The Incumbent

by Brian McGrory

  "All right. I may give you a shout later today if I come across anything. Give me a call if you hear something worthwhile."

  They arrived fashionably late for the interview, Stevens and Drinker.

  After a day spent accomplishing frustratingly little from my dozens of phone calls spread around official Washington, they were an oddly welcome sight. Poor Baker was nearly beside himself at the concept of female companionship at home. What a miracle. So I invited them in and offered them what I had, which at this particular time was water.

  "Hopefully," Drinker said, as we had taken our seats in the living room, "all of us are in a better frame of mind today."

  That, I think, was the closest I would get to an apology from this duo, so I accepted it gracefully and said, "I'm sure we all are."

  The brief informalities behind us, Stevens briskly took up where she left off the day before. "I talked to the president in-depth about this earlier today, and he assures me that he initiated the invitation to you. He said he is a fan of your work and had some specific things he wanted to talk to you about. So it appears we have cleared up those questions."

  Her tone softened as she added, "I'm hoping you can run through with me just what it is you saw out there."

  I regarded her for a moment. Her jet black hair had little wind-tussled wisps flowing in various directions, sexy, yet with a sense of casual innocence. It highlighted her translucent, alabaster skin. She was tall and slender, and her tan suit clung in some places and hung loose in others, making it appear that even when she tried being one of the boys, she was unmistakably a girl.

  I began talking, and she scribbled furiously, turning the pages of her tiny notebook as fast as she could write, not even looking up at me or bothering to acknowledge my words.

  "Very helpful," she said finally, when I had run out of things to describe. As witnesses go, I'm probably a pretty good one, considering that's what I do for a living. We met eyes a couple of times, and she never looked away. She even smiled once, when I did, when I talked about Davis screaming so loud that in the hospital, when I woke up, I had assumed that he had sustained some catastrophic injury, maybe even been killed. Drinker kicked in with a joke. "I talked to him yesterday, and he doesn't strike me as a real ruffian," he said.

  We went over a few more points, though nothing big. The frost of the previous day seemed to be gradually melting away. In fact, as Drinker sat there mute, Stevens was adopting this odd air of familiarity; the banter growing easy, harmless. I didn't quite understand yet the difference in tone from the day before.

  "Your house is beautiful," she said, looking around, in a signal that the interrogation had ended. "Great furniture. Great moldings."

  "Thanks," I said. "My wife and I bought and renovated it a couple of years back."

  "I know," she said. I shot her a quizzical look, and she smiled and shrugged. "Homework."

  Finally, as the dog began snoring on the floor, I summoned the confidence to ask a question of my own.

  "Do you mind if I ask something?" I said, adopting my reporter voice-confident and reassuring at the same time. "Can you guide me on the militia role in the shooting? There seems to be some discrepancy in public accounts on whether this was a militia-sponsored assassination attempt."

  Stevens opened her mouth and began to pronounce the first syllable of what I expect was going to be an answer when Drinker firmly cut her off.

  "We're not getting into these games," he said, looking at her, then at me. "Call our spokesman. You know who he is."

  As they were leaving, as if on cue, Drinker again turned around in the doorway. "I don't mean to belabor the point," he said, his voice softer now, "but that telephone call yesterday in the hospital. You said it was a friend. But that came in on a direct-dial line. That friend couldn't have been transferred from the hospital switchboard.

  For someone to have called you, you would have had to have given your number out. The telephone records show that you hadn't made any calls to anyone, because you get charged by the call, so they keep careful records. And the nurses at your station said you hadn't had any other visitors the night before, except for the Record's Washington bureau chief, Peter Martin. He's the only guy that would have known what number to call, because the hospital switchboard operator had orders from the FBI not to give your telephone number out to anyone who called on the main line. And Martin was in the room, so it wasn't him."

  This all sounded confusing, but I think I knew what he was getting at.

  Basically, I was cornered and screwed. He left the obvious question dangling as to who was on the telephone. I wasn't sure why he was so concerned about it, but I marveled at his ability to ferret out something amiss, the only fib I had told throughout this entire episode. I had nothing to lose, so I gave it my final, best shot at staving him off, at least for now.

  "Last I checked, I'm a witness, not a suspect," I said. "My calls are my business. I'm more interested in what your concern is."

  Neither agent said anything, so I added, "I guess Martin must have given out my number. You've put a lot more thought into this than I have. It was just a call from an old friend."

  He didn't push the issue this time, much to my considerable relief. He bade me farewell, and behind him, Stevens threw me what I took to be a cool parting look without so much as a verbal goodbye. So that was that, and I stood there wondering what it meant, all of it, the questions, the persistence, and more than any of that, this intriguing agent with the beautiful hair.

  Nightfall brought Baker's evening walk. I grabbed a tennis ball, which he quickly scooped up in his mouth, and some money, which I hoped to spend on dinner if I could find an outdoor table at a Georgetown restaurant early on a Saturday evening. We walked and walked, the fresh air and exercise acting like an intoxicant after a day spent indoors. We stopped at our usual park, down on K Street, on the Potomac River, to toss and fetch. With my ribs taped up, I couldn't throw nearly as well as Baker could retrieve, and he didn't do well feigning his disappointment. Eventually, he settled into the grass and chewed on sticks.

  For dinner, I took a place at a patio table at a small French restaurant on Thirty-first Street, Caf'e la Ruche. I leaned down to tie Baker's leash to the bottom of my chair, fumbling with it because of the growing soreness in my chest. I looked up into the blue eyes of a fairly stunning waitress, who presented me a menu and cooed at Baker.

  "Dining alone?" she asked in a way that was inexplicably flirty.

  "No, actually," I said, rising to the opportunity, "I'm dining with my dog."

  She smiled a big smile, and I thought that I still had it, whatever it actually is. We chatted about what was good and what wasn't. She left and brought me back a Miller, took my order, and left me with my beer and my thoughts.

  When she brought my food about fifteen minutes later, she reached into her apron and pulled out an envelope, handing it to me. It was blank, but sealed.

  "A gentleman asked me to pass this along to you a few minutes ago," she said, quite casually.

  I looked around curiously, first at the other diners, to see if there was anyone I knew, perhaps a colleague from the paper or a friend or someone who may have seen me on television and was passing along a note of support or disdain. Nothing. I looked out along the sidewalk and down the street-again, nothing. Before I put my fork into my swordfish, I carefully tore the envelope open to see what was inside.

  It was a typewritten, or rather computer-generated note, short to the point of abrupt.

  "Meet me alone, at the Newseum, Sunday, 5:30 P.m."

  Well, it provided the where, what, and when you hear so much about in journalism school, but it lacked the all-important who and why. I'd find that out, to be sure. I felt like I had stumbled onto the set of some James Bond movie. Again I looked around for the letter writer, but saw nobody that looked even remotely suspicious. I waved to my waitress, and she came bouncing right over.

  "Can you help me out here?" I asked, attempting to sound c
asual, but my voice almost cracking from nerves. "I'm trying to figure out who this envelope came from. Are they still here?"

  She put her finger up to her bee-stung lower lip and looked around thoughtfully. "I don't see him," she said.

  "Was he a diner here? Where did he give you the envelope?"

  "I was on my way into the kitchen, in a rush, and he just came up behind me and asked if I'd give this envelope to the guy outside with the dog. Tell you the truth, I didn't even bother to get a good look at him."

  I was walking a delicate line here. I wanted to prod her further, but I didn't want to sound any alarms, though I'm not sure why not.

  "Older, younger? Do you recall what he was wearing? Any idea at all what he looked like?"

  She was starting to lose interest and was looking across the patio at another table, where a woman was waving her hand at her to take care of some dining calamity. "I really don't," she said, walking away. "I'm sorry."

  Over the dozen years that comprise my reporting career, I have had countless numbers of anonymous callers. You try to read into their voices, get a mental picture of what they look like, where they're calling from, and why. It's nothing so glamorous as the famous Deep Throat of Watergate fame. No, I picture my callers as lonely people that life has left behind, semi-intelligent beings who wait with urgency for their morning newspaper, pore over every word of every story, and concoct terrifying scenarios in their own minds of what is happening to their world and to their own lives.

  I had one caller leave messages on my voice mail at work for three months after TWA Flight 800 exploded in the sky. He told me, in the same detail night after night, that the CIA shot a heat-seeking missile at the plane from a rubber raft in Long Island Sound because an Iraqi spy was on board with a stolen briefcase filled with the intricate design details of the U.s. $100 bill. If the spy got away, the caller told me, he could have kicked the entire national and even international financial system on its side, so the CIA justified the deaths of a few hundred passengers because they were, in effect, saving the world as we know it.

  Another time, an elderly-sounding man who told me he was from Cape Cod warned me that all Massachusetts State Police troopers were out to kill him because he once beat a speeding ticket in 1963 by proving that an officer parked on the side of the road had no basis on which to estimate his speed. From there on in, officers were required to follow speeding drivers to clock their speed-a decision that infuriated them, the caller told me. The spooky part about him was that an elderly gentleman had walked into a McDonald's restaurant in Hyannis during lunch hour one afternoon and pulled a gun. The man fired a wild shot, striking a blow-up Ronald McDonald doll in the head, causing it to explode and raising screams from dozens of children and their mothers eating lunch. Ironically, or maybe not, a State Police trooper buying lunch pulled his gun and shot the man dead. I never heard from my caller from that day on, and always had a nagging feeling that it was him who was killed that day.

  But this caller was different. For starters, he had somehow found my telephone number at the hospital within hours of my arrival, though Drinker explained how that would be a virtually impossible thing to do.

  He had spoken clearly, and made realistic, though cryptic accusations.

  He was not bothersome, and seemed to have a goal in mind. And beyond even that, my anonymous caller had followed me from my house, on my evening dog walk, all the way to this restaurant, where he slipped the waitress a note containing a directive on how I might learn more about the assassination attempt on the president of the United States. He meant business, and he seemed to know how to conduct it. This was all just terrific. I sat there on the restaurant patio, Baker blithely sleeping at my feet, spooning rice and swordfish into my face, wondering if he was watching me now, wondering why.

  The walk home, to say the least, was an anxious one, every crunch of the leaves sending my head turning in search of any mysterious presence. A man in a sweatshirt carrying a briefcase walked about ten yards behind me. I tried maintaining pace with a young couple up ahead, figuring no harm would come with witnesses around. A van approached and seemed to slow down as I walked up Twenty-eighth Street, the man with the briefcase still behind me. I braced for some sort of confrontation-physical or otherwise-but nothing. Suddenly I didn't hear his footsteps anymore. I turned around, and he was gone, as was the van. I kept my eyes peeled for suspicious cars, but saw nothing.

  The couple ahead walked up the stairs to their house, leaving me all alone on what felt like an empty stage set, not a street. Baker acted uncharacteristically nervous, heeling close to my left knee.

  As I arrived at my front door, that same van rounded the corner and slowly passed my house. I thought I spied the face of the man walking behind me sitting in the passenger seat. I hurriedly jammed the key into the lock and stepped inside.

  "You're an idiot," I said to myself, even the sound of my own voice in the dark foyer raising the hairs on the back of my neck. I pulled the note from my pocket and read it one more time, then trundled upstairs to try to get some rest from this action-slash-melodrama that had become my life.

  six

  Sunday, October 29

  In a world where precise planning and endless advance work serve as the foundation for success, every morning, a motley group of highly educated reporters and editors start the day from scratch, floating into America's newsrooms and bureaus at staggered hours, thinking big thoughts, working the telephones, pecking away at keyboards, struggling with word meanings and sentence flows, making and breaking careers and even lives in the communities they cover. In perhaps no other business, certainly not in insurance, not in the most prestigious law firms, not in the big-money brokerage houses on Wall Street, will you find so many employees living out their professional dreams.

  Reporting, to many, is not a job but a calling, and the privilege of doing it at a big-city daily paper makes them minor celebrities in their families, their circles of friends, and at PTA meetings, where another parent is liable to approach them in a quiet way and say,

  "You're a reporter for the Record. Can't you do something about this?"

  Maybe. Reporters can pick up the telephone and reach governors, senators, captains of commerce. A few reporters, and I immodestly but irrefutably put myself in this category now, can reach the president of the United States. Reporters can drive to work in the morning and assume their day will be spent in the office, then by night end up on a flight to New Mexico for a week in the desert covering the mass suicide of a religious cult that believed Carl Sagan's death signaled the end of all virtue in the world. A reporter's story can cause the indictment of a mayor, the firing of a rogue police officer, the release of a prisoner wrongly convicted on false testimony. All this, and no license required, nothing but the ability to ferret out the elusive concept we call truth and to present it in a readable and hopefully stylish way. At the end of the day, when it all comes together-a front page, a sports section, a style page, feature stories, and the summation of hard news events-the publication of a newspaper is nothing short of a daily miracle, an act of democracy and freedom celebrated with a simple read.

  Okay, so I'm biased. Why then, you might naturally ask, do reporters seem so unhappy? Well, there is the matter of pay, which is low, given the measure of responsibility they have. There are the foolish editors who fail to understand the brilliance of a reporter's idea or copy, the meek and self-righteous copy editors who take an evening's delight in catching a reporter's grammatical mistake. There are the mundane assignments-the Brockton City Council meeting, the routine drug smuggling arrest, the eighty-seventh inner-city murder of the year-set against the reporter's understanding of the better, more glamorous uses of his or her time. And there is the unimpeachable fact that reporters are natural complainers. It is what they do best, and when they are not complaining in print about the performance of professional sports teams or the lack of clout of the state congressional delegation, they complain about their own huma
n condition, about the very same newsroom that once seemed to have so much romantic appeal. And finally and most importantly, reporters, as well educated as they are, are resigned to being life's witnesses, recorders of the great and not so great deeds of all those around them but rarely in the spotlight themselves. They do not set policy, they write about it. They do not run for office, they follow around those who do. As important as they are to the very essence of our country, reporters are relegated to the sidelines, not coaches, not really even fans, just supposedly impartial observers whose only voice is expected to be set in ramrod-neutral tones.

  I mention all this because as I walked back into the bureau Sunday morning for the first time since I was shot, these were the sparring elements highlighted in my current situation. On the one hand, I had the president of the United States offering me a position as his press secretary, a move that would lead to great fame, policy making, a seat at the very center of power. On the other, I had what appeared to be a legitimate anonymous source ready to guide me toward the biggest story of my career, one that potentially led right to that same seat of power. Of course, I didn't know what that story was about yet, but such are the mysteries of a typical day in journalism.

  This cerebral battle would have been lost on the likes of Peter Martin, who hustled up to my desk moments after I arrived in the bureau.

  "Thank God," he said, breathlessly. "Jesus Christ, we're getting creamed." While he spoke, he rubbed his hand absently across the side of his face, as if exhausted, though it was not quite 9:00 A.m.

  "You see the Times this morning?" he asked. "Havlicek could only say what they had yesterday, maybe advance it a little, but they're way out front again today."