Doc Turner helped Henry to his feet. “Must’ve did someone wrong, huh?”
“Who was it?” Henry asked. He looked at the semicircle of people gathered around.
“I just saw the aftermath,” Doc said.
“Teddy Helms,” Judy said. “It was Teddy.”
Henry wiped a glob of bloody corn from his mouth, cut through the crowd, and walked off.
Norma said she saw Henry leaving Headquarters as she was coming in from a doctor’s appointment. “You could see the imprint of Teddy’s Georgetown class ring right under Henry’s eye,” she snickered. “Couldn’t have done it better myself.”
* * *
—
The next day, we got to work a few minutes early to see what the consequences of the lunchtime brawl would be. “Think he’ll be fired?” Kathy asked.
“Nah, that’s how the boys settle things around here. I wouldn’t be surprised if Dulles encouraged it, even. They’ll be back to normal in no time,” Linda said.
We went to work trying to figure out what had provoked Teddy to send his best friend to the dentist. “Let’s work backwards,” Norma suggested one morning at Ralph’s. “Teddy punched Henry, Irina left Teddy, Sally was fired.”
“What’s the connection?” Linda asked.
“Beats me,” Norma said.
And while Teddy appeared in the office the next day, two Band-Aids wrapped around his knuckles, Henry never returned. Norma did come across a bit of intel about his whereabouts, though. How, we knew better than to ask. But she told more than one of us his location, thinking it might be useful at some point.
Two weeks later, Judy surprised herself when she put her hand into her sweater pocket and found Henry’s teeth instead of the tissue she was expecting.
Three weeks later, we returned the wedding gifts we’d bought for Teddy and Irina, happy we’d saved the receipts.
A month later, Anderson brought in a new typist, and we realized Irina was not coming back.
CHAPTER 21
The Applicant
The Carrier
THE NUN
Under a curtain of wet hair, I watched the black water swirl down the drain. The chemicals made me dizzy, and when I lifted my dripping head, the woman who came to make me into a new woman opened a window.
After wrapping my head in a white towel, she instructed me to sit on the old trunk that doubled as the flat’s coffee table. She popped open her shrimp-pink makeup case to reveal a pair of shears peeking out from a purple velvet case, a variety of dyes, two tape measures, foam padding, makeup brushes, black and white fabric samples, and yellow rubber gloves.
She picked through the knots in my hair, combing it out until smooth, then pulled it back. After sawing through it with the scissors, she handed me a guillotined ponytail. I held on to it as she shook up the bottle of black dye she’d used on my head and delicately applied it to my eyebrows with a small brush. It burned more than the slight tingle she’d promised.
After wiping it off, she told me to stand and strip. I hesitated. “Don’t worry, honey,” she said. “I’ve seen it all.” I’d managed to gain back some of the weight I’d lost after Sally ended things, but not much. She held the foam padding to my chest, then my behind. “We’re gonna have to give you a little something extra.”
As she took my measurements, she talked. She told me how she used to work in the Warner Bros. costume department, applying false eyelashes to a temperamental Joan Crawford, inserting shoe inserts to hike up Humphrey Bogart, and scouring every Hollywood beauty parlor to find the right shade of blond for Doris Day. She rambled on about the time she’d walked into a dressing room to see Frank Sinatra’s head between the legs—hat still on!—of an actress she wouldn’t name. “He didn’t even look up,” she said. “Just mumbled into her hoo-hah for me to come back in twenty minutes. I never pegged Ol’ Blue Eyes as the generous type.”
I said nothing as the woman told her stories. Normally, I would’ve found her highly entertaining, but I wasn’t in the mood, and she was the kind of woman who could talk for forty-five minutes without realizing her audience had fallen asleep.
I’d arrived on a plane eight hours earlier and was exhausted. It was the first plane I’d ever been on, and when I stepped out onto the tarmac, even before my makeover, I became more than a Carrier—I became a new person.
I’d asked for it; now here it was. I had more than an assignment and a one-way ticket: I