"Yes, show your true colors," Edgar said with a twisted grin.
So that was it. Tipsy and bitter. All right, thought Clyde. If this was to be a night in which old restrictions were eased, why not a turn around the floor?
He approached a woman not only masked but wholly medieval, it seemed, a cloth wound about the head and a long plain cloak sashed at the waist and a tight bodice girdled high under her breasts.
She smiled at him and Clyde said, "Shall we?"
She was tall and fair and wore no makeup and spoke without awe of the evening and its trappings. A levelheaded young lady of the sort that Edgar might admire, and therefore Clyde as well.
She wore a raven's mask.
Clyde 's own mask, an unadorned domino, was in his pocket by now.
"Are we using names," he said, "or shall we abide by strict rules of anonymity?"
"Are there rules in effect? I wasn't aware."
"We'll make our own," he said, surprised by the slightly sexy banter he was generating.
He led her in and out of pairs of bodies ghost-floating to the tune of an old ballad from his youth.
Clyde used to have women friends. But when the Boss started to court other possible proteges, strong-bodied young agents who would serve a social function more than a Bureau function, Clyde knew it was time to submit to Edgar's need for a steadfast and unquestioning friend, a mate of soul and word and unvarying routine. This was a choice that answered Clyde 's own deep need for protection, a place on the safe side of the fortified wall.
Power made his suits fit better.
He saw Edgar being photographed with a group at the far end of the ballroom. Clyde recognized most of the people and noticed how eager Edgar seemed to nestle among them.
Edgar's own power had always been double-skinned. He had the power of his office of course. And also the power that his self-repression gave him. His stern measures as Director were given an odd legitimacy by his personal life, the rigor of his insistent celibacy. Clyde believed this, that Edgar had earned his monocratic power through the days and nights of his self-denial, the rejection of unacceptable impulses. The man was consistent. Every official secret in the Bureau had its blood-birth in Edgar's own soul.
This is what made him a great man.
Conflict. The nature of his desire and the unremitting attempts he made to expose homosexuals in the government. The secret of his desire and the refusal to yield. Great in his conviction. Great in his harsh judgment and traditional background and early American righteousness and great in his quibbling fear and dark shame and great and sad and miserable in his dread of physical contact and in a thousand other torments too deep to name.
Clyde would have done whatever the Boss required.
Knelt down.
Bent over.
Spread out.
Reached around.
But the Boss only wanted his company and his loyalty down to the last sentient instant of his dying breath.
Clyde saw another man, and another, in executioners' hoods. And a figure in a white winding-sheet.
"And that man over there. Having his picture snapped," the young woman said. "That's the person you were sitting with."
"Mr Hoover."
"Mr. Hoover, yes."
"And with him, let me see. The wife of a famous poet. The husband of a famous actress. Two unattached composers. A billionaire with a double chin." Clyde realized he was showing off. 'And a stockbroker-yachtsman, let me think, called Jason Vanover. And his wife, a middling painter called whatever she's called. Sax or Wax or something."
"And you are Mr. Tolson," said the woman.
And how clever, thought Clyde, who was rarely recognized in public and felt a bit flattered and somewhat unsettled as well.
They were dancing cheek, to cheek.
He saw another woman in modified medieval dress, a bit more shrouded and hooded, and it brought to mind-no, not the sixteenth-century painting Edgar was so morbidly fond of, the Bruegel, with its panoramic deathscape. (Edgar had postcards, magazine pages, framed reproductions and enlarged details stored and hung in his basement rumpus room. And he'd ordered Clyde to talk to officials in Madrid about the priceless original and how he might acquire it as a gift to the American people from a Spanish nation grateful for the protective shield of U.S. armed might. But when a B-52 and a tanker collided during routine refueling, earlier this year, and four hydrogen bombs came crashing to earth on the Spanish coast, releasing radioactive materials, Clyde had to deinitiate all discussions.) No, not Bruegel. The nunnish woman brought to mind, of all things and all people, the hip sick dopester comic-Lenny Bruce. No, Lenny Bruce was not a guest at the Black amp; White Ball. Lenny Bruce was dead. Died several months ago, at his home in Los Angeles, of acute morphine poisoning, naked on his toilet floor, limbs gone stiff, mucus trailing out of his nose, his glassy eyes wide open, the syringe still stuck in his arm.
An 8x10 police photo of the bloated body-the picture could have been titled The Triumph of Death-was in the Director's personal files. Why? The horror, the shiver, the hellish sense of religious retribution out of the Middle Ages. And only hours after the body was found a buzz began to circulate in the usual places. Dig it. Lenny's been killed by shadowy forces in the government.
Lynda Bird Johnson danced past with a Secret Service agent.
The rumors had not surprised Clyde. He could smell the decade's paranoid breath. And he wondered suddenly about the woman in his arms. Had he in fact approached her on the dance floor or had she subtly stepped into his path?
A man with a skeleton mask and a woman with a monk's cowl. There, standing at the edge of the bandstand.
"You know my name," Clyde said, "but I'm at a loss, I'm afraid."
"Which doesn't happen very often, does it? But I thought our rules tended to favor nondisclosure."
They were dancing to show tunes from the forties. She pressed slightly closer and seemed to breathe rhythmically in his ear.
"Have you ever seen so many people," she whispered, "gathered in one place in order to be rich, powerful and disgusting together? We can look around us," she whispered, "and see the business executives, the fashion photographers, the government officials, the industrialists, the writers, the bankers, the academics, the pig-faced aristocrats in exile, and we can know the soul of one by the bitter wrinkled body of the other and then know all by the soul of the one. Because they're all part of the same motherfucking thing," she whispered. "Don't you think?"
Well, she just about took his breath away, whoever she was.
"The same thing. What thing?" he said.
"The state, the nation, the corporation, the power structure, the system, the establishment."
So young and lithe and trite. He felt the electric tension of her thighs and breasts passing through his suit.
"If you kiss me," she said, "I'll stick my tongue so far down your throat."
"Yes."
"It will pierce your heart."
Then everything happened at once. Figures in raven faces and skull masks. Figures in white winding-sheets. Monks, nuns, executioners. And he understood of course that the woman in his arms was one of them.
They formed a death rank on the dance floor, halting the music and sending the guests to the fringes. They commanded the room, a masque of silent figures, a plague, a spray of pathogens, and Clyde looked around for Edgar.
The woman slipped away Then the figures trooped across the floor, draped, masked, sheeted and cowled. How had they assembled so deftly? How had they entered the ballroom in the first place?