"Yes," Cass answered without hesitating.
When those two left Chicago, it felt less like banishment than release. It was true, they had finished. Now they could begin.
The Melville Arms Hotel was only two blocks from the quarter of Capitol Hill that included the Library of Congress and the new Supreme Court Building. It had long been favored by less well-connected lawyers and lobbyists, by would-be staffers and fading hangers-on. The step boards and railings of its entryway were warped and unpainted, its masonry façade badly in need of pointing, its windows blanked by faded green shades in various stages of disintegration. The alley that ran back from Fifth Street directly beside the hotel led into a warren of no-toilet shacks in which destitute Negroes lived. But now not even the Melville Arms made itself available to just anyone, and it was rare that a room was booked out to the same party for more than a day or two, and unheard-of that one visitor should monopolize accommodations for a period of weeks. Yet that was exactly what was happening in Januaiy and February of 1944. In fact, by apparent coincidence, it was happening with two different rooms, two different hotel guests, each a government man of influence.
One was a portly former boiler baron named David Lothrop. His family had made a fortune in steam-works manufacture in Cincinnati, and the Lothrop factories on the Ohio River were one of the great industrial centers of the Midwest. After Pearl Harbor the Lothrop works had shifted to war production and now were a major supplier of the
primitive but powerful diesel engines used to power LSTs. A year into the war it had become clear both that the Lothrop Company was a highest-priority manufacturer and that David Lothrop, its president and owner, was incapable of running the concern in its new situation. That potentially insoluble problem was actually resolved quite handily when Senator Robert Taft proposed David Lothrop as a candidate for a prestigious senior position in the War Department. Lothrop was accordingly named deputy undersecretary of war, materiel. He assumed, as did his proud wife and children, that he was brought to Washington especially to oversee the crash manufacture of the thousands of landing craft that the Allies would need for their eventual invasion of the Continent.
In fact, Lothrop's incompetence was as apparent in the colossal new War Department Building in Arlington as it had been in the converted boiler works on the bluffs above the Ohio, and even Lothrop himself soon realized that he was surrounded in his fancy offices by people whose entire job was to keep him occupied with projects that involved careful preparations, elaborate briefings and complicated follow-up summaries, but which finally had nothing to do with fighting, much less winning, the war.
David Lothrop wasn't the only one with a morale problem. The news from Europe that winter was all bad. The great breakthrough landing in Italy had turned into a disaster at Anzio where tens of thousands of American soldiers were trapped on a narrow beachhead, an army bleeding to death week after week under savage German assaults. Every day brought more news of defeat.
It was under the pressure, perhaps, of seeing his own failure magnified by the entire army's that Lothrop had begun his uncharacteristic love affair. He had met the woman at the Red Cross honors ceremonies in the ornate marble Red Cross headquarters mansion near the White House. Her name was Sylvia Yergin, and though with her shapeless black hair and unstylish clothing she seemed indifferent to her appearance, and though she seemed ill at ease in speaking English, she struck Lothrop as all the more alluring for not being one of the aggressive Washington beauties who so intimidated him. Their first tryst took place in the small apartment Yergin shared with another woman. When on that occasion, to Lothrop's amazement, she expressed a wish for a discreet place to meet him regularly, he'd recalled someone in the Senior Mess mentioning the Melville Arms.
There, at last, with Sylvia Yergin's encouragement, Lothrop had rediscovered his competence, performing acts of which no one would have believed him capable, certainly not his thin-lipped wife or the condescending War Department functionaries who no doubt took his impotence for granted. He had found his place in Washington, finally—in the embrace of an exotic woman who claimed, incredibly, to love him.
The other party to whom the steel-eyed manager of the Melville Arms had let a room without restriction was Sean Dillon, and he was driving there now as fast as he dared. He could make it from Bureau headquarters on Ninth Street to the far side of Capitol Hill in less than ten minutes, but this time even that seemed an eternity. He pushed hard on the steering wheel and cut smoothly in and out of the oncoming traffic, storming the Hill. Washington was as much his city now as Chicago had ever been, and speeding along its axis avenue, aware of his own skill, Dillon felt the familiar exhilaration. To whomever the proud capital's echelons and traditions and, also, social privileges had belonged before, the city now had been put in the power of men like him. He could never have predicted what the FBI would come to mean to him, not only the bold integrity of the self-image it offered, but the sense of a deeper role in protecting the country against what threatened it. That function of the Bureau's was revered almost mystically not only by the agents themselves, but by Washingtonians, or at least by the civilians among them. The city of embassies, branches, departments, commissions and boards was afraid of itself, as besieged in its way as London was, if only from within. The war had started, after all, with a shock of deceit, and from then on the expectation of mortal betrayal would be a near permanent feature of the Washington mind.
FBI agents in the capital of the United States during World War II were, in Dillon's experience, exactly what he himself was—social, political and, despite their law degrees, educational outsiders who had been joined to each other by a common summons to serve the very circle that once would not even have noticed it was excluding them. Dillon had been moved by the tacit bond he felt with his fellow agents, men linked by a spirit of the emergency, but also by a recognition of common ideals; a shared lack of intellectual sophistication, perhaps, but also of pretension. Their virtues were the simple ones of directness and physical courage. They were a modest elite. It surprised Dillon what happiness it was to be one of them.
He slowed his car as he turned onto Fifth Street, not wanting to attract notice as he approached the hotel. He pulled over to the curb, glancing up at the third-floor window of a nondescript office building that stood across the street. He saw Coles, the agent who had called him to say the subjects had both arrived.
He got out of the car with the air of a bored messenger and sauntered across the sidewalk and up the stairs to the hotel. He crossed the small lobby without a glance at the desk clerk and went through the door to the stairwell. Now unobserved, he took the uncarpeted stairs in a hurry, but withholding his weight to keep the noise down. When he'd first ascended these stairs they had seemed familiar, and it was only on his second or third visit that he realized they reminded him of the winding, creaking stairs in Doc Riley's rooming house in Canaryville. It had been years since Riley met his fate, but to Dillon that failure of his had happened, it always seemed, just yesterday.
Coles and six others watched the hotel in shifts from their perch across the street, but Dillon was the only agent who ever entered it. The others were told this was to keep from drawing attention with their comings and goings, but the more important reason was that in this operation, only Sean Dillon, the agent in charge, could know what was going on.
On the third floor he left the stairwell and moved quietly down the hallway to the last room on the left. Once inside he crossed to the low chest of drawers on which two machines sat, a radio receiver and a wire-reel sound recorder. He snapped them both on and donned a set of earphones. He listened for a moment, then adjusted the volume on the receiver.
He closed his eyes and placed the open palm of his left hand on the bare wall before him. It was the wall his room shared with David Lothrop's.
The microphone hidden in the ceiling lamp above the bed in Lothrop's room picked up every faint rustle of movement. He adjusted the volume down again because the amplification registered in his earphones almost painfully as Lothrop and the woman approached the climax of their energetic fornication. The crude staccato of thumping bed furniture and human grunts meant nothing to Dillon but that he had arrived in time. It had been eleven days since the lovers had last met each other here, an interval which made today's the most important rendezvous yet.
Dillon had to check a surge of anxiety, and he deflected a simultaneous, rare impulse of curiosity. Nothing of professional interest to him would happen between these two until their postcoital talk began.
He listened with cold detachment, but in a wholly distinct—and personal—part of his brain something else began to happen, a straightforward erotic response, a matter of quick images of a woman's body, not any woman, certainly not the impersonal flirts of magazines or alluring girls on the streets or the woman on the other side of this wall. It was Cass, and he saw her clearly, not in a languid, willed fantasy, as if he had, voyeur-like, observed her too, but in the broken series of partial glimpses, the way he saw her in the throes of their own lovemaking.
It made him feel less like a pervert, perhaps, if this was his association with those sounds: Cass with her lips parted; Cass with her flattened breasts riding loosely back and forth beneath him, like mounds of gelatin; Cass with her painted toenails flailing a small circle by his left ear; everything reduced to Cass, to this moment inside her which in its intensity of pleasure and fearfulness meant more to Dillon, while it lasted, than the idea of all eternity, and
there
was why sex was sinful, how it obliterated for a moment everything else, including God; and
there
was why, with Cass, if with no one else ever, Dillon longed to dive into it, like into the water, as he'd come to think of sex, of which he was no longer afraid.
He tried to come back from that all too personal side of his brain, to listen to Lothrop, but another image—Cass, her hair flogging the damp pillow—popped into his head. He remembered the night after he had first watched Yergin and Lothrop making love. To his own surprise he'd arrived home in the grip of lust. He'd scooped Cass up and carried her into the bedroom and put her, not roughly, on the bed. She'd responded by laughing, "What have
you
been up to?"
"I can't tell you," Dillon had answered with a grin.
She'd grabbed his shirt to pull him down on top of her. "Well, whatever it is, I like it." That exchange had become a joke between them from then on.
He opened his eyes and stared at the fleck patterns in the swirled plaster wall. He tried to focus on what he was hearing, but still his mind faltered.
Cass was now in the last stage of her second pregnancy, due in a month or so. Her first had ended in a miscarriage shortly after she'd
discovered her condition. It had taken them almost two years to conceive again, and they were both happy and relieved. Dillon had expected that, pregnant, she would revert to a typical Irish reticence, but she hadn't. Once she had successfully weathered the uncertain first three months, her physical ease had returned and, in fact, she had become lustier than ever. As her belly grew Sean had found her more desirable than ever too.
"Oh, you are so wonderful! So wonderful!" The woman's voice crackled in his headset, hollow-sounding, as if the transmission wire ran under the ocean. "Do you know how wonderful you are?"
He brought his face closer to the wall, his left eye closer to the pencil mark encircling the pinhole. He heard the word as
wunderbar,
and he had to remind himself that she was not German. Sylvia Yergin was a Dane. She had been in Washington for a year and a half, having come from London as a liaison officer from International Red Cross.
Now he saw her. The pinhole gave him a view of the upper half of their bed. It was not to watch them fucking that he had drilled the hole, but only to be able to confirm beyond doubt every time that the woman Lothrop had brought here was Yergin. Dillon had seen her often from a distance, going and coming from Red Cross headquarters, waiting at her trolley stops, browsing in the Corcoran Gallery on Seventeenth Street, sitting on a stool in a luncheonette on Pennsylvania Avenue, shopping at a corner market near her apartment house in Georgetown. Despite her exotic accent and her success in snaring Lothrop, Sylvia Yergin was no one's idea of a femme fatale. She dressed frumpily, in thick woolen suits, heavy stockings and a dowager's stout shoes. Her graying hair made her look older than the forty years Dillon knew she was. Her aggressive lack of makeup gave her face an unpleasant severity.
Yet now, kneeling naked on the edge of their bed, craning over the spent Lothrop, her breasts folding onto him, her skin glowing silken pink—her appearance was transformed. To Dillon, no connoisseur, her head in profile had the finely wrought line of a woman in a painting, and her full figure had the erotic appeal of classic sculpture. There was a gentleness about her as she fondled Lothrop, a vulnerability Dillon associated only with a woman cuddling her child. He sensed how an unsuspecting man could find her irresistible.
Over the weeks he had heard the whole range of her passion sounds, and he'd thought Lothrop a fool for so slavishly responding to whores'
tricks. Not only her appearance was transformed in this room; her stern bashfulness became a feverish assertion that often threatened to leave her panting lover behind. But also, sometimes, she whimpered with such apparent depth of pleasure that Dillon, despite his resolve, and feeling all at once ripe for submission himself, would put an eye to the pinhole to watch. At such moments her face would take on a pleading aspect that reminded Dillon of the Dutch girl in the famous war-relief poster: "Answer Their Prayers." Dillon thought that Sylvia Yergin wanted Lothrop to see her as the heroine of one of those not incidentally Germanic fairy tales, a girl in a cape lost in the forest, this—to her—foreign, unfriendly war capital. But Dillon constantly forced himself to see her as the one who, when the woodsman lays down his ax, bares her fangs and lunges at the dumb bastard's throat.