Edgar, by the window, heard the old alarums. He thought the time might be coming, once again, when ideas became insurgent and rebel bands were reborn, longhair men and women, scruffy and free-fucking, who moved toward armed and organized resistance, trying to break the state and bring about the end of the existing order.
'They want the power to shake the world. It's the old bolshevik dream being dreamed again and it's the communists who are behind it all. And you know where it begins, don't you?'
'These are kids, mostly, who lie down in the street and wave flowers at the police,' Clyde said. ' Vietnam is the war, the reality. This is the movie, where the scripts are written and the actors perform. American kids don't want what we've got. They want movies, music.'
Let Junior devise his clever perceptions. He didn't understand that once you patronize the enemy, you begin the process of your own undoing.
'It begins in the inmost person,' Edgar said. 'Once you yield to random sexual urges, you want to see everything come loose.
He didn't finish the thought. Some thoughts had to remain unspoken, even unfinished in one's own mind. This was the point of his relationship with Clyde. To keep the subject unspoken. To keep the feelings unfelt, the momentary urges unacted-upon. How strange and foolish this would seem to the young people running in the streets, or living six to a room, or three to a bed, and to many other people for that matter-how sad and rare.
Clyde went back to his duties, leaving the Boss by the window.
Edgar thought there was something noble in a constant companionship that does not fall to baser claims. He assumed Clyde believed likewise. But then Clyde was the second man, wasn't he, and perhaps he only followed Edgar's line of march wherever it led, or didn't.
He heard the chanting intermittently on the wind. Clyde was in the shower now. Edgar turned to see where he'd left the mask and saw himself unexpectedly in a full-length mirror, across the room, in his white robe and soft slippers, and he was startled by the image.
Of course it was him, but him in the guise of a macrocephalic baby, sexless and so justborn as to be, in essence, unearthly.
Mother Hoover's cuddled runt.
He crossed the room and picked up the mask. He noted how the stylized handlebars were simple swirls of cut leather designed to flare from the temples.
He heard Clyde come out of the shower.
When they were younger and on vacation together, or away on business, sharing a suite or taking adjoining rooms and keeping the connecting door open so they could talk from their respective beds well into the night, Edgar sometimes managed to angle the mirrors in such a way that he could catch a glimpse-by taking the free- standing antique in an old inn, the cheval glass, for example, and simply moving it to another part of the floor, or opening the medicine cabinet to a certain position when he shaved and letting the mirror absorb the light from the bed in the next room, or leaving a hand mirror propped on a desk-a glimpse, a passing glance, a spyhole peek at Junior as he busied himself dressing or undressing or taking a bath, the arrangement being such that the moment would seem wholly accidental, should the subject realize he was being watched, and an accident not just from his perspective but to Edgar's own mind as well, Junior's likeness being a thing that might simply float across his ken in the normal course of events, away on urgent Bureau business, his companion's body lean and virile, or at a golf resort, or following the ponies west to Del Mar, when they were both a great deal younger.
Junior was going bald now, and bulb-nosed, and he walked with a stoop. But then Junior had always walked with a stoop in an effort to appear no taller than the Boss.
Edgar was in the bedroom with the door closed. He stood at the mirror, a seventy-one-year-old man wearing nothing but his sequined biker's mask and his wool-lined slippers, listening to the voices in the street.
When her workday was finished Janet Urbaniak put on her running shoes. There was a stretch of four desolate blocks between the hospital complex where she did classroom work and got floor experience and the apartment complex where she lived. Bleak and weedy streets, unshoveled snow going grim with bus exhaust, snow that was drilled and gilded with dog piss, and there were usually a few lurking figures in green fatigues, the last of a straggle battalion of wasted men.
So when her workday was finished Janet took off her lightweight casual slip-ons and got the running shoes out of her locker, a pair of firm padded sneakers with shock-absorbent midsoles and a supple and confident feel. Then she went and stood at the hospital entrance with another student nurse and they waited for the traffic lights to turn green along the semideserted length of the four extended blocks, the kind of heartless boulevard you find in parts of town where the architecture is guarded and tense and it always feels like curfew.
Janet stood and waited in the deep and eerie dusk. Then the lights went green and her buddy said, 'Go,
Some evenings, most evenings it's the men you want to look out for. This is why you're running after all. They see you coming in your bouncy blue-and-white shoes and have things to say and gestures to make or just looks to look, or nothing at all sometimes, you're a ghost, a shadow-a number of men clustered near a chain-link fence or empty lot, and you're never sure whether it's better to veer away in a defensive arc or keep running in a straight line because the first tactic might offend them and the second might tempt them to get familiar or maybe even affront them in its unaffectedness, and some evenings it's the snow.
It's the snow or rain or garbage or the stray dogs you have to look out for.
But you're not running because of the dogs. The dogs make you slow down, ease into a walk. It's the men loitering who make you run and the men who are out of sight in doorways or junked cars-you want them to think you're running for the love of running, you and all the others, the evening stream of students making the four-block sprint,
We're just runners, you want them to think, getting our minutes in.
Janet was dashing now, deep-breathing, concentrating on the snow and on the lights staying green, and she watched for men who might be leaning on a wall or getting out of a car-there were usually a couple of junked cars in the course of a run, used as social clubs in winter.
Four long blocks under a streaky northern sky. When she reached the entrance to her building the keys were already in her hand and she went inside and took the elevator up, still running in a sense, with the apartment keys out now, and fifteen seconds after she was in the living room, door double-locked, the telephone rang. It was only then that her heart stopped racing.
The call was routine procedure, another student back at the hospital checking to see if she'd made it safely They gave her eleven minutes door-to-door including the elevator up and the keys in the locks. A number of student nurses lived in the same complex and the routine was designed to allow people to switch roles systematically. Janet ran the dash, made the phone call and monitored the progress of the running woman according to a schedule.
They figured it all out and posted it on a board. Then they changed into running shoes and waited for green.
The second man made the decision to show up late. It was the kind of firm determination in the type of difficult circumstance that Clyde Tolson liked to make.
It proved his mettle. And when you're a man who is variously described as dutiful, deferential, obsequious, slavish and brown-nosingly corrupt, in descending order of distinction, you need to make a show of character now and then.
But first Clyde had to convince the Boss that missing an hour or two of party time was not going to haunt the
