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Alexandria, Virginia
1950
"You don't have to worry," said Arthur Dales' new friend, laughing. "You work for the FBI."
Dales took a sip from his scotch. "What do you mean by that?"
"Everyone knows that Hoover's a fairy."
He said it with the lazy assurance of a member of the establishment. East Coast (which Dales wasn't). Harvard man, Skull and Bones (which Dales definitely wasn't). He said it because he was two sheets to the wind already and it was only eight o'clock at night. He said it like he wasn't one himself.
"Queer as a three dollar bill," he continued. The whisky sloshed in his glass as he gestured. "Not that anyone ever takes a second look at the FBI. Oh no."
It was a private party in a well-to-do Washington suburb. The sort of party where there didn't seem to be as many women as there ought to be. The sort of party where you had the taxi driver drop you three blocks away. Even so, Dales couldn't help but look around to see if they'd been overheard.
"You want to be careful where you say that," he said quietly. He had been intending to make a move, but reconsidered when the man beside him tensed at his words.
"What do you mean? Everyone says that. What are you going to do... report me?"
"It isn't that. It's just--it's better not to get on his bad side. Believe me."
But Bill Mulder's mood had shifted for good. He leaned forward, eyes narrowed, all bonhomie forgotten.
"All of us at State are on his bad side now," he said. "You and McCarthy, you've made us all a laughing stock. You know the jokes. I bet you tell them yourself."
"Bill, it's not that simple."
"What are you playing at over there, anyway? Why don't you do something for this country, start catching Communists instead of playing cops and robbers with Hoover and Tolson? Do you think hunting queers makes you big strong men? Why don't you leave the rest of us alone?"
"Why don't you tell me how you lost China?"
It could have come to blows, the arguments of a hundred Senate hearings recapitulated on a couch in a suburban living room between two men who ought to know better. Dales didn't know why he'd said it. What did he care about China, about Acheson? He was a lawman, plain and simple. Except that nothing was simple anymore.
Bill Mulder stood up, swaying slightly on his feet.
"If you knew what we were doing at State," he said, voice raised, "what we're doing to protect this nation, you'd be shaking in your shoes. Do you think we care about China? China is nothing..."
The man who approached them had been standing by the window observing from within a veil of smoke. Another State man by the look of him, impeccably dressed in a three-piece suit.
"He's had too much to drink," he said to Dales, conciliatory yet firm. "He doesn't mean anything by it."
"I guess not."
"Bill, it's time for you to go home."
Putting his hand on Bill Mulder's shoulder, he led his friend out of the room.
It was another two years before Dales discovered what was really going on at the State Department.
***
The file never said that Edward Skur was a Communist. It said that he was a security risk--a distinction that Fox Mulder, a man who joined the FBI in the far more open climate of the 1980s, failed entirely to grasp. In the 1950s no one could doubt what "security risk" meant. Blackmail, circles of subversives, sexual perversion.
In short, Edward Skur was a homosexual.
Dales didn't have the heart to correct Mulder's misapprehension. Mulder would not have understood. It was kinder to give him a myth, a version of the truth where the monsters were real and not men like you or me. A fairy tale for children.
If you could smear a man as a Communist just by planting a membership card on him, then a hell of a lot more Communists would have been fired. Sometimes, just sometimes, you find nothing because there's nothing to find. Far easier to smear a man as a homosexual, especially if he was one.
What Dales remembered about that arrest was Edward Skur standing in his own front hallway, wife and children looking on, repeating one thing.
"I'm a family man. I'm a family man."
Hung himself two days later. He wasn't the only one, either. It happened.
***
Dales would have just gone on with his job, following orders as always, if he hadn't gotten a message asking him to come to the Hoot Owl at nine o'clock on a Wednesday night.
"He was a pervert," he said, taking a swig of bourbon and looking closely at the man sitting in the shadows across from him. Bill Mulder was still wearing his fedora.
"I know he was," said Mulder. "So am I; so are you. We wouldn't be sitting here if that weren't true. But that isn't why he died. In fact, he isn't dead."
"Oh?"
Dales listened, bourbon forgotten, as his man in the State Department unfolded the unbelievable tale. How Edward Skur had been part of a secret government project, using Nazi scientists brought back after the war in order to develop weaponry too horrific to reveal to the American public. A project gone wrong, the inconvenient qualms of conscience, and the decision to fake his death in order to cover it all up.
"So why tell me?" said Dales finally. "What can I do?"
"You can help me free him."
Dales studied Mulder carefully, wondering what could prompt a man to risk his career for something like this.
"Skur means something to you," he said finally.
"Yes," said Bill Mulder, and he drained his glass in one swift motion. "He means something to me."
***
So in the end Bill Mulder let Edward Skur go free... and Dales allowed him to get away with it. Maybe people were right to fear homosexuals, their loyalty to one another rather than to the system. Or maybe it was simply common human decency.
Dales didn't reflect too deeply on the question. It wasn't his way. He hardly thought about it at all until a young man wearing a broad wedding band showed up at his door decades later, asking all the wrong questions.
"Skur died saying my father's name," said Bill's son, born years after McCarthyism and after that party in Alexandria. "Why?"
"I haven't the faintest idea," said Dales, and tried to shut the door on the memory.
His brother always believed that love could change a man.
It transforms you, he wrote once, in a yellowing letter that Dales had tucked away and carefully saved. Transfigures, even. Passion alters your very nature.
He was always prone to flowery prose.
Lifelong bachelors, both of them. Dales always wondered what sort of love his brother had experienced to make him write a thing like that. But he never asked.
Maybe a life at the FBI had never allowed him to feel that sort of love. Maybe he just wasn't that lucky. But in his experience love didn't change anything about you. It only told you who you really were.