He smiled and began to dictate.
Chapter 50
He arrived at 2:45 and nodded at the duty marine, who only barely nodded back. Inside, people he'd known for months, whom he'd laughed with and drunk with, girls he'd tried to date, men who'd admired his closeness to the fabulous Roger, all looked away, as if whatever he had might be catching.
It was of course all around the building that he'd been leading a hunter-killer team after the revolutionary, and that he'd failed, and been lucky that some old Cuban cop was there to save his bacon. It made the Agency look so bad. They hadn't seen Moncada coming, and never caught up to it, and the business community was expecting some action, and instead they just got Boy Scout stuff in the mountains, to no consequence.
He tried to be lighthearted about it, and he was dressed surprisingly casually for such an important meeting, in old blue jeans, a knit shirt for polo playing-as if he'd ever played polo! — and a blazer. He wore his Bass Weejuns and no socks, and looked as if he'd just stepped off the quad at Princeton. If they were going to hang him-and they were-he'd be comfortable, dammit.
Frenchy climbed the steps and went back to his office on the third floor, but it was empty. Soon enough, Shirley, a Vassar girl of famously high spunk quotient, leaned in. She and she alone had the guts to face him, and to speak civilly, and possibly risk all for it.
'Don't you remember, Walter? It's in the ambassador's office.'
'Yeah, I just thought?' he said, and trailed off.
'Walter,' she said, 'for what it's worth, I always thought you were a good guy. I'm sorry you had to bury your light under that prick Roger. It's too bad when this stuff happens. Good luck.'
That seemed to be it: Shirley knew the score, it was all over except the part where the negro help washes the blood off the walls.
'A little late for luck, I think,' he said, smiling. 'But who knows what's up the old Short sleeve?'
He left for the ambassador's office, which took up the whole east wing of the second floor and had to be accessed through a series of increasingly lavish offices, and as he passed through each, people scurried to look the other way or suddenly found the files or documents before them utterly fascinating.
When he at last reached the big office, he heard laughter. It seemed the old boys-the ambassador himself, who probably didn't really know Frenchy's name, and Roger and Plans-were sharing a giggle. Something had amused them.
The door was open. Frenchy leaned in sheepishly.
'Uh, hi,' he said.
'Well, well, well,' said Plans, looking amused, 'our last team member is here. I was all set to bawl you out for being late, but I see it's exactly 3 P.M. sharp.'
'Yes, sir,' said Frenchy.
'Well, do come in.'
'Dick,' said the ambassador, 'since you boys are going to go all skull-and-bones, I think I'll absent myself. I have many things to attend to and I don't want to hear anything I can't tell my wife.'
'Thanks, Jack. Your cooperation is noted and I will whisper your name in many ears.'
'Thanks, Dick.' He smiled facilely, made deeply insincere eye-contact with each of them, and sauntered out, as if he weren't totally nonplussed at being evicted from his own office.
'Short, do come in, and sit down. Understand you ran a hell of a race in those mountains,' said Plans.
Frenchy went over and sat in an overstuffed chair. He felt awkward. The ambassador was some kind of big- game hunter, so animal heads hung everywhere in the office, which was done up like a Russian-Jewish set designer's Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer version of a Harvard eating club. It was heavy on flags, ships in bottles or too big for bottles, eighteenth century battle paintings, beautifully bound books in red leather, and a big eagle symbol embossed on a disk in bas relief, painted richly. Frenchy had never been in here, he realized.
Plans smiled sadly. 'Now, Short, suppose you just run through what exactly it was that happened up there, just for the record, and so I know what sort of a situation I'm facing.'
'Yes, sir,' said Frenchy.
He told, as quickly as he could, in measured terms though colloquially, how he and Earl had come in from the other side of the mountains, how Earl had read the land brilliantly and understood exactly where the target would be led, how when they'd made the intercept, Earl had it all before him and wouldn't pull the trigger.
'Hmmm,' said Plans. 'I've seen this man's record. He killed many, many times in the war. I don't understand his refusal.'
'I don't understand it either,' said Roger. 'It was his willingness to kill, as evinced by his war record, that made us bring him in in the first place.'
'Well,' said Frenchy, 'you don't get much in the way of explanations out of Earl. He does what he does by his own standards, without doubt. All the career offers, the possibility of a better life for his family, the ideas of helping the Agency and the country, all that meant nothing. His mind works in very strange ways. He just wouldn't do it.'
'You said you could?' Roger began, but Plans cut him off with a gesture, then asked, 'Where is he now?'
'The Cubans have him detained on our suggestion. We haven't figured out what to do with him.'
'Excellent, as I haven't yet figured out what to do with you.'
'Sir,' said Frenchy, 'not to discount a failure, but could I point out that in the end this may work out to the good. If we'd actually killed the revolutionary, he'd be a martyr. Who knows what mischief that would unleash? Now he's just another convict in the Cuban prison system. Anything can happen to him if he's not executed, though he still may be. So the same thing has been accomplished, but there's no trace of our connection. And in fact Earl did essentially stage-manage the capture.'
'Yes, all that may be true, Short. But it's irrelevant. As I recall, you were given an exact and specific assignment. The point, need I remind you, was to send a message. Remember the Big Noise? We were going to make a big noise. 'We will not be trifled with.' That was the message we meant to send, and that was the message that did not get sent. So you see, there is a problem here.'
Both young men looked at the floor.
'Well?' Plans said. 'Someone has to answer. That is the way of the organization. Will one of you please speak? Let's not mince words. I want to know exactly whose fault this was. Where does the blame go? Someone has to pay. Which of you will it be? Who gets the ax?'
It was Roger who finally spoke.
'I have to be frank here, Dick. It was Frenchy- Walter-who ran this mission, it was Walter who found and pushed Earl, it was Walter who swore for weeks that Earl could be brought under discipline. I think the record will show that I had severe doubts about Earl Swagger and raised questions many times. When I raised questions, it was Walter who downplayed them, who minimized them, who invested totally in Earl. I blame myself, of course, for not monitoring the situation more aggressively, but as you know, you sometimes have to take a certain level of staff performance on trust. I trusted. My trust did not bear fruit. Now, I like Walter very much, but I do wonder if he's a shrewd enough judge of character for this kind of work. It takes a certain I-don't-know-what, a certain sophistication to get certain things accomplished, and the honest truth is that while there are many things Walter can do and do well, this may not be an area where his capabilities come to the fore. Walter, I'm only telling the truth, painful as it is for me.'
Frenchy nodded.
'Sure, Roge. Tell it the way you see it.'
'Mr. Short, possibly you have a counterpoint to make. You'd best make it now or the situation will have gotten away from you.'
'I only know that I did my best.'
'Ah. Well, one cannot ask for more. But sometimes even that isn't enough. And so I suppose that a judgment
