The Coming of the Quantum Cats

17 August 1983

1:18 A.M. Nicky DeSota

I've taken the Daley Expressway down into the city a thousand times. Never like this before. Never with sirens going and overhead lights flashing off the hood ornament of the big Cadillac. At that hour of the morning there were not that many other cars on the road, but the ones that were scooted out of our way as soon as they saw the flashers of the Chicago Police Department cruiser that ran interference for us. We made it in twenty-one minutes. Faster than the train; but it was the longest twenty-one minutes of my life.

No one would tell me a thing. "What are you pulling me in for?" "Shut up, Dominic." "What did I do?" "You'll find out." "Can't you tell me anything?" "Listen, son, for the last time, shut up. Chief Agent Christophe will tell you all you want to know—a lot more, even!"

"Son" he called me. That was the gorilla on my right—dripping wet from coming into the pool after me, at least two years younger than I. But there was a big difference between us. I was the prisoner, and he was the one who knew the answers he wouldn't tell.

There wasn't any sign on the office building on Wabash, but the night watchman let us in at once. There was no name on the door of the suite on the twentieth floor. There was no one in the anteroom of the suite. No one would tell me anything still; but at least one question got answered. I saw the portrait on the wall over the receptionist's desk. I recognized that hallowed old face at once— anybody would—stern as a snapping turtle, determined as an avalanche.

J. Edgar Hoover.

The phone message hadn't been that garbled after all. I was in the hands of the FBI.

I don't know if you truly see all your life flashing before you when you're drowning. I do know that over the next few minutes I reviewed every punishable thing I'd ever done. Not just going topless or nearly demolishing a Chicago traffic cop. I went way back. I started with the time I peed against the back wall of Olivet Presbyterian Church in Arlington Heights, when I was nine years old and caught short on my way to Sunday School. I covered cheating on my college entrance examination, and the false claim I'd filed for fire losses when my dormitory burned—the bed and innerspring mattress I'd claimed hadn't really belonged to me at all, but to my buddy in Alpha Kappa Nu. I even remembered what I had censored clear out of my waking consciousness, the one time I'd really got close to serious trouble with the Arabs. It wasn't a prideful memory. My high-school buddy Tim Karasueritis and I had put away three bottles of illegal beer, practicing to be macho. It wasn't bad enough that I threw up. What made it really bad was that I did it right on the corner of Randolph and Wacker, in front of the biggest, richest mosque in all Chicagoland. And when I had poured it all out on the sidewalk Tim took his turn. While I was holding his head over the curb, I looked up. There was a hajji, white beard and green turban, looking at us with furious and accusing eyes. Bad scene! I thought we'd had it for sure, but I guess even Arab hajjis have teenaged kids. He didn't say a word. He just stared at us for a long, long moment, then turned and went into the mosque. Maybe he came out again with the Arab equivalent of the cops, but before then we were long gone, running when we could manage it and somehow staggering away anyway when we couldn't.

Oh, I plumbed my depths. I searched every indictable or reprehensible or merely obnoxious memory I had, without finding one that would justify the FBI coming after me in the middle of the night.

After ten minutes, I got brave enough to decide to tell somebody this fact. There wasn't anybody to tell. They had sat me down in a small room with little furniture. Bear in mind that all I was wearing was a bathing suit. It had long since dried out, sure, but they had the windows open somewhere in the offices, and cold Lake Michigan breezes were coming in under the door—the, as I discovered when my courage reached the point of trying it, locked door.

Funnily, even though I wore so little, they had insisted on searching me. They were taking no chance that I might be carrying a weapon, I supposed—either to attack one of them, or (maybe in a fit of contrition at the enormity of my crimes, whatever those crimes might turn out to be) to kill myself and spoil their plans for me.

Unfortunately I couldn't think of anything in my past worth killing for. It was embarrassing not to know what I was arrested for, but I couldn't do anything about that. I couldn't do anything much at all. Not only was the door locked, but there was very little in this tiny room to do anything with. There was a loudspeaker up high, behind a grille, that was playing music—violins, mostly; longhair stuff. There was a desk. It was absolutely bare on top, and what it might have inside its drawers I could not know. When I got up the nerve to just accidentally happen to tug at one of them it was as locked as the door. There was an upholstered swivel chair behind the desk, and a straight-backed wooden one before it. No one was present to tell me which one I might sit in, but I took the wooden one anyway.

I sat, my arms wrapped around me against the cold, and thought.

And then, without warning, the door opened, and Chief Agent Christophe came in.

Chief Agent Christophe was a woman.

Chief Agent Nyla Christophe was not the only one who came through the door, but there was no doubt who was who. She was the boss. The others with her, two men and a plump, middle-aged woman, demonstrated that fact by body language.

It took me a while to get over my surprise. Of course, everybody knew that the FBI had begun recruiting woman agents a while earlier. No one would expect to see one. They were like woman taxi drivers or woman doctors; you knew they existed because when one did show up anywhere it got onto the newsreels and you saw it the next time you went to the movies. That wouldn't happen with FBI agents, of course. No personality story about an FBI agent was ever going to turn up as a human-interest brightener in the weekly newsreel. Any cameraman who tried to do one would be in the soup— charged, probably, with something like reckless endangerment, for exposing a government operative to possible criminal retribution. Then he would turn up in an interrogation room in fear of his life. . .

Very much like me.

Anyway, in she came. First there was a big guy to open the door for her, then Chief Agent Chnstophe, then the fat lady, then another big guy to close it. She glanced at me as she came in, abstractedly: Oh, yes, there's the piece of furniture that belongs in this room. I looked back at her, with, I am sure, a lot more concentration. Nyla Chnstophe was a good-looking woman of a certain type. The type was big-boned and athletic. She had her hair tied behind in a ponytail, and pale blue eyes. She kept her hands folded behind her as she walked, in the style of a British admiral from the age of sail. She gave commands like an admiral. To the two huskies: "Tie him." To the plump lady who panted to the desk and pulled out a shorthand pad: "Write: August seventeenth, 1983, Chief Agent N. Christophe conducting interview of Dominic DeSota." To me:

"Make it easy on yourself, DeSota.Just give us the truth, answer all the questions, and we'll be through here in twenty minutes. First take the oath."

That wasn't good. To be put on oath right away meant that they were pretty serious. What I was going to tell them wasn't just going to be information received in an investigation. It was going to be evidence. The woman-stenographer stood up and held out the books to me, wheezing the words for me to repeat after her. I stretched my hand from Bible to Koran, little finger on one, thumb touching the binding of the other, and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God the Merciful, the All-Seeing, and the Avenging. "Fine, Dominic," said Chnstophe as the huskies retied my right hand. She glanced at her watch as though she really thought we might get out of there in twenty minutes. "Now,just tell me why you were trying to break into Daleylab."

I goggled. "Do what?"

"Break into Daleylab," she said patiently. "What were you looking for?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.

It was not the answer Agent Christophe wanted to hear. "Oh, shit, Dominic," she said crossly, "I hoped you were going to be sensible about this. Are you pretending you never heard of Daleylab?"

"Of course not." Everybody knew what Daleylab was—or, anyway, knew that it was some kind of hush-hush military research place, way southwest of Chicago. I'd driven near it dozens of times. "But, Miss Christophe—"

"Agent Christophe."

"Agent Christophe, I really don't know what you mean. I've never been in Daleylab. I certainly didn't try to break in."

"Oh, sweet Fatima," she said with a groan, bringing her hands together for the first time. There was a surprise. Chief Agent Christophe would have had a little trouble taking the oath herself if anyone had asked her to. She didn't have any thumbs.

It was not that unusual to see thumbless people, of course. It was a standard sentence for, like, second-offense thieves, or pickpockets, or sometimes an adulteress or a death-by-auto killer. But it was quite unusual, I thought, to come across a thumbless FBI agent.

It took an effort to get my mind off Christophe's missing thumbs, but the ropes were cutting into my arms. "Agent Christophe," I said, getting almost indignant, "I don't know where you got this notion, but it simply isn't even arguable. There is no chance I was anywhere near Daleylab in the last month or more."

She looked at the two bullies, then back at me. "No chance," she repeated thoughtfully.

"No chance at all," I said firmly.

"No chance at all," she echoed. Then she held out a hand.

One of the bullies filled it with a file folder. The top item inside the folder was a photograph. She glanced at it to make sure it was right way up, then held it before me so that I could see it clearly. It was a man at the door of a building.

The man was me.

He was me but wearing a suit I had never owned, a sort of one-piece coverall of the sort Winston Churchill made famous in World War II. But he was me, all right. "This was taken," Christophe said colorlessly, "by the surveillance cameras at Daleylab night before last. So were these others." She flipped through them quickly. They were not all taken with the same camera, because the background was different from the first one. But it was the same familiar face, in the same unfamiliar clothes. "And these," she said, taking a cardboard form out of the folder, "are your fingerprints as filed with your college I.D. at Northwestern. The ones under them were found at the lab."

There were only four prints below the full line of ten on the sample-all they'd recovered from the scene, I supposed. But even an amateur could see that the spirals and grooves on the thumb and middle finger of the right hand, and the index fingers of both, looked a lot like my reference prints above.

"But it's not true!" I wailed.

"Are you going to stick to your story?" Christophe asked incredulously.

"I have to! I wasn't there! I didn't do it!"

"Oh, hell, Dominic," she said, sighing, "I thought you had better sense." And she locked her thumbless hands together and gazed down at the ground. She didn't signal to her helpers. She didn't have to. They knew what came next and, as they moved toward me, so did I.

They didn't beat me very much. You know the gossip about how they treat suspects. By those standards they barely laid a finger on me. It isn't all gossip, either, I think, because I wrote a mortgage for a bartender once, and then he got arrested on suspicion of selling hard liquor to a person under the age of thirty-five. He didn't need any mortgage after that. What his widow whispered to me about the condition of the body when they gave it back to her for burial would pretty nearly turn your stomach.

I got nothing like that.

I got slapped around. It hurt, sure. It hurts twice as much when you're tied up because you can't hit back—well, you wouldn't do that anyway, not if you knew what was good for you-or even try to catch some of the blows on an arm instead of the side of the head. My head was ringing long before they were through, but it was all open-hand stuff, no bruises, no breaking the skin, and they stopped every few minutes so Agent Christophe could pick up the questioning:

"That's you in the pictures, isn't it, Dominic?"

"How do I know? It—ouch!—looks like me, a little."

"And the fingerprints?"

"I don't know anything about fingerprints."

"Oh, hell, go on, boys."

After a while they got tired of the side of my head. Or maybe they noticed that I was beginning to have trouble hearing Christophe; anyway, they began punching me in the belly or whacking me across the back. Since I was still wearing only the bathing suit, there was no protection. It hurt. But hitting me on the back must have hurt their hands some, too, because they weren't nearly as enthusiastic. They paused more frequently.

"Want to change your mind, Dominic?"

"There's nothing to change, damn it!"

And then they'd switch to the belly again. That did hurt. It took the wind out of me. I doubled over and could hardly hear what Agent Christophe was saying.

And so I almost missed it when she said, "Jerk, are you still denying you were in Daleylab on Saturday, August thirteenth?"

I gasped. "Wait a minute." Naturally they didn't wait, just kept trying to get a good punch in at my doubled-over belly. "No, please," I begged, and Christophe stopped them. I took a couple of deep breaths and managed to say, "Did you mean last Saturday? The thirteenth?"

"Right, Dominic. When you were caught at Daleylab."

I sat up straighter. "But I couldn't have been, Agent Christophe," I said, "because last Saturday I was weekending in New York City. My fiancee was there. She'll testify. Honest, Agent Christophe! I don't know who it was but it couldn't have been me!"

Well, it wasn't as easy as that. I took a couple of good shots after that before they were convinced-or not convinced, exactly, but at least confused. They got Greta out of bed to confirm my story, and she told them her whole crew would remember me, and they got all of them on the phone too. They all did. I didn't often go with Greta on her New York runs, and they were in no doubt about the date.

They untied me and let me stand up. One of them even lent me a trenchcoat to put on over my bathing suit to go home in the bright dawn. They weren't graceful about it, though. Agent Christophe didn't speak to me again, just put her head down over the file folder, gnawing at her lips furiously. One of the beaters-up was the one who told me I could go. "But not far, DeSota. No New York trips, understand? Just stay where we can find you when we want you."

"But I've proved I was innocent."

"DeSota," he snarled, "you've proved nothing. We've got all the proof we need. Surveillance photos, fingerprints. We could put you away for a hundred years with just that."

"Except that I wasn't there," I said, and then said no more, because Nyla Christophe had looked up from her folder and was looking straight at me.

It would have been only decent of them to give me a ride back home, but I didn't think it was worthwhile lingering long enough to ask. I found a cabby who took me, and waited outside while I went in to get my wallet and pay him off. Twelve dollars. A day's pay. But I never paid a bill more gladly.