The only action was the occasional cocktail lounge, like the Ambassador’s High Hat; first-class hookers and bored government girls made it easy to get cheaply and/or casually laid in that town; or so I understand (besides which, bubbly blonde Jeannie who worked at the Farm Credit Administration has nothing to do with this story).

Many of the important politicians who didn’t live in suburban Virginia or Maryland lived in NW, including most congressmen, as well as the client who’d summoned me here-James Vincent Forrestal, who rented a big colonial house on Woodland Drive, behind the swanky Shoreham Hotel and overlooking the leafy vastness of Rock Creek Park.

From a modest Irish Catholic background, Jim Forrestal had stormed the Anglo-Saxon bastion of Wall Street to become a key player at the powerful investment banking firm of Dillon, Read amp; Company, eventually becoming president. In 1940 he traded that million-dollar-a-year position for a one-dollar-a-year job as one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s administrative assistants. Not long ago Forrestal had been appointed Under Secretary of the Navy, and was currently applying his considerable managerial skills to mobilization and production.

This was the second job I’d done for Forrestal this year. The first one was a freelance Naval Intelligence job, which even today is classified; despite that mission’s failure, I had apparently impressed Forrestal to the degree that he’d chosen to hire me again.

A butler tried unsuccessfully to take my hat and showed me to a book-lined study, where Forrestal sat behind a massive mahogany desk, leaning back, smoking his pipe, a thick, brownbindered document in his hands like a hymnal. The desk was littered with file folders and loose paper, as well as several stacks of imposingly thick books (Outline of History by H. G. Wells, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years by Carl Sandburg), mingling with a banker’s lamp, framed family photos, pipe rack-and-humidor, candy jar, and ashtray.