her courses there were accredited toward her degree. And so off to London she went. Her brilliance and dedication at the L.S.E. never faltered; while other students stumbled at the strangeness of different routines, attitudes and customs, Erica Davenport fitted into her new environment faultlessly. She managed to acquire a few friends, go to parties, even have several love affairs with men generally held unattainable.
Having concluded her studies at the close of the academic year, she spent the summer of 1948 exploring the Continent; her canceled passport showed entry and exit stamps for France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. She traveled second-class and unaccompanied, explaining to those who asked that the solitude was good for her soul. When she touched base in London between trips, she inflicted color slide shows on her L.S.E. circle, one of whom complained that the scenery was gorgeous, but where were the people?
“I am not insensitive enough to photograph people going about their usual existence as if they were freaks!” she had said, annoyed. “If their costumes are alien to us, to them they are what everyone wears.”
“Then pay them to have their pictures taken,” someone said. “You’re a rich American, you can afford the dollar.”
“What, and drag them down to our level? That’s disgusting!”
Well, well! Carmine fingered this statement as if the paper were coated in gold. Once upon a time you had passions, Erica! Strong, ineradicable passions. Ideals too.
The law degree from Harvard and the doctorate from Chubb produced nothing new; the only thing about Erica Davenport’s second twenty years that he found intriguing was how immobile they were. After that three-month orgy of sampling Europe’s charms, she never went back, and that was strange. In his experience people always tried to recapture the joys and flings of youth, especially when they involved junkets to Europe. She hadn’t gone to West Germany and she had steered clear of Cyprus and Trieste; she had caught a ferry from Brindisi to Patras, thus avoiding any chance of encountering Yugoslavia. Was the visa situation that bad in 1948, before the cold war heated up?
“Delia!” he hollered. “I’m going to Cornucopia!”
“How good’s your Russian?” he asked Dr. Erica Davenport bluntly. “The Russian boyfriend hone your grammar too?”
“Oh, you are a busy boy!” she said, tapping the end of a gold pencil on her desk.
“It can’t be a secret. It’s in your FBI file.”
“Am I to infer that you believe the FBI have cleared me of suspicion in their espionage investigation?” she asked coolly.
“The FBI is the FBI, a law unto itself. In my eyes it does not clear you of suspicion,” Carmine said.
“I had a Russian boyfriend in my teens, I admit, and I happen to pick up languages very easily. A Smith professor gave me a special course in Russian grammar and literature out of sheer gratification at finding someone interested. I also toyed with the idea of going into the State Department as a diplomat. Satisfied?”
“How much of this does the FBI know?”
“Clever Captain Delmonico! You know I didn’t mention the boyfriend, yet you knew about him. Someone in the FBI slipped.”
“Bigger organization, more chance of slips.” He tilted his head and considered her. “What happened to the passion?”
“Excuse me?”
“The passion. At twenty you were full of it.”
Her smile resembled a sneer. “I don’t think so.”
“I do, and you’ll never convince me otherwise. Your aspirations for humanity burned your brain like red-hot pokers. You were going to change the world. Instead, you joined it.”
The face had gone pinched, pale. “I think…” she said slowly, “I think I found new outlets for my passions, if by that you mean youthful dreams. I discovered that women are not equipped to change the world, because the power resides with men. They assert it both physically and psychically. First things first, Captain. We must acquire power, that is our primary objective at this time.”
“We? Our?”
“The monstrous regiment of women.”
“Knox was a woman hater as well as a dirty old man.”
“But think of the power he wielded! Then name me a female equivalent. You can’t. Old men can deflower young girls with impunity when they control and direct the thoughts of others.”
“Are you tied to Dr. Pauline Denbigh and the feminists?”
“No.”
“Is Philomena Skeps?”
She laughed. “No.”
Carmine got up. “I’d like to meet Dr. Duncan MacDougall.”
“Why? To badger him the way you did my secretary?”
“I hardly think so. He’s director of Cornucopia Research.”
“I see. Power again. Underlings can be badgered, chiefs are sacrosanct.” She picked up a file. “Do your worst,” she said, sounding bored. “He makes his own appointments.”
The hardest aspect of having a conversation with Dr. Duncan MacDougall lay not in lack of cooperation but in understanding what he said. Carmine got a taste of it in the parking lot, his prearranged meeting spot. He watched the slight, sinewy little man walk toward him, stop, gaze at the array of chimneys dotting the vast hangarlike roof, then finish his approach at a run, face terrified.
“Coom on, mon, the lamp’s reekin’!” he cried, and hustled Carmine along like a teacher to a tardy child.
At least, that was what Carmine thought he said. Inside, the director hollered down a phone, then looked relieved.
“The lamp shoodna reek,” he said to Carmine.
“Excuse me?”
“There was smoke coming out of Peabody’s chimney.”
And so it went, though Carmine managed to translate most of what Dr. MacDougall said into plain English. It was impossible to fault his security measures, or see how he could improve them. Inside his time vault were a number of smaller safes, their size depending upon what they had to contain; blueprints went into big, flat safes with drawers inside, whereas papers went into the more usual kind of repository. There were guards, and they were as competent as well trained, and getting a document out of the vault was the most public of undertakings.
“I don’t think the thefts happen here, Dr. MacDougall,” he said at the end of a very comprehensive breakdown of procedures. “For instance, the new formulae for Polycorn Plastics and all the experimental scraps have never left this vault since Mr. Collins refused to take delivery. And I’d bet my bottom dollar Ulysses hasn’t gotten a whiff of them. I had some hard things to say about security in Cornucopia headquarters, but I don’t include this facility, sir. Keep it going like this, and you’ll always be squeaky-clean.”
“Yes, but that’s not good enough!” MacDougall said angrily. “So much great work comes out of Cornucopia Research, and no one who works here can stomach the thought that his or her ideas, energies and labor end up in Moscow or Peking.”
“Then we have to catch Ulysses, sir. You can do your share by making careful logs of exactly who handles sensitive material once it leaves you. You must have some notion of who the people in each division are as well as in Cornucopia Central. I’d really like to see what names you come up with.”
“As distinct from the FBI,” said Dr. MacDougall.
“Definitely,” said Carmine. “They don’t share much.”
“Och, aye, ye shall hae it!” the director said. Or something like that, anyway.
“No one understands a Scot except another Scot,” Desdemona said, dishing up veal scallops in a cream and white wine sauce made with mushrooms; she was getting very gastronomically adventurous now that Julian was turning into a human being.
“He might as well have spoken a foreign language.” Carmine eyed his plate with almost lascivious pleasure. Rice-ideal for sopping up sauce-and asparagus. This was definitely one of those occasions when he could thank his lucky stars he had amnesia of the stomach-after two hours it forgot it had eaten, so Luigi’s salad wasn’t even a memory.
