6

IT’S HARD TO SAY THAT I WOULD HAVE BROUGHT OFF THE FIRST LEG OF MY mission if not for a curious piece of luck. In the Eastern waiting area, just before boarding my plane, I encountered Sparker Boone, an old classmate from St. Matthew’s. One of our lesser lights, he had always been built like a pear armed with buck teeth. He had now added a premature bald spot to the back of his thin, sandy hair. Of course, I had no wish to go down to Miami with Bradley “Sparker” Boone when I was hoping to present myself as Harry Field, but on boarding the plane, I could find no way to avoid his invitation to sit with him since First Class was half-empty. I had to content myself with obtaining the aisle seat.

He told me soon enough that he had become a photographer for Life magazine, and was on his way to Miami to photograph some of the leading Cuban exiles. Before I could digest how worrisome, from an Agency point of view, this news might be (since Life—Kittredge had also assured me—was considered by us to be somewhat less dependable than Time), he added, “I hear you’re in the CIA.”

“God, no,” I said. “What gave you that idea?”

“The grapevine. St. Matt’s.”

“Someone is playing fast and loose with my name,” I told him. “Why, I’m a sales rep for an electronics company.” I was about to present the evidence when I recollected that Robert Charles happened to be the name embossed on my business card. My only excuse for such near-carelessness is that I was prodigiously distracted. To my small panic, both stewardesses in the First Class section fit Harlot’s description: They had dark hair, and were attractive. I did not feel ready to settle into a conversation until I made certain which girl was Modene Murphy.

The answer, however, soon declared itself. One stewardess was carefully groomed and well featured; the other was striking enough to be a movie star. As she went up and down the aisle checking seat belts and overhead compartments, she looked much pleased with herself, and tended to passengers’ needs with a subtle contempt, as if there was something second-rate about having needs to begin with. She did not seem to belong to her job so much as to be an actress in a role. The worst of it was that I thought her looks were marvelous. Her hair was as dark as Kittredge’s, and her eyes were a brilliant, insolent green, ready to suggest that she would compete with you over everything from an early-morning run down a powder trail to the first knock in gin rummy; she had a figure described immediately by Sparker as “a body I would kill for”—Sparker with his wife and bald spot and two daughters, their snapshots already presented to me, yes, Sparker, with his house in Darien, still ready to kill for possession of Modene Murphy, yes, I had the right girl. The nameplate pinned to her breast, which I glimpsed when she stopped to tell me to strap my safety belt, was confirmation.

I started to take off my jacket. “Could you hang this up, miss?” I asked.

“Put it on your lap for now,” she said, “we’re about to take off,” and without a glance to see what kind of man might be attached to the voice, moved to her bucket seat.

Once we were in the air, I had to ring for her. She picked up my jacket, and was gone. It was Sparker who gained her interest. With a knowing grin, as if the procedure had been successfully tested before, he reached to the floor, set his camera bag on his lap, and proceeded to load film, first into a Leica, then a Hasselblad. She was back before he was done. “Can I ask you?” she said. “Who do you work for?”

“Life,” said Sparker.

“I knew it,” she said. She called to the other stewardess. “What did I say, Nedda, when this one”—pointing to Sparker—“came on the plane?”

“You said, ‘He’s a photographer for Life or Look.’”

“How could you tell?” asked Sparker.

“I can always tell.”

“What would you have said was my occupation?” I asked.

“I didn’t give it consideration,” she answered.

She was leaning over me to get her face closer to Life photographer Boone. “How long are you going to be in Miami?” she inquired of him.

“About a week.”

“I want to ask you some questions. I don’t like the way my pictures come out.”

“I can help you on that,” he said.

“You seem very serious about photography,” I added.

She looked at me for the first time, but presented no more answer than the smallest turn of her lip.

“Where,” she asked Sparker, “are you going to stay in Miami?”

“At the Saxony,” he said, “in Miami Beach.”

She made a face. “The Saxony,” she said.

“You know all these hotels well?” he asked.

“Of course.”

When she came back, she handed him a slip. “You can get me at that number. Or, I may call you at the Saxony.”

“Whew!” he said so soon as she moved down the aisle again. I watched her talking with animation to a businessman in a silk suit whose manicured nails gleamed from three seats away. It took no more than that to put me in depression. I had been keyed on this meeting ever since Harlot announced it at lunch. With all I had done and not done in my life, I had certainly never picked up a girl before. The iron hand of St. Matt’s was still upon me. I felt helpless before this Modene Murphy. By comparison to myself, she seemed incredibly sophisticated and abysmally ignorant—hardly a fit.

“Sparker, let me have the girl’s number,” I said.

“Oh, I can’t do that,” he told me.

Back at St. Matt’s, he had been easy to bully. Memories returned of chastening him in a headlock. Now, meeting ostensibly as equal adults, he would try to prove stubborn.

“I’ve got to have it,” I said.

“Why?”

“I feel as if I’ve met someone who will mean a great deal to me.”

“Yes,” he said under my stare, “I can let you have her phone number. I can tell. She is not the girl for me.” His breath was sour as he spoke to my ear. “She looks awfully expensive.”

“Do you believe one has to pay her?”

He shook his head. “No, but these stewardesses demand a very good time if they give you a date. I can’t feel comfortable spending that kind of money when my wife and children can use it.”

“That makes a strong case,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, “but what will you do for me?”

“Oh,” I said, “you might try naming it.”

“I want a contact with a good Cuban hooker. I hear they are unforgettable in bed.”

That offered an image of Sparker Boone stroking his bone on the recollection through the sere and golden years.

“What makes you think I can take care of that?” I asked.

“You’re CIA. You have that sort of knowledge at your fingertips.”

It was not altogether untrue. I could ask one or two of the exile leaders. They would have, at the least, a friend in the business of brothels.

“Well, I will take care of it,” I said. “You have my word. But you have to do something else for me.”

“What? You’re getting the better of the bargain as it is.”

“Not at all,” I said. “You have to watch out for Cuban hookers. The worst can be venal and ill-spirited.” I was improvising. “The ground has to be prepared. I will take pains to have you introduced to your Cuban date as the friend of a very influential man. That will make a big difference.”

“All right,” he said, “I go along with that. But what is this ‘something else’ you want me to do for you?”

“Speak positively about me to Modene Murphy. You obviously have her attention.”

He frowned. He had his own kind of authority after all. “You are not an easy sell,” he said.

“Why? Why not?”

“Because she has made up her mind about you.”

“Yes. And what has she determined?”

“That you have no money.”

I felt reduced again by the thought of Modene Murphy.

“Sparker,” I told him, “you’ll find the way when you talk to her.”

He pondered this just long enough to suggest that he might also remember the headlock I used to put on him. “I think I have a handle,” he said.

“Yes?”

“I’ll tell her”—he held up his palm—“that while you won’t admit it, you’re CIA.”

“This is the damn stupidest thing I ever heard of,” I burst out. “Why would that interest her?” But I knew the answer.

“If it’s not money,” he opined, “then it has to be adventure. I know her prototype. Life has the same cathexis as CIA for women like that.”

It was coming in on me again that my plane ticket was in the name of Harry Field. I would have to be introduced to her by that name.

My stomach was upset. Bad enough for Sparker to be convinced I was an Agency man; now, I would be demonstrating it. The Agency rule of thumb, I reminded myself, was to hold out. Hold out at all costs.

“Boone,” I said, “I have to let you in on something. I am in electronics but I don’t work in Miami. My shop is in Fairfax, Virginia. I’m going down to Miami to see a married woman whose husband is very jealous.”

“Weighty stuff.”

“Very. My lady-friend warned me not to use my real name. Her husband works for an airline so he has access to passenger lists. She says he could not be held accountable if he found out I had come down to Miami. So I booked myself in as Harry Field. Harry Field,” I repeated.

“Why in tarnation do you want the stewardess’s phone number if you have a woman in Miami already?” He actually had to reach into the side flap of his safari jacket and take out the piece of paper to read her name. “Why this Modene Murphy?” he concluded.

“Because I’m struck by her. I can warrant that it never happened to me in this manner before.”

He shook his head. “What name should I give her?”

When I told him, he savored the moment by having me spell it. “H-A-R-R-Y F-I-E-L-D,” I heard myself saying.

The flight had entered on a bumpy course. For the next hour, no one could quit his seat. By the time we came into clear night sky, the trip was into its last half hour. He went up then to the galley, and I could see him talking to Modene Murphy. They laughed together a few times, and once she looked at me. Then he came back to his seat for the descent.

“Mission wholly accomplished,” he said.

“What did you tell her?”

“You don’t want to hear. You’ll only deny it.” He smiled in such a way as to tell me that if he was going to do a job, he certainly did it well. “I gave her to understand,” he said at last, “that Harry Field is the best in the field given his kind of occupation.”

“Did she believe it?”

“The moment you even hint at secret work the suspension of disbelief is total.”

He was right. After we landed, she came up with my jacket and handed it to me wordlessly. Her eyes were shining. In that instant, I learned the true force of a cliché—my heart leaped tangibly in my chest.

“May I call you?” I asked at the door to the plane.

“You don’t know my number,” she whispered.

“I’ll find a way,” I said, and walked off quickly.

Sparker was waiting in the exit lounge. He had an invoice to collect. “What is the name of that Cuban girl you are going to introduce me to?”

Not until I offered my vow that I would leave a message for him tomorrow at the Saxony would he surrender Modene’s address to me. She was staying at the Fontainebleau.

“Someone,” he assured me before we separated, “has to be picking up her bill.”

I took a moment to look again at him. I might be a poor excuse for a salesman of electronic products, but he was certainly out of focus as a photographer for Life. So soon as we separated in the terminal, I bought a copy of the magazine and turned to the masthead. He was not listed under the photographers but among the photo editors. He was half a fraud. That cheered me. Modene Murphy did not have so formidable an eye after all.

I was employing just this thought to underwrite my confidence when I called her room at the Fontainebleau next morning. She was as sweet, however, as when she had said good-bye to me at the airplane door. “I’m glad you called,” she said. “I really want to talk to you. I need some kind of wise man to confide in.” Then she laughed. “You know, an expert.” She had a gutty little laugh that proved agreeable, as if something unpolished in her was very much there to develop.

She had been out late last night, she explained, and would be shopping all day. She had another date for tonight, but “I have a window from five to six-thirty, and can fit you in there.”

We chose a cocktail lounge at the Fontainebleau. Before I was to see her, however, I had to suffer a small panic in mid-afternoon when a lunch meeting with the Frente at a safe house gave every sign of going on into the night. I would miss my date with Modene.

We were enmeshed in a dispute over money. The more I looked at my watch, the more I grew to dislike the man who went on the longest. He was the former leader of the Cuban Senate, Faustino “Toto” Barbaro, and for this luncheon Barbaro had worked up a proposed Frente budget of $745,000 a month for “elementary needs.” Our accountants, Hunt replied, were ready to allocate $115,000 a month.

The meeting became a shouting match. “Inform your wealthy Americans that we see through their various subterfuges,” Toto Barbaro bellowed. “We do not require handouts. We have the capacity to drive our own historical vehicle. I would remind you, Señor Eduardo, that we overthrew Batista with no assistance from you. So, give us the money for arms. We will do the rest.”

“For God’s sake, Toto,” said Hunt, “you know our Neutrality Act puts every restriction in the way.”

“You are playing with banal legalisms. I wielded the gavel in a Senate chamber filled with lawyers, Cuban lawyers. When it was to our advantage, we used the legal mode to paralyze the issue, but when, Señor Eduardo, we were ready to move, we excised those same restrictions. You are mocking us.”

“You talk to him,” said Hunt in a rage, and left the room. Howard knew when to use his temper. Frente bills were coming due, and the only American who had the power to negotiate was gone. In the face of much sullenness, the offer of $115,000 was accepted pro tem, and I was able to close the meeting. I was even able, by way of Barbaro, to pick up the name of a young Cuban widow who, he promised, would not prove too cruel for my old classmate, Sparker. It was another lesson in politics—by means of this favor Barbaro entrapped me into a date for dinner later that week. Politics, I was discovering, was the fastest way to mortgage the future. All the same, I had a drink with Modene coming right up and was on the causeway into Miami Beach before a quarter to five and could leave my car with the valet at the Fontainebleau on the mark of the hour.