A man down the table on Peruge’s left said, “Poppycock! This Hellstrom produces movies. That could be a dramatic piece of business for a film.”
“There is more,” Peruge said. “It includes partial instructions for an exchange circuit which our man at Westinghouse assures us is real. He was quite excited by the implications. He called it ‘another key to the puzzle.’ He concedes that it is an incomplete key; where the circuit would fit in the larger scheme is not indicated. However, there was one more item in the coded section.”
Peruge paused for effect, glanced once around the table. “The message is quite direct. It instructs the bearer of the subject papers to transmit his future reports through a man in Washington, D.C. The man is named. He is the senator whose activities we have come to question.”
Peruge wanted to laugh. Their reaction was precisely what the Chief had said it would be. He had their undivided attention, a thing seldom granted in this room of giants.
The man directly at his left said, “No doubt of that?”
“None whatsoever.”
From Dzule Peruge’s original report on Joseph Merrivale.
Subject has no detectable inhibiting emotions of warmth toward his fellows, but he counterfeits these reactions quite well. His administrative abilities are adequate for the necessary tasks, but he lacks qualities of initiative and daring. He is exactly what we had in mind, a man who can keep his division running smoothly and can, if directed, send his people to their deaths without a qualm. Promotion recommended.
As he left the conference, Peruge allowed himself a small sense of triumph. There had been a few touchy moments with that bitch, but he had managed them well, all things considered. He still could not understand why they had ever allowed a woman onto that board.
It was raining when he reached the street, freshening the evening air, but also imparting a smell of wetted dust that Peruge particularly disliked. He hailed a cab.
The driver, as luck would have it, was a woman. Peruge settled back into the seat with a sigh of resignation and said, “Take me to the Statler.”
There was no telling where women would intrude next, he thought. They were essentially frail things and should not be allowed into these occupations. He had that judgment from observations of his mother who had gone through life torn by conflicting attitudes toward her ancestry and toward the demands of her sex. That she knew about, she had black, Cherokee, Portuguese, and Cajun ancestors. Sometimes, she had been proud of her progenitors. “Never forget, boy, that your ancestors were here before the first white thief set foot on these shores.” Other times, she would remind him, “We were sailors under Henry the Navigator when most sailors never came back from a long voyage.” But she could temper these outbursts of bitter pride with cautious warnings: “Dzule, you look white enough for nobody ever to know about the niggers in our blood. Play the white game, boy; that’s the only way to win in this world.”
And he had won the field this day, no doubt about that. The bitch of the board room had tried to cross-examine him about Hellstrom’s corporate activities, trying to catch him in a contradiction. The Chief had warned him about that. “They’ll try to take advantage of you and check up on the Agency. I’m trusting you to give them blow for blow.” That was the Chief for you: like a father to those he trusted.
Peruge had never known his own father, who had been only the first in a long line of men who partook of Juanita Peruge’s favors. Her family name had been Brown, a commonplace easily discarded for the more mysterious Peruge. The father had stayed with Juanita long enough to name the infant Dzule for a half-remembered uncle, then he had gone commercial fishing on a voyage that would have satisfied the Navigator’s worst fears. His boat was lost in a storm off Campiche.
Tragedy had been the firming cement of Juanita’s character. It offered her the splendor of a lifelong search to replace a love that time made ever more romantic and unattainable. And for Dzule, she created a myth of the mighty John (originally Juan) Peruge: tall, bronzed, capable of any great deed he might envision. A jealous God had taken him, which said something pertinent about gods.
It was this tragedy, seen through his mother’s fantasies, that made Dzule forgive any of her offenses against morality. His earliest and strongest image of women told him that they could not withstand life’s crueler torments except by seeking the pleasures of the bed. That was just the way they were and one had to accept it. Others might deny this, but obviously they were hiding identical behavior in their own women.
The Agency had been a natural place for Dzule Peruge to find himself. Here, the strong sought their place in life. Here, those who took the blinders from their eyes naturally gravitated. And most important, it was a last outpost of swashbuckling. In the Agency, no dream was too remote, provided that you recognized most humans as essentially frail—especially women.
The bitch of the board was no exception. There was a weakness in her; had to be. She was clever, though, with her own brand of driving ruthlessness.
Peruge stared out of the taxi’s window at the rain-washed streets, reviewing the encounter in the board room. She had opened the attack by bringing out her own copy of the Hellstrom file. She had found the entries she wanted, referred to them, and said, “You tell us Hellstrom’s company is private, incorporated in 1958; one chief stockholder, himself, and three officers—Hellstrom, a Miss Fancy Kalotermi, and a Miss Mimeca Tichenum.” She’d put down the file and stared down the long table at him. “The disturbing thing to many of us is that, although two women signed their names to these incorporation documents in front of witnesses, duly notarized, you show no other record of them.”
Peruge’s response, he thought, had suited the attack. He shrugged and said, “That’s correct. We don’t know where they came from, where educated, nothing. They both sound foreign, but the notary in Fosterville was satisfied with their identities, and the attorney saw no objection to their being officers in a corporation doing business in this country. Mimeca could be an oriental name, as some of you have indicated, and the other one does sound Greek; we just do not know. This is not a page we intend to keep in its present blank state. We are exploring this avenue.”
“Do they live at Hellstrom’s farm?” she asked.
“Apparently.”
“Any description of them?”
“Vague: dark hair, possessed of general female characteristics.”
“General female characteristics,” she mused. “I wonder how you’d describe me. Well, no matter. What is their relationship to Hellstrom?”
Peruge had taken his time with the response. He knew how he appeared to women. He was tall, six feet four inches, and imposing, 221 pounds. His sandy hair held a distinct touch of red which his eyebrows carried to a darker tone. His eyes were that dark brown often mistaken for black, deeply socketed above a rather abbreviated nose, wide mouth, and square chin. The whole effect was dominantly masculine. He sent this machismo message down the table with a sudden grin.
“Madame, I would not describe you to anyone, not even to myself. Such is my responsibility to the Agency that you remain nameless and faceless. As to these other women, Hellstrom trusted them sufficiently to want them as officers of his corporation, which makes us extremely curious about them. We intend to satisfy that curiosity. You’ll note the documents list the Kalotermi woman as vice-president and the other one as secretary-treasurer, yet each has but a one percent interest in the corporation.”