Nature of the Game

by James Grady

  Jud unbuttoned his shirt.

  Confuse to aid concealment. Provoke to develop intelligence opportunities.

  Such were his orders. Reconnaissance by fire, Jud had thought. A common military tactic. But provocation was a means to an end that Jud thought went beyond creating “intelligence opportunities.” He didn’t know every motive that generated his orders, but the words gave him a license for his imagination.

  Earlier that night he’d been down the hall, past the Roosevelt Room to the offices of Kissinger and Haldeman. Kissinger’s locked files contained FBI reports about his staff and even an “Eyes Only” report from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on murdered Martin Luther King’s sex life. White House Chief of Staff Haldeman was WATCHDOG. He had two safes: one sat by his desk. The other, a French safe, was hidden in the wall. It had taken Jud five weeks to fashion a duplicate key for the French safe.

  From inside his shirt, Jud took an August 9, 1971, White House MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD concerning a meeting the President’s “plumbers” had had at CIA headquarters. Jud had stolen the memo from Haldeman’s French safe. The memo outlined the coordinated strategy between Nixon’s men and the CIA.

  The CIA liaison officer was named John Paisley. Six years after Jud stole that White House memo, when Paisley was serving on the CIA team analyzing the U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, he disappeared while boating alone on Chesapeake Bay. Days later, a bloated body weighted down with two diving belts was found floating in the Bay and was identified as Paisley. The body was four inches shorter than Paisley’s official height. No fingerprint or dental-record check was ever made. The corpse had a 9mm bullet wound behind the left ear. Paisley was right-handed. No gun or expended cartridge was found on his boat. The corpse was ruled a suicide and cremated at a CIA-approved funeral home without the family’s having been allowed to see it.

  That Friday night in the White House, Jud shuffled that “For the Record” memo in amidst the President’s papers.

  So, SEARCHLIGHT, thought Jud, smiling, will it wig you out to discover what’s materialized in your private safe?

  Jud buttoned the photocopied pages of the China memo from Nixon’s safe inside his shirt. He closed and locked the safe, closed the panel. Turned toward the President’s desk—

  “What the hell are you doing!” yelled a man from the hallway.

  Jud whirled, right hand locking on butt of his .357.

  Empty hands, the man silhouetted behind the velvet rope across the door had empty hands. White shirt and uniform pants. Gold bars on his shoulders.

  The Roving Deputy Watch Commander.

  With one hand, Jud beckoned for his superior officer to come closer; with the other hand, he held a finger to his lips.

  “Your post is the hall!” hissed the RDWC as he joined Jud beside the President’s desk. “What the hell—”

  “I heard something!” whispered Jud, moving toward the curtained French doors.

  “Why didn’t you call it in?” The RDWC followed Jud, his eyes darting around the Oval Office, his hand on his own gun butt.

  “There wasn’t time!” snapped Jud. “Besides, last time I did, the Watch Commander chewed my ass! Said I was hearing ghosts. Said it was Abigail Adams taking in her fucking laundry! He reamed Peters a new asshole for calling in the baby crying.”

  White House security logs are full of reports of unseen babies crying. Lincoln’s son died during his father’s first term.

  The two Executive Protection Service officers stood in front of the windows, staring out at the South Lawn and the night-enshrouded Rose Garden.

  “See anything?” whispered the RDWC.

  “Just you.” Jud took a breath. “SEARCHLIGHT’S not around. We call a nothing in, it’s paperwork city. Captain’s Review.”

  The two men’s radios squawked: shift change in twenty-five minutes.

  “Do you hear anything now?” asked the RDWC.

  “Just my heart. You.”

  “Fuck it,” said the RDWC. “Two years to my twenty, I don’t need this shit. It’s nothing, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I’ll stick around till shift change,” said the RDWC. “Just in case. But we’re okay here, aren’t we?”

  “We’re fine,” said Jud, his heart slowing. “We’re cool.”

  “This is a weird place,” said the RDWC. “Plays tricks on you.”

  “I know,” said Jud.

  The RDWC shook his head, nodded toward the night outside the White House windows. “The shit that goes on out there.”

  When his shift ended at midnight, Jud dawdled in the Security locker room, changing into his civilian clothes, joking with the men around him. His fellow officers were eager to get home or go on shift. When the locker room was almost empty, Jud carefully folded the purloined photocopied memo into an oversize birthday card, sealed the card in a stamped envelope. He invented a woman’s name, addressed the envelope to her at a post office box in suburban Maryland.

  A guard he didn’t like was about to leave the locker room. The man didn’t see Jud shed the pants he’d just put on.

  “Hey, Jerry!” Jud called the man over. “Would you drop this in the bag for me on your way? I gotta hustle and get dressed and get out of here, or the woman outside’ll skin me.”

  The guard named Jerry looked at Jud in his underwear. Looked at the greeting-card envelope that bore the name of a woman. Recognized a smile of male conspiracy on Jud’s face.

  “Yeah, what the hell,” said Jerry, taking the envelope. “Bitches, right?”

  “Right,” said Jud as Jerry left the locker room.

  Jud quietly scurried to the door, peered around the corner in time to see Jerry drop the envelope in the outgoing-mail pouch by the Watch Sergeant’s desk. The RWDC who’d surprised Jud in the Oval Office was chatting with the sergeant. The RWDC watched Jerry mail the card, watched him walk away. Said nothing. Didn’t grab the card, didn’t demand an inspection. If he had, it would have been Jerry’s envelope, Jerry’s word against Jud’s.

  White House guards use a side entrance to the fence surrounding the presidential grounds. By the time Jud dressed, packed his gear in his gym bag, walked through the iron gate, it was 1:31 A.M., Saturday, June 17.

  Nancy was parked up the street in her father’s old Chrysler. Even with all the windows rolled down, the car was full of cigarette smoke.

  “You’re fuckin’ late!” she snapped as he settled in the front seat. “You think all I got to do with my life is sit in this shithole car and wait for your ass to get off work?”

  Slumped behind the steering wheel, Nancy wore a T-shirt and no bra, baggy shorts. Her brown hair was razor cut in a shoulder-length shag. She had a round face and a squat body, but it was her eyes that marred her looks: she kept them narrow, hard.

  “You want to leave, leave!” he growled. “I can walk.”

  She blinked, licked her lips. “I’m … Look, it’s just hot, you know?”

  “Yeah,” said Jud. “I know.”

  “You … You want to drive?”

  He shook his head. She ground the car engine to life. Nancy was twenty-six years old, flunking out of her fifth year of part-time schooling at her third college. They’d met three months before, when she’d been blind drunk in a bar. Jud had pulled her out of the middle of a fight she’d incited between two conventioneers on the prowl. A week later, Jud gave her her first orgasm.

  “I’m tired,” he told her as she pulled the car away from the curb. Every turn of the car’s tires that took him farther away from the White House rolled a load off his back. “So damn tired.”

  “You want to go to my place?”

  He sighed, nodded.

  “How come you’re spending so much time in the gym, lifting weights and all that?” she said. “You were strong as hell, but now, you’re getting … big. You’re starting to look different.”

  Nancy’s car rolled into the lower end of Georgetown. Even at this late hour, slick women and well-dresse
d men prowled the sidewalks between bars. She stopped for a red light.

  “I mean,” she added, “I’m not complaining, but …”

  She trailed off, got no reply. The light changed to green. They drove on.

  “What time is that party tomorrow night?” he asked.

  “Why the …” She looked at him; changed her attitude. “After nine. It’s no big deal. You don’t want to go, do you?”

  “You work with them, they invited you,” he told her.

  “They only invited me because they had to. Because I got that damn stupid job. Because of my fucking father!” She pitched her voice to a whining mimic: “It’s a good opportunity! Interesting! Decent money!

  “Stupid damn job,” she whispered. “Errand runner with a stupid damn name. They had to give it to his daughter!”

  She put a cigarette in her mouth, punched in the lighter of the car that was once her father’s. It didn’t work.

  “Stupid damn car!” she swore.

  It was 1:47 A.M.

  Jud snapped his lighter, lit her cigarette, one for himself. He blew smoke into the heat outside the open window.

  “I want to go to the party,” he said. “We’ll get there after my shift ends at midnight; it’ll still be happening.”

  “Why do you want to go? All it’ll be is beer and wine and bad dope and a bunch of hot-shit, kiss-ass, and backstabbing reporters, few years out of college and hustling to get their name on top of some stupid damn story about shit nobody cares about. Wrap dead fish in the damn newspaper!”

  Nancy’s father was assistant in-house counsel for the Washington Post.

  “Copy aide,” she murmured. “The old man’s little girl. Oh, they really want me there tomorrow night.”

  “Don’t be late when you pick me up,” said Jud. “And don’t be drunk. Look nice.”

  “It’s easy for you,” she said, driving toward the apartment her trust fund subsidized. “He isn’t your damn father.”

  Jud’s voice was fire and ice: “Don’t you ever mention my father!”

  She blinked.

  “Ever!”

  “Okay, okay, baby!” She swallowed. She parked in the driveway of a Georgetown carriage house friends of her father’s were letting her use. Tossed her cigarette out the window to where cockroaches scurried over the brick sidewalk. Her eyes were wide as she leaned across the seat toward Jud.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. Her fingers brushed the gym bag holding his uniform. His gun. Handcuffs. Moved to his knee.

  It was 1:52 A.M., Saturday, June 17, 1972. A mile away, an unmarked police car with three plainclothes officers responded to the police dispatcher’s report of a burglary in progress at the Watergate complex.

  Jud looked at the brown-haired woman leaning toward him across the front seat of her father’s old car. Her eyes were narrow, her lips parted; the streetlight showed him her nipples were hard under her dirty cotton T-shirt.

  “Just relax,” he told her. “Everything’ll be fine if you just relax.”

  Relax.

  Eighteen years and three thousand miles away from that muggy Washington night, Jud heard the distant echo of his own words; blinked, and it was 1990. Blinked again, and he was inside a bedroom. On his back in a bed. Naked. The sheets were damp, his skin sticky. The lamp on the bed table glowed. Outside, the desert was cool and dark. Midnight drifted across the packed sand.

  Nora lay in Jud’s arms.

  “I told you, all you had to do was relax and everything would be fine,” she said, kissing his chest. “In fact, I’ll give you more than fine.”

  “Okay?” ventured Jud.

  “No man wants to know that it was ‘Okay,’” said Nora, raising up on her elbows to smile at him. “You all want to know that it was great.”

  “Was it great?”

  “It was okay,” she said.

  A heartbeat, then they both laughed.

  Nora lightly kissed his lips.

  “I told you so,” she said.

  They laughed again, and she nuzzled back down on his chest. She sighed.

  Another night together. Their silent understanding made sure that he brought nothing more than his toothbrush to Nora’s house. His clothes, his money, his secret gun—all stayed in the trailer.

  “What were you thinking of just then?” she asked.

  “I was following orders,” replied Jud. To her frown, he added, “Yours. You told me not to think. Just to feel. Relax.”

  “Not then.” She grinned. “I know what you were thinking about then: you were thinking about then—if you were thinking at all. This early in it for us, you aren’t remembering or fantasizing. Men believe it’s a big secret that they’re thinking about something else or somebody else or imagining things when they’re with a woman. But we know.”

  “Oops,” said Jud.

  “I don’t mind,” she said. “If you think that what’s in your head is more … interesting than what we’re doing …”

  She trailed a finger up his thigh.

  “Even my mind’s not that crazy,” said Jud. “Or strong.”

  “Yeah, but afterwards …” She shook her head. “You guys slip away faster than you slip out. If it’s been okay for a woman, she hangs around for a while. You guys go.”

  “Not always,” he said.

  “Always enough.” She brushed her hair off her forehead. Jud adored the wrinkles on her brow, the crow’s-feet by her blue eyes. “Were you thinking about your ex-wife?”

  “No.”

  “Someone else?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, that narrows it down.”

  She poked him in the ribs. “So then, what do you want to talk about, the tumbleweed count or UFOs?”

  “That’s it! The reason we haven’t seen any UFOs lately is they’re disguising themselves as tumbleweeds!”

  “Let ’em.” Nora propped herself up on her elbow. “How come you never ask me about being a prostitute?”

  “I know how that works,” whispered Jud.

  “’Cause you’re a spy.” She said it flatly. No trace of condescension, no hint of disbelief. Flat acceptance.

  He looked at her. “How did you start?”

  “Just lucky.”

  They laughed.

  “Sauk Centre, Minnesota,” she said. “My hometown. There’s this billboard next to the highway by the city limits. Says Sinclair Lewis wrote a book about the town. I’d see that sign every day from the bus I rode to grade school, and I swore I’d never read any book about that damn place.

  “Daddy was fire and brimstone for Jesus, Mom was afraid to be for anybody or anything. Back then, the law had something called ‘status offenses,’ and my status was offensive. Hitchhiking to town from our farm. All I wanted to do was go to the football game. Where I went was reform school. Twelve years old.”

  “Incorrigible, they said.” She shook her head. “Even then, I had tits out to here. That scared the hell out of the men in charge, made them think bad thoughts—so I had to be bad.”

  She sat up in bed, stretched. Jud thought her breasts were beautiful, and he told her so, quietly, almost like a boy.

  “Not bad for a woman winking at fifty,” she said.

  “How long did they keep you in reform school?” asked Jud.

  “As long as they could. Six years. I lived in a lot of fear. Learned how to survive. You figure out who the ringleaders are, learn what you have to do to get along with them. Learn how to cover your feelings. Only cry in your cell alone at night. Had my first sexual experience there, lesbian. I think that’s pretty normal though, don’t you?”

  “My first was a girl, too,” said Jud.

  She laughed.

  “Then what?” he asked.

  “Then I got out. I was intelligent, but not smart. My schooling was a joke—two times two equals four, and that’s as far as it went. I had two choices: I could crook or I could hook.”

  “Tried crook, but if you have trouble reading and writing, passing
bad checks is tricky. I got caught. Got another year—this time in jail. Saw some old friends, learned a little more about reading and a lot more about how to stay out of jail. Came out blond and beautiful, schooled and connected.”

  “I never worked the streets,” she said. “Never worked cribs. Lived with a black guy. My lover and business manager.”

  “Pimp,” said Jud.

  Nora shrugged. “He taught me a lot. Made me read the Wall Street Journal every day. Got me onto the high-class track in L.A. Beat me up some, but I expected it. Wouldn’t take it now, but then … That was the way things were. I got busted once. Paid a fortune to the right lawyer, everything smoothed out fine. Stay in line with the real power structure, you don’t get run over.”

  It was Jud’s turn to laugh.

  “People liked me,” she said. “I was good at getting men to give me money. I ended up in Vegas because a man I loved was there, and because the money was there.”

  “What about your Johns?”

  “I never called them that. I was a working girl, they were dates. They gave me what I wanted, I gave them what they wanted. I didn’t hurt anybody, didn’t steal or lie or cheat, always gave the bellman his third off the top. I charged a fortune and made a fortune, couple, three grand a night—clear. Men loved giving me money and I loved taking it.”

  “Wasn’t bad work.” She shrugged. “Could have done worse. Just … turn off your mind. In the middle of the wildest sex scene, thinking about what to get at the grocery store on the way home …

  “Did you ever use a working girl?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. Waited, then, “Does that bother you?”

  She smiled. “No.”

  Her blue eyes looked toward the bedtable.

  “I’m gonna get some cigarettes,” she said. She kissed his forehead. “Don’t go nowhere.”

  Barefoot, naked, she padded from the bedroom.

  Jud let himself settle back on the pillow. The room smelled like sweat and sex and lilacs from her perfume, and he let himself relax, let himself love it.

  There’d been some rough days.

  One afternoon, while he was washing dishes in the café’s kitchen, he got the booze shakes so bad the two truckers sitting at the counter could hear the plates rattling in the soapy tub. Carmen scurried out front to fill coffee cups whether they needed it or not. Nora sat behind the cash register, reading the Las Vegas newspaper. She said nothing.