Instead she goes upstairs to have a smoke in the fresh air. The building is on Welch Road, right across from Stanford University Hospital, and on the second floor several doctors have their offices, according to the directory mounted on the lobby wall. A woman, her head and face swathed in bandages, with glossy dark contusions under both eyes, is helped out of the elevator by a woman in scrubs and guided toward a waiting car. Curious. As she smokes, Sara Jane watches a Cadillac pull into the lot and park, and a middle-aged man steps from it to help another woman, similarly bandaged and bruised, out of the passenger seat. She emerges gingerly, grabbing hold of the man’s proffered arm with two hands, and together the two of them walk slowly from the large gleaming auto toward the entrance of the building. As they pass her, the man gives Sara Jane a slightly suspicious once-over. These dames are in serious discomfort with their busted-up faces. All at once Sara Jane remembers some Reader’s Digest article she once read describing the aftermath of certain types of plastic surgery. Blackened eyes from shattered noses. Stitched-up faces, the raw flesh employed as a sling against gravity. How foolish and pathetic. Going to a doctor to let him break your nose with a mallet. How very Palo Alto.
She tries to sign out forty minutes early, during the open book test, and the instructor nails her. Total cahoots; no doubt he gets a piece of the action too, of course. The discussion gets a little heated, and he asks her out into the hallway. What is the difference? She has finished her test and is a grown person with responsibilities. She could tick them off, just to see his eyes go wide, this dumb bunny from Bakersfield. Estate planning, how presumptuous, blechh.
Sara Jane double-parks her car on Twenty-fourth Street and charges into the dry cleaner’s, her ticket held at the ready. The pinheaded man behind the counter looks up without even a vestige of a smile on his sour puss. Only something like $250 a year she spends here. She decides to check carefully for stains because she knows she pointed them all out.
Oh here’s one.
She leaves a muumuu behind because sometimes you have to make the point that you won’t just take it from them all the time. There are other dry cleaners in this city. There are synthetic fabrics that require only a brush or a sponging down and need never be ironed and so the dry cleaner man needs to get it into his head that he should be thankful for her repeat business and for an old-fashioned girl’s taste in old-fashioned textiles. He takes the garment back from her and hangs it up and then patiently copies her driver’s license number onto her check. What is that going to tell you? How does a driver’s license number protect you from a bum check? It is all part of control. The numbers are gathered here at the very bottom of things and circulate upward to the heights of power. Driver’s license information. Social Security numbers. Telephone exchanges. She signs the check “Alice Galton.” Just to see if he notices.
“Sally, you are overwrought.”
“I go into the dry cleaner’s for two minutes. One, there’s a stain on an item. Two, he requests my personal driver’s license information. Height and weight and date of birth? What does this have to do with accepting personal checks?”
“Sally.”
“Three. I come out with my bundle and there is a man in a little pizza delivery cart putting a ticket on my windshield. I think you could say I am on police business.”
“I don’t know if I could agree with that.”
“You could agree with it but you won’t. I do not see why you can’t secure me with a placard or a sign. They give these to teachers. They give these to handicapped persons in wheelchairs. They give these to roving reporters.”
“That would be the police. The FBI has to go to the local police to get their parking permits as well.”
“What are they called? Those pizza carts?”
“It’s called a Cushman.”
“If I go to the man in the Cushman and tell him I am on FBI business, will I get a placard?”
“I sincerely doubt it and I hope you’ll consider how inadvisable it would be for you to do such a thing.”
“I think I’m entitled to some recompense.”
Thomas Polhaus reaches behind him to take his suit jacket off the back of his chair and gets his billfold from the inside pocket. The ticket Sara Jane Moore has thrown onto the surface of the desk before him is for ten dollars, and he removes a five and five singles from the billfold.
“I would think the FBI would have a more formal way of disbursing petty cash.”
“We probably do. Would you like to wait the usual two to four weeks?”
“I have just had a bad day. You don’t have to make fun of me.”
Polhaus says, “I’m not making fun of you. I’m trying to get you to relax and see things in perspective. Everybody gets a ticket now and then. No one’s ever happy about it. And while I’m always delighted to see you, you know that the reason for your coming here today wasn’t to appeal your parking citations or to air your grievances concerning the shoddy practices of Noe Valley dry cleaning establishments. Come on, Sally. I’m counting on you.”
“It is a lot of pressure on me. And then there are these aggravations, which I just want you to know about because it goes right to the matter of difficulty.” She looks as if she might be about to cry. That wouldn’t be unusual.
“Nobody ever said that doing the right thing is easy.”
“But does the State Board of Accountancy have to weigh in with its two cents right at this juncture?”
“Sally, what are we talking about?”
“I am taking supposedly required courses at this advanced age of my career in a Palo Alto basement where they perform disfiguring surgeries. That’s what. What kind of a day is that?”
“Maybe this can be the best part of the day.”
And it can. Polhaus knows he can lay a hand on her wobbly instability, restore purpose, direction, and meaning to a sorry and disconnected existence. It’s a bad moment when an ordinary person suddenly has to confront the way that the everyday evades significance. How unaccompanied, how unheralded, an ordinary life can be. Sometimes all that a person deciding whether to become an informant needs to push her over the line is the belief that life won’t always be able to disregard everything she says or does. Life doesn’t always have to be so infuriating; one doesn’t have to suffer unaccompanied. There is actually a written record, kept in a big building, guarded by men with guns. To these armed men, this record is important, and that is the ultimate rebuttal to habit and its dissatisfactions. Half the “informants” he deals with are lonely zanies, dialing from remote phone booths out on the Great Highway or the basements of faded hotels on Bush Street — grandmothers and secretaries, he imagines them, dockworkers and retired animal control officers, old men from the Avenues who see menace in the odd parcel someone sets out on the sidewalk with the trash. They call the Bureau to let them know. They report seditious conversations they overhear in Justin Herman Plaza or Union Square. If it’s mysterious and baffling and doesn’t quite seem to fit the definition of a crime as set forth by that Webster’s of the everyday, prime-time TV, call the FBI. Call early, call often, and don’t forget to ask for your case number. We like making them up on the spot.
But Sally Moore is exceptional. The nutburger who through a serendipitous series of accidents manages to find herself in precisely the right place to serve the Bureau’s purposes. There were plenty of middle-aged folks whose heads had been screwed up by the last ten years. Drugs. Politics. Vietnam. Civil rights. Long hair. You name it, there were a thousand causes, ideas, and substances into which an American human could disappear. But when, as inevitably happened, they finally became angry with their exciting new lives and, eager to turn in some coconspirator in their frustration, picked up the phone, the Bureau usually found itself with a misdemeanor drug case on its hands, which it routinely referred to local authorities. But now Sally is interesting. She has all the screwy hallmarks of the sort of person who’ll call up to report a few pot plants in the next backyard, or even an imaginary nuke in a suitcase, but instead of bailing out of the Telegraph Avenue scene and heading for a commune in Mendocino or a master’s program back East, this oddball manages to get herself a job keeping the books for the People in Need program and, moreover, manages to ingratiate herself not only with both Henry Galton and Lud Kramer, the program’s administrator, but with Popeye Jackson and other radicals, jailbirds, and bad hats the SLA had stipulated to oversee the distribution. All this Thomas Polhaus learned in the course of the routine sub rosa check he’d ordered on the PIN operation and its key workers and volunteers. It piqued his interest, but then what really got him was when he learned that Hank Galton quietly had sought out Sally Moore on his own, to serve as a liaison between himself and Jackson. Hank old pal, Polhaus had thought, how could you? Thought we were going to share and share alike. Of course the Bureau’s (subordinate, minor, marginal) role in the L.A. firefight had somewhat dulled the Galton family’s keenness to cooperate with it and then there had been Saxbe’s asinine comment about Alice’s being a common criminal.