“You played it just right, Miles. We’re very lucky nobody in that outfit is quite as bright as you.”
“Good old Miles,” Leo said.
Miles saw that the tension in the room was considerably released. Now what the hell?
“Trewitt got a guy out of Mexico — yeah, Trewitt, Dreamer Trewitt — that a lot of people want dead. But somehow Trewitt did it. It only cost his life. A Mexican smuggler and vice lord who brought Ulu Beg across the border back in March. He’s in the room next door, under my name, right now.”
“I don’t—”
“This fat slob had one secret and one secret only. Not that Ulu Beg was in America — we knew that. But that the Cubans were running interference for him, backtracking to wipe out his tracks.”
“Jesus, Paul, what would the Cubans—”
“Come on, Miles. The Cubans are acting for the Russians. This means Ulu Beg isn’t here on his own, but as the final part of a Soviet Intelligence operation.”
“They should know that at the Agency. We should tell them that at the Agency.”
“No. Because if they know that at the Agency, the Russians will very quietly put a bullet in Ulu Beg’s skull and back off. We’ve got to let them push it the last step, so that we can flip it over on them.”
Miles said nothing.
“All right, Miles,” said Chardy. “Now I’m going to tell you how you’re going to stop them. Stop Ulu Beg and a Russian named Speshnev, who’s running their op, who thought it up. Miles, you’re going to be a cowboy. A computer cowboy.”
49
Danzig sat in his office, amid the litter, the empty cups, the craziness. The room seemed full of black bats, broken glass, the stage props of melodramatic insanity; on the other hand, it also seemed just a dirty room, a room in which once a book had been written but which was now a mess. He sat inertly. He could hear,
Crackpot stuff, of course. Yet lately he’d been taking refuge in the crackpot, the harebrained, the addled, the twisted, the hopelessly banal
Or again: Bigfoot? Fascinating creature, the missing link; they even had it on film. It looked strangely like a man in a monkey suit — but no matter! It was a system of belief, a way of organizing data coherently. Which Danzig at this point in time lacked, and he was not willing to sit in judgment on any other man’s techniques for doing so. There were others too: saucers, phrenology, Rosicrucianism, Mormonism, Scientology, nudism. All systems of belief, perfectly logical, askew in only one tiny detail which, like one degree’s misaim in a compass reading, took them further and further into the ether the farther out they got, yanking them off into the realms of the purely crazy. Yet comforting! Full of abiding love! Offering safety!
I have no safety, Danzig thought.
What I mean is … What do I mean?
He looked about. Files spilled into files everywhere.
He needed a way to organize it. No matter how insane, how Rosicrucian, how bizarre, he needed a single theory by which the thing could be looked at, tested, then, if false, disregarded.
He needed science.
What he had was madness.
The room terrified him. It was the entropy principle, once again: randomness, disorder, the release of pure energy to no meaningful purpose other than disaster.
There lay the file on BANGLADESH, in one terrible isolated corner, starvation and treachery reeking from the jumble of typed pages (he remembered the photos of the Paki intellectuals bayoneted to death by teenagers for the benefit of the Western cameramen). And over there, huge one, most of it blurred papers, that thin stuff from State with a mad mix of CIA documents thrown in for good measure, CHINA, carbons, wads of it (he remembered Chou in the great hall: curious, a pinnacle moment in Western and Eastern civilization, the two cultures meeting as equals for the first time in two million years of humanhood, and all he could remember about it now, having talked and written about it extensively for almost a decade, were the terrible Chinese toilets, pissholes, sinks, shitdrains of primordial infection); and over there, tidier, a much smaller pile, indicative of how history had really passed her brave, pretty buildings and picturesque mountains by, W. EUROPE; then AFRICA, undeveloped, a few niggardly papers; and a huge and messy pile for SE ASIA, where history had paused for seven long and bitter years; and finally — he hadn’t the nerve to face it — MIDEAST, all the little countries, the passionate, violent, rich, desperate little lands, a horror of exile and betrayal and steel will, profligacy. Who could make sense of it? No man. Not even a man of outstanding intellect and ambition, a Danzig.
He spun (barefoot in tattered terry-cloth robe, his flat veined feet and yellowed toes before him) to face it: MIDEAST. It covered half a room. He’d begun, one time or other in his hibernation here, to divide the huge archive into smaller piles, IRAN and IRAQ and SAUDI ARABIA and the terrible, terrible little PALESTINE and a huge ISRAEL. It looked like a fleet, a formation, stacks and stacks of paper: working papers, reports, indexes, trade tables, economic profiles, intelligence reports, satellite photos, computer printouts, abstracts, memo drafts, think- tank bulletins — the gunk, the stuff, the actual plasm of history. And all this was A-level documents, the cream of the cream. In the basement there lurked still another ton and a half of ungraded documents; and in a warehouse in Kensington still more, press clippings, embassy invitations, routing slips. No man could master it all, the complexities, the strange subtleties. And in it somewhere, in one file or in a hundred, lay the ANSWER: who was trying to kill him. And why. No wonder he was going insane. Who wouldn’t? It’s a miracle I haven’t gone crazy before. No wonder I seek solace in crazy ideas, fascinated at the bizarre halls through which human minds can drag the hulking bodies that surround them.
He stared at the piles, aware finally of his own sour odor. He felt like a character in a Borges story lost in a paper labyrinth, time having been decreed to stand still. Truly: he was in a situation that could only have been designed by a blind Argentinian librarian-genius. Yet there was no other place to be. He could not leave. They would kill him if he left the labyrinth.
He pinched the bridge of his nose. Now, suddenly, the bridge of his nose hurt. It had supported glasses for all his adult life; yet now, in an hour of maximum stress, it too revolted. His body ached; he was disgustingly flatulent; his head ached, always, always,
I am out of control. I am an exile in my own house, my own brain.
He stood suddenly, but in the effort lost contact with the reason for standing. By the time he was fully up he could claim no reason for the move. He sat down again, just as suddenly, and began to weep.
How long did he weep? It must have been hours. His self-pity took on Homeric weight and gravity. He wept forever. Night was falling. He was growing weary. Twice men had crept down the hall to listen. He was trying to control himself, but he could hear them listening.
Oh, help me, please. Somebody. Please.
Who would help him? His wife? She was worthless. They had not fucked in years. When he spoke he saw her eyes wander to the ceiling; she had the attention span of a grasshopper. Sam Melman? Help me, Sam, please help me. But Sam was too greedy, too smooth, too ambitious. Help me, oh, please help me.
Lanahan? The little priest, whose adolescent acne still erupted on his bitter young face, so bent, so determined to succeed. Yet Lanahan was more insane than he was, even.
