Malcolm heard the click of an office door opening just as he started back upstairs with his cup of coffee, and braced himself for a lecture from Dr. Lappe.
“Oh, ah, Mr. Malcolm, may I… may I talk to you for a moment?”
Relief. The speaker was Heidegger and not Dr. Lappe. With a smile and a sigh, Malcolm turned to face a slight man so florid that even his bald spot glowed. The inevitable tab-collar white shirt and narrow black tie squeezed the large head from the body.
“Hi, Rich,” said Malcolm, “how are you?”
“I’m fine… Ron. Fine.” Heidegger tittered. Despite six months of total abstinence and hard work, his nerves were still shot. Any inquiry into Heidegger’s condition, however polite, brought back the days when he fearfully sneaked drinks in CIA bathrooms, frantically chewing gum to hide the security risk on his breath. After he “volunteered” for cold turkey, traveled through the hell of withdrawal, and began to pick up pieces of his sanity, the doctors told him he had been turned in by the security section in charge of monitoring the rest rooms. “Would you, I mean, could you come in for a second?”
Any distraction was welcome. “Sure, Rich.”
They entered the small office reserved for the accountant-librarian and sat, Heidegger behind his desk, Malcolm on the old stuffed chair left by the building’s former tenant. For several seconds they sat silent.
Poor little man, thought Malcolm. Scared shitless, still hoping you can work your way back into favor. Still hoping for return of your Top Secret rating so you can move from this dusty green bureaucratic office to another dusty but more Secret office. Maybe, Malcolm thought, if you are lucky, your next office will be one of the other three colors intended to “maximize an efficient office environment,” maybe you’ll get a nice blue room the same soothing shade as three of my walls and hundreds of other government offices.
“Right!” Heidegger’s shout echoed through the room. Suddenly conscious of his volume, he leaned back in his chair and began again. “I… I hate to bother you like this…”
“Oh, no trouble at all.”
“Right. Well, Ron — you don’t mind if I call you Ron, do you? Well, as you know, I’m new to this section. I decided to go over the records for the last few years to acquaint myself with the operation.” He chuckled nervously. “Dr. Lappe’s briefing was, shall we say, less than complete.”
Malcolm joined in his chuckle. Anybody who laughed at Dr. Lappe had something on the ball. Malcolm decided he might like Heidegger after all.
He continued, “Right. Well, you’ve been here two years, haven’t you? Ever since the move from Langley?”
Right, thought Malcolm as he nodded. Two years, two months, and some odd days.
“Right. Well, I’ve found some… discrepancies I think need clearing up, and I thought maybe you could help me.” Heidegger paused and received a willing but questioning shrug from Malcolm. “Well, I found two funny things — or rather, funny things in two areas.
“The first one has to do with accounts, you know, money payed in and out for expenses, salaries, what have you. You probably don’t know anything about that, it’s something I’ll have to figure out. But the other thing has to do with the books, and I’m checking with you and the other research analysts to see if I can find out anything before I go to Dr. Lappe with my written report.” He paused for another encouraging nod. Malcolm didn’t disappoint him.
“Have you ever, well, have you ever noticed any missing books? No, wait,” he said, seeing the confused look on Malcolm’s face, “let me say that again. Do you ever know of an instance where we haven’t got books we ordered or books we should have?”
“No, not that I know of,” said Malcolm, beginning to get bored. “If you could tell me which ones are missing, or might be missing…” He let his sentence trail off, and Heidegger took the cue.
“Well, that’s just it, I don’t really know. I mean, I’m not really sure if any are, and if they are, what they are or even why they are missing. It’s all very confusing.” Silently, Malcolm agreed.
“You see,” Heidegger continued, “sometime in 1968 we received a shipment of books from our Seattle purchasing branch. We received all the volumes they sent, but just by chance I happened to notice that the receiving clerk signed for five crates of books. But the billing order — which, I might add, bears both the check marks and signatures of our agent in Seattle and the trucking firm — says there were seven crates. That means we’re missing two crates of books without really missing any books. Do you understand what I mean?”
Lying slightly, Malcolm said, “Yeah, I understand what you’re saying, though I think it’s probably just a mistake. Somebody, probably the clerk, couldn’t count. Anyway, you say we’re not missing any books. Why not just let it go?”
“You don’t understand!” exclaimed Heidegger, leaning forward and shocking Malcolm with the intensity in his voice. “I’m responsible for these records! When I take over I have to certify I receive everything true and proper. I did that, and this mistake is botching up the records! It looks bad, and if it’s ever found I’ll get the blame. Me!” By the time he finished, he was leaning across the desk and his volume was again causing echoes.
Malcolm was thoroughly bored. The prospect of listening to Heidegger ramble on about inventory discrepancies did not interest him in the least. Malcolm also didn’t like the way Heidegger’s eyes burned behind those thick glasses when he got excited. It was time to leave. He leaned toward Heidegger.
“Look, Rich,” he said, “I know this mess causes problems for you, but I’m afraid I can’t help you out. Maybe one of the other analysts knows something I don’t, but I doubt it. If you want my advice, you’ll forget the whole thing and cover it up. In case you haven’t guessed, that’s what your predecessor Johnson always did. If you want to press things, I suggest you don’t go to Dr. Lappe. He’ll get upset, muddy the whole mess beyond belief, blow it out of proportion, and everybody will be unhappy.”
Malcolm stood up and walked to the door. Looking back, he saw a small, trembling man sitting behind an open ledger and a draftsman’s light.
Malcolm walked as far as Mrs. Russell’s desk before he let out his sigh of relief. He threw what was left of the cold coffee down the sink, and went upstairs to his room, sat down, put his feet up on his desk, farted, and closed his eyes.
When he opened them a minute later he was staring at his Picasso print of Don Quixote. The print appropriately hung on his half-painted red wall. Don Quixote was responsible for Ronald Leonard Malcolm’s exciting position as a Central Intelligence agent. Two years.
In September of 1970, Malcolm took his long delayed Master’s written examination. Everything went beautifully for the first two hours: he wrote a stirring explanation of Plato’s allegory of the cave, analyzed the condition of two of the travelers in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, discussed the significance of rats in Camus’s The Plague, and faked his way through Holden Caulfield’s struggle against homosexuality in Catcher in the Rye. Then he turned to the last page and ran into a brick wall that demanded, “Discuss in depth at least three significant incidents in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, including in the discussion the symbolic meaning of each incident, its relation to the other two incidents and the plot as a whole, and show how Cervantes used these incidents to characterize Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.”
Malcolm had never read Don Quixote. For five precious minutes he stared at the test. Then, very carefully, he opened a fresh examination book and began to write: