the medium who’s across the room chatting
with young Gavin Trefoil, “could be fallen upon at any moment—pouring in the windows,
hauling dangerous tough Eventyr away to the Scrubs on pretending-to-exercise-or-use-a-kind-of-conjuration-to-cause-the-spirits-of-deceased-persons-to-be-present-in-fact-at-the-place-where-he-then-was-and-that-those-spirits-were-communicating-with-living-persons-then-and-there-present
my God what imbecile Fascist
rot . . .”
“Careful, Mexico, you’re losing the old objectivity again—a man of science shouldn’t
want to do that, should he. Hardly scientific, is it.”
“Ass. You’re on
their
side. Couldn’t you feel it tonight, coming in the door? It’s a great swamp of paranoia.”
“That’s my talent, all right,” Pirate as he speaks knowing it’s too abrupt, tries
to file off the flash with: “I don’t know that I’m really up to the
multiple
sort of thing. . . .”
“Ah. Prentice.” Not an eyebrow or lip out of place. Tolerance. Ah.
“You ought to come down this time and have our Dr. Groast check it out on his EEG.”
“Oh, if I’m in town,” vaguely. There’s a security problem here. Loose talk sinks ships
and he can’t be sure, even about Mexico. There are too many circles to the current
operation, inner and outer. Distribution lists growing narrower as we move ring by
ring toward the bull’s eye, Instructions To Destroy gradually encompassing every scrap,
idle memo, typewriter ribbon.
His best guess is that Mexico only now and then supports the Firm’s latest mania,
known as Operation Black Wing, in a statistical way—analyzing what foreign-morale
data may come in, for instance—but someplace out at the fringes of the enterprise,
as indeed Pirate finds himself here tonight, acting as go-between for Mexico and his
own roommate Teddy Bloat.
He knows that Bloat goes somewhere and microfilms something, then transfers it, via
Pirate, to young Mexico. And thence, he gathers, down to “The White Visitation,” which
houses a catchall agency known as PISCES—Psychological Intelligence Schemes for Expediting
Surrender. Whose surrender is not made clear.
Pirate wonders if Mexico isn’t into yet another of the thousand dodgy intra-Allied
surveillance schemes that have sprung up about London since the Americans, and a dozen
governments in exile, moved in. In which the German curiously fades into irrelevance.
Everyone watching over his shoulder, Free French plotting revenge on Vichy traitors,
Lublin Communists drawing beads on Varsovian shadow-ministers, ELAS Greeks stalking
royalists, unrepatriable dreamers of all languages hoping through will, fists, prayer
to bring back kings, republics, pretenders, summer anarchisms that perished before
the first crops were in . . . some dying wretchedly, nameless, under ice-and-snow
surfaces of bomb craters out in the East End not to be found till spring, some chronically
drunk or opiated for getting through the day’s reverses, most somehow losing, losing
what souls they had, less and less able to trust, seized in the game’s unending chatter,
its daily self-criticism, its demands for total attention . . . and what foreigner
is it, exactly, that Pirate has in mind if it isn’t that stateless lascar across his
own mirror-glass, that poorest of exiles. . . .
Well: he guesses They have euchred Mexico into some such Byzantine exercise, probably
to do with the Americans. Perhaps the Russians. “The White Visitation,” being devoted
to psychological warfare, harbors a few of each, a Behaviorist here, a Pavlovian there.
It’s none of Pirate’s business. But he notes that with each film delivery, Roger’s
enthusiasm grows. Unhealthy, unhealthy: he has the sense of witnessing an addiction.
He feels that his friend, his provisional wartime friend, is being used for something
not quite decent.
What can he do? If Mexico wanted to talk about
Roxanne St. Claire
Brittney Cohen-Schlesinger
Miriam Minger
Tymber Dalton
L. E. Modesitt Jr.
Pat Conroy
Dinah Jefferies
William R. Forstchen
Viveca Sten
Joanne Pence