Tool of the Trade
Circumstantial evidence, but good enough for us. The FBI sent out a mailing to every hospital in the country, with a picture of the Scalpel. Did anyone like this show up on February 19 or soon after, seeking treatment for a serious wound? He’d lost more than a quart of blood.
We did get a positive identification, but by then the trail was cold. A couple of weeks later, a country doctor in Unionville, Maryland, saw the picture on a hospital visit and said sure, he’d treated the guy. The wound was badly infected and had been sutured by an amateur—Shilkov claimed that it had happened during a deep-woods camping expedition; he’d done the stitchery himself. The doctor drained and dressed the wound and wrote a prescription for antibiotics, and gently gave him a psychiatric referral. Then it was ten days before he dropped by the Frederick hospital and saw the picture.
So Shilkov could be anywhere by now, and Foley could be anywhere, and we never have had the faintest idea where Mrs. Foley was. Did they all come together in Cabin John on February 19?
Jefferson pointed out a grisly possibility. The couple who were so characteristically slashed apart may not have been killed by Shilkov, but by someone who wanted to implicate him. The other two could have been killed by anyone who was an accurate pistol shot—such as Nicholas Foley.
Or maybe it was a matter unrelated to the Foley case. A specialist like Shilkov could have come to the United States on multiple assignments. Like the Boston murder, the bloodbath could have been an internal KGB affair, an interrogation that got out of hand. Though in that case you wouldn’t expect the Soviet embassy to press for an explanation. Unless they were trying to misdirect us.
Jefferson and I got to the Cabin John scene after midnight. There was still a POLICE LINE-DO NOT CROSS cordon around the building, but only a couple of freezing rookies guarding things. The FBI espionage specialist had come along with us.
They’d taken the bodies away, leaving only improbably large frozen splashes of clotted blood and stacks of Polaroid color glossies showing the disposition of the corpses at the time of discovery. The FBI woman made it as far as the pictures of the mutilated bodies and then ran outside to throw up. I felt like following her. Jefferson didn’t look too good, either.
The man at the center of all this is a self-effacing, witty fellow who was the most popular teacher in his department, a family man with impeccable academic, military, and professional credentials. Is it always this way? They interview the neighbors of a mass murderer and he was invariably a nice guy who loved children and took care of his aged parents. He never pulls the wings off flies or brags about his collection of snuff movies.
The expression on the face of the castrated man will stay with me forever. I’ll be eligible for retirement in two years. Will I last that long?
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: NICK
We decided to drive when we left Miami, rather than push our luck with airports. Somewhere in Washington or Boston there might be a picture of James Norwood, not resembling Robert Redford. And of course they had pictures of Valerie.
Valerie pointed out that a “style” disguise would be more effective than any false-wig kind of masquerade. So although it hurt, we each bought a complete tacky-polyester wardrobe from K mart, got absurd haircuts, and made the trip to Mexico in a bright-yellow Mercury station wagon, five years old, with HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS stickered on the bumper. Nearly two hundred people loved Jesus between Miami and Zacatecas. We waved and smiled and honked back.
We were going to Mexico to get new faces. What I’d done, in the course of one night, was work my way up the Miami dope-dealing ladder, starting with a smooth-talking cocaine retailer in a notorious disco in Coconut Grove and winding up in the company of a dark man dressed all in silk, in the Cuban quarter, who dealt only in tens of kilograms. His English was no better than my Spanish, but between the two he understood and answered my question: Where would one go to have a new face constructed surgically and be certain the law wouldn’t know? He told me about the Clínico Libre de Zacatecas—the “free clinic” of Zacatecas—and generously gave me an attaché case full of hundred-dollar bills, because the name was a sarcasm. For some reason I let him live, and all the others who led me to him. Maybe I’m getting soft, and sane. Maybe I just know that when one dies, another has replaced him within an hour. Like malignant cells, or the brooms in The Sorcerers Apprentice. Our humanly bottomless capacity for evil. As if I were in a position to pass judgment.
The four-day drive from Miami to the border was pleasant, cruising along the Gulf Coast highway, putting on our lower-middleclass hick act whenever we got out of the car. We were able to keep straight faces most of the time, though I lost it once in a San Antonio souvenir shop, when Valerie bought a pair of sunglasses that looked like a prop from an old Buck Rogers movie. Even the clerk who rang them up was trembling with suppressed laughter.
We crossed the border at Nuevo Laredo after midnight, as I had been advised to do, and palmed the Customs guard a twenty-dollar bill, being deliberately clumsy and obvious. He chalked Xs on all our luggage, letting us pass without opening any of them. On the other side of the border we rested at a Mexican Holiday Inn, where the night clerk converted three of our hundred-dollar bills into pesos, at a creative rate of exchange. We started south at first light.
The road to Zacatecas had some rollercoaster twists and turns in the mountains, but was mostly a ruler-straight line through dusty desert, with occasional small, dusty towns, and the larger cities Monterrey and Saltillo, also dusty. Actually, we both would have liked to slow down and see the country, which had a spare beauty neither of us had experienced before, but there were time constraints. Radical plastic surgery isn’t an outpatient procedure, and they weren’t going to delay the summit while I healed.
We spent the night in the suburbs of Saltillo, again leaving at first light, and arrived in Zacatecas in the early afternoon. First we went to a bank and rented the largest safe-deposit box we could buy, filling it completely with hundred-dollar bills. That left us with three packets of ten thousand dollars each, for spending money.
The Free Clinic didn’t advertise in the streets, didn’t have an address in any directory. We’d been told to look up one Eduardo de Rivera at 26 Hidalgo. Of course he wasn’t in, and the housekeeper didn’t know where we could find him or when he’d be back. We sat in an outdoor cantina on the other side of the street for a couple of hours watching the door. When a man in a business suit rushed up to it, we were right behind him. Cutting short our introductions, he ushered us in hurriedly and turned us over to the housekeeper, saying he’d be back in a few minutes, and ran upstairs.
Like all the other residences on the block, 26 Hidalgo looked rundown from the outside, just a crumbling dusty adobe wall with a heavy door, double-locked and braced with metal bands. Inside, the place was opulent. Thick carpets and expensive woods in large, cool rooms with high ceilings, brass fixtures gleaming labor-intensively. Medieval wall hangings and pre-Columbian sculptures. We passed a grand piano and an ornately carved antique billiard table on our way to the atrium, where the housekeeper, Consuelo, seated us in comfortable wicker chairs in front of a trickling fountain that was very old and ostentatiously Italian. There was a riot of orchids in planters around the room, and exotic dwarf fruit trees. Wordlessly, she brought a bottle of Dom Pérignon and three crystal fluted glasses. She poured two of them and disappeared.
Valerie toasted me. “I think we’ve been in the wrong racket all these years.”
“Doing all right now, though.” I switched to Larry Martino’s soft, refined voice. “Here he comes.”
Senor de Rivera had traded his coat and tie for a cardigan pullover. He looked like Carl Sagan back in the seventies. The man who came down with him looked like George Raft in the thirties. Silent, unsmiling, stuffed into a dark suit. He obviously had company in the suit,.45 caliber or so. He stayed at the entrance to the atrium, unfortunately out of the watch’s range.
De Rivera’s English had an unexpected Hebrew accent. I
later learned he had grown up in Argentina at a time when being Jewish was becoming more and more dangerous, and so had gone to college and medical school in Tel Aviv, where he first learned the tongue of Shakespeare and Henny Youngman. “It is a facelift you want,” he said. “One or both?”
“Both of us want some modification,” I said. “For me, a combination: rhytidectomy, rhinoplasty, mentoplasty, and blepharoplasty….”
“Okay.” He put a finger to his lips. “You have looked into it. Face-lift, nose reconstruction, chin augmentation, eyelift. Expensive and painful. You are sure, or you want advice?”
“I’ll take advice.”
“Okay. You aren’t doing this so you look pretty. You’re doing this so that someone looks at you, he sees someone else.”
“That’s right.”
“Okay. I can make you look young like your own son. Brow-lift and then hair transplant to cover the scars.”
“I’d like that, but the hair transplant takes months, doesn’t it?” He nodded. “I have to be out of here in five or six weeks.”
“Okay. The other procedures should be doable in that time. The swelling will be down by then, and the scars not too obvious. Perhaps some numbness. Even paralysis. You are not young.” He turned to Valerie. “Señora. You also must leave in six weeks?”
“Maybe five,” she said.
“Okay. Face-lift, eyelift, brow-lift. I would say. Then hair dye and careful practice with makeup, new patterns. Forgive me, but you are not used to makeup.”
“I don’t normally wear any. It’s part of this disguise.”
“Sure, okay. We have a woman here who can teach you everything.” He reached under the cardigan and brought out a calculator, which he held up to the light for a few seconds, then started punching: “Two facelifts… two eyelifts. One of each… brow-lift, rhinoplasty, mentoplasty. Look,” he said, pointing at me, “I can make your ears not stick out so much, too. But you got to wear a band around your head while you sleep, maybe six weeks.”
“I’d better not chance it.”
“Okay. American dollars?” I said yes. “That will be two hundred fourteen thousand dollars, cash in advance.”
“Ouch. That’s almost ten times as much as the States.”
“Okay, so go to the Mayo Clinic. Maybe they take Medicare for it, hm? Maybe State Farm?”
“I’ll tell you what. We won’t haggle over the price. You’ll get your two hundred grand. But we give you half when you begin the procedures and the other half when we’re satisfied with the results.”
He slowly replaced the calculator, staring at nothing. “Look. Number one, I should do it over and over until you like your looks? What do you mean ‘satisfied’?”
“Just that we look radically different.”
“Okay, that much I can always guarantee. But like I say, there might be some paralysis. Maybe some pain we have to go in after at some later date.”
“That’s all right”
“Okay, number two. I got to have cash in advance because there are so many people involved. I just do the rhytidectomies. I got to fly in people from all over the place for the other procedures. A hundred thousand won’t do it”
“Oh, baloney,” Valerie said. “You fly in four people to do our eyes and noses. That’s eight thousand dollars first-class airfare, max, if they all live in Tasmania. Leaves enough to pay them each more than twenty thousand dollars for a day’s work. If they get more than that, I’m gonna walk out of here and go to medical school.”
He looked hurt “There are more than four people.”
“The offer stands,” I said, and turned on the watch, unnecessarily.
He stared away for a few seconds and then nodded.
“Okay, you bring me the hundred and seven and we’ll start calling people.”
I took the three packages of bills out of my pockets, and Valerie opened her purse. “Would you pick up the phone for sixty?”
He slit the plastic of one with a thumbnail and pulled a bill out of the middle. He held it up to the light and studied it closely, then crumpled it up and smoothed it out. “Okay. Forgive me, but I had a patient once who printed his own money.”
“A reasonable precaution. We have a precaution, too: We don’t both go under at the same time. One of us must always be awake while the other’s in surgery.”
He stacked up the six packets. “Actually, that’s not an unusual arrangement. Sometimes they even want an observer in the operating room. That’s awkward. Federico”—he looked up at the George Raft character—“Telefonea un taxi para los estimados señores.”
He stood up and bowed slightly. “Federico will tell you when your taxi comes. Be here tomorrow at nine o’clock… and, Senora, don’t eat any breakfast. We’ll work on you first.”
“This is the clinic, here?” she asked.
He smiled. “Indeed. The smallest and most expensive hospital in Mexico.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: VALERIE
Nick said it feels like having been on the losing end of a fistfight, this long healing period. I wouldn’t know. I was glad for the strong painkillers.
For weeks we were virtual prisoners at 26 Hidalgo, claustrated in a set of rooms that had no mirrors. Of course we could see each other, and lied about what we saw.
It was doubly painful, watching Nick agonize through the surgical procedures and also watching his face disappear, the man I’ve loved for more than half my life. I think of myself as practical rather than romantic. But no one is completely one or the other, I guess.
His chin augmentation gave me the shudders. They make a long incision in the gum, between front teeth and lower lip, and slide a piece of plastic down over your chinbone. It gave him a Kirk Douglas profile. I’d just started getting used to his chin, after all these years of seeing hair. Now I have twice as much chin to get used to.
Both of us temporarily got bright-red bloody sclera (the “whites” of the eyes) from the eyelifts, and since Nick couldn’t wear contacts after the operation, they brought him a pair of eyeglasses. I could see my vague reflection in them, enough to tell that Zacatecas was better off not having me on the streets for a while.
I was just as glad not to have the rhinoplasty, which gave Nick hell for almost a week, cotton packing jammed up his nose, an itchy cast taped over half his face. My brow-lift was a lot easier, though for a couple of weeks afterward I felt like I was doomed to walk around for the rest of my life with an expression of perpetual wide-eyed amazement.
There was no magical transition scene like you see in the movies, the surgeon slowly unwrapping the coils of bandage to reveal Natalie Wood bathed in soft light, radiant, impeccably coiffed. Instead, the bruises went from purple to blue to brown to green to yellow, and disappeared; meanwhile, the stitches came out, one set after another. Then one day we looked just like normal people, if strangers and a little under the weather.
They dyed my hair coal black and showed me how to use makeup dramatically, Latin style. Nick kept his ash-blond bleach job but started to brush his hair straight back, rather than part it. He looked like a man about forty, prematurely balding. I looked younger. De Rivera offered to complete the job with a thirty-five-thousand-dollar breast-and-ass lift, but I said no, gracias. I didn’t plan to go back into the escort business. Besides, whatever this figure’s shortcomings, I have worked hard for its virtues.
We walked around Zacatecas for a few days, getting a feel for freedom after so many weeks of confinement in our elegant prison, our stifling bandages. It’s a good town for exercise, very up and down. A couple of the sidewalks are so steep they had steps molded into them.
We also practiced being our new selves. The Free Clinic documents your new identity pretty thoroughly. Nick was Anson Rafferty, an unemployed-by-choice linguistics professor who lives in Miami with me, his wife, Linda, woman of some means. “Rafferty” was a person Nick had made up while he was working for the CIA: a man who spoke fluent Russian and had done some contract work for the Agency in the
sixties and seventies.
We had a family passport with four years’ worth of travel in Europe and South America; we made up and memorized consistent stories about the places we’d been, which was sort of fun. Florida driver’s licenses and an assortment of credit cards—the American Express Gold Card being in my name, naturally. We had a post office box in Miami where birth and marriage certificates were waiting (since it would seem suspicious to be carrying those around). They even went so far as to supply us with an assortment of appropriate business cards and receipts. Nick says they call that “pocket litter” in the spy biz.
I would have liked to relax in Zacatecas for a long time. Clean mountain air, cool mornings, warm afternoons. No KGB agents but my husband, and I didn’t mind him spying on me. But we had to get back to the muggy traffic clot of Miami and get to work. Since it was my idea, at least nominally, I couldn’t object.
We left the polyester disguises and Mercury station wagon for the clinic to hock and took an asthmatic puddle jumper to Guadalajara, where I put together a wardrobe for us from boutiques and a classy used-clothing store. Opened an obscenely large dollar account at the largest bank, with cash, and then closed it with a check. They didn’t even blink. Then we caught a comfy 777 back to Miami, where Customs scrutinized us for a half hour and found nothing. If they’d come upon the $397,850 cashier’s check, it might have given them pause, but it wasn’t illegal. The only illegal things we were smuggling in were sealed behind new faces.
We still had the lease on the West Miami high rise, but didn’t go back, in case they had trailed us that far—the CIA, the KGB, or the people who’d given us the attaché case full of money. We picked up the documents claiming we had been born and married, and drove a rented car north until we got tired, West Palm Beach. I opened an account with the cashier’s check and got a fancy television set as a premium. (I could have chosen a grandfather clock instead, but decided it would look tacky in the hotel room.) Then I wrote checks to three other banks, opening CD accounts in my name and a smallish joint checking account in one, just thirty grand.