Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson Page B

purpose here in this big bedroom beside the tiny golf course, was to create a second catalog arranged by categories the colonel had devised, and then cross-reference the two. Sands had no secretary, no help—this was the colonel’s private intelligence library, his cache, his hidey-hole. He claimed to have accomplished all the photocopying by himself, claimed Skip was the only other person to have touched these mysteries.
    The large guillotine-like paper cutter and the long, long ranks of the jars of glue. And the dozen card drawers, sturdy three-foot-long troughs like those in libraries, each with four digits stenciled across its face—

     

    2242

     

    —the colonel’s lucky number: February 2, 1942, the date of his escape from the hands of the Japanese.
    He heard the colonel telling a story. His roar carried through the house while the others laughed. Sands felt in his uncle’s presence a shameful and girlish despair. How would he evolve into anyone as clear, as emphatic, as Colonel Francis Sands? Quite early on he’d recognized himself as weak and impressionable and had determined to find good heroes. John F. Kennedy had been one. Lincoln, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius…The colonel’s smile as he’d examined the gun—had the colonel known beforehand Skip was to receive this weapon? Sometimes the colonel had a way of smiling—irritating to Skip—a knowing play of his lips.
    Long before he’d followed his uncle into intelligence—in fact, before the existence of the CIA—as a child, Skip had made of Francis Sands a personal legend. Francis lifted weights, he boxed, played football. A flier, a warrior, a spy.
    In Bloomington that day nine years ago, the recruiter had asked, “Why do you want to join the Agency?”
    “Because my uncle says he wants me as a colleague.”
    The recruiter didn’t blink. As if he’d expected the response. “And who’s your uncle?”
    “Francis Sands.”
    Now the man blinked. “Not the colonel?”
    “Yes. In the war he was a colonel.”
    The second man said, “Once a colonel, always a colonel.”
    He’d been a freshman then, eighteen years old. This move to Indiana University had been his first relocation since 1942, when, following his father’s death on the Arizona at Pearl Harbor, his newly widowed mother had brought him from San Diego, California, back to the plains of her beginnings, to Clements, Kansas, to spend the rest of his childhood with her in the quiet house, in the sadness that didn’t know what it was. She’d brought him home to Clements in early February, in precisely the month that her brother-in-law Francis Xavier, the captured Flying Tiger, made his escape over the side of a Japanese prisoner-of-war ship and into the China Sea.
    On graduation Skip had accepted employment with the CIA, but even before training was returned to school to get a master’s in comparative literature at George Washington University, where he helped Nationalist Chinese exiles with their translations of essays, stories, and verse from the Communist mainland. The handful of journals publishing such pieces were funded almost entirely by the CIA. He got a monthly stipend from the World Literature Foundation, a CIA front.
    At the mention of his uncle that day in 1955, both recruiters had smiled, and Skip smiled too, but only because they smiled. The second man said, “If you’re interested in a career with us, I think we can accommodate you.”
    They’d certainly done so. And here before him stretched that career: nineteen thousand notes from interviews, almost none of them comprehensible to him—

    Duval, Jacques (?), owner 4 fishing boats (helios, souvenir, devinette, renard). [ Da Nang Gulf ], wife [ Tran Lu (Luu??)] inf st boats poss criminal/intel use. Make no profit fishing. CXR

    —the last three letters designating the interrogator who’d made the entry. Skip had taken to adding notes of his own, quotations from his heroes—“Ask not what your country can do for