10

TWO CUBAN EXILES, REPORTING TO ME ON THE UNDECLARED ACTIVITIES OF their political groups, had to be serviced this same day in morning and afternoon appointments at two safe houses twenty miles apart. Not able to reach the second agent in advance, I could only tell Harlot that he would have to wait for my late afternoon departure. On arrival, I took a cab from National Airport to his house in Georgetown, and in the antique dining room we ate hamburgers and defrosted french fries, a detail I recall because he put them in the pan himself. It was the cook’s night off and Harlot commented that as a boy in Colorado he had rarely eaten anything else for supper, which was one of the very few items about his childhood he ever imparted to me.

“Whom did you eat with?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I ate alone.”

He got up from the table, led me to his office, opened a double-width attaché case to show a three-inch stack of files, then locked the case and handed me the key. “This is all yours for now,” he said, “and you are to keep these papers in your safe at Zenith.”

“Yessir.”

“I don’t want you leaving any of this out on your desk during the day, nor keeping one scrap of paper in your motel.” In the course of our low-amenities dinner, he had inquired about security arrangements at Zenith and the shape of my living conditions at the Royal Palms.

“Well,” he said now, “how would you characterize the situation?”

“Incredible.”

“Kennedy’s role is clear enough to me. If elected, he will be our first priapic President since Grover Cleveland. But just what is going on with the other one, Gargantua, as you thought to put it in that circus telegram?”

“I was heedless.”

“You were intoxicated with yourself. In our work, that’s equal to catching typhus.”

“Who could comprehend my meaning but you?” I asked.

“J. Edgar Buddha, for one. You simply don’t have the expertise to send open telegrams.”

“Yessir.”

“Go in for one more gaffe of this dimension, and you won’t work for me again.”

“Yessir.”

He cleared his throat as if to declare a new venue. “Now for the hygiene. The project will be referred to as HEEDLESS. Giancana will be called RAPUNZEL. Kennedy—IOTA. Let Sinatra be STONEHENGE. The girl ought to have a man’s name. How about BLUEBEARD?”

I nodded; unhappily, I nodded.

“Her old high school friend, Wilma Raye, with whom—you will discover—she talks all the time, can be AURAL. With an A-U, not an O—A-U-R-A-L.”

“Yessir.”

“I haven’t had the time to go through four bloody inches of transcript. I’ve merely skimmed the stuff. You are to digest all the provenance in this attaché case and summarize it for me. Leave out nothing essential. It’s FBI product, but the transcription, while electronically refined, is still garbled. Par for the Bureau. So clean it up for me. I want the essentials. When transcriptions are too diffuse, summarize the take. Extract from the mess some purchase on the comings and goings of this enterprising Bluebeard.”

He looked at me carefully. “Will you be able to bed the wench?”

“Fifty-fifty.” The answer popped out of me. “I have to wonder if I’m qualified.”

“I’m sure that’s what all the Soviet joy-boys say before the KGB sends them out. I say: Become her confidant. Of course, you must try not to leave your voice on FBI tapes. Take her to a different hotel room each time.”

“That’s expensive.”

He looked gloomy indeed.

“Will you authorize me to use safe houses?” I asked. “I can think of several in Miami that are not bad.”

“Oh, Lord, we’re stepping on the Torah now, aren’t we?” He pondered the possible hazards. “Let’s commence with hotel rooms,” he said. “If expenses get out of hand, we’ll reconsider the safe-house option.”

“Yessir.” I paused. “Assuming I reach the exalted place, we do have to look at other difficulties.”

“Trot them forth.”

“What with the FBI tapping her phone at the Fontainebleau, they are bound to hear her mention Harry Field sooner or later when she talks to friends. She may even suspect that Field is an Agency man. That’s no wild supposition in Miami. The FBI could get a fix on me.”

He nodded. “Is there any way to get the girl not to talk about you?”

“Perhaps I can convince her that RAPUNZEL will break my legs if she doesn’t protect me.”

“Well, that might stanch the drear and open wound of verbosity.” He winked. “Do you know, if not for my duties to the Agency, I might have been just as talkative as she is.”

“You?” I said. “Like her?”

“In our work, the impulse to divulge a secret is comparable to strong sexual desire in priests.” He clapped me on the back with considerable amusement, as if once again I could have no idea whether he was winching away on my leg. “Old sport,” he said, “there’s a midnight plane to Miami. Let’s get you back.”

He drove me to the airport, a rare courtesy from Harlot. On the way, I picked up nerve sufficiently to ask about Kittredge and Christopher.

“I see them once a month,” he said slowly, as if weighing his trust in me. “We have fond reunions in Maine. But, yes, Harry, it is lonely. Of course, it has to be. She is working on a book.”

“Is it going well?”

“The portion Kittredge showed me is remarkable, in my opinion. Wonderful on narcissism. She has a new theory I’ve not come across before, and Alpha and Omega work out very well in it. Narcissists, by her measure, are people whose most powerful human relations all take place within themselves. It’s brilliant, and I hope others see it so. She needs the recognition, does our girl.” He stared straight ahead, his hands on the wheel. “Kittredge is also a remarkably good mother to Christopher. The little boy is splendid. I miss him in ways I can’t even begin to describe to myself.”

We pulled up to the airline entrance and he shook my hand. “Let’s have some fun with this. Our work is cruel until we learn how much fun can be found in it.”

I slept on the plane. I was tired enough to sleep again when I reached Miami, but I went off first to my office, put the contents of the attaché case in my safe, and then caught another couple of hours on top of my desk which, as a bed, was one foot, unhappily, too short. I dreamt that RAPUNZEL had fifty thousand trolls tying my legs with spider’s thread.