"Don't talk dirty."
She laughed, but shook her head. "Really, Chet, I can't leave."
"Then let me take you home afterward."
"I'm staying here tonight."
There were things he wanted to tell her, but he checked himself.
"Chet, please . . . it's been a long time."
"Yeah. Hasn't it, though."
The party ended at midnight when the sirens sounded the curfew warning. Within fifteen minutes Kinsman and every- one else had left the stately red-brick Georgetown house and taken taxis or buses or limousines homeward. Precisely at twelve-thirty electrical power along every street in the Dis- trict of Columbia was cut off.
Kinsman fumbled his way in darkness up the narrow stairs to his one-room apartment. It was still unfamiliar enough for him to bark his shins on the leg of the table alongside the sofabed. The long, elaborately detailed string of profanity he muttered started and ended with his own stu- pidity.
In less than an hour of staring into the darkness he drifted to sleep. If he had any dreams he did not recall them the next morning. For which he was grateful.
The Pentagon looked gray and shabby in the rain. It bulked like an ancient fortress over the greenery of Virginia. The old parking lots, converted into athletic fields for the Defense Department personnel, were bare and empty except for the growing puddles pockmarked by the raindrops. Off in the mists, like enchanted castles in the clouds, the glass- walled office buildings of Crystal City lent a touch of contrast to the brooding old concrete face of the Pentagon. 184
Feeling as cold and gray within himself as the weather outside, Kinsman watched the Pentagon approach through the rain-streaked windows of the morning bus. As always, the bus was jammed with office workers, many of them in uniform. They were silent, morose, wrapped in their own private miseries at 7:48 in the morning.
The Pentagon corridors had once been painted in cheer- ful pastels, but now they were faded and grim. Kinsman checked into his own bilious green cubbyhole, noted the single appointment glowing on his desktop computer screen, and immediately headed for Colonel Murdock's office.
Frank Colt was already there, slouched in a fake leather chair in the Colonel's outer office. Otherwise the area was unpopulated. Even the secretaries' desks were empty. Frank always arrives on the scene ahead of everybody else, creases sharp and buttons polished, Kinsman thought. Wonder how he does it?
"Morning," said Colt, barely glancing up at Kinsman.
"I'm glad you didn't say good morning," Kinsman re- plied.
"Sure as shit ain't that."
Kinsman nodded. "Murdock's not in yet?"
Colt gave him a surly look. "Hey, man, it's only eight o'clock. He told us to be here at eight sharp, right? That means he won't waltz in here for another half-hour. You know that."
The Colonel's got his own car, he doesn't have to hit the bus on schedule.
