Rachel Alexander 03 - A Hell of a Dog

your left down the hall to twenny-one. Don’t mind that the sign says Authorized Personnel Only. I’m authorizing you.”
    The sign on the office door said Petrie Brothers. When I opened it, there was no receptionist. There was only Frank, sitting behind a big desk with so many phones on it, you’d think he was a bookie.
    “You the kid who called?” He looked me over from head to toe and back again. “Sit down. Sit down.”
    I nodded, taking the plastic folding chair on my side of the desk, wondering what the hell I’d had in mind when I made the call.
    “I was hoping you’d consider me as an investigator trainee,”
    I said, making it up as I went along, like everything else in my life.
    “Nah,” he said. “Now that I see you’re a girl, I don’t think so.”
    “Now that you see I’m a girl?” I shouted, surprising myself as well as Frank. “You mean you didn’t know I was a woman when you spoke to me on the phone? You mean the name Rachel didn’t tip you off that I’d be a female? You mean I had to waste my time waiting for two hours and then coming up here to see you for you to figure out I was a fucking female and that you didn’t hire women to work in your farkuckt agency? ” By the end, I was standing, my hands on his desk, leaning forward and looming over him. “Listen, mister, there’s no job here I couldn’t—”
    “Okay, you’re hired. When can you begin? I have a case that needs an undercover operative, at a hospital in Staten Island, night shift. Ya think you can handle it?”
    I sat down, stunned at my own behavior and at Frank’s response.
    He was grinning. “Just wanted to see if you had a little spunk, kid. You’re going to need it on this one. But let me tell you right off. You’re going to get in there, just like that, you’re going to want to blab. You’re going to want to tell just one person what you’re really doing there. Especially you broads, you know how you are, yadda, yadda, yadda with every stranger you meet. Don’t do it, I’m telling you. Because no matter what you think, you might be blabbing to exactly the wrong person, the person you’re looking to finger. You know what, use everyone else’s desire to blab. That’s how you do this.” He nodded. Then he whispered. “Mouth shut, except when asking questions. And don’t only listen with your ears. Listen with your gut” He slapped his abs for emphasis.
    I opened my mouth, but he didn’t leave me time to say a thing.
    “No. Don’t say nothing. I know what you’re going to say even before it comes out You’re a college graduate. Told me so on the telephone. Graduated with honors. See, I remember every word you said. You got a pen? Of course you do. Then write this down. It’s rule number twelve, but maybe it oughta be number one.”
    I picked up a piece of paper and a pen from his desk.
    “You’re going to want to blab. Don’t do it,” he said. Then he sat back, hands behind his head, and waited while I wrote.
    “There’s another one, sounds similar. But it’s different, believe me. It’s number eight. Don’t give information. Get information. See what I mean? Similar, but different. That one has to do with blabbing too, running off at the mouth instead of listening to see what you can find out. This one has to do with blowing your cover. Which, no matter what, you never do. Lie, that’s okay. But never—”
    “Blow my cover.”
    He’d nodded. I’d nodded back. But now, with years of experience and three cups of vodka under my belt, I was starting to think that maybe it was the exception that proved the rule. I was starting to think that I needed to talk things out about what was happening during this symposium, and I had the feeling that the last person who would listen to my theory with a sympathetic ear was the one person I should be talking to, Samantha Lewis. I was thinking, in feet, that it might be time to trust an old friend with the truth.
    That’s when I knew it was time to get moving. Frank Petrie was as pigheaded as they come, but in all the years I’d been in his employ, he had never been wrong in the advice he gave me about the work.
    As Dashiell and I slipped out the door, it wasn’t the chanting of my colleagues I was listening to. All I could hear, as clearly as if Frank were standing in front of me, was the cacophonous Brooklynese I had come to know and love, repeating the same phrase over and over again, as if it were a mantra: Don’t do it.



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