Feast of Murder(23)

Gregor also had a feeling that some people wouldn’t accept the change, no matter how radical. He had that feeling because the very young man from the FBI who was standing on his stoop was a throwback—but not really, because he was much too young to be thrown back to anything. The Bureau had always had a reputation for treating the citizens of its country as if they were an alien invading force. It was a reputation it had earned, even though most Bureau agents had no more tolerance for red baiting, domestic spying, and “counterrevolutionary” campaigns than anyone else. The truth of the matter was, as long as old J. Edgar Hoover was alive, the Bureau had been two organizations, not one. Even after his death, the Bureau had continued as two organizations to one degree or another, at least as long as Gregor had been a member of it. To this side was the great majority of Bureau agents, “real policemen” as they liked to think of themselves, who handled all those nasty interstate crimes the Bureau had been founded to combat in the first place. Kidnapping, interstate bank robbery and international bank fraud, mob-connected trucking and union   activities, smuggling, the bribery and extortion of national political figures—as long as you stayed away from drugs, real police work in the FBI could be much more interesting and much more exciting than the real police work in Dallas or New York. It had to be much more exciting than what those people over there did, which no one on this side ever quite figured out. “Infiltrating” the Yippies hardly seemed worth the bother. The organization accepted anyone who walked through the door and left its records lying around on desks for anyone at all to read. “Monitoring” the peace movement was worse, especially after 1973. For one thing, there wasn’t much left of it. For another, it did its business at rallies in public parks. Gregor was only sure of two things about what was going on over in that part of the Bureau’s ranks. One was that the regular agents were right, and that the whole domestic spying enterprise was Looney Tunes. The other was that all the Looney Tunes agents were Looney Tunes themselves.

The problem with the agent standing on Gregor’s doorstep was that he was a Looney Tune par excellence. If Gregor had had to reinvent from memory the epitome of a very dedicated domestic spy agent, he would have come up with this young man. The pale hair. The overneat clothes. The air of nervousness that just wouldn’t quit—the man was so tense, he was generating electricity. He was also about twenty-six, and that couldn’t be. Gregor had had a conversation just last week with a friend of his who was still in the Bureau. The big news over there now was that the Looney Tunes boys were being trimmed. “Not eliminated,” his friend had told him, “but there’s a hiring freeze and they’re not training any more and we all keep crossing our fingers and praying to God that we’re going to get rid of the nuts entirely.”

Gregor wrapped his arms around his body and marched up Cavanaugh Street away from the church, watching the young man on his stoop and the jumpy way he kept seesawing from one foot to the other. That the young man looked out of place in this neighborhood went without saying. He was the wrong body type and had the wrong coloring. That he would also be out of place in the Bureau was Gregor’s to ponder alone, but it presented an interesting chain of reasoning. If you’re paring back on Looney Tunes but you can’t really fire them all, what do you do with them? What sort of work would a Looney Tune be qualified for, once he could no longer spend his time tapping the phones at the Organization for the Vegetarian Solution to World War?

Gregor crossed the street, dodged a little to avoid a standing display of Indian corn that had been wound around a lamppost as if the lamppost had been a maypole, and noticed in passing that the paper flag on Lida’s third floor had been changed. This new one was much more neatly and professionally done, meaning Donna Moradanyan was back from the Main Line. It was also three entirely different colors. It made Gregor wonder where the confusion lay, here or on the other side.

Gregor got to his stoop, went up the concrete steps without touching the rail so he wouldn’t disturb the brown and amber ribbons someone had braided there, and then wondered when the braiding had been done. Donna Moradanyan was not only back, she was back with a vengeance. He stopped at the top of the stoop where the young man was standing and watched for a moment while the young man looked around himself, making wide arcs with his head like an electric eye scanning a security field. Then the young man turned back to the door, picked out the buzzer button next to “Apartment 3, Demarkian,” and pressed.