“Cut to the mid-1970s, when the Good Ship Titanic encounters a rather large iceberg, in the form of the Church Committee. And all of a sudden the organization stops talking with its old chums in the press, including Mr. B., and everyone’s running for cover and we have absolutely nothing in the file about your esteemed colleague for almost ten years. But there’s one final set of cables, and it’s yummy.”

“What does it say?”

“Will you promise me the Los Angeles bureau if I tell you? Because I’ve always wanted to cover Hollywood.”

“Stop it! Tell me what it says.”

“There’s a 1983 memo from the chief of the CI staff to the chief of EUR division. It says that a counterintelligence investigation of your esteemed colleague has been opened. No details given, except that the tip comes from a French source—cryptonym LVBLOW-1, if you care—who says Mr. B is on the books of LVKEY—that’s the crypt for the French external service—and is being paid a large sum of francs for his services. The CI chief says they’ve looked into the possibility that it’s a false-flag recruitment, and that his stuff is really being passed on to the Russkies, but they don’t think so. And that’s it. La commedia è finita. So what do you think? Am I a great reporter, or what?”

“Fuck!” I said. That was the worst possible news, because it meant I would have to do something. “That’s all there was?”

“There was one more memo in his 201 saying that the case had been referred to the deputy director for operations, personally, for resolution.”

“What did that mean?”

“It means they killed it, obviously. Prominent journalist. Too hot to handle. Embarrassing past history. And that was the end of it. The great glacier of the bureaucracy moved on, and now nobody knows or cares—except you and me and a few incompetent gnomes at the Culinary Institute of America.”

“Fuck,” I said again. “Now what do I do?”

“Hmmmm.” Cohen was purring. He liked making me uncomfortable. “All I can say is that if I had given you the same information about a politician, I am confident that it would be in tomorrow’s newspaper.”

19

19

I was underwater now, and I needed to breathe—to communicate what I knew to someone else. Bob Marcus, the bureau chief who had responsibility for both me and Bowman, was a possibility, but I didn’t trust him. He was thoroughly intimidated by Bowman. I could talk to Philip Sellinger, who had been so nice to me at Mrs. Parsons’s party, but what would he know about sources and spies? In actuality, there was only one possible solution. The man holding my oxygen mask was Ed Weiss. He had asked me to come see him, anyway, to talk about my career. I had an excuse.