J. Edgar Hoover.
The phone message hadn't been that garbled after all. I was in the hands of the FBI.
I don't know if you truly see all your life flashing before you when you're drowning. I do know that over the next few minutes I reviewed every punishable thing I'd ever done. Not just going topless or nearly demolishing a Chicago traffic cop. I went way back. I started with the time I peed against the back wall of Olivet Presbyterian Church in Arlington Heights, when I was nine years old and caught short on my way to Sunday School. I covered cheating on my college entrance examination, and the false claim I'd filed for fire losses when my dormitory burned—the bed and innerspring mattress I'd claimed hadn't really belonged to me at all, but to my buddy in Alpha Kappa Nu. I even remembered what I had censored clear out of my waking consciousness, the one time I'd really got close to serious trouble with the Arabs. It wasn't a prideful memory. My high-school buddy Tim Karasueritis and I had put away three bottles of illegal beer, practicing to be macho. It wasn't bad enough that I threw up. What made it really bad was that I did it right on the corner of Randolph and Wacker, in front of the biggest, richest mosque in all Chicagoland. And when I had poured it all out on the sidewalk Tim took his turn. While I was holding his head over the curb, I looked up. There was a hajji, white beard and green turban, looking at us with furious and accusing eyes. Bad scene! I thought we'd had it for sure, but I guess even Arab hajjis have teenaged kids. He didn't say a word. He just stared at us for a long, long moment, then turned and went into the mosque. Maybe he came out again with the Arab equivalent of the cops, but before then we were long gone, running when we could manage it and somehow staggering away anyway when we couldn't.
Oh, I plumbed my depths. I searched every indictable or reprehensible or merely obnoxious memory I had, without finding one that would justify the FBI coming after me in the middle of the night.
After ten minutes, I got brave enough to decide to tell somebody this fact. There wasn't anybody to tell. They had sat me down in a small room with little furniture. Bear in mind that all I was wearing was a bathing suit. It had long since dried out, sure, but they had the windows open somewhere in the offices, and cold Lake Michigan breezes were coming in under the door—the, as I discovered when my courage reached the point of trying it, locked door.
Funnily, even though I wore so little, they had insisted on searching me. They were taking no chance that I might be carrying a weapon, I supposed—either to attack one of them, or (maybe in a fit of contrition at the enormity of my crimes, whatever those crimes might turn out to be) to kill myself and spoil their plans for me.
Unfortunately I couldn't think of anything in my past worth killing for. It was embarrassing not to know what I was arrested for, but I couldn't do anything about that. I couldn't do anything much at all. Not only was the door locked, but there was very little in this tiny room to do anything with. There was a loudspeaker up high, behind a grille, that was playing music—violins, mostly; longhair stuff. There was a desk. It was absolutely bare on top, and what it might have inside its drawers I could not know. When I got up the nerve to just accidentally happen to tug at one of them it was as locked as the door. There was an upholstered swivel chair behind the desk, and a straight-backed wooden one before it. No one was present to tell me which one I might sit in, but I took the wooden one anyway.
I sat, my arms wrapped around me against the cold, and thought.
And then, without warning, the door opened, and Chief Agent Christophe came in.
Chief Agent Christophe was a woman.
Chief Agent Nyla Christophe was not the only one who came through the door, but there was no doubt who was who. She was the boss. The others with her, two men and a plump, middle-aged woman, demonstrated that fact by body language.
It took me a while to get over my surprise. Of course, everybody knew that the FBI had begun recruiting woman agents a while earlier. No one would expect to see one. They were like woman taxi drivers or woman doctors; you knew they existed because when one did show up anywhere it got onto the newsreels and you saw it the next time you went to the movies. That wouldn't happen with FBI agents, of course. No personality story about an FBI agent was ever going to turn up as a human-interest brightener in the weekly newsreel. Any cameraman who tried to do one would be in the soup— charged, probably, with something like reckless endangerment, for exposing a government operative to possible criminal retribution. Then he would turn up in an interrogation room in fear of his life. . .
Very much like me.
Anyway, in she came. First there was a big guy to open the door for her, then Chief Agent Chnstophe, then the fat lady, then another big guy to close it. She glanced at me as she came in, abstractedly: Oh, yes, there's the piece of furniture that belongs in this room. I looked back at her, with, I am sure, a lot more concentration. Nyla Chnstophe was a good-looking woman of a certain type. The type was big-boned and athletic. She had her hair tied behind in a ponytail, and pale blue eyes. She kept her hands folded behind her as she walked, in the style of a British admiral from the age of sail. She gave commands like an admiral. To the two huskies: "Tie him." To the plump lady who panted to the desk and pulled out a shorthand pad: "Write: August seventeenth, 1983, Chief Agent N. Christophe conducting interview of Dominic DeSota." To me:
"Make it easy on yourself, DeSota.Just give us the truth, answer all the questions, and we'll be through here in twenty minutes. First take the oath."
That wasn't good. To be put on oath right away meant that they were pretty serious. What I was going to tell them wasn't just going to be information received in an investigation. It was going to be evidence. The woman-stenographer stood up and held out the books to me, wheezing the words for me to repeat after her. I stretched my hand from Bible to Koran, little finger on one, thumb touching the binding of the other, and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God the Merciful, the All-Seeing, and the Avenging. "Fine, Dominic," said Chnstophe as the huskies retied my right hand. She glanced at her watch as though she really thought we might get out of there in twenty minutes. "Now,just tell me why you were trying to break into Daleylab."
I goggled. "Do what?"
"Break into Daleylab," she said patiently. "What were you looking for?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.
It was not the answer Agent Christophe wanted to hear. "Oh, shit, Dominic," she said crossly, "I hoped you were going to be sensible about this. Are you pretending you never heard of Daleylab?"
"Of course not." Everybody knew what Daleylab was—or, anyway, knew that it was some kind of hush-hush military research place, way southwest of Chicago. I'd driven near it dozens of times. "But, Miss Christophe—"
"Agent Christophe."
"Agent Christophe, I really don't know what you mean. I've never been in Daleylab. I certainly didn't try to break in."
"Oh, sweet Fatima," she said with a groan, bringing her hands together for the first time. There was a surprise. Chief Agent Christophe would have had a little trouble taking the oath herself if anyone had asked her to. She didn't have any thumbs.
It was not that unusual to see thumbless people, of course. It was a standard sentence for, like, second-offense thieves, or pickpockets, or sometimes an adulteress or a death-by-auto killer. But it was quite unusual, I thought, to come across a thumbless FBI agent.