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anything aside from marijuana, whether I’d had homosexual relations, whether I’d stolen anything or had any relationship with a foreign government, and so on.
    The exam lasted a little under four hours. After running through the same questions three times, Jarmen gathered up his charts and went out of the room. He came back ten minutes later, unhooked me, and said he wasn’t sure whether I’d passed or not. He would have to show the charts to his supervisor. It could take up to a week for a decision.
    When I told Scott how long the polygraph lasted, he gave me the thumbs-up. ‘You passed.’
    I was feeling pretty good about my trip until I got back to San Francisco and saw the boa constrictor sleeping on the landing outside my apartment door.
    The boa constrictor was my roommates’ pet, not mine. When it came time to move out of Mike’s apartment, I had gone to the Berkeley student union to check the bulletin boards. Two students, a couple, had a vacant room in an apartment close to campus that would have been perfect if I had ended up at Berkeley in the fall. I noticed the boa in its aquarium when I inspected the place - there was no way to miss it - but I didn’t mind snakes, and the couple seemed pleasant enough. It was only after I moved in that I learned they were dyed-in-the-wool anarchists and that from time to time the boa would escape the aquarium.
    Then, it had all seemed part of the local color. Now that I was job-shopping at the heart of the American establishment, it mattered deeply. I figured it would take some CIA gumshoe about five minutes of talking to the neighbors to find out about the anarchists and the boa - evidence enough of a serious character flaw on my part. I’d be lucky if the CIA didn’t turn my application over to the FBI. I hadn’t even been hired, and already I was developing a streak of paranoia.
    One morning about six weeks after I came back from my Washington interviews, the doorbell rang. I was alone in the apartment. A gray-haired man in his early sixties, wearing a suit and tie, was standing on the stoop. He had a briefcase in one hand and a map in the other. I thought he was one of those evangelical Christian missionaries who would sometimes try their luck in Berkeley.
    He apologized for disturbing me so early and asked if I was so-and-so. Geez, I thought, what a coincidence, he’s looking for one of my Berkeley friends. I was about to give him the proper address when it occurred to me who my visitor was - a CIA background investigator who had mixed up my address with that of a friend I’d listed as a reference. He was in mid-sentence, apologizing for the mistake, when I began to push him out the door. I didn’t want him to catch sight of the poster of Mao on the landing, underneath which was neatly written THE EAST WIND BLOWS RED, or the boa, which was sure to slither around the corner at any minute. Admittedly, if I had thought about it a little harder, I might have realized that an organization that couldn’t even get a legman to the right address was unlikely to pick up such subtle cues as anarchist landlords.
    I was asleep on the last Monday morning of July when the telephone rang a little after eight. It took me a moment to recognize Scott’s voice on the other end.
    ‘Can you be in Washington in two weeks? Security cleared you, and the Directorate of Operations is offering you a job.’
    A job? I hadn’t had any contact with the CIA in three months. The DO, I figured, was toast. The only thing remotely long-term on my mind was Mandarin Chinese, which I’d started during the summer session at Berkeley.
    Scott was impatient. ‘If you can’t make it in two weeks, it may be at least six months before I can get you into another class.’
    ‘Are you absolutely sure security cleared me?’
    Hadn’t the CIA checked with the FBI and found out about Ron Kovick or the trips to Paris and Prague? The motorcycle through the library? The anarchists and the boa? I