The Touch of Treason Read Online Free Page B

him, “Go off and worry about the missile defenses with those fellows at MIT. Talk to them about laser satellites and defense screens.”
    “You are our first line of defense,” Randall would say in an attempt at banter but feeling like a manservant.
    And Fuller would answer, “I am older than the Maginot Line, and as much use.”
    Yet the time Fuller had received the Medal of Merit from the President in a private ceremony kept from the press, Fuller knew it was for that specific instance when his form of intelligence—insight based on intimate understanding of how Khrushchev thought—was said to have provided the key that enabled a red alert to be wound down so the adversaries could return to the bargaining table.
    The President had said, “You are a greater asset than our coal reserves.”
    And Fuller had replied, “Mr. President, your asset has arthritis.”
    The President had been briefed, of course, and knew that Fuller steadfastly refused to take anything stronger than aspirin so as not to numb his brain as long as the work remained unfinished.
    Nor had Randall been able to change Fuller’s lifelong habit of imbibing nourishment from interchanges with younger people, graduate students, former students, younger professors, specializing in Soviet historiography, intellectuals of the left and right who thought that debate with a mind such as Fuller’s enriched them. Randall realized that Fuller needed their adulation to sustain the rigor of daily work at his desk seven days a week, every week of the year, but Randall, like some men of his generation, distrusted young people.
    “I am not a monk,” Fuller told him. “I will not isolate myself. I was not put on earth to teach only governments. I am, like all teachers, a snitch for the young, an informer.”
    *
    It was therefore not unusual that on the evening in April, Leona Fuller, seven years younger than her husband, who had been beautiful when young, and had grown, not only in her husband’s eyes, even more beautiful when old, presided with her husband over a dinner for four acolytes.
    Leona Fuller served them arroz con pollo , which she had learned to make when they lived in Mexico. She had transfigured the recipe over the years till all of their friends renamed it Leona’s chicken. She herself had the appetite of a small bird; her pleasure was in watching others enjoy her food.
    Melissa Troob, as usual, had positioned herself on Martin Fuller’s right. Long ago Leona Fuller had guessed correctly that Melissa’s barely epicanthic eyelids suggested an Oriental grandparent. In fact, her Chinese grandfather had taught Asian history at Stanford, where Melissa had also taken two degrees. A specialist in Soviet history, she’d heard Martin Fuller lecture at Stanford during his happy half year in northern California and had fallen in love with Fuller’s mind. If Fuller had been twenty years younger, Leona believed, the situation might have developed dangerously, for Melissa had not only a sharp mind, and an incredible memory, but was what she thought of as beautifully boned. Melissa’s cheekbones were as visible as an Indian’s, always touched with a blush of color. And whatever dress she wore, Melissa’s hips revealed their bony understructure in a way that Leona Fuller knew Martin would find erotic. Other men viewed women as laymen viewed buildings. They saw the exterior. Martin, like an architect, saw structure in beautiful things.
    Melissa, Leona suspected, had moved East for her doctorate less for the benefits of Columbia University than to continue to sit at Martin’s feet, sucking in his wisdom as only a graduate student still in a fever of learning could do. Fortunately, the man sitting across from her, Scott Melling, had found Melissa attractive. And Scott, who was six-feet-two with a very black mustache carefully trimmed, was angularly handsome in a way that seemed to complement Melissa’s beauty perfectly. Scott, now twenty-nine or thirty,