EVEN AS A BOY, BEFORE HE WENT TO WAR, CHRISTOPHER HAD DISliked games because they were mere parodies of reality. Afterward, as a spy, he despised them, a peculiarity that set him apart from nearly everyone else in the Outfit, an organization populated in its early days by men who looked on the Cold War as a sort of Hasty Pudding Olympics between the combined track and field teams of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale and an awkward squad of European bookworms and Asiatic oafs.
“That was why you were so good—you didn’t think like everybody else on our side,” Patchen said. “Except maybe Wolkowicz, who was never really on our side. He thought you were a genius—did he ever tell you that?—because you were able to see the obvious while all around you were oblivious to reality. Nobody sees the obvious for us now. They depend on computers.”
Christopher heard these words but did not register them. As he and his friend walked along the peopleless Mall with the floodlit and scaffolded Capitol dome rising up before them, he was thinking about a moment in Rome, years and years before, when he had woken in the night to find his lover Molly hanging a drawing of the dome of the church of San Pancrazio on a wall of their apartment. Thinking herself alone, she was working stark naked by the light of the lamps that lined the embankment of the Tiber beneath the living room windows. The drawing was a gift for Christopher, and he knew that she wanted him to see it in the morning and be surprised, so he did not reveal his presence. Lifting the framed picture onto its hook above her head, Molly rose on her toes with her long legs pressed modestly together and her round bottom uplifted, and it seemed to Christopher then, as now, that she was, at that moment and in that brief attitude, the most innocently beautiful thing he had ever seen.
“It’s been three weeks since the last Beautiful Dreamer was delivered to us,” Patchen said. “The computer whizzes have gamed every possible combination of data—does the kidnapper strike when the moon is full, do his crimes coincide with the anniversaries of outrages against the Arab nation, is he trying to drive us crazy by running an operation that has no plan or purpose? Are you listening?”
“No,” Christopher said.
“I thought not, when you let all those golden opinions go by without a peep.”
“What golden opinions?”
“Never mind. There’s something obvious in this situation, something hidden in plain sight that nobody has seen.”
“Another purloined letter.”
“That’s right. Your specialty. Have you thought about this case at all since we last talked?”
A week had gone by since their last walk together.
Christopher said, “Yes, I’ve thought about it. What makes you think it will happen again?”
“If it stops now, what’s the point of it?”
“If it doesn’t stop, you’ll have to shut up shop.”
Patchen knew what Christopher meant. More important, he knew that he had his attention at last. So he said, “We will? Why?”
“You know why. Your whole stock-in-trade is secrets. But what happens to the market if you can’t keep a secret, if you never know which one of your people is going to be grabbed next and given a shot of something that makes him want to tell everything he knows?”
“Go on.”
Patchen was intense. Christopher was amused. “I can’t, without expressing an opinion.”
“Then express one,” Patchen said.
“I think your kidnapper is doing the Lord’s work. If he gave every member of the human race a shot of this stuff every day, he’d solve the problems of the world.”
“That’s right. There’d be a fresh corpse in every garage.”
An ambulance sped by on Seventh Street in a deafening clamor of horns and sirens; hooting police cars converged from every direction on the scene of a crime.
“Cinéma verité,” Patchen said. It was an apt remark. Since midnight they had walked all the way from Georgetown, more than five miles, and at every step Patchen had repeated another of the known facts of the Beautiful Dreamers case, like a film director obsessively screening and rescreening the same rough cut in the hope of capturing some tiny detail, some fleeting image in the shadows of a single frame, some subversive wink of an actor’s eye, that would explain why his own movie made no sense to him. “Okay, forgetting about a cure for original sin,” Patchen said. “What do you really think?”
“David, I do not wish to think on behalf of the Outfit. I’m out.”
“Then think like an outsider. What’s going on here? Who are we dealing with? How does he do it?”
“What do you care about what, who, and how?” Christopher asked. “The only real question is ‘Why?’ “
“I agree,” Patchen said. “But how do I answer it?”
Christopher shrugged. “That’s obvious.”
“It is? Explain it to me anyway.”
A taxi approached. Christopher hailed it. As it pulled to the curb the Doberman tensed, ready to attack. It was trained to hurl itself through car windows in case of a threat to its master. Because Patchen was concentrating on Christopher, he neglected to give the animal a reassuring command; it bared its teeth and got ready to attack. “No thank you,” the taxi driver said, and sped away with squealing tires.
If Patchen noticed he gave no sign. “Come on,” he said. “What’s obvious?”
“Only the kidnapper knows the answer to your questions,” Christopher said.
“So?”
Christopher signaled another taxi. “So kidnap the kidnapper,” he said.