He rocked her back and forth; he’d already been in this place himself. “Julian wasn’t, Desdemona! He was sitting on your knee. I guess that means that somebody up there likes you.”
A good howl and a fit of the shakes helped get the shock out of her system. By the time it passed, she was beginning to return to the ordinary world.
“I’ve got nothing for your dinner!” she said.
“I brought pizza.”
“Sophia! How could I forget Sophia?”
“Patsy’s taking her to JFK. Myron wants her.”
Whereupon Julian woke, hungry but otherwise himself.
Carmine sat and watched his wife feed his son, battling to banish the demons. The trouble, he thought, was that Desdemona mistook her importance in his police scheme of things. Holloman was small enough for his wife to have her own presence, and she drew enmity to herself like a magnet drew iron filings. It was her size, the dignity that went with it, her air of invulnerability. If his enemies hated him, they also hated her, but in her own right. Desdemona was not a princess: she was sovereign.
May 1967
The death of Erica Davenport was the epicenter of a human earthquake; it shook people and their constructions to their foundations, from the chief executives of Cornucopia, through Carmine Delmonico and his family, all the way to the FBI.
“But she’s Ulysses!” Ted Kelly insisted, seeking out Carmine in his office at County Services. “We’ve known that for two years!”
“Then why didn’t you arrest her?”
“Evidence! It’s called evidence? No matter where we went, no matter what we unearthed, we could never find a shred of evidence against her that would stand up in court. If we’d tried her, she would have walked, and in a blaze of publicity that would have harmed our image as much as it enhanced hers.”
“That’s because she wasn’t Ulysses,” Carmine said. “I have actually heard of evidence, Ted, and it wasn’t there for the simple reason that Erica Davenport wasn’t Ulysses. I think she knew who Ulysses is, but that’s a far cry from being him. And you know what, Special Agent Kelly? I don’t like your attitude any more today than I did when I put your big ass on the ground. You’re as thick as two planks.”
“She was Ulysses, I tell you!” Kelly smacked his fists on his thighs, beat them up and down in frustration. “We’d just finished planning the neatest sting operation in espionage history—she couldn’t have resisted the bait, she’d have gone to her drop and we’d have been waiting. Now—Fuck!”
“You found out where her drop is?” Carmine asked, looking astonished and ingenuous.
“This one,” Special Agent Kelly said in goaded tones, then embarked on a tutorial. “Spies have a list of drop sites, they never use the same one twice. Their list is coded and they work through it. They have signals to alert their contact that something is going to be dropped, usually in a deserted spot like woods or an abandoned factory—”
“Or identical briefcases, or a package taped under a seat on a bus, or the fourth brick from the right seventeen rows from the top,” Carmine finished with a grin. “Come on, Kelly! All that’s horseshit, and you know it. The wad of money—the spy who can’t name his contact because he doesn’t know who his contact is—what a load of crap. First off, whoever’s doing this isn’t in it for the money or the intellectual thrill. He’s an ideologue, in it for the greater glory of Mother Russia, or Marx and Lenin—a Communist ideology, anyway. Secondly, the stolen item is passed openly, after a phone call or a fax from a number no one could know about. You can’t tap every phone in the country, or intercept every telex. No matter how fanatically you watch any individual, if he’s as smart as Ulysses he’ll pass his information right under your noses and you’ll never see or smell it. You can’t seriously expect me to believe that you and the FBI don’t know how important in himself Ulysses is! Which means he rides around big cities in a limo, uses private facilities when he has to go, has the run of five-star hotels, eats in places where you and I couldn’t afford the water in the finger bowls—how am I doing, Ted?”
“Ulysses was Erica Davenport,” Kelly said stubbornly.
“Ulysses is alive and well and slipped a noose around that poor woman’s neck,” Carmine said harshly. “Not, however, before he broke her arms and legs in two places each, to be sure how much she knew and whom she might have told.”
The mask fell completely. In a second the clumsy, slightly dense, distinctly lower-grade FBI agent disappeared, to be replaced by a highly trained, highly professional, intelligent and capable man.