“OK, I’ll cop to stealing it. But what’s so inappropriate? I mean, Delta of Venus is smut, but it’s literary smut.”
“It’s a curious sort of literature, though, isn’t it?” Dixon said. “For example, the third story in the book—the one entitled ‘The Boarding School’—concerns a young student at a monastery who is ogled by priests and sexually violated by his classmates…This is what you consider wholesome erotic entertainment?”
“I don’t remember that story.”
“Don’t you? I’d have thought it was a favorite. According to my records, you read it nineteen times while the book was in your possession.”
“According to your records?”
“Library Binding.” He offered me the printout. “There are some other items here I’d love to get your comments on.”
I started going through it. It was crazy: a catalog of every piece of porn and erotica I’d ever laid eyes on. Not just titles, either—there were notes about specific scenes, even specific paragraphs I’d paid special attention to. And you know, it was bullshit, what he was implying, but with all of it thrown together on one big list like that, I could see how someone with an overly suspicious mind might get the wrong idea.
What else was on the list?
Well, De Sade, of course. Assorted Victorian gentlemen—in college, I must have gone through the entire Grove Press library, I mean, who the hell didn’t? Henry Miller. William Burroughs. Anne Rice.
At first I was kind of mortified, you know? But as I got further into it—it was a long list—I started to hit stuff that was harder to be embarrassed about, books and stories that weren’t technically smut at all, even if they did have sex in them. Towards the end the list-maker really seemed to be reaching—there were even a couple of Shakespeare plays, I think. And then on the last page, I found the weirdest entry of all…
“The Bible?”
“November 13th, 1977,” Dixon said. “One of the few times you were actually in church. Eyes Only caught you lingering over a passage in Genesis—the one where Lot offers his virgin daughters to the mob in Sodom and Gomorrah.”
“Uh-huh…And because I lingered over this Bible verse, you think I might want to sacrifice a real virgin to an evil mob?”
“If you’d lingered over it nineteen times, I’d certainly have cause to wonder. Just the once, we can probably write off to prurient interest…Although I do find it curious you were laughing as you read it.”
“Right.” I shoved the printout back into his hands. “I get it.”
“You get it?”
“Yeah. You can tell True to get bent.”
“Ah…You think Mr. True told me to give you a hard time about this.”
“I questioned his call on Tyler, didn’t I? But this isn’t even close to being the same thing…”
“You are laboring under at least two misimpressions right now,” Dixon said. “The first is that I care whether you’re comfortable with Mr. True’s policy decisions. Trust me when I tell you, putting low-level operatives’ minds at ease isn’t one of my concerns in this life.”
“What’s the other misimpression?”
“That I disagree with you about Dr. Tyler. If it were up to me, the organization would deal much more aggressively with him—and all others like him. Unfortunately, like you, I have to defer to Cost-Benefits. And even if the decision was mine to make, my dream solution wouldn’t be feasible.”
“Why not? Because everyone has sick fantasies?”
“No. That’s just something people who have sick fantasies tell themselves, so they can feel normal. But there are enough of you to make a clean sweep logistically impractical…” He waited a beat before adding: “People who act on their sick fantasies, though—that’s a more manageable number.”
And just like that, I finally got it, what this was really all about: he knew about the pet boys.
“I know about the pet boys,” Dixon said.
The pet boys?