6

The first working session had gotten off to a relatively sluggish start. “The desk clerk offered me a room with a queen-size bed,” the Admiral was explaining. “I naturally inquired about the view. ‘If you are into brick the view is terrific,’ he told me. I am not inventing. ‘Into brick’ were his precise words. I let him know I was into park. He consulted one of those television screens attached to a typewriter. ‘I can give you park,’ he said, ‘but no queen-size bed.’ ‘What is it with you and queen-size beds?’ I asked him. He gave me as thorough a once-over as I have ever had. ‘Just playing a hunch,’ he said.”

“Into brick,” repeated the middle-aged woman whose face was masked by a veil. She clucked her tongue appreciatively.

“I am afraid park will cost you slightly more a day than brick,” Toothacher informed Wanamaker. “I trust you will feel the additional money was well spent.”

“Brick, park, it’s all the same to me,” Wanamaker said impatiently. He noticed that the Admiral’s eyes were rimmed with red. He’s been off carousing with Huxstep, he thought, but what he does with his free time is his business as long as he plugs my leak. Wanamaker pushed a batch of dossiers across the felt to the Admiral. “For starters, here are the service records of the twelve staffers assigned to Operations Subgroup Charlie. Mildred here is my man Friday. She was raised in Tehran, speaks Persian, Pashto, Avestan and Kurdish fluently, can pronounce the Ayatollah’s name without an accent. Only ask her. She will get you whatever else you feel you need.”

Mildred reached up and lifted her veil. “I am a navy brat,” she announced breathlessly. “I was weaned on stories about you. Admiral Toothacher this. Admiral Toothacher that. For me, Eisenhower, Kennedy were minor figures in the Toothacher era. Frankly, it is a thrill just to be in the same room with you.”

When it came to matters of seduction, the Admiral followed an old formula that in his experience seldom failed; he flattered the beautiful people for their brains, the intelligent ones for their looks. ‘The pleasure is entirely mine,” he solemnly informed Mildred. “I seldom get to work with someone who is as easy on the eyes as you.”

Mildred, flustered, let the veil drift back across the upper half of her face. “You are not at all what I expected,” she admitted.

“Dear lady,” the Admiral said, “dare I open that Pandora’s box and ask what you expected?”

Under her veil Mildred blushed. “I was anticipating pie.” She lowered her eyes, her voice. “But you are all meringue.”

Toothacher, absently shuffling service records, turned back to Wanamaker. “I will need to see the paper trail on the sensitive operation you referred to.”

Once again a muscle over Wanamaker’s right eye twitched. He started torturing a paper clip. “The paper trail is thin.”

“Thin? How can that be?”

“As far as the sensitive operation is concerned, nothing in writing was ever circulated. The few scraps of paper dealing with the operation never left this office.”

The Admiral studied his former man Friday through the middle lenses of his trifocals. “I will naturally need to know what you are up to.”

Wanamaker’s face was utterly immobile. “That’s out of the realm of possibility.”

“I must be missing something,” the Admiral said sarcastically. “You obviously trust me or you wouldn’t have asked me to walk back the cat for you.”

“I would trust you with my life,” Wanamaker said with such fervor only a fool would have doubted him. “But our sensitive operation is another story.”

“It will make my task infinitely more difficult,” the Admiral noted.

Wanamaker shrugged a shoulder. Toothacher saw there was no point in insisting. “What about deadlines?” he asked. “I should know if there is a clock ticking.”

“I suppose it won’t compromise the what if I tell you the when,” Wanamaker said. “For reasons I will not explain to you, we must execute the operation by mid-March or call it off.”

“How very poetic—I mean to have the Ides of March as a deadline. That doesn’t leave me much time.”

“One day short of four weeks,” said Mildred.

The Admiral favored her with an ironic smile. “Thank you.” He turned back to Wanamaker. “Of the twelve people in your subgroup, how many are in on your little sensitive operation?” he asked.

Wanamaker ticked them off on his fingers. “There’s me. There’s Mildred here. There’s Parker. There’s Webb. That makes four.”

“The others don’t have an inkling of what’s going on?”

Wanamaker shook his head. “The others keep track of terrorist groups.”

Toothacher was a breath away from abandoning the whole thing. How could he be expected to plug a leak on an operation he didn’t know anything about? Let Bright Eyes get another sucker to walk back his cat. Suddenly the idea of returning to Guantánamo, to his wife of twenty-nine years who wheezed in her sleep, to the endless boredom of pinochle and happy hours, was too much for him. He batted both eyes in Wanamaker’s direction. “Shouldn’t I at least know what code name your operation goes by?”

Wanamaker hesitated. He studied a hole a Schimmelpenninck had burned in the felt. He advanced an empty low-fat cottage cheese container across an imaginary chess board, then took back the move. He shrugged a shoulder. He arched an eyebrow and lowered it. He was obviously having a conversation with himself. Finally he said, “Do I have your word you won’t repeat it to a living soul?”

The Admiral, who loved secrets the way other men loved women or money or fast cars, shivered in anticipation. “It is another white hair that will go to the grave with me,” he promised.

“We call it Operation Stufftingle.”

“Stufftingle?”

“Stufftingle.”