O'Farrell's Law

“What about sex? Everything okay between you and Jill?”

They did not make love with the regularity or with the need they’d once had, but when they did, it was always good. O’Farrell said, “Everything’s fine.”

“What about elsewhere?”

“Elsewhere?” O’Farrell asked, choosing to misunderstand.

“Any sudden affairs?”

It was a fairly regular question, acknowledged O’Farrell. Getting satisfaction from the reply, he said, “None.”

“You’ve said that before,” the doctor reminded him unnecessarily.

“It’s been true before, like it is now.”

“Not a lot of guys who say that are telling the truth.”

“I am,” said O’Farrell, who was. He’d never ever considered another woman, knew he never would.

“Jill must be a very special lady.”

“She is,” said O’Farrell, bridling.

The psychologist discerned the reaction at once. “It worry you to talk about her?”

“It worries me to talk about her in the context of screwing somebody else.” Where was he being led? “Jill hasn’t got any part of this,” he said.

“Any part of what?”

“What I do.” Fucked you, you self-satisfied bastard, he thought, knowing that Symmons couldn’t ask the obvious follow-up question.

“That worry you, what you do?”

O’Farrell swallowed at the ease of the other man’s escape. “No,” he said, pleased with the evenness of his own voice. “What I do doesn’t worry me.”

“What does worry you?”

“I told you already: nothing.”

“Been to the graves lately?”

It had been a long time coming. “Not for quite a while.”

“Why not?”

“No particular reason.”

“That used to worry you,” the psychologist said.

O’Farrell felt the slight dampness of discomfort again. “Wrong emotion,” he insisted. “It was sadness that something that happened to her so young made her later do what she did.”

“Lose her mind, you mean?” Symmons was goading him.

“That. And the rest.”

“Never feel any guilt? That you could have done more but didn’t?”

“No,” O’Farrell insisted again. “No one knew. Guessed.”

“Looks like that’s it, then,” Symmons said abruptly.

O’Farrell had not expected the sudden conclusion. He said, “See you in three months then?” The squirrels were still swarming over the trees. O’Farrell had an irrational urge to ask the man if they damaged his garden but decided against it: he couldn’t give a damn whether they chewed up everything.

“Maybe,” Symmons said, noncommittal.

He would be expected to respond to the doubt, O’Farrell realized. So he didn’t. He let Symmons lead him back across the coldly patterned hallway and at the entrance gave the perfunctory farewell handshake. Because he guessed the man might be watching from some vantage point, he did not hesitate when he got into the car, as if he needed to recover, but started the engine at once. He carefully controlled his exit, not overaccelerating to make the wheels spin but going out as fast as he could, an unconcerned man wanting to get back to work as quickly as possible after an intrusive disruption. Which he actually didn’t want to do. He was only about thirty minutes—forty- five at the outside—from Lafayette Square, and Petty would expect him to come in, but O’Farrell decided on unaccustomed impulse not to bother. A call would do. Start the weekend early, instead: that was what half the people in Washington did anyway.

O’Farrell drove without any positive goal, the road dropping constantly toward the capital. He had done all right, he decided, repeating the dressing-room assurance. But he’d been stupid to try to find significance in Symmons’s questions: he’d have to avoid that next time. There’d been one or two moments when he’d come near to making mistakes by wrongly concentrating upon what the psychologist meant rather than upon what he was saying, but nothing disastrous.

Jill wouldn’t be home yet. And she might think it odd if he were in the house ahead of her, because it hardly ever happened. Maybe he should go to Lafayette Square after all. No, he rejected once more. What then? O’Farrell started to concentrate on his surroundings and realized he was near Georgetown and made another impulsive decision. If he were going to goof off, why not really goof off?

O’Farrell got a parking place on Jefferson and walked back up to M Street, choosing the bar at random. Inside, he sat at the bar itself, selecting with professionally instilled instinct a stool at its very end, where there was a wall closing off one side. He hesitated only momentarily when the barman inquired: the martini was adequate but not as good as those he made at home.

Why was he doing this? It was out of pattern, a definite break in routine, and he wasn’t supposed—wasn’t allowed—to do anything contrary to pattern or routine. But where was the harm! He was just goofing off a couple of hours early, that’s all. It wasn’t as if he were on assignment: never took risks on assignment. No harm then. Have to call Petty, though. But not yet: plenty of time to do that. From along the counter the barman looked at him questioningly, and briefly O’Farrell considered another drink but then shook his head. Only one, he’d assured the psychologist. What about when he got home? So maybe it would be one of those nights when he’d have another. No reason why he shouldn’t have more than one, like he did occasionally. Just a small pattern break, still no harm.

O’Farrell lingered for another fifteen minutes before going to the pay phone further into the bar, glad that temporarily there was no music. He dialed the number of Petty’s private telephone, the one on his desk. The man answered without any identification, and O’Farrell didn’t name himself either.

“Where are you?” his controller asked.

“Thought I’d go home early,” O’Farrell said. Now he’d told Petty, he wasn’t even goofing off anymore.

There was a momentary pause. “Sure,” the man agreed. “How did it go?”

“Like it always does.”

“Was he happy?”

You get the official reports, I don’t, O’Farrell thought. He said, “Seemed to be.”

“Have a good weekend then.”

“You too.”

O’Farrell used the Key Bridge and chose the Washington Memorial Parkway instead of the inner highway, wanting to drive along the Potomac. He did so gazing across the river, picking out the needle of the Washington Monument and the Capitol dome. The word stuck in his mind, from that day’s assessment. And then others. Country. And patriot. Which really was how he felt: he was a free man in a free and beautiful country and it was right that he should feel—that he should be—patriotic toward it. And he was; O’Farrell reckoned it would be difficult to find many other men prepared to take their patriotic duty as seriously as he did.

Jill was already home. He kissed her and asked about her day and she complained it had been busy and asked about his, and he said his had been, too. She believed him to be a financial analyst at the State Department with particular responsibility for the budgets of overseas embassies, which provided a satisfactory explanation for those sudden foreign trips; when he was not employed in his true function O’Farrell actually did work on accounts, those of the CIA’s Plans Directorate. Of everything, O’Farrell found the pretense with his wife the most difficult to maintain: she trusted him absolutely and every day of their married life since joining the Agency he’d lied to her.

The martini he made for himself was a proper one, with a bite that caught in the throat; he slightly overfilled the shaker, so he had to take a sip to make room for the remainder. Two and a half, he thought as he did so. No harm at all.

O’Farrell took the glass to the den, placing it carefully on the side table away from his desk, where there was