“Maybe she got mixed up.”
“And that line about ‘Live fast, die young’? That was John Derek in
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
I know it is futile to question the recall and accuracy of the Human Computer. I think of the rooster carafe and the intimate moment just for me. My feet drop off the desk and onto the floor.
“What’s the matter?”
“She just takes things.”
I don’t know why this should be so upsetting and bewildering.
“Maybe she was acting.”
“Uh-uh.”
“Maybe she’s crazy.”
“She’s not.”
Barbara is dismayed. Even the Human Computer can’t process this. ‘
“I don’t understand. These are
But I have processed it all too quickly.
“She’s lying about the whole damn thing.”
“The doctor?”
I nod. I think I’m going to cry.
“Check him out,” Barbara advises softly. “You have to. For Galloway. One more time.”
SEVENTEEN
I TRACK DOWN Donnato in the public cafeteria on the first floor of the building. He is sitting behind a pillar where nobody can find him, finishing a piece of blueberry pie and reading the
“I’m between a rock and a hard place, Donnato.” I tell him my troubles and eat the piece of crust he has left on the plate. “I need something for Galloway. I can’t go back and say the trip to Boston was a bust and I’ve been chasing my tail ever since. I’ve got to find out for myself if the doctor is dirty.”
An Indian woman in a yellow silk tunic edges to the table beside us and wearily sets down a tray. Another civil servant trying to make it to the next three-day weekend.
“It’s time to check out the source. I think I should go undercover. Put on a wire, get in there as a patient, ask the doctor for painkillers and see if he’ll give them to me.”
“Why didn’t you go to a wire before?”
“I never had the evidence to get Galloway to approve an undercover assignment.”
“You still don’t.”
“Right. But I’m going to do it anyway.”
“Without approval?”
I nod, swallowing down the anxiety that is rising in my throat like acid vomitus.
“I know this is a little out of bounds—”
“Way out of bounds.”
“Will you partner up with me? Monitor the wire?”
“On a maverick operation? What if it goes bust?”
“It can’t go bust, it’s too simple. You and I have each done this routine a thousand times.”
Donnato rubs his beard upward against the grain in that impatient way of his when he wants to be done with an annoying thought.
“It’s a risk.”
“A controlled risk.”
Donnato shakes his head. “Not my thing.”
“I understand.” I feel hot and foolish and suddenly lost. “That’s okay. I’ll use a microcassette in my purse.”
Donnato drains the last of his lemonade.
“Pumpkin started law school, did I tell you?”
“Good for her.”
“I was hoping she’d wait until Jeremy’s settled in high school, but that’s two more years.”
“Is he having a tough time?”
“Working with a tutor, but with attention deficit disorder, which is the latest thing they say he’s got, it’s an ongoing process. Rochelle didn’t want to wait.”
He stands and dumps his garbage. The public cafeteria smells of hot dogs sitting in greasy water. We walk past a table of government co-workers: a Japanese clerk using chopsticks to eat food she brought from home in a plastic box, two white males in shirtsleeves, and a Filipino girl with a fake Gucci bag. What on earth do they have to say to one another?
When we get to the door, he opens it for me.
“I’ll partner up,” he says.
I look at him with gratitude but his eyes are focused across the plaza, where members of a film crew are setting up folding canvas chairs and dragging cables through the shrubbery, fitting a big ungainly camera onto a tripod and unpacking black cases filled with lighting equipment. A crowd of workers from the Federal Building is gawking at some television actress whose mane of blond hair looks familiar. I can see that if she were Jayne Mason it would cause a serious disturbance. We head straight through until a kid with a walkie-talkie stops us and makes us go around to the side doors. I don’t like being bossed around by civilians and I resent like hell being called “Madame.”
You’re supposed to get used to film crews shooting on location in Los Angeles, it’s good for the local economy and some people think it’s a thrill, but to me it’s nothing but a pain in the ass, all these self-important types taking over our plaza like they own it because — let’s face it — movie people are special, they are above life.
Meanwhile, down here in the public cafeteria, we are all the same.
• • •
The cubicle where you check out surveillance equipment is in the southeast corner of the garage behind an unmarked door.
I hate going there because the clerk running it has a terrible purple birthmark across half his face and compensates by being unbearably helpful, nodding and making little bows over every transaction. He’s got a pocket-size TV tuned to the soaps and three postcards pinned to the wall that people sent him from vacations, and he stays down there all day in his dark orderly little warren, tape recorders and cameras neatly numbered and stowed on metal shelving. Filling out the forms in duplicate, you know that if there is an anteroom to hell this is it, and if there is a keeper who suffers for eternity this poor guy with the birthmark must be he, or maybe your discomfort is appropriate for the act you are about to commit, the threshold you are about to cross: spying on citizens, recording their most intimate acts.
I finesse an appointment with Dr. Eberhardt by pleading with the receptionist that I have incapacitating back pain from a recent car accident in which I was rear-ended, thinking of the incident in Boston that still gives me a twinge after a hard set of butterfly. She asks who referred me and for one appalling moment I don’t have an answer. Then:
