Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

likewise had ambushed him between Sacramento and Seattle, sending him to bed for forty-eight hours and minimalizing his contact with Maestra. It wasn’t until he was leaving her house that he thought to give her the bracelet of linked silver camellias he’d bought for her at the Sacramento airport. Maestra had been preoccupied, herself, attempting to break into the computer files of an art appraiser whom she suspected of deliberately undervaluing her Matisse. Intuitively, she’d steered clear of the topic of Suzy.

The cross-country migraine was neither milder nor more severe than the short-distance one. In both cases, there was the sense that in the space behind his eyes a porcupine and a lobster were fighting to the death in front of a strobe light.

At some juncture on the train ride from New York to Washington, one or the other of the prickly creatures prevailed and a neuro-optic gaffer switched off the strobe. Switters was feeling reasonably normal when the skyline of the nation’s capital came into view. At the sight of the Washington Monument, wahooish bubbles formed in his spinal fluid. The excitement, needless to say, owed nothing to the monument itself, it having even less of a connection to him than to the dead statesman it was meant to honor. Aside from the fact that it was tall and white, what did the structure evoke of George Washington, the soldier, President, or man? On the other hand, since Jefferson described his colleague’s mind as “being little aided by invention or imagination,” perhaps the blandness of the monument was entirely fitting—and besides, what symbol would a designer have erected in its place: a surveyor’s transit, a hatchet, a set of clacking dentures?

To Switters, the monument signaled that he was back on the job, and that was the reason for his tingling. Back on what job was another matter. He knew only that, armed with privileged credentials, he had reentered the maw of the beast, the power-puckered omphalos upon which all angelic mischief must sooner or later come to bear, the city where winning was absolutely everything.

And only the winners were lost?

That night he slept in his own bed. Such a cozy, comforting phrase: “in his own bed.” Like many such sentiments, however, it was fallacious. True, he owned the bed and, under mortgage, the apartment in which it was situated, but in the two years since he’d acquired those things, he’d slept in them fewer than forty times.

Because he was born on the cusp between Cancer and Leo—which is to say, drawn on one side to the hermit’s cave, on the other to centerstage—he both craved the familiarity of a private, personal, domestic space and loathed the idea of being fettered by permanence or possession. At least, astrologers would attribute the ambivalence to his natal location. Someone else might point out that it was simply an acute microcosmic reflection of the fundamental nature of the universe.

The apartment was sparsely furnished. Except for some of the suits and T-shirts, the few articles in it (including refrigerated food items in states of degeneration that brought to mind the special effects in Mexican horror films) had been purchased at least two years prior.

The more advertising he saw, the less he wanted to buy?

Depending upon their level of . . . what?—fear? alienation? vested interest? humanity?—people looked at the new headquarters building of the Central Intelligence Agency from varying psychological perspectives. Switters’s perspective was fairly neutral. He was, by Bobby Case’s definition, a “neutral angel.”

Switters was even neutral about angels. Biblical angels, that is. On the rare occasion when he considered the subject, he was inclined to compare angels to bats. He could scarcely think of one without the other. It seemed perfectly obvious. They were two sides of the same coin, were they not? One winged anthropomorph the alter image of the other.

White and radiant, the heavenly angel represented goodness. Dark and cunning, the nocturnal bat was associated with evil. Yet, was it really that simplistic?

Bats, in actuality, were sweet tempered, harmless (less than 1 percent rabid) little mammals who aided humankind by devouring immense amounts of insects and pollinating more plants and trees in the rain forest than bees and birds together. Angels, conversely, often appeared as wrathful avengers, delivering stern messages, wrestling with prophets, evicting tenants, brandishing flaming swords. Their “pollination” was restricted to begetting children on astonished mortal women. Which would you rather meet in a midnight alley?

Angels had their worth, however. Creatures of wonder, they bore the ancient marvelous into the modern mundane. Skeptics who howled at the very mention of ghosts, space aliens, or crop circles (not to mention greenhouse gases) were not so quick to scoff at angels. According to a Gallup poll, more than half of all Americans believed in angels. Thus did the supernatural still influence the rational world.

Women tended to be afraid of bats. Even Maestra. As near as could be determined, it was not a subconscious fear of pollination, some sowing of bad seed. Women, rather, were afraid that bats might become entangled in their hair. Ah, but St. Paul had decreed that women’s heads be covered in church “because of the angels.” In Paul’s era, words for angel and demon were interchangeable, and there was a species of angel/demon that was said to be attracted to women’s hair. Angels in hair. Bats in hair. Once again, distinctions were not as crisp as they might have superficially appeared. At some point, then, angels and bats must converge. There, as in mathematical space, the coin would have only one side. But what point was that? Where or when was it that light and darkness combined? End of Time—or, rather, Today Is Tomorrow—might have answered: “In laughter.”

Within the CIA, the opposite of the neutral angel was the cowboy. Cowboys believed themselves on the side of light (which they identified exclusively with goodness), but because they insisted on light’s absolute dominion over darkness—and would stop at no dark deed to insure that domination—they ended up transforming light into darkness. It was strictly a transformation, though, not a merger. Laughter never entered the equation.

Thus, when critics looked at the CIA headquarters and saw evil, they were not entirely mistaken. What they failed to see, however, was what Switters (now climbing clumsily out of a taxi in front of the building) almost always saw: a factory unexcelled at manufacturing the very monkey wrenches that might be tossed into its own machinery.

After being cleared through a series of checkpoints, Switters eventually arrived at the offices of Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald, assistant deputy director of operations. It was 10 A.M. Joolie, Fitzgerald’s redheaded secretary, with whom Switters had enjoyed an ongoing flirtation of some years’ standing, frowned speculatively at the wheelchair but did not inquire about it. One does not prosper at Langley by being nosy.

As for Fitzgerald himself, he pretended at first not even to notice. Mayflower, as he signed his memos and preferred to be addressed, never showed surprise at anything. A display of surprise would have been a breach of sophistication, a violation of ingrained principles.

“You’re right on time,” said Mayflower, when he’d shut the door behind them.

“That’s only natural,” said Switters, who had blown Joolie a kiss as he disappeared into the inner office. “I’m an operative, not a lawyer, a Hollywood agent, or a self-important bureaucrat.”

If Mayflower took offense, his face did not reveal it. Perhaps he was accustomed to Switters, expected him by now to deport himself with cool effectiveness under certain field conditions, but at other times to wax florid, audacious, rascally. In any event, he stared silently, inexpressively, at his subordinate for quite a few seconds, stared through steel-rimmed spectacles whose assiduously polished lenses gleamed as brightly as his bald spot. Actually, it was a bit more than a spot. At fifty-five, Mayflower had just about enough left of his iron-gray hair to bewig a small doll. Chemotherapy Barbie. Steel glasses, iron hair, granite jaw, golden voice, and a mind like weapons-grade plutonium. To Switters, the deputy director seemed less animal than mineral.

It was Switters who finally broke the silence. “Errand boy,” he said, “not operative. Sorry if I overstated my position.”

Mayflower’s thin lips twitched but stopped short of a smile. “Is the wheelchair a prop to dramatize some point?” he asked.

“Minor mishap in South America.”

“Really? Nothing to do with our fellow Sumac, I hope?”

“Nein. To do with End of Time. Or, rather, Today Is Tomorrow.”

Mayflower stared at him some more. Switters stared at the wall behind the desk. In many government offices, an official of Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald’s rank might have displayed a Groton pennant and framed diplomas from Princeton and Yale (all part of Mayflower’s background), but at CIA, relics of personal history were discouraged. Not so much as a photograph of wife, child, or dog graced the desk. There was, however, on one wall, a signed eight-by-ten glossy of Barbara Bush. The former first lady wore a turquoise dress in the photo, and