Tuesday, my principal calls me out of my lunch in the staff room to meet a visitor.
A cold hand clutches my heart. It’s either Ma, in jail for rooking the night nurses at double-up, or somebody from the hospital to tell me she’s dead.
But it’s a total stranger. Some guy in a dark suit with a cop face.
I pretend I don’t know a cop face when I see it.
“Helen Nagazy, good to meet you. I’m Agent Nick Jones,” he says, taking my hand in a powerful grip. “Can we talk privately? He looks at the principal as if he’s a dog who should slink away, and by God, the principal does. “Is this room secure?”
I blink at him. “The kids don’t like coming in here unless they have to.”
“Ms. Nagazy, I work for a government agency that tracks and studies the incursion of magic into the mundane world. We work in hot spots like Pittsburgh, cool spots way off the interstate, and locations in transition, like Chicago.”
My heart starts blattering.
They’re onto me. Impossible.
I blink again. “You must be very busy these days.” You didn’t have an agency five years ago. Nobody knows about you, do they? One of my teammates is an anti-magic cop for the city. I live in dread of her catching onto me and putting me away. “Does da Mayor know you’re in town?”
He puffs up. The cop face becomes more pronounced. “We also track discussions of magic on the internet — people who claim to have expert knowledge.”
Now I know where this is coming from. Damn. I haven’t gotten on a list in all these years, and now I have.
“Are you learning anything new?” I say. “Because I’ve been trying to find someone online who knows anything about magic, and it seems to me they’re all idiots.”
“That’s classified, Miss.”
“Ms. I’m over twenty one.”
His cop look says, You don’t look it. He’s right. I’m constantly having my driver’s license retouched.
“We’ve noticed that you seem to turn up on all the sites we visit.”
“Well, I’m curious.” I don’t sound defensive. Should I? It’s so hard to know what these bozos expect, and to fulfill their expectations but in a look-how-innocent-she-is kind of way. Thank God I look seventeen, I think for once.
“You’ve been visiting Dr. Katterfelto’s website,” he says.
“Oh, him. Yeah, he’s kind of a pollyanna.”
Agent Jones looks at me long and slow. I can see we have reached the Agent’s Discretion portion of the interview. Now he has to stick his neck out. “We’d like you to infiltrate his organization on behalf of the agency.”
My jaw drops. “Me?”
“You look young for your age. He won’t suspect you.”
“Are you nuts?”
“We hope he’s just a nut. But we have to know for sure.”
I lie. “I’m no expert. What would I be looking for?”
“That’s our concern.”
I want out. This can’t go well. I allow moral outrage and disapproval to gather in my frown. “You want me to spy!”
“We’re the government, Miss. It’s called ’investigating.’”
“Uh, I don’t think so,” I say sharply.
“You owe it to your country.”
I snap, “I’m not a machine or a puppet. I’m a person. If you want to plant a bug on him, plant one. I’m sure you can,” I add.
These jerks wouldn’t have approached me if they hadn’t checked me out first. I have a huge paranoia about being checked out.
Agent Jones favors me with that slow look again. “We want you to visit his installation. Find out what he is working on. Tell us what he lets you work on. If at all possible, obtain copies of records from his offices. Particularly records describing his experiments. Find out who funds him.”
“Is that all?”
“No, it is not all. If you work with us, you work with us. I don’t question my orders. You will not question yours.”
“Then I won’t work with you. I don’t like having other people imposing their rules on me.”
Up go his eyebrows. “You’re a teacher, Ms. Nagazy. Seems to me there are lots of rules for teachers. This is scarcely more onerous.” Which is a huge lie.
I get snippy. “Society’s rules, as you call them, are the expectations of these children’s parents. Which I understand. They’re simple. ‘Protect my kid. Teach him.’ Not complicated, and not confidential. I don’t want to find out halfway through this that I’m helping you rub this guy out or something.”
I shouldn’t have said that. “Rub him out” is a phrase nobody uses anymore.
He looks stuffy. “Such a decision would never come through my agency.”
“So you do kill people.”
“I do not,” he growls.
“If Katterfelto dies, I’ll know it’s my fault. No thanks,” I say with finality.
“I assure you that this is not your concern.”
“I assure you, it is.” I straighten, and lie with outrage trembling in my voice. “I do not kill people or make myself accessory to killing people. There’s this little thing called right and wrong.” I should shut up, but he’s so determined to put me in my place. “My students’ parents will not be happy if they find out their teacher helped a government agency murder somebody.”
“It’s not murder if the government does it.”
“Believe me, from down here among the ants, it looks just like murder. My parents would think it was murder.”
He bears down. “If they find out any such thing, you’ll be in serious trouble for breaching confidentiality.”
“I’m already in serious trouble for saying No to you. No thanks.”
He cracks a smile, and his whole face transforms. “Aw c’mon, Ms. Nagazy, give me a chance. You don’t even know what he’s doing yet.”
He almost had me. If he had left it at “give me a chance.” Agent Jones is good at persuasion.
I say, more patiently than before because he really has a nice smile, “Reason number two to say no. If our conversation proceeds much farther, I will know more than you want me to know unless I’m in. You have some set of rules that you think governs me here. And I don’t know what those rules are. And yet, you get to decide when I know so much that I’m automatically in, or else. No.”
“You’ve watched too many spy movies.”
“Too many for your good, certainly.”
He looks human, kind of adorable, and now he’s maneuvered me into liking him and I’m talking too much.
I stand up. “I have to get back to my kids.”
I look at him carefully from head to toe, putting scorn in my eyes so that it isn’t obvious that I’m memorizing him, his regulation square jaw and thick neck, his brown eyes and broken nose, his jug ears, his smell of soap and old leather and gun oil and hot man. If he turns up again in my life, say, at my bar, in disguise, I’ll remember him. “Don’t ever approach me again, please.”
He says, “You know you can’t expect an agent of the government to leave you alone.”
“You know that in the world of nice people,” I say icily, “among us ignorant little ants down here on the anthill, when a woman tells a man to leave her alone, period, she is now within her rights to call a cop if he bugs her again.”
“The police won’t protect you from agency interest.”
“Gotcha. Again.” I throw him a sneer and walk out.
I feel flustered, but I’m calm on the outside as I teach the next class. My two worst boys are home with the flu, so I don’t have to work past four o’clock.
So I go visit Ma at the hospital.
Never have I wished so much that I could ask her to play Mommy for me.