Blind Date

  Levanter felt the warmth of her breath on his neck. He was silent for another moment. Then he asked, “What will happen to you now?”

  She disengaged herself and pulled him toward the staircase. “Come upstairs with me.”

  They entered a large, dimly lit room. Several waiters, young effeminate men in white sailor uniforms, navigated between the tables carrying trays of drinks. Dense smoke from tobacco, hashish, and marijuana filled the air.

  Levanter noticed that most of the tables were occupied by older women dressed in gaudy gowns, or leather jackets and short skirts, with black silk stockings suspended from satin garter straps and puffy feet squeezed into stiletto-heeled shoes. The few male customers also seemed old. Many of the people in the room already appeared to be in a state of drunken or drugged dreaminess, prevented from falling asleep by the loud music blasting from two corner speakers.

  Foxy Lady pulled Levanter into the room. Several women looked up, arching their plucked-out, penciled-in eyebrows. They called to Foxy Lady, admiring her dress and hairdo but paying no attention to Levanter.

  In the hazy light of the room, the women seemed old. Yet when he looked into their faces, he discovered they were barely middle-aged. No joy showed in their eyes. Under the thick make-up, their skin was coarse and wrinkled, their dyed hair was thin and scanty with balding patches, which some tried to cover with wigs. Almost all of them were obese, with fleshy necks, fatty shoulders, shapeless thighs and overdeveloped calves. Their artificially overblown breasts had become soft, and flapped like pancakes on their barrel chests. Their hands, covered with brown spots, were unnaturally broad, nearly square; their fingers, the nails bright with polish, seemed uniformly thick.

  Slowly, Levanter turned and left the room. Foxy Lady followed.

  “That’s what we call the Menopause Room,” she said. “It’s where we pause after being men — the only menopause we get. And those are some members of our self-made generation,” she said, forcing a matter-of-fact tone. “Hormonal imbalance. Metabolic disorders. Mental impairment. No sex drive. And no money for doctors or a decent life. Sleeping most of the day in their cold-water flats, drinking most of the night here to wash down an endless supply of uppers and downers. Their only salvation is that the club owner remembers them as foxy ladies, young and fresh and lovely, and gives them dinner every night without charge. Then, of course,” said Foxy Lady, “in a country as large as this, there are still some customers willing to go on a blind date with them.”

  They went downstairs again. As she was helping him on with his coat, he saw some men in the cloakroom leering at her. She saw them too.

  “Let them look,” she said. “They’ve known all along what you’ve learned only tonight. They want me, yet they think I’ve made the worst sacrifice a man can make. And for what? For no more than a short appearance just for them. Until I end up upstairs too!”

  Alone, missing the company of Foxy Lady, Levanter turned for company to his old friends. JP was one of them. In the world of sport, JP was a legendary figure. Three-time world fencing champion, Olympic gold medalist, winner of scores of other international meets, JP ranked as the greatest saber fencer of all time.

  As was customary for star athletes in Eastern Europe, JP was given the pro forma rank of lieutenant colonel in the army and assigned to a Ministry of National Defense troop-training program.

  He had come to a competition in New York and invited Levanter to his hotel room. JP sighed and shifted in his chair as he told Levanter that intelligence-service officials had proposed that he act as military attaché in his country’s Brussels embassy, using his social and sporting connections in Western Europe to penetrate the high command of NATO.

  “They want me to become a spy for the Warsaw Pact military forces,” JP said.

  Levanter was astounded.

  “When they first spelled it out to me,” said JP, “my mouth went dry. I couldn’t say a word.” He stopped for a moment. “Fencing is my whole life, you know that. The saber is the national symbol of my country, and at home I am a hero to every man, woman, and child, a source of national pride. Why isn’t that enough?”

  “What did you say to them?” Levanter asked.

  “I said I only know how to fight in the open. Then a general present at the meeting shouted that I would be ideal for the job because in the West they worship me so much they don’t watch my hands. ‘You’re wrong, General,’ I said. ‘I’m a fencer. If they worship me, it’s because they do watch my hands.’ And I stormed out of the interview.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Nothing at first. Then my address books and notebooks would disappear for a while, only to turn up later in places I would never have put them. Some of my friends were interrogated. One time I was fined a third of my salary for arriving late at a training session.” He laughed bitterly. “As there’s no one better—or even as good as I am—for a sparring partner, I fence against my own reflection in a specially constructed triple mirror. And several times they fined me for being late to train against myself!”

  JP stood up and walked across the room.

  “Then this,” he said, taking a book from the top of a bureau, “was the biggest blow. And it happened right before I left on this trip.”

  He handed the book to Levanter. It was a copy of The Olympic Gold, his newly published autobiography.

  “Fresh from the State Publishing House,” he said wistfully. “Delivered to me just as I was boarding the plane to New York.” He paused, obviously upset. “Without my knowledge, unidentified state censors have deleted many passages from the book and seriously altered many others. The name of my fencing coach, whom I had mentioned dozens of times, now doesn’t appear even once. The man taught me all I know. I guess they took him out because he’s Jewish,” JP said. “Things have been added also — attacks on high military and sports officials, dragging me into their political infighting.”

  Anxious to help JP, Levanter called on his friend, the Arab diplomat.

  “What would you like me to do?” the diplomat asked.

  Levanter did not hesitate. “Can you find out whether JP will be in danger if he returns home?”

  A few days later, the diplomat phoned and told Levanter to meet him at a men’s public baths in mid-Manhattan. At first he was surprised that the Arab would choose such a place. But once he was inside, it occurred to him that the diplomat probably frequented such establishments for sexual purposes, and possibly used them for the privacy they afforded for secret political activities.

  Wrapped in towels, they walked along the dark corridor without speaking. Music seemed to flow from every corner — slow and sentimental, it combined with the dim light and the scent of marijuana to create a sense of insistent intimacy. The doors to most of the rooms they went past were open; inside each room, under weak blue lights, lay naked men, some sleeping, some posing, some sniffing drugs from small atomizers, and others blatantly gesturing to them to enter. They went downstairs, passing a large shower-and-bath room, with large bottles of red mouthwash and stacks of paper cups piled high over each sink. A younger man approached from the opposite direction, and just as he was about to pass them, his extended hand touched the diplomat’s groin. The Arab patted the young man’s cheek. “Not now, not now,” he said. Smiling, the young man walked away.

  “It’s too bad,” said the diplomat, “that you Westerners, when pressed by desire, rely on the gesture. In my culture, men first talk about their sexual wants in great detail; words carry no shame. You must visit us sometime,” he said to Levanter as the two of them entered the dormitory, a large room with dozens of cots.

  Men cruised the aisles, watching each other, their limbs posed as invitingly as their faces might be in ordinary daytime encounters. Every now and then, one would edge closer to another, seeking the other’s flesh, first with his hand, then with his mouth. In the far corner of the room, two naked men lay in a tight embrace. There, sitting together on a cot, in the eerie light of the b
are red bulb, amidst the quiet music and the hum of whispers and sighs, Levanter and the diplomat discussed JP’s fate.

  The diplomat told Levanter that JP had voiced his opposition to certain methods of troop training adopted by the military, claiming they were too harsh and inhuman. Because of his status as a national hero, his views attracted many supporters. The Party, fearing the growing role of the military, was clearly setting the stage for JP’s arrest. Consequently, the diplomat told Levanter in hushed tones, East European intelligence agents were spreading rumors in Western sports circles that the fencer was a member of a gold-and-antiques smuggling ring. And more recently they seemed to be working up a charge of Zionist conspiracy.

  The diplomat also explained that several hotels in Paris, London, and New York were indirectly owned or controlled by East European state security agencies. Certain suites reserved for important guests were equipped with sophisticated monitoring devices so that the authorities could keep track of the activities and contacts of traveling officials, scientists, sports stars, actors, and writers, all of whom were assigned to hotels by their embassies. Thus, their trips abroad served not only as a reward for loyalty to the state but also as a further test of this loyalty.

  It was from the New York hotel where JP often stayed that his government had obtained the most incriminating evidence against the fencer, the Arab diplomat said. They had complete recordings of all JP’s conversations with his Western friends, including one with the man they considered an open enemy of their state: George Levanter.

  The diplomat strongly advised that JP not go home. Whenever the state went to such lengths to find evidence to incriminate a man, he said, it always found that evidence without difficulty. In fact, JP’s government had already prepared its lists of national world sports record holders for distribution at the forthcoming World Championships — and JP’s name was not on it.

  Levanter wasted no time. He had JP meet him in a park near his hotel. When JP heard what Levanter had learned from the diplomat, he appeared stunned.

  JP thought for a moment. “This can’t be true,” he said. “Of all people, why a national hero?”

  “You must not go back,” said Levanter. “You belong to fencing, not to the government. Stay in America. Fence here. Teach fencing. Write.”

  JP reflected. “I never considered defecting,” he said. “I belong to my nation; my saber helps shape my people’s national pride. Everybody in the government knows that. They can’t touch me. I am going back.”

  Some weeks later, the Arab diplomat got in touch with Levanter to give him the news about JP. As the fencer stepped off the plane from New York, he had been arrested and held incommunicado in a military fortress.

  For a while there was silence about his fate. Then the first ominous sign appeared. In one of the country’s official publications, a well-known Party hack published a cartoon showing JP as a hooded, trench-coated, saber-rattling spy, superimposed on a graph of military secrets, his weapon broken, his leg chained to a ball. The word was soon out that JP had refused to cooperate and play into the hands of his accusers. With some sense of relief, Levanter reflected that in a small country of soulless bureaucrats, no secret can be kept, not even in a fortress.

  From various leaks and rumors, the following picture of JP’s interrogation had reached Western intelligence: JP had been seated in a chair in a large, stark room, the diplomat told Levanter, and had been grilled under glaring lights. After a long session of loaded questions clearly designed to wear him down, the fencer had pointed to his arm and shouted, “You can’t destroy what this arm stands for. It belongs to the people!”

  The officer in charge got up from behind his desk and entered the circle of light to stand behind the fencer. “Is this the arm you speak of?” he asked calmly, tapping JP’s right shoulder.

  JP swung around in his chair to face him. “Yes, Colonel, this is the arm,” he said, extending it with pride.

  The officer looked at the outstretched arm. Swiftly he grabbed it with both hands and, putting all his weight on one leg, pushed the chair away with the other. Like a peasant breaking a twig in two, the colonel bent the fencer’s arm over the back of the chair, then pressed down. The elbow snapped with a loud crack, and the arm went limp. JP howled and tried to pull free, but the colonel twisted the broken arm sideways and brought the wrist down over the back of the chair. Now the wrist cracked, and the hand went as limp as the arm. Moaning, JP slid from the chair onto the floor. “So much for the arm of the people,” said the colonel, returning to his desk.

  A military tribunal, meeting in closed session, decided to deprive JP of property and all civilian rights for life as punishment for acting against the highest interests of the state. In addition, he was sentenced to twenty-five years in a maximum-security prison.

  Levanter was filled with outrage. Twenty-five years for JP the fencer, he thought, while most of the leaders of the Third Reich received shorter sentences from the international tribunal at Nuremberg. He determined to conduct a systematic survey of the hotel in New York where JP had stayed.

  With the diplomat’s aid, he obtained a long list of JP’s compatriots who had been booked into the same hotel and were punished when they returned home: a novelist who failed to recount his meeting with an American intellectual had his forthcoming book withdrawn before publication; an actress who saw her uncle in New York but had never admitted having a relative in the United States was not allowed to travel abroad again; an architect who overlooked mentioning a professional fee he had received from his American colleagues for an industrial design was assigned to work on collective projects only. There were dozens of other such victims.

  Several times, under different names and wearing various disguises, Levanter rented rooms in the hotel. He was looking for surveillance devices, and soon he found them. By scrutinizing the hotel employees responsible for selecting and assigning the rooms, he narrowed his search to a senior clerk, the man in charge of booking visitors from Eastern Europe.

  The clerk, Levanter learned, had worked in the hotel for over ten years. After observing him for some time at his job, Levanter followed him one evening to his house in the suburbs. Then, when the man and his wife went away for a weekend, he broke into their home and found a large basement workshop filled with electronic equipment. Several of the components matched those Levanter had discovered in the hotel suites regularly assigned to guests from behind the Iron Curtain.

  Levanter checked with the Arab diplomat, who confirmed a few days later that, according to his sources, there were sufficient indications that the senior clerk was one of the minor East European operatives active in North America.

  Levanter telephoned the man at the hotel one morning and, in a rehearsed stutter intended to make his speech unforgettable, introduced himself as a well-to-do retired businessman from out of town. Levanter explained that he had obtained the clerk’s name from a travel agency whose clientele included many East Europeans. He was concerned about the fate of certain men and women from behind the Iron Curtain, he said, some of whom might wish to defect to the United States. He pointed out that these visitors were often advanced in age and not fluent in English, and that they might therefore hesitate to take such a decisive step without aid and encouragement. Levanter explained that several freedom-minded American businessmen — he mentioned half a dozen names the clerk would be sure to recognize — had just established a special tax-deductible fund for long-range assistance to potential defectors.

  He and his associates needed someone trustworthy and knowledgeable to cooperate with them; for obvious reasons it couldn’t be anyone too visible who might put such a clandestine human-rights project in jeopardy. Would the clerk be interested in helping them? Or did he know of anyone who might? There would be substantial remuneration for any professional risk incurred, and financial arrangements could certainly be worked out to their mutual satisfaction. The clerk expressed interest and was willing to meet with Levanter to discuss the matter f
urther.

  Levanter apologized for not having a private club in New York where he could take his guest, but said he had thought of a convenient spot where they could meet privately. Besides, he said, he had a bad lower back and needed a sauna. Could they, therefore, meet at the Cavalier Baths, in midtown, where they could enjoy a measure of seclusion and anonymity? As he had to fly home the next morning, Levanter said, he hoped the clerk could meet him that day, perhaps after lunch, when the baths would not be crowded.

  The clerk eagerly agreed, and Levanter, who remembered the layout of the baths from his previous meeting there, outlined a plan. To save them both time and insure that they did not miss each other, he suggested, the clerk should rent a room at the baths, prepare himself for a sauna, and then come to the room Levanter had reserved, number 101. Then they could proceed together to the sauna and converse discreetly there.

  Levanter had just two hours to prepare himself for the meeting. He put on a pair of chamois gloves and picked up a saber he had bought some weeks earlier and a heavy household hammer with a thick leather protective cap over the iron head. Wrapping each in a woolen scarf, he put them into a strong shopping bag, added a coil of rope, took off the gloves, and threw them into the bag.

  In the strong light of his bathroom, he carefully fitted a gray theatrical wig over his hair and glued on false eyebrows, a mustache, and a short beard. In minutes, he had become unrecognizable.

  He left his building through the service entrance, hailed a taxi, and arrived at the baths, his raincoat draped casually over the shopping bag.

  He approached the cashier, a sleepy old man with a sallow complexion and puffy cheeks, and, in a low voice, said he had reserved room IOI. Scarcely raising his eyes from his newspaper, the cashier handed Levanter a bracelet with the room key and two towels, murmuring that the price of the room covered twelve hours of rental time.