BC’s brow wrinkled. “The Magi? Melchior, Balthazar, and what was the last one called?”
“Caspar. And yes, those three. But also no. By which I mean no, you literal-minded dipshit. Wise Men is Company lingo for three agents Frank Wisdom brought in with him in ’52.”
“Brought in?”
“Wisdom was OSS during the war. Was one of the advocates for a permanent agency to oversee American intelligence-gathering activities as well as a direct-action division to follow up on that intelligence when more visible options weren’t available.”
“You mean covert ops.”
“The Wiz more or less invented the concept. Legend has it that him and Joe Scheider recruited a couple-a three kids in his OSS days, was basically raising them to be spies—some spook story about sleepers and all that. In fact, now that I think of it, the program was pretty much the forerunner of Artichoke, Ultra, Orpheus, all that sci-fi crap. Anyway, the Wiz’s recruits were known as the Wiz Kids at first—big surprise, right?—which later gave way to Wise Men, which in turn led to the idea that there were three of them—Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar. According to legend, the goal was to place them in deep cover inside the Soviet Union, but Balthazar supposedly died during the course of his training, and Melchior was already too old—not to mention too dark—and ended up becoming the Wiz’s field hand.”
“And Caspar?” The name rang a bell, but BC couldn’t place it.
Jarrell shrugged. “Who knows? Even odds says there never was a Caspar—that the whole thing was just a story the Wiz made up, or maybe even Melchior. At any rate, Melchior got a reputation for being a crazy fuck— among other things, he’s repeatedly destroyed his own file, so no one besides the Wiz knows his real name or what he’s been up to for the last ten or twenty years.” Jarrell looked BC up and down in his vacuum repairman’s uniform. “You, my friend, are one lucky son of a bitch.”
BC ignored this.
“So how do I find him?”
“Melchior? Fat fucking chance. The Wiz had a nervous breakdown in ’56 after the whole Hungary thing blew up. I guess he’d told the rebels that if they rose up against the Soviet Union, the U.S. would help them out. But Ike, you know, he’d already fought his war, plus he had an election coming up, and he wanted nothing to do with it. Thousands of rebels were pretty much slaughtered, and the Wiz took it hard. Ended up going for shock treatments and all that, never really did recover. They farmed him out to London, then finally forced him out entirely last year. Without his patron, Melchior was pretty much persona non grata. You’d hear stories. One day he was in the Congo, the next in Southeast Asia, then he was off to Cuba. They could’ve all been true or all been lies. But the one thing I can tell you is that he don’t spend much time in DC.” Jarrell paused. “Although, come to think of it, if he is here, you might want to check out Madam Song’s.”
“And she is?”
“Oh baby.” Jarrell licked his lips like a teenager in the locker room about to describe the wonders of eating pussy. “Only the finest purveyor of female flesh on the Eastern seaboard. In addition to running an exclusive brothel, she also procures and supplies girls to mob bosses and politicians and other movers and shakers. Specializes in exotics—Orientals, Africans, niche-market cooz. She and Melchior were once ‘linked,’ as they say in the gossip pages, and there’s a reasonable chance he’s paid her a visit if he’s back in town.”
“For such a supposedly super-secret spy, his habits seem pretty well documented.”
Jarrell shook his head at BC like a disappointed teacher. “You got to understand how the trade works. There’s no such thing as a secret no one knows. Espionage is built on half truths, quarter truths, and lots and lots of lies. Every piece of useful information is attached to dozens, hundreds, of pieces of misinformation, and the best spy is the one who can sift through the bullshit to the truth. Part of it’s what we call legend—the invented story that creates an operative’s cover—and part of it’s just aura, the mystique that Melchior cultivates in order to give himself more clout out there in spyland. I’ve probably heard more stories about the Wise Men than I have about my uncle Joe, but the difference is 99.9 percent of those stories are complete and utter fabrications.”
“You don’t have an uncle Joe.”
“No.” Jarrell smiled. “But Virgil Parker does.”
“So what you’re saying is that you have no idea if Melchior really even knows Madam Song, let alone if he’ll have visited her.”
“What I’m saying is that Melchior’s name has been mentioned in connection with Song’s often enough that there’s probably something there. Whether they fucked once, or she’s an agent herself, or just runs a really good brothel, is anyone’s guess.” Jarrell shrugged. “But yeah, that’s about all the help I can give you.”
“There is one more thing. A woman. I don’t think she has anything to do with this, but—”
“Who?”
“Her name is Mary Meyer. She—”
“Yeah, I know who she is, and what she did.
“She gave him LSD.”
Jarrell shrugged. “So? He’s already hopped up on more pain pills and antianxiety drugs than all the housewives in Arlington combined. What’s one more?”
“She got the LSD from Edward Logan.”
Jarrell chuckled. “Well, he doesn’t appear to have developed any mental powers or turned into a zombie, so I think he’s safe, for now.”
BC stood up. “Well, thank you again.” He couldn’t help but ask. “Why did you help me?”
Jarrell poured himself his fifth or sixth whiskey before answering. He looked around the maze of newspapers with their colored markers, the myriad coded and recoded and decoded secrets they contained, then turned back to BC.
“I dunno. Because you found me, I suppose. Because you broke into J. Edgar Hoover’s Vault. Anyone who can do that is obviously fairly good at what he does. He’s also probably insane, but in a way I can identify with.” He
