“You’re kind of skinny for it,” Kitty said. “But we’ll see.”
I went to the Thai consulate to have my passport stamped with a visa. I went to Air India and booked a flight to Bangkok with interim stops at San Francisco, Honolulu, and Tokyo. At Deak and Company on Times Square I turned some American money into Siamese bahts. The baht was holding firm at 4.78 U.S. cents, the clerk told me. On West 45th Street I visited a rare coin dealer and bought a couple hundred dollars’ worth of common gold coins, mostly British sovereigns. The baht is a relatively stable currency, and the American dollar is highly desirable, but gold is good anywhere, at any time. And Bangkok is a center for the illicit trade in precious metals. Gold or silver may be exchanged there for anything – teen-age concubines, opium, guns, anything.
At my apartment I tucked the cash into a flat nylon money belt and fastened it around my waist beneath my clothing. The gold pieces, twenty-two of them, fit into the casing of a flashlight battery with just a little room left. I added cotton to fill and put the battery back in the flashlight. I was packing the flashlight and a variety of other things in a pair of suitcases when the phone rang.
I answered it, and a girl with a French or Belgian accent wanted to know if I was the Blue Star Hand Laundry. I said I wasn’t, and the girl said she simply had to get in touch with the Blue Star Hand Laundry, and hung up.
At the beginning, when the Chief first started using me for unusual assignments, I often failed to get the point of odd calls like that. My natural impulse, when some clown gets a wrong number, is to hang up, sometimes with a friendly word, sometimes with a curse. The Chief – I don’t know his name or exactly what he does, but he seems to think I work for him, and now and then I do – the Chief, at any rate, is indefatigable. He knows that the CIA taps my phone and the FBI reads my mail (or else it’s the other way around), so he sends me cryptic messages that may or may not fool the CIA and the FBI but that almost always fool me. Once an operative of his had to hand me a gum wrapper twice before I finally read the little message on it instead of flipping it into a litter basket.
This time, though, I understood immediately. I picked up the Manhattan yellow pages and looked up laundries and found a listing for the Blue Star Hand Laundry at 666 Fifth Avenue. Since it seemed unlikely that some mad Chinaman would open a laundry, hand or otherwise, in the Tishman Building, I guessed that the Blue Star was a telephone front for the Chief’s organization, whatever it might be.
So I closed the yellow pages and went on packing. There was no point in answering him. He would probably want to send me sneaking off to Poland or Hungary on some unpleasant task, and I couldn’t because I had to go to Siam. I didn’t want to try telling him why I had to go to Siam. I didn’t want to tell him anything at all. I wanted to wait for the fifty-six hours before I could board my Air India flight and then, as unobtrusively as possible, I wanted to fly to Bangkok.
I finished packing. The phone rang again, and it was the same woman, but this time she had an Italian accent. Sometimes the Chief has all the subtlety of a pneumatic hammer. I said, “No, damn it, you have the wrong number,” and added a string of curses in Italian, which I rather hoped she understood. I banged the phone down and when it rang again twenty minutes later, I let it ring. I stayed in the apartment for four hours, and the silly phone went on ringing intermittently. I found that it took a startling amount of will-power to ignore a ringing telephone. This should not be so; the simple fact that some dolt possesses one’s phone number and a dime should not compel one to answer the thing. But we are all of us brothers of Pavlov’s dogs, quick to respond to that bell, with feet and hands if not with saliva; held captive, too, by the idiot notion that the call might be Something Important. After four hours I couldn’t stand it any more. I left the apartment and went out for a walk.
Some nut followed me.
I may have been followed before, but this was the first time I ever realized it. When I left the building, there was a short, dumpy, middle-aged fellow on the other side of the street. He was watching some of the neighborhood kids play stickball. I walked uptown on Broadway and stopped for coffee at a Nedick’s and I saw him again, studying ties in a store window. I didn’t really pay much attention to him. I doubled back to the apartment to pick up a book I’d been reading on nationalism in the Far East, and when I came out, there he was back at his first post, watching the stickball game. When I saw him for the third time, I decided that it was an odd coincidence and I kept an eye out for him from then on. He wasn’t very good; after that, every time I turned around, there he was.
I wondered to whom he belonged. If he was from the CIA or something like that, I could let him follow me forever, and it wouldn’t much matter. If he was one of the Chief’s men, and this seemed more likely, then sooner or later he would make contact. That was the last thing I wanted. I could always lose him, I thought, but I would have to do so in innocent and casual fashion or the Chief would wonder why I was ducking him.
I used the subway, slipping through the door at 59th Street at the last moment, as if I had almost forgotten my stop. It was a nice try, but my man had been standing near another door and just made it out in time. I went upstairs and jumped in a cab, and he caught another cab and stayed right behind me. That there should be two empty cabs on hand at that hour struck me as a piece of particularly bad luck. I let my cabby take me down to the Village. The other cab followed close behind.
In a coffeehouse on Macdougal Street, nearly empty in the late afternoon, I scribbled furiously on a paper napkin. He came in right on my heels, caught my eye, winked. He had to be one of the Chief’s men, I decided, and he was ready to make contact.
He took a table near mine. I stood up, walked past his table, dropped the napkin in front of him, and kept going to the lavatory. The writing on the napkin said, There’s someone following both of us. I’m going to skip – cover me.
I glanced back at him. He winked at me again, crumpled the paper napkin, and turned a wary eye on the doorway. He would stay there like a faithful guard dog until I dropped his leash.
Now, I thought, it would be simple. I had invented a fairly plausible reason for my own departure; I wasn’t ducking out on him but on someone else. I locked myself in the john. The window opened out on an alleyway that cut across to Minetta Lane. All I had to do was climb through it.
I spent five minutes struggling with that window. I don’t think it had ever been opened since they built the building. They certainly hadn’t done so when they painted the last time, or since then, because the damned thing had been painted shut. When someone began knocking impatiently on the john door, I gave up and went back to my table. My shadow was where I had left him. He said in a whisper, “The Chief-”
“No time,” I said. “C’mon, cover me.”
I left, and he walked beside me. We headed south toward Bleecker. He looked around, then spoke to me out of the corner of his mouth. He said, “Who’s on our tail?”
There were two boys in field jackets a few paces behind us. Near them was a long-haired girl carrying a guitar. Behind her a young executive type with attaché case.
“The one with the briefcase,” I said.
“I didn’t notice him before.”
“Surprising. He was on me while you were watching the kids playing stickball.”
“Never even spotted him,” he whispered. “You go ahead, Tanner. I’ll take him out.”