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“I may well imagine,” I said.
“Each of the Soviet agencies is accusing the other of prime responsibility for the situation. There will probably be a purge, perhaps several purges. And at least one of the agencies is trumpeting it about that Peking is responsible for what happened. That the Chinese were attempting to discredit Moscow on her own doorstep.” He snorted. “So far everyone’s gotten a bit of the blame except the International Zionist Conspiracy. And the United States.”
“Then it turned out well,” I said, slowly.
“It turned out perfectly. Except for the Boy Scouts, who lost a few reliable men.”
“They weren’t a particularly nice lot,” I said.
“No, I don’t suppose they were.”
“Not at all.”
“Well,” he said. He sighed heavily. “I do think we ought to keep your role in this debacle completely quiet. As far as I can tell, the CIA ops in Kabul never got in touch with headquarters at Langley. They kept them wholly in the dark insofar as your presence was concerned. This is all to the good. As far as the Agency is concerned, their men made a bad error, got themselves knocked over by patriotic Afghans intent upon maintaining their neutrality, and the U.S. lucked out in that Kabul thinks they were Russians. Complicated, isn’t it? All it adds up to is that we should keep quiet about this. I trust you’ll do so?”
“Oh, definitely.”
“And the girl? You did bring her out, didn’t you?”
“She’s a sort of private operative of mine,” I said. “Actually she helped me penetrate the cover of that white-slaving operation to begin with. We won’t have to worry about her.”
“Good, good.” He got to his feet, approached, extended his hand. We shook briefly. “You won’t get a medal for this one,” he said. “One of those exploits that must remain forever untold, as it were. But as far as I’m concerned, Ta
So when I got back to the apartment the phone was ringing. I made my usual mistake. I answered it.
“Mr. Ta
“Long Numbel,” I said. “This Brue Stahl Hand Raundley.”
“Mr. Ta
I said, “Hello, Mrs. Horowitz.”
“So I call you to find my Deborah for me and what do you do? A sinful woman you make of her.”
“Uh.”
“So when will you make an honest woman of her, eh, Ta
“Deborah’s not here, Mrs. Horowitz.”
“Ta
“She went to the zoo, Mrs. Horowitz. I’ll tell her you called.”
“Ta
I hung up; and before she could call back I took the phone off the hook. The door opened. I turned around, and it was Phaedra.
“Hi,” she said. “You’re back from your appointment.”
“No, this is my astral projection. The Manishtana taught me how to do it.”
“You do it very well, then. What’s the matter with the phone?”
“Your mother was on it,” I said.
“Oh.”
“Where’s the kid?”
“Downstairs,” she said. “Playing with the Puerto Rican kid. Mikey.”
“He’s not in school?”
“It’s Chanukah.”
“I should have realized,” I said. I looked at the phone. It was making that whirring noise that it makes so that you’ll know that you didn’t hang it up. The telephone company evidently can’t believe that a person might want his phone off the hook for a reason. The telephone company never had a girlfriend that had a mother.
I looked at Phaedra. She was taking off all her clothes.
I looked at the phone again. It had stopped whirring, and now an operator was shouting at me to hang up the receiver. Then there was some loud clanking, and then the operator started in again.
“Listen to that woman,” I said.
“I think she’s a recording.”
“They all are.”
So I hung up the phone to stop the noise, and I reached for Phaedra, and she giggled and purred, and the phone rang.
The more things change…
At 2:30 one fine December afternoon I ripped the telephone out of the wall.
Afterword
Evan Michael Ta
That summer was my first stay in New York, and what a wonder it was. After a year at Antioch College, I was spending three months in the mailroom at Pines Publications, as part of the school’s work-study program. I shared an apartment on Barrow Street with a couple of other students, and I spent all my time – except for the forty weekly hours my job claimed – hanging out in the Village. Every Sunday afternoon I went to Washington Square, where a couple of hundred people gathered to sing folk songs around the fountain. I spent evenings in coffeehouses, or at somebody’s apartment.
What an astonishing variety of people I met! Back home in Buffalo, people had run the gamut from A to B. (The ones I knew, that is. Buffalo, I found out later, was a pretty rich human landscape, but I didn’t have a clue at the time.)
But in the Village I met socialists and monarchists and Welsh nationalists and Catholic anarchists and, oh, no end of exotics. I met people who worked and people who found other ways of making a living, some of them legal. And I soaked all this up for three months and went back to school, and a year later I started selling stories and dropped out of college to take a job at a literary agency. Then I went back to school and then I dropped out again, and ever since I’ve been writing books, which is to say I’ve found a legal way of making a living without working.
Where’s Ta
Hovering, I suspect, somewhere on the edge of thought. And then in 1962, I was back in Buffalo with a wife and a daughter and another daughter on the way, and two facts, apparently unrelated, came to my attention, one right after the other.
Fact One: It is apparently possible for certain rare individuals to live without sleep.
Fact Two: Two hundred fifty years after the death of Queen A
I picked up the first fact in an article on sleep in Time magazine, the second while browsing the Encyclopedia Brita
I put the idea on the back burner, and then I must have unplugged the stove, because it was a couple more years before Ta
Ta
My first book for Fawcett was a noir suspense novel. We were going to call it Grifter’s Game. I’m not sure what my original working title had been, although I think it may have been A Little Off the Top; I know it wasn’t Mona, which is the title Daigh slapped on it. And why, pray tell? Because he’d recently bought some cover art consisting of a sketch of a woman, so he wanted to call the book by the name of the femme fatale, in order to make the cover appropriate.