Chapter 37

THE FORMAL PRINTED CARD on the door to the New York apartment read Lt. (jg) Thomas G. Smith, USN. Not that he received many visitors anyway. Most people considered Tom Smith too dull to include in their social calendars.

Joan Turner stood in front of the sign, primping her strawberry-blond hair and using a compact mirror to touch up her lipstick. Smith had, after all, promised to marry her, and so she had a perfect right to show up any time she wanted. She had already caught him spying on his country, so what could be worse?

From inside the apartment, she heard muted shrieks of feminine laughter, a rumba beat pounding from a stereo, trumpets and loud Latin music. This wasn’t what she expected to hear from mild-mannered Smith at all, but when she double-checked the address in her purse, she saw she had come to the right place.

It sounded like a party was going on. Without her.

She grabbed the knob and burst in.

The bachelor apartment she had expected to find meticulously neat and clean was now overwhelmed by chaos. A thick-cushioned divan sat askew in the center of the room. Half-empty bottles of tequila and rum stood upright on the side table; three bottles lay on the carpet, spilled over.

Pedrito sprawled on the couch half dressed and entirely drunk. Two naked women giggled next to him, also thoroughly inebriated. One draped herself over the back of the couch on her stomach, trying to dribble another drink between Pedrito’s lips. Closer to the stereo, the second woman attempted to do the rumba with unsteady dance steps. She wore nothing but Tom Smith’s naval officer’s cap.

Despite Joan’s unexpected arrival, none of them paid any attention to her. “Well!” she cried, loud and censorious, crossing her arms over her chest. She wished she had thought of something more clever or wicked to say.

Pedrito raised his head heavily and tried to focus on her. His hair was mussed, as if he had tried to comb it with a vacuum cleaner. Recognizing Joan after a moment, he waved his arm drunkenly to beckon her. “Well, if it ishn’t Joan! Come on in here, you old bat, so theshe girlsh can show you how itsh really done! They’re professhionals, you ssheee. Got them right down at the street corner — two-for-the-price-of-one sale.”

Clamping her purse under her arm, Joan stormed out. She slammed the door so hard that Smith’s printed address card fell onto the floor. In a raging fury she stood there, trying to think, blinking back the red haze from in front of her eyes. Then she got a decidedly brilliant idea on how she could fix that lousy bastard.

Out in the street she found the nearest telephone booth and dug in her purse for change. She attempted to put coins into the slot, but she was so furious her fingers missed, scattering quarters on the floor of the phone booth. By the time she managed to make the call, she was so coldly angry her words stabbed across the phone lines like ice picks. She enjoyed the sensation very much. . . .

In the local FBI office, a bored special agent sat at his desk, speaking with complete disinterest into the phone. He was bloated and mean, a promoted field agent, though it had been a long time since he’d been in the field. He held a pencil in his hand, scribbling on a notepad — but his notes were part of a grocery list and had nothing to do with the furious conversation the woman hurled at him from the other end of the phone.

He talked out of the side of his mouth, mumbling in a squeaky, falsetto voice. “Who’ja say yer name was?” he said, trying to sound tough. He liked to talk like a hardened criminal. “Well, lady, I ain’t takin’ no dope from nobody what won’t give dere name . . . uh, uh-huh, yeah . . . okay.” Now he wrote it down. “Joan Turner. Dat’s better. Come clean now, kid. What’dja do?” He listened. “Okay, so what did yer boyfriend do? Is it a felony or a misdemeanor? Does it carry the death penalty? Does you got pictures?”

A scarecrowish-thin agent came in, looking like a dried-up convict, as the bloated agent hung up the phone. “What was that, Fats?” the thin agent said. “Don’t tell me we gotta work today?”

“Aw, jus’ some skirt blowin’ the whistle on her boyfriend,” Fats said. “Like always.”

“You’re not supposed to call ’em ‘skirts’ anymore. It ain’t politically correct,” the thin agent said. “You’re supposed to call ’em dames now.”

“Yeah, yeah, Lefty. I hear the bureau’s issuing a guidebook for dat sort of thing.” Fats made a raspberry sound. “I bet old J. Edgar is rollin’ over in his grave.”

Lefty reached for the pad to read the doodled words mixed in with his grocery list. “She told you someone in the Office of Naval Intelligence is a Commie spy?”

Fats peered at the pad. “How can you read this writing anyway? Where’s it say that?”

“You wrote it!”

“Jesus Christ, I did!” Fats suddenly looked secretly delighted. He glanced up at his partner as he struggled to push himself away from his desk. “Lefty, dis is where you and I gets promoted!”