Nightwork

5

In the morning I packed my bags and carried them myself to the elevator. I didn’t want to have any more conversations with Morris, the bellboy. I checked out, paying with some of the money I had won on the second race at Hialeah. Under the hotel canopy I looked around carefully. There was nobody as far as I could see who was waiting for me or who might follow me. I got into a cab and drove to the bus terminal where I could board a bus to Washington. Nobody would dream of looking in a bus terminal for a man who had just stolen a hundred thousand dollars.

I tried the Hotel Mayflower first. As long as I was in Washington I thought I might as well take the best of what the city had to offer. But the hotel was full, the man at the desk told me. He gave me the impression that in this center of power one had to be elected to a room by a large constituency, or at least appointed by the President. I resolved to buy a new overcoat. Still, he was polite enough to suggest a hotel about a mile away. It usually had rooms, he said. He said it the way he might have said of an acquaintance that he usually wore soiled shirts.

He turned out to be right. The building was new, all chrome and bright paint and looked like a motel on any highway in America, but there were vacancies. I registered under my own name. In this city, I felt, I didn’t have to go to extreme lengths to remain anonymous.

Remembering what I had heard about crime in the streets of the capital, I prudently put my wallet in the hotel’s vault, keeping out only a hundred dollars for the day’s expenses.

Avoid the chambers of the mighty. Danger lurks at their doorsteps. The Saturday night pistol lays down the final law.

The last time I had been in Washington had been when I’d flown a charter of Republicans down from Vermont for the inaugural of Richard Nixon in 1969. There had been a lot of drinking among the Republicans on the plane, and I had spent a good part of the flight arguing with a drunken Vermont State Senator who had been a B-17 pilot during World War II and who wanted to be allowed to fly the plane after we crossed Philadelphia. I hadn’t gone to the Inaugural or to the ball for which the Republicans had found me a ticket. At that time I considered myself a Democrat. I didn’t know what I considered myself now.

I had spent the day of Inaugural at Arlington. It seemed a fitting way to celebrate the installation of Richard Nixon as President of the United States.

There was a Grimes buried in the cemetery, an uncle who had died in 1921 from the effects of a dose of chlorine gas in the Argonne Forest. Myself, I would never be buried in Arlington. I was a veteran of no wars. I had been too young for Korea and by the time Vietnam came around I was set in the job with the airline. I had not been tempted to volunteer. Walking among the graves, I experienced no regret that I finally would not be laid to rest in this company of heroes. I had never been pugnacious – even as a boy I had only one fistfight at school – and, although was patriotic enough and saluted the flag gladly, wars had no attraction for me. My patriotism did not run in the direction of bloodshed.

When I went out of the hotel the next morning, I saw there was a long line of people waiting for taxis, so I started to walk, hoping to pick up a taxi along the avenue. It was a mild day, pleasant after the biting cold of New York, and the street I was on gave off an air of grave prosperity, the passersby well-dressed and orderly. For half a block I walked side by side with a dignified, portly gentleman wearing a coat with a mink collar who looked as though he could be a Senator. I amused myself by imagining what the man’s reaction would be if I went up to him, fixed him, like the Ancient Mariner, who stoppeth[7] one of three, and told him what I had been doing since early Tuesday morning.

I stopped at a traffic light and hailed a cab which was slowing to a stop there. It was only after the cab had come to a halt that I saw that there was a passenger in the back, a woman. But the cabby, a black man with gray hair, leaned over and turned down the window. “Which way you going, Mister?” he asked.

“State.”

“Get in,” the cabby said. “The lady is on the way.”

I opened the back door. “Do you mind if I get in with you, ma’am?” I asked.

“I certainly do,” the woman said. She was quite young, no more than thirty, and rather pretty, in a blonde, sharp way, less pretty at the moment than she might ordinarily have been, because of the tight, angry set of her lips.

“I’m sorry,” I said apologetically and closed the door. I was about to step back on the curb, when the cabby opened the front door. “Get in, suh,” the cabby said.

Serves the bitch right. I thought, and, without looking at the woman, got in beside the driver. There was a bitter rustle from the back seat, but neither the cabby nor I turned around. We drove in silence.

When the cab stopped in front of a pillared government building, the woman leaned forward. “One dollar and forty-five cents?” she said.

“Yes ma’am,” the cabby said.

The woman yanked open her purse, took out a dollar bill and some change, and put it down on the back seat. “Don’t expect to find a tip,” she said as she got out. She walked towards the big front doors, her back furious. She had nice legs, I noted.

The cabby chuckled as he reached back and scooped up his fare. “Civil servant.” he said.

“Spelled c-u-n-t,” I said.

The cabby chuckled again. “Oh, in this town you learn to take the fat with the lean,” he said.

As he drove, he shook his head, chuckling to himself, over and over again.

At State, I gave the man a dollar tip. “I tell you, suh,” the cabby said, “that little blonde lady done made my day.”

I went into the lobby of the building and up to the information desk.

“I’d like to see Mr. Jeremy Hale, please,” I said to the girl at the desk.

“Do you know what room he’s in?”

“I’m afraid not.”

The girl sighed. Washington, I saw, was full of tight-assed women. While the girl thumbed through a thick alphabetical list for Jeremy Hale, I remembered how I had once said to Hale, long ago, “With a name like that, Jerry, you had to wind up in the State Department.” I smiled at the memory.

“Is Mr. Hale expecting you?”

“No.” I hadn’t spoken to Hale or written him in years. Hale certainly wasn’t expecting me. We had been in the same class at Ohio State and had been good friends. After I took the job in Vermont we had skied together several winters, when Hale wasn’t on a post overseas.

“Your name, please?” the girl was saying.

I gave her my name and she dialed a number on the desk telephone.

The girl spoke briefly on the phone, put it down, scribbled out a pass. “Mr. Hale can see you now.” She handed me the pass and I saw she had written on it the number of the room I was to go to.

“Thank you, miss,” I said. Too late, I saw the wedding ring on her finger. I have made another enemy in Washington, I thought.

I went up in the elevator. The elevator was nearly full, but it rose in decorous silence. The secrets of state were being well-guarded.

Hale’s name was on a door that was exactly the same as a long row of identical doors that disappeared in diminishing perspective down a seemingly endless corridor. What can all these people possibly be doing for the United States of America eight hours a day, two hundred days a year? I wondered, as I knocked.

“Come in,” a woman’s voice called.

I pushed the door open and entered a small room where a beautiful young woman was typing. Good old Jeremy Hale. The beautiful young woman smiled radiantly at me. I wondered how she behaved in taxicabs. “Are you Mr. Grimes?” she said, rising. She was even more beautiful standing than sitting down, tall and dark, lissome in a tight blue sweater.

“I am indeed,” I said.

“Mr. Hale is delighted you could come. Go right in, please.” She held the door to the inner office open for me.

Hale was seated at a cluttered desk, peering down at a sheaf of papers in front of him. He had put on weight since I had last seen him and had added statesmanlike solidity to the mild polite face. On the desk, in a silver frame, was a family group, a woman and two children, a boy and a girl. Everything in moderation. Zero population growth. An example to the heathen. Hale looked up when I came in and stood, smiling widely. “Doug,” he said, “You don’t know how glad I am to see you.”

As we shook hands, I was surprised at how moved I was by my friend’s greeting. For three years now, no one had been genuinely glad to see me.

“Where’ve you been, where’ve you been, man?” Hale said. He waved to a leather sofa along one side of the spacious office and, as I sat down, pulled a wooden armchair close to the sofa and sat down himself. “I thought you’d disappeared from the face of the earth. I wrote three times and each time the letters came back. Haven’t you learned anything about forwarding addresses yet? And I wrote your girl friend. Pat, asking about you and she wrote back and said she didn’t know where you’d gone.” He scowled at me. He was agreeable-looking, tall, comfortably built, soft-faced, and the scowl was incongruous on him. “And you don’t look so almighty great, either. You look as though you haven’t been out in the open air for years.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, “one thing at a time, Jerry. I just decided I didn’t like flying anymore and I moved on. Here and there.”

“I wanted to ski with you last winter. I had two weeks off and I heard the snow was great… ”

“I haven’t been doing much skiing, to tell the truth,” I said.

Impulsively, Hale touched my shoulder. “All right,” he said. “I won’t ask any questions.” Even as a boy in college he had always been quick and sensitive. “Well, anyway, just one question. Where’re you coming from and what’re you doing in Washington?” He laughed. “I guess that’s two questions.”

“I’m coming from New York,” I said, “and I’m in Washington to ask you to do a little favor for me.”

“The government is at your disposal, lad. Ask and ye shall receive.”

“I need a passport.”

“You mean you never had a passport?”

“No.”

“You’ve never been out of the country?” Hale sounded amazed. Everybody he knew was out of the country most of the time.

“I’ve been in Canada,” I said. “That’s all. And you don’t need a passport for Canada.”

“You said you were in New York.” Hale looked puzzled. “Why didn’t you get it there? Not that I’m not delighted you finally had an excuse to visit me,” he added hastily. “But all you had to do was go to the office on Six thirty…”

“I know,” I said. “I just didn’t feel like waiting. I’m in a hurry and I thought I’d come to the fountainhead, from which all good things flow.”

“They are swamped there,” Hale said. “Where do you intend to go?”

“I thought Europe, first. I came into a little dough and I thought maybe it was time I ought to get a dose of Old World culture. Those postcards you used to send me from Paris and Athens gave me the itch.” Deception I found was coming easily.

“I think I can run the passport through for you in a day,” Hale said. “Just give me your birth certificate…” He stopped when he saw the frown on my face. “Don’t you have it with you?”

“I didn’t realize I needed it.”

“You sure do,” Hale said. “Where were you born – Scranton, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

He made a face.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Pennsylvania’s a bore,” he said. “All the birth certificates are kept in Harrisburg, the state capital. You’d have to write there. It’d take at least two weeks. If you’re lucky.”

“Balls,” I said. I didn’t want to wait anywhere for two weeks.

“Didn’t you get your birth certificate when you applied for your first driver’s license?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Where is it now? Have you any idea? Maybe somebody in your family. Stashed away in a trunk somewhere.”

“My brother Henry still lives in Scranton,” I said. I remembered that after my mother died he had taken all the accumulated family junk, old report cards, my high school diploma, my degree from college, old snapshot albums and stored them in his attic. “He might have it.”

“Why don’t you call him and have him look. If he finds it tell him to send it to you special delivery, registered.”

“Even better,” I said. “I’ll go down there myself. I haven’t seen Henry for years and it’s about time I put in an appearance, anyway.” I didn’t feel I had to explain to Hale that I preferred not to have Henry know where I was staying in Washington or anywhere else.

“Let’s see,” Hale said. “This is Thursday. There’s a weekend coming up. Even if you find it, you couldn’t get back in time to do anything until Monday.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “Europe’s waited this long I guess it can wait another couple of days.”

“You’ll need some photographs, too.”

“I have them with me.” I fished the envelope out of a pocket.

He slid one out of the envelope and studied it. “You still look as though you’re just about to graduate from high school.” He shook his head. “How do you manage it?”

“A carefree life,” I said.

“I’m glad to hear they’re still available.” Hale said. “When I Took at pictures of myself these days, I seem to be old enough to be my own father. The magic of the cameraman’s art.” He put the photograph back in its envelope, as though the one glimpse of it would do him for a long, long time. “I’ll have the application ready for you to sign Monday morning. Just in case.”

“I’ll be here.”

“Why not come back and spend the weekend here?” Hale said. “Washington is at its best on the weekends. We have a poker game on Saturday night. You still play poker?”

“A little.”

“Good. One of our regulars is out of town and you can have his place. There’re a couple of eternal pigeons in the game who’ll donate their dough with a pathetic generosity.” He smiled. He hadn’t been a bad poker player himself in college. “It’ll be like old times. I’ll arrange everything.” . The phone rang and Hale went over to the desk, picked up the instrument, and listened for a moment. “I’ll be right over, sir,” he said and put the phone down. “I’m sorry, Doug, I have to go. The daily eleven A.M. crisis.”

I stood up. “Thanks for everything,” I said, as we walked toward the door.

“Nada,” Hale said. “What are friends for? Listen, there’s a cocktail party at my house tonight. You busy?”

“Nothing special,” I said.

“Seven o’clock.” We were in the outer office now. “I’ve got to run. Miss Schwartz will give you my address.” He was out of the door, moving fast, but still preserving a statesmanlike decorum.

Miss Schwartz wrote on a card and gave it to me, smiling radiantly, as though she were ennobling me. Her handwriting was as beautiful as she was.

I awoke slowly as the soft hand went lightly up my thigh. We had made love twice already, but the erection was immediate. The lady in bed with me was profiting from my years of abstinence.

“That’s better,” the lady murmured. “That’s much better. Don’t do anything for the moment. Just lie back. Don’t move.”

I lay back. The expert hands, the soft lips, and lascivious tongue made remaining motionless exquisite torture. The lady was very serious, ritualistic almost, in her pleasures, and was not to be hurried. When we had come into her bedroom at midnight, she had made me lie down and had undressed me slowly. The last woman who had undressed me had been my mother, when I was five, and I had the measles.

It was not the way I had expected the evening to end. The cocktail party in the nice Colonial house in Georgetown had been polite and sober. I had arrived early and had been taken upstairs to admire the Hale children. Before the other guests came, I had chatted desultorily with Hale’s wife, Vivian, whom I had never met. She was a pretty, blondish woman, with an overworked look about her. It turned out that through the years Hale had told her quite a bit about me. “After Washington,” Mrs. Hale had said, “Jerry said you were like a breath of fresh air. He said he loved skiing with you and your girl – Pat – am I right, was that her name?”

“Yes.”

“He said – and I hope you won’t think it’s condescending – he said that you, both of you were so transparently decent.”

“That’s not condescending.” I said.

“He was worried about you when he found out that you weren’t well – together – anymore. And that you’d just vanished.” Mrs. Hale’s eyes searched my face, looking for a reaction, an answer to her unspoken question.

“I knew where I was,” I said.

“If I hadn’t met Jerry,” Mrs. Hale said, candor making her seem suddenly youthful, “I’d have nothing. Nothing.” The doorbell rang. “Oh, dear,” she said, “here comes the herd. I do hope we’ll see a lot of you while you’re here…”

The rest of the party had been something of a blur, although not because of drink. I never drank much. But the names had been flung at me in such quick succession. Senator So-and-So, Congressman This, Congressman That, His Excellency, the Ambassador of What country, Mr. Blank, he works for The Washington Post, Mrs. Whoever, she’s ever so important at Justice, and the conversation had been about people who were powerful, famous, despicable, conniving, eloquent, on the way to Russia, introducing a bill that would make your hair stand on end.

Even though I knew next to nothing about the social structure of the capital, I could tell that there was a lot of power assembled in the room. By Washington standards everybody there was more important than the host, who, while obviously on the way up, was still somewhere in the middle ranks of the Foreign Service, and who couldn’t have afforded many parties like this on his salary. But Vivian Hale was the daughter of a man who had been a senator for two terms and who owned a good part of North Carolina besides. My friend had married well. I wondered what I would have turned into if I had married a rich wife. Not that I ever had the offer.

I had merely stood around, wincing a little as the drinks began to take effect on the rising curve of conversation, a glass tactfully in my hand at all times, smiling manfully, like a small boy at dancing school. I wondered how Hale could bear it.

Mrs. Whoever, whose hand and lips were now caressing me, had turned out to be the lady who was ever so important at Justice. She looked thirty-five years old, but a very handsome thirty-five, full bodied, with glowing skin, large dark eyes, and soft dark blonde hair, almost the color of mine, that fell to her shoulders. We had found ourselves in a corner together and she had said, “I’ve been watching you. Poor man, you look marooned. I take it you’re not an inmate.”

“An inmate?” I had asked, puzzled. “Of what?”

“Washington.”

I had grinned. “Does it show that badly?”

“It does, man, it does. Don’t worry about it. I leap at the opportunity to talk to someone who isn’t in the government.” She had looked at her watch. “Forty-five minutes. I have done my duty. Nobody can spread the rumor that I don’t know how to behave in polite society. Time for chow. Grimes, are you busy for dinner?”

“No.” I was surprised that she had remembered my name.

“Shall we leave together or leave separately?”

I laughed. “That’s up to you, Mrs. …”

“Coates, Evelyn.” She had smiled widely. I decided she had a mouth for smiling. “Together. I’m divorced. Do you consider me forward?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Excellent man.” She had touched my arm lightly. “I’ll wait for you in the front hall. Say good-bye to your hosts, like a good boy.”

I had watched her sweep through the crowded room, imperious and confident. I had never met a woman like that before. But even then I hadn’t imagined for a moment that the evening would end up as it did. I had never in my life gone to bed with a woman the first time I had met her. What with my stutter and ridiculously youthful appearance, I had always been rather shy, not sure that I was particularly attractive, and had felt that I was clumsy with women. I was resigned to the fact that other men got the beauties. I had never gotten over wondering why Pat, who was exceptionally attractive, had had anything to do with me. Luckily for my ego, I had no taste for the ordinary kind of male conquest, and the remnants of my religious upbringing had kept me from promiscuity, even if I could have indulged in it.

The restaurant Mrs Coates had taken me to was French and, as far as I could tell, very good. “I hope you’re enormously wealthy,” she had said. “The prices here are ferocious. Are you enormously wealthy?”

“Enormously.”

She had squinted at me across the table, studying me. “You don’t look it.”

“It’s old money,” I had said. “The family likes to pretend to be slightly shabby.”

“What old family?”

“Some other time.” I had turned her off.

She had talked about herself, though, without any urging from me. She was a lawyer, she worked in the antitrust division of the Justice Department, she had been in Washington eleven years, her husband had been a commander in the Navy and was an absolute beast, she had no children and wanted none, she went to the Hamptons, on Long Island, whenever she could and swam and pottered around a garden, her boss had been trying to lay her for five years, but otherwise was a dear, she was determined to run for Congress before she died. Along with all that, all spoken in an incongruously low melodic voice, she had entertained me through dinner by interrupting herself to point out other guests and describing them by function and character in short, malicious sketches. There was a senator with whom a girl wasn’t safe if they were in an elevator together, a second secretary at an embassy who ran dope in the diplomatic pouches, a lobbyist who had blocs in both Houses in his pocket, a CIA operator who was responsible for murders in several South American countries. I had enjoyed myself, allowing her to pick the wine, although I would have preferred beer, and order for both of us, saying, “I’m just a simple country boy and I trust myself to your hands.” It was exhilarating to be able to talk to a handsome woman without stuttering. A whole new world seemed to be opening up before me.

“Is your entire, enormously wealthy, slightly shabby family composed of simple country boys like you?”

“More or less,” I had said.

She stared at me quizzically. “Are you a spook?”

“A what?” “A spook. CIA?”

I had shaken my head, smiling. “Not even.”

“Hale told me you were a pilot.”

“Once. Not anymore.” I wondered when she had had time, in all the confusion of the party, to question Hale about me. For a moment, the woman’s inquisitiveness had bothered me and I half-decided to put her in a cab after dinner and let her go home herself. But then I had thought, I mustn’t get paranoid about the whole thing and settled back to enjoy the evening. “Don’t you think we need another bottle?” I had asked.

“Definitely,” she had said.

We had been the last ones left in the restaurant, and I was pleasantly drunk from the unaccustomed wine when we got into the taxi. We sat in the taxi without touching each other, and, when the taxi stopped in front of the apartment building in which Mrs. Coates lived, I had said, “Hold it, driver, please; I’m just seeing the lady to the door.”

“Forget it, driver,” Mrs Coates had said. “The gentleman is coming in for a nightcap.”

“That’s just what I need,” I had said, trying not to mumble, “a nightcap.” But I had paid the driver and gone in with her.

I hadn’t discovered what the apartment was like, because she didn’t switch on the lights. She merely put her arms around me as I shut the door from the hall and kissed me. The kiss was delicious.

“I am now seducing you.” she had said, “in your weakened state.”

“Consider me seduced.”

Chuckling, she had led me by the hand through the dark living room and into the bedroom. A thin shaft of light from the partially open door to a bathroom was enough so that I could make out the shapes of pieces of furniture, a huge desk piled with papers, a dresser, a long bookcase against one wall. She had led me to the bed, turned me around, then given me a sharp push. I had fallen backward on the bed. “The rest,” she had said, “is my job.”

If she was as good at Justice as she was in bed, the government was getting its money’s worth.

“Now,” she said, sliding up on me, straddling me, using her hand to guide me into her. She moved on me, first very slowly, then more and more quickly, her head thrown back, her arms rigid behind her, her hands spread out on the bed, supporting her. Her full breasts loomed above me, pale in the dim light reflected off a mirror. I put up my hands and caressed her breasts and she moaned. She began to sob, loudly, uncontrollably, and when she came she was weeping.

I came immediately after, with a long, subdued sigh. She rolled off me, lay on her stomach beside me, the weeping slowly coming to an end. I put out my hand and touched the firm, rounded shoulder. “Did I hurt you?” I asked.

She laughed. “Silly man. Lord, no.”

“I was afraid I…”

“Didn’t a lady ever cry while you were fucking her?”

“Not that I remember,” I said. And none of the ladies ever called it that either, I could have added. They obviously called a spade a spade at Justice.

She laughed again, twisted around, sat up, reached for a cigarette, lit it. Her face was calm and untroubled in the flare of the match. “Do you want a cigarette?”

“I don’t smoke cigarettes.”

“You’ll live forever. So much the better. How old are you anyway?”

“Thirty-three.”

“In the prime of life,” she said. “The dear prime of life. Don’t go to sleep. I want to talk. Do you want a drink?”

“What time is it?”

“Drink time.” She got out of bed and I saw her put a dressing gown on. “Whiskey okay?”

“Whiskey is fine.”

She went into the living room, her robe making a soft rustling sound. I looked at my watch. She had taken it off, the last item, when she had undressed me and put it neatly on the bedside table. She was an orderly woman. The luminous dial of the watch showed that it was past three. Everything in its time, I thought, lying back luxuriously, remembering other three o’clocks, the noise of the adding machine, the bullet proof glass, the bedraggled women asking me to unlock the front door.

She came back with the two glasses, handed me mine, sat on the edge of the bed, her profile outlined against the light from the bathroom. The silhouette was bold and sharp. She drank heartily. She was a hearty as well as an orderly woman. “Most satisfactory.” she said. “You were, too.” I laughed. “Do you always rate your lovers?”

“You’re not my lover. Grimes,” she said. “You’re a nice-looking, youngish man with good manners whom I happened to take a slight shine to at a party and who had the great virtue to be passing briefly through town. Briefly is the operative word in that sentence. Grimes.”

“I see,” I said, sipping at the whiskey. “You probably don’t and I won’t bother to explain.”

“You don’t have to explain anything to me,” I said. “Sufficient unto the night are the pleasures thereof.”

“You don’t do this sort of thing often, do you?”

“Frankly, no.” I laughed again. “Frankly, never. Why – does it show?”

“Like a neon sign. You’re not at all like what you look like, you know.”

“What do I look like?”

“You look like those young men who play the villains in Italian movies – bold and dark and unscrupulous.”

Nobody had ever said anything like that to me before. I had gotten used to hearing that I reminded people of somebody’s kid brother. Either I had changed drastically or Evelyn Coates was not deceived by surfaces, could see through to the wished-for inner man. “Is that a good way to look?” I asked. I was a little worried by the “unscrupulous.”

“It’s a very nice way to look. In certain situations.”

“Like tonight, for example?”

“Like tonight.”

“I might be coming back to Washington in a few days,” I said. “Should I call you?”

“If you have nothing better to do.”

“Will you see me again?”

“If I have nothing better to do.”

“Are you as tough as you pretend to be?”

“Tougher, Grimes, much tougher. What would you be coming back to Washington for?”

“Maybe for you.”

“Try that once more, please.”

“Maybe for you.”

“You do have nice manners. Maybe for what else?”

“Well,” I said slowly, thinking, this is as good a place and as a good a time to dig for information, “supposing I was looking for somebody …”

“Somebody in particular?”

“Yes. Somebody whose name I know, who’s dropped out of sight.”

“In Washington?”

“Not necessarily. Somewhere in the country, or maybe even out of the country…”

“You are a mysterious man, aren’t you?”

“Someday I may tell you the whole story,” I said, sure that I never would, but pleased that luck had put me into the bed of a woman who was in on the secrets of government, and whose job, partially, at least, must involve tracing people down, people usually who did not want to be traced down. “It’s a private, delicate matter. But suppose I had to find this hypothetical friend, how would I go about it?”

“Well, there are a lot of places you could look,” she said. “The Internal Revenue Service – they’d know his address at the time he sent in his last return. The Social Security people. They’d have a record of whom he was working for. The Selective Service people, although that would probably be outdated. The FBI. You never know what you can pick up in that factory. The State Department. It would all depend upon whether or not you knew the right people.”

“Take it for granted that I would get to know the right people,” I said. For a hundred thousand dollars, I could take it for granted somebody would be able to reach the right people.

“You probably would eventually be able to pick up your friend’s trail. Say, are you a private detective or something! ”

“Or something,” I said ambiguously.

“Well, everybody comes to Washington eventually,” she said. “Why not you? It’s America’s real living theater. Standing room only at every performance. Except that it’s a peculiar audience. The good seats are all filled by actors.”

“Are you an actress?”

“You bet your life. I’m playing a role that can’t be beat. The dauntless Portia striking deadly blows at the malefactors of great wealth. Women’s Lib at Justice and Injustice. I’ve gotten rave reviews in the best beds in town. Do I shock you?”

“A little,”

“While on the subject,” she said, “let me give you a T.L.”

“What’s a T.L.?”

“Where have you been, you poor innocent?” She reached over and pinched my cheek. “T.L. stands for trade last. A compliment. You gave almost the best performance of anyone I’ve slept with in this town. You were even as good as a certain Senator from a Western state whom I shall not name, who used to be at the head of the list. Until the poor dear was beaten at the last election.”

“I didn’t realize I was giving a performance.” I had no desire to hear the defeated Senator’s name.

“Of course you were. Otherwise you wouldn’t be in Washington. And every performance calls on enormous talent here. We all have to pretend we love our roles.”

“Are you like that, too?”

“You must be kidding, honey. Of course. I’m a big, grown woman. Do you think that, if I went into that office every day for the next hundred years, it would make the slightest difference to you or General Motors or the United Nations or anybody’s pet dog? I just play the game, honey, and have fun like everybody else, because this town is the best place to have fun anybody’s found for people like us. Actually, what I believe is that, if everyone here, from the President down to the janitor at Indian Affairs, would only be allowed to operate two weeks a year, America would turn out to be the greatest country in the world.”

I had finished the whiskey by now and felt an overwhelming desire to sleep. I barely suppressed a yawn.

“Oh,” she said, “I’m boring you.”

“Not at all,” I said truthfully. “But aren’t you tired?”

“Not really.” She put her glass down, slipped out of her robe, and got into bed beside me. “Sex invigorates me. But I have to get up early and it doesn’t do for me to look debauched when I get to the office in the morning.” She snuggled up to me and kissed my ear. “Good night, Grimes. Of course call me when you come back.”

When I awoke, it was nearly ten o’clock and I was alone. The curtains let enough sun through for me to see that it was a nice day. There was a note on the dresser, where she had put my money clip the night before. “Dear Guest: Off to work.

You were sleeping like a baby and I hadn’t the heart to wake you. I am happy to see such evidence of a clear conscience in this naughty world. There’s a razor and shaving cream in the medicine cabinet and a big glass of orange juice in the refrigerator and a pot of coffee on the stove. The good servant deserves his hire. I hope you find your friend. E.C.”

I grinned at the last sentence, then went into the bathroom and shaved and showered. The cold shower woke me up completely and I felt fresh and cheerful. And, I had to admit, pleased with myself. I looked carefully at myself in the mirror. My color had improved.

As I went into the living room, I smelled bacon frying. I pushed open the door to the kitchen and saw a young woman silting at a table in slacks and a sweater, with a scarf around her head, reading the newspaper and munching on a piece of toast.

“Hi,” the young woman said, looking up. “I wondered if you were going to sleep all day.”

“I … I’m terribly sorry…” I said, flustered. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“You’re not disturbing me.” She got up and opened the refrigerator and took out a glass of orange juice. “Evelyn left this for you. You must be thirsty.” She didn’t say why she thought I must be thirsty. “Do you want bacon and eggs?”

“I don’t want to be any trouble.”

“No trouble. Breakfast comes with the deal.” She stripped off three slices of bacon from an open package and put it in the pan with the others. She was tall and slender in her slacks. “Sunny side up?”

“Any way you’re having them.”

“Sunny side up,” the woman said. She put a slab of butter in another pan and cracked four eggs into the pan, her movements swift and authoritative. “I’m Brenda Morrissey,” she said. “I share the apartment with Evelyn. Didn’t she say anything about me?”

“Not that I remember,” I said. I sipped at the chilled orange juice.

“I guess Evelyn was busy at the time,” she said flatly. She poured two cups of coffee, indicated the cream and sugar on the table. “Sit down. You’re not in a hurry, are you?”

“Not really.” I sat down.

“Neither am I. I run an art gallery. Nobody ever buys a picture before eleven o’clock in the morning. It’s a dream job for a girl like me. Evelyn neglected to tell me your name.”

I told her my name.

“How long have you known Evelyn?” she asked, as she stood at the stove, shaking the pan with the eggs in it with one hand and feeding slices of bread into the toaster with the other hand.

“Well,” I said, embarrassed, “the truth is we just met last night.”

She gave a short, sharp chuckle. “That’s Washington. You collect votes wherever you can find them. Any kind of votes. Maybe this is the nicest kind. Dear Evelyn,” she said, but without malice. “I heard you at your revels.”

I felt myself blushing. “I had no idea there was anyone else in the house.”

“That’s all right. Actually, I keep meaning to buy earplugs and then I forget from one time to the next.” She slid the eggs onto plates and put the bacon over them. She sat across from me on the other side of the little table, clear greenish eyes staring at me steadily. She was wearing no lipstick and her lips were light pink, her cheeks just a little flushed from the heat of the stove. She had a long face, the bones all showing, and the scarf around her head made her look severe. “Evelyn’s not one to keep her enjoyment to herself when she’s being amused,” she said, as she broke a piece of bacon and started eating it with her fingers. “I had to use all my maidenly restraint to keep from coming and joining the fun.”

I felt my face go rigid and I ducked my eyes. The woman laughed. “Don’t worry,” she said, “it hasn’t happened yet. Whatever else we do around here, we do not go in for orgies. Still,” she said evenly, “if you’re going to be in Washington tonight and if you tell me what hotel you’re staying at, you might like to buy me a drink.”

I won’t say that I wasn’t tempted. The night had reawakened all the sensuality in me that had lain dormant for so long. And the cool impersonality of the invitation was intriguing. At least for its novelty. Things like that had happened to friends of mine, or at least so they had said, but never to me. And after what I had done in room 602 of the St Augustine Hotel, I could hardly refuse on moral grounds to sleep with the friend of a lady I had only just met the night before. Let the accidents happen. But there was the business of the birth certificate. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m leaving town this morning.”

“What a pity,” the woman said tonelessly.

“But I’ll be back at my hotel…” I hesitated, remembering Jeremy Hale’s poker game on Saturday night. First things first. “I’ll be back on Sunday.”

“What hotel are you staying at?”

I told her.

“Perhaps I’ll call on Sunday,” she said. “I have nothing against Sundays.”

Money in the bank, I thought, as I was leaving the apartment building, even money in a bank two hundred and fifty miles away must give off an irresistible sexual aroma.

I tried to examine just how I felt that morning. Springy and light-footed. Lighthearted, I decided. Wicked. It was an old-fashioned word, but it was the word that came to mind. Was it possible that for thirty-three years I had miscalculated absolutely what sort of man I was? I looked carefully at the ordinary faces of the men and women on the street. Were they all on the edge of crime?

At the hotel I rented a car and took my wallet out of the vault. I was beginning to feel deprived if I wasn’t carrying a certain number of hundred-dollar bills on me.

The roads through Pennsylvania were icy and I drove carefully. A car crash was one accident I wanted to avoid. This was no time to be laid up immobilized and helpless, in a hospital for weeks or maybe months on end.