Forrestal was as tidy as his desk was cluttered: three-piece Brooks Brothers double-breasted gray worsted, gray-and-blue striped four-in-hand tie. My navy-blue tropical suit from Sears was lightweight and, theoretically, cool; but I was working up a sauna sweat, the windows closed, the chamber stuffy with the memory of stale pipe smoke. Forrestal seemed aloof from such petty matters as climate.

I approached the waiting chair opposite Forrestal, who rose and flipped the binder onto the desk, extending his hand. Surprising power resided in the small man’s grip, a fact he tried a little too hard to demonstrate. Standing perhaps five inches shorter than my six feet, Forrestal-slender, fit, late forties-draped himself in the controlled dignity of the statesman, but any air of elitist intellectualism was offset by the battered features of his spade-shaped face, with its broad flattened nose (he’d boxed at Princeton) and lipless slash of a mouth over a ball-like cleft chin.

“Thank you for coming, Nate,” he said, fixing his intense blue-gray eyes on me.

“I wouldn’t have,” I admitted, settling into the hard captain’s-style chair, “if your telegram hadn’t specified this was personal.”

His mouth seemed faintly amused around the pipe stem. “Not interested in government work?”

“No. And I hope this wasn’t a ruse to get me back working for Navy Intelligence …”

He shook his head. “This is a private matter, Nate … though when we get into this war, I may call on you again-to serve your country.”

There wasn’t a war, not yet, so I just asked, “What sort of private matter?”

“My wife,” he said, and he turned one of the framed photos toward me. “Josephine.”

It was a rather exotic photo, dating I guessed to the late twenties or early thirties: a raven-haired beauty in an Oriental-pattern frock clutched a large reflective glass ball, like an absurdly oversize Christmas ornament.