‘I — uh, I don’t know what he ... u, looks like. I’ve never
uh, met... Look, what he looks like doesn’t matter.’
Oscarfield stared at Rothschild for quite awhile. It was a bad idea, he was beginning to think. But lie decided to try again. ‘Let me try once more,’ he said. ‘This man named Bob will come to you and ask you to play “Moon Over Miami.” When he does, give him this envelope. It’s like a code, you see? Who cares what he looks like? I don’t care if lie looks like King Kong as long as he gives you the code. Okay?’
‘We’re in business,’ Rothschild said, sticking out his hand. ‘Don’t do that,’ Oscarfield said. ‘People will see us. Put your hand down. Here, take this.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s the two hundred dollars,’
‘A deal is a deal,’ Rothschild said, and as Oscarfield started out of Senor Collada’s, he played a few chords of ‘Moon Over Miami.’
Actually Rothschild was simply toying with Oscarfield. Everybody from the pastry chef to the doorman knew Oscarfield’s dodge. At first Rothschild didn’t really take him seriously. Then, one evening, Bob showed up. It had to be him. He was the size of a Mack truck and wore dark glasses in the middle of the night and he changed tables three times during one set.
That’s him. Got to be, thought Rothschild. Playing musical chairs like that. Nervous as a preacher at a nudist camp. But if this was some kind of undercover job, why would they pick somebody the size of Mount Rushmore?
The answer, he eventually learned, was that the obvious frequently eluded them.
The minute he announced the break, Bob was on his feet and beside him. He stuck out a hand as big as the piano top.
‘I’m Bob,’ he said.
‘Good,’ said the Magician.
‘Do you know “Moon Over Miami”?’
‘I don’t play requests.’
Bob was taken completely aback. He was not programmed for jokes. ‘Do you know “Moon Over Miami”?’ he repeated.
‘Does it go like this?’ Rothschild asked, and began whistling a few bars of ‘Stars Fell on Alabama.’
Bob looked around the place without moving his head. ‘I don’t know how it goes,’ he said. ‘Goddammit, where’s the fuckin’ envelope?’
Realizing the big man had no sense of humour, absolutely none, Rothschild slipped him the envelope.
‘You’re off the wall, y’know that,’ Bob growled under his breath and lumbered out of the place.
Rothschild figured that was the end of that. But two weeks later Oscarfield appeared again. ‘That vas nice, the way you handled that,’ he confided. ‘Really put old Bob to the test. I heard about it.’ He slipped Rothschild another two bills.
Four hundred dollars for not playing ‘Moon Over Miami.’ Rothschild was impressed. After that, Oscarfield used him frequently as a drop. He never saw Bob again. Pretty soon another agent decided to use Rothschild as his Caribbean drop, then another. Then there was Haversham, a British operator with M16. Then an Israeli named Silverblatt. And a Frenchman named...
Within five years Rothschild was the postman for the entire Caribbean intelligence community. He became adept at steaming open envelopes. Then he got into cryptology. It became a hobby. Breaking codes. Keeping files. Cross-references. Before long, Rothschild was quite aware that most of the spies in the islands spent most of their time spying on one another. Sometimes members of one agency even spied on other members of the same outfit. Sometimes they didn’t even know they were both members of the same agency. The madness of it all appealed to Rothschild’s love of the perverse. He began to feel a sense of power. Occasionally he would change the messages slightly, just to see what would happen. In one such instance he almost started a revolution in Guatemala. It was marvellous. It gave the Magician an entirely new outlook on life.
So when he moved to St Lucifer to become pianist in residence at the Great Gustavsen, the epicentre of the Caribbean undercover network just naturally shifted to St Lucifer. Rothschild became so important that once, when he went to the States for a three-week vacation, the entire intelligence community was thrown out of whack. At one time there were eighteen operatives, representing every major country in the world, staying at the Great Gustavsen, waiting for le Sorcier to return.
By the time he acquired Isidore he was knocking down almost five thousand a month in retainers, from the CIA, the KGB, the Surete, M16, and every other outfit in the network.
Isidore opened up whole new vistas. With Isidore his power became even greater.
Voila! May I present Izzy,’ Rothschild said as he opened the door to Isidore’s room.
Isidore’s room was a walk-in closet.
Isidore was an Apple II mini-computer.
O’Hara stared at it in mute appreciation, It was beautiful and very compact. It had a keyboard with a telephone cradle attached to it, and it had its own monitor screen and its own high-speed Kube printer. The main box, Izzy’s brain, was about a foot square, with three gates in the front and a large square ready light. A cassette recorder was attached to the telephone modem on the keyboard. The telephone was also equipped with a speakerphone.
Into it, Rothschild had fed mountains of information. But he also made the computer available to agents on a confidential basis, always leaving the room so they could tap out their identification and open up the files of their home-base computers. A video camera built into the wall and aimed at the screen enabled him to collect all of the various codes and machine language necessary to tap into the main computers of most of the major intelligence
