Tool of the Trade

  We slept twelve hours, and then Nick started the delicate business of getting a job as President Fitzpatrick’s Russian translator. He had put the wheels in motion before we left for Mexico.

  We’d found out that Fitzpatrick’s usual translator, in French as well as in Russian, was J. Cameron Lambert, a general in the Air Force Reserve and dedicated party hack. He had done a lot of work in the primaries and delivered at least New Hampshire, and this was his reward: Special Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Assistant Director of Presidential Foreign Advance. He was a robust man in his midsixties, who was about to fall ill with the flu. Unable to make the Russian trip, he would recommend his old friend Anson Rafferty. Speaks Russkie like a native. Real patriot. Did some hush-hush work for the CIA, never could tell me what it was about. President Fitzpatrick would be a sucker for that; he loved spy stuff.

  When Nick had created the dossier on Rafferty, he’d put his own fingerprints in the file, but the picture was his old new face, and he’d only given a sketchy background. So before he made the move on J. Cameron Lambert, he had to make sure that Anson Rafferty existed as a whole paper person, with an up-to-date photograph. That meant he had to talk his way into the right file room at Langley. He made some phone calls.

  To give us a West Palm address, I rented a swank efficiency under my mother’s maiden name. Then I went to the bank to get us traveling money and ran into an annoying wall of tellers and vice-presidents: “You can’t draw on this account; your check hasn’t cleared.” But it was a cashier’s check. “We have no record of what kind of check it was: there will be a ten- to fourteen-day waiting period.” Let me get my husband.

  Nick came in with his watch and withdrew twenty thousand in small bills from the account of a real estate firm with its main office in Bogota. He conducted the transaction from a vice-president’s office, so that his face wouldn’t be on the teller’s camera.

  Packing for the trip, I had to admit I was getting to like this strange life. Not many people have to leave clothes behind because there’s too much money clogging the suitcase.

  We took the first morning flight to Washington and set up shop. Nick had me do the detail work while he went out to keep a couple of appointments at Langley. “Anson Rafferty” had a post office box in Georgetown, which was a solid jam of advertising circulars. I rented us an apartment only a couple of blocks from Nick’s old one. We had to assume that the “James Norwood” identity was no longer safe, though Nick had set up a cover story about a year’s sabbatical. People might wonder why he didn’t look like Robert Redford anymore.

  The second day Nick came home tired but in a good humor. He opened a bottle of beer and sat down in front of the picture window that looked out on the quiet street. Six weeks had made a big difference in Washington; instead of snow, buds and even blooms. Downtown the cherry blossoms were riotously declaring Japanese-American solidarity. Our street had dogwood, for resurrection and hope. I got a glass and sat down next to him and helped him with his beer.

  “I really think it’s going to work,” he said. “I really do.”

  “Did you get to the translator today?”

  “Lambert, yeah. No problem. He keeps an office next to Blair House; I just called him and suggested we have lunch. Walked a few blocks to the Hofbrau. I finished most of the convincing before we got to the restaurant.

  “Turns out he wasn’t enthusiastic about going to Leningrad anyway. He’s been there twice before, and both times his arthritis gave him hell for months.”

  “The water?”

  “Foreigners don’t drink the water. Not even people from Moscow. You can preserve small animals in it. He thinks it was something in the air.

  “Anyhow, I told him he was going to start coming down with the flu this afternoon. He’s to call Fitzpatrick and beg off, suggesting me as a substitute. I don’t suppose the president has called.”

  “No… I’m almost sure I would’ve remembered.”

  “Right.” He ruffled my hair. “Lambert would normally go out a week or ten days ahead of time, with the advance protocol team. I’ll do that too, but we’ll have one of Lambert’s assistants to do the actual time juggling and fork counting. I just want to meet the Soviet translators and, if possible, the premier. Make sure the machine works on everybody.”

  “What if the premier’s hard of hearing? He’s pretty old.”

  “Nothing in his CIA file about it. Lots about his digestion and back problems. No way to tell, of course, except try the machine. Same with Fitzpatrick. He’s older.”

  We both jumped when the phone rang. It was the president’s social secretary, asking whether Mr. Rafferty would like to join Mr. and Mrs. Fitzpatrick for lunch tomorrow. Nick got me included in the invitation.

  We split another beer over that, and I got so nervous, I had to go out and buy a new dress, cursing myself for personifying a cartoon cliché female. It was a nice dress, though, and the shoes and purse and hat weren’t bad either.

  We’d been told apologetically to arrive at least a half hour early, to accommodate security requirements. The Secret Service men and women were thorough, and not remarkably polite about it It’s a good thing Nick had found my FBI file and fiddled with the fingerprint record. Aging Radical Apprehended Sneaking Into White House Luncheon.

  The social secretary eventually rescued us from the minions of the law and ushered us down to the Rose Room, where we were seated at a four-person table and plied with California wine, politically correct but unexciting. After about ten minutes, the president and Mrs. Fitzpatrick came bustling down. He declined the vin du Ernest and Julio in favor of a symbolic martini with more olive than vodka.

  It’s hard not to be in awe of a president, even if you voted against him. The White House sings with power, the continuity of power, and the tenant may be temporary, but he’s the focus of it all. Fitzpatrick didn’t just bask in it. He glowed.

  I found myself wondering what he’d been like before—how much of his undeniable charm and charisma was the power of high office amplified through an appropriate, perhaps carefully invented, persona. Whether he’d be as impressive as a college dean or a shopkeeper. Well, he hadn’t been chosen at random. There had to be a lot of mana there from the beginning.

  I’d never had pheasant under glass before. I could make it a habit.

  Molly Fitzpatrick and I mostly ate and listened while our husbands exchanged observations and ideas about the Russians and the upcoming trip. Nick seemed convincing in his worldly, conservative Rafferty disguise. The two times he’d visited the Soviet Union before had been deep-cover CIA assignments around Kiev; Fitzpatrick had been briefed about them. (If he knew that all of Rafferty’s putative supervisors for these assignments were now conveniently dead, he didn’t mention it) He assured us that even if ne Soviets knew that Rafferty had done some work for the CIA, they wouldn’t make an issue of it, so long as he wasn’t actively spying anymore. They assume that any American who speaks Russian is a spook, anyhow.

  The president took Nick upstairs to look at some of the classified arrangements, leaving his wife in charge of me. That got a little dicey.

  Molly Fitzpatrick could have been a liability to a politician with presidential ambitions. When they’d married, he was a recently widowed fifty-year-old; she was a girl barely twenty, a friend of the family who had helped look after their children. Twenty years later, she turned out to be a real asset, a symbol of Fitzpatrick’s agelessness and his link to the young conservatives in both parties. Molly was the first actually glamorous woman to hold the “office” since Jacqueline Kennedy. She had only had a high school education, but she was as sharp as she was beautiful.

  We were walking around the room with our sherry, looking at the paintings, when she dropped her bomb: “So how long has it been since the facelift?”

  I spilled a little wine. “Pardon?”

  “Guess I’m too California. Forget it.”

  “No, really, I-I’m just surprise
d. I didn’t think it showed.”

  “Takes one to know one. I got overhauled right after Gid got elected, wanted to be okay before the Inauguration. You think that wasn’t a bitch. The reporters agreed not to notice, but for a while there I spent more time at the makeup table than an actress. You know, slowly evolving my new look. Even though I spent a month under wraps at the clinic, in Mexico.”

  Good God. “Zacatecas?” I regretted it the moment I said it.

  “Take what?”

  “Oh, that’s the town where my clinic was. Where in Mexico?”

  “Yeah, I was down in Acapulco. Didn’t get much sun an’ fun, though. Sort of sit around and try not to pick at the stitches.”

  “I know, they start itching the day they stop hurting.”

  “It was nice, though; I’ll give you the name of the place. I’m goin’ down every eight or ten years until, you know, it doesn’t make any difference. Every room has its own swimming pool out front and every morning somebody throws a handful of rose petals on the water.”

  “I could live with that.”

  “Yeah. So how come you got it? I mean, not to criticize, God knows, but for me it was kind of a cold-blooded thing, professional thing; for eight more years I’ve gotta be Gid’s little girl. It wasn’t out of vanity. You don’t strike me as vain, either.”

  “Well…”

  “Look, I know I’m way out of line. Like Gid says, I’ve got a real nose problem. Forget it.”

  “No, that’s okay. With me I guess it was simple depression, the usual, a kind of therapy. Twenty-five years married, you know. Sort of dreading menopause and being an old lady.”

  She put a hand on my shoulder. “God, don’t I know. Don’t I know.” We stopped at a painting of Martha Washington, looking prim and spinsterish. “You got to wonder. It must’ve been easier on them, none of this youth culture BS, no Hollywood, no image problems. ‘Hey, I’m an old lady. That’s what happens if you live long enough.’ My grandmother, she lived in her eighties, and just seemed to love it. Putting up jam, you know, baby-sitting for everybody. I can’t see myself that way. I’d even like to, but I can’t.” She laughed harshly. “I’m a rock-an’-roller, for Christ sake. I can’t be a grandmother!”

  I had to laugh, coo. I liked her. “Me, too. When I read that Ringo Starr was going bald, God, it put a chill down my spine.”

  “Yeah, and Gid would say ‘Ringo Who?’ Anson’s a lot younger than that, isn’t he?”

  “Oh yeah.” I felt a little twinge of Nick’s kneejerk paranoia. “A bit younger. Gid fought in World War Two?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I guess that makes him ten, fifteen years older.” I took a chance, anticipating the next question. “Yeah, Anson went along with me to the clinic. Had a couple of tucks taken, I think mostly to make me feel better. He didn’t want to get rid of the wrinkles, though, on his forehead. That would really take some years off him.”

  She sighed. “Gid won’t even joke about it. He likes being an elder statesman.”

  “I think Anson feels some of that. Wrinkles are badges for men. They earn them; we just get them.”

  “Right.” She started to say something but just shook her head.

  Nick appeared, with the social secretary close behind. “We better get home and start packing,” he said. “Headed for Helsinki tomorrow.” We said good-bye to Molly and declined the Secret Service limousine. It was only a forty-five-minute walk, and we needed the exercise.

  As prearranged, our conversation on the way home was “safe.” The Secret Service had had our coats for three hours.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: NICK

  We rested for a day and a half in Helsinki, catching up on eight time zones. I was surprised at how much Finnish I could understand. It had been half a century since my father spent the summer drilling it into me. Of course my current persona couldn’t speak it, so I was carefully ignorant. I couldn’t even tell Valerie when a schoolboy taunted the “old baldie with his arm around the young woman.”

  Some of the protocol party lived it up pretty desperately in Helsinki. It’s a bustling modern city with a night life that goes on till dawn. The night life of Leningrad, they knew, would peter out about an hour after dinner. And it wasn’t exactly casinos and raw sex. Maybe a crowded auditorium with folk dancing or ballet. More my speed, actually.

  Valerie went along with the gang seeking fleshpots; I decided to stay at the hotel and relax in the sauna. But the sauna was not just a hot room and it was not particularly relaxing. An old lady with the strength of ten beat the hell out of my naked carcass and then alternately scalded and froze it Afterward I felt like a cheap cut of meat that had been tenderized. Clean, though.

  Thought I’d kill some time at the hotel casino, but I was too thoroughly knocked out. I’d barely had time to lose ten markkaa when I started to fall face forward into my Scotch. It was probably for the best. I slept the clock around and woke up feeling almost human. Valerie woke up about the same time, but creeped around like a wounded invertebrate, having barhopped, jetlagging, till after two. I told her it was the bad example of Molly Fitzpatrick, born-again sex kitten, and she tried to make a face.

  I’m more afraid of the First Lady than the CIA, especially from what Valerie said. She’s a lovely and singular woman, but I think that if she gets curious about something, she will run it down like a hungry hound after a fox.

  Could I kill her if it came to that? The stakes are sufficiently high to justify any person’s death. I’ve never killed a woman.

  The revelry continued aboard the Finnair flight to Leningrad, a lot of people dosing their hangovers with morning beers and carawayflavored spirits. I had some cool tea and smoked reindeer, which made me feel vaguely guilty, like eating Donner or Blitzen or Rudolph the Red-nosed. Some KGB agent.

  Leningrad was hidden under clouds. I was sorry for that; I’d looked forward to tracing out the districts of my old hometown from the air, finding the streets where I’d lived. So much was destroyed during the Siege, of course, and rebuilt. I’d read that the rebuilders had tried to be faithful to the original designs, even to details of finish, in many buildings.

  That was good. I wanted to find my father’s house. I wanted to see the one across the street, where I’d spent half my childhood playing. Until the war’s fist flattened it. Until I saw Alex cough blood and die in his father’s arms.

  That’s like another world, like a documentary movie I saw and remember well only in fragments. But in a curious way it’s also like yesterday. With my eyes closed I can smell the dust and smoke, the cordite from the bombs; I can hear the thin screams of people buried in rubble, the neighbors shouting back as they claw through the debris, bombs and shells still falling, finally to pull out bloodied corpses grimy with the dust of pulverized brick and stone. The dead looked so calm. Beyond all of it, we say conventionally. But of course they are the most lasting part of it, really, until the memories of the last one of us who saw them also finally surrender to death.

  Moscow gave our city a medal, the Order of Lenin. I remember my foster father suggesting that they beat it into a million pieces, one for each of the dead. He had made the calculation and showed me how large each splinter would be. A microscopic sliver for each of a million graves.

  I came back from Rivertown for one day before flying to Canada and this odd life My foster father was dead and my foster mother was in a hospital, too far buried in age and grief to recognize me. I took a bus out to the mass cemetery where most of the million are buried, and spent the afternoon there, pacing the fields of unmarked graves, vowing through youthful tears that this would not happen again, not to Mother Russia, not to anyone. We are vilified as sneaks and traitors and worse, we spies, but this is the truth: We normally win and lose our wars with no one dying. That’s a large thing if you’ve lived through the usual kind of war.

  Our diplomatic status should have allowed us to bypass Customs, but the KGB man in charge insisted that our papers were not in o
rder. A pity the KGB doesn’t have a secret handshake; perhaps I could have saved us some time and frustration.

  They wanted to separate the three of us who knew some Russian from the nonspeakers, but that didn’t work because Valerie and I were on the same passport. After twenty minutes of baleful stares and whispered conference, they evidently decided to treat us normally, i.e., alternating belligerent harassment with stony silence.

  There are three kinds of KGB people prevalent in Russia. These flunkies were the border guards who keep the teeming hordes of aliens outside from rushing into the Soviet Union; they wore plain army uniforms with KGB insignia. The second type, the ones who keep an eye on Soviet citizens at home, also wear a sort of uniform, at least in the cities: rumpled dark suit, narrow tie, supercilious expression. Children may be afraid of them, but most Soviet citizens have learned to live with them, like living with mosquitoes or shortages. The third type is dangerous, because you may know one who looks and acts like anybody, and you think he works for the roads commission or the copyright office—until one day you learn that he was otherwise, and you should have been more careful about what you said between the eighth vodka and passing out.

  (We—perhaps I should not say we—Americans who wax righteously horrified over this sort of thing might try to cast a clear eye on our own police state.

  It’s true that most people go through life without knowingly running into a CIA or FBI agent. But our everyday police have guns, which is not the case in Russia, and some of them have too much of an itch about the trigger finger. And the liberties the Bill of Rights guarantees to us may not be available to Russians, but on the other hand, those rights are also routinely violated by the CIA and the FBI when an American citizen is presumed guilty. Anyone who thinks otherwise has his head in the sand.)