And he would not think the comparison inapt. As the pilot did not want to crash and burn in midocean for lack of preparation, so too did Millikan not want to make the slightest misstatement or give the world any chance to make a misreading of him, and thereby of the United States of America. Only when he had assured himself of the status of the multiple compartments of his life did he begin to emerge from the protective cocoon of his eiderdown.
He stepped into his English slippers, which he had carefully arranged by the side of his bed the previous evening, and put on his robe over his striped pajamas. His home was on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C., right across from the National Cathedral, but this morning he happened to be in Paris, in the Hotel Inter-Continental. Nevertheless, his slippers and robe were exactly where they would have been at home. He had bathed and shaved the previous evening. He applied some Brylcreem to his thinning hair and took a swipe with his electric razor at the glittery silver stubble that had dared to emerge since midnight.
He devoted three quarters of an hour to reading several documents from his briefcase, most of them tersecables originating from major cities in the Middle East.
He went back to the suite’s bedchamber and applied his cologne and deodorant, specially mixed at Whitsons on the High in Oxford. He opened the armoire. On the top shelf there were the ten folded and starched French-cuffed white shirts that were always at the ready. On the next shelf were the ten pairs of black silk stockings, the ten pairs of pressed and starched boxer shorts, the ten undershirts, and the ten starched linen handkerchiefs. On the next shelf were the three pairs of matching black wing tips that he alternated from day to day. He had five dark-charcoal pinstripe suits from Mallory’s on Savile Row hanging up, which he wore in sequence, one of them always out at the dry cleaner’s. He had five silk Hermès ties comfortably nesting in their rack.
He dressed in a determined and efficient manner, put on his tie, his fleur-de-lis cuff links (he was, after all, in France), his Duckers Wing tips, handmade at the shop on the Turl in Oxford, looked at himself in the full-length mirror on the inside of the door of the armoire, pulled his cashmere coat from its hanger.
Then he went down to the front desk, nodded to the doorman, and stepped out into the streets of his favorite city. He stopped on the sidewalk and breathed the cool, fragrant air of early spring—the cherry trees and early rhododendrons were peaking. He looked down the Rue Castiglione at the pink-tinted clouds over the Tuileries. He turned left and strolled to the Rue St. Honoré; the breeze shifted as he came to the corner, and he smelled roasting coffee and baking bread. He stopped at his favorite corner café, stood next to a blue-uniformed sanitation man, drank a café noir, and ate a croissant.
He walked onward, stepping carefully through the random pattern of dog shit, noting that thanks to Georges Haussmann, the gutters of Paris were always cleaner than the sidewalks. He walked with some care and looked at the windows of the boutiques that catered to capitalism’s winners and their significant others: Gucci, Salavin Chocolatier, Guerlain, Bulgari, and Fayer.
He especially loved Paris early in the day, when it was still quiet, and while the city of Washington was still asleep, and (except for the nocturnal gnomes at the Agency) incapable of pestering him. That would begin around midafternoon, too late to spoil his luncheon meeting. For the next few hours Millikan was more or less a free agent, and he was at the peak of his game: articulating the gross and crude impulses of the United States of America into a foreign policy toward the rest of the world. He, not Baker over at State, understood the United States of America and the world. He, James Gabor Millikan, was the one who was here, out in the field, preparing for a luncheon meeting with his old friend, Tariq Aziz, the foreign minister of Iraq. It had been scheduled as a dinner meeting, but Aziz had been mysteriously summoned back to Baghdad and had requested a lunch instead.
He looked in briefly at the Eglise Polonaise, crossing himself as he stepped inside, admiring the ecstatic baroque saints and wannabe saints on the walls. He moved on to the Rue Royale, paused for a moment to admire the neoclassical elegance of the Madeleine on the right, then took a left toward the Place de la Concorde. The hieroglyphs on the obelisk were uncommonly clear and crisp in the light of the rising sun, as if they had just been carved last night.