One afternoon not long after I spoke to my mother, I was trying to handle a short circuit in an electrical closet at the station during a rare day shift when a man with a pomaded wave in his hair appeared at my elbow and introduced himself. He was a consultant, he said.
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
“What are they paying you?” he said cheerfully. “I bet it’s not enough.”
I took a closer look at him.
“I might have some work for you,” he said. “An electronics outfit in Jersey. They’re looking for people. Something on the side.” He glanced up and down the hallway as if anxious that we not be seen, and I couldn’t be sure if this was a joke or not. He handed me a card. “I’m not poaching you. It would be extra.”
“Oh. Well, thank you.” I examined the card. Consulting. An address on the east side and a phone number.
The man shook my hand and irradiated me with his smile. “Really, give me a call,” he said.
The fact was, I didn’t make enough money, and my landlord was threatening to terminate my lease if I bounced another check. It had been keeping me from my sleep. I called the number on the consultant’s card and a secretary gave me the address of a shop in Jersey City.
I appeared dutifully at a storefront on Warren Street on a foggy Tuesday morning and rang the bell. The blinds were closed and the place looked deserted. At last an old man opened the door and ushered me through a front office that looked abandoned and into a large back room. It was a place that could have been used comfortably for car repair, with raw brick walls, a poured concrete floor, and high cobwebbed windows facing a narrow alley and the back of a church. Four workbenches were piled with wiring, sheets of copper, switches, and Mylar.
“What do I do?” I said to the old man.
“You make circuit boards,” he said.
Now I spotted the billiard-table green of a stack of circuit boards on the workbench.
“Those are all dead,” he said. “Fix the ones you can. Then make copies of the ones that are working.”
So I worked in the shop every Tuesday for two months, with a stack of circuit boards growing at my elbow. I was paid well for this work, suspiciously well, and in cash. By January, when the consultant finally appeared at the shop without warning one afternoon, I had an idea of where this was going.
“You’re doing well here,” he said jovially.
My elbows and back were sore. I had cuts on my fingers, dabbed up with Mercurochrome. “Is my audition over?” I said.
He sat down on the other side of my bench. His expression shifted. The fluorescent smile changed, became slightly more ordinary. He regarded me across the bench, and for the first time I saw the intelligence in his eyes, like a flicker of static electricity.
“I mean,” I went on, faltering now but trying to brazen it out, “you’re one of those CIA men, aren’t you? Or State Department?”
A jazz DJ at the station had told me months ago that the men in suits who sometimes visited the business office were propagandists from the CIA, a claim I had dismissed until I observed them for a while myself and noticed the news stories we ran after they visited. I had been thinking about this moment for weeks, wondering if it would come, telling myself periodically that I was crazy. It was possible that the job might simply be what it claimed to be. But as time went on I had become more confident that I was being recruited, and it was making me edgy, distracting me on the long rides home after work in the dawn hours, setting me off on reveries during the slow nights at the station. What would it mean if it were true? A secret life, I thought. Independence. More money than I needed. I hoped for all that. I couldn’t quite bring into focus what I would lose. It would be dangerous. But I was twenty-two years old and couldn’t take any danger to my person seriously.
“The intelligence services have roles for women,” he said. “You understand electronics. You speak Spanish and French.”
“How do you know that?”
He kept smiling calmly at me, as if I had asked a rhetorical question.
“You’ve been looking at my school records?” I said.
“My boss was concerned about the Maryland Youth Center,” he said. “But I pushed for you.”
“Where did you get my records?”
“The next theater of war is Latin America,” he said.
He said this the way a person might say, “On Fridays the cafeteria serves fish.” A car in the street outside was failing to start. It coughed and whined. Dust motes floated in the air above his head.
“Cuba?” I said.
“Central America, South America, the Caribbean.”
“What are we talking about?” I said.
“Surveillance.”
I cleared my throat. “Are you offering me a job?”
“Yes, a job,” he said, smiling more brightly. “That’s a good way to think of it.”
I was confused. “How else could I think of it?”
“A life,” he said.
We studied each other. I said, “People get killed doing this kind of work.”
“Yes,” he said. “The CIA would do everything possible to protect you. You see what’s happening in the Eastern Bloc. What they did to the students in Hungary. Cuba is just the beginning. The jails in Havana are full of political prisoners. The Soviets are behind them with ballistic missiles. We’re at war.”
I said nothing. I had seen photos of the uprising in Hungary, students who were later shot. I was thinking of how helpless I had felt on the phone with my mother when she called about the missiles.
“What’s keeping you here?” he said finally.