Max Collins - Target Lancer

Eben Boldt and I clip-clopped across the three-hundred-foot-high octagonal rotunda, surrounded by polished granite, white and Siena marble, elaborate mosaics, gilded bronze, and government drones. An elevator with a uniformed attendant (you were seeing less and less of that now) took us up to the ninth floor, where the various federal offices were as utilitarian as the lower area was imposing.

On the ride back from Glenview, Boldt and I had not discussed my confab with the attorney general-in fact, the meeting wasn’t mentioned at all, Bobby Kennedy’s presence unacknowledged. We knew each other well enough to rustle up some small talk about his wife and their two grade-school-age children, and about my boy Sam, and how I was looking forward to spending time with him over Thanksgiving vacation.

The only reference to the little trip we’d just taken came when we were already in the Loop, with Eben saying, “It will be good having you work with us on this.”

And I said, “Yeah. How will Martineau feel about that? We mildly butted heads a while back.”

I had worked for an attorney defending a guy who had passed some counterfeit money, innocently as it turned out (at least according to the jury), and Martineau-who had not appreciated my testimony-asked me after, “How do you sleep at night?”

“With my eyes closed,” I’d said.

“SAIC Martineau and I,” Eben said, pulling into the Federal Building parking ramp, “maintain an uneasy truce.”

I didn’t pursue that.

Moving through an area half the size of the A-1’s waiting room, past a stern-looking but not unattractive brunette receptionist with mannish eyeglass frames, we entered at the midpoint of a rectangular bullpen of perhaps a dozen gray-metal desks. The layout-courtesy of substantial squared-off pillars and wall-like arrangements of filing cabinets-divided itself into numerous sub-areas, giving each desk some work space and even privacy. Down to my right, one end had a glassed-in area of telex machines with a door on either side marked INTERVIEW ONE and INTERVIEW TWO, and down at my left, that end was home to two glass-and-wood-faced offices, the glass blotted out by venetian blinds.

Eben walked me through and I nodded to a couple of agents I recognized, though most were as anonymous as monks hunkered over calligraphy. These servants of a higher power wore not shaved skulls and robes but crew cuts, dark-rimmed glasses, and white shirts with dark ties (suit coats slung over chairs). They seemed to either be on the phone or at their typewriters, the latter on stands that extended from the right of metal desks arrayed with gooseneck lamps, blotters, multiple-line phones, and disturbingly neat piles of paperwork. Clipboards hung on pillars with high-mounted black-bladed fans and the occasional clocks. This was an institutional world of gray-green plaster trimmed in dark wood, accented by bulletin boards bearing circulars, existing under fluorescent lighting that gave everything and everyone a ghostly pallor.

At the end with the two offices, Eben ushered me to the door at right, which was stenciled in gold:

SPECIAL AGENT IN CHARGE

Maurice G. Martineau

the implication being that the position was more important than the mere man who held it.

Eben knocked, waited for the “Yes,” and said, “Mr. Heller is here, sir.”

“Send him in, Ebe.”

This was apparently Eben’s nickname around the office, sounding vaguely like “Abe,” and news to me.

The Negro agent opened the door for me, I stepped in, and he shut it behind me, not joining us.

This was a good-size office, also rectangular but in the opposite direction as the outer area, putting Martineau at his glass-topped mahogany desk at right with a blinds-shrouded window behind him, facing a small conference table all the way across the office, by a wall bearing a big map of the United States. The furnishings were not the gray metal of the bullpen, but dark woods, Mediterranean style. A framed picture of Kennedy overlooked a bookcase of law books opposite as you entered, with the wall adjacent to Martineau’s work area dominated by a bronze Department of the Treasury seal.

Martineau did not rise. He was in fact on the phone-had two multiple-line jobs on the desk, which held many stacks of papers and files, nearly as neat as those of his minions. The desk itself wasn’t any bigger than a Buick, and instead of a gooseneck lamp, he had a green-shaded banker’s number, the shade the same color as his blotter. No ashtray.

Maurice G. Martineau was a sturdy-looking fifty or so, not in his shirtsleeves-his charcoal suit tailored, his tie striped blue and black. His oval mug was well-grooved but otherwise as anonymous as those faces in the crowd out in the bullpen. No crew cut for Martineau, though-his salt-and-pepper hair was neatly parted and combed and a Little-Dab’ll-Do-Ya’ed, and the only thing unruly about him were wiggle-worm eyebrows over deceptively bland blue eyes.

He raised a hand while he finished his phone call. I took in a few other details-the American flag behind him and to his right, the framed family photos (wife, boy, girl) arrayed on another smaller bookcase under the Treasury seal. Also a pitcher of ice water and several glasses.

Call finished, Martineau leaned back in his dimpled-brown-leather swivel chair and extended his hand. It was an odd example of gamesmanship, because this required me to rise from the visitor’s chair to accept the handshake, which proved firm and perspiration-free.

Sitting back down, I said, “I’ll try not to get in anybody’s way, Mr. Martineau. I’m just here to help.”

His smile might have seemed genuine to somebody who couldn’t read eyes.

“Make it ‘Marty,’” he said. “We don’t stand on ceremony around here. I know the Service has a reputation for stuffiness, but when your job is to lay your life on the line, the people you work with become your friends.”

“Fine. So then make it ‘Nate,’ and just let me know how I can lend a hand.”

“Let’s start with why you’re here.” He was rocking a little. “All I’ve been told is that you’re on loan from Justice, as…” He checked a paper on his desk. “… an investigative assistant courtesy of the Attorney General. But to my knowledge…” He gestured in the vague direction of the Monadnock Building. “… you work across the street. For yourself.”

I wasn’t crazy about justifying my presence to this bureaucrat, but I could see I needed to.

“I was an investigator on the rackets committee,” I said. “Worked for Bob Kennedy, and became an occasional asset to him, ever since. About an hour ago, he asked me to help you out for the next few days. Because of this situation with these potential assassins. And I said yes.”

His smile couldn’t have been more stuck on if he’d used Scotch tape. He put a lightness in his tone that didn’t quite do the trick when he said: “Then you’re not a spy?”

“What, for Bobby Kennedy? No. He just knows you’re shorthanded. And meaning no disrespect to that young crew of yours out there, most of whom were not raised in this town, I do know my way around Chicago.”

He thought about that for two seconds. “All right. Then I’ll treat you as just another agent.”

“Fine by me.”

“With one exception. You’ll take the office next door. For one thing, I don’t have a free desk. For another, I want the men to understand that you have a certain standing in this investigation. That you represent the AG.”

“Oh, that’s not really a card I want to play.…”

“Then don’t play it. But it’s how I’ll present you, and…” He gestured toward the wall dividing this office from its neighbor. “… that’s the available space I have for you. Used to be my office, when I was deputy SAIC. But when I got moved up, I didn’t get assigned a second-in-command.”