“Harvard,” said Hoffman.
“Harvard?” said Rogers sitting up straight in his chair. “I didn’t know you went to Harvard.”
“I didn’t,” said Hoffman. “I went to Holy Cross. But we used to play Harvard in football.”
“So?”
“So when we played in Cambridge, I made a practice of listening to the Harvard band. They were the smart ones, you see, and they liked to sing in Latin just to show everybody how smart they were. When everyone else sang ‘Ten Thousand Men of Harvard,’ they sang their Latin number, ‘Illegitimi non carborundum.’ Would you like me to sing it for you?”
“No thanks,” said Rogers.
Hoffman started singing anyway, bobbing his large head until Rogers finally cracked a smile.
“Gaudeamus igitur,” sang Hoffman vigorously.
“Veritas, non sequitur!” His hands were gesturing in the air like a conductor’s.
“Illegitimi non carborundum. Ipso, facto!” He bowed slightly in Rogers’s direction when he had finished.
“Not bad,” said Rogers.
“Don’t let the bastards get you down,” repeated Hoffman.
There was a brief interlude of silence. Hoffman resumed his tune, humming it sotto voce.
“God damn it!” said Rogers, raising his voice above the sound of Hoffman’s humming, finally allowing himself to get angry at something, in this instance Hoffman’s relentless good humor.
“What’s bugging you, anyway?” asked Hoffman.
“What’s bugging me?”
“Correct,” said Hoffman. “You.”
“Isn’t that obvious?” answered Rogers. “They’re trying to take my case away from me!”
“My boy, they are not trying,” said Hoffman. “They are taking your case away from you. It’s done. Over. Finished. Kaput. So wise up, and stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
“Thanks,” muttered Rogers. “That makes me feel a lot better.”
“It could be worse, my boy. They could have fired you.”
“They probably should have,” said Rogers. “I let them down-especially Stone.”
“Forget Stone.”
“He tried to help. When I went back to Washington a few months ago, he took me to dinner at his club and gave me a long lecture about control and self-control. He was on the mark.”
“Did you say he gave you a lecture about self-control?”
“Yes.”
“In this little lecture, I don’t suppose he told you his story about the Brit-‘C’-and how he cut off his leg with a penknife, did he?”
“As a matter of fact, he did,” said Rogers. “What of it?”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” said Hoffman. “Except that the story is total bullshit.”
“It is?”
“Yup! ‘C’ lost his leg in a car wreck all right, but he didn’t cut it off himself. That’s a legend the Brits have been circulating for fifty years. Stone tells it to everybody. It’s his favorite story. But it ain’t true. So wise up. Nobody’s perfect. Not ‘C’. Not Stone. Not you.”
Rogers shook his head. He had no idea who was telling the truth: Stone, Hoffman, or perhaps, neither of them.
“Do you want my advice?” asked Hoffman.
Rogers didn’t answer.
“My advice is, fuck ’em. The whole lot of them.”
“That’s helpful,” said Rogers.
“Seriously,” said Hoffman. It was a word Rogers hadn’t heard him use. “I think you need a break from the Palestinian account. Change of scene. Catch your breath. Forget about how your colleagues in the front office are mistreating you. Let them screw things up for a while. How does that sound?”
“I don’t want a vacation, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Look, smart ass, if you think I can spare my best man just because he’s having an identity crisis, forget it.”
Rogers’s face showed a flicker of interest.
“What I had in mind,” continued Hoffman, “was that you spend some time on the other side, in East Beirut with the Christians. Prowl around. Make some contacts. See what’s out there. Something’s going on with them, or my name isn’t Nathan M. Pusey.”
“Like what?” Rogers asked.
“Like some kind of secret underground movement.”
“What in the world does that mean?”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t need you, would I?”
“Don’t you already have people on that account?”
“Second-raters.”
“I don’t know,” said Rogers, still wary.
“Well, I do! Anyway, it isn’t a suggestion. It’s an order.”
“Yes, sir,” said Rogers. As he spoke, he was already making a mental inventory of what would be necessary for the task Hoffman had described.
“I’ll need access to the files. And I’ll need to know who’s already on our payroll, so we don’t buy the same people twice.”
“Permission granted,” said Hoffman.
“Thank you.”
“But I can save you a lot of trouble by telling you the simple truth, which is that our agents in East Beirut are a bunch of flaming assholes who are good at only one thing, which is stealing money.”
“So where do I begin?”
“If it were me,” said Hoffman, “I would begin with our esteemed colleague in the Lebanese Deuxieme Bureau, General Fadi Jezzine.”
“Why him?” asked Rogers. His image of General Jezzine, from dinner at the ambassador’s house months ago, was of an elegant, austere man in a tuxedo who seemed, to Rogers, to typify the political and economic system that was strangling Lebanon.
“Because the general knows where all the bodies are buried on the Christian side,” said Hoffman.
“Who owns a piece of him?”
“Everybody,” answered Hoffman. “And nobody. The good general sells information to us, the Israelis, the Syrians, the Egyptians. He’s a regular supermarket. He’s got something for everyone. Which means he’s never completely in the bag for any one customer. What’s more, he understands the first rule of the intelligence business.”
“Which is?”
“Which is: Don’t give anything away for free. When you have a piece of information, sell it, or trade it. But don’t give it away.”
“How am I going to get anything new out of him?”
“That’s your problem,” said Hoffman. “By the way, if you strike out with the general, try his wife. She’s a firecracker.”
“I know.”
“You know the lady?”
“Slightly,” said Rogers. “I sat next to her one night at a dinner party when she got drunk and denounced the Palestinians.”
“Excellent.”
Rogers turned and began to walk out of the office.
“Guadeamus igitur!” called out Hoffman.
“What does that mean?” asked Rogers.
“Let us make merry.”
21
East Beirut; July 1970
Rogers embraced the new assignment as if he was starting a new life. He spent his days in East Beirut, among the Christian elite, making new contacts and renewing old ones. Several weeks after his conversation with Hoffman, he had wangled an invitation to lunch at the Jezzines’ house in the mountains northeast of Beirut.
The luncheon took place on a bright summer day that seemed hot when Rogers left his apartment in West Beirut. He was dressed casually, in a light summer suit and open-necked shirt, and his cowboy boots. When he reached the mountains near the Jezzines’ village, the air was chillier and Rogers wished he had brought a sweater.
The village, on the slopes of Mount Lebanon, had been tidied up for the arrival of a special visitor. There was a string of lights across the main street, shining dully and almost invisibly at midday, and Lebanese flags were fluttering from many of the stone houses. As Rogers drove down the road, he noticed that in the windows of some of the houses were faces, staring silently at him.
The village was the ancestral home of the Jezzine clan. Their villa sat atop the highest hill, sheltered in a grove of cedar trees. As Rogers neared the house, he saw a barricade ahead in the road. It was manned by peasant boys dressed in black and carrying automatic weapons. They stopped him, asked to see his passport. When they had established that he was the important American vistor who was expected that day, the gunmen insisted on driving Rogers the remaining one hundred yards to the house.