"We'll arrest them and charge them," Clyde said. "That's all we can do."

Edgar turned from the window, smiling.

"Maybe I can sympathize with the Mafia over this."

Clyde smiled.

"You were always half a gangster," he said.

They laughed.

"Remember the tommy-guns we carried," Edgar said.

"When photographers were around."

They laughed again.

"You were right there alongside me, posed heroically."

"Edgar and Clyde," said Clyde.

" Clyde and Edgar," said Edgar.

Where the current of one's need for control met the tide of one's paranoia, this was where the dossier was reciprocally satisfying. You fed both forces in a single stroke.

"I liked the thirties," Edgar said. "I don't like the sixties. No, not at all."

The desk at the end of the room was out of the thirties in a way, equipped with items fashioned to Edgar's specifications. Two nibbed black pens. Two bottles of Skrip Permanent Royal Blue Ink, No. 52. Six sharpened Eberhard Faber pencils, No. 2. A pair of 5x8 linen-finish writing pads, white. A new 60-watt bulb in the standing lamp. The Director did not want to breathe the dust of old bulbs used to illuminate the reading matter of total strangers. Newspapers, guidebooks, Gideon bibles, erotic literature, subversive literature, underground literature, literature-whatever people read in hotels, alone, thumbing and breathing.

Clyde checked his watch. Dinner first, the two of them, alone, a practice spanning the decades-then the short ride to the Plaza.

It was called the Black amp; White Ball. A godlike gathering of five hundred, a masked affair, invitation only, dinner jacket and black mask for men, evening gown and white mask for women.

The party was being given by a writer, Truman Capote, for a publisher, Katharine Graham, and the factoidal data generated by the guests would surely bridge the narrowing gap between journalism and fiction.

Edgar had not been invited, initially. But arranging an invitation was not difficult. A word from Edgar to Clyde. A word from Clyde to someone close to Capote. They were in the files of course, a number of those involved in planning the event-all catalogued and dossier'd up to their eyeballs and none of them eager to offend the Director.

Clyde took a call from the desk. The mask lady was coming up for a fitting.

Edgar noticed that Clyde was wearing a necktie with a driblet design. The little figures made him think of paramecia, sinister organisms with gullets and feeding grooves. At home Edgar sat on a toilet that was raised on a platform, to isolate him from floorbound forms of life. And he'd ordered his lab people to build a clean room at the Bureau with unprecedented standards of hygiene. A white room manned by white-clad technicians, preferably white themselves, who would work in an environment completely free of contaminants, dust, bacteria and so on, with big white lights shining down, where Edgar himself might like to spend time when he was feeling vulnerable to the forces around him.

She walked in the door, Tanya Berenger, in a maxidress and thrift-shop boots, once a well-known costume designer, now ancient and frowzy, living in a room in a sad hotel off Times Square, a place where the desk clerk sits behind a grille eating a tongue sandwich. People tracked her down, three or four times a year, to do masks for special occasions and she found fairly steady work doing sadomasochistic accessories for a private club in the Village.

The two men, as always with a female in the room, someone they didn't know, and without others present, and lacking an atmosphere of sociable cheer-well, they tended to become stiff and defensive, as though surprised by an armed intruder.

Clyde did not stray from Edgar's side, sensing a potential for wayward behavior on the woman's part. She wore heavy makeup she might have poured from a paint can and cooked. And Clyde noted how one pocket on her dress drooped just a bit, becoming unseamed.

She spoke to Edgar with a sort of rueful affection.

"You know I can't let you wear one of my masks, dear man, without a consultation. I must put my hands on the living head. Bad enough I had to create my objet from a set of written specifications, like I'm a plumber installing a sink already."

She had a European accent slashed and burned by long-term residency in New York. And her hair had the retouched gloss of a dead crow mounted on a stick.

Of course Clyde had been briefed on Tanya Berenger. She was in the files in a fairly big way. She'd been accused at various times of being a lesbian, a socialist, a communist, a dope addict, a divorcee, a Jew, a Catholic, a Negro, an immigrant and an unwed mother.

Just about everything Edgar distrusted and feared. But she did exquisite masks and Clyde had been quick to commission her for the job.

He hurried into Edgar's bedroom and fetched the mask.

When she held it in her hands she looked at Edgar and looked at the mask, weighing the equation, and the Director experienced a queer tension in his chest, wondering whether he was worthy.

She held the object at eye level, six inches from her face, and looked through the eyeholes at Edgar.

And Edgar in turn looked at the mask as if it had a life, an identity of its own that he might feel ballsy enough to borrow for a single midnight on the town.

It was a sleek black leather mask with handlebar extensions and a scatter of shiny sequins around the eyes.

Tanya said, "You want to put it on or have a conversation with it?"

But he wasn't quite ready.

"Do I want to put it on, Junior?"

"Be brave."

Tanya said, "Leather. It's so real, you know? Like wearing someone else's face."

She fitted the mask over Edgar's head, the padded band not too tight and the leather alive on his skin.

Then she took him by the shoulders and turned him slowly toward the mirror over the desk.

Clyde took the whiskey glass from his hand.

The mask transformed him. For the first time in some years he did not see himself as a tenant in an old short popover body with an immense and lumpish head.

"I can call you Edgar-this is okay? I can tell you how I see you? I see you as a mature and careful man who has a sexy motorcycle thug writhing to get out. Which the spangles give a crazy twist, you know?"

He felt creamy, dreamy and drugged.

She made a slight adjustment in the fit and even as he cringed at her touch Edgar felt himself tingle thrillingly. She was insidious and corrupt and it was like hearing your grandmother talk dirty in your ear.

"You are a butch biker to me, you know, riding into town to take over leadership of the sadists and necrophiles."

Clyde watched in civilized alarm as a cockroach crawled out of Tanya's pocket and moved slowly down her flank. It was Spanish-Harlem-sized, with antennae that could pick up the BBC.

"It's a lovely fit, darling. You have savage cheekbones for a full-figure man. I would love to do the total face, you know? Highlights and shadows."

Clyde took her gently by the arm, concealing her roach side from Edgar's view, "In fact, shall I tell you something? The ball tonight is a perfect setting for you. Because you are very black and white to me. So you'll be totally in character, yes?"

When she was gone the men busied themselves with practical preparations. Clyde made dinner reservations and set out their evening clothes. Edgar set the mask on a tabletop and took a bath.

When he was finished he put on his fluffy white robe and stood by a window sipping the rest of his drink. He heard a sound above the beeping traffic, something strident rising in the night. New York was less genial than it used to be when the saloons and supper clubs were hangouts for lively and charming women and for gentlemen-bums with a comic flair.