15

Waiting his turn in line, the Weeder couldn’t help overhearing two teenage girls giggling away behind him. “I know a better one,” the girl with the nasal voice informed her friend. “My botany teacher told us about this insect, see, that’s got no vagina.”

“Like how does it do it, then?” her friend asked in awe.

“Well, the male of the species punches a hole in the female of the species with his, you know, thing, is how. He punches the hole and then he screws it. You’re supposed to be able to tell how many times she’s done it by the number of holes she’s got in her.”

The second teenage girl said seriously, “Wow! I guess we’re lucky we come equipped. That way the parents can’t keep track of our sex lives.”

Both girls burst into peals of laughter.

Snow’s great-aunt Esther, whom the Weeder had talked into coming with him so he would be less conspicuous, observed his expression out of the corner of her eye. A sly smile played on her lips as she said in an undertone, “When I was their age we talked clean but thought dirty. It seems to me what they’re doing is a lot more wholesome, not to mention more fun.” She snapped a bridge back into her gums for emphasis.

The Weeder said, “I’m beginning to wonder if there is anything that can shock you.”

“I’ve seen it all,” Esther agreed, “and imagined the rest.”

“Me too,” the Weeder remarked, “I’ve imagined the rest.”

When their turn came the Weeder bought two tickets and ushered Esther past the guard into the Isabelle Stewart Gardner Museum. Built to resemble a Venetian palace, it had been commissioned by the rich and seductive Mrs. Gardner, who had wanted to transplant a piece of Venice to Boston. “Beats where I live by a mile,” Esther observed, squeezing the Weeder’s arm as they surveyed the central patio overrun with plants and trees, and the delicate Gothic facades rising off it. “There’s a Sargent portrait of Mrs. G. somewhere. Let’s find it.”

“I’ll catch up with you,” the Weeder said, gently detaching his arm from hers.

“Where are you off to?”

“The men’s room, if you must know.”

“Why don’t you come right out and say you need to pee instead of beating around the bush. It’s a natural bodily function and nothing to be ashamed of.” Snapping her bridges, Esther tottered off to find the Sargent portrait.

The Weeder drifted around the patio toward the toilets, lingered to study the vines coiling up the columns as he tried to spot the FBI stakeout team that would surely be posted near Savinkov’s dead drop. The likeliest candidate he could find was a clean-cut young man in blue jeans and basketball sneakers taking pictures with a telephoto lens directly across the patio from him. What gave him away were his lightly tinted aviator sunglasses. Behind the Weeder a middle-aged man reading the museum’s guidebook emerged from the men’s room and started up the steps toward the first floor. The Weeder glanced across the patio in time to see the FBI agent aim his camera and take a photograph of the man with the guidebook. It occurred to the Weeder that he had witnessed another in an endless series of invasions of privacy. Maybe Snow was on to something after all, he thought. Maybe invading each other’s privacy was the basic way people related to each other these days.

The Weeder pushed through the door into the men’s room. From behind the locked door of a stall came the sound of a hacking cough. He took the envelope he had meticulously prepared the previous night out of his pocket and slipped it behind the radiator. Then he washed his hands and dried them under the hot air blower and headed for the exit.

To make the letter to Savinkov more believable he had purposely left it unsigned. But the FBI would have his fingerprints on the envelope and the photograph of him coming out of the men’s room. It wouldn’t take them long to put two and two together, to sound the alarm. The computer printouts in the pawnshop would be retrieved. Wanamaker would be brought in to authenticate them. Those whose job it was to leap to conclusions would announce that Stufftingle had been permanently compromised and must be scrapped.

That was the up side. The down side was that the hunt for the Weeder’s scalp would begin in earnest.