Dad sighs, then answers in a reluctant voice. “Not Bobby. But Jack … yes. When the CIA guy and Royal were the drunkest—when we were finally headed back to the marina—they started talking about Dallas. That’s all the CIA guy called it: Dallas. But it was the way he said it that chilled me. Like he’d been there. He was furious at whoever had planned the operation, and kept saying how unprofessional it was. Now and then he’d cuss up a storm in French. When I tried to move away from them, Devereux cornered me in the bow and started trying to involve me in a personal injury lawsuit he had going.”

Dad laughs bitterly, and the result is like a painful cough. “That voyage turned into a damned nightmare. By the time we got back to Biloxi, the CIA guy was ready to fight somebody—anybody. Brody apologized and asked whether Leland or I could sedate him. He was serious. But we didn’t have any drugs with us. We got the hell off that boat as fast as we could and took off.”

“Why would Dr. Robb go into business with Royal after that?”

“Lee was already partners with Brody by that time. I think the next day he told himself he’d imagined most of what we’d heard. But I’d recognized the edge in that guy’s voice, from Korea. I’d run across a few intelligence types over there, guys nobody wanted to mess with. There’s a dark undercurrent to American power, Penn, and Royal and his friend were part of that. And since we’re showing each other old snapshots … let me show you one.”

He turns and reaches back into the bookshelf behind him and pulls out a worn copy of Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son, by William Alexander Percy, the Mississippi soldier and poet who raised his second cousin Walker Percy. Fanning the pages, Dad pulls out a faded color photo and slides it slowly across his desk.

“I only have this because Percy’s book was in my office the year of the fire,” he says with ineffable grief. We almost never speak of the event that destroyed the priceless library my father spent most of his life amassing, or the human cost that dwarfed the loss of those treasured books. Yet on this night, when Ray Presley’s name has already been spoken, it seems more than apropos.

Examining the picture, I see a little boy who looks like me standing beside a seesaw on the now-vanished playground of St. Stephen’s grade school. Back then St. Stephen’s was still an Episcopal school, and our classes were held in an antebellum mansion downtown.

“I remember this picture,” I tell him. “I was in first grade. I thought you used it as a bookmark.”