Libra - Don Delillo [163]
“Where is she?” He called out, “Where’s my little girl?”
“In her room,” Mary Frances said.
He called out, “But we want her down here. We need some serious cheering up.”
“Once she’s in her room, the subject’s closed. The day is definitely over.”
“I had to share a room,” he said.
“I had my own, thank God.”
“I think you’ll find that the great figures of history rarely had their own rooms.”
“I loved my room,” she said.
“Are you saying nothing ever again has been quite so nice?” He called out, “Come down and talk to us or we’ll be very unhaaaappy.”
He went out to the porch to investigate a noise. He stood there smoking. He could hear the radio faintly. An old voice, a radio voice from another era can bring back everything. This was a house that nurtured memories. The curved porch. The oak posts furled in trumpet vines.
He knew all the techniques ever devised to beat the machine but he also knew he would be helpless to bring them into play. He believed in the polygraph. He wanted to cooperate, show everyone the machine was working well. Devices make us pliant. We want to please them. The machine was his only hope of deliverance after what he’d done, what he’d loosed into the crowd. A way out of death. Because in time a pity would fall across their faces. They would all see he only wanted what was right for his country. He loved his country. He loved Cuba, knew the language and the literature. He would go beyond yes and no. Tell them about the deathward-tending logic of a plot. T-Jay is out there somewhere, chewing gum and squinting in the light. They would nod and understand. A forgiveness would come to their eyes. Because they are not, after all, unmerciful men. Say what you will about the Agency. The Agency forgives.
God is alive and well in Texas.
He went inside and turned off the radio. The day wasn’t half done and it was time to go to bed again. He checked the front door and turned off the porch light. He walked down the hall for the millionth time, checked the back door, checked to see that the oven was off. The last thing downstairs was the oven, except for the kitchen light. He turned off the kitchen light and began to climb the stairs.
He slipped near the top of the stairway, an ordinary misstep, no harm, no deeper meaning, but Mary Frances was out of the bedroom in a silent burst to take him by the elbow and lead him inside.
He sat at the edge of the bed taking off his shoes. She watched him, reading his face for signs.
“Just a little slip,” he said.
“It sounded.”
“Just an ordinary fool missing a step.”
“You have a seminar tomorrow. Arts and Sciences Building. Ten A.M.”
“I want you to be well,” he said. “You have to be absolutely well. We can’t have a situation where you’re not completely yourself. I couldn’t even begin to carry on if you somehow weren’t well. I count on you for everything that matters.”
The Agency forgives. There wasn’t a man in the upper ranks of the four directorates who didn’t understand the perils of clandestine work. They would be pleased by his willingness to cooperate. What’s more, they would admire the complexity of his plan, incomplete as it was. It had art and memory. It had a sense of responsibility, of moral force. And it was a picture in the world of their own guilty wishes. He was never more surely an Agency man than in the first breathless days of dreaming up this plot.
He stood at the side of the bed in his