“I used to see him around town with his women,” Owens said, a little bitterness creeping into his voice. “They were nothing more than a part of his mob scene, he used to tell me. Mostly they were the wives and mistresses of the foreign diplomats assigned to the missions in town. He got a lot of gossip that way, but it was tough on his marriage.”
Owens was a puritan. He had married his high school sweetheart and had never strayed, not once, though he admitted he had been tempted plenty. In this day and age he was a refreshing anachronism, and McGarvey found that he had a lot of respect and admiration for the man.
“Of course he made his mistakes. Rarely, but the construction of missile bases in Cuba escaped his people until six hours after the first photos were brought in from our U-2 overflights. The first conclusive photos. Yarnell was in a rage for months afterward. He drove his people mercilessly. We had a pretty high attrition rate there for a while because of it. But Yarnell wanted only the best around him. He wasn’t going to let something like that happen again.”
“Then the president was assassinated,” McGarvey said softly.
Owens looked up at him, his lips compressed. He nodded. “The bastards killed Jack Kennedy. I’ll never forget that day, not as long as I live. None of us will. We all thought it was the end of Yarnell, he took it so badly. He blamed himself.”
The remark was startling. “How so?”
“He was convinced that it was Castro’s people who arranged it. Something about the Mafia being paid off by Cuban Intelligence to do it. Twenty-five million dollars. For six months he tried to prove it. He should have known, he should have forseen it, he kept saying. But it never happened for him, and following so closely on the heels of the missile thing, he figured he was done on the Latin American desk. Said he wanted no part of it any longer. He wanted to work on something else, something more civilized, anything that did not involve spics. He started drinking, too, and he moved out. Took an apartment in town and left his wife to herself. She finally went back to Mexico City for a couple of years, but even her home had been ruined for her. She felt like an outcast, so she came back to the States, put the child in a boarding school, and moved to New York.”
Something very large dropped into place for McGarvey, who had been listening to Owens’s narrative and picking up an extra beat between the lines. Owens knew and was disturbed by Evita Perez Yarnell, yet he was in love with his own wife. There was only one other possibility for his depth of knowledge and obvious emotional attachment.
“Darby Yarnell was your protégé.”
“Wasn’t so terribly difficult to guess, was it?” Owens said sadly.
“Did you tell him that you were disappointed in the way he was treating his wife?”
“Not my place.”
“He was turning out badly …”
Owens flared. “Just listen here, his product always had been, and at that point still was, without reproach. The very best. The way I figured it, if his home life wasn’t going exactly the way it could have, or even should have, who was I, or anyone else for that matter, to say anything? I wasn’t a preacher, and we weren’t running a Sunday school down there. This is the big, grown-up world in which nuclear missiles are aimed at you from ninety miles away, and where presidents get shot down. This is a crazy, goddamned world, McGarvey. If a man isn’t exactly as devoted to his wife as he’s supposed to be, then we know that he’s just like everyone else — not perfect.”
“But it hurt,” McGarvey suggested gently.
“He was so goddamned good it was a crying shame. A lot of us looked up to that kid.”
Including your wife, McGarvey wanted to say, but he could not. It would have been too cruel, true or not. He had a strong suspicion, though, that Yarnell was a man who never left anything to chance.
They walked on for a time in silence. Clouds continued to build out to sea, and the surf continued to rise. A salt mist drifted on the air so that a hundred yards down the beach it seemed as if the fog was coming in. The air smelled wonderful though. It brought McGarvey back again to the Hamptons with Kathleen and Elizabeth. It struck him as odd that he had not known a single soul who had escaped at least one such emotional disaster in their lives. Even his sister’s marriage was rocky at times. Christ, where were the devoted people? Where was sincerity and openness? Perhaps Owens was the only one in the world who had had a good marriage. But then it had ended tragically with her death long before his.
“We were doing a lot of building in those days. The intelligence directorate, for instance, consisted of only half a dozen departments. But within the next few years that number was doubled: operations, strategic research, the U.S. Information Bureau, the Intelligence Requirements Service, central reference, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, imagery analysis, the National Photographic Interpretation Center. The list went on and on. Every day it seemed as if we were being asked to provide another type of product to a host of new customers.”
“You were busy.”
“Yes,” Owens said dryly. “Too busy to give a damn about another man’s problems.” He looked over at McGarvey. “I had my own bad luck there for a year or so, too. I was working twelve and eighteen hours a day. Some nights I wouldn’t even go home. My marriage nearly went on the rocks. It was never quite the same afterward.”
McGarvey didn’t want to hear it. Not that. “Did Yarnell get off the Latin American desk?”
Owens blinked. “Right into operations the first part of ’64. Worked for the deputy director until he started up the new Missions and Programs section. Pulled half a dozen of our very best people right out of the field, put them in a think-tank environment, and told them they were to come up with a world-wide missions and programs plan that was based on their direct experience.” Owens grinned at the memory. “All hell broke loose there for a bit. Yarnell had apparently emasculated our foreign intelligence operation. But in the end the seventh floor recognized the wisdom of his action and gave him the gold star. An A for effort.”
“Funny they didn’t give him operations.”
“He was offered the assistant deputy directorship, but he turned it down from what I heard.”
“He had something else in mind?”
“Oh yes, and so did I, though I didn’t know it at the time.”
“Within operations?”
“Foreign intelligence,” Owens said. “He sent himself out to help replace the people he had pulled in. He said he needed the field experience. So long away from Mexico, it was time for him to put his hand back in. None of us was getting any younger, and he was always worried that time was passing him by much faster than it was for other people. In a way I suppose it was. He seemed always to be living his life on half a dozen different levels all at the same time, and all at breakneck speed. He was like a flame in pure oxygen, someone said. A lot of people in the Company thought he’d burn himself out one day soon. In the meantime, though, he was the brightest star in the sky.”
“Where did they send him?”
“Why, Moscow, of course. Right into the heart of the lion’s den.”
McGarvey wasn’t surprised. Of course he had known some of this already from the background Trotter and Day had given him. But it was the timing that he found so fascinating now.
“That was in what year?”
“The summer of 1965.”
“They sent him out as chief of the Moscow station?”
“Assistant chief of station,” Owens said. “He was very good, the best, but he was still pretty young. Besides, there is something you have to understand about Darby Yarnell. He never gave a damn about titles. He was more interested in getting the product, analyzing it, and then satisfying our customers with it. ‘The end results are what counts,’ he used to say. ‘We’re in the business to provide enough information that our political leaders can make the very best of choices for us, Darrel,’ he would say. It was his pet philosophy.”