He went upstairs and spent the rest of the night in the bedroom, the slow, methodical search, unfolding each item of clothing, paging through each volume-the house was stacked, crammed, jammed with books-emptying the wastebaskets and uncrumpling each wad of paper. Nothing, just the detritus of an involved professional life-notes on meetings, calendars, appointment books, nothing at all out of the ordinary. One of them spoke French and one spoke Spanish; there were many, many books in either language, and he went through them too, page by page, looking for notes either written in the margins (frequent and meaningless) or tucked between the pages. Nothing.

He worked through the morning, going to his low crawl during the daylight hours so that nobody walking by might catch a glimpse of shadowy movement and call the police.

He slept for two hours in the spare bedroom, then got up with enough light remaining, turned on Jack’s computer terminal, and didn’t get much beyond the desktop full of icons, because a code was required. He’d found no code; obviously Jack had committed it to memory. He tried number sequences based on obvious dates-Jack and Mitzi’s birthdays, the dates of big demonstrations, the date they almost got blown up in the house in New York, the date of the Pentagon bombing, the date they were freed from prosecution, that sort of thing. Nothing.

When it got dark, he reverted to the photos on the wall. He took each one down, carefully probed it for hidden documents folded between the photos and the matte backing, and that was more tedious than anything. He looked at each one for scrawled notes or something. This went on and on, as the Strongs literally had hundreds of photos. It seemed their every second was subject to a photo, some with celebs, most on the glorious ramparts. He even found one of the two of them with fists upraised after some sort of dinner with T. T. Constable and his then-wife, the beautiful Joan Flanders, four extremely beautiful human beings caught in a circle of love and adoration, all celebrating the smugness of the moral righteousness that made them so perfect for each other, maybe early nineties, when everyone was in from the cold.

He felt a momentary spasm of rage and had an urge to smash the picture, but what would that prove? Really, what would that prove? He hung it back up and continued with the thankless task, picture after picture, again coming up with nothing.

What am I missing? What is here that I don’t see? I’m too stupid to see, of course, because I’m the redneck marine from Arkansas and these people are so much smarter, so much more insightful, so much more penetrating. Bob Lee, Earl’s son, was just a grunt who followed orders, almost got killed, and killed too much. They knew better. They were above that. With their airs, their sophistication-the wine cellar was amazing, and clearly Jack knew his vintages, while Mitzi’s kitchen was the most complex room in the house, still full of life from the dinners she’d cooked for their many friends, the many joyous nights of camaraderie here in the old castle in Hyde Park. He’d seen the pictures, for many had been taken; Jack more or less holding court, lots of young, beautiful kids, lots of earnest intellectual types with the bushy hair, the wire-frame glasses, the women all with straight, undyed hair, in tight jeans, all of them so goddamned happy.

It was like they were some kind of European royalty, Bob thought. It had nothing to do with-

European.

That was something, yeah. Yeah, they really didn’t see themselves as American, did they? There was nothing anywhere in the house that was, strictly speaking, American. No pictures of landscape, nothing celebratory of American themes like farms, mountains, plains, no flag; instead it was all European in tone and texture. From the food to the books to the photos on the white walls, to the slick, hardwood floors, to tapestries of multitextured, usually African or Afro-Cuban tonalities, all of it belonged in a house in Paris.

What does this mean? Practically, not philosophically. They don’t shower enough. They have affairs, Jack a mistress? They drink espresso? They have wine with dinner? They won’t eat sliced bread? Hmm, among other things, it meant they put little lines through the letter Z and the number 7, after the European fashion, an idiosyncracy that he’d noted that meant absolutely nothing.

But it did mean something. It meant they were European.

He tried to think of other ways that-

And for some reason he thought of the computer, how he’d tried to run the famous dates of the glorious Strong-Reilly history as a way through the code. But Americans wrote dates month/day/year, as in March 25, 1946, 03/25/46. But Europeans wrote them day first, as in day/month/year, and put periods between them, so that March 25, 1946, came out 25.03.46.

Bob first drew shades so that its dead glare wouldn’t leak into the night, then flicked the computer on, watching it stir lazily to life, clicking mysteriously.

The blinking demand for an access code stared at him. He was an expert; he’d read Radical Romantics: The True Story of Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly, by O. Z. Harris.

He remembered the date they got married.

He remembered the date of the bank robbery in Nyacett.

He remembered the date they got pardoned.

He remembered the date they blew up the Pentagon.

He remembered the date they blew up a judge’s house in Connecticut, during a Black Panther trial.

He remembered the date the bomb had gone off accidentally in their Greenwich Village townhouse, killing its poor builder and sending Jack and Mitzi into the streets.

No, nothing.

Then he remembered the date Saigon fell. He’d never forget that one; it had sent him off on a three-day drunk and he ended up in a jail in Alabama with his real estate business totally trashed and his first wife filing a missing persons report.

He typed it in, European style: 25.04.75.

And thus he entered the secret world of Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly.

20

They met at Soleil, a tapas restaurant popular with the lunch crowd in the redeveloped sector of SE. It was a gaudy, mock-peasant place, full of young government workers and journalists and others who considered themselves quite fascinating. David Banjax was evidently well known enough here to command a table in the window, and Nick and Phil Price were escorted into the great man’s presence.

Banjax, about thirty-five, with a goatee and otherwise short hair, in a suit without a tie and a pair of Italian architect glasses, rose and put out a hand as Price handled the intros. Then they sat, and it turned out that thankfully Banjax was not one for small talk, didn’t offer an opinion on the Redskins or the new president or the war in Afghanistan or any other topic of the day. He commenced immediately with his sucking up.

“So, Agent Memphis, I hear you’re quite the hero. You shot it out with those bad guys in Tennessee last year or so. Is that why you limp?”

“That is why I limp, Mr. Banjax. But I wasn’t quite the hero. I was with a very skilled undercover officer who handled the gunfight. My only contribution was that I stopped a bullet that might have hit him, and I did manage to shoot a car twice in the right rear fender, which cost the Bureau over seven thousand in repair costs. But I think we’re countersuing now. Don’t mess with the Bureau.”

“Nick is known for his modesty,” Phil said smoothly, showing some minimal gift for the job. “Nick ran the team that broke up what could have been an eight-million-dollar heist and put seven men in prison for the rest of their lives.”

“Wow,” said Banjax. “No wonder everyone I talk to thinks so highly of you.”

“They’re a resilient mob. I’m sure they’ll have escaped and be drinking Jax beer and sporting with the gals this time next year. You can’t keep the Grumley boys down,” Nick said.