ROMAINE STREET

I was in Hollywood by half past seven that morning, having driven up from the Airport Marina through a city that did not yet know it was interesting, and the first thing I saw at Romaine was the door, which was wrong in the particular way only a professional entry leaves things wrong: intact, closed, and no longer meaning anything. Inside, the second floor smelled of cut steel. Whoever had come in the night had gone through the office where the proprietor's paper lived, opened two safes with a torch, tried a third and thought better of it, emptied certain drawers with what the marks said was a shopping list, and gone out the way they came, carrying, among lesser goods, a quantity of cash and four boxes of files.¹ They left the cut safes standing open like patients on a ward. Nobody heard anything. In that building, hearing things had never been the staff's strong suit.

By nine the corridor outside the communications office held three governments' worth of investigators, all lying to one another with the fluency of men doing it on salary. Two LAPD detectives, Irish both, worked the scene the way the parish works the bingo money, confident the answer was local and larcenous. A pair from the Bureau stood off near the water cooler being federal at everybody. And there was a quiet third party in an insurance adjuster's suit whom the detectives took for an insurance adjuster, which was the idea, and whom I took for what he was, because I had been paid out of the same till for four years. Each of the three shops wanted to know what was in the boxes; none of the three would say why it wanted to know; and the Summa men, whose religion was silence the way Guthrie's was paper, told all of them, courteously, approximately nothing. I have worked rooms in my time, but I never saw a room worked the way that corridor worked itself: eleven professionals, one crime, and not one sentence of plain truth said aloud between breakfast and dark.

"And you are, sir?" the older detective asked me at the rope, book out.

"Mining relations," I said. He looked at the building, which is windowless, and down the corridor, which held eleven men and no mining, and wrote it down without comment, which is the correct way to receive a fact you can do nothing with, and I have thought better of the Los Angeles Police Department ever since.

The inventory was the morning's real business, and they let me sit in on it as mining relations, which tells you how the compartments had begun to lean on one another. Two of Sorensen's young men went drawer by drawer against the registers, calling losses in flat voices, and it was the calling that did it to me, because I come of a family with a certain history in the accounting of what gets left in other men's houses; my father once telephoned a house in Great Neck, its owner shot dead and not yet buried, about a pair of tennis shoes he had left there. I thought of him that morning for the first time in years, listening to the Hughes empire count what strangers had carried out of its house in the night. The Hugheses kept better lists.

And on the list, called in the same flat voice as the petty cash, was the item this whole number exists to record: a memorandum, one of a drawerful, touching the relationship between the proprietor's organization, the Central Intelligence Agency, and a certain sunken submarine.²

I want the reader to stand where I stood, because I had been standing there, in a sense, since 1943. My religion, the reader has had it often enough, holds that paper is the enemy: that the man who keeps the receipt is the man who pays, that nothing you never wrote can never be read to a jury. For four years, under orders, I had run the religion backward, and generated paper by the hundredweight, and told myself the inversion was safe because the paper was mine, designed, every sheet of it built to be found. And now the doctrine had come round the mountain and run me down with my own congregation aboard: somewhere in Los Angeles, in a bag, in the hands of parties unknown with a shopping list, was a page tying the mining venture to the Agency and the Agency to the boat, and it was loose precisely because somebody else had done what I had spent thirty years warning governments against. They had written it down. Not one line of the fatal paper was mine, and I want that on the record too, and the reader may decide which I valued more that morning, the operation or the acquittal; I have decided three times myself and gotten three answers.

Guthrie flew in on the afternoon plane, and I met a Guthrie I had not seen. He went through the emptied office with the registers under his arm, checking the called losses against his own copies, and somewhere in the second hour he stopped producing sounds. I found him at the end of it standing over the torched safe with a page of his neat figures in his hand, and he said, not to me, not to anybody: "There's no receipt." I asked him what he meant. "Whatever leaves this building leaves against a signature," he said. "Forty years, everything, a signature. They took things and there is no receipt." He looked down at the safe the way men look into open ground at a funeral, and I understood that I was watching a believer's crisis, the discovery that the universe does not keep his books, and I had the grace, or the sense, to say nothing, and I record that it is the closest I ever came to loving him.

The ransom noise started inside a week. It came the way that noise always comes, through a go-between with soiled hands and a clean story: an attorney of the sort the studios keep for their third divorces, a Levantine gentleman with beautiful cufflinks, who let it be known that the boxes might be available, as a block, for a figure with six zeros, no questions travelling in either direction. I sat in on the coffee-shop end of that, in a booth on Highland with the adjuster's-suit man two booths back, because a proposition nobody can admit receiving wants a listener nobody can admit sending, and that has been my exact trade since Fort Monmouth. I listened, and admired the cufflinks, and conveyed upward what I heard, which was nothing a court would call an offer and nothing a professional would call anything else. "My principals are romantics," the attorney said at the end, spreading his hands over the check. "They believe a thing is worth what its owner will pay to have it home quietly." I told him his principals had mistaken their man, the owner in question being famous for buying silence only by the year, never by the pound, and he smiled with real pleasure and paid for the coffee, one professional recognizing doctrine when it was quoted at him. And there it stuck, for the beautiful bureaucratic reason that there was no way to pay: no line in any ledger of the Republic could disgorge a million dollars for the return of documents about an operation that did not exist, without creating, in the act, more paper than the burglars had.³ The religion again, the reader observes, this time fighting for the other side.

Fay was questioned three days running, in relays, by all three shops, her office being the natural landlord of everything the burglars had wanted, and she came out of it with her hat on straight and met me at the counter place on Santa Monica as if returning from the dentist. "They're children, Jay," she said, ordering the eggs. "The Bureau one kept touching his gun for comfort. The police one wanted to know if I noticed anything unusual in the building. Twelve years I've been in that building; I told him I had never once noticed anything usual, and he wrote it down." Then she buttered her toast and gave me, in passing, unasked, the only piece of hard intelligence produced by anybody in Los Angeles that month: "There's an index to that drawer, you know. The drawer travelled but the index didn't. Your program's in it, fourth line, by name." She said it the way you'd mention a parking ticket, and went back to the eggs, and I sat on my stool with my coffee halfway up and looked at the most composed human being in the state of California, and found the composure, in equal parts and for the first time, the most attractive and the most alarming thing I had seen in years. I did not ask how she knew. In our arrangement nobody asked, and I had drawn, as the reader knows, the very great benefit of that clause, and a man does not audit the treaty that is protecting him.

The sailing conference met the following week in the program office at El Segundo with the blinds down, and I will compress a long grey afternoon into its arithmetic, because that is all the afternoon was. To hold: the boxes were loose, the index named the program, one newspaper call could end everything, and prudence said wait. Against: the lift needed the mid-Pacific summer, the long calms, June into August and not an hour outside it; miss the window and the operation stood a full year at the dock, seals broken, waiting on the same burglars, the same newspapers, and the Soviets' patience besides.⁴ A man from Washington said the words that decided it, and he said them without drama, reading off a pad: the risk of going was unknown, the risk of waiting was certain. Nobody voted; the decision condensed out of the cigarette smoke like weather, and the weather said sail.

She stood out of Long Beach on the afternoon of the twentieth of June, 1974, big and dull and believed, a mining ship going mining.⁵ There was a modest crowd at the breakwater, wives and gulls and a few of my trade-press regulars, and I watched from the office with Guthrie, who had flown down with his registers reconstructed and his grief locked wherever he locked such things. Neither of us said anything for a while. On the glass the ship got smaller and the ocean got bigger, and I stood there doing the one sum neither of us was going to say out loud: that the boat was going to sea with the secret already ashore, in a bag, in Hollywood, and that everything now rode on which of two strangers moved first, the claw or the man with the shopping list.