Harriet the Spy, Double Agent (7 page)

Annie looked up and down as she opened the wooden gate, letting herself onto East Eighty-seventh Street. Harriet froze, holding her breath, even though she knew full well there was no way she could be spotted behind the closed blinds. She waited till she could see Annie’s back heading west. Then she put on her glasses frames, pulled up the hood of her parka, and slipped out the door.

Chapter 6

Harriet stayed on the shady side of the street, keeping her distance from Annie.

Even with her unfamiliar ski parka zipped up to her nose, she was careful to alter her walk so that she wouldn’t be recognized if Annie happened to glance her way. She was grateful that Annie had worn her bright red beret—it would be hard to lose sight of, even in the crush of holiday shoppers along Eighty-sixth Street, the neighborhood thoroughfare.

Annie went west along Eighty-sixth till she got to Third Avenue. After crossing, she paused at the corner, took a deep breath, and entered a brightly lit, glass-fronted stand with giant signs trumpeting PAPAYA KING—FRESH JUICES—HOT DOGS. Harriet crossed the street quickly, before the light changed, and positioned herself right outside the big window, where she’d be obscured by a
Drink to Your Health
! poster.

There was no place to sit, just a take-out counter and high, round tables where people could rest their cardboard trays while they ate standing up. There were several customers sipping juice drinks out of tall yellow cups. One of them smiled, dropped his empty cup into the garbage, and went to meet Annie.

Harriet stared. He was older, all right—he appeared to be in his mid-twenties. He was dressed in a handwoven jacket that looked Guatemalan, and wore his blond hair hanging over his collar. He even had sort of a beard, a small goatee patch beneath his lower lip. He looks like an off-season surfer, thought Harriet.

What happened next startled her even more. The window glass muffled the sound, but she clearly saw the blond surfer type mouth the word “Annie?” as if he were asking a question. When she nodded, he held out his hand (woven hemp watchband on right wrist; attention to detail) and shook Annie’s hand. It seemed they were meeting each other for the first time. I don’t get it, thought Harriet. Did she fall in love with an older-man pen pal?

Before she could wonder too long, she realized Annie was turning in her direction. Harriet dipped her head lower, pretending to read the small print on a price list, and let them walk past her. The surfer guy’s words drifted to her ear as they went through the door.

“… didn’t want you to take any chances,” he was saying to Annie.

Chances
? thought Harriet. What kind of chances?

“So I’ll bring you right down to the restaurant,” he finished. Annie nodded, her hands jammed down deep in her pockets, her shoulders held rigid.

They walked up the sidewalk to Lexington Avenue. Harriet didn’t dare to stay close enough to overhear what they said, but the blond guy seemed to be doing the bulk of the talking. When they got to the corner, he craned his head uptown and Harriet heard him say, “Perfect. There’s our bus.”

Not so perfect for
me
, thought Harriet. She couldn’t very well get on the same bus—Annie would certainly recognize her in so close a space—and she wouldn’t be able to keep up on foot. Nor had she brought enough cash for a cab, even if she’d been willing to wheedle the driver into stopping at every bus stop and waiting.

Harriet scanned the bus as it pulled to the curb and opened its doors with a pneumatic hiss. Every window was jam-packed with passengers standing back to back in the aisle. There was plenty of traffic on Lexington. With all these holiday shoppers forcing the bus to stop every two blocks, Harriet might stand a chance if Annie wasn’t going far. What do I have to lose? she thought.

She crossed Eighty-sixth Street and started downtown at a racewalker’s clip. It would take a few minutes for that long bus line to file on board; she could get a jump start. The bus overtook her at Eighty-fourth, but sure enough, four people were waiting at the next stop, and the bus groaned its way to the curb to make room for them.

Harriet kept pace for twelve more blocks, first getting ahead of the bus, then nearly losing it, then barely catching up at the next stop. The navy blue parka was making her sweat, and she longed to unzip it. I hope they’re not going much farther downtown, she thought. I need a breather.

As if in answer, the surfer and Annie got off the bus just below Seventy-second Street. Annie glanced around nervously, touching her red beret. Harriet stepped to the side of a newsstand just in the nick of time, hiding behind magazine racks and cheap winter scarves. “Ready?” she heard the man say. Annie mumbled something she couldn’t make out. He patted her shoulder—not, in Harriet’s rather inexpert opinion, the way a boyfriend would touch her—and opened the door of a seafood restaurant with dark wooden columns and elegant tablecloths.

Harriet sidled up to the window’s far corner. Facing the street, she craned her neck over her shoulder to look inside. A uniformed headwaiter stood at his station, arching his eyebrows expectantly. A tall man with curly brown hair got up from the bar and went straight to them, pumping the surfer guy’s hand and stepping back to look at Annie. He opened his arms and she went to him dutifully, letting him fold her into an embrace.

Harriet practically screamed with shock. The first guy was old, but this one was older—a bona fide grown-up, nearly her parents’ age, his sandy curls starting to thin at the temples. Had Annie gone out of her mind?

The two men were talking now, and the younger one nodded and laughed. He went over to sit on the older one’s barstool, raising his hand to signal the bartender. The older man turned to Annie with a broad smile, which she returned awkwardly. He led her over to the headwaiter, who looked in his reservation book, nodded, and brought them inside.

Annie took off her coat and beret and laid them on the green leather seat of a private banquette. Harriet’s view of the man was obscured by the curve of the bench—she could see just the top of his curly head—but she had a clear angle on Annie, who seemed to be, uncharacteristically, at a loss for words. She glanced at the bar, where the younger man had taken off his woven jacket and gotten a Bloody Mary.

Harriet’s imagination had gone into overdrive. Why would Annie go out to lunch with a man more than twice her age, and who was that guy at the bar? A bodyguard trying to pass himself off as a surfer dude? Why would the older man
need
a bodyguard?

Maybe Annie was pulling a double cross, pretending to lie but actually telling the truth when “Cassandra” dropped all those dark hints about the Witness Protection Program.

Maybe the Feigenbaums weren’t really her uncle and aunt but Mafia hit men maintaining an unlikely cover as Upper East Side Jewish doctors.

The headwaiter had returned to his station and was glaring indignantly at the girl whose nose was now pressed to his window. Harriet took a step back and realized that the turbaned Sikh at the corner newsstand was staring at her as well. I need a cover myself, she thought.

She looked up and down the block and fixed on a Greek coffee shop on the opposite corner. There was a row of small tables along the front window, just right for a stakeout. Harriet went to the crosswalk and waited as cabs and delivery vans inched down the crowded street. Someone was playing a radio so loudly that she could feel the bass throbbing through the closed windows: a rock ‘n’ roll version of “Silent Night.” The Greek waitress gave Harriet the evil eye every time she passed, even though Harriet was a legitimate paying customer. True, she had bought only one Coke and had sat at this table for more than an hour, scrawling notes in her notebook and looking up sharply whenever the door of the seafood restaurant swung open, but there was no law against drinking your soda too slowly.

A balding waiter slouched by with a tray full of sizzling shish kebabs that smelled richly of garlic, and Harriet realized she had skipped lunch. She wished she’d brought more than a couple of dollars and a handful of change when she left her house. She wrote in her notebook, DEVELOP EMERGENCY SPY FUND.

A movement across the street caught her attention. The surfer was holding the door open for Annie and the curly-haired man, who was toting a Bloomingdale’s shopping bag. When all three of them stood on the curb, the curly-haired man set the shopping bag down, reached into his wallet, and handed the surfer a bill. Harriet squinted but couldn’t see how big the payoff was. Ten dollars? Twenty? Five hundred? She tossed a tip onto her table and went to the door, being careful to pull up her hood in case Annie should look her way.

The curly-haired man reached into the shopping bag and took out a lavender box, the size of a shoe box but flatter. As he gave it to Annie, the surfer dude suddenly lunged onto East Seventy-second Street, shooting his arm up to flag down a cab. The curly-haired man gave Annie a hasty hug, kissed the top of her head, and shepherded her to the cab. He closed the door after her, leaned down toward the window, and waved.

Then he stood at the curb and watched as the cab pulled away.

Emboldened by Annie’s departure, Harriet went to the crosswalk.
He
won’t recognize me, she figured, and I want a closer look. When the light clicked to WALK, she started across the street and realized that the curly-haired man was heading right toward her. She dipped her head, pretending to look for something in her backpack. As he passed her, she zipped it back up with a sigh of frustration, as if she’d forgotten something important, and turned around, following him down the stairs to the downtown-bound subway.

Harriet hesitated a moment, weighing her parents’ directive against riding the subway alone against her intense curiosity. Curiosity won. She went through the turnstile and stood on the platform a few poles away from the man. His coat was cut of a butterscotch-colored cashmere that looked very expensive. His shoes were well shined.

But his face didn’t look like a gangster’s—at least, not the gangsters in movies. He had blue eyes and a long nose with slightly flared nostrils; his unruly curls looked as if they’d been blown by a sea breeze. If she had run into him at the yacht club in Water Mill, Long Island, where her family spent summers, she wouldn’t have batted an eye.

The downtown train pulled into the station. The man got on quickly and took a seat next to a couple of black teenage girls with enormous gold earrings. Harriet went in through the same car’s far door and positioned herself at a center pole. Only when the train closed its doors and lurched out of the station did it occur to her that the man might be riding to Brooklyn or Queens, maybe even to Kennedy Airport. I’ll stay on the case for a couple more stops, she thought, feeling her heart pound, and then I’ll decide.

Luckily, he got off at Lexington and Fifty-first Street, a transfer stop Harriet knew well from weekend excursions with Ole Golly. Was he going to the Museum of Modern Art? It didn’t seem likely, but no good spy ever ruled anything out without firsthand proof. She followed him at a discreet distance, pinning her gaze on the sleeve of his butterscotch coat as she stayed behind two German students with oversized backpacks.

They arrived at the E train platform.

The man took a seat on an empty bench and reached into his coat pocket, unfolding a long piece of paper and peering at it with a studious frown. That’s a
clue
, thought Harriet. I’ve got to get closer and see what he’s reading. She noticed a garbage can next to the bench and riffled through her pockets, searching for something to throw away. There was a wadded-up page that she’d torn from her spy notebook when she’d misspelled a word. Perfect, she thought. All I have to do now is look casual.

She took a deep breath. An easy saunter, she thought, your basic who-cares-about-anything stroll. She balanced the crumpled-up page on the palm of her hand and strolled toward the trash can, slowing down as she passed the bench. The man was squinting at a railroad schedule. Of
course
, thought Harriet, he’s on his way to Penn Station. The getaway! She was so thrilled by her spying skills that she nearly forgot to throw out the paper she had in her hand.

Penn Station was vast. Harriet had been to the interstate railway station just once, to see Ole Golly off on the Montrealer, and the thought of navigating that huge maze of tunnels and crossing the vaulting concourse with its crush of commuters and fast-flipping destination signs, without her hand safely clutched in her mother’s, was simply too daunting. I’m
twelve
, she thought. I’ve done all that a spy of my years can be expected to do, maybe more.

Anyway, she reassured herself, I’m supposed to be spying on
Annie
.

An E train clattered into the station. The curly-haired man stuffed the schedule back into his pocket and went to the edge of the platform. The double doors opened and people poured out. Harriet watched the man’s back as he stepped on board, still lugging the Bloomingdale’s bag. She hated to give up the chase, but as soon as she got to her room, she could write every detail down in her notebook. The thought made her happy.