13

To the Admiral’s bulging eyes, Wanamaker’s outer office wasteland looked as if it had been hit by a tidal wave. Desks, coffee tables, swivel chairs, filing cabinets, magazine racks, the telephone switchboard, the two standing lamps, the government-issue metal coat tree (duly stamped Mark something or other, Mod. something or other) had all washed up in the middle of the room. The pile was covered with white paint-stained canvas drapes. Two men in white paint-stained overalls, with paint-stained cigarettes glued to their lower lips, were wielding rollers, methodically covering the grimy walls with a fresh coat of cerulean blue. Admiral Toothacher paused in front of the miniskirted receptionist, who was sitting on the only uncovered chair in the room painting her fingernails a shade of metallic gray best described as pewter. She looked up, suppressed a smile at the sight of the chalky hair flying off in all directions, asked, “So what do you think, Admiral?”

“What do I think about what?” the Admiral inquired starchily. He was a bit put off at being addressed so directly, and so familiarly, by a secretary.

‘The color, natch.”

Toothacher glanced at the walls, found the color unremarkable, admitted as much.

“I’m not talking about the walls. I’m talking about my fingernails.” And the secretary waved one drying hand, fingers spread-eagled, in his startled face.

“I have seen worse, I just don’t remember where,” the Admiral commented with premeditated gracelessness. (It was one of the quirks of his personality that the happier he felt the ruder he became.) “Can I interrupt your work“ -he emphasized the word insultingly- “long enough to inform me if R for Roger Wanamaker has arrived yet?”

The secretary regarded the Admiral with undisguised disdain, shook the stiff locks of her home permanent to indicate that the promotion policies of her government were an unfathomable mystery to her, cast a devastatingly bored look at the door leading to the inner sanctum to suggest that the early bird was digging for worms somewhere behind it. The Admiral directed his bulging eyes on the door with such intensity that the secretary suspected him of having X-ray vision. By the time she realized how ridiculous the idea was he had disappeared into the room and slammed the door emphatically behind him.

Inside, one look at Wanamaker’s sidewalk-drab two-day stubble was enough to convince the Admiral that something was amiss.

“You look as if you are carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders,” he commented as he dusted the lopsided armchair facing Wanamaker’s desk with his handkerchief and gingerly fitted his body into it.

“I’m having a bad day with gravity,” Wanamaker conceded.

The Admiral decided he would be generous and break the ice. “Aren’t you going to offer me a choice of coffee, tea or something with a kick to it?” he asked. He flashed what his wife had once laughingly described as his smile of complicity.

Wanamaker thrust a Schimmelpenninck between his teeth and lit up. A perfect halo of smoke wafted into the Admiral’s face as Wanamaker pushed a telegram across the desk. Toothacher ducked under the smoke ring, leaned forward, angled his head and read the telegram out loud. “ Tm alive and well. Stuffbingle is not. The Weeder.’ “

“Bingle, of course, should be tingle, as in Stufftingle,” Wanamaker noted glumly. “The t got replaced by a b somewhere between here and Boston, which is where the telegram came from.”

“Someone is pulling your leg,” Admiral Toothacher ventured with a sinking heart.

Another halo of smoke emerged from Wanamaker’s puffy lips. Some words leapt like trained circus dogs through it. “There-is-no-corpus-delicti!”

“No corpus delicti?”

“In the rubble. In Boston. I checked.”

“That is simply out of the realm of possibility.”

Wanamaker pried open a paper clip with his thick, squared-off fingernails and began twisting it into various shapes. He worked the metal back and forth until it snapped and discarded the halves in a desk drawer. “You have let me down badly,” he told the Admiral. Wanamaker’s expression was totally expressionless, but his voice had slipped into a range normally associated with eulogies. “I used to idolize you,” he said. “You were an icon for me, a father figure. I thought you were the only thing standing between us and the Bolshevik hordes.” Wanamaker shrugged a shoulder to indicate that times had changed. “Now you can’t even arrange things so I can explode a relatively small atomic device in the city of my choice.”

Trying to avoid Wanamaker’s eye, Toothacher let his gaze drift across the room. It settled on the tacky photograph of the President the Admiral batted both his eyes to bring it into focus, then caught his breath in surprise-the President appeared to be blinking back at him. Toothacher plucked a large handkerchief from a pocket of his blazer and wiped away the perspiration that had accumulated on his brow. He bitterly regretted this visit to Wanamaker’s office. He should have taken the first plane back to Guantánamo and retreated into the boredom of its happy hours without saying good-bye to his former man Friday. Now his clothes, his hair, would smell of fresh paint, of tobacco. His clothes could be dry-cleaned, his hair washed with soap and water. But the stain on his reputation-that was another matter. Watching Wanamaker suck on his cigar, the Admiral was suddenly overwhelmed by the sensation that he had been wasting his time; wasting his life. How he longed for the halcyon days when everyone used code names-his, he remembered, had been Parsifal- and was required to give a sample of his Morse “fist” so that no one could send messages in his place. In those days an espionage agent had to be something of a metaphysician, shoring up, against his ruin, seemingly unrelated fragments to get a handle on the ultimate nature of reality, of existence. It had all been very pure, very beautiful even. But the world had moved on.

The Admiral sighed inwardly. If he could wind up this last assignment on a positive note, he vowed never to allow himself to be lured out of retirement again.

“What day are we today?” the Admiral asked Wanamaker.

“The seventh.”

“That still leaves eight days to the Ides,” Toothacher noted without much enthusiasm.