'Just a theory.'
'I'd love to hear it'' she said, leaning forward with obvious interest.
He shook his head.
'I told you, I discuss facts, not theories.
Sorry. When I have facts I'll be glad to-' 'I save your life and this is my thanks?' she inquired, gently chiding and not really challenging him. If he didn't want to tell her now, she seemed to be saying, he didn't have to.
So he changed the subject.
'That reminds me' he said, 'that wasn't an emery board you cut me down with. Do you always carry it?'
'A girl needs protection 'It's against the law, you know.'
'Law?' She looked at him disbelievingly and laughed. 'n take my chances,' she said with a certain bitterness. He didn't ask how she'd become so proficient with it. Instead he had the sense of having said something silly.
Again he changed the subject.
'Let's go way back before the elevator,' he said.
'You were about to tell me about George McAdam and Peter Whiteside'
There was an uneasy silence for a moment. She pursed her lips, as if wondering how much to say, then folded her hands on the table before her, pushing the plate away. She looked him in the eye as if to speak from the soul.
'Yes, of course' she said absently.
'You should know. I should have told you anyway.' It was as if an eloquent debate were taking place within her, conflicting urges to tell the truth against an impulse not to reveal too much. Clearly she was struggling with it. She looked up at him and saw him studying her. She perhaps realized that she appeared evasive. So she blurted out the truth.
'George McAdam was a 'sandhog.''?.
'A what.
She looked perplexed, as if to wonder,
'You mean you don't even know that? Are you lying to me, or are you just plain ignorant?' But she said nothing other than,
'Let's go for a walk. I'll tell you About it.'
They were on Lexington-as usual she was choosing the direction. They carefully watched around them, nervously paying attention to each car that passed and anyone walking too closely behind them. She chose to walk uptown on an avenue that went downtown, so that they could see traffic approaching. No mistake. She knew the tricks. More than he did, he was reminded, and it was a good thing she did. She'd saved his life once already But then again, it was his sudden involvement with her that had almost cost him his life in the first place.
Or so it appeared.
'Sandhogs,' he said.
'A nickname' She walked beside him, close but not holding his arm. Her coat was pulled tightly around her and her hands were thrust protectively into her coat pockets. She watched ahead and didn't look at him as she spoke.
'Keep going' he said.
'It was the nickname given to agents within a certain branch of the S. I. S ' ISIS.?'
She glanced at him quickly, then looked way again.
'Never heard of it?' she asked. He wasn't sure if there was suspicion in her voice.
'Never.Sorry. Secret Intelligence Service,' she said.
'British, of course.'
'Continue.'
They walked northward.
'In this branch were the agents who had a certain sort of expertise' she said.
'You already know my foster father was in the Middle East when he was shot. What comes out of sand?'
It took him only a moment.
'Oil.'
'Oh,' she confirmed.
'I pieced it all together over the years, just as I pieced together who I was. The sandhogs were the British agents in oil intelligence. Long ago the British government realized that it was burning more oil than was healthy. Great Britain is an island, dependent on its imports. As long ago as the fifties any intelligent observer could have told you that England could be brought to its knees if its petroleum imports were cut off. There's never been any secret.'
He listened intently as they walked.
'I have no idea what the sandhogs were doing. All I know is that he, McAdam, was back and forth in different parts of the world.
Standard cloak-and-dagger stuff, I'm sure. It was on one of those intrigues that he got shot in the hip in 1953. Before he retired and took me on as a daughter.'
He nodded. The icy wind made him pull his coat collar tight.
'Well,' she continued, 'some men can never retire. They miss the excitement. Or maybe it's just the violence and the blood they miss.
My foster mother died in 1968. That left my foster father in Switzerland, limping around in an empty house staring at the lake and longing to be back in the service.
'At his age?'
'At his age. And as it happened, SIS. were willing to take him back. They had an operation in a different part of the world that needed sorting out. An area where no one would know him, they thought.
Venezuela. South American oil instead of Middle Eastern.' She smiled.
'It all gives off the same stench when it burns ' They turned another corner and were now on a side street east of Lexington Avenue.
'Can I ask where we're going?' he said.
'See that sign down there?' she asked, pointing halfway down the block to a sign saying READER AND ADVISER, MADAME DIANE.
'That's where we're going.'
They walked. She continued to speak.
'My foster father had contacted another man in the Service. The man in Whitehall who was his immediate superior and to whom he would be reporting once his new assignment began. They planned to rendezvous in Maracaibo. They did, in fact. Then they went on to Caracas.
Eventually they were heading north to the United States. There might have been a meeting with some U.S. intelligence service. I don't know.
I only know they never arrived.'
'Why not?'
They stopped short and stood immediately beneath the READER AND ADVISER sign.
Leslie glanced at the vacant doorway to the gypsy's parlor.
'The airplane blew up an hour after takeoff,' she said.
'A Caracas-to-Miami flight. June 14, 1971. Sabotaged And it wasn't an accident that they were on it. I suspect it was sabotaged for them expressly. After all, there are agents from the 'other side'-as my foster father used to call it-who are actively seeking the oil down there. And with one well-placed bomb, the top British sandhog and his superior were eliminated from the region.' She looked at Thomas, studying him for his reaction.
He listened to her story with compassion and sympathy. He believed her just as he had on the first day she'd come to his office.
And just as he'd believed the man in London calling himself Peter Whiteside.
'And that, Thomas'' she said in softer tones, 'is why my foster father can't be of help anymore.'
'What about Peter Whiteside?' he asked.
Her smile was pained. She shook her head.
