op,” he relayed to Dewart, “in the planter in the kitchen.”

“Any idea what’s up with it?”

“A short, maybe?”

“How could that happen?”

“Maybe he thought he was watering the plant.”

“All his plants are plastic.”

“Good point.” Trying to ignore his rising anxiety, Pitman mouse-clicked to the feed from 20-N and 20-S, nickel-sized pinhole video cameras he’d painted the local streetlamp-gray and wired onto streetlamps at either end of the block.

His display showed a block devoid of motion except flickering Christmas lights and a wind-tossed bar coaster-he could read the Schlitz logo. He could also see Drummond’s side door dangling open. Drummond kept the door triple locked as a rule, except when taking out the trash. The alley was empty aside from garbage cans.

Pitman felt as if he’d been kicked in the stomach. “We need the JV,” he said. His mind was a feverish montage of the potential consequences of losing Drummond, including several scenarios in which one of the “junior varsity” players climbed to the attic and, on orders from above, drew a gun-end of scene.

Yes, surveillance units lost targets all the time, even much bigger and more sophisticated surveillance units-Pitman had heard of an eighty-person team in floating box formation that lost its target when the wheel artist’s car was cut off by a flock of kindergartners and a stubborn crossing guard.

But Drummond Clark wasn’t just any target, of course.

At six the next morning, a disagreeably frosty Christmas, Charlie Clark was the lone passenger on the Q11 bus rattling past a desolate stretch of Queens Boulevard discount stores, fast food restaurants, and office buildings in decline or awaiting demolition. He saw that the driver, a pleasant, fresh-faced man around his own age-thirty-was looking him over in the rearview mirror. Even when Charlie wore old sneakers and jeans torn at the knees, like now, strangers mistook him for a yuppie.

The driver called back, “Going out to the island to be with family?”

Charlie weighed telling the truth. The thing was, over the engine rumble and the thumping of tires in and out of potholes, he’d heard a certain wistfulness in the driver’s voice. Also, when boarding, he’d noticed the driver’s thick wedding band and a snapshot of two little girls taped to the fare box. Charlie figured that, preposterously early this morning, the guy had had to pry himself away from the warm bosom of his family to come spend his Christmas breathing icy diesel fumes, dodging tipsy holiday drivers, and enduring the recorded voice’s plodding recitation of the rules of disembarkation at every stop, even when no one disembarked. So probably he wouldn’t be cheered to learn it amounted to chauffeuring an inveterate gambler to the track.

“I’m going to see Great Aunt Edith,” Charlie said.

Great Aunt Edith was a filly.

The bus driver glowed as if his fare box had been replaced by an open fire. Charlie was warmed as well. To keep the poor bastard’s buzz going, he got off a stop before Aqueduct Racetrack, at a neighborhood of quaint but tired little brick and shingle houses that might well be populated exclusively by great aunts.

It meant walking a couple of extra blocks. He shivered, but not because of the cold.

It was the debt.

The Big A opened in 1894. Many horseplayers called it the Big H, for heaven, especially on sunny days when the breeze lofted an aromatic blend of hay, freshly mowed grass, and horses into the sweeping, twin-tiered grandstand.

Charlie had spent a good part of the past ten years in the grandstand but developed no such sentiments. He thought of the ancient colossus as the weight of one more stubbly guy in a stained shirt away from collapse-when he thought about it at all. His focus was almost always on the races or the goings-on before and after: happy snorts, dragging hooves, extra steps. While stubbly guys all around him were crumpling tickets from the race that had just ended and muttering about their luck, he drank up clues.

A few months ago, he had noticed a colt take an extra step on the way to the stalls, avoiding a puddle. He read it as aversion to water and filed it away until six weeks afterward, when it was raining in Louisville, the Downs were mud, and the same colt was favored-the exact scenario Charlie had gotten out of bed hoping for every day in the preceding six weeks. Betting the consensus second pick netted him a sporty new Volvo, which was almost as exhilarating as the twentieth of a second during which the horse crossed the wire.