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story said he was the Washington bureau chief for Newsweek, which sounded important. It felt strange seeing our neighbors’ names in a crime story, and I read over Dad’s shoulder as he drank his morning coffee.
    “Shouldn’t you be getting ready for school, sport?”
    “I’m done.”
    “Teeth brushed?”
    I bared them fiercely, and he turned back to his reading. A few seconds later he chuckled under his breath.
    “What’s so funny?”
    “Oh, it describes this poor woman’s ex-husband, Cord Meyer, as a ‘local author and lecturer.’ You remember Mr. Meyer, don’t you?”
    I did, mostly because he was the only person I’d ever met named “Cord.” Still is.
    “I thought he worked with Mr. Wisner?”
    “He does. The paper is being discreet.”
    “What’s ‘discreet’ mean?”
    “You could look it up. Increase your word power, like in Reader’s Digest. ”
    Dad hated Reader’s Digest, so I took it for a joke, although I didn’t get it.
    “Don’t you be wandering over to the towpath. That’s police business, not yours. And if you cross Wisconsin Avenue on your bike, for God’s sake, walk it across.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Naturally I made a beeline for the towpath after school on my red Galaxy Flyer. To my disappointment, there was no sign of the crime, so I set out for the next best destination—the victim’s art studio in the Bradlees’ garage, on an alley behind N Street. The Post had evocatively described a freshly painted canvas, still wet from her final brushstrokes, drying on an easel in front of an electric fan.
    I negotiated a dogleg turn up the alley, and to my morbid delight the garage was wide open, revealing a roomful of canvases, including the one in front of the fan. What I hadn’t bargained for were the two men who turned abruptly at the sound of my approach.
    One was Mr. Bradlee, who relaxed the moment he recognized me. But the other man, taller and thinner, stared with probing eyes from behind thick, horn-rimmed glasses. He acted more like a cop than a neighbor, and when he took a step in my direction I nearly fell off my bike. Fortunately Mr. Bradlee put out a hand to stop him.
    “It’s all right, Jim. It’s Warfield Cage’s boy.” Then, to me: “It’s Bill, right?”
    “Yes, sir. I’m sorry if—”
    The man named Jim interrupted.
    “This isn’t your business, son. That’s what your father would tell you.”
    It probably wasn’t his, either, but I’d been taught not to talk back to adults.
    “Yes, sir.”
    Then he said the strangest thing, reminding me of one of those folk tales where the troll offers a riddle for safe passage:
    “Remember, son. Caution is the eldest child of wisdom. Now run along.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    I was shaky in the saddle until I reached the wide open spaces of Thirty-third Street. When I described the encounter to Dad, he chuckled just like he had while reading the Post.
    “Sounds like Mr. Angleton,” he said. “Quoting Victor Hugo, no less.”
    “Who’s he?”
    “Victor Hugo?”
    “Mr. Angleton.”
    “Oh, sort of an ‘author and lecturer,’ like Mr. Meyer.”
    “Why was he in that lady’s room?”
    “Looking for secrets, I’d imagine. That’s mostly what he writes and lectures about.”
    “What kind of secrets?”
    “They wouldn’t be secrets if he went around telling everybody, would they?”
    Not until my thirties did I find out from some book what they’d really been up to. By then I was working for Bradlee, who’d become executive editor of the Post, and I’d long since learned that Jim Angleton had been the CIA’s chief counterspy. They’d been looking for Mary Meyer’s diary, which described her affair with the late President Kennedy. Since she was something of a lefty, Angleton may also have wanted to scan it for clues to assist his infamous Great Mole Hunt, a paranoid quest in which he ruined the careers of so many trustworthy CIA men that he, too, was eventually forced out.
    They found the diary. Bradlee