The table made an affirmative noise.
“What is Ms. Hart’s story?” Stone asked the columnist.
“Well, let’s see if I can encapsulate it in one short paragraph,” the man said. “Well-brought-up girl comes to Washington and works for an important senator, one Gerald Hart, of Virginia; marries senator; senator dies, leaving a widow surprised that he left her so little; senator’s federal pension is insufficient to keep widow in style to which she has become accustomed; then someone offers her funds to tide her over, affection presumed; then someone else offers, and pretty soon widow is living stylishly again.”
“I hear Milly has a stylish clientele, too,” the anchorman’s wife said.
“Was Brix Kendrick among them?” the columnist’s wife asked, directing her question to Stone.
“You tell us,” Stone said, “please. We’re new in town.”
“Frankly,” said the anchorman, “I don’t know how Brix could afford her, on his White House salary.”
The senator grinned. “Perhaps someone should audit Brix’s books at the White House,” he said, pointing his fork at Fair. “After all, he reigned over a considerable budget. My committee has seen the numbers.”
“Senator,” Fair said, “the audit has already been done, and everything was in apple-pie order.”
“Apple pie can be messy,” the senator replied.
“Not our apple pie,” Fair said.
“Oh, that’s right,” the senator said. “Will Lee is notoriously proper about budgets.”
“And notoriously transparent, too,” Fair responded.
“No skeletons in that closet, then,” the senator admitted.
“Well,” said the columnist, “not the budgetary closet, anyway. There are, of course, other closets, and upright, dull Brix was, apparently, occupying a crowded one.”
That got a laugh from the table.
“I should think,” the senator’s wife said, “that that would make Brix neither upright nor dull. I can’t imagine how a man of his age could manage so well.” She shot a meaningful glance at her husband across the table, and he looked uncomfortable.
“Someone has pointed out to me,” Stone said, “that, at fifty-one, Brix’s age, half of American males are experiencing erectile dysfunction. Has it occurred to anyone that Brix might be among the other half? Or perhaps among an even smaller percentage who are raging bulls at that age?”
“Hugh Hefner is in his eighties,” Fair said, “and he seems to be holding up well.”
The senator snorted. “All that guy has to do is lie still,” he said, “and they do it for him.”
The anchorman laughed. “I hope I can lie that still when I’m his age.”
“I hope so, too, dear,” his wife said.
Shelley spoke up. “Would anyone care to hazard a guess as to who else is on Milly Hart’s preferred list?”
“At least one senator, I hear,” the columnist said, raising his eyebrows in the direction of the senator present.
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“I wouldn’t know about that,” the senator said. “And even if I did, senate cloakroom gossip is privileged.”
“Only if we can’t pry it out of you,” Fair said.
Everybody laughed.
“He’s apparently right,” his wife said. “He won’t even tell me what’s said in that cloakroom.”
“I recall,” the columnist said, “that Warren G. Harding, when he was a senator, is alleged to have impregnated a young woman on a sofa in that cloakroom.”
“That the young woman was impregnated by Warren G. is not in doubt, though the geography in question is a little hazy. I think that information,” the senator said, “was traced to the young woman herself, though she may have embroidered her story for effect. It did not come from one of Senator Harding’s colleagues, though.”
Everyone moved back to the living room for coffee, and Stone asked Fair for the powder room.
“I believe it’s occupied,” Fair said, “but use my bathroom.” She pointed to a door.
Stone opened it and found himself in a very feminine bedroom. He crossed it and found the bath, and while he stood at the toilet, he could not keep himself from opening the medicine chest on the wall before his nose. He found prescription bottles for a painkiller, a sleeping pill, and a couple he did not recognize.
Also, he was intrigued to find a clear plastic case containing four lipsticks, the same brand that he had been told about by Shelley, apparently part of a promotion, none of which was Pagan Spring. There was, however, an empty space in the case. One lipstick had been removed.
He stopped by her dressing table on his way back to the living room, but found no Pagan Spring there, either. He was, he reflected, going to have to make a trip to a drugstore.
23
Teddy Fay had finished bringing his hangar apartment up to his standard of living, and now he sat at his work table, putting the final touches on a peeler/slicer combination for his usual client. He prepared it for sending to a mail drop in Missouri that would, in turn, forward it to the addressee. In due course, if his client found it acceptable, and Teddy was certain he would, funds would be wired to a numbered account in the Cayman Islands, making Teddy awash in cash. Royalties from later sales would keep the stream flowing.
Bored with the fine work, he turned his thoughts elsewhere, and a whim struck him. He donned a fresh pair of latex gloves and opened a packet of very common stationery, sold in many drugstores, then uncapped his silver Montblanc pen.
My dear Miss Holly Barker: It has been some time since we last communicated, and longer still since we actually met, and I felt I should express a few thoughts to you.
I am aware that you have risen quickly in the estimation of your colleagues at the Agency and that with the rather self-serving help of Lance Cabot, the ultimate careerist, and the approbation of Director Katharine Rule Lee, you have moved up in the Agency’s structure with considerable speed. I am aware, too, that you have been assigned, from time to time, to supervise operations. This, again, is self-serving on Lance’s part, since it is important to him to have an assistant deputy director with actual experience with running agents.di, y/div>
However, there is beginning to appear a blot on your copybook, as it were, and you must take steps to correct that, if you do not wish your progress up the ladder to be impeded in committee. I refer, as you may have supposed, to the assignment of young Todd Bacon to his current task, and to his repeated failures to complete it successfully.
Young Todd is, in many respects, the ideal officer. He is a planner, meticulous and thorough, and can even be inventive. He lacks, however, the most important qualities of the best operatives: imagination and the ability to improvise on the move. Like a mediocre chess player, he thinks only of the next move and not the two or three down the road.
That having been said, the Agency has always needed people like Todd Bacon to do the planning and dogwork that every operation requires, without actually serving at the pointed end of the mission, where dash and quick thinking are required for success. It occurs to me that young Todd is very nearly at the point where it would be difficult if not impossible to move him sideways into a position where he could contribute on a consistent basis and earn himself some praise and, eventually, a pension.
I know, of course, that his current assignment is off the books and, thus, not subject to the usual committee scrutiny that accompanies most operations, but that very fact puts you, and to a lesser extent Lance, in the hot seat. Lance, to the lesser extent, because if there should be heat to be taken, he will arrange for you to take it.
So, it is time for one of two things to happen: either close the books on Todd’s mission and reassign him (it occurs to me that the boy might eventually do well in my old department, Technical Services-he is, after all, proficient with computers, weapons, and the like), or, the other thing: assign someone with both the professional and personal qualities to make a success of the mission.