Anto lay curled up on his right side, his left body half so damaged it made no anatomical sense. It didn’t even look real.
You stupid Irish bastard, Bob thought, remembering the long evenings at the Mustang Bar in Wyoming and what a happy time that had been. So much talent, so much guts, so much charm, and you end up in the high grass with your body blown in two, and for nothing but some rich asshole’s benefit, and he’s going down too.
By this time, the helicopter Chuck had hired was closing in. He raised a hand, not that it was necessary, as he stood out on the slope in a vastness of nothing. The chopper, a familiar old Huey, set down a hundred yards away, flattening the grass, lifting small stones and a haze of prairie dust, seeming inappropriate in a place otherwise so still. Its racket drowned all sound and made chatter impossible. Chuck ran over and gave Bob a nice thump on the shoulder, grabbed the gear, including the ghillie and his own Remington Sendero, while Bob carried Anto’s AI. They made it to the chopper, tumbled in, but not before Bob pulled his friend close and whispered, “Man, do I need to change my goddamned diapers.”
52
Washington DC, like any cosmopolitan city, has wife restaurants and mistress restaurants. If you’re with your spouse, your partner for life, your better half, your ball and chain, the mother of your children, and you have a hankering for steak, then you go to Morton’s, subdued and swanky at the corner of Connecticut and K, right in the center of lobbyland. It’s wonderful, it’s tasteful, it’s perfect, it’s dull. If, however, you’re with your “mentee,” your walking, talking, quivering fountain of youth, your single-evening Viagra-consumption record, your “niece,” your lambchop, and the next Mrs. Whoeveryouare, then it’s off to the Palm, on Nineteenth, for your slab of protein.
The Palm has swagger, bravado, a New York gangster dive ambience. The waiters all look like they made their bones in Newark in ’67, with those walnutty faces, thick pomades of rich Mediterranean hair, and little khaki waiter’s coats, with all kinds of odd bric-a-brac pinned across the belly. The place is dark and, even in the decreed absence of cigarettes and cigars, still feels smoky; the walls are festooned with somebody’s dim idea of celebrity caricature (unrecognizable); the potatoes look like they could be called the myocardial infarction facilitation kit-pancakes fried in diesel grease, possibly?-and the meat is stark, primordial, and bleeding.
Thus on his one mistress dinner night of the month (his wife of thirty-five years and mother of his four children was so understanding), Bill Fedders sat with current flame Jessica Delph, in his usual booth on the left side of the dim room, sipping a powerful vodka martini while admiring the young woman’s aquiline features, drawn-back blond hair, and hooded eyes. God, she was beautiful! Too bad he was going to dump her soon.
“Jessie, when I look at you, I wonder why you haven’t given your heart away to some twenty-five-year-old linebacker.”
“Possibly it’s because all the linebackers in this town are Redskins, that is, losers,” she said, with a smile that concealed the fact that she had in fact given her heart away-and some other goodies, as well-to a thirty-one-year-old stockbroker, because she didn’t want to have that conversation until Bill had gotten her, as promised early in the relationship, a job with a really fine lobbying shop.
“I love a gal who knows that she’s as beautiful as she is smart and as smart as she is beautiful,” he said. It was a treasured line, but he didn’t think he’d used it on this one, and besides it didn’t matter, because he knew about the stockbroker.
“So are we celebrating something, Bill?” she asked.
“Actually, we’re in mourning.”
“Ohhh, death. I hate it when that happens.”
“It’s not death, just massive frontal trauma, a coma, the patient in the oxygen tent out like a light, but I think it’ll come out of it.”
“It?”
“Not a person, a campaign. My oldest and dearest client had me running a campaign to hurry a certain federal policy toward implementation.”
“Details boring or classified?”
“Details unnecessary. Long story shortened: I had a young guy on the team, he seemed so promising, and I let him develop something on his own and it proved to be a hoax. A fraud. He was caught. Disaster.”
“You let him go?”
“He wasn’t really in my employ. I was helping him in his career. Anyhow, he’s been placed on probation, as I understand it, and now he’s covering New Jersey sewer commissions.”
“Bummer.”
“Indeed. I do think we’ll be okay. It’s just that Monday I have to make a phone call I’m not looking forward to. But it’ll work out, I’m sure, just not quite as quickly as we had hoped. But that’s why I’m a little down for now.”
“Poor guy,” she said, reaching across the table to touch his hand. “Jessie will try to make you feel better.”
“Excellent. Now let’s order and-”
But a shadow fell across the table.
Bill looked up and was surprised to see Nick Memphis of the FBI. He almost did a double take.
“Nick, I-”
“Bill, imagine running into you here. Gosh, what a surprise.”
Was that mockery in his voice?
“Uh, Jessica, may I present Nick Memphis, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Nick, this is Jessica Delph, a friend of mine.”
Nick bowed.
“Ms. Delph, a pleasure,” he said.
Then he turned to Bill and smilingly said, “Bill, you know, I think it would be a good idea if you gave Ms. Delph carfare and sent her home. I think it’s going to be a long evening.”
Bill swallowed, dammit, and looked for the joke in the agent’s face but saw no humor.
“Ms. Delph, sorry, but I think your evening with Bill here is over.”
“Bill, is anything the matter?”
“Uhhh,” Bill stumbled, at a loss for words for the first time in his life. Then he said, “I don’t know. Is anything the matter, Nick?”
“Well, Bill, that depends on how well you do over the next few minutes as we have our little chat. I’m trying desperately to find out why I shouldn’t touch this button on my pager and stand back as our crack apprehension team-this is five guys who were all tackles or guards at Nebraska-come through that door in full SWAT gear, guns drawn, and throw you to the ground, mace you, slam on the cuffs, and drag you out by your ears, your Allen Edmonds shoes dragging in the sawdust. Imagine how quickly that would get all over town. We don’t want that, do we?”
Bill had no desire to find out if Nick was bluffing.
“Jessie, here’s a twenty, honey. I’ll call tomorrow.”
Quickly, she scurried out, and Nick slipped in.
Bill took a sip of his martini, then another, and ate the olive.
“Am I allowed to order another?”
“Sure.”
“And you’re not drinking, I’m guessing.”
“You got that right.”
Bill gestured Vito Corleone over and sent for another vodka martini.
“Okay, Nick, I’m all yours.”
“I want to know why I shouldn’t arrest you on seven counts of aiding and abetting a felony crime, namely murder, the first-degree kind.”
Bill’s lower jaw not merely hit the table top but fell clean through the floor to the wine cellar beneath. When he got his breath back and his jaw reinserted in its hinges, he spoke with a weak, phlegm-choked voice.