“Dear chap,” smiling angelically, “there isn’t going to be any crisis. Labour wants the American found as much as we do. We sent him out to destroy the blacks, and it’s obvious now he won’t do the job. What harm can he cause, roaming around Germany? For all we know he’s taken ship for South America and all those adorable little mustachios. Let it be for a while. We’ve got the Army, when the time is right. Slothrop was a good try at a moderate solution, but in the end it’s always the Army, isn’t it?”

“How can you be so sure the Americans will ever condone that?”

A long disagreeable giggle. “Clive, you’re such a little boy. You don’t know the Americans. I do. I deal with them. They’ll want to see how we do with our lovely black animals—oh dear, ex Africa semper aliquid novi, they’re just so big, so strong—before they try it on their own, ah, target groups. They may say a good many harsh things if we fail, but there’ll be no sanctions.”

“Are we going to fail?”

“We’re all going to fail,” Sir Marcus primping his curls, “but the Operation won’t.”

Yes. Clive Mossmoon feels himself rising, as from a bog of trivial frustrations, political fears, money problems: delivered onto the sober shore of the Operation, where all is firm underfoot, where the self is a petty indulgent animal that once cried in its mired darkness. But here there is no whining, here inside the Operation. There is no lower self. The issues are too momentous for the lower self to interfere. Even in the chastisement room at Sir Marcus’s estate, “The Birches,” the foreplay is a game about who has the real power, who’s had it all along, chained and corseted though he be, outside these shackled walls. The humiliations of pretty “Angelique” are calibrated against their degree of fantasy. No joy, no real surrender. Only the demands of the Operation. Each of us has his place, and the tenants come and go, but the places remain….