By the time Chuck reached us, we were already running the other way along the river as fast as we could. I wished I hadn’t worn sandals.
13
Chuck Levy wondered for years after that if Lieutenant Murray and the Chicago police had passed our information along to the FBI. As I walk up Pennsylvania Avenue and see the ugly concrete fortress up ahead, I look for the sign. On their website, I noticed they keep the official name of their headquarters on the down-low, buried beneath layers of HTML. But here in the real world, it’s right up front, bronze letters over the door, immune to any discreet digital revisionism: J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building.
It’s warm for February, and I’m wearing flats, so I decide to walk the mile back to the hotel. I’ve just been to the National Gallery to see a show called “Deep Surfaces: Masterpieces of American Pop Art.” Two of the paintings in the exhibit, I noticed, were on loan from the collection of Alexander G. Macallister III.
The Willard is not my favorite kind of hotel, too big, too marbleized, too fussy. But Sarah’s anniversary dinner is here, so it didn’t make sense to book a room elsewhere. And when I arrived in the middle of the night via Omaha, the clerk recognized me and upgraded me to a suite, which made me love the place. I’m easy. He claimed my room is the one in which Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote the “I Have a Dream” speech fifty years ago. I wonder if it’s the same room that the FBI bugged a few months later in order to record Dr. King having sex with a white woman while shouting “I’m fucking for God” and “I’m not a Negro tonight.”
The beautiful Ethiopian girl now at the front desk tells me my “gentleman friend” phoned to confirm our “engagement” at ten tonight in the hotel bar.
In my room, as I put on makeup and look at my hair, I wonder, as always, if a blowout makes me look better or older, more attractive or simply more ladylike. And I wonder, if the chambermaid were to find DEATH FOR NAZIS scrawled on the mirror in pink lipstick (Admirable by Chanel), would she just Windex it off or notify her supervisor?
Down in the Crystal Room, I hug Sarah and Victor, hand them my officially unwanted gift.
“Don’t worry,” I say, “I also donated to Water-dot-org.”
After a minute of Sarah and I telling each other how fabulous we look and how wonderful it is to see each other, Victor, who just retired from the Washington Post, asks how my new book is going.
“You know how it is,” I say, “it’s going.”
Sarah gives me a funny look because she hears the evasiveness in my voice. “We’ll talk, Hollander,” she says, and with another hug and kiss, I release her to the next arrival.
Half the guests are staring at their devices, bored or mesmerized or some odd new modern combination of the two. Smartphones turn grown-ups into faux-teenagers, annoyingly oblivious, shamelessly self-absorbed—although my son, Seth, says the ubiquity of handheld devices has made him feel less freakish about his Asperger syndrome.
My toast at dinner goes over well, especially the end. I say that Sarah and Victor and I were barely fifty when we all celebrated my twenty-fifth anniversary, and that I suspect they’re throwing a big shindig for their twenty-fifth because it makes them seem much younger than they are. I finish with the last verse of Dylan’s “Forever Young,” which would cost too much to quote here, but trust me, in the room, the lines kill. Even I choke up a little.
I arrive early at the Round Robin bar and order sparkling water. I’m waiting for my friend, a man I met when I lived in Washington.
He worked for the federal government then and works for the federal government now, has only worked for the federal government or for private firms that do most of their business for the federal government.
His name is almost never in the press, and he’s probably never appeared on television. But among those he calls “the function zero-fifty, one-fifty, and seven-fifty people”—the federal budget identifiers for national security, foreign affairs, and law enforcement—he’s sort of famous.
When we met in 1997, he was vague describing his occupation and affiliations, but merrily so, with an openhearted smile, acknowledging his bobbing and weaving even as he bobbed and wove. “I get detailed all over the fucking place,” he told me during that first encounter, as I was trying to get a fix on his job, “at the assistant director level.” I knew by then that ADIC was the relevant acronym, and I knew how it was pronounced. “So you’re a sort of a big swinging ay-dick,” I said, “roving around the nomenklatura,” which made him laugh. Such is the nature of flirtation in Washington, D.C. He’s six years younger than I am, single then and single now. He’s not as skinny as Jack was, but he’s not fat, and he’s got a great sly smile and an excellent head of hair.
Our affair ended in 2001 when I left government and moved back to New York full-time. I’ll call him Stewart Jones.
We hug like we mean it.
“Welcome back to our nation’s capitol. You smell wonderful. How was it? Sarah’s thing?”
“Fine. Lots of people I used to know. Very nice. What you’d expect. I’m really glad I came. Have you ever heard of the Failed States Index? A jerk I met at the dinner was talking about it.”
“Useless horseshit. The fake precision. I mean, Sudan is two-point-seven points less ‘failed’ than Afghanistan? Canada is eight-point-three points more ‘failed’ than Finland? Please. Pointless think-wanker make-work.”
Stewart calls think tanks “think wanks.” He orders a double Scotch, neat. I stick to Pellegrino.
He holds up the Round Robin cocktail napkin. “You know what a round robin is? What it was, originally?”
“Some British sports thing? Cricket? Jousting?”
“A way for eighteenth-century subversives to organize protests without really stepping up to the plate. On their petitions to the king, they’d sign the paper in a circle, a round robin, instead of in a regular list from top to bottom. If nobody signed at the top, then nobody could be nailed as the leader.”
“I’m not Spartacus … I’m not Spartacus … I’m not Spartacus.”
He chuckles. “Exactly.” He takes a gulp of whiskey. “So I can still be your lifeline?” When we were dating, I told him that if I were ever a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, I’d designate him as the friend I would call to help answer questions that stumped me. “That’s still about the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“That’s about the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“I’ll tell you what’s sad—they eliminated Phone-a-Friend a few years ago.”
As I tell him my Tibetan terrorist story, he jots something electronically.
“I was surprised,” I say, “there wasn’t an air marshal on the flight.”
“Aww, you cute, trusting girl, you. Even coming into D.C., your odds of having FAMs on board are maybe one in ten.” He puts his BlackBerry on the table. “I was out in your neck of the woods a couple of months ago.”
“In L.A.?”
“Kern County, way out in the middle of nowhere, one day, didn’t set foot in Los Angeles, that’s how swell my life is. But the whole trip made me think of you.”
“Gee, thanks. But not enough to call.”
“Because you remember when they renamed National after Reagan, how pissed you were?”
“Don’t do that thing where you make me out to be some left-wing nudnik. I was annoyed because he was still alive, and saints don’t get canonized until they’re dead.”
“Yeah, sure. Anyway, I thought of you because I flew from D.C. to Costa Mesa, got bumped over to Burbank—”
“Burbank is twenty-five minutes from my house, you jerk!”
“—then flew home out of San Diego with a stop in Houston.”
I wait. “And? So?”
“Ronald Reagan Airport to John Wayne Airport, rerouted to Bob Hope Airport, and then from Charles Lindbergh Field to George H. W. Bush Airport, quick visit to the Lyndon Johnson Space Center, back to Ronald Reagan Airport. A Republican royal flush plus the liberal
the old liberals grew up hating! I’ve asked a guy at the FAA to find out for me if anybody has ever flown that route before.”
Down to business. “So,” I say, “I’m working on another book.”
“Fiction, nonfiction?”
“Memoir.”
“Cool. So, fiction.”
“Ha. I won’t name you.”
“But I’m in it? Really? Wow.”
He may be the most ostentatiously unsentimental person I know, yet he is touched. Which I find awfully sweet, even stirring. I didn’t expect to have those embers fanned tonight.
“So it’s one of these huge epic tick-tocks? ‘And then on February twenty-fourth, 1992, I flew to Prague and started writing the new constitution with President Havel, blah blah blah’?”
“No, it’s mainly about when I was a kid. Remember me telling you about my thing with James Bond, these games we did, with clandestine recordings and foreign accents and toy guns and stuff?”
“Yeah, of course. It explained everything to me.”
My brain freezes, then flutters. What does he mean? What does he already know?
“It’s why you let me turn you into an adulteress. I was one of your fictional characters come to life.”
Ah. I breathe and smile.
“So this new book,” he says, “is like Risky Business with you as the young Tom Cruise and then twenty years later me as the Rebecca De Mornay hooker character?”
“Not exactly. My whole life will be in there, but with certain parts in much sharper focus. The important parts. The interesting parts.”
“No offense, is your life really interesting enough, do you think? For a book? I don’t mean you’re not a significant figure and a beacon to all American women—”
“Fuck you.”
“But nice parents, cozy suburban childhood, Ivy League, practicing law, New York bigwig, distinguished pro bono whatnot, working for Fat Boy”—his nickname for President Clinton—”teaching law, Charlie Rose appearances, books, distinguishedness. No scandals. It’s kind of a standard high-end run, isn’t it? Every happy person is the same.”
I stare him straight in the eye.
“Aha. It’s about you and the Supremes, isn’t it? About whatever it was that got you dinked off the list.”
“I didn’t get dinked. That was one hundred percent my choice. The White House was totally surprised when I withdrew my name.” I haven’t seen Stewart in three years.
“Interesting. Very, very interesting. I always figured you had to be weirder than you let on.” He takes a drink of Scotch. “I didn’t expect to want to fuck you tonight.”
Stewart has the dirtiest mouth of anyone I’ve ever known. It’s one of the ways in which he manifests his habitual brutal candor, especially since so much of his professional life requires staying mum and revealing nothing to people who don’t have at least a Confidential security clearance. On our second date, when we went to watch Richard Pryor receive a prize at the Kennedy Center and one of the comedians made a penis joke, Stewart told me matter-of-factly, “My dick isn’t long, but it is thick.”
We spend the next ten minutes talking about sex. I tell him about the last man I dated, a museum director who accompanied me to the 3-D Zapruder movie last fall. How he played Guitar Hero wearing a bathrobe in his bedroom and said “Not a snowball’s chance in heaven” when I asked if he ever smoked pot. How surprised I was to discover he had an electronic device implanted just above his buttocks called a “sacral neural stimulation device.” (Stewart knew it was not a machine to enable or improve erections but prevented incontinence.) How the guy asked, in the middle of sex, if I was “cool with facials” and then, after an awkward exchange during which he made his meaning clear and I demurred, pulled out and ejaculated on one of my breasts.
“I could have the guy killed, if you’d like,” Stewart says.
“You’re sweet.”
“The old-dude demand curve for fucking must be skyrocketing now, with all the sildenafil patents expired and cheap generics flooding the market.” He writes himself another note on his BlackBerry, and I lean over to look. It says ARGUS sildenafil.
“Argus like in the Argonauts?”
“No, Argus the all-seeing giant with a hundred eyes.” He puts down the device. “Advanced remote ground unattended sensor.”
“Boys and their toys, bureaucrats and their acronyms. So why would the government care about generic Viagra?”
“Sorry. You don’t have the clearance.”
“Ha ha.”
“Argus is computers scraping foreign media and blogs, all the open-source shit, for ‘potentially salient epiphenomena.’ Birds and crops dying off more or less than usual, spikes up or down in obituaries, absenteeism, whatever the fuck. I’m thinking maybe it makes sense to tag reports of more old Arab guys knocking up young broads. Creating more suicide-bombing shahida for the class of 2034.” He orders another Scotch.
“So, my dear,” I say, “for this memoir of mine. I could use your help.”
“What, my calendar for 1998 and 1999? Like a catalog of our dates or something?”
“Uh-uh. I want to find out what government files exist on me. And like the man says, I don’t have the clearance.”
“Ahhhh. Aha. I’m a back channel.”
“Because I don’t expect my FOIA-ing to turn up what I’m looking for. Not in this lifetime.”
“Who? Which agencies?”
I take a deep breath and exhale. “FBI—”
“From the background check last year?”
“No. I pulled out before they did anything.”
“And then shot on their face,” he says.
“Ha ha. Anyhow, FBI, CIA—”
“Oh, before I forget, I’ve got to tell you this story. In Pyongyang, we just found out they have a special clinic, a sperm bank for the North Korean muckety-mucks, the elite DPRK dudes, to bank their jizz or donate it to infertile peasants or whatever. And they’ve got all these young women, ‘nurses,’ whose job it is to jerk off the guys into the little cups. Two of them Japanese girls, we’re told. Probably abductees. Is that not unbelievably fucking wonderful? Sorry: who’d you write to?”
“FBI, CIA, the army, and Homeland Security.”
He grins. “Whoa Nelly! Quadfecta! What are your dates of interest?”
“And the National Archives, just to be thorough; 1967, 1968.”
“Really?” he says, calculating. “From when you were eighteen, nineteen?”
I nod.
“God, I bet you were a super-hot eighteen-year-old. Miniskirts, man! When miniskirts were new and wild and crazy! And I was twelve, just getting addicted to beating off. I don’t need time travel, only communication across time, so I could tell the twelve-year-old me to take the bus from Buffalo to Chicago to check you out.”
“I know this is a huge ask, and it may be impossible, probably is. And I really don’t want to get you in trouble.”
“In trouble? I live for trouble, Ilsa. Seriously, what the fuck. Early retirement isn’t my worst nightmare. If I were an operator, I’d already be aged out. It’s KMA time, baby.”
“Kill My Associates? Kill the Motherfucking Assholes?”
“Kiss My Ass. It means I’m fifty-eight years old and can do whatever I want. So I’m in.”
“Thank you. As far as the details go, I don’t know what you need me to tell you about what I—”
“Nothing. I don’t want to be pre-briefed. Cleaner intel that way. If I want more later, I’ll ask. On the FOIAs, have they denied you?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Good, that’s good, that’s better. Homeland Security? Really?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Wow. You fucking un-American.” I’ve delighted him. As I figured I might. He sings in a silly falsetto: “ ‘What a bad little girl I am, I need you to solve it, bad, bad, bad, bad!’”
“Dinah Washington?”
“Ask your granddaughter.” He gulps some Scotch. “Rihanna. I’ll see what I ca
n do. But tell me: was this the plan, seventeen years ago, why you seduced me?”
“Seduced you!”
“In order to turn me into a long-term asset you could cash in when the time was right? Because if so, I am incredibly fucking impressed.”
“Sorry. There was no plan. If anything, the opposite. I actually worried, back then, that because of what you do, you, you know, might have found out things about me that would’ve made it awkward for us. There was no plan. There was just me about to turn fifty, and this slightly insane, very un-boring-Washington, very thick-dicked, very attractive single man.”
“You’re making me hard. Keep going.”
“And a dead marriage.” I signal for the check.
“Now I really get it, your mixing and matching of fiction and nonfiction. I was double-oh-seven come to life—and for forty fucking years, you’ve been this based-on-a-true-story outlaw. A fugitive in your own mind.”
I sort of smile and sort of nod. He continues.
“Like I say, I’ll do what I can do and find what I can find. In any case. But for right now, your place or my place or none of the above?”
“Mine, but let me use your phone first, okay?” I pick up his BlackBerry and press the browser icon. “I may want to leave later tomorrow and want to check what the last flights home are.”
“The phone won’t work for you. Ten-twenty, United, Dulles to LAX, gets you there at one in the morning.”
His phone doesn’t work. He takes it from my hand and touches the icon, which blooms normally into a browser window. “It’s secure,” he says. “Configured to respond to the speed and direction and pressure of my touch only. Cool, huh?” He pockets it and stands. “Vamanos?”
True Believers Page 13
