No one used the term textbook operation. Three days later Radio Swan was still on the air, promising the abandoned troops in Zapata swamp that help was on the way. Larry slept on a cot in grubby clothes but made it a point to shave every day. Shaving had an impact on his morale and he needed all the help he could get. Several weeks earlier he'd borrowed heavily to buy stock in Francisco Sugar at depressed prices. Sugar was the word going round. There were stunning profits to be made, insiders said, once the plantations were back in U.S. control.

"People think we're the strangest marriage," Beryl said.

"Why should they? Who? What's strange about us?"

"Only everything."

"People think we're interesting. That's my impression."

"They think we're strange. We have nothing in common. We have no practical reason for being. We never even talk about practical things."

"We have no children. We're not parents. Parents talk about practical things. They have reasons to be practical."

"With or without children. Believe me. We're considered strange."

"I don't think we're strange. I think we're interesting."

"We're interesting in a way. But we're also strange. I'm the one they focus on. I'm the stranger of the two."

"I don't like conversations like this. I don't know how to have these conversations."

"They're probably not a good idea."

"So let's change the subject," he said.

"Although the fact of the matter is you're far stranger, love, than I could ever think of being,"

"Strange how? I'm not strange. I don't like this at all."

"Strange like a man. Strange like someone I could never know the heart of, the truth of."

"This is thankfully outside my range."

"I don't think I could ever begin to imagine in years and years of living intimately with a man what it is like to be him."

"Funny. I thought women were the secret."

"No no no no no," she said softly, as if correcting a touchy child. "That's the wisdom handed down from man to boy, through the ages, a hundred generations of knowledge and experience. But it is just another Agency lie."

From the moment the CIA monitored a rebel broadcast on January 1, 1959, announcing that the tyrant Batista had fled the country at 2:00 a.m. and that Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz was the supreme leader of the Cuban revolution, from that moment to this, four and a half years later, as he stood in his striped robe mixing a drink for his wife, Larry Parmenter had been involved in one or another plot to get Cuba back. Soldiering on, Beryl said. She liked to remind him that he was not vindictive, had no strong political convictions, did not hate Castro or wish to see physical harm come to him. Larry was famous in fact for going to a costume party as Fidel Castro, with beard, cigar, khaki fatigues, about a month before the invasion. Seemed funny at the time.

One thing Larry didn't like at all. This was the kind of fellow he'd occasionally had to deal with in joint efforts to recover investments in Cuba. The gambling interests, the casinos and hotels, the men who bought off officials routinely, who sent a steady traffic of couriers with hefty satchels moving through the Bahamas to the International Credit Bank in Geneva-men who thought longingly of the millions they'd once skimmed from the gaming tables in Havana. He wanted nothing to do with those roly-poly wops.

Earlier that day a young man walked into the outer office at Guy Banister Associates in New Orleans. Delphine Roberts was at her desk typing a revised list of civil-rights organizations for Banister's files. The young man stood patiently waiting, in jeans with rolled cuffs, two days' stubble on his chin. Delphine stopped typing long enough to pat her teased hair, a nervous habit she was determined to overcome. Then she resumed her work, aware that the young man was studying a calendar on the wall in order to kid himself into thinking he was not being made to wait. She knew all the styles. She could type a complicated text and scrutinize a visitor at the same time. This visitor had a little smile that seemed to say, Here I am-just the fellow you've been waiting for.

"I would like to fill out an application for a position with the firm."

Delphine kept on typing.

"You have people who do undercover work, I believe, like mingle with students or go to political meetings. I am referring to collecting information. I want to apply to become an undercover agent. I have a verified alias. I have served in the armed forces. And I have lived abroad in a situation that gave me special depth into the communist mentality."

Delphine was not surprised. They had some thought-provoking individuals walking in unannounced at 544 Camp. This address tended to draw people from a colorful range of backgrounds.

She stopped typing long enough to give the young man an application. He said he had to get back to work at the coffee company around the corner but he would fill out the form and return it in the morning. Then he was gone.

David Ferrie came out of the small back room and said in his routine disbelieving whisper, "Who on earth was that?"

"He has a verified alias."

"Do we have forms for undercover agents?"

"No. It's just a normal form."

"Like height and weight."

"Whatever it says. I don't know."

"Like insanity in the family. Or give us the history of your disease."

"It says whatever you want it to say, Dave. I'm very, very busy."

"How can a person explain his disease on a printed form?"

David Ferrie went into Guy Banister's office, which was empty, and looked out the street-side window, trying to catch a glimpse of the young man whose voice he'd just been listening to. Had he caught something familiar in the tone? Would he be able to match a body to the voice? He looked at the swarm of people moving down the street. Dark folks aplenty, he thought. But no sign of the sweet-voiced boy who wants to be a spy.

Even coming back he was a military man. His father was a veteran. His brothers were in the service. My own brother was a navy man. We were a serviceman family. He sent me a regular allotment every month out of his pay and when he heard about my injury, which I said in a letter, he put in for a hardship discharge, as I was disabled from work and trying for six months to collect on my claim. He was stationed in California then and they let him go early in order to help his mother. This is the injury of a candy jar falling off a shelf that four doctors have taken x-rays of my nose and face and there is travel time and carfare and the store is still holding tight to their cash. I am a disabled woman who can't collect. It is like the days of Mr. Ekdahl, a ten-thousand-dollar-a-year man with an expense account who fixed it so my welfare was ignored.

I am leaving out Lee had a beautiful voice and sang beautifully at age six in Covington, Louisiana. He sang a solo in the Lutheran church, "Silent Night," and that can be verified.

Now this boy comes home from the service and says he will work on a cargo ship and send money home to me. That was our only conversation over three days where he slept on a cot in the kitchen, which was the only place I had for him, plus he told me that he passed his high-school-level tests, Mother, which I don't know why you need this to lift crates on a boat. He was here only parts of three days before packing a bag and leaving. Then I received a letter postmarked New Orleans that he has booked passage on a ship to Europe. It is painful to accept, your honor. There is nothing in the letter that says cargo. There is nothing about he will work his way for a certain time until I have found a larger place for us to live. It is, "I have booked passage." It is, "My values are very different from Robert's or yours." It is, "I did not tell you about my plans because you could hardly be expected to understand."