The Seventh Floor, page 7
“No need,” she said. “I know what we want. I will have the rhubarb pie”—new total: 13,420—“and he will have . . . Rem, dear, what do you want?”
“I am not hungry.”
“He will have the honey cake. We will also have two glasses of the ice wine with dessert. And coffees for each of us after. Thank you.” The waiter hustled off, joyful bounce to his stride.
“What is the damage now?” she said.
He pounced on his water to dodge her eyes. For about ten seconds no one spoke. Ninel fixed him with an unkind smile. He sighed. “I don’t know.”
“Which price did you forget?”
“I didn’t forget. You need to know something to forget it.”
“Which”—Ninel could skillfully compress paragraphs of tension into single words—“did you forget?”
“The ice wine.”
“Twelve hundred per glass.”
He thought for a moment. Refolded the napkin in his lap. “Seventeen thousand five hundred and seventy.”
She leaned into the table to take his hand. “My dear, this little quirk of yours is going to be insufferable on our vacation after you retire.”
“I agree,” he said, squeezing her palm. “Let’s skip the trip, then.”
PART II
DEAR FRIENDS AND CHERISHED ENEMIES
10
KISSIMMEE, FLORIDA THREE MONTHS LATER
Sleepy Pete wasn’t actually sleepy. He should’ve been called Spunky Pete or Mean Pete. He was a known biter, after all. Hell, he’d bit her twice.
First time right near the elbow when she was learning the ropes. Spent an afternoon at the hospital up in Hunters Creek. Happened to everybody. It was a when, not if, kind of a thing, Cummings would say. Second time on her left hand. A smidge embarrassing.
She was grabbing at Pete now, but her hands were butter in the wet heat. She pulled Pete up from the muddy lagoon. He was working a creepy half smile and his limp feet left scars in the sand. She dug in her Birks and yanked him across the beach. The crowd was screaming, louder than usual, primal vibes were building: there was blood coming. She’d seen this movie before, lord she had. The kids would plaster the video up on social media and that night it would hit FOX 35 and the other Orlando stations. There was a certain notoriety to violence, but it was mostly bad for business—Gatorville’s customers figured out pretty quick that they could be next.
She paused for a moment to catch her breath, and Sleepy Pete set to crawling back toward the lagoon. She waddled through the sand after him and got her hands on his hind legs and then she was on his back trying to cover his eyes so she could clasp shut his jaw. Her Cleveland Indians ball cap slipped off into the wet sand and her frazzled black hair tumbled down to cover her eyes. Sleepy Pete was pissed. She couldn’t blame him. There was a human chick on his back slapping hands on his face and dragging him by the tail out of his sweet lagoon. Tail whipping around, he started twisting and writhing to sink his teeth into her arm. She was focused now, muscling his snout into the sand, covering the eyes.
With one hand she snagged the hat from the sand and put it on the gator bastard. Here’s one hell of a photo op, folks, she gritted into the mic pinned to her shirt. The cap fell off pretty quick, but she figured it was a bit embarrassing for the gator and she was all for embarrassing Sleepy Pete on account of the two bitings. Once she had his snout mashed into the sand she slid her hand down to his gator lips or whatever the fuck and pinned the jaws shut. She was straddling his shoulders. She lifted Sleepy Pete’s head into the air so his under snout was pointing right at the crowd. A murmur went up from the bleachers, and she whispered into his little gator ears that she owned him, that this was her swamp.
Then the gator whipped his tail and she lost purchase and was in the sand, muttering holy hell, ah fuck, into the hot mic with the gator pouncing at her and the crowd wild, parents shielding young eyes, this being the type of crisis that could trigger therapy down the road, the exotic varieties not covered by insurance. She hurdled a fence, the gator’s jaws snapping shut a few inches behind her shorts, and she rolled into a thicket of palms, curses filling the mic and booming over the loudspeakers. Cummings was dashing into the ring after Sleepy Pete.
“Artemis!” he was yelling. “Artemis, dammit. Dammitall, Artemis, get back in here. Artemis!”
Once they’d safely returned Sleepy Pete to his lagoon, after they’d distributed apologies and refunds and all manner of gift certificates, after they’d warned the lawyers in Kissimmee of the deluge of lawsuits that was surely coming, after Procter had smoked three Virginia Slims on the emptied bleachers, Cummings sat her down in his office to scream at her. Within a few months’ time, she thought, canned from CIA and now maybe Gatorville. A twofer that hadn’t happened to anybody before, and probably wouldn’t again. But Cummings didn’t want to fire her, he just wanted to yell. Labor was always short around Gatorville. He couldn’t afford to go looking for someone else.
“You still want me to cover the Jumparoo tomorrow?” she asked Cummings when he’d finished shouting.
He pointed at the door: “Get the hell out.”
Her trailer sat on a few acres off Boggy Creek that Cummings had rented her on the cheap, a sandy patch thick with palmetto and oak neighboring a swamp that bubbled in the heat. Procter’s Sunshine State domain boasted a galley kitchen with a banquette, a bedroom, bathroom, and a cramped living room doubling as a storage facility. The sofa was sagging and turquoise and floral-printed. Most of the curtains were beads.
Procter parked her RAV4 next to the rusty weight rack. The swamp bristled with the whine of insects. The air was wet, the sky thick with unfallen rain. Inside she dialed the EDM up so loud that the trailer’s windows shivered and the bead curtains shimmied.
To distract herself from the day’s agitations, she tended to the small armory snuggled under her bed. First, she lapped bore oil through her dear friend, a twelve-gauge Mossberg shotgun. Next, she cleaned the handle of her cherished bat and then applied pine tar, working it a ways up the barrel for good measure. The M4 was in fine shape. She debated disassembling and cleaning the Mk 48 belt-fed machine gun but could not summon the energy. The cases went back under the bed.
She took a shot of gin and flopped across the sheets. By and by, with the first jets of rain drowning the croaks and bonks of the frogs, Procter fell asleep.
Next day Cummings meted out Procter’s punishment for the Sleepy Pete fiasco: for three weeks she would cover the eleven-thirty and the two-thirty Gator-Mania shows, then string up the whole chickens and pig carcass for the four o’clock Jumparoo. “And, Artemis, you are gonna manage tear-down,” he said, folding his chubby hands in front of his mouth and leaning back in his chair, which he did when he was pleased with himself.
Jumparoos brought solid coin for Cummings, but Procter couldn’t stand them: her end—teardown, aka cleanup—was a pain in the ass, like mopping up after a long day at the Colosseum. Pig and chicken giblets went airborne across sections of boardwalk, where they would be trampled, mashed into the slats by tourists hustling for cover. By late afternoon the flies were rolling, the air was ripe, and Procter had to use the Meat Stick to floss the gore from the boards. The stick was, in fact, a broom handle filed down to floss the slats. And sometimes it got stuck.
She was yanking at the thing when she caught sight of him standing at the far end of the boardwalk. He looked the same. What had she expected? Bent back? Hollow eyes? Bald? Prison beard? He stood tall, half smile on his face at the sight of the Meat Stick. Bags around the eyes were flabbier, but unless you knew where he’d spent the summer you’d think nothing amiss, other than perhaps that wiry handsome guys were rare around Gatorville, and when they did appear they tended to be draped with kids.
The stick popped free, and she tossed it aside. When she’d reached him, she drew him in for a hug. For a few moments they hung there. She did not want to let him go. And she had no idea what to say.
She knew Sam was out, of course. Mac had called with the news the day of the swap, when Sam returned stateside. And Theo had visited Gatorville weeks earlier, while they were debriefing Sam at the Farm. Mostly she and Theo drank, and he’d spilled a few details: There’d been a trade. Mac and Gus had done something vaguely heroic. Bodily, Sam was fine. “And mentally?” she’d asked. “Too soon,” Theo had said. “Too soon to say on that one.”
Her mouth was opening when he said, “You know you’ve got a good deal of blood on this shirt, Chief.” A half step back, and he tugged at it, a blue-black number stenciled with an albino gator submerged in the swamp, eyes peeking above the surface.
“Pig’s blood,” she said. “Occupational hazard.”
Sam looked down. A few gators were thrashing in the brackish water below.
She pulled him in for one more hug, her version of being overcome with emotion, and said, “Look, I’m no good at these types of speeches. So how about you assume I said exactly what I should have in a moment such as this?”
“You just did.”
“I appreciate that. And it’s good to see you. Well and truly. I confess I am surprised Gatorville is on your USA return tour.” This was surprise, not self-loathing—that would have been a decidedly off-brand emotion for Procter. Even though she and Sam went back more than a decade, she’d figured that he wouldn’t be too keen to trek down to Central Florida’s third largest alligator-themed amusement park to make breezy chitchat with the woman responsible for the op that sent him to a Moscow prison camp for the summer.
“With a new lease on life, how could I miss this?” he said, nudging his chin in the direction of the discarded Meat Stick. “When do you get off work?”
She checked her watch. “Near enough to now.” She scanned around the boardwalk. “Looks like I got most of it.”
“Got a place we can talk?”
“This isn’t a social call?”
He tried to force a smile, but the skin of his face seemed to fasten tighter to his skull as his jaw clamped shut and the humor drained from his eyes. “Needs to be private,” Sam muttered, dropping his voice to a harsh whisper. “We have a problem, Chief. A big problem.”
The sun had vanished, and the bog bristled with frogs and crickets when she turned onto the sandy drive leading to her trailer. Sam rode in the passenger seat. After they had left Gatorville—separately—she had picked him up from a restaurant in Kissimmee; he did not want his rental traveling to her home. She stepped into the sand, arched her back to stretch. “Let me sparkle back up,” she said, “rinse off the blood and such, and then we can get down to business. Meantime, make yourself comfortable.”
After she’d showered, Procter made two gin and tonics in plastic Gatorville souvenir cups. She gathered a pack of Slims and a lighter, and for an ashtray she selected a Gatorville mug, the one with the gold rim and the handle shaped like a gator tail. They slid into the banquette.
Sam Joseph had been a rising-star case officer who made a bad decision: he’d fallen for an asset, a Syrian, during their tour in Damascus, Procter’s first tour as a Chief. The CIA’s Performance Review Board had sent him to the Penalty Box—two years riding a desk under adult supervision—but he had recovered, clawing his way back to the field for a few tours until he’d been directed to Headquarters, where Procter, on a trip through the Box herself, had snagged him for Moscow X.
“Jaggers,” she said, fixing herself a smoke. “Welcome to paradise.”
Burt O. GOLDJAGGER was Sam’s “funnyname,” the alias used in written cable traffic to avoid printing his true name on documents. Procter often went with “Jaggers” over his Christian name.
She shoved the Slims and lighter his way, but he waved them off.
“Quite the place,” he said, giving the bead curtain a smack. “Your cousin owns it?”
“Nah, I bought it straight-out. Picked it up on the way down.”
“I meant the gator park,” Sam said.
“Ah,” she said. “Right. Yes. Cummings. Mom’s big brother’s kid. Land’s been in the family since the forties.” She puffed out clouds of smoke while she spoke, cigarette pinned in her teeth. “Pay’s not so great, but I’ve got my pension, and the perks are swell”—at this Sam made a face, and Procter put a solemn hand to her heart. “Plus, I eat and drink on the Gatorville tab. And there’s thirty percent off at the gift shop,” she said, raising her souvenir cup approvingly. “Only ten percent at the emporium, though.”
“There’s a difference between the gift shop and the emporium?”
With a long last drag of her cigarette, she crushed the butt in the mug and gave the gator-tail handle a flick. “Emporium’s fancier.”
“Quite the setup here,” he said, jerking his head around the trailer, with the tone of a man commenting on a mysterious skin rash.
“It’s a single wide, Jaggers. And I’m single as hell, so it works for me. She lit up another and screwed the ball cap backward so Chief Wahoo faced the wall.
“You know, Chief,” Sam said, “they’re not called the Indians anymore and you shouldn’t be wearing that offensive hat.”
“Oh dear,” she said. “My bad. The guy who got caught banging his asset is offended. I’m so sorry.” She twisted the hat back around and smiled all big and white. Then it evaporated.
He was chuckling. “You’re such a dick, Chief.”
“I’m not a Chief anymore,” she said. “Just a dick. What’ve they got you doing now, by the way?”
“Back in Moscow X desk-riding,” he said. “Working for Gus. When I got home they stashed me at the Farm for a bit, let the family and Natalie come see me, spend some time together but in the nursery, you know how it goes. Then it got rolling: security and Counterintelligence debriefings, writing it all down, a roto-rooting from the docs and the shrinks. The capstone was a month of mandatory leave. Gus called me toward the end, asked if I wanted my old job back.”
“And here you are,” she said.
“And here I am.” His phone shivered in his pocket. He looked at the name, wrinkled his nose, and typed out a reply. The phone chirped with a response and he thrust it back into his pocket.
“Natalie?” Procter inquired.
“Yeah.”
“What’s she have to say?”
“That she misses me.”
“Well, of course she does, you’re the tits. Remind me: How long have you two been together?”
“Little over a year.”
“And does Natalie know you’re here?”
“No.”
“Where does she think you are?”
“Vegas.”
She laughed. “You know, Jaggers, most guys would lie to their girlfriend about where they’re going in order to get to Vegas. Instead, you’re using Vegas as the alibi for a trip to the swamps outside Kissimmee, and you, presumably, are not even here for sex or some other vice. To cap it all off, you’re lying to the woman who waited faithfully for you to emerge from a Russian prison and who, if memory serves, is a gem sparkling from all angles, and a Levantine, to boot. Said differently: Sam Joseph’s kryptonite. Now, look, you’ve come a long way and told lies to get here, so I imagine some heavy shit’s coming. You should feel free to dish it to me whenever you’re ready.”
Sam picked up the pack of cigarettes and fixed himself a smoke. He blew ragged clouds through the bead curtains for a moment, thinking, she figured, about how to begin.
“I need to go through it from the start,” he said. “I’ve had to tell the Russians one story, the Agency another, and Natalie and my folks a third, and it’ll help me to give you the clean version, front to back.”
“You start where you want,” she said, with a quick sip. “I’ve got oodles of time.”
“The dates are a little fuzzy,” Sam said, “on account of the obvious. But the cable comes in from Moscow on the morning of . . .” He stopped talking and just stared past her. His brain seemed to have misfired.
Bad start, she thought. This might be rough.
“That cable arrived from Moscow Station on the morning of the fifteenth,” she said, “March fifteenth. Hard for me to forget that day now.”
“Right. By next afternoon I’ve made my arrangements for Singapore—room, surface transport, pocket money. I wire money into my account and take the hundred grand of cash for the down payment to Golikov. You approve the final cable and I sign the receipts for the money.”
“You signed them ‘Daffy Duck,’ I heard,” Procter said. “The receipts.”
“Heard?” he said, chuckling, “You didn’t look?”
“No one looks at the fucking receipts except for the Finance smurfs, which is who complained to me. But keep going.”
“Next morning I’m wheels up from Dulles. Wheels down in Singapore next afternoon and straight to the high-limit bacc tables to scout for Golikov. No sign of him. I mean, hell, the guy’s given us a hotel and a two-day window, but the place is not small. Upstairs for a shower and Red Bulls, and then I stroll through the hotel for the lay of the land: the exits, the flow, where security has the fixed points, and how they’re moving. I scout the sight lines into the high-limit bacc rooms. Back to the tables for a bit, then I cool it. No sign of the guy, it’s seven a.m., and we know the delegation is in meetings all day. I go upstairs, sleep. I’m up by noon, and I try to sweat out the jet lag in the gym.”
While he spoke, Sam rolled the bead curtains in his fingers as if praying the Rosary. “That night I’m at the bacc tables again. High-limit room. Not the ones for whales. The tier below. Every seat is taken. And I see Golikov. He’s playing and looking around like he’s creeped. I cash out, toss down a sparkling water at a bar, and return for a seat at his table. And I’m lucky. There is a seat open, right next to him. I order whisky, a Macallan, and I casually mention that during a recent run in Vegas I’d sampled the forty-year. Guy fumbles the cards at the signal, but recovers, says he’s drinking a Springbank. We drink and play a few more hands, and then he leans in close to say something. I’ve blocked it from the Russians. And from the Agency . . .”
