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Blacky,” she said softly, “I won’t need much light … to read to you from Jane Austen.”

4
    The director and his aide Jerry Adams got out of the car and buried their faces in woolen scarves as they walked the thirty yards up from the driveway to the ski lodge. They might have done so in any weather but, under the frigid circumstances, if anybody was observing them such a decision would have appeared logical, in the bitter cold of Stowe, Vermont, against an easterly that howled down the mountainside on which the comfortable lodge abutted, a single light in the kitchen holding out against the blackness. Moreover, if somebody had been lying in wait in a parked car, he in turn would probably have been spotted by the two occupants of another car that, passing the driveway, at nonchalant speed, continued down the road—so lonely, after dark, all the skiers having long since retreated to their caravansaries dotted about the mountain and village.
    The second car drove the half mile to the chair lift and anyone observing it would assume it was bound on a maintenance or logistical mission. The headlights appeared to verify that the scene was abandoned, and so they paused at the lift, got out of the car, entered the building through the skiers’ passageway, disappeared from sight for a few moments as if attending to some commission or other, reentered the car two minutes later, turned it around, and drove back, stopping at the garage at the south wing of the lodge which, after Jerry unlocked the door from inside, they entered and parked. Silently one of them walked back to the Director’s Chevrolet, turned the key that had been left in the ignition, and moved the car over alongside their own. Now they locked the garage doors from inside and walked into the kitchen. The Director and his aide had hung their coats and entered the lively, paneled living room, past the dining room with the counter separating it from the kitchen, and stood by the fireplace, out of sight of the kitchen and beyond the range of anyone’s hearing. Jerry said, taking a heavy log from the Director, “Let me do that.” He piled it on the kindling and newspaper, looked about for a match, and settled for the Director’s pipe-lighter. The response was immediate and gratifying, and they both stood close-by as the flames swept up, illuminating in dancing shadows the large comfortable room to which a wealthy sportsman brought his grandchildren to ski four or five times a year, but never on those Mondays and Tuesdays marked on his calendar with an “X,” after a telephone call from his old friend and classmate, the Director.
    Jerry sighed. “I must say, sir, the upper class really knows how to live.”
    The Director’s reply was oblique. “You ski?”
    â€œYes, sir. As a matter of fact, I used to come to Stowe every now and then from Dartmouth. I was on the ski team. We lost seven consecutive meets.”
    The Director was clearly not shaken by this piece of intelligence, but years in diplomacy had trained him intuitively to keep a conversation alive rather than appear abrupt or indifferent. “Bad luck, eh?”
    â€œNo sir, bad team. But we had a lot of fun. Dartmouth isn’t opposed to fun. Some people there even encourage it.”
    â€œYou sound nostalgic. Are you implying your present employers don’t encourage it?”
    â€œThat’s a pretty fair way of putting it, sir.” Jerry was on his knees, taming a promiscuous log. His red hair and freckles and powerful hands were highlighted by the fire as he gripped the iron. The Director smiled. Jerry Adams had been with him five years, and knew every one of the Director’s crotchets, including that appetite of his for petty complaints against Life in the CIA. Such complaints stroked the general sense of stoicism the Director thought appropriate to the profession.
    â€œSo you find yourself burdened, do