9
I NEVER DID GET TO SLEEP NEXT DAY. A TAXI RIDE AT DAWN DROPPED INGRID off at the shabby seven-story apartment house where she lived, then a stop at my apartment, a shower—I was off to my job.
If I had hope that Bill Harvey could have forgotten his last conversation with me, it was at once dispelled. Before I filled my coffee mug from the urn, the buzzer rang, and Chief ’s low voice reverberated in my ear. “Start the London push with these fellows,” he said, and furnished me three cover names: Otis, Carey, Crane. “Approach them in that order. Otis is an old friend. Has the clout to do the job. Carey’s a hard worker and will produce. Crane is less experienced but a go-getter.”
“Chief, do you want me to put all three on the job?”
“Hell, no. Take the first one who is available. Tell him it’s worth a couple of Brownie points.” He hung up.
I had by now developed enough sense of Company security to anticipate the difficulties. If Berlin Base wished to speak to Station in London, or in Paris, or, for that matter, in Japan or Argentina, such telephone traffic had to be routed through the hub in Washington. It was out of bounds to go around the rim. If the procedure was time-consuming, I undertook it nonetheless with no disdain. Exposure to the shenanigans of the cellar bar had led me to see why foreign outposts of the Company were not encouraged to communicate directly with each other. Given the amount of deviant behavior in the world, communications along the rim could become damnably exposed—far safer to feed all messages into the hub and out again.
So I was soon engaged in the webwork of prearranging telephone calls from Berlin to Washington to London, and spent the morning putting in requests to speak at specific times that afternoon on secure phone installations at London Station with Otis, Carey, and Crane.
By early afternoon, I reached cover-name Otis in London.
“What the hell is this,” he asked, “and who are you? My boss is pinning donkey tails on my ass. He thinks I’m looking to transfer to Berlin.”
“No, sir, it’s not like that at all,” I told him. “Big BOZO, Berlin, needs a helping hand in London. On a minor matter.”
“If it’s minor, why didn’t Bill use a fucking pay phone and call me at my apartment?”
I was uneasy that Harvey’s first name was used so freely, but then this was a secure phone. I replied, “The matter, when all is said, may not be minor. We don’t know.”
“What’s your name?”
“Sloate. Charley Sloate.”
“Well, Charley boy, tell me, what made Harvey think of me?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Otis. He said you were an old friend.”
“Bill Harvey doesn’t have old friends.”
“Yessir.”
“Who are you, the flunky?”
“A rose by any other name,” I managed to say.
Otis began to chuckle. “Charley boy,” he said, “do me a favor. Walk Bill Harvey’s little project around the corner and kick it in the ass.”
“Yessir.”
“I’m going to break a rule of two months’ standing and have a martini before five.”
“Yessir.”
“Bill Harvey. Jesus!”
He hung up.
While I did have some idea that SM/ONION was not going to be found in London, I still had to proselytize Carey or Crane into working on our request; otherwise, I could face Base Chief Harvey with a report that I had nothing to report.
I prepared, therefore, to speak to Carey, the man described as able to produce. I told myself that Carey would not know the rank of Charley Sloate and I must address him as an equal. I had certainly been too meek with Otis.
It was a firm preparation, but Mr. Carey was not in London. His secretary, however, was pleased to be talking over a secure phone. “This,” she said, “is the first time for me, Mr. Sloate. I hope you won’t take it personally, but you sound like you’re down in a well. Do I sound sort of ghoulish too?”
“We will improve on closer acquaintance.”
“You’re funny.”
“Thank you.”
“May I say whatever I want to over this phone?” she asked.
“It’s safe.”
“Well, Mr. Carey is in America. Can he assist you from there?”
“I don’t believe so. When’s he coming back?”
“Oh, it’s at least a couple of weeks. He and his wife are getting a divorce, and he’s over there to divide the property. It’s a difficult time for him.”
“Could you do something for me?” I asked.
“I’d be glad to.”
“We’re trying to locate a Company man who’s been assigned to London. All we have is his cryptonym.”
“Mr. Sloate, I’d love to be of help, but that kind of access is closed to me.”
“Yes, I thought it might be.”
“In fact, I received a reprimand from Mr. Carey because I wasn’t careful enough. You won’t repeat this?”
“No.”
“Well, once or twice, I let slip his real name while talking to his colleagues, and that is a negative mark. I knew they were aware of the selfsame real name, so I wasn’t as properly careful as I should have been about cover.”
“I have trouble with such stuff too,” I said.
“You’re nice.” She paused. “Will you ever get to London?”
We chatted about whether I would ever get to London. She assured me that it was a good place for Americans.
I was down to Mr. Crane, the go-getter. On the assigned time for ASTOR (Approved Secure Telephone Rendezvous), I encountered the voice of the man who would indeed help me.
“Yes,” he said, “Crane on the line. I’ve been waiting. How is big BOZO?”
“Well, he’s fine. Working hard.”
“Great man. You tell him I said I would do anything he wants, and this is before I even know what it is.”
“He’ll enjoy your trust in him.”
“Tell him I’ve learned a little more about poker since he took me down to my BVDs.”
“Is that a warning not to get into a game with him?”
“Mr. Sloate, you’ll learn at the feet of a master. And you will pay for it.” He cleared his throat. Over the secure phone, it sounded like a motorcycle starting up, and I thought of the myriad of electrons scrambling and unscrambling themselves to the sound. “Hit me with the task,” Mr. Crane said. “Harder the better.”
“Person in question has been trying to locate one of our people, a Junior Officer Trainee, who’s been recently assigned to London. His cryp is SM/ONION. We don’t know his cover name or names.”
“That should be the adverbial duck soup.” He laughed at his own qualifier. Given our instant amity, I laughed with him. Now, we sounded like two motorcycles riding around in a large barrel.
“Need it today?”
“Preferably.”
“Did you pick up any refills on this umbilical?” he asked.
“Yes. We have Repeat-Access at 1800 to ASTOR.”
“Way to go. I’ll call on the minute at 1800.”
It was now a quarter to four. I had time to reach Harlot. To enter his secure telephone, there would be no need for ASTOR. I would be speaking directly to Washington. At BOZO, however, one still had to log in every secure telephone call, and I did not want to use William King Harvey’s logbook for such a call. It would be necessary, therefore, to take a trip over to the Department of Defense where I still kept my desk even if I had not approached it in three weeks. On the other hand, DOD was half across the American sector from BOZO, and we were almost in the rush hour. Moreover, their phone might be in use. I decided to carry this operation as far as I could on my own.
Crane came back on the line at six. “I won’t,” he said, “give you definitive returns until tomorrow, but we don’t seem to have an SM/ ONION. Nor a scallion. Nor a rutabaga. Not in London town.”
“Does London include all of Great Britain?”
“You don’t think the Brits invite the Agency into every village with a mill, do you? London is about all of it. We’ve got a Consulate slot in Manchester.” He stopped. “Plus Birmingham. A bloke in Edinburgh. Ditto Glasgow.” He grunted.
“I appreciate your effort,” I said. “I hope our troubles didn’t impinge on your afternoon.”
“Well, I thought I was going to have to stand up my golf foursome, but this is London. The drizzle turned into a downpour. No golf. Nothing lost.”
“That’s swell,” I said.
“Charley Sloate, let me tell you. Our check-out will continue tomorrow, but BOZO’s target is not going to be found on teacup liaison to some one-thousand-year-old color guard in Edinburgh. Target ought to be right here in London. However, we’ve pursued such inquiry already. Negative.”
“Check.”
“Where does that leave us?”
“My principal still wants SM/ONION,” I said. “After all, ONION can’t have an SM unless he’s in England.”
“Technically, he can’t.”
“Technically?”
“We’re secure on the penmanship, right?”
“You mean this phone?”
“I mean this is ex officio. You’re not memo-ing any of our palaver, I assume.”
“I wasn’t intending to.”
“All right. Hear this: Cryptonyms can develop a life of their own. But, I never said that, Charley Sloate.”
“I follow you.”
“How important is all this, anyway?”
“I can’t tell you because I really don’t know.”
“Inform our friend that I am ready to step up the search. We can keelhaul our files with search vouchers into the defunct cryptonyms of personnel who are still with us in London. That’s a big load of wash. London Chief may query Headquarters, D.C., as to why Berlin Base has a meatball up its giggie. Does His Bigness want the onion that much? I’m happy to do the work if he does.”
“I’ll see him tonight.”
“Good. Hear from you in the morning.”
“By the way,” I said, following an inspiration I had not owned even an instant before, “is there some possibility that SM/ONION is on detached duty to the English?”
“You mean Liaison to MI6?”
“Well, something of that order.”
“Can’t be Liaison,” said Crane. “All the saddlebags at Liaison were checked out today.”
“Might ONION be in a more committed activity?”
“Special duty?” He whistled. Over the secure phone, it sounded like a bear wheezing in a cave. “I don’t know if we can penetrate such cover. Yet, that could be the answer.”
In the evening, I had five minutes with Bill Harvey. He was taking C.G. to the opera. He was also swearing as he finished troweling his studs into a starched and pleated shirt.
“Total tap-out, you’re telling me,” he growled.
“No. Mr. Crane did have one interesting lead. He thinks ONION may be on special duty with MI6.”
“Fearsome,” said Harvey. He started to shake his head. His phlegm came up. Extracting a wet-tipped stub of a cigarette from his lips, his hand wobbled over to a standing ashtray and released the butt. His torso shook from the cough. The taffy machine started. He hawked his product into the ashtray to follow the cigarette, and like a leech it slid its way down the standing tube to the cuspidor at the bottom. His suspenders hung to his knees. I mention such details because in Harvey’s presence it took that much to make you aware of anything more salient than the workings of his mind.
“This is a true son of a bitch,” he said, “if it has real wings.” He nodded. “Sit down. C.G. and I may just have to get to the opera a few minutes late. I have to think it out. Look at what this scenario signifies. First, an alleged file clerk is shifted all around Washington, then is shot out to Korea, slipped back to London, and now is placed on special duty to MI6. We could be talking about a bang-and-bust specialist they had tucked onto a siding in the Snake Pit for a couple of weeks. Why not? A demolition expert hidden in the Snake Pit? But what did he blow up so imprecisely that they have to send him flying around the world? What is his connection to me? Why is he now in England working for MI6? Could it have any tie-in to Suez? Shit! I happen to like Wagner, believe it or not, and I’m not going to hear much Lohengrin tonight. Are you free to meet me here after the opera?”
“I’ll be on hand.”
“SM/ONION assigned to MI6. I have a lot to kick around.”
So did I. I descended to my cubbyhole office in GIBLETS, put all my papers on the floor, set the alarm for 11:00 P.M., and went to sleep on my cleaned-off desk.
This evening nap allowed me to recover from my hangover, and I awoke with good appetite and a desire to see Ingrid. I had hardly time, however, to make myself a sandwich from the icebox in GIBLET’s kitchen before I could hear the motor of BLACKIE-1 coming back to the paved turnaround in the rear of our sandbagged villa. By the look on Mr. Harvey’s face as he came into the galley, his bow tie off, his dinner jacket open to show the handles of his revolvers, I gave up any notion of getting over to Die Hintertür in the next hour or two.
“Well, we arrived so late we had to promenade down the aisle just before the overture commenced,” he said. “C.G. is plenty irked. She hates running that kind of gauntlet. Those Krauts hiss at you. The damnedest sound. Little pissy noises. Psss! Psss! I had to squeeze by an old biddy in a diamond tiara, and she was sssss-ing away, so I whispered, “Madame, we are the sons and daughters of Parsifal.”
I was obliged to return him one blank look.
He grinned. “When in doubt, sow confusion. Strategies of Poker, Volume One.”
“I heard today about your rep in poker.”
“Which unqualified son of a bitch let you on to that?”
“Mr. Crane.”
“He means well, but he can’t play. If I claim any edge at the game, it is that occasionally I can read a mind.” He burped. Mr. Harvey’s gut utterances were like guided tours to his alimentary canal.
“Hubbard,” he now said, “I like my mind to be clear. I hate impedance.”
“Yessir.”
“This situation with CLOAKROOM. It’s lodged in my brain. Is it or isn’t it penny-ante?”
“I suppose that’s what we’re trying to find out.”
“The worst obsessions,” he said with some gloom, “begin with the smallest things. Hell, the brain even has the same hue as an oyster. By which logic, every obsession is a putative pearl. All the while I was listening to the music, I was also running down my options. I’ve given up on any big American bang-and-bust man whom the Brits are grooming for Cairo. The Brits would never accept the idea that we have better technical personnel than they do. Too much pride.”
“Where does that leave us?” I asked.
“Ready to do it by the numbers. I broke my own rule tonight. In these matters, you weigh hypotheses, you don’t juggle them. You don’t start with your largest possibilities. You paw over your small scenarios first. Check?”
“Check.”
“All right. The very smallest. Let’s say the whole thing is a fiasco from day one. It involves no more than some poor asinine kid who has a rabbi. Some rabbi high enough upstairs to know the ropes. KU/ ROPES. Was somebody trying to tell me something right from the start?” He paused, he took a beat just long enough for my heart to lose its beat, and then went on. “Let’s assume, if this is the case, that CLOAKROOM’s poor performance on the cable concerning Wolfgang was an accident. I took to this possibility for a while because it was simple. I’m a great believer in Ockham’s Razor. Did they teach you that at Yale?”
I nodded. Before I could offer my contribution, he stated, “The simplest explanation that covers a set of separate facts is bound to be the correct explanation. Check?” he asked.
“That’s about it.” Actually, Ockham’s Razor, as I remembered it, went: Pluralites non est ponenda sine necessitate—excess cannot exist without necessity—but I wasn’t about to substitute my erudition for his.
He burped ruminatively. “Our simplest scenario does not, however, manage to tell us why so much effort has been put into protecting CLOAKROOM. So I reject it. Too small. Something else is going on. Is CLOAKROOM part of a team? If so, what kind of rig are they rolling? First subhypothesis: They are the Let’s-Give-the-Shaft-to-Bill-Harvey gang. Larger subhypothesis: One of our kingfish in D.C. is working a Berlin caper and it involves Wolfgang. I’m excluded. That makes me nervous. Wolfgang is one loose end, and I may be the other. Let’s say it’s time for a drink.”
He got up, went to the icebox, took out the makings, and mixed a batch of martinis: He filled his shaker with ice, poured in a quarter inch of Scotch, poured it out, then loaded the pitcher with gin. “The best Chicago hotels make it this way,” he informed me. “The bar at the Ambassador, and the one at the Palmer House. You have to use good gin. The Scotch adds that no-see-um flannel taste you’re looking for. Slips the job down your gullet.” He drank off his first fill, gave his glass another, and passed me one. It did slide down. Smooth fire, sweet ice. I had the disconnected thought that if I ever wrote a novel I would call it Smooth Fire, Sweet Ice.
“To resume. You enter my mental life this afternoon with Mr. Crane’s hypothesis. SM/ONION may be in MI6. Ingenious. That certainly explains why we can’t locate him at London Station. But it slings me off into my worst vice: premature intellectual ejaculation. I get too excited by hot hypotheses. If I ever went to a psychiatrist, he’d discover that I want to fuck an elephant. I have fucked, parenthetically speaking, everything else. Female, that is. But these martinis will have me writing my memoirs before long. It’s the passing blaze when the gin hits your system. I am not off the track, Mr. Hubbard, merely taking on steam. Those Heinies were awful at the opera, psss, psss.”
He lay back for a moment and closed his eyes. I did not dare to hope. I knew if I put all my mental efforts into concentrating upon his need to fall asleep, and failed to hypnotize his spirit, I would be good for not much more once he opened his eyes.
“Very well,” he said, “I reject the idea of a demolition expert on loan to MI6. For all I know, the British are now planting bombs under Nasser’s balls, but, as I say, they would not use one of our men for that, and, in addition, it takes us further away from Base Berlin. So, all through Lohengrin I was marching myself in the other direction. Since I can’t explain what kind of CIA man could be inserted so far up into MI6 that he’s untraceable by us, I employ an old Hegelian trick I acquired back in law school: Turn the premise upside down. What if this slippery slime-ball Señor Cloakroom-Ropes-Fragment-Onion is a young undercover operator for the English who has managed to bore his way into the CIA?”
“A mole? A mole working for the English?”
“Well, they just about managed that once with Burgess and Maclean. I don’t even want to get into Mr. Philby. It’ll ruin these martinis.”
“But those men weren’t working for the English. They were KGB.”
“All Europeans, if you scratch them, are Communist. Amend that. Potentially Communist. There is no emotion on earth more powerful than anti-Americanism. To the rest of the world, America is the Garden of Eden. Unmitigated envy, the ugliest emotion of them all.”
“Yessir.”
He took another refill from the martini pitcher. “Let us suppose a group in MI6 was able to insert a small self-contained network into our ranks.” He burped tenderly, reflectively, as if his stomach might be entering a regime of peace. “Go ahead,” he said, “play devil’s advocate.”
“Why would the English go to such lengths?” I asked. “Don’t we continue to pool some information with them? I think they have more to lose if such a venture were ever exposed than they could possibly gain from infiltrating us.”
“They’re still in pretty bad odor with Washington. We can’t forgive them for building a royal pavilion to cover Philby’s ass. Why, it was their way of saying, ‘Our worst Englishman means more to us than your best detectives.’ At present, we have stuff they need to know that we won’t trust them with. We can’t. Not so long as they are fatally inept at spotting KGB penetrations into their highest places. If I hadn’t been there to sniff out Philby, he could have climbed all the way to the top. He was penultimate level already. The Russians have demonstrated this ability time and again to recruit young Englishmen for lifetime jobs. The best young men. It’s as if you, Hubbard, had been made by the KGB back in college, and joined the Agency precisely to work for the Russians. Ugly to conceive, isn’t it? For all we know, it’s going on right now. This much, I do postulate. The tricky Brits have the motivation to get into our fanciest plumbing. It would give them a way of expressing themselves. Creative bastards. Even if such an English mole is only loyal to Britain and never to the Soviets, we’re still hanging by our fingernails. Because let there be one KGB agent working near the top of MI6, and he will get wind sooner or later that they have a mole in our midst. He will find a way to obtain the product and pass it on to the Sovs.”
I was appalled how my inspired suggestion to Mr. Crane that SM/ ONION might be attached to MI6 had now been transmuted into a threat to the West.
“Fearsome,” repeated Harvey. “Awesome. But I’ll find out. There are a couple of Brits in this town who owe me beaucoup favors.”
“I don’t see it,” I said. “If the British have placed a mole in the Company, why would they call him back to MI6?”
“Oh, they can slip him out again. Keep one step ahead of us—as they have already. I expect they panicked. Once I got on the trail, they decided to tuck him back into MI6 for safekeeping.”
“As of now,” I said, “this is your leading hypothesis?”
“As of now.” He stopped in the middle of sipping his martini. “But what do we do next?” he asked.
“That’s what I don’t know.”
“Why, we return to the old hypotheses. We plod through them again. One by one. From the simplest to the most elaborate. Only an empty hypothesis fails to improve on second look.”
“Check.”
“So I, Hubbard, am going back to the smallest. Do you recall it?”
“Yessir.”
“Expatiate.”
“Whole thing a fiasco from day one.”
“And?” he asked.
“Involves some poor kid who has a rabbi on high.”
Now he looked me in the eye. Over the last few weeks, I had been waiting for this. He was renowned for his ability to look at you as if he were already dead and you would soon be. His gaze offered no light, no compassion, no humor—just the dull weight of evenhanded suspicion.
I bore up under this examination, but by the time he looked away, my hangover had returned. The gin so recently added to my blood had gone bad. Nonetheless, I took another drink. “Yes,” I said, “that was your first hypothesis.”
“Right. I asked you to separate out any juniors you knew who went from the Farm to the Snake Pit. Then, I told you to acquire their cryps through the Bypass.”
“Yessir.”
“Have you done that?”
“I may have been remiss.”
“All right. I know how busy you’ve been. We’re all remiss. Tomorrow, however, you get on the talk-box to Washington, and bring me back names.”
“Check.”
“Did you ever set foot in the Snake Pit?”
Was this the crux? Some instinct told me to say “Yessir.”
“Yes,” he said, “I’ve heard you were seen on those precincts.”
“Well, I barely set foot there,” I said. “I guess we can start, however, with me.”
“What was your cryptonym on the days you went into the Snake Pit?”
“Don’t you remember, sir? I told you that I can’t reveal that saddlebag. It’s from Technical Services.”
“Nonetheless, you walked into the Snake Pit with your cryptonym.”
“Yessir.”
“Would they have a record of that?”
“I have no idea. I did sign an entrance book.”
“I could probably triangulate your cryptonym from that. But let’s save time. Unreel your last set of remarks, will you?” His eyes were now as calm and open as window glass.
“Well, sir, all the while I was waiting for clearance at Technical Services, I was instructed to use the Snake Pit for job cover. My roommates in Washington were under the impression that I went there to work every day. In fact, to implement such cover, I was given a pass to enter Snake Pit premises, and for a couple of mornings I did try to look busy. I’d take out a file, walk it down the corridor, take it back. I guess it was analogous, you could say, to my so-called job here at the Department of Defense.”
“Which of your fellow trainees did you happen to run into on these excursions?”
“That’s what I can’t remember. I’ve been racking my brain. I don’t recall a soul.” That, at least, was true. I was the only one from my training platoon to be sent there.
“But you yourself did no real work in the place?”
“No, sir. None.”
“All right. Let’s call it a night.”
“Yessir.”
“Make those calls to Washington in the morning.”
“Done.”
I started to leave. He held up a hand. “Hubbard, at present, I subscribe to the MI6 hypothesis. But I still am going to take a hard look at you. Because this is the first occasion on which you’ve told me that you expended a little shoe leather in the Snake Pit.”
“I’m sorry about that, sir. Will you believe me. It was so minor, I never thought about it.”
“Well, don’t stand there looking like Judas Iscariot. You’ve worked at your job for me. I don’t turn on people for too little. Only when they flunk a lie-detector test.”
“Yessir.”
I got out of the room without rattling the knob. My inclination to look for Ingrid had disappeared. It was Harlot I needed. There was no choice now but to get myself over to the Department of Defense, and use the secure phone. For the first time since taking a course at the Farm, I employed evasive tactics, riding a taxicab from GIBLETS up to Charlottenburg where I got out and walked for half a mile before doubling back on my route in another taxi, which took me within a few blocks of Defense. It was, I discovered, impossible to be certain that one was not being followed. An empty street took on shadows, a taxi ride at night was dazzled by the reappearance of certain cars. I made the determination that I was 80 percent certain I had not been followed, even if my emotional state was ready to put it at even money.
Harlot, whom I had the luck to reach with no delay, was home for dinner. He listened to my account, paying particular attention to the episode with Butler and Wolfgang, then to my conversation with Crane, and my distorted confession to Bill Harvey about the Snake Pit. I considered telling him about Ingrid as well since it was unlikely she would not occasionally have information to sell, but I chose not to. First things first.
“All right,” he said when I was done, “Harvey is obviously paying attention to the largest and smallest scenarios, MI6 and you, dear boy.”
The “dear boy” brought its own metallic hum to the secure phone.
“Yes,” I said, “I’ve come to that conclusion, too.” My voice must have been croaking its way through the Scrambler-Descrambler like a squall of gulls.
“I’m going,” said Harlot, “to tip the scales in favor of MI6. I have a friend there. He’ll come through for me. Harvey will be pointed toward our British compeers for the next couple of days.”
“What will happen when he can’t find out who it is?”
“He’ll come back to you.”
“Yessir.”
“I’ll tap into Bridge-Archive, meanwhile,” said Harlot, “and obtain a few cryptonyms you can claim to have picked up from the Bypass. Just a few harmless Snake Pit drones. We’ll choose types who are more or less your contemporaries, so as to keep Harvey convinced you’re taking care of his assignment. Do you, by the way, happen to know anyone’s cryptonym?”
“I do,” I said, “but is that fair? A friend’s career could be injured.”
“It’s never going to get to that. I have just made a decision. You are in this bouillabaisse because of me. Since I have legitimate Company business in Berlin, with Mr. Harvey no less, I’m coming over.”
I did not know whether to take this news as a promise of succor or the guarantee that my fortune had just slipped a little further into peril.
“For the nonce,” he said, “do get Mrs. Harvey to talk about her husband’s decision to move from FBI to CIA.”
“She wasn’t married to him then,” I said.
“I certainly know that. I just want to obtain a notion of the story Bill Harvey told her. Try to keep the lady close to the details. Install a sneaky on your person.”
“I don’t know if I could feel right about that,” I said. “She’s treated me well.”
“You sound like the little sister I never had,” said Harlot.
“Hugh, with all due respect, and I respect you . . .”
“Harry, you’re in a hard game. As of this moment, I would hope you cease whimpering. Your conscience led you to this profession. Now you are discovering that your profession will oblige your conscience to see itself all too often as deplorably used, contemptible, atrocious, mephitic.”
“Mephitic?”
“Pestilential. I would not be in the least surprised if iron, assuming iron has sentiments, feels much the same way when it is obliged to consign its sulphur to the furnace in the course of being annealed.”
“I’ll do it,” I said. I did not know if it was a matter of steeling my conscience, or whether I was privately pleased by the assignment. Something new seemed to be stirring.
“Get the details,” said Harlot. “The more details, the better.”
“She’s a closemouthed woman.”
“Yes, but she does love her husband. Or so, at least, you tell me. Every injustice visited on him, therefore, must be packed into her memory. Once the closemouthed start to speak, you can find yourself on the face end of a cataract. Since J. Edgar Buddha seems to have been his usual gracious self in the manner he told Bill Harvey to get lost, do work on her sense of outrage.”
“Please give my best to Kittredge,” I said.
“Of course.”
“Hugh?”
“Yes?”
“What if I were to locate Wolfgang? Assuming that the cellar-bar fellow was Wolfgang.”
“Good point, Harry. Prepare the ground. I may want to look him over myself.”
“When will you be here?”
“Figure on a week at the outside.”
As we hung up, it occurred to me that the situation could come to issue in much less time.
No matter. I was too excited to sleep. Instead, I went in search of Ingrid, but it was her night off, and Die Hintertür was empty. I sat at the bar and flirted with Maria who, in turn, teased me about Ingrid. She had obviously received her report.
“That’s all right,” I said, “I’d rather be with you.”
Maria returned her mysterious smile. I do not know what amused her, but two days later, along with everything else, I came down with a dose of gonorrhea.