off the ground. He’d then decided to spend his days perfecting his backswing at the Columbia Country Club, but that got boring, and after a month or two, he knocked on Dulles’s door—his actual door, in Georgetown—and asked for a job at the Agency. In his early fifties, Anderson was given an administrative role, although he’d begged to be put back into the field.
The old gang had gathered to celebrate an anniversary of sorts. Eleven years earlier, we’d left our posts in Ceylon, the war already over. The future of the OSS and American intelligence had remained uncertain. It’d be two years before the Agency would be created—two years before a home would be given to wayward OSS officers who’d grown tired of raking in the dough at their New York law firms and brokerage houses and wanted, even more than to serve their country again, the power that came from being a keeper of secrets. It was a power that some, myself included, found more intoxicating than any drug, sex, or other means of quickening one’s heartbeat. We’d planned on celebrating our tenth anniversary, but it was postponed again and again until someone just set a date.
“Anyway,” Anderson continued. “Honest to God, the fucker was nine meters long.”
“Twenty-nine feet?” one of the younger Agency men piped in.
“That’s right, Henry, my boy. Mark my words, she was a man-eater. Killed half a dozen Burmese by the time I got called in.”
“How do you know she was a she?” I asked.
“Believe me, Sally, only a female could’ve wreaked such havoc. And they needed a man to put her in her place.”
“So why were you called in?” I said.
“Community relations,” he said, straight-faced. “The snake was a menace. I’m telling you, she was something out of a horror flick. That snake still makes the occasional cameo in my nightmares. Just ask Prudy.” He pointed to his wife, a petite woman with large yellow plastic earrings that made her earlobes droop, keeping warm inside the yacht’s saloon with the other wives. She looked out the window and gave a little wave. “Anyway, she wouldn’t come out of her hole—”
“Like this story!” someone yelled from the back of the crowd.
“It was more like a cave than a hole, really,” he continued, ignoring the heckler. “She’d be in there for months. Sleeping, waiting. Then one day, she’d slither out and saddle up next to a cow. Then bam!” He clapped his hands for effect. “She’d drag the poor bovine back down the hole without so much as a moo. Really put a hurting on the village’s economy. And we didn’t want that, right?”
“Wouldn’t be a horrible way to go,” Frank Wisner said, joining the group. The circle split so the boss could take a front-row seat for Anderson’s story. Frank was the one who’d paid for the boat we were standing on, the alcohol we were drinking, and the shrimp cocktail we were eating. “Wouldn’t know it was comin’,” he continued in his Mississippi lilt. “Just standing in a grassy field somewhere, chewin’ on some cud, perhaps contemplating whether to go down to the stream for a drink, and then—”
“Don’ be morbid, Frank,” Anderson said. “Jesus.”
Anderson had started slurring his words—and when he slurred his words, the words he did manage to get out usually got him in trouble. With the boss in the mix now, I motioned for him to hurry up and finish the goddamn story.
“I oversaw the whole operation.”
“Operation Kaa?” my friend Beverly asked. She half-laughed, half-hiccuped, and the crowd tittered.
“For the love of God, can I please go on?”
“No one’s holding you back,” Bev said, her voice high and throaty, indicating she was one too many glasses of bubbly over her limit. She was wearing a black Givenchy sack dress, bought on a recent trip to Paris. After the war, Bev had married an oil lobbyist, who kept her dressed in the latest fashions as long as she turned her head when he came home smelling like bourbon and knock-off Chanel No. 5. She hated the guy’s guts, so she made sure the trade was as even as possible by buying everything as soon as it stepped off the runway, not to mention having the occasional dalliance of her own with her old OSS beaux. The sack dress did nothing to flatter her figure, but I gave her credit for attempting it.
Someone handed Anderson a flask. He took a swig and coughed. “Anyway. I brought ten men with