The Mulberry Bush Read Online Free Page B

sorry ass out of here. You’re toast.”

2
    Father had committed the ultimate Washington sin of baring the ass of the Establishment. His Moscow prank made his betters look foolish, exposed the hesitancy of an agency that was chartered to be bold, and made it the jest of the month at Georgetown dinner parties. At Headquarters, a full internal investigation began. Amzi Strange was summoned home to be debriefed by the inspector general, who was in charge of this exercise. The IG operated on the assumption that everyone at Headquarters except him was a potential if not an actual double agent controlled by the intelligence service of a hostile power. Father thought that the IG was a psychopath in desperate need of treatment. The IG thought that Father was a dangerous saboteur who should long since have been fired—or, better yet, prosecuted for his antics at the Plantation.
    Downfall in Washington among the mighty and the obscure alike typically stems from a trivial incident. In a cubbyhole outside the Oval Office, a president undergoes fellatio by a woman not his wife or discusses ways to cover up a Keystone Kops burglary, and thereby provides his enemies with an opportunity to destroy him without revealing their real purpose,which is to reverse the outcome of an election they lost but should have won if the voters had not been deceived by the political Beelzebub they feel it is their moral duty to overthrow.
    The same rule applies to more humble figures, like Father, who discomfit the elite. Whether you are carrying out a coup d’état or the shaming of a nobody, it is essential that you be perceived as the virtuous avenger, and that your victim to be unmasked as the evil person he is and always has been.
    In Father’s case, kangaroo justice was swift and thorough. He was reduced two civil service grades in rank, fired for cause, and threatened with prosecution for violation of federal espionage laws and for cheating on his expense account. Father was not deprived of his pension, a pittance based on a percentage of his pay and his years of service, but the IG ruled that he had to wait until he reached retirement age to start collecting it. Meanwhile he had no income, and as a result of the divorce, few assets.
    He was unemployable in any profession where Headquarters had friends. Former colleagues who had gone into business as government contractors shunned him. So did everyone else he had ever known at Headquarters. He was a fluent writer, but he soon discovered there was no market for his memoirs (which in any case would have to be cleared by Headquarters before publication), so he wrote a comic novel about undercover life, casting the leading character, based on himself, as the Little Tramp of espionage. The manuscript was rejected by twenty different publishers, none of whom read past page ten because they saw nothing funny about the unspeakable doings of the satanic thugs who, they devoutly believed, worked at Headquarters.
    Finally, when Father was down to his last few dollars, he got a job working for a shady private investigator, but he had been a spy by trade, not a cop, so this didn’t work out and he was let go after the probationary period. In letters to me he joked about buying a used taxicab and becoming a mobile philosopher.
    As I have already reported, he and my mother, who was a lawyer at a backwater government agency, had led separate lives for many years. She had long since stopped accompanying him on foreign assignments, so I hardly ever saw him after the age of twelve, though he wrote me monthly letters and every summer he and I got together for two weeks wherever he happened to be posted. We went on safari in Tanganyika (I shot a kudu), hiked in the Himalayas, toured three-star restaurants in France. Among other ancient ruins, we visited Angkor Wat and the Taj Mahal and the ruined architecture of the Roman Near East, sailed in the Mediterranean and dived in the Red Sea.
    He had real