Money for Nothing Read Free Page A

could call, any time after I get home. I'll always be there." He grinned at her, stroking her shoulder. "I'd like you to call," he said. "I miss you."
    Her smile was sunnier. "You'd better miss me," she said.
     
     
    The keys were waiting for him at the parking lot cashier's shack. When the woman handed them out to him through the window, he felt immediate almost astonished relief — Levrin
had
been telling the truth — followed by almost as immediate depression: Levrin had been telling the truth. "Tourists" had been in the apartment all weekend, not leaving fingerprints.
    In New York he kept a monthly outdoor parking space in a vast lot in the West Sixties where some day another huge building would rise, but not in the foreseeable future. It was an eight-block walk home, during which he tried to think of courses of action. Tell the police; phone his mother and father in Muncie, Indiana; grab the forty thousand dollars and Eve and Jeremy and run for Canada; plot to be here next weekend to
catch
the tourists, see who and what they were. But finally he realized that inaction was his only possible move. Wait and see. Hope things wouldn't turn very bad.
    His Monday routine this month was to have a sandwich and a cup of coffee at home, then get to the office by two-thirty, around the time everybody else would be getting back from lunch. But today, before going into the kitchen, he searched the apartment for signs.
Had
anybody been in here while he was gone? It wasn't really possible to stay in a residence and leave absolutely no trace at all, was it? But he searched the foyer, the living room, his and Eve's bedroom, Jeremy's tiny room, the bathroom, and there was nothing, just nothing, not an area rug scuffed, not a washcloth out of place.
    Had there
been
nobody in here? After all that mystery, all that tension — all that money — had this apartment
not
become a safe house?
    He went into the kitchen last, to make his lunch, and it was in the kitchen that he found it. He and Eve kept their cups and glasses upside down on the shelves, so their insides wouldn't get dusty. Two water glasses, on the shelf just above eye level, were precisely in their places, right side up.
    He didn't eat lunch that day.
     
4
     
    "FORTUNATELY THE AMERICANS don't go in much for torture, at least not when there's a public light on things."
    Levrin's words never did say very much, as Josh remembered them, or tried to remember them, but they hinted at a great deal. A public light on things?
    After a sleepless night, he spent Tuesday morning not engaged in Sewell-McConnell's affairs, though he was using their computer, in the terminal at his desk. Nimrin. Was that the way it was spelled? No other combination looked right, so that was the name he inserted into data banks at the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post
, the
Boston Globe
, and the
Los Angeles Times
. Whatever it was that had shed a public light on things, presumably it had happened sometime in the last seven years, because, at least at the beginning, according to Levrin, Mr. Nimrin had been his "control," another word from spy movies, all those glum Le Carré characters dragging themselves out of their Tartarean beds every morning. Or afternoon.
    He found it in the
Washington Post
, because it was in a federal court in the District of Columbia that the public appearance had taken place, almost a full seven years ago, on August eighteenth. This Ellois Nimrin — surely Levrin's man — seemed to be nothing but a minor walk-on in an industrial espionage case. The question was, had or had not advanced computer technology been illegally exported by this agglomeration of beetle-browed moustachioed men with strange-sounding names lined up at the defendants' table here?
    Ellois Nimrin didn't appear in the body of the news story, nor in any of the other items on the case Josh scanned, but was only a name in a photo caption: "Defendants" — and then three difficult names, and then — "Ellois