THE FOX AND THE
GRAP 'E
651
fun of him, behind his back, of course, and there were endless jokes
about his being so secretive that he would make sure he would not
be seen before he sneaked into a toilet. Some people also insisted that
when he went to bed with a woman he did not tell her who he
w.as; and a story went the rounds that one girl slept with him because
he said he was Molotov, whom he vaguely resembled, on a special
mission to this country. Though everyone took for granted his name
was an assumed one, even this was not enough to conceal his identity,
for he was usually called
J. J.,
apparently a further conspiratorial
abbreviation.
J.
J. was supposed to have been married several times, but his
wives were blotted out with the rest of his past. Everyone knew, how–
ever, that he was an inveterate lecher, though his sexual .activities
were even more furtive than his political ones. It was said that when–
ever a woman came to his office for political advice, he would put
his
arm around her to be more persuasive. And several people who
would not go so far as to claim they were eye-witnesses said that
J.
J.
once got himself so involved in the education of a student who
could not grasp the nature of dialectics that he ended up with her
on the desk in his office.
J.
J. was not an attractive man, at least not by conventional
standards. Yet his slightly comic, gnomish look-in between that of
an overgrown child and .a dwarfed man-offset his conniving air.
He was built like a sphere, short, round, and compact, as though he
had just been hatched from an egg. His head was moony and large,
like Humpty Dumpty, bulging out of
his
neck, a little ball on a
bigger ball. He wore thick horn-rimmed glasses that concealed small,
roving eyes, giving
him
a grave and innocent stare. Even the older
bureaucrats, who knew they had to watch out for
J.
J.'s maneuvers,
were often taken in by their own picture of him as a pompous, timid
little man, the natural butt of every red-blooded joke.
As
J.
J. continued uptown, groping his way like a sleepw.alker,
he suddenly became very thirsty, and began to look anxiously at
every bar he passed. But they all seemed forbiddingly respectable and
clannish, full of cozy couples and gay parties, where he was sure he
would feel out of place.
J. J.
was almost ready to give up, when he
remembered that a recent expose of vice in New York had men-
