Immediately, he called his bureau chief. He was told to come right over.
NOW, WHAT I’M about to tell you, Brian, his chief said — you have to understand a policy decision has been made that was explained to the director, and however reluctantly, he has chosen to go along.
What policy decision?
The investigation is concluded.
Right. Where’s the kid? I’m pretty sure I’ve made an I.D.
But you’re not listening. There is no kid. There was no body in the Rose Garden. It never happened.
So where’d they bury him?
Where? Where they would not be questioned, where nobody would see them at two in the morning.
The two men looked at each other.
They panicked, the chief said.
Did they, now?
They shouldn’t have detained that groundskeeper who found the body.
You’re so right.
Someone tipped his daughter over in Treasury. So they swore him to secrecy, sprung him, and allowed as they’d been holding him as a material witness on some classified matter. But they also told her that they’d perceived signs of dementia. So if he does say something—
That’s really low.
It wasn’t just that. The Post is nosing around. Someone sent them a letter.
From Texas.
Well, yes. How did you know?
I can tell you what it said, Molloy said.
WHEN AGENT MOLLOY got back to his office, he was seething. He sat down at his desk and, with his forearm, swept the stack of paperwork to the floor. There’d been a pattern of obstruction from the start. He’d felt an operative intelligence in the shadows all through this business. On the one hand they wanted answers, as why wouldn’t they, given an intolerable breach of security? On the other hand they didn’t. They may have made their own investigation — or they may have known from the beginning. Known what? And it was so sensitive it had to be covered up?
Whenever Molloy needed to cool off, he went for a walk. He remembers how, when he first came to Washington as a young trainee, he’d been moved almost to tears by the majesty of the nation’s capital. Quickly enough it became mere background to his life, accepted, hardly noticed. But in his eyes now it was the strangest urban landscape he had ever seen. Classical, white, and monumentalized, it looked like no other American city. It was someone’s fantasy of august government. On most any day of the week, out-of-town innocents abounded on the Mall. The believers. The governed. He kept to the federal business streets, where the ranks of dark windows between the columns of the long pedimented buildings suggested a nation’s business that was beyond the comprehension of ordinary citizens.
BACK IN HIS OFFICE, Molloy scrambled around on the floor looking for the awards-ceremony guest list. When he found it, it was as he’d thought — no Texas residents. At this point it occurred to him that if the President had had personal friends staying over that night, they might not have been on this list. Personal friends were big-time party supporters, early investors in the presidential career, and prestigious moneyed members of his social set. They were put up on the second floor, in the Lincoln Bedroom or across the hall in the suite for visiting royalty, these friends.
Molloy left a message with the White House social secretary. By the end of the day his call had not been returned. This told him he might not be crazy. Like everyone else in Washington, he knew the names of the in crowd. A couple of them had cabinet appointments, others had been given ambassadorships, so they were not possibles. But one or two of perhaps the most important held portfolios as presidential cronies.
On a hunch, he called the controllers’ tower at Dulles. He would have to show himself with his FBI credentials to get the information, but he thought he’d give them a head start: Molloy wanted to know of any charter or private aircraft logged out of Dulles with a flight plan for anywhere in Texas the morning after the awards event.
In heavy rush hour traffic he drove to the airport. He was tired and irritable. His wife would be sitting home waiting for him to appear for dinner, too inured to the life after all these years even to feel reproachful. But his spirits lifted when an amiable controller in a white shirt and rep tie handed him a very short list. Just one plane matched his inquiry: a DC-8 owned by the Utilicon Corporation, the Southwest power company, with home offices in Beauregard, Texas.
HE HAD SOME leave time coming and put in for it and flew to Houston on his own money. Looking down at the clouds, he wondered why. Over the years he’d been involved in more than his share of headline cases. But in the past year or two he’d felt his official self beginning to wear away — the identity conferred by his badge, his commendations, the respect of his peers, the excitement of being in on things, and, he had to admit, that peculiar sense of superiority as a tested member of an elite, courteous, neatly dressed, and sometimes murderous police agency. In his early days he would bristle when the FBI was criticized in the press; he was more judicious now, less defensive. He thought all of this was his instinctive preparation for retirement.
How would he feel when it was over? Had he wasted his life attaching himself to an institution? Was he one of those men who could not have functioned unattached? He had suspected of some of his colleagues that they had taken on the federal agent’s life as much for their own protection as anyone else’s. Whatever his motives, it was a fact that he’d spent his life contending with deviant behavior, and only occasionally wondering if some of it was not justifiable.
He picked up a car at the airport. Beauregard was about an hour’s drive to the east. He could see it miles away by the ochre cast of sky.
At the outskirts, he turned off the interstate and continued on a four-lane past petrochemical plants, oil storage tanks, and hardscrabble lots that were once rice paddies.
The Beauregard downtown looked as if it had succeeded in separating itself from the surrounding countryside: a core of glass-curtain office buildings, a couple of preserved old brick hotels with the state flag flying, chain department stores, and, dominating everything else, the skyscraping Utilicon building, a triangular tower faced in mirrors.
Molloy did not stop there but went on through the residential neighborhoods where imported trees shaded the lawns, until, after crossing the railroad tracks, he was bumping along on broken down roads past bodegas and laundromats and packed-dirt playgrounds and cottages with chain-link fences bordering the yards.
HE PULLED OVER at the Iglésia del Bendijo la Virgen. It was a clapboard church, unusual for Catholics. The priest, Father Mendoza, a younger man than Molloy, slender, with a salt-and-pepper beard, explained that it had been built by German immigrants in the nineteenth century. Their descendants live in gated communities now, he said with a wry smile.
They sat in the shade on the rectory porch.
You realize I can say nothing.
I understand, Molloy said.
But yes, Juan and Rita Guzman are my congregants. They are righteous people, a virtuous family. Hardworking, strong.
I need to talk to them.
That may be difficult. They are being detained. Perhaps you can tell me what exactly is the motivation of the INS.
I have no idea. That is not my bailiwick.
I will tell you the child had last rites. A mass. Everything from that point to burial a scrupulous celebration of the Mystery.
Molloy waited.
Unfortunately, in the shock of bereavement, in the sorrow of their loss, people are at their weakest, the father told him. Sometimes the consolations of the Church and the assurance of Christ do not quite reach to the depths of the heart of even the most fervent believer. Are you a Catholic, Mr. Molloy?