There is no more welcoming venue for peroration and longueur than a congressional hearing, but still the chairman exhorted the doctor to get to the point — What is your point? — as the doc drummed his fingers on the table, thinking: My point? Kidnapping is part of the national consciousness. Should I move on?
Oh please, yes, move on.
The doctor said: Among postings online about kidnappers at large and lionized by his people is one about North Korean potentate Kim Jong-il.
But he was stopped there.
Mr. Chairman, I gather the good doctor is trying to get it on record that the Helix and Kim Jong-il are in bed together, and I want it known this is balderdash.
Mr. Chairman, unless I am dotty, I don’t think the doctor was claiming kin between North Korea and the Helix, but that it’s actually my good friend from Massachusetts who is trying to get this absurd rumor on record, which is an affront to the comity of these proceedings and also the intelligence of the American people watching and—
Another motion on the table. Procedural squabbles. Mutual yielding for the sake of getting finished before the next ice age. Objections for the record. Objection to the objections, also for the record.
The chairman took a long drink of water and called for order. But his mind was elsewhere. He was thinking that in a different life, he might have been Helix, too. Thurlow Dan was probably a nut, but couldn’t a nut still be spokesman for that anguished and desolate feeling you had every morning just for waking up alive?
It was time for a witness. Vicki swore to tell the truth, hand on the Bible, though she gave her right hand, much to the merriment of all who noticed, all but Vicki, because, what, a hooker was so lost to virtue she didn’t know about God and swearing? She’d just forgotten, is all.
She took her seat. At first she’d been cowed by the pomp adhering to her part in this. A car and driver, plus a suite at the Mayflower Hotel. She’d done her best to look right. Wore a cream skirt suit in defiance of the season. Fussed with her hair, trying to tamp down a spike in the front with wax putty and clip. Traded the black enamel of her nails for sunset pink, deracinated the studs from either cheek, and plugged the holes with that face powder Thurlow had given her. For all its claim to a natural provenance, it was still going to infect the shit out of her puncture wounds — like they were ever going to heal — but she’d done this just the same because it was Capitol Hill and a big fancy hearing, plus her parents would be watching from their convalescence home, she knew it.
The questions came fast: if Thurlow knew in advance the feds were coming, if the kidnapping was premeditated, if she knew anything about his contacts in North Korea, not that he had contacts, but if he did, the stipulations of that arrangement, the whereabouts of his arms cache, if he had an arms cache, the whereabouts of his second and third in command, the whereabouts of the hostages because, my God, it had been two days and no one knew where they were, and then of course, Thurlow, the vanishing cult leader, and Esme, who was now in violation of the Espionage Act, the Patriot Act, the Human Decency Act—Poof! they were gone.
Vicki swatted down every question with ignorance, and when they pressed her and began to suggest she was lying, she recalled them laughing about the Bible and got pissy.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Why don’t you ask the brains?” and she pointed at the sky because Esme was out there somewhere. “I’m just the hooker you hired, remember?”
The chairman closed his eyes. And people wondered why everyone in D.C. was having affairs and secretly gay — like his wife of nine hundred years could relieve the tension and annoyance of having to cycle through the gears of justice, the gears lubed in molasses, and he close to tears.
It was time for the butler. In every murder mystery — Murder? Who said anything about murder? — the butler either had the answers or knew how to get them.
Martin took the oath, though not even the girl deputized to hold the Bible was listening, so that when the time came for I do, Martin had to say it thrice before she stepped away.
Order, order. Where is Esme Haas? I don’t know. Where is Thurlow Dan? I don’t know. The hostages? No wait, let us guess: You don’t know. Correct. Is there anything you do know? No.
Well, so be it. In some universe, this must count as progress.
The last hour of the hearing was given over to the index cards recovered at the crisis site. Could Martin decipher them? They were in code. And written in multiple inks, ballpoint and felt tip, as though the author wrote on the move. Esme’s scrawl had no regard for the architecture of letters or the language to which these glyphs should bow down, assuming she wrote in her mother tongue, which was English, though possibly in the tongue of her learning, which was Korean. The latitudes of this scrawl were formidable, from left to right, and graved into the card stock with the intensity of a last chance.
The cards were bound with a thick blue rubber band. Only reason the fire investigator who collected the bundle knew it was any more important than the other ten tons of wreckage was that it had been doused in a fire retardant.
He took notes at the scene: Points of entry undisturbed. Walls strafed with bullet holes. Smoke lifting from the carnage in duffel bags. His soles weeping into the asphalt. A birdcage melting down.
Alongside the ambulances and helicopters, there was music. The sizzle and wheeze of wood and plaster, parquet and trusses, of memories risen from the char, all consolidated in dirge for a fire well spent.
He knew exactly what everyone wanted to hear, which was that this fire had been started inside and on purpose.
If this stack of index cards could survive a blowup like that, someone wanted them read. He put them in his bag, intending to return to the site tomorrow.
Trouble was, he’d been taken off the case overnight. Was he a federal investigator? No, he was part of the Cincinnati Fire Department, est. 1853, oldest in the country, thanks. Fine, but go home. And then to D.C., where instead of being asked to testify, he’d produce some killer evidence in the form of index cards that would earn him a seat in the front row, so that on day one of this joint hearing of the House Committee on the Judiciary and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, a fire investigator from Cincinnati took real pride in his work.
Into record: an affidavit in code, comprising sixteen index cards, the content of which might be germane to the unpacking of motive charged to a hearing such as this. Perhaps if the committee knew what Esme Haas had been thinking, they could better suss out the whereabouts of the hostages. No doubt they were with her, or vectored out of the compound by her? If, of course, they were not dead. Please do not be dead.
Martin was put to work. Apparently, it wasn’t masquerade he liked so much as transformation. Because, in an irony that belied his life’s commitment to disguise, he laid bare the stuff of Esme and her monologues issued for the wooing of Thurlow Dan out of his house.
Ensuing: debate about who should read the cards into record. Ensuing: was it prudent or even tasteful to hire an actress? If so, would she sight-read or practice? Come time to animate someone else’s beating heart, this can make all the difference.