Spy in a Little Black Dress - By Maxine Kenneth Page 0,3

door. Back on Seventh Avenue, she plotted her next move since her orders stipulated spending the day doing tourist things in the city, making sure to hold the bag firmly under her arm so as not to risk losing it or having it stolen.

She walked over to Fifth Avenue and headed uptown. Her first stop was Charles Scribner’s Sons bookstore, where she fulfilled her tourist obligation by spending a brief time browsing. In the fiction section, she came across a mystery novel entitled Death in the Fifth Position, by Edgar Box, and smiled to herself. She knew that this was a pseudonym for her cousin Gore Vidal. It seemed that his second novel, The City and the Pillar, had scandalized the New York Times reviewer Orville Prescott with its frank depiction of a homosexual relationship. Prescott had placed a ban on reviewing any more books by its author. So to get around the critic’s embargo and continue to earn money as a writer, cousin Gore had concocted this commercial mystery novel and arranged for it to be published under a pen name. She bought a copy, thinking it would make diverting reading on the train trip back to D.C., and dropped it into the Hermès bag.

Back on Fifth Avenue, she wondered what was inside the bag that made it so important to the CIA. Was there something hidden inside it? Top secret papers, perhaps? Or a large sum of paper money sewed into the lining? Unfortunately, she was in the dark here because she had been briefed for this assignment only on a need-to-know basis.

Suddenly, Jackie felt a slight tingling sensation and glanced casually over her shoulder. A man she had seen in the bookstore was now following her down the street, or so it seemed. He was dressed anonymously in a blue seersucker banker’s suit and had an anonymous-looking face to match. But there was something about his manner that told Jackie it might be best to test out some of those evasive maneuvers she had been taught.

Fortunately, she was coming up on Saks Fifth Avenue. According to her training, department stores were excellent places in which to lose a tail. They were crowded with people and had many exits to exploit. Jackie entered the store, spent some time looking in the makeup department on the first floor, then took the elevator to the second floor to look at the new women’s fashions, not that she needed to buy anything. She then went to the ladies’ room to kill some time, hoping that the man, afraid of being conspicuous, would give up and move on.

After what she thought was a decent amount of time, Jackie left the security of the ladies’ room and walked out of Saks, using the exit on Fiftieth Street. Back on Fifth Avenue, she passed St. Patrick’s Cathedral, looking occasionally behind her for any sign of the man. She hoped that, if he had truly been following her, she had now lost him.

She headed over to Fifty-Third Street and decided to stop in at the Museum of Modern Art, where she paid her admission and spent her time there viewing a survey exhibition, Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America, which featured works by Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and others. Jackie found the paintings both shocking and exciting in their unusual deployment of colors and shapes that forced one to consider art—and life, for that matter—in a new light. But even more shocking was the sight of Mr. Seersucker, as she was now beginning to think of him, pretending to be gazing intently at a Franz Kline. Somehow he had managed to forestall her attempt to lose him at Saks.

With an escalation of that tingling sensation, Jackie looked at her watch while plotting her next move. It was one fifteen. She had enough time to make her way over to Times Square, where she purchased a ticket from a broker and attended a matinee performance of the sold-out musical Guys and Dolls at the 46th Street Theatre.

Before the house lights dimmed, Jackie’s mind kept turning back to that man. Three times she had seem him in three different locations. This was obviously too much to be a coincidence. What did he want with her? Was he after the Hermès bag? Just thinking about it made her clutch the bag even tighter.

Once the curtain went up, though, she was able to forget momentarily about the anonymous-looking man and lose herself in the musical antics