She turned back to Jack Lovett and smiled.
I had known Inez Victor for perhaps a year but I had never before seen her smile that way.
“He can’t stay,” she said then. “Because he’s running a little coup somewhere. I just bet.”
There it is, the first look.
The instructiveness of the moment remains moot.
Actually I know a lot about Jack Lovett.
Some men (fewer women) are solitary, unattached to any particular place or institution, most comfortable not exactly alone but in the presence of strangers. They are comfortable for example on airplanes. They buckle in, establish certain ground rules with the cabin crew (to be woken or not woken, extra ice or none, a reading light that works and a move after Singapore to the bulkhead seat); stake out blankets, pillows, territory. They are solaced by the menus with the Dong Kingman water colors on the cover, by the soothing repetition of the meal (Rôti au Vol, Legumes Garnis) at arbitrary intervals during flights that run eleven, twelve, twenty-two hours. A flight of fewer than eight hours is a hop, a trip these men barely recognize. On the ground they seem easy only in hotel lobbies and transit lounges, in the Express Check-Ins and Clipper Clubs of the world, sealed environments in which they always remember the names of the attendants who make the drinks and arrange the connecting flights. Such men also recognize one another, and exchange desultory recollections of other travels, absent travelers.
“That joint venture in Dakar,” one hears them say.
“Frank was in Dakar.”
“I saw Frank in Hong Kong Friday, he’d come down out of China.”
“Frank and I were in a meeting in Surabaya with this gentleman who didn’t speak a word of English. He sat through this meeting nodding and smiling, you know, a regular buddha, and then he spoke the only English words I ever heard him speak. ‘Six hundred million sterling,’ he said.”
“They all speak sterling.”
“Frank takes it in stride, a real player, looks at his watch and stands up. ‘You decide you want to talk a reasonable number,’ Frank says to the buddha, in English you understand, ‘you can reach me tonight at the Hilton.’ No change of expression from the buddha. The buddha thinks Frank’s going to sweat out this call in Jakarta. ‘In Manila,’ Frank says then. ‘The Hilton in Manila.’ ”
They recall other Franks, other meetings, Hiltons around the world. They are reserved, wary, only professionally affable. Their responses seem pragmatic but are often peculiarly abstract, based on systems they alone understand. They view other people as wild cards, useful in the hand but dangerous in the deck, and they gravitate to occupations in which they can deal their own hand, play their own system, their own information. All information is seen as useful. Inaccurate information is in itself accurate information about the informant.
I said that Jack Lovett was one of those men for whom information was an end in itself.
He was also a man for whom the accidental did not figure.
Many people are intolerant of the accidental, but this was something more: Jack Lovett did not believe that accidents happen. In Jack Lovett’s system all behavior was purposeful, and the purpose could be divined by whoever attracted the best information and read it most correctly. A Laotian village indicated on one map and omitted on another suggested not a reconnaissance oversight but a population annihilated, x number of men, women, and children lined up one morning between the maps and bulldozed into a common ditch. A shipment of laser mirrors from Long Beach to a firm in Hong Kong that did no laser work suggested not a wrong invoice but transshipment, re-export, the diversion of technology to unfriendly actors. All nations, to Jack Lovett, were “actors,” specifically “state actors” (“non-state actors” were the real wild cards here, but in Jack Lovett’s extensive experience the average non-state actor was less interested in laser mirrors than in M-16s, AK-47s, FN-FALs, the everyday implements of short-view power, and when the inductive leap to the long view was made it would probably be straight to weapons-grade uranium), and he viewed such actors abstractly, as friendly or unfriendly, committed or uncommitted; as assemblies of armaments on a large board. Asia was ten thousand tanks here, three hundred Phantoms there. The heart of Africa was an enrichment facility.
5
THE woman to whom Jack Lovett was married from 1945 until 1952 described his occupation, whenever during the course of their marriage she applied for a charge account or filled out the forms for a new gynecologist or telephone or gas connection, as “army officer.” In fact Carla Lovett made a convincing army wife, a druggist’s daughter from San Jose who was comfortable shopping at the commissary and spending large parts of her day at the officers’ club swimming pool, indifferent to her surroundings, passive in bad climates. Fort Hood and Georgetown and Manila and Schofield Barracks were the same to Carla Lovett, particularly after a drink or two.
The woman to whom Jack Lovett was married from 1962 until 1964 was a Honolulu divorcee named Betty Bennett, a woman who lived only a few doors from Janet and Dick Ziegler on Kahala beach and with whom Janet Ziegler occasionally played bridge and discussed shopping trips to the mainland. Betty Bennett had received the Kahala house as part of the settlement from her first husband, and continued to live in it during and after her marriage to Jack Lovett, an eighteen-month crossed connection that left little impression on either of them. When Betty Bennett filed for her divorce from Jack Lovett (I say “her” divorce reflexively, I suppose because Betty Bennett was a woman who applied the possessive pronoun reflexively, as in “my house,” “my 450-SL,” “my wedding lunch”) she described his occupation as “aircraft executive.” According to Jack Lovett’s visa applications in 1975 he was a businessman. According to Jack Lovett’s business cards in 1975 he was a consultant in international development.
According to Jack Lovett himself he was someone who had “various irons in the fire.”
Someone who kept “the usual balls in the air.”
Someone who did “a little business here and there.”
Someone who did what he could.
Anyone who did any reporting at all during the middle and late sixties and early seventies was apt to have run into Jack Lovett. He was a good contact. He knew a lot of things. After I finished my first novel and left Vogue and started reporting I actually ran into him quite a bit, most often in Honolulu but occasionally in one or another transit lounge or American embassy, and perhaps because he identified me as a friend of Inez Victor’s he seemed to exempt me from his instinctive distrust of reporters. I am not saying that he ever told me anything he did not want me to know. I am saying only that we talked, and once in a while we even talked about Inez Victor. I recall one such conversation in 1971 in Honolulu and another in 1973, on a Garuda 727 that had jammed its landing gear and was in the process of dumping its fuel over the South China Sea. Jack Lovett told me for example that he considered Inez “one of the most noble” women he had ever met. I remember this specifically because the word “noble” seemed from another era, and as such surprising, and mildly amusing.
He never told me exactly what it was he did, nor would I have asked. Exactly what Jack Lovett did was tacitly understood by most people who knew him, but not discussed. Had he been listed in Who’s Who, which he was not, even the most casual reader of his entry could have pieced together a certain pattern, discerned the traces of what intelligence people call “interest.” Such an entry would have revealed odd overlapping dates, unusual posts at unusual times. There would have been the assignment to Vientiane, the missions to Haiti, Quebec, Rawalpindi. There would have been the associations with companies providing air courier service, air cargo service, aircraft parts; companies with telephone numbers that began “800” and addresses that were post-office boxes in Miami, Honolulu, Palo Alto. There would have been blank spots. The military career would have seemed erratic, off track.