"I structured a serious deal here."
"Jack, take it to them and tell them. Mention I talk to Tony Push all the time. He has the reputation he's very close to Carmine Latta."
"Carmine is not in loanshark in a big way."
"I am only saying make a statement that I am known to Tony Astorina."
Karlinsky looked at him. A silent countdown. Then he said he would do whatever Jack asked. He had a deep, smooth and reasonable voice, gone hollow now, and a house with a giant searchlight, and a perfect turquoise pool, and four daughters and a son, and Jack Ruby wondered if this is what it takes to look invincible.
They shook hands in the doorway and then the older man stepped back into the office, briefly, as if he had a happy secret to reveal.
"The jacket is mohair. Look."
Then they walked to the head of the narrow stairway that led down to the street. They shook hands again. The saxophone was blatting. Jack took a Preludin with a glass of water at the bar for a favorable future outlook. Then he walked among the tables to mingle with the crowd. What is the point of running a club if you can't do that?
Dinner at home was a quiet affair with harpsichord concertos on the stereo and conversation coming in small runs. Beryl watched her husband raise the wineglass to his lips. Larry didn't drink his wine. He chewed it. To savor the tonality-the dryness, or the wetness. This is how we build a civilization, he liked to say. We chew our wine.
"You don't look happy," she said. "You haven't looked happy in a while. I want you to feel good again. Say something funny."
"You're the funny one."
"I am always the funny one, the strange one, the tiny one. I want you to assume one of these thankless roles."
They ate in silence for some moments.
"Remember the missile flap?" he said. "It's about ten months now since U-2 planes photographed offensive missiles in Cuba. Guess what? They've come up with something new."
"Do I want to know what it is?"
"A Soviet surveying team has found a major oil field. And it's precisely the area where I'd arranged drilling contracts. I saw the photos last week and they were so detailed I could recognize the terrain. I was there. I stood right there. I visited the fields. We did mineral surveys. There was serious money behind us."
"Your oil. Your field."
"Ours. And better ours than the goddamn Russians. You know what they'll do to that island. Drain the living blood out of it."
"I don't doubt it. But it's hard sometimes to live with a man who never, never, never lets go."
"This is damn right I don't let go."
They let it drop for a while. She got up and turned over the record. It was raining hard and she caught a glimpse of someone running in the street.
"Let me explain about obsessions," he said.
"Oh yes please."
"I take a sweeping view of the subject."
"God yes."
"It's the job of an intelligence service to resolve a nation's obsessions. Cuba is a fixed idea. It is prickly in a way Russia is not. More unresolved. More damaging to the psyche. And this is our job, to remove the psychic threat, to learn so much about Castro, decipher his intentions, undermine his institutions to such a degree that he loses the power to shape the way we think, to shape the way we sleep at night."
"Maybe what I don't understand is why Cuba. Do I know the first thing about this island? Is it West Indian, is it Spanish, is it white, is it black, is it mulatto, is it Latin American, is it Creole, is it Chinese? Why do we think it belongs to us?"
"It's not a question of belongs to us. It's a question of something working beautifully, of private investment being given the chance to help a country rise in the world, and Cuba was rising in distribution, manufacturing, literacy, social services, and any high-school student can make a solid case that the flaws and excesses of the Batista regime could have been contained without a revolution and certainly without a march into the communist camp."
They fell silent again. The power of his feelings made her want to pause. There weren't many things he believed in strongly. She felt a shrinking in herself, the old pathetic readiness to give in quietly. But what was there to fight about? She didn't know the subject. She saw the world in news clippings and picture captions, the world becoming bizarre, the world it is best to see in one-column strips that you send to friends. Refuge only in irony. If her aim was to go unnoticed, then why fight?
"Things are looking better in some areas," he said. "There are things I'm not unhappy about at all. I am making something of a professional comeback. There is, talk of moving me to the Office of Finance. There is a field unit in Buenos Aires. This is not to be discussed, of course. I'll work in money markets, making sure we have foreign currencies on hand for certain operations."
"Is this a plum, Buenos Aires?"
"I don't know where it stands in the fruit-and-vegetable kingdom. It is just goddamn good of them to give me this chance. The Agency understands. It's amazing really how deeply they understand. This is why some of us see the Agency in a way that has nothing to do with jobs or institutions or governments. We are goddamn grateful for their understanding and trust. The Agency is always willing to consider a man in a new light. This is the nature of the business. There are shadows, there are new lights. The deeper the ambiguity, the more we believe, the more we trust, the more we band together."
It was remarkable how often he talked to her about these things. The Agency was the one subject in his life that could never be exhausted. Central Intelligence. Beryl saw it as the best organized church in the Christian world, a mission to collect and store everything that everyone has ever said and then reduce it to a microdot and call it God. She needed to live in small dusty rooms, layered safely in, out of the reach of dizzying things, of heat and light and strange spaces, and Larry needed the great sheltering nave of the Agency. He believed that nothing can be finally known that involves human motive and need. There is always another level, another secret, a way in which the heart breeds a deception so mysterious and complex it can only be taken for a deeper kind of truth.
There were anemones in a bud vase on the table. The phone rang and Beryl went to her desk in the living room to answer. It was a man named Thomas Stainback. She knew from the tone of voice that it was a call Larry would take upstairs. She simply stood in the doorway. When he saw her, he got up from the table. She waited for him to climb the stairs to the guest room and pick up the phone and then she put the receiver down softly and went in to drink her coffee.
Parmenter said, "I'm here," and waited for Everett to ask the first question on the list.
"What do we know about schedule?"
"It looks like mid-November."
"That gives us time. I'm anxious to hear what Mackey is doing."
"He knows we've got Miami. I haven't told him when."
"Tell him right away."
"I can't find him," Parmenter said.
A pause on the other end.
"Is he reassigned?"
"I did some very delicate checking. He's not at the Farm or anywhere else he might logically be. There is no trace. It's beginning to look like he just submerged for a time."
"It's a reassignment," Everett said,
"I looked into it, Win. I was extremely goddamn thorough.
He is not in a cover situation. He is supposed to be training JOTs and he isn't."
"Does it mean he's out? We can't operate without Mackey."
"He's setting up. That's all. He'll get in touch."
"He can't just walk away."
"He'll get in touch. You know the man is solid."