The door opened. A gray suit appeared. The suit had a head. The head had a face. The face had a mouth. The mouth said:
“You can come in now.”
The soles of Melchior’s sandals squeaked on epoxied marble when he stood up. He twisted his left shoe a little, which made the sound louder, longer. To an observer it might’ve looked as though he was just being obnoxious, a high schooler sliding his sneakers on a freshly waxed basketball court. Indeed, his whole demeanor exuded contempt for protocol and propriety, from his too-long and slightly oily hair to his ill-fitting linen suit to the utterly ridiculous woven leather sandals on his feet. But in fact all he was doing was adjusting the inner liner of his shoe, which had bunched up because of the piece of paper folded between it and the sole. A piece of paper worth more than this whole building, although Melchior would settle for an office in it, as long as it came with a pretty secretary.
The man who’d opened the door showed him into the inner office, then, instead of leaving, closed the door, walked around Melchior, and took a seat at the desk. The nameplate in front of him read RICHARD HELMS. Melchior’d never met Helms in person, but he’d seen his picture in the paper often enough. This wasn’t Helms.
Melchior was intrigued.
As soon as he sat down, the man seemed to forget about Melchior. He began flipping through the pages of a file on the desk. Melchior’s presumably. Melchior noted with pride the thinness of the sheaf of pages. Agents whose tenure with the Company was half his had files two, three, four feet thick, but there were only twenty or thirty pages on the desk. Even so, he didn’t like this self-important functionary looking at it. Where in the hell was Dick Helms? Given the fact that Melchior had worked side by side with the former occupant of this office for nearly two decades—not to mention the importance of the intelligence he’d gathered in Cuba—surely he rated a meeting with the current DDP?
Helms’s surrogate continued to ignore him, so Melchior plopped into one of the green leather chairs in front of the desk. The surrogate sighed but didn’t look up.
“I didn’t ask you to sit down.”
Melchior lifted both feet off the floor and held his battered sandals in the air. After fifteen months on his feet— and who knows how long on their previous owner—the soles were so worn that when he curled his toes the brown leather wrinkled like skin. So thin that you could see the outline of the piece of paper just under the leather of the left shoe, if you knew what you were looking at.
Finally the man behind the desk raised his eyes.
“I’m sorry Deputy Director Helms wasn’t able to meet with you today. I’m Drew Everton. Acting assistant deputy director for the Western Hemisphere Division.”
“How in the hell do they fit all that on your card?”
Everton rolled his eyes. “Would you put your feet down, please?”
Melchior smiled. “I just wanted the Company to see what I’ve had to endure for the sake of my country. I been walking around in a pair of huaraches for more than a year. My feet,” he said, letting them plop one at a time to the floor, “are fucking
Cambridge, MA
November 1, 1963
Once upstairs, Chandler didn’t know what to do: sit Naz down and ask her a thousand and one questions or throw her on the bed and ravish her.
“I slept for five days.
Naz shrugged. “I know.”
Chandler pulled up short. “How do you know?”
He was behind her at that point. Her hair was looser than it had been a day and a half ago, fell down her back in lush ringlets. She wore a dark sweater, threadbare but cashmere. It clung to her back, which seemed as tiny and delicate as the thorax of a wasp. A skirt of pale gray wool rode softly over her hips; silk stockings added gloss to the curve of her calves. When Naz said, “You know how I know,” Chandler started, because he’d been so caught up in her body that he’d almost forgotten she was in the room.
“Don’t start in with that stuff about mind-reading and mental telepathy and extrasensory perception.”
“All those terms mean the same thing. And I never mentioned any of them.”
“ESP can refer to all sorts of phenomena. Remote viewing, precognition—”
“Would you be more comfortable if you predicted the results of next year’s election?”
“I do not believe—”
“Chandler.”
“—in ESP or secret CIA drug programs or two-way mirrors in seedy motels or—”
“Chandler.”
“—the existence of a part of the brain called the Gate of Orpheus—”
“Chandler!”
Chandler, pressed against the wall, looked at Naz as if she were a rising flood and he was trapped on the roof of his house.
“Your father’s name was John Forrestal.”
“Anyone could have found that out. My family is well known.”
“He hung himself from the chandelier in his office,” Naz said over him. “
