The man on the right of the group had brought in the Eames lounge chair from the foyer, but not the ottoman. He was sitting in the chair, leaning back in its contour with his legs crossed at the knee, and he made an elegant impression. He was wearing a gray suit. I assumed from the start that he was my government liaison man, and I was proved right. I had worked with many similar men, and I felt I could take his habits and abilities on trust. Mistakes are made that way, of course, but I was confident I wasn’t making one that night. The only thing that unsettled me was that he had positioned his chair an inch further away from the main group than was strictly necessary. As I said, my living room is not small, but neither is it infinitely spacious: that extra inch had been hard won. Clearly it spoke of a need or an attitude, and I was aware from the start that I should pay attention to it.
My dining chairs are the Tulip design by the Finnish designer Eero Saarinen; both now flanked the sofa opposite me and were occupied by men I assumed were my transport coordinator and my communications expert. Initially I paid little attention to the men, because the chairs themselves had put me in a minor fugue: Saarinen had, of course, also designed the TWA Flight Center at John F. Kennedy Airport—or Idlewild, as it was called at the time—which building had quite rightly become an icon, and an absolute symbol of its era. It recalled the days when the simple word
But I reassured myself by reminding myself that the new world is challenging, too, and that those old-timers might well run screaming if faced with the kind of things we have to deal with now—like male-to-female ratios, for instance, and their mutual interactions. So I stopped looking at the chairs and started looking at the men, and I found nothing to worry about. Frankly, transport is an easy job—merely a matter of budget, and I had no practical constraint on what I was about to spend. Communications get more complex every year, but generally a conscientious engineer can handle what is thrown at him. The popular myth that computers can be operated only by pierced youths whose keyboards are buried under old pizza boxes and skateboards is nonsense, of course. I have always used exactly what had arrived: a serious technician with a measured and cautious manner.
On my left on the sofa opposite me was what I took to be our mole. I was both pleased with and worried by him. Pleased, in the sense that it was obvious he had been born in-country, almost certainly in Tehran or one of its closer suburbs. That was indisputable. His DNA was absolutely correct; I was sure it was absolutely authentic. It was what lay over his DNA that worried me. I was sure that when I investigated further I would find he had left Iran at a young age and come to America. Which generally makes for the best moles: unquestioned ethnic authenticity, and unquestioned loyalty to our side. But—and perhaps I am more sensitive to this issue than my colleagues—those formative years in America leave physical traces as well as mental ones. The vitamin-enriched cereals, the milk, the cheeseburgers—they make a difference. If, for instance, due to some bizarre circumstance, this young man had a twin brother who had been left behind, and I now compared them side by side, I had no doubt our mole would be at least an inch taller and five pounds heavier than his sibling. No big deal, you might say, in the vernacular, and I might agree—except that the
