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it. Not at my billing rate.”
    “But it involves CIA.”
    “No question about that CIA is the Corporation’s single biggest client.” “I don’t want you doing it,” Molly said. “We talked about it already that’s your past. You made a clean break stay away.”
    She knew how important it was to me to separate myself from the clandestine operative work that brought out the icy ruthlessness in me.
    “That’s my instinct, too,” I said. “But Steams is going to make it as hard for me to say no as he possibly can.”
    Now she got up and knelt on the floor facing me, her hands on my knees.
    “I don’t want you working for them again. You promised me that.” She was rubbing her hands back and forth on my thighs as she spoke, seducing me away, and fixed me with a beseeching stare, more inscrutable than usual.
    “Is there anyone you can talk to about this?” she asked.
    I thought for a moment, and at last said, “Ed Moore.”
    Edmund Moore, who was retired from the Agency after thirty-some years, knew more about the inner workings of the CIA than just about anyone else in the world. He had been my mentor in my brief intelligence career my “rabbi,” in intelligence argot and he was and remained a man of rare instincts. He lived in Georgetown, in a wonderful old house, and he seemed to be busier now, since his retirement, than in his active days in the Agency: reading seemingly every biography ever published, attending meetings of CIA retirees, luncheons with old CIA cronies, testifying before Senate subcommittees, and doing a million other things I couldn’t keep track of.
    “Call him,” she said “I’ll do better than that. If I can clear my calendar tomorrow afternoon, or the day after, I’ll fly to Washington to see him.”
    “If he can spare the time to see you,” Molly said. She had begun to arouse me, no doubt her very intention, and as I leaned forward to kiss her neck, she suddenly exclaimed, “Oh, great. Now the damn putanesca sauce is burning.”
    I followed her into the kitchen, and as soon as she had turned off the burner—the sauce was now a hopeless cause—I encircled her from behind.
    Things were so charged between us that with a little nudge in either direction, we could be embroiled in an endless argument, or … I kissed her right ear and made my way slowly downward, and we began to make love on the floor of the sitting room, plaster dust or no plaster dust, pausing only long enough for Molly to go find her diaphragm and put it in.
    That evening I called Edmund Moore, who delightedly invited me to join him and his wife for a simple dinner at their home the next evening.
    The next afternoon, having postponed three eminently postponable meetings, I caught the Delta shuttle to Washington National Airport, and as dusk began to settle over Georgetown, my taxi crossed the Key Bridge, rattled over the cobblestones of N Street, and pulled up to the wrought-iron fence in front of Edmund Moore’s town house.
    THREE.
    Edmund Moore’s library, in which we sat after dinner, was a magnificent two-story affair lined with shelves of oak inset with cherry. The second tier was ringed with a catwalk; several library ladders rested against the first-tier cases. In the dim lighting the room seemed to glow amber.
    Moore had one of the finest personal libraries I had ever seen, which included an impressive collection of books about espionage and intelligence. Some of them were accounts by Soviet and East Bloc defectors, which Ed Moore had placed with American and British publishers, in the years when the CIA did such things. (Openly, anyway.) Entire bookcases were devoted to the works of Carlyle, Dickens, Ruskin.
    They had the look of those books you could purchase by the yard from an interior decorator to simulate the look of an old baronial library, but I knew that Ed Moore had painstakingly collected them all at auctions and in book shops in Paris and London, and in secondhand stores and barns