“Start the fucking car. Take me to the office. I don’t have time to sit around and shoot the shit with you over a greaseburger.”
Albright turned the key- The engine caught. Two blocks later he said, “You going to deny it?”
“Why bother? You have never given me a list of the stuff you got from X. Now today you give me this crap about Frank- lin being X and I’m supposed to go charging off like Inspector Clouseau. Why don’t you go back to Moscow and tell Gorby you screwed the pooch? Mail me a postcard when you get to Siberia. I hear it’s lovely in the snow.”
“I don’t know the file names. Even if I did, I don’t have the authority to give them to you.”
“Go tell it to somebody who gives a shit. I don’t.”
“What about Smoke Judy?”
“What about him?”
“What’s he up to?”
“He’s trying to peddle inside knowledge of defense contracts. So far without much success, as far as I can tell. Apparently he doesn’t think money is vulgar.”
“Are the fraud people onto him? IG or NIS?” IG was the In- spector General. NIS meant Naval Investigative Service.
“If somebody’s opened a file on him, I don’t know about it.”
“Don’t turn him over to them-”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m asking you not to.”
“Well, kiss my ass. You’re taking a big chance, asking a double agent for a favor. Stop up here at the corner.” They were going west on Constitution Avenue. “This is close enough. I need some air.”
Albright pulled over to the curb and braked to a stop. “Don’t turn him over.”
“Up yours.”
“I was just trying to motivate you. You know I don’t doubt your loyalty.”
“If I was a double agent we would have pulled in Terry Franklin a long time ago and squeezed him for the name of every file that you don’t want me to know. He’d sing like a canary.”
“I know,” Albright replied as Camacho opened the car door and stepped out.
“You don’t know shit. You don’t know how many anonymous fraud waste and abuse hot lines there are over at the Pentagon. The damn numbers are posted everywhere. Don’t like your boss? Nail him to the cross on your coffee break. Busybodies and prissy fat ladies are burning up the wires. Somebody could drop a dime on Judy any minute. Then I’ll be your falll guy, the double agent”
“Find X.”
“That mechanic screws me, I’ll break your nose.” Luis Camacho shut the door firmly and walked away.
As he trudged through the tourists and secretaries on lunch break he tried to decide if he had handled it well or poorly. The lies were plausible, he concluded, but he was suspect. Peter Aleksan- drovich was nobody’s fool. And “schlep”—what an interesting word for a commie to use. Underestimating this man could be fatal.
The new Amy Carol Grafton frowned at the peas on her plate. She glowered at the carrots. She carved herself a tiny chunk of meat loaf and put it in her mouth, where she held it without chewing as sne stared at the offending vegetables.
“What’s the matter, Amy?” Callie asked.
Amy Carol sat erect in her chair and tossed her black pageboy hair. “I don’t like vegetables.”
‘They’re good for you. You need to eat some of them.” Amy’s brand-new mom was the soul of reason. Jake Grafton took another sip of coffee and the last bite of his meat loaf.
“I don’t like green food.”
“Then eat your carrots, dear.” Callie smiled distractedly. If the child didn’t eat her peas, what would be her vitamin count for vegetables today? Callie had spent the past week researching diets for diabetics. Right now she was swamped with strange facts.
“I don’t like orange stuff either.”
“Amy,” said the new father with a glint in his eye, “I don’t care what you like or don’t like. Your mom put this stuff on the table, so you’re going to eat it. Now start.”
“She isn’t my mom. And you’re not my dad. My parents are dead. You’re Callie and Jake. And I don’t like you, Jake, not one little bit.”
“Fine. But you’re going to sit there until you finish those vegeta- bles and I say you can get up.”
“Why?” Her lower lip began to quiver and her brows knitted. Callie thought Amy looked so cute and helpless when she clouded up. Jake thought Callie had a lot to learn.
“Because I said so.” Jake picked up the newspaper, opened it ostentatiously and hid behind it
Callie got up and went to the sink, rinsing dishes. Jake reached around the paper every so often for a sip of coffee. Their second meal with their new daughter. Another disaster.
The youngster was trying to establish who’s in charge, Jake told his wife. He thought Callie was making the same mistake Neville Chamberlain did. He used precisely those words to the new mother last night, after the first, opening-day debacle at the dinner table, when the youngster was finally in bed, and had been told in no uncertain terms that he was a lout.
“Lout or not, I am wearing the trousers,” he said with his right trigger finger pointed straight up, “and we are going to establish very early that I have the last say on junior-senior relations around here. Somebody has to be in charge and it’s not going to be an eleven-year-old.”
“Just because you wear trousers, huh?”
“No. Because when I was growing up my father was the head of his family, and I intend to be the head of mine. It’s a tried and true system with ancient tradition to commend it. We’re going to stick with it.”‘
“You can’t issue orders around here. Captain Grafton. Amy and I don’t wear uniforms.” She raised a finger, mimicking his gesture.
This evening was also off to a rocky start.
Jake put down his newspaper and examined the vegetable situa- tion. The child apparently hadn’t touched a pea or a carrot She was staring fixedly at her plate with a sullen, defiant look.
“How was school today?” Jake asked.
No answer.
“I asked you a question, Amy.”
“Okay.”
“Tell me about your teachers.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Their names, what subjects they teach, what they look like, whether you like them. That kind of stuff.”
“Wellll,” Amy said, her gaze flicking across Jake’s face, “some of them are nice and some aren’t” And away she went on a five- minute exposition that covered the school day from opening to closing bell. Jake tossed in an occasional question when she paused for air.
When she had exhausted the teacher subject, Jake asked, “What subjects do you think you’re going to like best?”
Away she went again, debating the merits of math versus En- glish, social studies versus science. This-time when she ran down, Jake asked if she had any homework.
“Some math problems.”
“Need any help with them?”
“The division ones,” she said tentatively.
“Eat some of those peas and carrots and we’ll clear the table and work on the problems.”
“How many do I have to eat?”
‘Two spoonfuls of each.”
She made a face and did as she was bid. As he carried the dishes to the sink, Jake asked, “Just what vegetables do you like?”
“Not any of them.”
“Well, do you have some that you don’t hate as much as oth- ers?”
“Corn. Corn is okay. But not the creamed kind.” She squirmed. “And I like lima beans.”
