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then recorded choice quotes on index cards to be fit into future speeches. Substance and surface rubbing together. It was a measure of his skill that I didn’t mind.
    I was enjoying the padded chair when I noticed that it was 5:15. Mary Carelli emerged from her office and wordlessly waved me in. The experimental subject had been sealed and delivered. I liked her less than ever. When I got to the door, she was already behind her desk looking at a notepad and waiting for me to sit. So I leaned against the door frame until she looked up. Her eyes were watchful and didn’t change with her smile, which seemed to measure itself to the nearest millimeter. She nodded toward a chair. “Come on in and sit down.”
    I looked at my watch with studied deliberation. “Does whatever we’re going to do have to be done today?”
    She sat up in her chair and squared her shoulders. Set against the white walls and the hanging plants in her window, she looked mint cool. “Don’t be bureaucratic. I’d just as soon talk to you now.” The voice was cool too—a touch of scorn amidst a lot of indifference.
    I didn’t move. “I’m not bureaucratic. Just thirsty. I’ve talked more today than I care to and listened to more than I like to hear. A good deal of it nonsense. So I’m thirsty—and bored.”
    She sat holding her pad, still except for her left hand, which idly rubbed the pad between forefingers and thumb. It was as if all but her fingertips was under military occupation. She spoke with measured impatience. “So what do you suggest?”
    “I’ve suggested to myself that I have a gin and tonic on the deck of the Hotel Washington, and marvel at our nation’s capitol. I’d be happy to buy you a drink and talk business there.” Once I’d asked, I wasn’t so sure. But it beat sitting at attention in her office by a comfortable margin.
    Her body was a stiff parody of resistance. Finally, she willed it away. “All right. But I don’t intend to make a habit of this.”
    I knew what she meant, but played dense. “Why?” I asked innocently. “You married?”
    She looked at me askance. “No. Divorced.”
    I believed it. We left, more or less in tandem.
    The deck of the Hotel Washington overlooked the Potomac, the White House, and the Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln memorials, surrounded by grass and trees. From this distance, the squalid brown of the Potomac was blue, and carried a toy armada of trim pleasure craft. Arlington Cemetery sat in soft green hills, an optimist’s glimpse of eternity. The vivid view had an odd unreality, like a mural of the tourists’ imagined Washington. It was possible here to drink oneself into a dazed belief in the dramatic Washington of political fiction: statesmen launching soliloquies at moonlit marble, musing over the fate of Western civilization. The real Washington sat around me: knit-suited bureaucrats, drinking gin with tight mouths, nibbling on salted peanuts and calculations of small chances for petty gains. I looked out again and decided that I had a mild case of overcynicism. On its merits, the view was lovely.
    Mary and I sat in awkward silence staring out at the view. She was as remote as the marble. I would have preferred having a drink with the Washington Monument; it wasn’t so embarrassing when it didn’t talk to you. Instead I ordered two gin and tonics and waited for something to happen. Nothing did. Finally, I asked her what it was that she wanted. She told me. So I gave her the rundown she requested—what I had found and what I intended, including the subpoena to Sam Green. The last part caught her interest.
    “Have you already sent the subpoena?”
    “Yes,” I lied.
    She looked angry and unsettled, for reasons I couldn’t fathom. She sat erect and marshalled her shoulders again. I was beginning to read her better. She seemed to expend a lot of energy just keeping herself under control. And the rest of it controlling others. “I thought it was understood that you