“I haven’t seen you since the Hiltz case and the start-up of BAAAAD BROTHER.”

“Well, two times lucky, and two times unexposed.”

“Yeah, but at some goddamn price.”

Dwight shook his head. “I’d rather not talk about it.”

“I don’t blame you. The old girl, third-rate militants and Scotty Bennett in one go? I’d have called in a rest break before you did.”

“Can it, Jack. It’s old news now.”

Jack coughed. “Well, shit, you know the drill. You monitor the general dirt files and supplant them with informant pieces. You’ve got cops, criminals who want favors, newsmen, bug men, waiters, doormen, wheelmen, repo men, hotel clerks, barflies and the aggrieved great unwashed of the universe. Try to underpay for your dirt. The old girl wants the shit, but she wants it at bargain-basement prices.”

Dwight sneezed. The file room was overcooled. Dry air fought off paper rot.

“Are you running standing bug posts?”

Jack rolled his eyes. “We’ve got bugged fuck pads and hotel suites. Duke Wayne blows into Chicago. The doorman at the Drake calls the Chicago SAC. Before you know it, the Duke’s upgraded to the penthouse. Too bad it’s hot-wired. The Duke’s a cross-dresser, by the way. He wears a size-fifty-six extra-long muumuu.”

Dwight laughed. “Anything else I should know?”

“Half the fruit bathhouses in LA. are wired. The old girl caught a city councilman at a joint on La Cienega once, so she’s running nine listening posts full-time.”

Dwight plucked a file and skimmed it. Johnnie Ray sucks dick in Ferndell Park, The suckee is an FBI informant. Lana Turner dives dark sisters, circa ‘54. A snitch calls from Sultan Sam’s Sandbox.

Jack said, “How’s the old girl’s health? I saw her in D.C. last month. She looked positively spectral. I had an informant once named ‘Jean the Mean Queen.’ She had to be the old girl’s long-lost sister.”

Liberace’s all-boy cathouse. Scopophile Danny Thomas, nympho Peggy Lee. Muff-diver Sol Hurok. Masochist James Dean-the “Human Ashtray.”

Dwight replaced the file. Margin notes lingered. Ava Gardner and Redd Foxx. Jean Seberg and half the Black Panthers.

“Have fun, Dwight. I told the old girl it’s a swinging new world, but she didn’t believe me.”

He rented a fallback. It was a work space/crash pad. It was close to the drop-front and Karen’s place. He and Joan had keys. They kept their gear there. The bungalow overlooked Karen’s street. He could watch the girls play.

Baxter and Cove was close. Two blocks and binocular range.

Dwight parked and lugged in boxes. He had brooding time. He was meeting Joan at the Statler later. The fallback was a plotter’s den. Living room, kitchen, bathroom, mattress for naps.

He pulled a chair out to the terrace. He pointed his Bausch amp; Lombs south. Karen walked across her yard. Dina and Ella chased cats.

Karen looked haggard. His offer stunned her. She knows it’s an adjunct op. She knows the main op is big. He can’t tell her the gist. We’re going to kill Mr. Hoover and frame Marsh Bowen for it.

They’ll manipulate a convergence. Marsh will be pre-indicted by forged document trails. They will lead back to the year zero and extend beyond 2000. They’ll recruit a pro shooter. Bob Relyea shot MLK. He should shoot again. The assassin is a homosexual black policeman. He kills the era’s prime symbol of white authority and ends his own life immediately. Planted paperwork reveals public policy gone bad. Marsh Bowen has been consumed by a politically incubated madness. The FBI suborns him and sends him undercover. He undergoes a radical transformation. He concurrently attempts to exploit his situation. He’s beset by sexual demons that induce a harrowing shame. The “Black-Militant Blastout” leaves two children dead. Marsh Bowen resumes his police career with honors derived from innocence slaughtered. Mr. Hoover created the overall context. Special Agent Dwight C. Holly implemented it.

They will create a Marsh Bowen diary. It will detail a brilliant black man’s rising tide of conversation and psychic disjuncture. Entries will describe his odd friendship with Special Agent Holly. Agent Holly unburdened himself to Marsh Bowen. He laid out the FBI’s war on the civil rights movement and described Mr. Hoover’s rabid racial animus.

The King hit plot would not be mentioned. It would eclipse the shock of Mr. Hoover’s death and spawn apocalypse. The fictional Holly-Bowen friendship would be deeply etched. It would encompass a world of guilt and hope. The diary would form a syllabus. It would bring readers to a copious glut of pre-existent FBI paper. The paper would form a narrative of banal minutae that would attenuate into horror. Grand juries would indict Marsh postmortem. Conspiracy talk would engulf the body politic. Every real and concocted trail would lead back to Mr. Hoover and his legacy of hate.

Mr. Hoover was partially discredited now. His anti-King salvos had become public fare. They were negligible compared to this. They lacked hardcore shock value. This would be a huge event. It would spawn waves of disbelief and tragically resigned acceptance.

He would be the trigger man. He would sit in committee rooms and grand-jury chambers. He would stand on the U.S. Senate floor. He would describe his exploitation of Marsh Bowen. He would detail his own lifetime of racial rancor, minutely outline his black-militant faux pas and chart the human cost. He would reveal his friendship with Marsh and paint a vivid picture of a white man and a black man as mirror-twinned souls in duress. He would embrace Marsh with forgiveness and the distanced love you feel for those you refract. He would tell the story of his crack-up. He would resign himself to an invasively scrutinized life.

Karen’s house was a stone’s throw. Dwight trained his binoculars. Ella threw building blocks at Dina. Big sister laughed and ran.

He told Joan the plan. They were in bed. They rented a guest house near Silver Hill. She trembled the way he trembled routinely. He struck the awe in her that she had always struck in him.

He’d go to prison. Four to six felt right. Protective custody, tennis courts, Fed-informant perks. There might be some animals he could care for.

Joan said, “Take these. They’ll help you sleep.” Two brown herb capsules.

They didn’t put him out. They put him in between. Joan guided him places. She put her hands on his chest and made him breathe in sync. She started out in French and Spanish. He caught most of it. Cap-Haпtien, Cotui, Pico Duarte. Puerto Plata, Saint-Raphaлl, El Guyabo.

Breathe through, I’m here, you’re safe now. I’ll tell you what we did with Wayne’s gifts.

It was the Statler. He knew that. They had Bureau-vouchered digs. Joan covered his eyes and told him to go where she said.

Every dime went to the struggle. We refurbished four safe houses and bought black-market medicine. Celia painted the walls. Balaguer planned to turn Tiger Klaw into a pleasure yacht. Four comrades dynamited the hull in dry dock.

We airlifted food and medicinal herbs to the slums outside Dajabуn. A small sect there has canonized Wayne Tedrow. They wear newspaper photos of him, attached to pointed hats. A dream myth exists about Wayne now. People believe that winged men murdered and martyred him.

Be still now, I know you see it, I know you loved him. We honor the dead through imagery. Belief works that way.

Celia ran an arms funnel. We purchased weapons in Cuba and shipped them to Port-au-Prince. I bought inmates out of La Victoria prison and got them forged ID cards and guns. Money went to converts in La Banda. They left jail doors open and shredded documents. A young man whom Wayne rescued from harm repaid his debt in full. He killed six La Banda torturers at a whorehouse in Borojol. Celia blew up the torture chamber under El Prйsidente’s golf course.