“Get back to it?” the man scoffed. “You haven’t even started it.”
“How did you—”
“No bookmark. And if I know my Beau Query—and I think I do—I bet you got yourself a personalized bookmark that moves from book to book, and you never start a new one before finishing the last.”
“My name is Querrey. Beau-Christian Querrey.”
“Don’t blame me for that. I only just met you.” The man grinned. “C’mon. Show me the bookmark. Come on.”
Despite himself, BC snorted and reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a wafer-thin rectangle the size of a charge plate. It was made of ivory, however, rather than cardboard or plastic, and had a finely engraved image of—
“Why, that’s just too poignant, ain’t it?” The CIA man snatched the bookmark from BC’s hand. “Huck and Tom rafting down the Mississippi. Poignant and pointed. Practically on—the—nose,” he said, tapping his broad nostrils with the corner of the card. “Well, now, that’s got a edge to it.” He rasped the bookmark over the shiny stubble on his cheek. “Bet you use that to cut pages, too, don’t you?”
BC would have snatched the bookmark from the man’s hand, but it had belonged to his mother, and his mother had taught him not to snatch.
“But now lemme think here,” the man said, scratching his face with the bookmark and staring at the book in his other hand. “Subversive content, sub-ver-sive con-tent. Why, that sounds like COINTELPRO work to me. So I gotta ask: what’d you do to get demoted?”
“Counterintelligence is one of the most prestigious—” BC stopped himself. This interrogation had reached an absurd pitch. Had the man researched him before getting on the train? And if so, why?
“See, only two kinds of agent end up in Counterintelligence: the ones who’ve served the Bureau long enough to prove to J. Edna that their first loyalty is to him rather than the law, in which case they’re sent out to infiltrate whatever group’s got his panties in a bunch—socialists, suffragettes, and of course the darkies—and the ones who’re a little too independent for their own good. Maybe they open up a closed case to prove someone was convicted on faulty or, dare I say it, falsified evidence, or they call the local paper before they make a bust to make sure their picture ends up on the front page. The only thing J. Edna hates more than an open case is when a story about the Bureau mentions someone’s name other than his. Of course he can’t fire you for doing your job, so instead you get mustered out of—” He squinted at BC. “Organized Crime? Behavioral Profiling?”
“Profiling.” BC sighed.
“And now you’re reading weirdo novels looking for subversive content and taking long train rides to—well, I guess we’re back where we started, ain’t we? Where are you heading today, Beau?”
The man’s read on his career was so accurate that BC had to laugh, if uncomfortably.
“At this point I’m pretty sure there’s nothing I can say about myself that you don’t already know, so why don’t you tell me something: were you really in Cuba?”
The man’s lips curled oddly around his cigar, and it took BC a moment to realize he was smiling.
“Would you like me to have been in Cuba, Beau?”
“I’d like you to be in Cuba right now.”
A roar of laughter erupted from the man’s mouth.
“D’you hear that, boy? He’d like me to be in Cuba right now! That’s the best thing I heard since you called me a nigger!”
BC looked over his shoulder, saw the Negro conductor marching slow and steady down the aisle with a glass in each hand. He set the drinks down and scurried away, even as wet smoky laughter continued to burble out of BC’s companion’s throat.
“Let me explain the difference between an intelligence agent and a federal agent, Beau. See, a spy understands information’s value isn’t its accuracy, but how it can be deployed. The question isn’t, Was I in Cuba, but, Can I make you believe I was in Cuba?”
BC couldn’t help himself. He made a grab for his book, but the man was faster, held it above his head like a game of keep-away. But then, smiling, he tossed it to BC, who held it in both hands like a puppy for one embarrassing moment, then set it on the table.
The man sucked on his cigar and smiled wickedly. “What was his name?”
“Who?” BC said, although he knew what the man was talking about.
“The guy you got out of jail.”
BC rolled his eyes. “Roosevelt Jones.”
“Well, that answers my next question, don’t it?”
“Yes.” BC sighed. “He was a Negro.”
The CIA man scrutinized him a moment, and then a broad smile spread across his face.
“You got your picture in the paper too, didn’t you?”
BC had been waiting for the question. “Well, I couldn’t very well get an innocent man out of jail and then leave a crime unsolved, could I?”
The CIA man laughed even louder than he had before. “Well, get a load-a you! I wouldn’t-a thought you had it in you.” Suddenly the man’s voice leveled. “Well?”
Once again BC knew what the man was referring to; once again he pretended ignorance.
“Well what?”
“Yeah, you might be a good detective, but you’re a terrible actor. So just tell me: did the Bureau manufacture evidence to convict Nigger Jones?”
BC steeled himself.
“No.”
The man smiled again, but this time it was a mean smile. Mean, but not surprised, which only made BC’s shame greater.
“Like I said, Beau: you’re a terrible actor.”
BC’s eyes dropped, and there was the novel the director had given him that morning. He couldn’t decide which was more absurd: the man sitting across from him, or the fact that he was being paid six thousand dollars a year to read a book.
Suddenly an idea came to him.
“Are you really CIA?” he said. “Or is this just some elaborate prank the director worked up to, I don’t know, trick me into divulging Bureau secrets to unauthorized personnel?”
The man placed a spread-fingered hand on his chest, and for the first time BC noticed the hole under his lapel, just over his heart. “Did I ever say I was CIA?”
“Because if you are CIA,” BC continued, “it seems like an awfully big coincidence that we’re on the same train, in the same car, at the same time.”
“Coincidental?” The man waggled his cigar like Groucho Marx. “Maybe even suspicious? Or just too good to be true? Who knows, maybe the Company sent someone to follow you up to Millbrook?”
BC opened his mouth, then closed it. This wasn’t proof that the man was CIA, after all. He could still be the director’s stool pigeon. He’d heard stranger rumors about his boss.
“So tell me, Beau.” BC’s companion was clearly enjoying his indecision. “What’d the director tell you about Project Orpheus? I’m guessing from your choice of reading material that he either told you nothing at all, or, even more likely, he told you everything, and you can’t quite bring yourself to believe it, because then you’d have to admit to yourself that not only the Central Intelligence Agency but the Federal Bureau of Investigation is spending thousands—millions—of dollars on investigations that can only be called, well, stupid as shit. Pure science fiction,” he said, tapping the cover of BC’s book. “Truth serums. Brainwashing. Manchurian candidates even.”
“The Manchurian Candidate8 is a novel,” BC said, grabbing his book and staring down at the cover. An electrifying novel of our world as it might have been. He flipped the book open and pretended to read the first page, which happened to be blank.
“C’mon, Beau, I’m trying to help you out. Restore your faith in your employer. You don’t think the director’d send an agent of the prestigious Counterintelligence Program all the way up to New York State to check out a bit of science fiction, do you? There’s got to be something else involved, right? Someone else maybe? A VIP who has to be handled delicately? Lemme guess. He mentioned Chandler Forrestal? Told you how prominent his family is?”