“Yes, sir. We have,” Amjac said grimly.

Marco said, “Raymond, there is no known area of this case which we haven’t covered in many ways. We’ve talked to every member of the patrol. We’ve traveled maybe ninety-two hundred miles around the country. We’re sure Chunjin is here as an enemy agent, assigned to you as a body guard and assassin, if necessary. I have a unit in New York and Washington which does nothing but concentrate on this problem. There are seventeen of us, all told. Mr. Amjac is on loan from the FBI and Mr. Lehner is with us as an expert from Central Intelligence. Working on that riddle of why the enemy should go to enormous trouble to secure the Medal of Honor for you is all I do, day and night. It’s all Amjac and Lehner do. It’s all the seventeen of us do, and the White House wants to know what happened in a report every week and a copy of that report goes to the Joint Chiefs. And you want to hear something offbeat, Raymond? I mean something that will throw this out of context for a moment to let you see what a unique person you have become? A copy of the report goes to the Prime Ministers of Britain and Canada and to the President of Mexico.”

“But what the hell for?” Raymond seemed outraged at this invasion, as though he were being shared by four heads of government. “What the hell do the Mexicans and the bloody British, who tried to kill my mother, incidentally, have to do with that lousy medal?”

Lehner tapped Raymond on the forearm. Raymond looked at him, drawing his arm away. “Why don’t you listen?” Lehner said. “If you talk you can’t learn anything.”

“Don’t touch me again,” Raymond said. “If you want to remain here with us, doing your clerk’s tasks and waiting for your pension, do not touch me again.” He looked at Marco. “Continue, Ben,” he said equably.

“It is our considered opinion,” Marco said, “that we are moving into the area of action which will reveal why they wanted you to have the Medal of Honor. The patrol happened in 1951. Chunjin didn’t arrive to take up his duties until ’59. Eight years’ lapse. Whatever is going to happen is going to happen soon. You’re a marked man, Raymond. They’ve marked you and they guard you. We’ve marked you. Am I frightening you, Raymond?”

“Me?” Nothing frightened Raymond. A man needs to have something to lose to become frightened. Even only one thing that is his and that he values will make it possible for threat to scare a man, but Raymond had nothing.

“That’s what I explained to our unit. And that’s what our psychiatrists had projected on you, that attitude, that—that fearlessness, you know?—but I have to frighten you, Raymond, because we need you to think of yourself as some kind of time bomb with a fuse eight years long. You walk barefooted on the edge of a razor. Only you will know when the change comes, when the mission is divulged, when your move is to be made, and it can only end one way. Your country, my country, this country will have to be in danger from you and you will be expected to do exactly as you have been told or will be told. They got inside your mind. They did. I swear before God.”

“Aaaah!” Raymond disliked this kind of talk. It sickened him. What kind of a world of fondlers had this become? Why did Marco have to say that those thick-necked pigs were inside his mind?

“I told you that we talked to every member of the patrol this summer. You know what they said about you, every one of them? That you were the greatest, warmest, most wonderful single guy they had ever met. They remembered you with love and affection, Raymond. Isn’t that funny?”

“Funny? It’s ludicrous.”

“How do you account for it?”

Raymond shrugged and grimaced. “I saved their lives. I mean, they thought I had saved their lives. I suppose the poor slobs were grateful.”

“I don’t think so. I’ve had to work all this out with our psychiatrists because I don’t have a very objective view, either, but my actual memory is that there was a broad chasm between you and those men before the patrol. They didn’t hate you, they seemed rather to fear your scorn, you know? You had a way of freezing their dislike and keeping them uneasy and off balance. The psychiatrists will tell you that an attitude, a group attitude as well as individual attitudes like that, can’t be changed into warm and eager interest, into such admiration and deep respect merely because of gratitude. No, no, no.”

“Life isn’t a popularity contest,” Raymond said. “I didn’t ask them to like me.”

“I’m going to start to prove right now that they have gotten inside your mind, Raymond, because you once told me, in a joking way, that you had come out of the Army with much more of an active interest in women than when you went in—and because I have to frighten you, I will have to embarrass you, too. We checked. We are experts. Experts’ experts, even. We went back over the seams of your life, looking for lint. You were twenty-two, going on twenty-three years old, when you left the Army, and you had never been laid. More than that. You had never even kissed a girl, had you, Raymond?” Marco leaned across the table, his eyes lambent with affection, and he said softly, “You never even kissed Jocie, did you, Raymond?”

“You had men talk to Jocie? In Argentina?” Raymond wasn’t outraged. Long before, he had set all his dials so that Marco could do no wrong with him, but he was extremely impressed and for the first time. He felt elated to be in connection with anyone who had looked at Jocie, had sat beside her and had spoken to her about anything at all, and to have spoken to her about him, about that wondrous summer together and about—about kissing. He felt as though his eyes had climbed into the upper space above the earth and that he could see himself as he sat in Hungarian Charlie’s and at the same time watch sweet, sweet Jocie as she sat in a bower, under pink roses, knitting something soft and warm, in the Argentine.

“I had to know. And I had to make you understand that going ten thousand miles and back for the answer to one question is very little to do in the face of the pressure and the threat that is implied.”

“But, Ben—Jocie—well, after all, Jocie—”

“That’s why I brought these two strangers. The only reason. Do you think I would talk about such things—things which I know are sacred to you when I also know that nothing else in this whole world is sacred to you—in front of two strangers if I wasn’t desperate to get through to you?” Raymond did not answer; he was thinking about Jocie, the Jocie he had lost and would never find again.

“They are inside your mind. Deep. Now. For eight years. One of their guys with a big sense of humor thought it would be a great gag to throw you a bone for all of the trouble they were going to put you to, and fix it up inside your head so that, all of a sudden, you’d get interested in girls, see? It meant nothing to them. It was only a gratuitous gesture, a quarter tip to the men’s-room attendant, considering all the other things they were going to do inside your head and have already done from inside your head.”

“Stop it! Stop it, goddammit, Ben. I will not listen to this. You nauseate me. Stop saying that people and things and a lot of outside filth are inside my head. Just say it some other way if you have to talk to me. Just say it some other way, and what the hell are you talking about—what they have already done from inside my head?”

“Don’t shout,” Lehner said. “Take it easy.” However, he did not touch Raymond this time.

The giant juke box had found a giant guitar. It was being strummed insanely, alternating between two of the most simply constructed chords while a farmer’s voice bellowed cretinous rhymes above it.

Marco stared at Raymond compassionately and held his gaze for a long moment before he said, “You murdered Mavole and Bobby Lembeck, kid.”

“What? Whaaaat?” Raymond pushed at the table but his back was against the wall, literally as well as figuratively, so that he could not move backward to escape the words. His glaucous eyes in the long, bony face held some of the terror seen in the eyes of a horse falling on ice. He was incredulous but Marco and Amjac and Lehner knew that Marco was getting through because they knew Raymond the way a marine knows his own rifle, because they had been drilled on Raymond, his reactions and inhibitions, for hours of day and hours of night.