“I am talking about your recent visit to the Culinary Institute of America. Are you out of your mind? The gentleman you visited is an idiot. The man is a toy soldier. Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve been trying to tell you? I must say, I am extremely disappointed. I thought better of you.”

“How the hell do you know about my meeting? It was supposed to be secret.”

“Someone told me, dear boy. We are a small fraternity, a band of brothers; actually, we are a cage full of rats who would sell their grandmothers for a piece of cheese. But now that I know of your vulnerability to this sort of national-security cult propaganda, I am prepared to offer my services as a deprogrammer.”

Rupert proposed that we meet for a drink at a place in Adams-Morgan called Tom-Tom. “Nobody will notice us there,” he said. It turned out to be a raunchy Caribbean bar, with blue neon lights, funky music and a lot of leggy women looking down their noses at everybody. Crowding around the bar was a herd of young men in button-down oxford shirts and no ties. They looked like Capitol Hill staffers—they had to be—who had come up to Adams-Morgan hoping to score. That was the one omnipresent, irreducible fact about Washington, stretching from administration to administration, party to party, decade to decade: it was a magnet for young people who wanted to serve their country—and get laid. In the midst of this urban meat market, knocking down a mai tai, was Rupert Cohen.

“I should amend what I said on the phone,” he said, taking a sip of the cocktail through a long, colored straw. “Tom Rubino is less of an idiot than many of my colleagues. He at least attempts to be professional. But he is still, at bottom, an idiot.”

“He didn’t seem like an idiot to me,” I answered. “He seemed quite smart. And unlike you, he actually told me something useful about what the French are doing in China. He struck me as a guy who was trying to do the best he could with what he had.”