The Listeners: A Novel

Also by Maggie Stiefvater

The Shiver Trilogy

The Raven Cycle

The Scorpio Races

All the Crooked Saints

VIKING

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Copyright © 2025 by Maggie Stiefvater

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Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data

Names: Stiefvater, Maggie, 1981– author.

Title: The listeners / Maggie Stiefvater.

Description: New York : Viking, 2025.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024039499 (print) | LCCN 2024039500 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593655504 (hardcover) | ISBN 9798217060511 (international edition) | ISBN 9780593655511 (ebook)

Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.

Classification: LCC PS3619.T535488 L57 2025 (print) | LCC PS3619.T535488 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20240830

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024039499

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024039500

Ebook ISBN 9780593655511

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Contents

Dedication

Epigraph

Letter to Jillian Pennybacker

Part One: Upstairs

Order, Room 411, 1/31/1942

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Part Two: Downstairs

Order, Room 411, 2/01/1942

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Part Three: Inside

Order, Room 411, 3/20/1942

Letter to Miss Hudson

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Part Four: Out

Order, Room 411, 4/01/1942

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Epilogue

Order, Room 411, 5/13/1942

Letter to Eric Parnell

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Recommended Reading

About the Author

_151539918_

For Richard, who dreamt of the Avallon

There’s one thing you’ll never find in a good hotel—an argument.

—The Hotel Monthly, January 1940

December 7, 1961

Jillian Pennybacker

Lodge 3

William & Mary Campus

Dear Miss Pennybacker,

This is the story of the hotel I mentioned at the party, the magnificent building with the magical water beneath it. I thought you would appreciate your father’s role in it.

Chin up, see! Miracles do happen.

Warmly,

Eric Parnell

U.S. State Department

Washington, D.C.

Part One

Upstairs

Order, Room 411, 1/31/1942:

New York Times

Vogue

Britannia and Eve

Modes & Travaux

2 lemons

2 croissants

2 yards mustard wool (sample attached)

1 yard printed cotton (sample attached)

Frenchman’s Creek, Daphne du Maurier

The Sun Is My Undoing, Marguerite Steen

Windswept, Mary Ellen Chase

Grease pencil

Chapter One

The day the hotel changed forever began as any other.

June Porter Hudson woke before dawn in a basement apartment in the staff cottage closest to the hot springs. She climbed out of bed, displacing three dachshunds (two smooth, one wiry), who poured to the floor to follow her at a polite distance. She ducked beneath the clothesline hung across the room and unclipped her shirt and underwear before hanging her quilt in their place to air for the day.

By the light of a single bedside lamp, she dressed in her usual attire: waist-high wide-legged slacks, a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up neatly, a delicate wristwatch, a swipe of lipstick. Her dark hair was bobbed just below her ears, and when she was working, she slicked it back elegantly with some grooming cream. The entire look was out of step with the formal pin curls and dresses found inside the hotel, but the Rockefellers and the Roosevelts didn’t expect her to look like them; she certainly didn’t sound the same, not with her holler-bred accent. They were used to their hoteliers having a French accent if they had any at all, and the only French June had was Vive l’empereur!, which one of her waiters used to hiss under his breath each time the chef came into view. It did not matter. The guests loved her anyway.

After she stepped into her low-heeled Mary Janes, June silently drank two full glasses of mineral water beside the kitchenette’s single window. In the summer, the small, eye-level porthole offered a gray morning view of the mulch and shrubs around the porch, but now, in the winter, the dark glass merely reflected her face (wide-set eyes, arched eyebrows, lips pragmatic as a pencil). Sweetwater, that was what the locals called it, although it tasted like a split lip and a mouthful of dust. The water wasn’t named for the taste—it was named for what it did to the body. What ailed you? Rheumatism, constipation, barrenness, grippe? Dyspepsia, malaria, biliousness, croup? Homesickness, homeliness, eczema, gout? Indigestion, inflammation, apoplexy, doubt? Medical journals and medical guests debated the springs’ potency, but June didn’t pay them much mind. She just started and finished her day the same way, never missing those four glasses of mineral water. After she’d drunk hers, she poured a glass into the dachshunds’ bowl, fed them some meat scraps from the icebox, and then got to work.

Work, work. It never ended. June oversaw 450 staff, 420 rooms, 418 acres, 212 Shropshire sheep, 110 Golden Delicious apple trees, sixty box stalls, twenty-one cottages, seven cabins, four bathhouses, three bottling rooms, and two mineral streams. Every day there was staff to organize, supplies to inventory, events to execute, each heaving breath of this expensive beast accounted to the penny, so that the Gilfoyles, who owned the hotel, were reassured that none of their fortune was having fun without them.

The business of luxury: the first thing on her mind when she woke, the last thing on her mind when she went to bed.

On that day, January 25, the Avallon was hosting a tartan ball in honor of Robert Burns, a long-dead but still-lauded Scottish poet. With her dachshunds in tow, June had joined her staff captain Griff Clemons on the ballroom balcony to observe a dress rehearsal of the technical components. The ballroom was impressive. At its center, a sweetwater fountain covered with carved rhododendron flowers filled the space with the scent of sweet earth and wildflowers. The ceiling far above bore a brilliant mural of West Virginia scenes by Susie M. Barstow, of the Hudson River School. On the north wall was an enormous stage where the glamorous Geraldine Farrar had once reprised her Met role as Madama Butterfly. On the south was a fireplace taken stone by stone from the ruins of the Battlesden House, gifted by the willing Duke of Bedford’s estate. During a presidential stay, Grace Coolidge had had a hand in selecting the parquet floor. Heiresses. Presidents. Royalty. This was the nature of the average Avallon guest: people so high on the social ladder they had to duck for the sun to go overhead.

How are your girls doing, Griff? June asked.

Fine enough, he replied.

Your voice says otherwise.

The Avallon’s general manager and staff captain were an unusual pair of employees for a hotel of this status—a smiling White mountain woman and a half-sighted Black man—but they’d both done it the honest way, working their way up from the bottom. Neither of them was in any danger of seeing someone like themselves on a future guest list.

One of them’s decided she’s in love, Griff replied. The other’s got her mind on revenge.

Griff’s twin girls had only just turned five.

June said, So times are tough in the Clemons household.

I thought girls were meant to be gentle.

Am I gentle?

The staff captain gave one of his eyes a pensive rub, an unthinking gesture that often punctuated his conversations. Those big hazel peepers would spare him from the draft. The left was standard-issue, but the right had been merely decorative since he got kicked in the face by an irritable heifer at age six. She was grateful. The tall, wiry staff captain was her left hand, responsible for everything that happened back of house, out of guests’ sight. I’m not answering that one, Hoss.

Clunks, clatters, and jingling came from below as the sounds of feast preparation escaped from the Grotto. Trills and moans sounded from the orchestra pit. Most Burns Night parties were humble, sitting room ceilidhs of fiddle and pipes and haggis, but the Avallon’s would feature a full orchestra, hired pipe band from New York, five-course dinner, drinks deep as the ocean. The dancing would go on until four or five in the morning.

Ordinarily, it would be a modest offseason event, by Avallon standards. This year, of course, was different. This would be the first party since Mr. Francis Gilfoyle, the hotel’s owner and June’s mentor, had died on November 7, collapsing halfway in, halfway out of an elevator on the fourth floor. And the first since the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, plunging America into war. That made the Burns Night ball more than a party. It made it a decision: Would parties still happen in these times? The Hotel Monthly, a publication by hoteliers, for hoteliers, had recently published a six-page feature (Defining American Luxury) presenting the Avallon as a standard most could not hope to achieve but would do well to emulate. Its position on wartime activities would be noted and aped.

And what June had decided was this: for decades, presidents, foreign dignitaries, tastemakers, and decision-makers had relied on the Avallon to be a place where past and future were erased, replaced by an immutable, carefree present. To hesitate was to break the spell forever.

The party would go on.

A voice came from below. Hoss, is that you I hear?

I’m here, June replied. Who’s that I’m listening to—Johnny?

Yep. Can you see the anchors from where you’re at? They all look flush?

She put a Scots twist into her voice, for Burns. Aye, laddie.

Johnny accepted the game. Aye, lassie! We’ll be set in just a moment.

The night before, at three a.m., when she’d finally managed to steal away into her humble office behind the front desk to take a crack at dinner (cold chicken, potatoes in lemon glaze, leftover pilaf), she’d approved thirty thousand dollars in linens, nylons, sheets, and rubber bands, all items she expected would soon become scarce, even if the war was over by summer, as some were saying. As she finalized the purchase orders, it had felt like she was officially signing the war into existence. She had tried to avoid thinking about it to this point: she couldn’t quite bear the image of Sandy, the baby of the Gilfoyle family, in uniform. Edgar David Gilfoyle, Mr. Francis’s debonair oldest son and heir to the Avallon, had told June that he didn’t think the hotel would really be affected. This had been just a few days after Pearl Harbor and just about a month after his father’s funeral. He and June had been in bed together—a situation that had happened before but was not meant to have happened again—and Gilfoyle was dragging a blown pink rose from the bedside arrangement on a journey beginning at a sweaty point between her breasts and ending at a sweaty point below her belly button. War is not coming to the Avallon, he’d told her. How could it even find us?

And so far he was right. War had only lightly rummaged through the mountains: the 150th Infantry of the West Virginia National Guard had been transferred to the Panama Canal Zone and draft offices had appeared on a few coal-stained main streets. This latter truth urged June to change how she mentally catalogued her staff. Previously irrelevant attributes became assets. Her best carpenter had a limp, her boiler repairman was short a few fingers, her kindest registrar thankfully had an old case of miliary tuberculosis. Griff had his one eye. Simple gifts.

Here we go, called Johnny (over forty, too old for the draft). Hoss, shout if you see anything come free.

Aye.

Aye!

June propped her elbows on the balcony, expectant. Griff, never so casual, drew close to observe with his spine straight as a railroad tie. Above them, the ceiling twitched to life. The dachshunds cowered as a dull roar thrummed—less like a machine, more like a rising storm.

Is that all right? Griff asked.

June said, The bagpipes will cover it.

What was luxury? Nimble. In a drought, it was a glass of water; in a flood, a dry place to stand. Whatever made the Avallon luxurious a year ago would not be what made it luxurious now. For Burns Night, a famous designer who also happened to be the Avallon’s most persistent guest had helped design a surprise meant to remind guests that, even in wartime, luxury persisted. June was opinionated about luxury and, earlier in her career, Mr. Francis, proud of and defensive about his working-class novitiate, would send challengers her way. The most recent had been a member of the Delafield family well-known in New England real estate, who cornered her in her office.

The battle went quickly:

Delafield: Frank says you have some sort of religious theory that luxury and wealth have nothing to do with one another.

June: Good afternoon to you, too, Mr. Delafield. It’s simple enough, isn’t it? Wealth is just security. Luxury is living carefree.

Delafield: I’m carefree.

June: Sure you are. What do you want to hear, Mr. Delafield? A sermon? All right, I’ll preach: Wealth doesn’t care who you are deep down, at night, when you can’t sleep. Luxury doesn’t care about anything else; that’s how we can guess what you jaspers need before you even realize you need it. Didn’t you notice your room is different this visit? The registrar made sure you wouldn’t ever have to share an elevator with Miss Q; you’re welcome. Housekeeping moved your nightstand so you’d stop knocking your glasses behind it. And the stable boys know Commander’s your favorite, but he’s been a bit fresh with you the last few visits, hasn’t he, so they’ve been lunging him so he’ll be sweet as pie for you this week. Do you recall asking for any of that? I didn’t think so; it’s the Avallon’s pleasure to anticipate you. Now, I’d be happy to hear your thoughts on the matter, seeing as this is my business and I’m always looking to improve it, but truth is, I already know you agree with me. Because you’re standing here with our luxury instead of back in Connecticut with your wealth. That’s a fur piece to come if wealth and luxury are the same thing.

Delafield:

Delafield: Go to bed with me.

June: I don’t possibly have the time, Mr. Delafield, but I can recommend a good book or two.

She didn’t mistake it for meaningful attraction. She’d just taken him by surprise. Powerful people forget they can be surprised—she knew this firsthand now, because, wonder of wonders, she had become a powerful person. June Hudson, mountaineer, woman, general manager of the Avallon. It was a miracle, all those words existing together. At her first hotel conference, during the cocktail meet and greet, when she’d first spoken aloud, the men standing closest had laughed. Not cruelly, just from shock. This slender woman, this outrageous accent.

Oh, one fellow had said. You’re the Avallon’s GM.

God, she’d been happier than a pig in the sunshine. Three hundred miles away, and they’d heard of her. How do you come up with your strategies? they asked.

The sweetwater is full of ideas, she said, because even then, she’d known a thing or two about legend-making.

Now June’s staff worked several hand cranks to jerkily lower a custom-built apparatus from where it had been tucked close to the mural. Dangling from its long wooden arms were hundreds of sheets of thick Bristol paper, each displaying a poem by Robert Burns.

The sweeping blast, the sky o’ercast,

The joyless winter-day

It’s like a dog shivering in the rain! shouted Johnny. More smoothly!

The apparatus’s progress became more subtle. The pages no longer heaved to the ground, but rather drifted, flew, flapped. They seemed alive, organic, twisting and turning, flocking and floating.

The machinery fell silent.

The poetry bobbed just at eye level, looking like a children’s mobile. This was what luxury looked like right now, in this moment, before it would have to shift again. Nimble.

June and Griff murmured wordlessly. June had had her doubts, but now she could envision the partygoers wondering at the mobile’s descent, stilling a twirling poem to read to their companions, beginning to dance once more, making slow, dreamy loops through papery clouds. June knew how it felt when one’s blood turned to fizzy champagne, how strawberries tasted when someone else fed them to you on those pale leather sofas. She could pass for one of these partygoers, for a little while. Her fingers pinched lightly at her side, as if she were reaching up for one of the poems herself. She could taste the words in her mouth:

Ae fond kiss and then we sever

Ah! She should’ve never gone back to Gilfoyle’s room after the funeral. This stupid hope. She knew better. She had known better for years. The mind remembered, the body forgot.

Watch out!

A cry and a crash, in one.

An object had fallen from somewhere above June and Griff, missing one of the workers by only a few inches. It skittered across the parquet floor, coming to a stop at Johnny’s feet.

Land sakes! June said. She scanned the apparatus for obvious signs of failure. What is it?

But when Johnny brandished the missile, she saw that it was just a wooden rung from the balcony above them. She said, Did the apparatus catch hold of it?

Someone, out of sight, replied, "It was thrown!"

What’s happened to the end of it? she asked.

It’s rotted, Hoss, replied Johnny.

The staff members muttered: no human actor was visible; everyone knew the rumors about the fourth floor; this was supernatural malice at work.

Let’s not get carried away here, June told them. The water damage was mysterious, but it proved how the apparatus could have so easily knocked it free. Whoa, now, Griff, don’t you follow that rung down. He was leaned over the railing, trying to get a better look at the floor above. The fourth floor was for the long-term guests, those who had both the fortune and the inclination to stay at the Avallon year-round. June knew them well—this was, in large part, why they stayed—and none were likely culprits for either mischief or clumsiness.

When June caught Griff’s expression, she said, Not you, too!

He rubbed his dud eye. With Mr. Francis passing on, is it possible…

She interrupted, The water don’t work that way, Griff.

Even if one never took a dip in the swimming or bathing pools, it was impossible to avoid the sweetwater at the Avallon. The volatile water flowed through pipes in the walls, filled up the fountains, and burst out of fonts on every floor. But it did not throw missiles from the fourth floor.

Or at least, it hadn’t.

Hoss? Here was Griff’s new runner boy, Theophilus Morse, who was just about the same age June had been when she first came to the Avallon. Eleven, twelve. Too young for the draft. His backstory was tragic, but this was West Virginia, tragedy was cheap and plentiful. Currently, the boy was doing his best to emulate Griff’s immutable good posture, but his chest was heaving. He’d run here.

What’s the fire, Theo? June asked.

Mister— He gulped for air. Mr. Gilfoyle called—

Just his name was sufficient to warm June’s throat. She hadn’t seen Gilfoyle since that night. A month. An endless amount of time, a nothing amount of time. She could still feel the petals on her skin.

Get yourself together, boy, Griff said. He stood straight. Theo stood straight. Together they breathed in, out, mirrors of each other.

Theo got air enough in him to deliver the rest. Mr. Gilfoyle called. Inhale. He’s leaving New York right now for a meeting here. Inhale. He got us the list of attendees. Inhale. He wants you at the meeting.

Gilfoyle, coming here, to the Avallon, to her.

She asked, Who’s the client?

It’s the Feds, Hoss. The State Department.

Griff’s mouth went odd.

What do the Feds want with us? June asked.

Theo hesitated.

June had long ago discovered that most people were bad listeners; they thought listening was synonymous with hearing. But the spoken was only half a conversation. True needs, wants, fears, and hopes hid not in the words that were said, but in the ones that weren’t, and all these formed the core of luxury. June had become a good listener.

This was how she heard a single unspoken word between them. Clouding the truth with smoke and digging trenches into their hearts.

Theo said, They’re taking the hotel. For the war effort.

War.

Coming for her hotel.

War is not coming to the Avallon, Gilfoyle had told her. How could it even find us?

Turned out, it could just drive up the mountain, and he would open the front door.

Chapter Two

Special Agent Tucker Rye Minnick wasn’t allowed in the front door.

None of the agents were. When they arrived at the Avallon Hotel, the Feds had just a glimpse of the hotel’s wintry facade, perfect as a postcard, before uniformed, gloved attendants directed them away from it. The trip seemed interminable. They’d driven from Washington at forty miles an hour, the speed Roosevelt was supposedly about to propose to save rubber and gasoline, and now it felt as if they were being sent farther into the gray mountains. Around their vehicles, snow fell in unmotivated, meditative circles; mist rose from the ravines. January in West Virginia was raw, spare, objectively beautiful.

Tucker wondered why it was that humans were drawn to natural beauty. It wasn’t for them. Here, in fact, it actively opposed them. Everything that made the landscape beautiful—the remote location, the steeply pitched slopes, the rushing rapids—was dangerous. And yet, like mice before snakes, deer before hunters, a certain type of gentle woman before a certain type of brutal man, humans pined and longed for these vistas. Even he, with all his life experience and his training, saw loveliness in these surroundings. Everything logical in him was unnerved; everything else swooned.

His last post had been like this, too, albeit with vastly different aesthetics. Albino Ridge, Texas, a little border town with the poor fortune to serve as a point of operation for Singing Joey Puglisi, who ran opium through Mexico up to New York. The dry landscape outside the town had been barbed and venomous, ready to kill a man in a day or two…but the first few months of his post, he’d stood on the back porch every evening to watch the sunset glaze the Chisos Mountains red and then black. He’d reminded himself over and over that this brutal place wanted him dead, tried to talk himself out of being moved by the beauty.

But he was still out on that porch every night, wasn’t he?

Eventually, the track around the Avallon led to a staff entrance, where a gloved porter in the Avallon’s gray-and-gold uniform waited.

Hello, hello, hello. Hello, young fellow, we have arrived.

Thus entered Mr. Benjamin Pennybacker, the State Department representative leading the mission. The State Department was not exactly a rival agency to Tucker’s FBI, but they were not bosom colleagues, either. Technically the Bureau men were to refer to him as Agent Pennybacker or, even more appropriately, Special Agent Pennybacker, but in private, the three agents, by unspoken agreement, called him Mr. Pennyback, the first half said quickly, like winding up the pitch, and the second half thrown into the mud with energy. PennyBAAACK. Give me my PennyBAAACK. Currently, Pennybacker was greeting the porter while balancing on one foot, the better to flick gravel from his opposite shoe as he nattered on about the weather, golf, the local wildlife, the problem of stuck typewriter keys, fifteenth-century Welsh uprisings, each topic carrying the conversation’s participants further from the matter at hand, not closer.

The State Department! They weren’t agents. They were schoolboys who didn’t notice their shirts were untucked in the back, coming of age in a file cabinet while the Bureau men trained in the field.

Tucker broke in. I was led to believe our meeting was in the main hotel.

The porter replied, We’ve been asked to park your vehicles back here to avoid disturbing the guests.

The guests are still here?

Sir?

At this reveal, Pennybacker’s eyes beseeched first the porter and then Tucker. He did not seem to have the words for his disappointment; he was a kid pummeled for his candy.

Tucker asked the porter, Is Mr. Gilfoyle here to meet us?

Oh yes, sir.

Well, then it would be made right, thought Tucker. He glanced over his shoulders at the other two FBI agents. Wipe your shoes, fellas.

With the mountains at their backs, they entered the hotel, scuffing the January slush off their soles. Benjamin Pennybacker, his jaw squared with brave new optimism; Special Agent Hugh Calloway, graceful as Astaire; Special Agent Pony Harris, grin like a crocodile. Special Agent Tucker Minnick, tight as a piston. Heads down, hats in hand. Scuff scuff scuff.

The porter asked, Would you like to hang your coats?

Pennybacker immediately relinquished his, revealing a rumpled shirt. The Bureau men, however, looked to Tucker. They all wore Bureau-issued .38 Colts beneath their jackets.

Tucker said, We’ll keep them.

Inside, the hotel was a gilded rabbit warren. Halls branched from halls. Stairways tunneled into the dark, some of them just six or eight stairs, younger stairways that seemed to be still growing. Doorways upon doorways in no predictable orientation. On the walls, stone bears and cougars, eagles and deer, choked mineral water into basins, their mouths stained dark. And still Pennybacker prattled on. Cruise ships, competitive harp playing, wool dyeing, saints in America.

Tucker interrupted, Did you request the blueprints?

A good thought, Pennybacker said. An exemplary thought. Secret passageways. Men jumping from holes in walls. Women disappearing in the night. This place stirs the imagination.

Tucker crooked a finger at one of the Bureau assistants behind them. Make that happen.

I’ll do what I can, sir, replied the assistant.

No, Tucker said. Not good enough. Make it happen.

Yessir.

Better.

Unlike Tucker, the assistant would head back to Washington after this meeting, free as a bird. The assistant, a young man so junior he probably still had pulled muscles from the academy, had years of grunt work in front of him before he’d earn any status, work Tucker had been eager to put behind him. But now he envied those days of surety, ambition, the feeling that the only way was up. Hoover had sent Tucker here as special agent in charge, two agents underneath him—on paper a lateral step, if not an upward one—but both he and Hoover knew it was an exile. He’d earned it.

Staff flowed in and out of the agents’ view to open and close doors, seeming less like employees and more like an extension of the hotel itself, a helping hand for those who faltered. Unsettling, yes, but not as unsettling as the hotel’s complicated odor: perfume, blood, fruit, dirt, caves, blossoms. The smell of the mineral springs.

He remembered that smell well.

You won’t be here long, Tucker thought. Just get the job done.

The staff were stealing discreet glances at Hugh. He wasn’t the only Black man there, but he was the only one starkly visible; every front-of-house staff member was White. Perhaps they were just curious; a G-man was unusual in this place, and a Black one even more so. Or maybe their attention signaled something darker. There were plenty of ugly things dressed in nice uniforms, weren’t there?

Your pop never teach you to blink? Pony asked a porter, who ducked his head swiftly.

Hugh told Pony, You’re just jealous of my admirers.

Pony tapped a salute off his forehead at a second staring staffer, showing them all his teeth.

Hey, Tucker said. Tighten up.

Admonished, the two other agents slunk into the library, leaving Tucker feeling even more unpleasant. He was perfectly at ease with the authority he wielded over the assistant, many years his junior, but he was less certain of how to approach his peers, Hugh and Pony. Hugh could have led this mission himself, except that Hoover would have never put a Black man in charge. And Pony…young Pete had informed him when they met that he’d gotten his nickname for a pony of whiskey, as if Tucker might have been impressed by the autobiographical note. Pony was a red-blooded young man in a way Tucker had never been, and the only role Tucker knew how to play with him was disappointed father. None of them were typical Bureau material, and it wasn’t difficult to imagine the other two agents were meant to be another part of Tucker’s exile, or he part of theirs.

Taking ahold of Pennybacker’s arm to stop him in the doorway, Tucker said, We won’t be so informal again. The Bureau men, I mean.

Pennybacker nervously straightened his bow tie, as if he were the one who’d been rebuked. Ah, it’s all right, it’s just a hotel.

If it was only that, Tucker replied, we wouldn’t be here.

In the Smith Library—the most formal of the hotel’s three libraries, according to the staff, despite holding thousands of stiff-jacketed titles—the meeting began. In addition to