Agent 6

New Jersey Bergen County The Town of Teaneck

FBI agent Jim Yates stood beside his sleeping wife, looking down at her as if she was a corpse and he was the first officer on the scene. She was wrapped up in a thick comforter in the height of summer, in a bedroom that was as hot as a sauna. Hypersensitive to noise, twirls of cotton wool spiralled out of her ears like wisps of campfire smoke. A thick black eye mask protected her in perpetual darkness, closing out the world, for she despised even this brilliant sunny morning. He leaned down, his lips hovering above her forehead and whispered:

– I love you.

She rolled onto her side, turning away from him, creasing up her face in irritation, shooing him awaywith the furrows of her brow. She didn’t lower her eye mask and didn’t reply. As he straightened up, the image flashed through his mind of taking off that mask, placing his fingertips on her eyelids, forcing them open and making her look at him – repeating, calmly, in a measured voice, not shouting, or losing his temper: I. Love. You.

He’d keep repeating it, louder and louder until she said it back to him. I. Love. You. Too.

He would say thank you. She would smile sweetly. And that was how a normal day should begin. A husband tells his wife he loves her, she should tell him she loves him back. It didn’t even have to be true but there was a formula to follow. That was how it worked in every other household, in every decent suburb, in every normal American family.

Walking to the window, Yates pulled back the curtain and looked out onto their garden – it was overrun, the flowerbeds choked with knee-high weeds knotted together like witch’s hair. The lawn had died a long time ago, the earth split into rock-hard chunks: jagged fissures between clumps of lank yellow grass, like the surface of some inhospitable moon. Set among the perfectly tended gardens of their neighbours it was an abomination. Yates had proposed hiring a gardener but his wife had refused, unsettled by the idea of a stranger moving in and out of the house, making noise, talking to the neighbours. Yates had suggested asking the gardener not to speak, never to come inside and to make as little noise as possible, anything so that their house wasn’t such a vision of shameful neglect. His wife had refused.

Ready to leave, he went through the exit routine, checking the windows, making sure they were shut. He stopped by the phone, making sure it was unplugged. With these checks complete, he descended the stairs. At great expense they’d been carpeted with the thickest and finest material, of exotic foreign origin, to muffle any noise. Yates left the house, pinning a note on the door: PLEASE DO NOT RING THE BELL PLEASE DO NOT KNOCK ON THE DOOR

Originally he’d concluded with the explanation that no one was at home. But that line had been cut since his wife was worried it might attract burglars. When he returned after work he’d take the note down. Whenever he went out, even if it was for an hour, even if it was for five minutes, he went through the checks and put up the note. His wife did not react well to disturbances of any kind.

Yates got into his car, grabbed hold of the steering wheel, but did not start the engine. He just sat there, surveying his home. He’d loved this house when he’d bought it. He’d loved the street with its beautiful front yard, located near parks and a range of stores. In the summer it smelt of freshly cut lawns and always seemed to be cooler than the city. People would wave and say hel. Nothing angered him more than people who didn’t appreciate how lucky they were to live in a country like this. The race riots in Jersey City in August last year were a disgrace, men and women destroying the very place where they lived. Those riots proved he’d been right to oppose the desegregation of public schools in Teaneck. Many people had been proud of this development, which they called social progress. Yates hadn’t said anything in public but he was sure it would lead to an influx of outsiders and that would lead to tensions. Paradise doesn’t need progress. The photographs of Jersey City had shocked him – smashed shop windows, burning cars. Maybe there were some legitimate complaints in that part of town, problems with employment, there were always problems, but only a sick man, a blind man, would trash his own home rather than trying to fix it. Yates would fight to stop the same happening here.

He pulled out of the drive, heading towards Manhattan, thirty minutes away. He’d been in the city until late last night, wanting to be certain that every member of the Soviet delegation staying in the Grand Metropolitan was accounted for. Once the final checks had been completed and he was sure that they were in their rooms, he should have returned home, to his wife. Instead, he’d visited a basement bar called Flute, off Broadway, where a part-time waitress worked, a woman he’d been seeing for the past three months. Twenty years younger than him, this waitress was beautiful and interested in the mostly made-up stories he told about the FBI. She would lie on the bed, naked, holding her head in her hands while he sat, shirt unbuttoned, recounting his adventures. Almost as good as the sex was the way she hung off every anecdote, saying Un Be Lieve Able at the end of each story, pronouncing it as though it were four words, as though being unbelievable were the highest compliment a man could be paid.

A real wife would’ve been suspicious. He’d arrived home at four in the morning, silently ascended the carpeted stairs to see his wife, Diane, curled under the blankets like a sick animal. Days went by and he never saw her in any other position. It had been too hot to sleep and he’d lain on top of the comforter, naked, still smelling of Rebecca. He hadn’t ever wanted to be a cheat. He didn’t romanticize infidelity. He’d wanted to be a good husband: he’d wanted nothing more in the world. He’d tried not to blame Diane for the guilt he felt every day. There were times when he was so frustrated he wanted to rip their house apart with his hands, take it down plank by plank and brick by brick. He wished he could start his life over again – he’d do everything the same, everything single thing except for Diane.

Last year his parents had celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. They’d held a party in their garden. Over two hundred people turned up. People had travelled from other states. Several had caught a plane. Diane hadn’t been able to make it. After two hours of pleading, after banging his hands on the table-top, after smashing the bottle of twenty-year-old wine intended as a present, after punching his hand through a glass cabinet and cutting his knuckles, Yates had been forced to go without her, turning up late, knuckles bandaged and having already downed a quart of Scotch. He’d taken over the barbecue and stood there like a dumb mute servant, staring as the meat sizzled and spat globs of fat onto the fire. Yates had ended up in the most miserable, rotten relationship in the entire neighbourhood and everyone knew it. Some days the humiliation was enough to make him want to die, literally die, his heart to clog up, his lungs to turn as dry as dust.

Diane had seen doctors and therapists y’d said more or the less the same thing. There was something wrong with her nerves. It sounded like the kind of diagnosis written a hundred years ago and Yates couldn’t believe it was being handed out now. Was there a pill that could help? They gave him pills and she’d take them but none of them did any good. In an attempt to remedy the disintegration of their marriage they’d tried for a child. The baby had been lost in pregnancy. Even though Yates had prayed for the strength not to blame Diane, he did: he blamed her for his dead child. He blamed her for the waitress – he blamed her for everything that was rotten about his life because the rot spread from her. He’d wanted the dream, the perfect marriage, children, the perfect home, he’d been able to provide it materially and emotionally, he’d been ready, and she’d trashed it with her craziness. Maybe that was the definition of craziness – to trash a good thing for no reason at all.

He’d arrived at West 145th Street. Parking the car, Yates wound up the window. His was one of only four cars on the street – the kind of Harlem street where no one would notice if a home had been left to ruin and the occupant was a crazy woman who didn’t get out of bed. This was the kind of neighbourhood where Diane belonged. She didn’t deserve their home. There was no greenery here, no parks for the children to play in. The children ran about the streets, jumping in and out of hopscotch chalk outlines that covered the summer-hot tarmac as if the streets were built for them and not for cars. Yates took pause every time he saw these kids. No space to play, no future, no hope – what made him mad were the men sitting around in the doorways, doing nothing, when they should be working, they should be trying to get these children a yard, a front lawn. But they never did anything, huddled in conversations, as though they had important matters to discuss. It was a joke, the seriousness with which the dropouts would sit around and talk while old women, as old as seventy, carried heavy bags of shopping. Yates never saw them move to help, never saw them offer to carry the bags or open the door. He was convinced they looked down on work. Work was beneath them. It was the only explanation.

Stepping out of the car, the heat was oppressive. The redbrick houses soaked up every bit of the sun but the summer wasn’t pleasant like it was in Teaneck, it was a sickly heat, like a tropical fever. If the main streets were dirty, the alleys were something else, piled up with trash like they were waiting for a flood to wash it all away. Not such a bad idea, Yates thought, a flood, an almighty deluge, maybe it could take some of these layabout losers at the same time. He crossed the street, feeling everyone’s eyes on him, hundreds of eyes squinting at him in the sunlight. Kids stopped playing. Men stopped their conversations, following him with controlled dislike, not expressive enough to get themselves into trouble, just enough to make it clear they hated him. Let them hate him! Let them think his opinions had to do with the colour of their skin. But the truth was that he didn’t care what colour their skin was: he cared what kind of men they were – the colour of their soul. And a man worked. He tried to make his country a better place. He wanted to tell them that a man without a job wasn’t a man, and yet he was sure that they wouldn’t get it. They were alien to him, as surely as those Soviet Communists were.

Yates had worked for COINTELPRO, the FBI Counter-Intelligence Program, since its inception in 1956. Over the past nine years he’d become one of the programme’s leading agents, making his name hindering the efforts of the National Committee to Abolish HUAC – the House Committee on Un-American Activities. A committee tobolish a committee: but those activists hadn’t the wit to even spot the ridiculousness of their name, let alone their entire enterprise. They were too busy arguing for the rights of traitors, engaged in an abstract academic debate about how the individual’s rights were more important than the well-being of their society. He would’ve thought Communists would understand that the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few. They had no interest in the fact that there were real plots intended to do real harm against his country. They dismissed those arguments as scaremongering. Their complacency disgusted him. He’d seen the plots, the plans – he understood their way of life was hated by a powerful enemy and needed protecting.

He’d been rapidly promoted to dealing with CPUSA, the Communist Party of America. The party’s membership was in decline. He wasn’t sure whether this was due to new members being ordered underground. They weren’t taking any chances. COINTELPRO wanted the party dead. Nothing else would satisfy them. The new leader of CPUSA, Gus Hall, had been trained at the International Lenin School in Moscow and COINTELPRO had no intention of giving him the space to expand the organization’s public profile, or create a secret network that could better evade the range of measures deployed against it. There were several methods open to them: infiltration, psychological warfare, legal harassment – such as tax, sending in the IRS to go over every scrap of paper, searching for the smallest of mistakes. They could deploy the local police force and finally but importantly use non-legal harassment. He didn’t get involved in that: it was farmed out to retired officers or people with no connection to the FBI. He had no qualms with it, of course. According to Hoover: The purpose of counterintelligence action is to disrupt and it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge.

As COINTELPRO officers they were tasked with pinpointing and neutralizing troublemakers before they could exercise their potential for violence. And Yates was one of the best.

Entering the stairway of a redbrick five storey, the temperature seemed to jump. It was so hot Yates had to stop, taking out a handkerchief and mopping his brow. The smells were bad, mingled odours he didn’t want to think about too much. Walking up the stairs, his pores seeping alcohol from last night, he surveyed the cracked plaster and broken floorboards, the shabby pipes and doors held together with mismatched planks of wood and cardboard, no doubt kicked apart in some argument or other. Yates could sense the hostility from the people in the walkways, people milling in the communal spaces, with no jobs to go to, no skills to offer, just an inbred sense of injustice. They’d talk for twenty-four hours a day about how they’d been wronged and how their country had failed them. At least twenty per cent of CPUSA membership was estimated to be Negro, far higher than the Negro proportion of the national population – that was their solution to not getting a job, ripping down the whole edifice of their nation. He smiled at them as he passed, knowing full well it would drive them crazy. Hatred radiated from their faces like heat off hot coals. If they thought it bothered him they were wrong. He wanted to ask the young man perched on the window: You think your hatred matters?

Of all the hatred in the world, theirs mattered the least.

At the top of the stairs, Yates knocked on the door. He’d been on the threshold of this apartment before although he’d never been invited inside. He would have authorized a search of the premises but it was impossible to do anything without the neighbours knowing, they all lived on top of each other, in and out of each other’s apartments. Personally, he didn’t care if they knew. He didn’t see any need to be subtle about it. He’d been tempted to authorize it anyway, not expecting to find anything, but as part of the psychological warfare. The issue of race had stopped him. He was told that an illegal search might inflame relations between the community and the police. They couldn’t even make it look like a burglary since realistically no one would rob a shit-hole like this.

He knocked again, louder this time. He knew the apartment was small, no more than a single room. No matter what they were doing inside it should only take a second to reach the door. Perhaps they could recognize the sound of his knock – angry, impatient – perhaps no one else in this building knocked that way. Finally, the door opened. The man who stood before him had been codenamed by the FBI: Big Red Voice. Yates said:

– Hello, Jesse.