Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (52 page)

If this worked out, I might be making the climb often. How convenient it would be if, with an occasional visit to Jenkins’s office, I could find out exactly what he knew about me and what his plans were. I should, I thought, really have done this sooner. People are too inclined to be passive.

But as I mounted the marble stairs, my confidence began to give way to apprehension and then to outright dread. I was taking an enormous risk. I could go anywhere in the world to escape these people, and yet I had chosen to come here.

When I reached the seventh floor I walked the entire length of the corridor, which wrapped around on itself in a large rectangle, with offices on either side. There would be a courtyard in the center. I found a door marked 723 and below that Global Devices, Inc., and then studied the markings on the neighboring doors, trying to determine how many rooms Global Devices occupied. Then I went down to the sixth floor and entered the offices of an advertising agency directly below, walking through them several times until I was sure I had the floor plan clear in my mind.

I went back up and waited in front of 723. Normally, I am willing simply to push open a closed door and slip through, because often no one even notices a door opening a few inches and then closing, and if someone docs notice, harmless explanations always suggest themselves: someone starting to enter and then changing his mind, a sudden draft, something. But the people behind this particular door would instantly draw the right conclusion. Any incongruous little movement or noise would make them think of me at once. And they would have me. Here, I could not take chances.

After about twenty minutes a young woman came down the corridor, carefully holding out in front of her in both hands a brown paper bag from which coffee dribbled. Without letting go of the bag, she managed to get one hand onto the doorknob and pushed the door open with her shoulder. Staying as close to her as I could, I followed her in.

I was in a large office containing several shabby secondhand desks. A woman sat at one of them typing. When we came in, she looked up and said, “Oh, you’re back.” Along the walls were file cabinets of unrelated shapes and a large Xerox machine. There was a closed door in the left wall, which would lead to the other offices. I watched the first woman unpack five containers of coffee and several pastries on her desk. After putting one cup on her colleague’s desk and leaving one on her own, she carefully gathered up the remaining cups, balancing the pastries on top, and headed for the door, which she managed to get open, with some difficulty. I hesitated. It would be more dangerous on the other side of the door. Well, why was I here? I stepped up to her and slid through the door with her.

I stood now in a short corridor lined with doors. I watched as the woman pushed the first one open. Gomez sat at a desk with his back to us, looking at a computer display. There was a second computer in the room and what appeared to be a number of very elaborate tape recorders. Several large pairs of headphones lay on a table. On the wall opposite Gomez was an enlarged photograph of me in a bathing suit, holding a drink. I did not recognize the photograph: probably, I decided, I had never seen it. I had an odd — perhaps ridiculous — expression on my face. It struck me that this must have been part of a larger picture with other people in it. The photograph was pinned to the wall with a metal dart skewering the crotch of my bathing suit, and it had been spun forty-five degrees so that it looked as if I were beginning a long fall. Gomez turned around in his seat and counted out change to pay for his coffee and Danish.

Next we delivered a cup of coffee and a doughnut to Clellan, who as always was full of good-old-boy chatter: “Thank you, Jeannie. That’s very kind. Well, don’t you look fine today.” She blushed and smiled.

Then, carrying the last cup of coffee, she knocked on the third door, and I heard the voice within, although I could not make out the words. She pushed open the door, and from my position in the corridor I saw Jenkins sitting at a desk writing, his pallid face expressionless. And although he did not stop writing or even look up when the woman entered, I felt like a bird gazing into the eyes of a snake.

I was startled, perhaps even frightened, by the drabness of the office. The desk and chair were the sort you would find piled three high in a used-office-furniture warehouse. There was nothing on the walls, which some time ago had been sloppily painted a dirty white color, and there were two filing cabinets, dented and scratched, one green, the other brown. The window looked out over black rooftops and water towers. On Jenkins’s desk were several large piles of papers and an inexpensive plastic cup holding pencils and ball-point pens. The only sign of status or power seemed to be the presence of two telephone receivers. It struck me that one of them would be for the number he had given to me.

She put the coffee slowly down on his desk. Still without looking up or pausing in his writing, he said, “Thank you, Jean.”

“You’re welcome, sir.”

She stepped briskly out of the room. I considered momentarily whether I should slip through the door before she shut it. Better not to risk it. One involuntary cough or sniff, and I was finished. I had to wait until I could go in alone.

She pulled Jenkins’s door shut and walked back out into the front room, shutting that door behind her as well. I was trapped in the little corridor, surrounded by six closed doors which I did not dare open. I stood — and after a while sat — there for the rest of the day. Occasionally, I would hear a telephone ring somewhere behind one of the doors, and once, leaning with my ear pressed against Jenkins’s door, I was sure I heard the murmur of his voice, but I could not make out any words. Excruciatingly boring, sitting there looking at those closed doors. Well, I had no choice now.

When after two hours the door at the end of the corridor opened and Morrissey entered, I was almost glad to see him. He paused, holding the door open, and looked back into the outer office, and I quickly picked myself up off the floor and moved toward him, thinking I might take this opportunity to escape from the corridor. One of the women was speaking to him.

“The meeting tomorrow is changed to two in the afternoon, because Colonel Jenkins has a meeting with someone from Washington first thing in the morning.”

Morrissey pulled the door shut before I got to it, and I retreated again to let him pass down the corridor. He knocked at Clellan’s office and went in, closing that door behind him as well.

Someone from Washington. I should be there for that. That might be the way to learn something useful. In the meantime, though, what should I be doing? So far I had accomplished nothing. I put my ear up to Clellan’s door and heard a meaningless, unarticulated drone of low voices. I was certainly not learning much this way. A waste of time. But I had to try everything. It was around four o’clock: soon they would be leaving, and I would be able to look around. After a quarter of an hour Clellan came out and went into the outer office for something. Through the open door I could see Morrissey sitting motionless on a wooden chair next to Clellan’s desk. Five minutes later Clellan returned and closed the door again.

At around four-thirty Morrissey came out and left. Then, at what must have been about five, Gomez came out. I watched him lock his office behind him. Damn! If they were all going to do that, this really was a waste of time. Perhaps it was just the computers and the tape recorders. Anyway, there would still be the outer office. A little later Clellan emerged. He locked his office. Outside I could hear the women in the outer office packing up for the day. As Clellan passed into the outer office, there were loud good-nights, and then everything was still.

It was another two hours of waiting until Jenkins emerged, carrying an old, inexpensive briefcase. He set it down and double-locked the door to his office. Hopeless. He picked up his briefcase and walked down the corridor and out through the door at the end. Then I heard him lock that door as well. I was locked up in this little passage for the night. A moment later the light went out, and I was left sitting on the floor in darkness.

I waited what seemed like a very long while, although it is difficult under such conditions to judge the passage of time. Then I felt my way down to the end of the corridor, where I could see a little crack of light under the door, hoping — although really I knew better — that there would be some way to unlock the door from this side. Nothing. I worked my way back down the corridor, trying each door as I went. One after the other was locked. I got out one of my credit cards and tried to jimmy them open, but I knew that it would not work. They were bolted. There must at least be a toilet. My bladder was by now painfully full. My mood took another nasty plunge, as I realized that there would be no toilet: the toilets would be out in the public hallway. That was why Clellan had gone out earlier. No. This door was unlocked. Must be a toilet after all. At least that.

I pushed the door open very slowly. There was still some light coming through a window that looked into an air shaft. It was a long, narrow room, almost entirely filled by a large, oval conference table, around which were half a dozen metal chairs. Shoved into one corner was a grey metal desk with no chair in front of it. The only other furnishing in the room was a wastepaper basket. As a matter of principle, I went over to the desk and slowly pulled each drawer open. All empty. With some difficulty I forced the grimy window open and urinated into the air shaft.

I went back out into the corridor and stretched out on the uncarpeted floor, where for the next twelve hours I tried to sleep.

Jenkins was the first to arrive in the morning. I was on my feet and wide awake before he was through the outer door. I felt myself trembling from hunger and from having lain half-awake on that floor all night. And also from fear, I realized. But I was there. I would stay with it through the morning meeting with the person from Washington. I could certainly go a day and a half without food.

I watched as Jenkins came through the door and walked down the corridor toward me. I knew that there was no reason in the world for him to continue past his office, and yet it terrified me to see him coming straight at me, and I felt as if it had been a narrow escape when he stopped and unlocked his door. This time he had left both his office door and the door at the end of the corridor open behind him. It was early— before eight — and you could hear every little noise reverberate through the empty building. I waited where I was, absolutely still. From Jenkins’s office came the sound of drawers being opened and closed and then the scratching of a pencil on paper.

A half hour later an electric bell sounded in the outer office, and Jenkins reemerged and walked out to the entrance. This was the moment. I crept into his office. I could hear him in the distance unlocking the entrance door again and greeting someone. Fragments of two voices approaching. Something about the Eastern Shuttle, I thought. I looked rapidly around the room for the safest place. The corner away from the door. No one walks into a corner. I sat down with my back leaning against the wall, trying to find a comfortable position so that I would not have to move. I prayed that this really was whomever Jenkins was meeting with, because the worst thing that could happen would be to find myself closed into a room with one person — and that one person Jenkins. I would not be able to sniff or cough or clear my throat; I would hardly be able to move, perhaps for hours. These situations are bad enough when there are two people, but at least then they are paying attention to each other, and they are shifting around in their seats and sneezing, and each has someone else to attach a random noise to.

Jenkins stopped at the door to let the visitor precede him. The man was in his fifties, immaculately groomed and wearing a suit that had been made for him at great expense. His eves skipped around the room as he sat down in the scuffed wooden chair next to Jenkins’s desk.

“Temporary quarters?” His thin lips twisted easily and automatically into an urbane smile each time he finished speaking. As he settled himself on the chair, he crossed his legs and adjusted his tie.

Jenkins, who had opened his mouth as if to say no, paused abruptly and closed it again. For an instant he seemed to scrutinize his visitor’s face.

“Yes, I suppose so. We’re always in temporary quarters, really.”

The visitor, who had been peering curiously at the battered front of the metal desk before him, looked up, startled.

“Yes, of course. You are, in a way, aren’t you?” He turned his eyes to the green metal file cabinet standing awkwardly against the wall beside him and then looked suddenly back at Jenkins again. “I was speaking about you just the other day with Bob Neverson. He sends his best. He has an extraordinarily high opinion of you. Said you were the most capable person he’d ever had assigned to him.” The man smiled.

“That’s extremely generous of him,” said Jenkins without any hint of emotion. “It was a privilege working under him. Those were valuable years for me.” As Jenkins spoke, the other man’s attention seemed to wander, his eyes flitting distractedly about the room. “I rarely see Bob now,” said Jenkins. “Please give him my best.”

“I will. I certainly will.” The smile formed. The stranger uncrossed and recrossed his legs. Then he started speaking again, in a changed tone of voice which indicated that the real discussion would now commence. “I wanted to take this opportunity to meet alone with you this morning because, as you are doubtless aware, there are so many rumors floating around about your operation, and before we find ourselves facing a full attack on the budgeting for this, I wanted to be clear in my own mind exactly what our goals and priorities are here.” He paused and ran his index finger delicately along his lower lip. “The budget, in fact — that is, the portion directly attributable to your operation — seems likely to run over twelve million dollars. And then there are the various indirect and support costs… and above all the requests for interagency cooperation. These are real costs…”

“Of course,” Jenkins said. “And you naturally need to assure yourself that these expenditures are justified. Let me say I’m glad—”