When we got into his paneled office, Timothy Beame directed me to a leather club chair, saying, "Sit thee doon, sit thee doon." I have recently come across that same supposedly humorous expression, of course, in Dr. Bob Fender's science-fiction story about the judge from Vicuna, who got stuck forever to me and my destiny. Again: I doubt if Timothy Beame had ever addressed such an inane locution to anyone ever before. This was a bunchy, shaggy old man, incidentally — accidentally majestic as I was accidentally small. His great hands suggested that he had swung a mighty broadsword long ago, and that they were fumbling for truth and justice now. His white brows were an unbroken thicket from one side to the other, and after he had seated himself at his desk, he dipped his head forward so as to peer at me and speak to me through that hedge.

"I needn't ask what you've been up to lately," he said.

"No, sir — I guess not," I said.

"You and young Clewes have managed to make yourselves as famous as Mutt and Jeff," he said.

"To our sorrow," I said.

"I would hope so. I would certainly hope that there was much sorrow there," he said.

This was a man who, as it turned out, had only about two more months to live. He had had no hint of that, so far as I know. It was said, after he died, that he would surely have been named to the Supreme Court, if only he had managed to live until the election of another Democrat to the presidency.

"If you are truly sorrowful," he went on, "I hope you know what it is you are mourning, exactly."

"Sir — ?" I said.

"You thought only you and Clewes were involved?" he said.

"Yes, sir," I said. "And our wives, of course." I meant it.

He gave a mighty groan. "That is the one thing you should not have said to me," he said.

"Sir — ?" I said.

"You ninny, you Harvard abortion, you incomparably third-rate little horse's ass," he said, and he arose from his chair. "You and Clewes have destroyed the good reputation of the most unselfish and intelligent generation of public servants this country has ever known! My God — who can care about you now, or about Clewes? Too bad he's in jail! Too bad we can't find another job for you!"

I, too, got up. "Sir," I said, "I broke no law."

"The most important thing they teach at Harvard," he said, "is that a man can obey every law and still be the worst criminal of his time."

Where or when this was taught at Harvard, he did not say. It was news to me.

"Mr. Starbuck," he said, "in case you haven't noticed: We have recently come through a global conflict between good and evil, during which we grew quite accustomed to beaches and fields littered with the bodies of our own brave and blameless dead. Now I am expected to feel pity for one unemployed bureaucrat, who, for all the damage he has done to this country, should be hanged and drawn and quartered, as far as I am concerned."

"I only told the truth," I bleated. I was nauseated with terror and shame.

"You told a fragmentary truth," he said, "which has now been allowed to represent the whole! 'Educated and compassionate public servants are almost certainly Russian spies.' That's all you are going to hear now from the semiliterate old-time crooks and spellbinders who want the government back, who think it's rightly theirs. Without the symbiotic idiocies of you and Leland Clewes they could never have made the connection between treason and pity and brains. Now get out of my sight!"

"Sir," I said. I would have fled if I could, but I was paralyzed.

"You are yet another nincompoop, who, by being at the wrong place at the wrong time," he said, "was able to set humanitarianism back a full century! Begone!"

Strong stuff.

8

So there I sat on the bench outside the prison, waiting for the bus, while the Georgia sun beat down on me, A great Cadillac limousine, with pale blue curtains drawn across its back windows, simmered by slowly on the other side of the median divider, on the lanes that would take it to the headquarters of the Air Force base. I could see only the chauffeur, a black man, who was looking quizzically at the prison. The place was not clearly a prison. A quite modest sign at the foot of the flagpole said only this: "F.M.S.A.C.F., Authorized Personnel Only."

The limousine continued on, until it found a crossover about a quarter of a mile up. Then it came back down and stopped with its glossy front fender inches from my nose. There, reflected in that perfect fender, I saw that old Slavic janitor again. This was the same limousine, it turned out, that had set off the false alarm about the arrival of Virgil Greathouse somewhat earlier. It had been cruising in search of the prison for quite some time.

The chauffeur got out, and he asked me if this was indeed the prison.

Thus was I required to make my first sound as a free man. "Yes," I said.

The chauffeur, who was a big, serenely paternal, middle-aged man in a tan whipcord uniform and black leather puttees, opened the back door, spoke into the twilit interior. "Gentlemen," he said, with precisely the: appropriate mixture of sorrow and respect, "we have reached our destination." Letters embroidered in red silk thread on his breast pocket identified his employer. "RAMJAC," they said.

As I would learn later: Old pals of Greathouse had provided him and his lawyers with swift and secret transportation from his home to prison, so that there would be almost no witnesses to his humiliation. A limousine from Pepsi-Cola had picked him up before dawn at the service entrance to the Waldorf Towers in Manhattan, which was his home. It had taken him to the Marine Air Terminal next to La Guardia, and directly out onto a runway. A corporate jet belonging to Resorts International was waiting for him there. It flew him to Atlanta, where he was met, again right out on the runway, by a curtained limousine supplied by the Southeastern District Office of The RAMJAC Corporation.

Out clambered Virgil Greathouse — dressed a most exactly as I was, in a gray, pinstripe suit and a white shirt and a regimental-stripe tie. Our regiments were different. He was a Coldstream Guard. As always, he was sucking on his pipe. He gave me the briefest of glances.

And then two sleek lawyers got out — one young, one old.

While the chauffeur went to the limousine's trunk to get the convict's luggage, Greathouse and the two lawyers looked over the prison as though it were a piece of real estate they were thinking of buying, if the price was right. There was a twinkle in the eyes of Greathouse, and he was imitating birdcalls with his pipe. He may have been thinking how tough he was. He had been taking; lessons in boxing and jujitsu and karate, I would learn later from his lawyers, ever since it had become clear to him that he was really going to go to jail.

"Well," I thought to myself when I heard that, "there won't be anybody in that particular prison who will want to fight him, but he will get his back broken anyway. Everybody gets his back broken when he goes to prison for the first time. It mends after a while, but never quite the way it was before. As tough as Virgil Greathouse may be, he will never walk or feel quite the same again."

Virgil Greathouse had failed to recognize me. Sitting there on the bench, I might as well have been a corpse in the mud on a battlefield, and he might have been a general who had come forward during a lull to see how things were going, by and large.

I was unsurprised. I did think, though, that he might recognize the voice from inside the prison, which we could all hear so clearly now. It was the voice of his closest Watergate co-conspirator, Emil Larkin, singing at the top of his lungs the Negro spiritual "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child."