Barbara was sitting at the desk. I leaned over her to retrieve a fifteen-year-old photo from the St. Paul Pioneer. A wide-bodied man, overstuffed in his hairless body, biceps and big belly flexed, showing the camera a crazed grin. He wore chaps, boots with spurs and a black cowboy hat. The caption read, “Outlaw Bull Gutter vs. Bobo Godzilla Tonight, Civic Auditorium.” I said, “Minnesota has cowboys, too.”
Sounding weary, Barbara laughed. “An Indian kid living with a make-believe cowboy… I don’t know if it’s sad or funny.”
“Ironic anyway.”
“Or maybe it’s worked out. Half an hour it took us, from the airport to Midtown, and Will hardly said a word. But he took off his hat when we met. Shy but polite, you know? ‘Very nice to meet you, ma’am.’ That type. And he loved riding in a limo. But I could tell he was… different, somehow.”
“Oh?”
“I expected a scholar, I guess. A nerd with glasses… No offense.”
I said, “None taken,” thinking about the kid’s vocabulary.
“Maybe I understand now, one foster home after another. Tonight, he was reserved because he was overwhelmed-flying in at night, his first look at New York City, skyscrapers and all those lights. But he loosened up by the time we got to the Explorers Club. In fact, he asked if I wanted to get together later for a drink.”
“An adolescent boy?”
“That’s what I’m saying. It was unexpected. A boy without a male role model. No one permanent anyway. Maybe thinking that’s what men in the big city say to women. A line he heard in a movie.”
“Have a drink, as in have a drink -coming on to you?”
She shook her head. “Of course not. At fourteen? He was trying to fit in. His whole life, Will has probably been trying to fit in. Dressing like a cowboy after a year with Outlaw Bull Gutter. He wears whatever costume it takes.”
I was thinking twelve years on an Oklahoma reservation was a more likely explanation as I opened the courtesy bar. “I have bottled water, beer… wine, too. But I might have to call room service for a corkscrew…”
Barbara said, “No need to do that for me,” meaning the shirt I’d grabbed, not the corkscrew. Her staff had delivered my things from the Explorers Club and my hotel.
I put the shirt on anyway but left it unbuttoned, as the woman said, “Let’s talk about this,” then explained that one glass of wine wouldn’t help. It was impossible to sleep after what had happened.
“When I’m this wired, there are only a couple of things that relax me. But I have to be with someone I can trust.”
I didn’t know what that meant. Because she saw me look at the clock radio, she added, “Plus, there’s something personal I’d like to discuss.”
I’d hoped to get five hours of sleep, but maybe the car Harrington was sending would be late.
I said, “Anything you want.”
She said, “Don’t volunteer before you know the mission,” a line she’d probably heard at some military briefing, giving it an inflection that made me think, Uh-oh! “I’ll be back in a minute.”
I was buttoning my shirt as she went out the door.
Now she was sitting at the desk, sipping wine from a water tumbler, a half-empty bottle of red next to my laptop. She had closed the computer and rearranged the desk before using the corkscrew-a woman accustomed to taking charge.
She was wearing jeans and a green denim blouse, no makeup, her hair still wet from the shower. Barefoot, I noticed, as if she’d dressed in a rush, the emotional overload showing. I sat and listened, hoping she would burn adrenaline by talking.
The boy wasn’t the only thing on her mind.
Her in-laws were flying in from Chicago, she told me. She was talking about her late husband’s parents. Favar Sorrento had been an entertainment mogul before he went into politics and married Barbara, a TV anchor who was twenty-five years younger than the wife he’d just divorced.
Barbara said, “His mother’s bearable in a passive-aggressive sort of way, but the father’s a bastard. He’s old-school Castilian Spanish. Left Havana just before Castro took power and still thinks a woman’s place is on her back when she’s wearing shoes and in the kitchen when she’s not.” The woman folded her hands behind her head and leaned back in the chair. “When Favar was alive, Favar Senior tried to undermine my influence in every imaginable way. Now he tries to take advantage of my influence in ways you can’t imagine. He still treats me like a brainless trophy wife. Like the only reason I won the election is because I’m his dead son’s proxy. Next election, I finally drop the hyphen and the Sorrento and run under my own name.”
Mostly, though, Barbara was awake because she was worried about the boy. I stood, took the wine bottle and filled her glass, watching her nervous hands as she drank, her gray-green eyes showing more color when she turned from the window, saturated with light from the desk lamp. It was touching listening to her fret about a boy she barely knew. She had collected a lot of background and shared it with a harried energy that was symptomatic of guilt.
“Every time I close my eyes, I feel like I can’t get enough air. Like it’s me inside that coffin. When the agent described the convict shoveling dirt, the girl hysterical inside the box… my God, that’s what happens when I start to drift off. I hear dirt hitting the lid”-she touched the palm of her hand to her nose-“this close to my face. God!”
She stood, too agitated to sit, and began to pace and talk.
Her staff still had a hell of a lot to do and was working around the clock. Everything in the cartons the kidnappers wanted was being cataloged and copied. A team had been assigned to arrange for a plane and crew to deliver the cartons-through the military or State Department possibly-hoping Barbara could convince her committee, along with other layers of government, to cooperate with the kidnappers.
“They have to,” she said, but in a wistful way that told me she knew it wasn’t true. “God damn them! They wanted me! Why did they have to take a fourteen-year-old boy?”
I stood and took her hands in mine. Held her, trying to stem an escalating panic that signaled hysteria. “Maybe someone on your staff has a sleeping pill or something. You need rest.”
I was startled by an unexpected mood change. Barbara yanked her hands free and turned her back.
“Are you okay?”
“Ford, I need to ask you something. I want an honest answer.”
“I’ll try.”
“I was hoping for a yes.”
“A maybe is better than starting with a lie.”
“If that’s the way it has to be… The vacation video they were using to blackmail me… you said you discovered it accidentally?”
“Not accidentally. But it wasn’t a priority. I knew there were videos of other people, some powerful.”
“You said you took it because it was the right thing to do. A good deed for a stranger. You wouldn’t accept money and didn’t want anything in return from me.”
I hesitated before putting a hand on her shoulder, thinking she might shrug it away. She didn’t.
I said, “All true. But I was aware there are benefits to having a U.S. senator for a friend. Power radiates. I won’t pretend I didn’t know. You’ve done favors for me that you probably aren’t aware of.”
That’s when she shrugged my hand away. I let it fall from her shoulder as she turned, looking up into my eyes. “I’m aware of more than you realize. Did you know that James Montbard is a British intelligence agent? Covert. He’s been with MI6 for years.”
“I didn’t think the UK was our enemy.”
“If you’re going to play word games, I’m leaving.”
I took a step back. “I’m sorry.” I meant it. Then stupidly tried to add, “But I wasn’t sure that Hooker was-”
The woman cut me off. “If you can’t tell the truth, I’d prefer you said nothing.”
I cleared my throat, said nothing.
Barbara faced the window, the reflection showing her eyes as she stared out, the night air cleaner now that it had stopped snowing. “What about Harrington?”