SEVENTEEN

Ed Heineman had a voice Spraggue wouldn’t have minded appropriating: effortlessly mellow for a man of his limited age and experience, with unusually low pitch and pleasing timbre. Ten years ago, some speaking coach would have hauled the upstart aside and hurriedly eliminated any vestige of his Southern upbringing. Today, in the anything-goes TV-radio world, accents were considered homey and attractive, no longer the kiss of death.

He watched the tape for the fourteenth time moving his lips along with Heineman’s. The videocassette recording was easier to work with than an audio tape alone; he could not only hear the deviations from Standard American Speech, he could see the shape of the newscaster’s lips on his curiously open A, his unconventional E. After a while he just listened to it, lying flat on the Oriental rug in the library, staring at the grape-leaf molding of the ceiling two stories over his head. Mary had long since returned to her bedroom office. The walls and doors of the mansion were so thick they muffled even the sounds of her clacking machinery. He might have been alone in the vast house.

He scooped up the notebook lying at his side, scratched out a symbol, made another in its place, and nodded with satisfaction. Phonetics had been a compulsory part of his classical actor’s training, at RADA, where professors thought nothing of ordering up Hamlet’s soliloquys in anything from Northumbrian to Liverpudlian to Texan. Spraggue thought Heineman might hail from Georgia, but he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t any Henry Higgins; his goal wasn’t identification, but mimicry. Short-term mimicry at that.

Transcribing Heineman’s words into the International Phonetic Alphabet was an exercise in frustration. Just as he would start to congratulate himself on how well he remembered his lessons, he’d come across a sound for which he recalled no symbol, have to flick off the tape, and search through an old copy of Kenyan and Knott’s Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language. When he at length completed the transcription, skipping a few words he knew he’d have no occasion to use, words like government, which Heineman pronounced guvment, and Iran, which he pronounced airun, it was two in the morning and only the beginning.

There was no sense in perfecting a general Ed Heineman; that would take days, and he only needed a persuasive two-minute Heineman. So, first, he constructed the message, a single thought conveyed in three variants. Which one he actually delivered would depend on who answered the phone. He wrote them out, deliberately choosing as many words as possible directly from the evening news, it being more difficult to extrapolate from an accent than to copy one. Nowhere in his prepared text did he actually lie. The lie was in his voice, not in what he said. If someone answering the phone were to mistake him for Ed Heineman … well, he could hardly be held accountable for that.

He jackknifed into a sitting position and carefully recited ten words, common everyday words in which Heineman’s pronunciation differed from the norm—lowering his pitch to the level of Heineman’s, breathing where Heineman would have breathed. The man, in his newscasts, had a jerky pattern of delivery. Talking to him in the bar, Spraggue had noticed a similar quality in his off-camera speech, an easy gimmick to copy. That and the slightly Southern pronunciation should carry the deception. He practiced his lines nonstop until Aunt Mary appeared, cheerful and rested, to announce that it was 5 A.M. and would he like croissants for breakfast?

He succumbed, ate three freshly baked pastries smeared with apricot jam, but foreswore Dora’s excellent coffee. He drove back to Cambridge, set the alarm clock to allow a scant four hours sleep, threw himself fully dressed across the bed. When he woke, he showered, shaved, and changed, rehearsed in front of a mirror. At the last minute, he decided not to make the call from his house. Who knew what tracing devices the cops might have rigged on Donagher’s line? He set off on foot for Harvard Square.

The morning air was cool and bracing, more like nippy autumn than gentle spring, but it hadn’t fooled the swelling buds on the oak trees. The heavy tree limbs were speckled with tiny verdant spots of color, like a pointillist painter’s dots: lush, vivid green from a distance, sparse, separate buds from close at hand. Keyed up with a rush of pre-audition adrenalin that compensated for too little sleep, he repeated his lines into the breeze as he walked down Brattle Street, hardly aware of the great houses on either side of what had once been called Tory Row.

The first real phone booth he encountered was on Church Street. The others he’d passed had been ugly, modern stands, blue poles with phones perched on top and no provision for privacy. Behind Sage’s, where that old French restaurant had been and the new building was now, were actual booths.

He placed a ragged-edged three-by-five card, his speech written painstakingly in the letters and symbols of IPA, on the shelf reserved for the ripped-out Yellow Pages. The dangling metal cord that should have bound the phone book to the booth got in his way and he used his right hand to wrestle it under the shelf, dialing with his left hand and cradling the phone between his shoulder and chin. He dialed the number Collatos had given him two weeks earlier, tapped his fingers through six long rings, hoped the right someone would answer the phone.

A woman’s voice, low and sweet.

“Həl” was all he said. It was one of Heineman’s most distinctive words: He said həl, not hεlo. He was sloppy with his vowels.

“Ed?” the woman murmured, alarmed. Spraggue exulted; she’d got it in one.

He’d taken time selecting a likely setting. Where would Lila Donagher agree to meet Ed Heineman? Someplace that offered privacy, someplace she wasn’t known. Not a park, not an open space, where she could simply walk away when he, not Heineman, approached. He wanted her seated, with food in front of her, in a place where a hasty departure would cause a scene.

The Harvest Café.

It was always crowded; the central bar was the focal point of Cambridge’s young, affluent dating crowd. It boasted alcoves and tall plants and one booth, in particular, that was almost invisible from the door. Heineman was known there, probably lunched there; it was credible. And the food was good, entailing no gastronomic sacrifice.

“a nid t∧ tͻk t∧ yu,” he said. “Urgently. Tomorrow. Lunch at the Harvest Café. One thirty. Ask for Mr. H’s table.”

“Someone might see us.” The protest came out in a harsh whisper.

“Trust me,” Spraggue said. “It’s important.”

When he hung up, there was a clatter of change and his dime was refunded into the compartment at the bottom right of the pay phone. He stared at it, a dingy gray circle resting on his palm, stuffed it back into the phone. Ma Bell deserved it.