Most of the time I suspect he’s merely mediocre, but it’s impossible to be sure. He runs a nameless intelligence agency that is so secret that its own agents don’t know how to get in touch with it. His employees operate on their own initiative, establish their own contacts, pull their own strings, and ultimately cut their own throats. You don’t have to write out reports when you work for him, nor do you have to worry about any of the usual bureaucratic claptrap. You just go out and do the job.

The Chief thinks I’m one of his best men. He got this idea about four years ago and I’ve never seen fit to disabuse him of the notion. Every once in a while he finds some dumb way to get in touch with me and shoves some assignment at me, and every once in a while I can’t find a way to avoid the assignment, so maybe I work for him and maybe I don’t. It’s hard to be certain. The thing of it is that I’m on so many subversive lists as it is, with the FBI tapping my phone and the CIA reading my mail (or else it’s the other way around), that I figure I need all the help I can get.

“Joe Klausner,” he said. “My boys are on their own, Tanner, but I would have helped Joe if I could have. But all at once he was dead. Just like that.” He walked to the window, looked out of it. “I didn’t even know he was in Berlin. I thought he was in St. Paul, Minnesota. Then there was a call from Berlin -”

He filled his glass. “You don’t know Sam Bowman,” he said.

“No.”

“It may be too late. Just as it was too late with Joe. But there’s a chance, you know.”

He drained his glass. He seems to drink all the time but never seems affected by it. Either I have never seen him drunk or I have never seen him sober.

“Ah, Tanner,” he said heavily. “I don’t suppose you’ve so much as heard of Modonoland, now have you?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t think so,” he said. “Most people – you have?”

“Yes.”

He said that was marvelous and would save a great deal of time.