TOAST: Kate. We don’t take the letter seriously… “Homosexual maniac”?

KATE: I thought you didn’t—

TOAST: I didn’t read it. But I sure had it quoted to me enough times. At least the homosexual maniac part. I rode with them on the plane, Riggs—

KATE: Riggs and Northup. Who I’m up against.

TOAST: No. We seal this letter business off. Closure. It can’t contaminate, it can’t feed, it will die.

KATE: So this is basically damage control.

Pause.

TOAST: Damage control is no longer a term with any real utility. As nomenclature it was too…apt. Compartmentalization is so much more elaborate and just so much more ridiculous. You discuss compartmentalization for ten minutes, you feel like all day you’ve been inhaling fumes. Everyone sounds like Munchkins…Throbbing Technicolor absurdity. (Pause.) Do you see what’s happening? (KATE shrugs helplessly.) To sit across this table from somebody and speak the truth about our fate?

Pause.

KATE: Nobody in the whole department has ever talked like this to me before.

TOAST: And I’ve never talked like this to anyone. And only one person ever talked like this to me. And I’m sure I was the only one he ever—(Pause.) Manfred Dillman.

KATE: Man-fred Dill-man!…“A man first and last.”

TOAST: Man-fred Dill-man. He was a man coming and going. He was the one. He sat me down in his office on his last day. I’d never spoken to him before. You know what people said about him? How long have you been with the Department?

KATE: Twelve years, almost. I knew of him.

TOAST: They used to call him the greatest bureaucrat next to J. Edgar Hoover. But they were wrong. He was greater.

KATE: Tell me.

TOAST: J. Edgar Hoover was a maestro. A campaigner. He parted his name on the side, for Christ’s sake. A conniver. Dillman was a genius. Dillman was a poet…(Intense, rapid:) I’m sure he picked me entirely at random. He spoke to me for five minutes. He was wearing a brown suit. A yellow shirt. A blue string necktie fastened with a tarnished silver longhorn steer’s…head. He invited me to push the limits of the absurd. To make that my vocation. He said, “We—are—surrealists.” And he dismissed me. Now. Now don’t you understand what’s happening?

KATE: Well. All right—no.

TOAST: I’m giving you the formula for success, Kate. In exchange for those notes. I’m acting unilaterally. I’m utterly at your mercy.

Pause.

She hands them over. He holds her hand. Pause. Suddenly they’re kissing. As they kiss:

KATE: What are we—doing—

TOAST: We’re celebrating, honey—

KATE: Okay! Celebrating what?

TOAST: A supremely intimate moment. It’s unrepeatable. (Pause, kissing.) They said you met him.

KATE: Who?…Yeah! Her brother walked up to me in a restaurant and sat down and called me a homosexual maniac!

TOAST: You didn’t tell Georgina Jameson. I mean about the threats.

Pause. They separate as before.

KATE: Then he phoned me twice.

TOAST: You mean the brother—

KATE:—the brother. Get off his sister’s back or he’s gonna “blow the whistle.” I thought he was crazy. He is crazy. I didn’t think he’d—her brother—what if he did nothing? I’m spooked into denying accusations in advance. Then the accusations don’t come. I flipped a coin. Tails. I waited him out.