"It's not a question of belongs to us. It's a question of something working beautifully, of private investment being given the chance to help a country rise in the world, and Cuba was rising in distribution, manufacturing, literacy, social services, and any high-school student can make a solid case that the flaws and excesses of the Batista regime could have been contained without a revolution and certainly without a march into the communist camp."

They fell silent again. The power of his feelings made her want to pause. There weren't many things he believed in strongly. She felt a shrinking in herself, the old pathetic readiness to give in quietly. But what was there to fight about? She didn't know the subject. She saw the world in news clippings and picture captions, the world becoming bizarre, the world it is best to see in one-column strips that you send to friends. Refuge only in irony. If her aim was to go unnoticed, then why fight?

"Things are looking better in some areas," he said. "There are things I'm not unhappy about at all. I am making something of a professional comeback. There is, talk of moving me to the Office of Finance. There is a field unit in Buenos Aires. This is not to be discussed, of course. I'll work in money markets, making sure we have foreign currencies on hand for certain operations."

"Is this a plum, Buenos Aires?"

"I don't know where it stands in the fruit-and-vegetable kingdom. It is just goddamn good of them to give me this chance. The Agency understands. It's amazing really how deeply they understand. This is why some of us see the Agency in a way that has nothing to do with jobs or institutions or governments. We are goddamn grateful for their understanding and trust. The Agency is always willing to consider a man in a new light. This is the nature of the business. There are shadows, there are new lights. The deeper the ambiguity, the more we believe, the more we trust, the more we band together."

It was remarkable how often he talked to her about these things. The Agency was the one subject in his life that could never be exhausted. Central Intelligence. Beryl saw it as the best organized church in the Christian world, a mission to collect and store everything that everyone has ever said and then reduce it to a microdot and call it God. She needed to live in small dusty rooms, layered safely in, out of the reach of dizzying things, of heat and light and strange spaces, and Larry needed the great sheltering nave of the Agency. He believed that nothing can be finally known that involves human motive and need. There is always another level, another secret, a way in which the heart breeds a deception so mysterious and complex it can only be taken for a deeper kind of truth.

There were anemones in a bud vase on the table. The phone rang and Beryl went to her desk in the living room to answer. It was a man named Thomas Stainback. She knew from the tone of voice that it was a call Larry would take upstairs. She simply stood in the doorway. When he saw her, he got up from the table. She waited for him to climb the stairs to the guest room and pick up the phone and then she put the receiver down softly and went in to drink her coffee.

Parmenter said, "I'm here," and waited for Everett to ask the first question on the list.

"What do we know about schedule?"

"It looks like mid-November."

"That gives us time. I'm anxious to hear what Mackey is doing."

"He knows we've got Miami. I haven't told him when."

"Tell him right away."

"I can't find him," Parmenter said.

A pause on the other end.

"Is he reassigned?"

"I did some very delicate checking. He's not at the Farm or anywhere else he might logically be. There is no trace. It's beginning to look like he just submerged for a time."

"It's a reassignment," Everett said,

"I looked into it, Win. I was extremely goddamn thorough.

He is not in a cover situation. He is supposed to be training JOTs and he isn't."

"Does it mean he's out? We can't operate without Mackey."

"He's setting up. That's all. He'll get in touch."

"He can't just walk away."

"He'll get in touch. You know the man is solid."

"I've had a foreboding," Everett said.

"He's setting up. I'll get in my car one morning and find him sitting there. He wants this to happen as much as we do."

"I've had a feeling these past weeks that something isn't right."

"Everything is right. The city, the time, the preparations. The man is absolutely solid."

"I believe in the power of premonitions."

Larry put down the phone. Downstairs he found Beryl at the table with the newspaper, her coffee and a pair of scissors. Pages were spread over the wineglasses and dinner plates.

He'd stopped commenting on this oddness of hers. She said the news clippings she sent to friends were a perfectly reasonable way to correspond. There were a thousand things to clip and they all said something about the way she felt. He watched her read and cut. She wore half-glasses and worked the scissors grimly. She believed these were personal forms of expression. She believed no message she could send a friend was more intimate and telling than a story in the paper about a violent act, a crazed man, a bombed Negro home, a Buddhist monk who sets himself on fire. Because these are the things that tell us how we live.

Baby LeGrand stood at the end of the runway, knees bent, hands locked behind her neck, the drummer going boom to the jolt of her pelvis, and she scanned the club meantime, making out shapes beneath the tinted lights, whole lives that she could diagram in seconds, oh sailors and college boys, just the usual, plus a waitress taking setups to the hard drinkers, a kid in a skimpy outfit that makes her titties bulge. She ran a sash between her legs and waved it slow-motion through the baby spot. She eyed the table of off-duty cops drinking their cut-rate beer. She saw the odd-job boy taking Pola-roids of the customers which Jack will present as gifts. These are men in suit and tie, on business in the city, and men who come with dates to do the twist between sets. Brenda knows the twist crowd. She likes the younger cops if they are blue-eyed. She knows the smallest tomato stain on the narrowest tie because the only food is pizza from up the street, which somebody sticks in the warmer. Meantime the drummer's picking up the beat and a sailor says go go go. She drags the sash through the smoke and dust, scans the bar for the lowlife types that Jack drags in off the street, sad sacks and drifters he feels sorry for. And there is the gambling element or whatever they are, the vending-machine and Sicilian element, men of sharp practices, standing frozen at the back of the club. It's the whole Carousel in a five-second glimpse, plus the tourists from Topeka. They are saying go go go. They are crying for a garment. They want the piece of silk that passed between her legs. They are here to bathe in the flesh of the sleepwalking girl, the girl who wakes up naked in a throbbing crowd. This is how it always seems to Baby L. She is having a private fit in the middle of the night, like she is demonized, and wakes up naked in a different dream, where strange men are clutching at her body. Does anybody here know the stupid truth? She wants to be a real-estate agent who drives people around in a station wagon that is painted like wood. An award-winning realtor in a fern-green suit. But she is humping a spotlight in front of a crowd, flinging sweat from her belly and thighs, and the tassels on her pasties are swishing to the beat.

She did her trademark twirl of the breasts, one breast spinning clockwise, the other counter, and quickly disappeared.

Then she showered and wrapped herself in a towel and sat in the dressing room, smoking. This was the time when a cigarette was the purest pleasure known.