The Defection of A. J. Lewinter, page 9
BODKIN: How about access? Could he have had access to any material outside his own special area?
KASTNER: We run an airtight shop, securitywise, Mr. Bodkin. It would have been impossible for him to see anything, anything at all, outside his own lab. And, as I told you, his lab has so far scored a big fat zero.
BODKIN: If he had seen some classified material, how would he have gained access?
KASTNER: As I say, it’s impossible.
BODKIN: But hypothetically?
KASTNER: Well, hypothetically, he would have had to apply for the material in the documentation stacks in the vault downstairs. He would have had to have a signed “right-of-access” check to draw any particular folder. Which he didn’t have except for Category 7 stuff—that’s ceramic-nose-cone data.
BODKIN: And if he had managed to draw material from the stacks, what then? Could he photograph it or copy it?
KASTNER: Again, impossible. I told you we run a tight shop. He would have had to take it to the reading room off the stacks, where he would have been under constant surveillance by one of the reading room guards. Anything he copied down would be noted in the log and reported to the security section, which would have asked me why he was copying something down.
BODKIN: I see. You don’t mind if I take a look at the stacks and the reading room for myself, do you?
KASTNER: Help yourself, Mr. Bodkin. But you’re wasting your time. We run an airtight shop. Hell, when you come right down to it, the only thing Lewinter had to offer anyone were those amateurish trajectories of his and some garbage-disposal nonsense. Hardly enough to put him across a border, huh?
Edited transcript of conversation between Agent A. Bodkin and P.J. Noble, Documentation Stacks Librarian for Ballistic Missile Research and Development at M.I.T. 19 August. Subject has no known connection with Lewinter.
BODKIN: I’m not sure I understand. I thought you were the permanent stacks librarian.
NOBLE: But I am, you see. I was moved up from Permanent Assistant Documentation Stacks Librarian after the accident—
BODKIN: The accident?
NOBLE: Our Mr. Marmsbury. He was very near-sighted, you know. One of life’s little twists and turns, n’est-ce pas? We’d been chatting about vacation, he and I. Poor Mr. Marmsbury was a widower, you know, and he planned to take one of those swinging singles cruises. To the Caribbean. Not ten minutes after we parted, he lay dead under the wheels of a truck. Can you imagine, not ten minutes.
BODKIN: How long ago was this?
NOBLE: Now let me see, today’s the nineteenth, isn’t it? Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six. It was the sixth, just two weeks ago tomorrow.
BODKIN: So you’ve only been librarian for two weeks, then?
NOBLE: Permanent Documentation Stacks Librarian, we call it. That’s correct. Of course, I was Assistant Documentation Stacks Librarian for fourteen years before, so I know my way around here. I’m not what you’d call a babe in the stacks.
BODKIN: Tell me, Mr. Noble, do you remember one of the staffers here named Lewinter, initial A initial J Lewinter?
NOBLE: Oh, I’m afraid I didn’t have much contact with the staffers, that is until two weeks ago. You see, the Permanent Assistant Documentation Stacks Librarian, which is what I was, spends all his time in the stacks filing, so he doesn’t get to see many of those bright faces. And I’m afraid I don’t remember a Lewinter visiting us during the last two weeks.
BODKIN: Un-huh. Let me try a different tack. Was your predecessor, Mr. Marmsbury, a careful man?
NOBLE: He was Mr. Meticulous. I admired him for it, really. He was a librarian’s librarian, Mr. Bodkin. That could stand as his epitaph. Here lies a librarian’s librarian.
BODKIN: A librarian’s librarian.
NOBLE: Absolutely. In all the years I knew him, he slipped up only once. Do you know anyone who has only made one teeny mistake in fourteen years of exacting service, Mr. Bodkin?
BODKIN: I’m afraid not. No, that’s quite a record. By the way, what was that slip-up?
NOBLE: Oh that. Just one of those silly errors that reminds us we’re all human. One of the staffers came down a month or two ago with a handful of trajectory formulas and asked to see the trajectory folder to make some comparisons. If he hadn’t had his own trajectory formulas in his hand, I’m positive Mr. Marmsbury would never have given them to him. But it threw him off his guard, I mean having his own trajectory formulas in his hand like that. And it was only a matter of minutes.
BODKIN: Minutes?
NOBLE: Yes, minutes, before Mr. Marmsbury determined that the staffer didn’t have a right-of-access check. I’m sure he never even got the folder open in the reading room. Can you imagine the nerve, walking in here with a Category 7 clearance and asking for trajectory material?
BODKIN: Hell of a nerve. Did Mr. Marmsbury report the incident?
NOBLE: He noted it in the log, of course. He was meticulous in these matters. But since he retrieved the folder before the interloper could read it, I don’t think, no, I don’t think he made what you call a federal case out of it. Ha, that’s a good phrase, don’t you think? A federal case!
BODKIN: Quite a good phrase, Mr. Noble.
Edited telephone conversation between Agent A. Bodkin and Lieutenant Merton Frank of the Boston Police Department. 19 August. Subject has no known connection with Lewinter.
FRANK: Marmsbury, Arthur, initial R, Caucasian male, age 62, height 5 foot 7½ inches, weight 155, eyes brown, hair gray, that the one?
BODKIN: That’s it, Lieutenant.
FRANK: Right. It was a hit-and-run, all right.
BODKIN: Did you catch the guy?
FRANK: No, we didn’t. I remember this one. Strange. He was hit by a small van with a logo stenciled on both sides in bright yellow letters. Haifa dozen people identified the logo. It was so clear nobody bothered with the license plates. Fairfax Dairies. That’s what the logo said. Fairfax Dairies.
BODKIN: What was so strange?
FRANK: There is no Fairfax Dairies, not in Boston, not in Massachusetts, not anywhere on the eastern seaboard as far as we can determine.
Edited transcript of conversation between Agent A. Bodkin and Louis Mendelini, Reading Room Security Officer. 19 August. Subject on various occasions kept Lewinter under normal surveillance in the reading room.
BODKIN: When did you retire?
MENDELINI: A year ago September. Thirty years on the force. With all those long-hairs and perverts and drugs, I’m not sorry to be out. I put in my time.
BODKIN: This is quite a change of pace.
MENDELINI: It drags, sure. But at least the people here are gentlemen. Oh, I get bored stiff. But it’s a good way to stretch the pension check, you know what I mean.
BODKIN: I’ll probably wind up the same way. Listen, give me a rundown on how you operate, will ya?
MENDELINI: Sure, it’s simple. When a guy draws anything from the stack, he can only come into the reading room. Chuck—that’s the officer on the door—Chuck checks their badge and I.D. and the label on the folder and reads them to me on the intercom system, this thing right here. Then I copy what he says into this running log, with the time in and the time out, like here, see, this one here. Then I just sit and watch what they’re doing through this window. It’s a mirror on the other side, what they call a one way window. We used to have a regular window, but all those eggheads got nervous about someone watching them, so they put in this one-way window. Funny thing is they all know it’s there, all right—some of the old-timers even wave at the mirror when they walk in—but you should see what some of them do.
BODKIN: What, for instance?
MENDELINI: Like pick their noses, or scratch their ass. One of these days I expect someone to jerk off. And I’ll log it. Arrived such-and-such a time, jerked off, departed such-and-such a time. Ha!
BODKIN: Listen, do you remember a guy named Lewinter, 39, medium height, balding, paunch?
MENDELINI: I really don’t remember these guys by name. It’s not my job to. But it’ll be in the log here. Lewinter, huh?
BODKIN: Initial A, initial J, last name is Lewinter with a capital L small W.
MENDELINI: See, I’ve got them indexed alphabetically, and next to the names the pages of their visits. I invented this system myself.
BODKIN: Can I see his last visit.
MENDELINI: Last visit coming up. Page 245. Here, 44, here it is, 45. Ah, here, Lewinter, see. He comes in here at 1535 with a folder marked Payload Trajectories, whatever that means.
BODKIN: What’s rused mean?
MENDELINI: It’s my own shorthand for “perused.” Means he just sort of thumbed through the stuff, as opposed to trate which is short for “concentrated study” and means that they really got involved in the stuff. Now, see here, at 1542, which is seven minutes later, Marmsbury came into the room and grabbed the folder back.
BODKIN: Marmsbury came into the room and grabbed the folder back! Do you remember the incident?
MENDELINI: Jesus Christ, no. Marmsbury was always bursting in and grabbing folders. He was very near-sighted, you know. They said you could draw the formula for the atomic bomb if you flashed a PTA card in his face. It’s none of my business, you know. I only work here. But it’s a hell of a way to run a security stack, isn’t it?
BODKIN: I guess it is.
12
LEO DIAMOND WASN’T STARTING a new life; like an engine coupling with a boxcar on a siding, he was picking up an old one where it had been left off. And the first order of business, so it seemed to him, was to divest himself of the dead weight he had carried around through the interregnum—the habit of doing things by habit, the indifference with which he sugar-coated his perceptions to make them palatable, above all the clock that ticked away in his brain to remind him, the few times he glanced over his shoulder, that midway through the journey of a life was too late to search for old sidings.
The clock was no longer ticking when he and Sarah boarded the shuttle for New York two days before the start of the C.P.P. In the cool half-light of a Washington twilight, with the remote city backing and pivoting away from the airplane, picking up where you had left off seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
“… feels like to be a member of an oppressed minority,” Sarah was saying. The smoking light blinked on. Searching through a khaki fisherman’s sack crammed with one of everything, she produced a cigarette and lit it.
“And what oppressed minority are you a member of?” Diamond asked banteringly.
“Why, the left-handed minority, of course,” Sarah said. “Your security people didn’t tell you I was left-handed, did they? We’re the most discriminated against group in the world, we lefties. Everything is made for righties—guitars, can openers, gear shifts, rifle bolts, cameras, you name it. We’re outcasts, Leo. D’ya know that a left-handed oath is one you don’t have to keep, huh? That the evil eye is the left eye, d’ya know that? When the French say someone is gauche, they mean he’s awkward. When the Italians call someone mancino, they mean he’s deceitful. Even the Russians are against us—when they do something na levo, they’re doing it on the sly.”
Her laughter, at once tender and triumphant, wrapped itself around them like a cocoon, and it made Diamond feel private and warm and one of the chosen.
Across the aisle, a middle-aged weights-and-measures bureaucrat fidgeted with a slide rule and glanced enviously out of the corner of his eye at the cocoon, aware that it was there, resentful at being excluded from it.
It was the same in New York. Sarah had the use of an East Side apartment—a model spending the summer in the Aegean had given her the key—so she and Diamond had a good deal of privacy. But for the first time since they had become lovers, they sought the company of others. It was like bringing a plant nurtured in darkness out into the sunlight. The overall effect of the change in environment was to deepen the attachment between Diamond and Sarah with a fragile cement—the elitist, two-against-the-world feeling.
“Did you hear her?” Sarah said after the press party at the photographer’s studio for the group, Sarah included, that would be going to Russia to model American ready-to-wear fashions. “She’s an absolute dictator at her magazine. Rips off memos with things like ‘Is there anything more beautiful than a single delicate pearl? Positively no!’ She’s always doing that—ending with a question, and then answering it herself.” And Sarah mimicked her perfectly: “‘What do you think of growing old, my dear? It’s simply ter-rible, isn’t it? Growing old, I mean. It’s so, well, how to phrase it, unavoidable, don’t you think? I do. I console myself by telling myself that it’s unavoidable. Do you have a philosophy? That’s mine. If it’s unavoidable, why, then, one can’t really be expected to avoid it, can one?’” And again Leo found himself safely inside the cocoon of Sarah’s laughter.
“This Russia thing,” Diamond said, “do you really have to go?” He had known about the junket, of course, but somehow the idea that Sarah would be away for a week had not bothered him until now.
It was after the press party when he brought it up. Sarah and Diamond were sharing a small table with the Kruzmans, John and Joan, at a crowded, noisy, dingy East Side pub presided over by an enormously fat lady who corked the door with her body when all the available space inside was occupied. There was a scuffle at the next table—an intoxicated fag trying to crash a dinner party was being shouldered toward the door by the boyfriend of a man he had been pawing. The Kruzmans—she was a fashion editor, he a copy writer on Madison Avenue—had been to the studio party also, and, for lack of anything better to do, were dissecting it. They talked haphazardly, their fragmented sentences overlapping, neither paying much attention to the other, each fighting off interruptions by the other, he by raising his voice when she tried to break in, she by cutting down on the space between words and rushing on when it would have been natural to pause for a fresh breath or a fresh thought. All the time their eyes roamed back and forth across the restaurant as if they were on patrol.
“… the one with the handlebar mustache, you couldn’t miss him,” John Kruzman was saying. “Met ’im in Amagansett, at Lull’s barn, ‘member? …”
“… Lill’s barn, as you call it, happens to be …”
John fought Joan off by going up half an octave and some decibels. “It’s a god damn barn …”
“—difference … remodeled …”
“—anyhow … not the point … handlebar mustache is telling some naive chick with no bra that he’s following Fitzgerald’s advice, F. Scott, that is, writing his novel as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finishes it—”
“—girl happens to be Beatrice Joiner … her layouts are the smartest things in—”
“—gave me idea for short story—”
“—you met her ex-husband—”
John went up another quarter-octave and plunged on: “About guy on death row writing a book. See—”
“What do you mean no bra … body stocking—”
“—governor agrees to delay the execution until he finishes it … get it? He writes the novel as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finishes it! So he never finishes it.” John Kruzman made the mistake of laughing at his own fantasy, and his wife used the lapse to get up a head of steam.
“—you men all the same never look at a girl when you can look through her any part of her button holes armpit holes body stocking’s greatest invention since …” She plunged on, pause-less, while her husband waited for the crack that would allow him to wedge himself back into the conversation.
Inside the cocoon, its walls soaking up the conversation that hung in the air like moisture, Diamond repeated the question: “This Russia thing, do you really have to go?”
Sarah’s finger tips rested lightly on the back of his hand, an understated intimacy that drew emotion like an electrical charge across a gap. “If you don’t want me to go, Leo, I won’t.”
“I don’t want you to go.”
“I won’t then.”
Diamond brought up the subject again that night in bed.
“You sure you don’t mind?”
“Am I sure I don’t mind what, Leo?”
“Going to Russia,” he said. “You sure you don’t mind giving up the trip?”
Again she told him that if he didn’t want her to go, she wouldn’t go.
The intimacy, always understated, always overpowering, was there all the time now—the pressure of her breast against his arm as she leaned close in the zoo to tell him, “I detest zoos”; the quiet half-smile that came when the conversation lagged, as if to discredit words as a means of communication.
Slowly, effortlessly, Diamond began to accumulate the details of her life that served, like caulking, to join together the main events he already knew about. He discovered, for instance, that she had once wanted to be an actress and had gone so far as to spend two stifling hot months doing summer stock on Cape Cod. “The high point of my career,” she said merrily, “came when I played the title role in Tea and Sympathy.’”
Diamond bit: “That’s not bad, the title role.”
And Sarah yanked home the hook: “I played the tea—I was the only one in the company who could whistle like a teapot coming to boil, so every night I stood in the wings and, on cue, played the tea.” And she demonstrated, starting on a low note and sliding into a steamy high-pitched whistle that she held until her lungs were drained of air and her eyes bulged. Then she collapsed in a spasm of laughter that sent tears spilling down her cheeks. Later, Diamond remembered the tears and recognized in them the salty residue of once bitter disappointment.
Another time Sarah told about being decked out in middy blouse and a navy blue pleated skirt and packed off to boarding school, where she spent most of her free time writing desperate letters to her father begging him to let her come home. After eight months, he finally gave in—but the patina of loneliness acquired in the interim clung to her still like some faint fragrance that wouldn’t wash off.
