146
PARTISAN REVIEW
She seemed properly bewildered and there was no apparent rea–
son for believing she had lied to me. At the same time, knowing of
her active dislike of Miss Caruso, I was a little suspicious of her lack
of interest
in
what must have been a sensational bit of news to her
about Miss Caruso. Could it be, as I had feared from the beginning,
that I alone was sought out by Intelligence. I detennined
to
find
Tom, the superintendent. That is not as easy as it might seem to be,
for Tom spends most of
his
time hiding from the tenants of the build–
ings under
his
care. Nevertheless, after several hours of combing sys–
tematically every hallway and alley in the neighborhood, I found Tom
explaining to some large woman that cold water is better than no
water at all. I pried him away from her, with very little difficulty,
and asked
him
whether Army Intelligence had talked to
him.
He, too,
appeared surprised and said nobody had approached
him.
I could
no longer escape the conclusion that the finger of Intelligence pointed
at me, and only me. I tried to reassure myself by reflecting that even
Intelligence would find it difficult to find Tom, and that Tom's in–
difference could be explained by the fact that he was interested
in
nothing but his job, which was to avoid as much work as possible.
But I could no more allay my suspicions in this way, than a sick man
can remove
his
anxieties by noting the diseases of other people.
I detennined to get to the heart of the matter by going directly
to Army Intelligence. Everybody knows that it is much easier for
Intelligence to find someone it is looking for, difficult though that
may be, than for anyone to find Intelligence. Still I had no idea of
the bureaucratic labyrinths one had to go through merely to locate
it and to find a person with sufficient authority to listen to my story.
First of all, and this was perhaps the greatest shock, I discovered that
there is no such thing as Army Intelligence. Or, to put it more con–
cretely, Army Intelligence may exist in the abstract, but it does not
have either an address or a phone number. In its place are a number
of fluid agencies
in
a constant state of organization,
all
on the verge
of dissolving into each other, yet knowing nothing of each other's
activities.
I called one office after another, repeating my story to anyone
who answered the phone. It was always the same answer, which
is
really remarkable when you consider that none of the offices had
anything to do with each other: had they given me the same infor-
