19

The bartender, known as Yul because his head was shaven down to his sidewalk-gray scalp, set the whiskey on a paper doily with lacelike edges and slid it across to the man with the toupee, whose name was Howard something or other.

“I’m giving you fair warning,” Howard told Huxstep. “I teach mathematics at a junior high school.”

“If you don’t believe the man,” the bartender told Howard, “why don’t you put your money where your mouth is?”

Howard ran a finger around the rim of his glass but failed to produce a hum. “There has to be a time limit,” he insisted.

Huxstep, sitting two stools away directly across the U-shaped bar from the Admiral, popped some salted peanuts into his mouth and washed them down with a gulp of beer. “Listen, Yul, fifteen seconds is all I need,” he said.

The man with the toupee slipped a calfskin wallet from the breast pocket of his blazer, pulled out a crisp fifty-dollar bill and dropped it onto the bar. Huxstep, laughing under his breath, slapped two twenties and a ten on top of it. The mathematics teacher punched some numbers into his wristwatch calculator. “All right, Yul. You count off the fifteen seconds. That way there’ll be no discussion.” He looked at Huxstep. “Here’s the problem. Divide 9876.54 by 4567.89.” Yul started to count out loud. “One hundredth. Two hundredths. Three …”

Huxstep’s eyes strained at the top of their sockets. His lips moved. “The answer’s 2.1621667.”

Frowning, the mathematics teacher watched Huxstep pocket the money. “I’ve read about people like you,” he told Huxstep. “What’s your trick?”

Huxstep laughed. “I’m in love with numbers.”

“So am I,” Howard gushed. “It’s rare to find someone who feels about numbers the way I do.” He slipped onto the stool next to Huxstep. “Maybe we could meet for a quiet supper sometime and compare notes. What do you say?”

“What I say,” Huxstep said, “is you should fuck off.”

Howard smiled smugly. “I like people who play hard to get.”

“I’m not playing hard to get,” Huxstep informed him. “I am hard to get. Beat it.”

Across the bar the Admiral studied his neighbor through lidded, bloodshot eyes. He liked what he saw: the eyebrows plucked into a pencil line, the cheeks lightly rouged, the gold medallion hanging from a delicate gold chain in the V of the shirt, the gold studs and the gold cuff links instead of buttons—all the outward signs of a class act. And a body like a Citroën.

So the Admiral talked braininess. “You have a way with words,” he told his neighbor. “May I ask what you wrote your thesis on?”

“Thesis? What thesis?”

“Your Ph.D. thesis.”

“Ph.D! I have never even set foot in college.”

“You have to be pulling my leg. Your insights could only come from a systematic investigation of philosophy. More power to you if you are self-taught. You are a bookworm. Own up.”

The Admiral’s neighbor toyed with a gold-plated lipstick. “I used to read Reader’s Digest cover to cover.”

The Admiral smiled triumphantly. “I could tell there was more to you than looks.”

Toothacher’s new friend offered a manicured hand. The Admiral seized it eagerly and gave it a conspiratorial squeeze. “My friends call me Pepper,” he said.

“If you’re Pepper, I’ll be Salt.”

They both laughed, the Admiral at the prospect of burning another candle at both ends, Salt because what had started out as a dull evening had taken a turn for the better.

The Admiral was about to signal to Yul for refills for himself and his newfound friend when Huxstep came loping over. He nodded toward a booth in the back of the bar, behind the jukebox. “He’s here,” he mumbled.

The Admiral swiveled on his stool and peered in the direction of the booth. He could make out the figure of a man huddled in its shadows. The figure raised a hand and saluted him with a weak wave.

Toothacher brushed Salt’s wrist with his fingertips. “Order yourself a refill on me,” he said. “I’ll be back in a jiffy.” He hiked his lanky body off the stool, ambled across the crowded room and slid into the booth facing the shadowy figure. “Wasn’t sure you weren’t dead and buried by now.”

“I hang in there,” chirped E. Everard Linkletter, the Company archivist. “You are looking fit as a fiddle. What lures you up from the Shangri-la for retired naval officers?”

“If I told you would you believe me?”

“Try me.”

Toothacher batted both eyes in an innocent wink. “I came up to lobby the Secretary of the Navy for a cost of living increase to my pension.”

Linkletter exploded in laughter. “Come on, Pepper. You used to be able to do better than that.” The archivist brought a menthol cigarette to his nose and breathed in its aroma. “There was a time when you trusted me with those secrets of yours,” he remarked. “Someone’s screwed up, hasn’t he? The old fox himself, Rear Admiral J. Pepper Toothacher, has been called in to walk back the cat.” Linkletter studied Toothacher through dirty eyeglasses. “What are they paying per diem these days, Pepper?”

“Whatever they pay,” Toothacher said morosely, “it’s not enough.” He was thinking of the most recent love letter to Wanamaker, which had arrived that morning, an epistle so tightly held that there was no security rating on the books that pertained, or so Wanamaker had pretended when he flatly refused to let the Admiral see it. Whoever was writing the love letters, Wanamaker had ranted in a voice as scruffy as his office, knew all about Stufftingle and was threatening to expose him if he went through with it.

“He knows everything!” Mildred had asked Wanamaker in alarm.

“Absolutely everything,” he had confirmed.

“He knows about the packages we’ve been smuggling in?” Parker had asked.

Wanamaker had nodded dejectedly.

Webb had shaken his head in disbelief. “He couldn’t know where. That’s simply not possible. Even among ourselves we hardly ever mentioned Kabir.”

Wanamaker had flashed a furious look in Webb’s direction and the word Kabir had not come up again in the discussion, which had turned around the necessity of canceling Stufftingle. But the Admiral had noted it.

Linkletter raised a finger in an effort to catch Yul’s eye. “My doctor told me not to drink, so I switched doctors. What’s your pleasure, Pepper?”

“I invited you,” Toothacher said. “I’m buying. Are you still presiding over the Company’s dusty archives?”

“Here it comes,” Linkletter moaned. “It never fails. The day I meet someone who doesn’t want to know something outside channels I will give up cigarettes and sex.”

The Admiral leaned over the table until his head was inches away from Linkletter’s. “Does the word Kabir ring any bells in that brain of yours?”

Linkletter jerked back in surprise. “I don’t believe it,” he exclaimed. “I simply refuse to. You’re the second person this week to ask me about Kabir.”

The Admiral’s bulging eyes bored into Linkletter. “Who,” he asked, “was the first?”

The Company archivist sighed. “Come on, Pepper. You’ve known me long enough to know I won’t answer a question like that. I don’t mind helping out a friend with the odd piece of information he could get by going into the archives himself. But it’s not my style to betray compartmentalization.”

Toothacher batted his eyes innocently. “And you’ve known me long enough to know I won’t let you off the hook easily.” The Admiral crooked a forefinger in Linkletter’s direction. The archivist leaned cautiously toward Toothacher, who said in an undertone, “People who leave the Company under a cloud would be idiots not to take their private files with them—to make sure the Company didn’t change its mind about paying a pension.” The Admiral narrowed his eyes to stir his memory. “An excerpt from a police blotter crossed my desk when I worked at counterintelligence. I have a photocopy in Guantánamo. It came from a Tampa, Florida, precinct, I remember. It mentioned lewd behavior. At a playground. Exposing a sexual organ to a minor.”

“It wasn’t true,” Linkletter burst out. “Not a word of it. The minor in question was nineteen years old and a professional. The Director himself decided the evidence was too flimsy, my services too valuables—”

“The Director is dead,” Toothacher said in a bored voice. “Long live the Director.”

“I retire in two years, three months and nine days,” Link-letter whispered plaintively. His eyes watered with emotion. “You wouldn’t …” He studied Toothacher’s weathered features. “You would!”

“Who,” the Admiral repeated his question, “was the other person to ask you about Kabir?”