They had run along two kinds of highway. One was country highway, with green rolling hills and leafy trees and a wide grassy median between the three northbound and the three southbound lanes, and it was all pleasantly pretty every time you looked at it, and it was all the same pleasantly pretty every time you looked at it, and the goddam green hills were still there every time you looked at it. And the other was city highway, where the lanes were narrower and there was no median strip and the traffic was full of delivery vans and pickup trucks and there were many many exits and many many signs and the road’s design was a modified roller coaster, elevated over slums and factories, undulating and curving inside low concrete walls, sweeping past tall sooty brick buildings with clock faces mounted high on their facades that always told the wrong time.
“Suitland?” May and John in the backseat had been looking at maps, just for fun, and now May looked up, looked around at the scenery, and said, “There’s a place next to Washington called Suitland?”
“Oh, sure,” Anne Marie said. “That’s very close in, over near District Heights.”
“The whole place should be called Suitland,” John said.
May said, “Are we going by there?”
“No,” Anne Marie told her, “we’re taking the Beltway the other way around, through Bethesda.”
Andy, driving with the nonchalance of somebody who didn’t much care if this car picked up a dent or two, said, “I’m on the Beltway? Or inside the Beltway? Or what?”
“You’re on the Beltway,” Anne Marie told him. “Pretty soon you’ll cross the river and then turn off—”
“What river?” Andy asked.
Anne Marie, surprised, said, “The Potomac.”
“Oh, right. The Potomac.”
“I’ve heard of that,” John said, from the backseat.
“I’m going to take you into the city from the south,” Anne Marie explained. “That’s the quickest way to get to the Watergate area. So we’ll be crossing the Potomac twice.”
John said, “Andy, you got to introduce this person to Stan Murch.”
Andy said, “I was just thinking the same thing.” Seeing Anne Marie’s raised eyebrow, he explained, “That’s a friend of ours that takes a particular interest in how you get from point A to point B.”
Anne Marie said, “Doesn’t everybody?”
“Well, Stan kind of goes to extremes,” Andy said. “Is this your river?”
“Yes,” Anne Marie said. “You want the exit to the George Washington Memorial Parkway.”
“The George Washington Memorial Parkway? They really lean on it around here, don’t they?”
“After a while, you don’t notice it,” Anne Marie assured him. “But it is a little, I admit, like living on a float in a Fourth of July parade. Here’s our turn.”
There was a lot of traffic; this being Sunday, it was mostly tourist traffic, license plates from all over the United States, attached to cars that didn’t know where the hell they were going. Andy swivel-hipped through it all, startling drivers who were trying to read maps without changing lanes, and Anne Marie said, “Now you want the Francis Scott Key Bridge.”
“You’re putting me on.”
“No, I’m not. There’s the sign. See?”
Andy swung up and over, and there they were crossing the Potomac again, this time northbound, the city of Washington spread out in front of them like an almost life-size model of itself, as though it were all still in the planning stages and they could still decide not to go ahead with it.
From here, things got sudden. “Route 29, the Whitehurst Freeway.”
“Who was Whitehurst?” Andy asked, making the turn.
“President after Grover,” Anne Marie said. “Stay with 29! Don’t take any of those other things. And especially don’t take 66.”
“Get your kicks on Route 66,” Andy suggested.
“Not this time. Sixty-six goes under the Watergate. Don’t take Twenty-fifth Street, it goes the wrong way, you want the next one, down there, Twenty-fourth Street.”
“I thought that might be the next one,” Andy said.
“It isn’t always,” Anne Marie told him. She watched as Andy made the turn, and said, “That street that goes off at an angle there, that’s New Hampshire, you want that.”
“If you say so.”
They got stopped by a light and Andy peered at the street signs. “Is that One Street?”
“No, I Street. Sometimes they spell it like your eye, but it’s the letter. All the north-south streets are numbers, and all the east-west streets are letters.”
“We’re on New Hampshire. What’s that?”
“A spoke of the wagon wheel.”
Andy nodded. “I bet there’s even some way that that makes sense,” he said, and the light turned green and he drove on over I and down past H, saying, “I thought it was gonna be J.”
“Turn right on Virginia,” Anne Marie said.
“Another spoke of the wagon wheel?”
“Different wheel,” Anne Marie said.
“Some time,” Andy said, stopping at another red light, “you’ll have to tell me all about it.”
“You can turn right on red in Washington,” she told him, as the light turned green. “Or on green, for that matter.”
Andy made the turn and said, “Somehow, I have a feeling I’m going in circles here.”
“In a way,” Anne Marie said. “That’s the Watergate across the street there. Can you get over there?”
“Well, that depends,” Andy said, “on how much all these other people care about their cars.”
Fortunately, they all cared.
Fifteen minutes later, there was a knock on Anne Marie’s door. She was in a very nice room, the largest hotel room she’d ever seen, on the fifth floor of the Watergate Hotel, with large potted shrubs flanking the broad glass door leading to the balcony and a long view out over the Potomac to Virginia on the other side. She quit looking at that view to go over to the door and let Andy in. He’d dropped them at the hotel entrance and then driven away to, as he’d said, “deal with” the car, and now he was back. “All set,” he said, coming in.
She shut the door. “What did you do with the car?”
“Well, I drove away from here,” he told her, crossing to the bed where his big battered canvas bag had been placed by the bellboy, “and I came to a stop sign, so I stopped.”
“And then what?”
“I came back here,” he said, and zipped open the bag.
She moved around until she could see his face. “You left the car at a stop sign? Just got out and left it there?”
“Wiped the steering wheel first.” The others, before getting out of the car, had also smeared any place they might have left fingerprints.
Anne Marie stared at him. “But . . . why? Why make a mess with the traffic?”
“Well, you know,” Andy said, “I feel a certain responsibility to the doctor.”
“I’m not following this,” Anne Marie admitted.
Andy changed clothes while he explained. “Well, let’s say I found a parking space and left the car there.”
“There are no parking spaces in Washington.”
“So that’s another consideration. But say I did find something like that, it could be weeks before the cops notice anything and the doctor gets his car back. This way, the cops have already noticed the situation by now, they’re probably phoning the doctor this minute, he could be reunited with that nice vehicle before sundown. How do I look?”
Andy was now wearing a short-sleeve white dress shirt open at the collar with a half-dozen pens in a white pocket protector in the shirt pocket, plus khaki pants and tan workboots and dark-framed eyeglasses with clip-on sunglasses angled up toward his forehead and a yellow hardhat. In his left hand he held a clipboard. Work gloves protruded from his right hip pocket. “Different,” Anne Marie decided.
“Good.”
“What’s going to happen now?”