In his early career, Billy had not played for the same high stakes that Hillsinger had, and certainly where he had first landed, at a big bank, he stood no chance of being promoted with Hannah’s politics being what they were. But the Board of Education witch hunt had forced Billy to leave and start his own company, an investment fund focused abroad, and the active support of Peregrine Wilkie had made his business secure. More surprisingly, in the quiet rooms where old men decided where the real money would go—Hillsinger himself had seen them, during his Wall Street interlude before the CIA—Billy’s relative isolation came to be seen as a strength. He invested in exotic, difficult markets like Japan and Angola, and exotic was certainly not the old men’s favorite word. However, with a nudge from Peregrine, they began to note that Billy’s fund was mostly uncorrelated to the U.S. market, which they said made their overall portfolio safer. And so Billy became their favorite hedge against domestic catastrophe. His timing was also good because fortunes were being made in obscure corners of the market, and the old men liked fortunes. The trickle of funds increased to a healthy flow, and finally Billy ran enough money, from enough different people, that he became both rich and astonishingly well connected. He became dangerous.
The absurd and stinging part was that their former roles were now more or less reversed. Hillsinger had always stood at what seemed like the center of the world, in the sense that the people he knew and the institutions in which he routinely thrived had the quasi-magical ability to change perception and even reality. They could make careers, make money, change public opinion. After the War, for example, they called the CIA the great slaughterhouse: the place in America where the best men were separated out from the merely very good. For a long time, Hillsinger had been among the best.
In the CIA’s infancy, he was handpicked by Director Dulles and installed temporarily on Wall Street while Congress built the nation’s intelligence apparatus. When Hillsinger was finally summoned to Washington, they were not called the CIA, their office was in a broken trailer on the Mall, and for two years they did not have typewriters or even stationery. The Soviets had obliterated them at first. News of fresh disaster came nearly every day, and many men died. Between 1947 and 1949, they had lost at least two hundred in Albania alone. But eventually they learned, and once they did—once they had not only understood but truly absorbed the stakes—then they were more than good. For two years Hillsinger was on the front lines, in Warsaw, where he exposed three substantial KGB operations and where, by the end, the local Russians were legitimately afraid of him. He was recalled because the Director wanted him closer at hand, and when that happened they gave Hillsinger all the secret decorations that mattered, the ones that were never spoken of—majestic letters for his file. From that point on, he was marked: he would be Director, Ambassador to Paris, even Secretary of State. It was, they said over and over again, only a matter of time.
But then he—the same Jim Hillsinger—was accused of treason and forced to resign from the CIA. Only five men knew of the treason charge and four of them did not believe it, but the odd man out was James Angleton, the head of Counterintelligence, who was adamant. The Director gave Angleton what he wanted, and Hillsinger had gone quietly, the way the innocent always did. The charge would never be public or even known beyond that small circle, although it would also never be disproven. Not officially. Among those who knew, the stain would never completely fade.
So what now? How to live, when a calling was revoked? What could compare? He was tempted to say nothing, but then there also was, in one dark corner of his brain, something else—an intimation. A possibility of rebirth. The idea of emerging from this disaster, in another city, as someone else—someone leaner, more austere, stripped of his last unhelpful illusions—very few people get that type of chance. He intended to take advantage. But before he could do that, he would have to understand very precisely how he had been tricked so many times, and on such a large scale. Because for all of this to have happened—and for it to have happened to him, of all people—he must have been told lies that he wanted to believe.
23
Lila’s youngest, little Isa, had asked why they built fairy houses only out of things that were on the ground. The things they used, Isa said, like bark and pinecones, fell apart so quickly; the fairy house they built just yesterday had already collapsed. Lila nodded sympathetically; she had asked herself the same question. They never ate food that fell on the ground, Isa had continued, so why did fairies want branches and leaves for a roof instead of shiny and smooth things like her rain hat, which she had carried out from the house even though the weather was beautiful? The truth, of course, was that the Old Man had decreed it so.
Fairies, Lila had said to her daughter, are different from us. They are so pure that they don’t see dirt. All they see is a pinecone that had once been part of their friend the pine tree, or bits of soil shaken loose from their friend the Earth. Above all things, she said, fairies want to be among their friends.
“But what do fairies eat?” Isa said for the thousandth time.
“Fairies eat the sunlight,” Lila said yet again.
Isa paused.
“What if it rains?”
Up to that point, Lila felt they were in the domain of ritual, and she was content to answer, as many times as necessary, in that spirit. But this was a new question.
“If it rains,” Lila said hopefully, “then they eat clouds.”
“Is that why the sun comes back again?”
Lila smiled, but chose not to answer. The logic of fairies, if pursued too far, could end up in a scary place.
All these houses were tiny, a foot high at most, and designed as resting places for fairies who were pictured by the children, as far as Lila could tell, as fireflies with human features. The houses lined either side of the road as it entered the forest from the clearing, and the Old Man would remove non-Seven items—anything with manmade building materials—from offending fairy houses and pile them on the Hill House front steps as a warning. Spoons for gateposts or eyeglasses for windows, cigarettes for seesaws or the Stork Club ashtray used for a swimming pool. All anathema. It was astonishing, Lila thought, how even this flimsiest of pastimes, when repeated enough, could evolve such a tangled and specific set of rules.
Lila was searching the underbrush for a square patch of moss to use as a roof or perhaps a doormat, when she heard Isa shriek.
“Catta!”
The fairy houses were one of the six-year-old Isa’s two main preoccupations on the island: the other was Catta. She was thorough in documenting and “treating” all of her brother’s perpetual cuts and bruises. When he sat down in her sight, Isa would examine his exposed skin for any new wounds and then put a Band-Aid on everything she could find, including mosquito bites, and his arms became a mosaic of bandages. The Hill House chronically ran short of medical supplies. Catta would take them all off after Isa went to bed, and at first Lila worried that, the next morning, the disappearance of Isa’s careful work would make her feel rejected, but in fact she was delighted and cheerfully bandaged him up all over again.
“We made a fairy house out of birch bark!” Isa said as Catta walked up.
“It needs a roof, silly,” Catta said. He lifted Isa up and turned her upside down and she shrieked again, and louder.
Back on her feet, Isa staggered briefly, dizzy, and then said that Mommy was just over there, finding moss for a roof.
“Will these help?” he said, and pulled four large feathers out of his waistband.
“Feathers!” Isa said, as if she had never seen anything so perfect.
“Those are eagle feathers,” Catta said. So he hoped—it was hard to know which feathers belonged to which birds. The biggest and most symmetrical ones must, he thought, have come from eagles.