Line of Succession

They had lived in one of those towns the existence of which was defined in terms of how many miles it was from Alexandria. He had kept the house six months and then moved to the city, a two-room walk-up.

Now the Executive Office Building was emptying and he did not want to return to the two-room walk-up. There was always Bev. But he went to the bar of the Army-Navy Club.

A vodka martini, very dry. Once, he had found comfort in bars, dim impersonal chambers where football and old movies provided conversational sustenance.

Lime had developed a passion for old movies: he could name character actors who had been dead for twenty years and all you needed was one fellow film buff to kill an evening with enjoyable trivia. “Eugene Pallette in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.” “No that was Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” “I thought that was Claude Rains.” “It was. They were both in that one.” Remember the beautiful cloaked melodrama of Mask of Dimitrios, Greenstreet and Lorre and was Claude Rains in that one too? He was in Casablanca with them but was he in Dimitrios? I don’t know but it’s running on one of the UHF late shows next week, I saw it in TV Guide...

A slough of boredom. Halfhearted anger toward the rutting man and woman who had accidentally given him his ticket into the world. Too young, during the war, for anything but Dave Dawson novels and radio melodramas and sandlot baseball and junior rifleman badges. Too old, afterward, to join the concerned generation: Lime had graduated from college without ever asking his roommate’s politics.

He had known too many bars. They had become too familiar. He left the club.

In the Fifties the Cold War had seemed real and he had enjoyed matching himself against the best the other side had to offer. Are you old enough, Mr. Lime, to remember the days when you could tell good from evil?

In those days American Intelligence was an infant modeled on the British system and things went on in a peculiarly arcane British fashion, as if nuclear superpowers could be treated in the same way as internecine Balkan intrigues of the Twenties. But gradually cynicism set in. Courage became suspect. It was fashionable to plead cowardice. If you chose to face danger for sheer thrill you were singled out as a case of masochistic guilt. No one was supposed to look for risks. Bravery became contemptible: if you did something dangerous you were expected to say you did it for the money or for a cause. Not because you liked it. To prove you were normal you had to boast you were chicken. They had effectively outlawed courage. Crime, and driving cars recklessly, had become just about the only outlets left.

Lime had an ungrammatical talent for picking up foreign tongues and they had used him in the field for fifteen years, mostly in North Africa but once for eighteen months in Finland. Gradually he had begun to detest dealing with his own kind — not only his opposite numbers on the other side but his allies as well. They were warped people playing a meaningless game and the computers had taken the thrill out of everything. What was the point of risking his life?

In the end Lime had used what little influence he had to post himself into an office where nothing was required of him, where sometimes he forgot what the business was all about.

He was a GS-11, he earned fourteen thousand dollars a year or at least collected it, he ran an office which investigated a thousand threats on the President’s life every month and found all but three empty — an office in which lazy irresponsibility could masquerade as duty — and he had retirement to look forward to: a job as chief security officer for a corporation somewhere, with fate presiding over him like an expectant mortician.

It was all he deserved. When you reached the point where it was just a job you could switch off at five o’clock — when you no longer did it believing in it — you had been in it too long. You went through the old motions but it was like saying the same words over and over until they lost all meaning.

The evening gloom was chilly. He walked home, up the sooty row of turreted gingerbread Victorian houses, up the outside stair into his rooms. The steam radiators made a dense heat and the air was close — stale, as if it hadn’t moved for a long time. The blown lamps had reduced the rooms to a grayish half-light and the demons of the place were on the prowl. Abruptly and uneasily he lifted the telephone and dialed.

“Hello?”

“Hi.”

“Caro mio. How is it today?”

“Dreary,” he said “Have you had dinner?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Heavy silence clung to them. She said finally, “I tried to reach you but you didn’t answer.”

“I stopped in for a drink somewhere.”

“You’re not drunk.”

“No.”

“Well come over and I’ll fix you something to eat.”

“Not if you’re feeling that way about it.”