Andersen, Kurt (16 page)

Imagine if bands of militant young American outlaws today were setting off dozens of bombs a week around the country, hitting banks and the Capitol and the Pentagon and getting away with it, as the Weatherpeople did forty years ago. Twenty-first-century America would be crazed, consumed, talking of nothing else.

I think I know what the big difference is. Those bombings back then seldom made the national news, because the national news consisted of twenty-two minutes each evening on the three broadcast TV networks. Which meant that only stories deemed important by the Establishment received attention, and the attention they received was always calm. There was no alarmist electronic drone about the sky perpetually and sensationally falling. The radicals’ bombings in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s were publicity stunts, and our national publicity gatekeepers refused to rise to the bait. Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn badly
wanted
to be revolutionary celebrities, household names, but they never were, not really, in their prime. Even after their nth bombing, the nightly news still had to identify them as “a radical group calling itself the Weather Underground.” Bill Ayers finally became famous when he was a harmless sixty-three-year-old professor, because now our proliferating electronic media are free to focus on the irrelevant, obliged to fill air time and keep viewers and listeners riled by any means necessary. We’ve given the bad guys—a radical group calling itself al Qaeda—an unprecedented opportunity to scare us silly.

As we begin our descent toward Reagan National Airport, I shut down my computer and return my seat and tray table to their upright and locked positions, brush the pretzel crumbs off my skirt, and glance out at the obelisk and dome shining white against the night sky. They always look like splendid toys to me.

12

When Alex returned at the end of August 1963 from Toronto, he was distinctly Alexier. “It’s so
sophisticated,
” he said. His sense of Canadian sophistication derived mainly from their television programs, and he wouldn’t stop talking about an old movie he’d seen called
The Third Man.

He had missed seeing the March on Washington two days earlier. “
Rats,
” he said when Chuck and I told him about Dylan.

“‘He can’t be
blamed,
’” Chuck sang, Dylanishly, about the Klansman who’d assassinated the Mississippi civil rights lawyer two months earlier, “ ‘he’s only a
pawn
in their
game.
’”

Did tiny little hearts fly out of my crossed eyes and circle around my head for a couple of seconds?

It was the last Saturday of the last summer before high school, and we were preparing to embark on our final Bond mission—spying on a crypto-Nazi U.S. senator, then assassinating his secret fascist compatriot who was a UN diplomat. We’d never been to Chicago by ourselves.

Alex’s brother gave us a ride down to the Riverview amusement park.

“So are you nerds
trying
to get beat up?” Flip Macallister asked.

We were overdressed for Riverview, Chuck and Alex in white dress shirts and hound’s-tooth jackets, me in an aquamarine shift with a scoop back. Chuck was carrying an old attaché of his father’s.

“I mean, for Christ’s sake,” Flip said, “at least unbutton your top buttons and loosen the ties.”

“I’m wearing sandals,” I said.

From the backseat, I could see Flip look at me in the rearview and grin. “Yeah, of
course
you are, Brenda Beatnik.”

Alex had pushed for Riverview because its giant Ferris wheel was just like the one in Vienna that he’d seen in
The Third Man.
We also rode on the new Space Ride, a tram that crossed back and forth over the park, pretending the older man in our car was the Nazi senator.

We took the El down to the Loop, headed for a jazz club called London House. The inspiration for this was a chapter in
Live and Let Die
in which Bond visits Harlem nightclubs looking for the Negro villain Mr. Big. The Chicago River and the brand-new Marina City, whose sixty-story cylinders we called Jetson Towers, looked super-sophisticated in the summer twilight.

Alex had phoned a week before, telling London House we were students “arriving on holiday” from Europe. To my astonishment, the lie worked. The young woman with the beehive hairdo at the front desk, and then the guy in charge, treated us like honorary adults. He apologized that they wouldn’t be able to serve us alcohol. “Drinking age here in the States,” he said, “twenty-one.”

“Would you care to check your briefcase?” the girl asked Chuck.

“Thanks awfully, but no,” Alex answered in a more extreme Etonian voice than he’d ever used. “All our passports, the visas and so forth, you know.”

“Gosh, I love that accent,” she said as she led us to a table. “Are you two from England also?”

“I am Sweess,” Chuck said. He sounded like a Spanish Count Dracula. “Frome Gee-neva.”

“Ukrainian,” I said. “Part of USSR.”

“Oh, I know—my granddad’s from Ukraine. I didn’t realize they let you come here. I mean, travel overseas.”

Uh-oh: she knew what Ukrainian-accented English was supposed to sound like.

“Tanya is a
fantastic
ballet dancer,” Alex said. “One of the best her age in the Soviet Union. And also her father, Comrade Romanova, happens to be a very important commissar, one of the senior men at the Kremlin, a great chum of Mr. Khrushchev’s, so she’s free to go anywhere.
Wherever
she pleases.” He winked.

The London House girl, apparently impressed by this elaborately improvised backstory, didn’t ask any more questions.

As soon as she was out of earshot, I said in my Natasha-from-
Rocky-and-Bullwinkle
voice, “And we are to be expecting two friends before music begin—when they arrive, please show moose and squirrel to table.”

Chuck laughed and Alex shushed us, but we all grinned at one another, three North Shore kids on our own in downtown Chicago, playing European secret agents playing European students.

Whenever we went to Chuck’s house before a mission, he’d put on the Miles Davis album
Kind of Blue
to get in the mood. One of the saxophonists on that record, Cannonball Adderley, was performing that night. Until a middle-aged man appeared at the bar, the only Negroes in the place had been the musicians and two busboys.

Although the music was a perfect soundtrack for the mission, I couldn’t imagine loving jazz, easily and naturally, the way I did “Wipe Out” or “Heat Wave,” songs that were nervous and a little crazy but also as fun and easy to gobble down as a McDonald’s hamburger.

“Zo,” I said when the first song ended, “wheech man is secret ringleader of Tyranny League?”

Alex suggested that we go stand at the bar to get a better look at everyone. “Right next to Mr. Big,” he said. He meant the bald Negro in a suit and eyeglasses who was writing in a notebook.

Shockingly, as soon as we stationed ourselves at the bar and lit cigarettes, Mr. Big turned to us and smiled. “You’re the kids from overseas?”

It felt wrong to carry on our masquerade with this nice man, but we had no choice now.

“Yes. I am Tatiana, and these are school friends”—I thought fast—
“Hillary,”
Bond’s alias in the latest novel, “and, um,
Emilio,
” the main villain in
Thunderball.

“Very good to meet you all,” he said. “I’m John Levy.”

I glanced at Chuck, whose mouth opened and eyes bugged as he asked, “You’re the
bass
player John Levy?”

“Yes, sir.”

Chuck turned to us—“He played with
Erroll Garner
and
Billie Holiday
!”—then turned back to Levy. “Who you with now?”

“Leave the gigs to the great players nowadays. I type up contracts and sign checks. Management.”

“Therefore,” I said, “in American jazz world, you are … 
Mr. Big.
”

Levy laughed. “You’re a funny girl, Tatiana. So you aficionados liking the show?”

“Completely,”
Chuck said,

“How long you all visiting?”

“We’ve been in the States for a fortnight,” Alex said, “and jetting back across the Atlantic on Monday. But sir, I have a question—is that a Windsor knot on your necktie?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then I guess you disagree with a man in England I know who says a Windsor knot is the mark of a
cad.
”

He was quoting Bond, and I thought of his brother’s crack—
Are you nerds
trying
to get beat up?
—but Levy put his arm around Alex’s neck and laughed loudly. He was so tickled by this impertinent little English twit that he instructed the bartender to give us all drinks, on him—real drinks, gin and tonics and a Negroni. Mr. Levy mentioned that there was another European visitor in the club, “a West German fella.” He pointed out a handsome blond man with gray temples and excused himself.

The German was wearing a turtleneck and a red pocket square. He was smoking a cigar, and smiling a lot, and accompanied by two younger women, one of them in a low-cut dress. His table was on the edge of the room, near the door. We had found our assassination target.

I couldn’t tell if I was feeling the effects of the gin or of the spectacular success of the mission or both. I went to the bathroom. Staring at myself in the mirror as I touched up my lipstick, I imagined it was a one-way mirror, like the one through which Tatiana and Bond were filmed having sex by SPECTRE. I grinned at myself. I was tipsy.

Chuck, as usual, would be the triggerman. In the shadows beneath the bar, Chuck opened his briefcase and took out the Luger, which he’d fitted with a silencer—a thick Tinkertoy dowel wrapped in black electrical tape—and wedged the gun into his inside jacket pocket. His plan was to make his way, just before the set ended, close to the UN Nazi’s table, then take his shot during the applause.

None of us noticed the man approaching from the front of the club.

“Hello there.”

We turned. He hadn’t taken off his hat. He was holding up his open wallet. “I’m Lieutenant Murray, from the Chicago Police Department.”

I figured it was because we were underage. The maître d’ and the woman at the podium near the front door were staring at us. I felt frightened and embarrassed and … underage. The mission was over.

When Chuck spoke, I was startled all over again, afraid in a new way.

“Hello,
signore,
I am Emilio Largo, pleased to meet you. How may we help?” He was still Swiss.

The policeman looked at me. “You are Miss Tatiana Romanova?”

Oh, Christ. I paused, took a breath. Then caved. “My name is Karen Hollaender, actually.” I was using my normal voice and trying to smile.

The policeman’s face tightened. By telling the truth, I’d made him angry.

“We’re from Wilmette. And we didn’t order these drinks or lie about our age.”

“Didn’t you identify yourself earlier tonight as a Soviet citizen by the name of Tatiana Romanova?”

“Yes, but—well, we were just goofing around. Pretending. That’s a name from a book, from a James Bond book.”

The policeman stared at me. “Nice shade of lipstick,
Karen.
What do you call that?”

Oh,
Jesus.
“Coral.”

“That’s what you used to write ‘Death to Nazis’ on the mirror in the ladies’ washroom?”

Actually? I’d written D
EATH
FOR
N
AZIS
. “I’m sorry.”

For a long moment the policeman said nothing and looked each of us over. “Do you have identification on you?”

There was only one form of identification that any fourteen-year-old American might carry in 1963, and we hadn’t brought along our Wilmette Public Library cards. We shook our heads.

“And I suppose you’re not British?” he said to Alex.

“Uh-uh, no, sir. Born and raised in Wilmette.”

“Who’s Ernie Banks?”

“What? Who?”

“Ernie. Banks.” He was testing us, the way soldiers did in World War II movies, to see if we were actually Americans.

“A baseball player,” Alex said. “For Chicago? The pitcher for the White Sox—no, the Cubs?”

Oh, Alex.

The policeman was getting excited, and his lips verged on a smile. “What league are the Cubs in?” the cop asked.

“Um … the American?”

“
National
League,” I said, “and Ernie Banks plays first base. He doesn’t really follow baseball, Lieutenant.”

Lieutenant Murray turned back to me. “What place are the Cubs in?”

“Low. Out of the running for the pennant.”

Now he smiled. “Good guess.”

“Seventh place, I think. And the White Sox are in second, twelve games behind the Yankees.”

His smile disappeared. I had finally managed to convince him we were not junior Soviet spies.

“
You
got very quiet all of a sudden, Emilio,” he said to Chuck.

Chuck just shrugged. It was an impressively cool move, like James Dean’s character in
Rebel Without a Cause
imitating Brando’s in
The Wild One.
I found it scary as well as sexy.

Lieutenant Murray had us each write our name and address on a note card. He said that if any of us “ever get on the radar of the Chicago Police Department again,” we would regret it, because—and I couldn’t believe he said this—”Big Brother’s watching.” He told me to “go clean up your mess in the little girls’ room.” And then he left.

Chuck was angry. “I cannot believe the way you wussies just immediately finked out and left me hanging.
Jesus.
”

“I can’t believe
you’re
not thanking your lucky goddamn
stars,
” Alex whispered. “What if he’d found our
guns
? We lucked out. We
completely
lucked out.”

“Alex is right. We could’ve really gotten in big trouble,” I said.

“Yeah, and we could’ve kept going and made it the all-time perfect mission that we’d be proud of forever and always remember. It was
real
! It was everything we’ve ever imagined coming true! I’m just surprised at the two of you.”