Paramour (11 page)

At 5:30 P.M., Marilyn came out the front door of the building and retraced her morning route. She went directly to her apartment and remained there for the evening.

The next day, Saturday, Powers was sitting in his sedan in front of Marilyn's apartment house at dawn. Though it was not a workday, he'd arrived early anyway. At 9:47 A.M., as he considered leaving to phone Sullivan, Marilyn strolled out the front entrance. She was wearing a white shirtdress, white tennis shoes, and a casual blue tunic. It was nice to see her in something other than her conservative CIA clothes. He had the urge-it sometimes happens on surveillance-to speak with her; perhaps tell her that he liked the outfit. Fantasy helped pass time.

He started the engine.

Marilyn looked both ways, crossed the street, and walked along the sidewalk in his direction. Fearing to come face-to-face with her, Powers pulled into traffic and drove past. At the corner, he turned right and sped up Fifteenth Street to the next block. For cover, he parked behind a truck. A minute or so later, she crossed the street. He quickly turned off the engine. Though his car was in a one-hour parking zone and would probably be towed away, he crossed the street and continued after her on foot.

At Sixteenth Street, a wide thoroughfare lined with retail businesses, she walked north, passing some clothing stores, a hotel, and a candy store. Stopping on the corner, she allowed other pedestrians to move past her in the crosswalk. Then, suddenly, she turned around and looked behind her.

To protect himself from her view, Powers stepped into the candy store. Marilyn looked up at the tall buildings, then at cars on the street, then at the other people on the sidewalk. This continued for what must have been three or four minutes. Then she headed back the way she came.

Powers felt his heart race.

"May I help you, sir?" said a youthful black woman standing behind the candy counter.

"No, thanks," Powers said, hurrying out the door.

Marilyn continued to the end of the block, then stopped abruptly in front of Dorothy Bullitt's, a large women's clothing store. To keep from being seen, Powers stepped into an alcove in front of a leather goods establishment next door.

As if window-shopping, Marilyn moved slowly along the length of the display window, but without stopping to study any particular item. Then, suddenly picking up her pace, she turned, crossed to his side of the street, and entered a diminutive concern whose window was filled with travel posters. The sign above the door read THE TRAVEL BUREAU. Powers recognized it as a branch office of a nationwide chain of franchised travel agencies
.

Marilyn came out of the place twelve minutes later and moved down the street.

Remaining behind at a discreet distance, Powers followed as she made her way back to her apartment house. Ignoring a black female mail carrier shoving mail into the receptacles in the joint mail collection box at the entrance, Marilyn used a key to unlock the front door and entered without looking back.

Powers hurried around the corner to his car. He climbed in, started the engine, and raced around the block. He pulled into a curbside parking space down the street from her apartment house. From the car he had a clear view of both the window of Marilyn's apartment and the apartment house entrance.

Thus ensconced, he leaned back in the seat, using the headrest to relax. Wondering what Marilyn was up to, he took deep breaths. Later, he turned on the radio and tuned it to a jazz station. Blossom Dearie, his favorite female vocalist, was singing a melancholy cabaret tune. Because of lack of sleep caused by the long hours of surveillance, his eyelids started to feel heavy. The morning passed.

Nothing else happened at the apartment house for the rest of the day.

By 7 P.M., he was starving.

In the Gramercy Park Hotel, he purchased three Snickers bars in the gift shop and hurried back outside. Behind the wheel again, he unwrapped one of the bars and ate it in three bites. Though it didn't fully satisfy his hunger, he dropped the other two bars in the glove box to save them for later because he had no idea when he would get to eat a square meal again. Once in Bangladesh, protecting Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, he'd lived on Snickers bars for three days. Though this was a source of mirth among the other special agents, when everyone else including Kissinger himself came down with a raging dysentery it was Powers who had the last laugh.

Later that evening, Powers headed across the street and entered the Gramercy Park Hotel. At a pay phone, he dropped change and dialed Sullivan's home number. Sullivan picked it up after the first ring.

"Sullivan here."

"She's in bed. Can we talk on this line?"

There was a pause. "No. Meet me at Blackie's."

Blackie's cocktail lounge, located on I Street around the corner from Secret Service headquarters, had become the Secret Service hangout after Powers and Ken Landry had rescued the owner, Blackie Horowitz. Headed home from working a night shift at the White House the previous summer, they happened upon Horowitz as he was being pistol-whipped by two armed robbers in front of the bar. In the running gun battle, one robber was stopped by a bullet piercing his buttocks laterally. The other, throwing his empty gun into a trash can so he too wouldn't be blown up, continued along Connecticut Avenue for more than a mile until he finally fell down in exhaustion. After the shooting, Horowitz had invited Powers and Landry to the restaurant for dinner. They, in turn, had invited the entire seven-man White House Detail working shift. The grateful Horowitz had torn up both the bar and restaurant tabs for everyone, and the word spread quickly to other White House Detail shifts, groupies, and, eventually Headquarters divisions that Blackie's was the place to go. Blackie Horowitz not only earned the price of the shooting celebration back a thousand fold but became the permanent sponsor of the White House Detail softball team. In fact, once, when faced with happy hour competition from the Dock, a secretary-loaded downtown bar that was the former Secret Service hangout, Blackie responded by offering Secret Service agents half price on all drinks any time, night or day. From then on, off-duty agents never considered going anywhere else.

Powers pulled to curbside. Sullivan, dressed in slacks and a windbreaker, was waiting on the sidewalk in front. He pulled open the passenger door and climbed in.

"This morning she took a walk from her place to the District Mall," Powers said. "On the way she kept doubling back, checking window reflections. It looked like she was checking to see if she was under surveillance. The only place she stopped was a travel agency. She went inside for twelve minutes, then headed straight back to her apartment."

Sullivan reached into his windbreaker and took out a package of cigarettes. He lipped a cigarette from the pack and lit it with a disposable lighter. He took a puff and blew a sharp stream of smoke out the window. "Twelve minutes is long enough to pick up an airlines ticket," he said ominously.

Powers nodded.

Sullivan took out a small note card. "The call she made Thursday night from the Dupont Hotel lists to a pay telephone located at 2711
Cumberland Avenue Northwest." He handed the card to Powers. The address was typed on it. "Calls from pay phones, street countersurveillance-people don't take these precautions unless they have something to hide."

Powers nodded gloomily. "I agree."

"But we're gonna need more than phone calls and a visit to a travel agent, a hell of a lot more." Sullivan dragged on his cigarette, then turned his palm and looked at it as smoke rose from his mouth. He rubbed his chin for a moment. "There are other ways to further an investigation."

Nothing was said for a while. A faint sound of music came from the jukebox in Blackie's. Powers knew what Sullivan was getting at.

"The best evidence is physical evidence," Sullivan said, looking Powers directly in the eye.

Powers felt his face and hands flush. In Uncle Sam's Secret Service the code words "best evidence" meant illegal entry.

"How hard would it be, Jack?"

Powers' throat suddenly felt dry. He swallowed. "It uh ... can be done. "

"If she's involved in espionage there's a good chance you'll find something incriminating in her place. If so, the mission is accomplished. We'll have enough to convince the man. Even if the place isn't dirty, at least we'll have learned something about her to help in going forward with the investigation. Considering what we have to gain, I feel it's worth the risk."

Powers, remembering Watergate, knew he should refuse and walk out the door, no matter what the consequences. But he was a Secret Service agent who'd been asked to help the President. He couldn't walk away.

Powers cleared his throat. "I'll handle it. But I'll probably have to wait till Monday."

"Thanks, Jack," Sullivan said, looking him directly in the eye.

It was 1:15 A.M. by the time Powers arrived back at his apartment. He set his alarm clock for 5 A.M., stripped off his clothing, climbed into bed, and closed his eyes.

It seemed that the alarm went off only seconds later.

Powers dropped his feet to the floor. Drugged with exhaustion, he rubbed his eyes for a moment. Before rushing out of the apartment, he rummaged through a utility drawer in the kitchen and found a long screwdriver and the pair of rubber dishwashing gloves used by the Georgetown Arms cleaning lady during her once-a-week-cleaning visit. Dropping the items into his briefcase, he hurried out the door.

As he drove toward Scott Circle, he considered the various ways to get into Marilyn's apartment. No matter how careful he was, no matter how carefully he planned the break-in, there was still an enormous risk. All it took was one neighbor getting suspicious and phoning the police or the building manager. If the police arrived, unless he could convince them he was on authorized government business, he would be arrested, handcuffed, and booked for burglary. Jack Powers, meet Howard Hunt.

"Shit," Powers said out loud.

****

EIGHT

Watching Marilyn's window from his car as the sun came up on Monday, Powers brooded over other sunrises he'd observed while on duty: sunrises in Palm Springs and Kennebunkport, Santa Barbara and Moscow, and at Jimmy Carter's retreat on St. Simon's Island. Because of a policy initiated by Director Fogarty ordering bachelor agents to work holidays in order to give married agents a chance to be with their families, a number of the sunrises were on Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving. Because his mother and father were both dead and his only relative was a younger sister, a real estate agent living in Fresno, California, with whom he had never been particularly close, he'd always figured being on duty was, under the circumstances, as good a way as any to spend the holidays. But now, with his career at midpoint, he had to admit he'd grown tired of being an observer, of living someone else's life, even if it was the President's ... or the President's girlfriend.

But this sense of alienation was nothing to what he would feel if he ended up getting thrown in jail as a burglar.

Whether Marilyn was a spy or not, if he was caught all bets were off. He would be tried and convicted of burglary and sent to prison, a scapegoat.

But a man was only as good as his word. He'd made the commitment to Sullivan, and he would go through with it.

It looked like Marilyn wasn't going to work today. And she had stayed indoors all day yesterday. What was going on?

At 9:30 A.M., a taxi pulled up in front of the apartment house. A minute or so later, Marilyn came out the front door and got in. The taxi pulled into traffic.

Powers started his engine and swerved into the street to follow. The taxi jogged through district streets to the corner of Twenty-first and K Street and pulled to the curb in front of a diminutive beauty shop, with a bay window. The sign read CURLS AND FURLS.

He slowed and pulled to the curb a few doors down the street. Marilyn paid the driver, climbed out of the taxi, and entered the beauty shop.