• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“I understand you’ve gone through critical-incident training.”

I stand, parka flying, looking like a raving homeless person among the suits. “What are you implying, sir?”

Donnato: “Take it easy.”

Abbott: “I’m wondering about your emotional stability.”

“Not an issue. I’ve been certified for duty. I’ve been living with the bad guys, taking calculated risks every day, and it’s paying off. I know the territory. Let me get in and I’ll get this guy.”

Peter Abbott doesn’t lift that wise, prowling stare from my face.

“Remaining undercover, knowing who he is, will be difficult. The mission has changed,” he reiterates evenly. “We are asking you to occupy close quarters with an agent that you know has gone milk-sour. It’s a psychological minefield.”

“I am able and committed.”

He folds his clean white fingers.

“Thank you, Agent Grey. Would you mind stepping out of the room?”

“A covert operation is still the way to go,” I insist. “I formally request to stay on as the undercover—”

“He realizes that,” says Galloway, interrupting me.

I have noticed a good boss knows when to save you from yourself.

I gather my stuff and leave. Donnato, playing with his handcuffs, does not look up. He’s on the boys’ team now.

Exiting the intensity of the conference room to the quiet bull pen, I walk an aimless circle, lost in the desert. Rosalind, an administrative assistant who has worked at the Bureau for more than thirty years, gets up from her desk and pads over like a little engine, huffing and puffing with asthma.

“Hot in the kitchen?” she inquires gently.

“Like walking on coals. I think I’m out.”

I set my backpack down and unscrew a jar of oatmeal cookies, inhaling the calming scent of raisins and brown sugar. I suppose the two of us make a funny pair commiserating at the coffee machine—me all wired, down a few pounds, wearing scuzzies, Rosalind wizened and round, in a black dress with cheap gold buckles, sporting processed hair. She can hardly walk on her swollen ankles, but even the Bureau wouldn’t dare let her go.

“Don’t let them get to you, honey. The men like to pretend they know what’s going on, but it’s barely controlled mayhem. You should have seen them with their tails between their legs whenever the director came out.”

“J. Edgar Hoover came to Los Angeles?”

“Oh, yes,” says Rosalind, fishing a vanilla wafer from a bag. “When the director was coming, you had to paint the whole office all over again.”

“No kidding.”

“I got sent home one time because I was wearing pants.”

“You couldn’t wear pants?”

“Uh-uh. Ladies could wear a pants suit. That was okay, but not a pair of slacks. No way. That’s how it worked. That’s the way things got done. Now, everything’s a mess.”

I feel uneasy, shifting in my boots. Already I have missed this place. I almost never feel this connected anywhere else. Rosalind’s stories are gems in the repository of family history, and usually when she starts talking this way, it’s the high point of the day. But in Darcy’s clothes, through Darcy’s ears, the Bureau sounds nothing but repressive, misogynous, sterile, and dangerous.

I wonder if Dick Stone felt the same strange dissociation when he first checked in as an undercover agent, with long hippie hair and a stud in his ear, having seen things and done things with nubile hippie chicks that would cause straight-arrow agents to fall on their knees and pray for his counterculture-corrupted soul.

It’s not easy to assimilate back.

“You miss the long-timers?”

“We were young,” Rosalind says. “We had fun with the agents. Well, you had to call them ‘Mr.’ They called us by our first names, of course, but I had a lot of respect for those young men. And they all smoked like chimneys! But they were good family men,” she pronounces. “They were nice.” She clucks her tongue and sweeps a dismissive hand. “Not like now. You can keep that Peter Abbott.”

“Tell me about it. He’s the one who grilled me.”

“Back in the seventies, when we were into the security stuff, he was a supervisor, yes, on the beard squad. That’s what we called it. The young agents