OMEGA–9

I COULD ANTICIPATE ROSEN’S NEXT QUESTION: HAVE YOU, HARRY HUBbard, removed Harlot’s X-rays from the file?

The trouble was, I couldn’t give an answer. I had no recollection of ever bringing anything to Harlot from his medical file. My powers of on-demand recollection, after thirty years of drinking, could show a gaping hole or two. It was not impossible that I had forgotten.

More likely someone else had done the lifting. I could have been merely one of a number of mules carrying bales of papyrus from Langley out to Harlot. For that matter, the loss of the X-rays could be attributed to FMWP—pronounced as foam-whip—our in-house acronym for Files Mislaid Within Parameters. The CIA had been expanding for close to four decades in spite of—or was it due to?—foam-whip. One could never assume a missing file to have been filched in mortal sin. The removal was more likely to be venial—plucked to protect some officer’s self-interest, or assigned to the wrong department on its way back to the nest, or, for that matter, a young file clerk, distracted over a dubious romance, could have plunked the papers into the wrong folder, the wrong box, or now that we were computerized, down the chute on an off-key. The user-friendly computers employed by our common folk were as ready to take you off the road as the steering wheel of a fat old four-door sedan.

In short, Harlot’s X-ray files were not now available.

“We’re also having some trouble locating his fingerprints,” Rosen now told me. “Although that may not matter. The fish got to the ends of his fingers. Which is interesting. There is a substance, some equivalent of catnip, but solely for fish, that could have been painted on the fingertips. Which got the catfish nibbling in the desired place. On the other hand, fish do nibble at extremities. So it could be for natural reasons.”

He dipped into an attaché case he had sitting beside him on the floor, and handed over two eight-by-ten glossies respectively of a left hand wearing a ring, and a right hand. “Would this be recognizable?” Perhaps it was the pallor of the black-and-white tones in the photograph, but the hands could have belonged to anyone, they were identifiable only as the puffed-up mitts of a man who had been in water much too long. And the tips of the fingers were indeed frayed to the bone.

“I asked Kittredge if she could make any identification from this, but she became distraught,” Rosen said.

Yes, distraught. The moment when I begged her to let me into the bedroom came back in all its rags of woe. How she must have suffered at the sight of those enlargements. Harlot’s hands—once so deft. Kittredge’s grief became a little more comprehensible to me. It was—cruel paradox—that her torment had nothing to do with mine: Her suffering had a separate existence. This occurred to me in the way that a physicist might encounter a new and offensive proposition in his field: It did not matter how much I loved Kittredge, no guarantee was returned that she could love me. That was the offensive proposition. Did Einstein, facing the quantum theory and a universe of chance, feel any more of an unholy stir?

I am a professional, however. It is the operative word. It was time again to remind myself. One’s body must be in the appointed place. Hung over or well rested; friendly or boiling with bile; loyal or treacherous; fit for the task or conceivably incompetent; one is, nonetheless, a professional; one shuts off the part of one’s mind that is not appropriate to the task. If what is left does not have enough to manage the job, one is still professional. One has shown up for work.

“Harry,” said Rosen, “not all of the face is lost.”

I could hardly follow him. Then I did. “What was left for us?”

“The right lower jaw. All the teeth on that side are absent. Except for the last two molars. That checks out. Harlot used to wear a bridge on his right lower jaw anchored to the same two molars.”

“How do you know about this bridge?”

“Well, my friend, we may not have his general medical records, but the dental file was found. On those X-rays, one of the two molars shows a small gold inlay. So does the cadaver. In fact, the filling on the dead man matches astonishingly well to the Montague X-rays.”

“Astonishingly well? Why not assume you have Hugh Montague’s funeral to prepare for?”

“Because it doesn’t feel right to me.” He put out his hands in apology as if he had been debating this through the afternoon with technicians in the laboratory. I realized he might be alone in his suspicions. “I can’t help it,” he said. “I don’t like the product.”

He filled his pipe and lit it. I did not care to speak while he was refueling. I suppose I have been annoyed by pipe smokers all my working life. We do not have as many now in the Company as in Allen Dulles’ day when the Director’s old Dunhill became part of the role model for a good many of us, but how many of my hours have been spent inhaling a colleague’s pipe?

“Can you tell me why,” he asked at last, “it doesn’t feel all that good?”

“It’s the only path through the evidence,” I said. He knew it. I knew it. Harlot had taught us: Partial evidence which leads to but one conclusion is to be distrusted. Categorically distrusted.

“I think,” he said, “that a cosmetic deception may have been brought off.”

“Can we put the ball back on the playing field?” I asked, and had the passing thought—my mind seemed afflicted now by passing thoughts—that it was, after all, amazing how so many of us still spoke the way advertising people used to carry on twenty and thirty years ago. I think we are equal in some way—we, too, may not know whether an assertion is true or egregiously fraudulent. Run it up the mast and see if it waves. Many of our ventures were dependent on metaphor.

I digress, but I did not wish to engage the enormity of Rosen’s suggestion. There was no alternative, however. I tasted my Scotch. I said, “Ned, are you proposing that a dental technician worked on another man’s mouth skillfully enough to convert those two molars into facsimiles of Harlot’s? And did it in advance of his death?”

“Not impossible.” Rosen was excited. Harlot might be over the horizon, but the game was before him. “This,” he said, “is what we have so far. Hugh Montague’s dental X-rays were done a couple of years ago. At his age, teeth grind down and shift. So it isn’t as if someone had to find a man of the exact age and size who also had two molars identical to Harlot’s. You just need molars that are close. Obviously there would be no great problem in producing a precise copy of the gold inlay.”

“Would the dentist be working for the King Brothers?”

“Yes,” he said, “it would have to be. We could lock in on some person whose physical specifications are near enough to be satisfactory, but we could hardly deal with the rest of the job. I postulate that we have been presented with a highly worked-up KGB special.”

“Are you,” I asked, “really claiming that they found some seventy-year-old Soviet prisoner and proceeded, after much dental work including possibly the extraction of all the other teeth on that half of the lower jaw, to go ahead and very carefully break the old fellow’s spine in just the right place, and then mend him back to health, smuggle him into this country, take him down to Harlot’s boat, carefully shoot off his head to leave no more than the two facsimile molars, and then consign him to Chesapeake Bay long enough to puff up the rest of the remains, while they hang around through it all to be able to nudge him back to shore? No,” I said, answering my own question, “I’d rather believe Harlot is dead, and you are holding the remains.”

“Well,” he replied, “it would be a demanding operation. Even for the KGB. With all their patience.”

“Come,” I said. “It’s worthy of Feliks Dzerzhinsky.”

Rosen stood up and poked the fire. “They would never go to such lengths,” he said, “unless the stakes were very large. Let’s go back to the worst-case scenario. Suppose Harlot is in the hands of the King Brothers?”

“In the hands of the King Brothers and alive?”

“Alive and happy,” said Rosen. “Happy and on his way to Moscow.”

I certainly didn’t wish to give Rosen any help at this point. Where could this thesis leave me? Yet, my mind with all its conditioned reflexes for twisting a hypothesis until it broke or took on form—we treated hypotheses not unlike the way Sandy Calder used to bend wire—now bent Rosen’s line of thinking into the next turn, and did so, I suspect, for no better reason than to improve on his scenario. The need for superior acumen is also an uncontrollable passion. “Yes,” I said, “what if Harlot is alive and happy and on his way to Moscow, and doesn’t want us to be able to conclude whether he’s alive or dead?”

I had gained a step on Rosen. We did not even have to speak of it. For Harlot to defect was as huge a one-man disaster as the CIA could conceive. Even Bill Casey might recognize that it was larger than Nicaragua. Yet if it took a good many qualified people a year or more, we could still assess the damage—call it the meltdown—of the mess that would leave us in. If, however, we did not even know whether he was actually dead or, to the contrary, was educating the King Brothers about us—which would be the education of the century!—then we were condemned to live in a habitat where the keys would fit the locks until they didn’t. This had Harlot’s signature. It would be exactly in his style to leave us a tainted corpse. How often had he instructed Rosen and myself in the principle. “Americans have to have answers,” he told me once. “The inability to reply to a question drives us mad, and Russians look for control before they even have the answer. Both courses breed the same unmanageable anxiety. Find the answer! Neither CIA nor KGB can tolerate ambiguity. It’s to our advantage, therefore, in many an operation, to leave behind just a bit of our spoor—just a trace. The spoor will consume a thousand hours of investigation for every hour they gain by the product. Not at all routine to bring off, Harry, but demoralizing to the opponent.”