The Lebanese system for electing a president married the sectarianism of parliament to the other great Lebanese political tradition: corruption. The president was elected by parliament, not the people, which meant that every six years there was a carnival of bribery as the eager parliamentary deputies auctioned off their presidential votes. What made the 1970 election ominous was that the most popular bribes that year seemed to be shipments of weapons and ammunition for the illegal militias that were springing up around the country.
Rogers spent several listless weeks at the office, busying himself with routine work. Tasks that he normally ignored or delegated to others now seemed to preoccupy him. He arrived early each morning and read the overnight cable traffic from Washington, a tedious and generally unrewarding job. He spent hours auditing the accounts of agents under his supervision. He checked and rechecked the station’s watch lists and surveillance reports. Had anyone asked him whether he was depressed, he instantly would have denied it.
At home he was restless and short-tempered, even with his son. The boy’s games of roughhouse and ball-playing, which Rogers usually enjoyed, now gave him a headache. Mark would quiz him about who was leading the Lebanese Soccer League and Rogers would answer dully, “I don’t know.”
Rogers would go into his study immediately after dinner to read. But when the door was closed, he often found he had the energy only for reading newspapers and magazines. Depression was a stranger to Rogers, which was why he found the encounter with it so disorienting. His career had left him unprepared for failure.
Jane Rogers, who had never seen her husband in such a prolonged melancholy, was uncertain how to deal with it. Over cocktails, she would wait for him to light the spark-to speak about a small event at work, or something he had seen on the way home, or a trip they would all take to the country, or some other flicker of conversation. But the spark didn’t come, leaving Jane sitting in silence with a drink in her hand, wondering what was wrong. She didn’t ask, of course. That was against the rules.
Jane eventually tried various gambits to bring her husband out of his gray mood. She embarked on conversational jaunts of her own, chatting about plays and novels and the latest news from the ladies at Smith’s grocery. She experimented in the kitchen, cooking elaborate Lebanese dishes with garlic and yogurt. She even bought a manual of sexual instruction from a bookstore on Hamra Street and, following its advice, picked up her husband one evening after work dressed in a raincoat with absolutely nothing underneath. In the car on the way home, she unbelted the raincoat and let it slip open till it revealed the curve of her breast and her bare thighs. They made love lustily that night, beginning in the stairwell on the way up to the apartment, and Jane thought she had found a cure.
But the next morning the emptiness and sense of failure returned for Rogers. Jane wished that he would be less polite and scream out his unhappiness. But that was against the rules, too.
What saved Rogers from utter despair in those weeks was his daughter Amy. Her health preoccupied Rogers. He took her to the doctor, checked her temperature and pulse every morning, tested her reactions with a silver mallet. And he rejoiced when the signs from all these tests confirmed what the doctor said. She was getting better. Rogers found that some days his daughter was the only person in the world he truly wanted to see. He would sit with her in his lap in the evening and rock her slowly to sleep. Sometimes he would even bring her with him into his study after dinner and let her play on the floor while he read. It was as if her physical illness and Rogers’s spiritual wound had combined in Rogers’s mind and become extensions of each other.
Jane resolved to see the difficult period through. She gave Rogers room to brood, made few demands on him, and waited for the clouds to clear.
As she lay awake in bed on one of these somber evenings, Jane thought of a boat in the fog. It was a boat her parents had chartered one summer, and they were cruising off the coast of Maine. In the thick fog she could hear the sound of waves breaking against the rocks on the shore, and the sound of foghorns from other boats, and the occasional clanging sound of a buoy marking the channel. But she couldn’t actually see anything beyond a few feet, the fog was so dense. She saw her father, staring at the ship’s compass, glancing from time to time at a chart, steering a course toward the next mark. He was muttering to himself as he tried to keep the boat on its compass heading.
I know where I want to be, her father had grumbled, but I don’t know where I am.
That muttered remark in the fog off the Maine coast was the very heart of the truth, Jane thought to herself. You could hear and feel the world around you, but you couldn’t see anything clearly. You did your best to steer a course by dead reckoning, with no certainty even that you were heading in the right direction.
Rogers ignored Fuad. The Lebanese agent was part of an operation that was dead, as far as Rogers was concerned. Rogers approved his expense vouchers and signed a weekly report for the auditors, but otherwise he left Fuad alone. Eventually, after a few weeks, Fuad became restless and left a message in one of the dead drops requesting a meeting with his case officer.
“Have I done wrong?” asked Fuad when they met. “Why do you ignore me?”
“I’m sorry,” said Rogers. “I’ve been very busy.”
Fuad nodded. Rogers was, for him, such a towering figure that it would not have occurred to him that the American might have problems of his own. It would have been easier for Fuad to imagine the sun not rising.
“I am at your service,” said Fuad. “If there is any project you would like me to undertake, I am ready.”
Rogers heard the eagerness and loyalty in Fuad’s voice and felt ashamed. Agents are like children, he thought to himself. They are utterly dependent on their case officers for work, protection, meaning, survival. They cannot live alone. The part of them that was independent has been destroyed by the process of recruitment.
“Fuad,” said Rogers in as commanding a voice as he could summon. “There is one thing I would like you to do.”
“What is that, Effendi?” asked Fuad. He already looked a little happier.
“I am going to be very busy with other work for a while. So I won’t be able to meet with Jamal. I’ve asked other people to help out on that.”
Fuad nodded. He was disappointed, but trying not to let it show.
“I would like you to keep an eye on Jamal for me,” Rogers continued. “Make sure that he is adequately protected. That he has enough bodyguards, that he isn’t spending money too wildly. That he isn’t leaving himself vulnerable to anyone. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, Effendi,” said Fuad. His posture had changed. He was a man restored.
Rogers was not. After rousing himself to deal with Fuad, he fell back into his numbness. Indeed, the brief discussion of Jamal only made him sorrier that his role in the operation had ended in failure.
Hoffman, who had been watching Rogers’s melancholia mount day by day, eventually decided that he had had enough. There was room in the station for one prima donna, and that post was already filled by Hoffman himself. One afternoon in late June, the station chief called Rogers into his office.
“Sit down, my boy,” said Hoffman when Rogers arrived. “Listen to me carefully, because I’m going to tell you three crucial words that will matter a great deal in your career.”
“Yes, sir,” said Rogers dutifully.
“Illegitimi non carborundum,” said Hoffman, reciting a Latin phrase.
“What?” asked Rogers.
“Illegitimi non carborundum,” repeated Hoffman. “Those are the three words.”
“What do they mean?” asked Rogers.
“They mean: ‘Don’t let the bastards get you down.’ ”
“Where did you learn that?” asked Rogers, rousing himself slightly.