She hiccuped, then said, “Really?”
“Count on it.”
“Now I’m going to have to trust you,” he told Madison, back in the living room. “I have a possible source into Goodman.”
He told her about Cathy Ann Dorn: “I’d love to get her into Goodman’s office, take the hard drives out of his computer.”
“Jake: think,” Madison said. “She nearly gotten beaten to death. That’s not a coincidence. You’d send her back in there?”
Jake frowned: Cathy Ann wasn’t exactly in the army. “Okay, that’s not the best idea. But she’s a resource. I’ll think of something.”
“Interesting job you have . . .”
Madison asked him how he came to work for the president. Jake filled her in, told her about his grandparents’ ranch, and the distance between himself and his parents. Then, “You want another beer?”
“Sure. One more couldn’t hurt.”
She came back to his grandparents, and he talked about working the ranch, about how his grandfather resisted the transition from horses to ATVs. “I used to envy those kids with the big Hondas and Polarises riding around in a cloud of smoke, tearing up the countryside. I’d be sitting up there on some mutt, take me fifteen minutes to get somewhere you could get in one minute on a Honda,” Jake said. “Now, I’m nothing but grateful. Would have been nice if the family had been a little tighter, you know, my parents, but hell. I had a pretty good childhood, all in all. Thought I’d die myself, though, when Grandma went . . .”
She told him about her childhood, in Lexington and Richmond. Her father had been a lawyer, her mother a housewife. Her father committed suicide when he was fifty.
“I hated him for it,” she said, getting out of her chair, wandering around the room with the bottle in her hand. “I was in college, and we’d had some growing-up troubles, and some arguments, and they got pretty hot and I did some screaming and I never had a chance to make it okay before he went out in the backyard and shot himself.”
“Was there . . . ? Did you know why?”
“Yes. He was depressed. Major depression of the medical sort. He wouldn’t go to a shrink, because he still thought he might run for a serious political office—he was on the Richmond City Council twice. He didn’t want a ‘mental illness’ brought up. So he had some pills from his M.D., but they weren’t working . . . And one day, a really nice day, he went out in the yard and sat in a swing for a while, and then blam. A neighbor heard it and came running . . . Maybe that’s why I married an older guy. Maybe I was trying to get back to Daddy.”
She sat down again, but when she sat down, she sat on the couch with Jake. Feeling precisely like a teenager in a movie theater, Jake let his left arm fall along the top of the couch. He started thinking about his breath, and what he’d eaten. Beer should cover it, he hoped.
She was talking about riding, and did a little butt-hop closer on the couch, and he thought, Man, she’s sending out semaphore signals, just go ahead and do it. And he thought about Novatny and his good luck. Amazed at his own boldness, he moved a little closer to her himself, reached a hand behind her far shoulder, and pulled her a bit closer and kissed her. She sank into it, leaning against him, said, mmm, and when he started to pull away, caught him, and they kissed again.
The conversation grew confused.
After a minute or two, Jake’s hand wandered down her body, and the conversation grew even more confused. And he realized that with the second beer in him, he was going to have to pee, and fairly soon. He also realized that he would cut his legs off before he’d leave the couch.
He thought, What small heads women have, when his hand was behind her head, and at another moment, when his hand was wandering from one breast to another, she misinterpreted it as a fumble and said, “Here, wait a minute,” and helped him unbutton her blouse. He popped her brassiere one-handed and she mumbled, “I see you’ve had some training in brassieres,” and he said, “I was just lucky,” and she said, “Right . . .”
After that, the conversation seriously languished until she laughed, a little breathlessly, and said, “Jake. Stop. Jake, I really, really have to pee. Let me up, you oaf.”
She ran up the stairs to the bathroom. Jake hurried into the first-floor bathroom, flushed a few seconds before she did, washed and dried his hands, checked his hair in the mirror, gargled some water, just in case, and was standing in the living room with his hands in his pockets when she came back down the stairs.
“Hi.” He took her hand and pulled her in and kissed her on the forehead and said, “This brings up the whole question of sleeping arrangements.”
“My God, Jake. Do I have to do all the heavy lifting?”
He slept his four and a half hours. He woke up and felt the weight and remembered she was beside him, listened to her breathe, and then thought about the evening. He should, he thought, quit trying to work the problem. He should take Madison on a trip to London, or Paris, and lie low until the whole thing was done. Then they could come back and go wherever the relationship took them.
Ride horses.
But that wasn’t what he was going to do.
He could close his eyes and see the face of the dead girl in Madison. Cold, bloody, cruel murder.
16
They ate breakfast together, English muffins, marmalade, and coffee, and Jake said, “You can either come with me or I can ditch you with a friend. I know a retired professor at Georgetown, you’d be pretty secure at his place.”
“Silly goose,” she said. “I’m coming with you.”
He called Gina at the White House and asked, “What’s my schedule, if I have a schedule?”
“Jake, it’s a nightmare here,” she said. For the first time since he began working for Danzig, Jake could hear excitement in her voice. “The guy wants to talk to you, but he hasn’t had time. Let me see if I can interrupt him.”
He listened to electronic noise for a minute, then two, and then Danzig came up abruptly and said, “Stay in touch. I’ll want you on two hours’ notice. Not today or tomorrow, but maybe the day after . . . or the day after that. We’ll want you to talk to Novatny, give him a deposition on the retrieval of the package.”
“Things are proceeding?”
“Yes. We should have it wrapped up in forty-eight hours. Sixty at the outside.” And he was gone.
They took Jake’s car, leaving hers behind in the garage, moving slowly with the congestion across the bridge into Virginia, fighting traffic every inch of the way, a full hour before they broke into a steady flow.
They were in Richmond a little after ten, followed the navigation system to the hospital. As they came up to it, Jake said, “It might be better if she didn’t see you. If you want to shop for a few minutes or maybe talk to your mother.”
She shook her head: “I couldn’t visit Mother for less than four hours. Give me the car, I’ll run over to a bookstore.”
Jake had gotten a room number from Dorn, and went straight up to the surgical-care center on the third floor. He’d spent a lot of time in hospitals, and the smell of the place brought it all back: everything from the scramble to get him to a med unit, to the flight out to Germany, to the hospital in Bethesda, and the small stuff—the sound of the overhead speakers, the beeping of monitors, the hollow sounds of voices in tile hallways, and all the drawers; drawers everywhere.