Collateral Damage

by Michael Bowen

  “Shit,” Cindy said thoughtfully.

  “It must have an unusually high linen content or the entire thing would be just so much dust by now,” Marjorie said.

  Proceeding more carefully and, somehow, doing remarkably little additional damage to the document, Cindy finished removing it from the Bible and laid it on the table, bent in a rictus that was almost painful to look at. She leaned across the table toward Michaelson, close enough that he could smell the cigar smoke on her breath.

  “All right,” she said. “We have a deal, right?”

  “Right,” Michaelson answered. “I’ve given my word and I’ll keep it.”

  “And I should believe that because—”

  “Because in the modest position I occupy in Washington at the moment, without office, power, or prospects, my word is all I have. Unless everyone in town knows they can take it to the bank, I’m finished.”

  Cindy slid the page across the table. With infinite delicacy, pushing it gently at the edges an inch at a time, Michaelson turned it around so that he and Marjorie could both examine the text right side up. He recognized it, for he had seen part of it before in a grainy photograph with a hotel receipt on top of it.

  “You’re going to have to help me,” he said to Marjorie. “In this light, my eyes aren’t up to two-hundred-year-old handwriting.”

  “My privilege,” Marjorie said with complete sincerity. She began reading:

  This INDENTURE, made, done, sealed, and delivered at Annapolis Courthouse, Anne Arundel County, Maryland, this fourth day of April in the Year of Our Lord One-thousand-seven-hundred-and-ninety-seven and of the independence of the United States of America the twenty-second—

  WITNESSETH:

  I, Colonel Charles James Calvert, Esq., the Fourth of that Name, of Calvert Manor, Prince Georges County, Maryland, for and in consideration of receipt in hand of a bill of exchange in the amount of Three-Hundred-and-no-One-Hundredths Dollars ($300), and for other good and valuable consideration, the receipt and sufficiency of which I do herewith acknowledge, do hereby bargain and sell, transfer, and convey, unto Thaddeus Praisegod Humphreys, freeholder of Calvert County, Maryland, in full title and free, to have and to hold, with no liens, encumbrances or other hindrance whatsoever, from this day forward, as his chattel property, the slave TOBY, a Guinea male of twenty-one years more or less and in fair health.

  Signed and sealed as of the day and date first

  above written.

  /s/ Col. Charles James Calvert IV Esq.

  Locus Sigili

  Michaelson and Marjorie both looked up at Cindy, who gazed back with the mildly baffled detachment of the only one in the room who doesn’t get the joke. Michaelson was convinced by now that she was thoroughly intelligent—indeed, brilliant. Could she possibly be so innocent of history—not just without historical knowledge, but lacking any sense of the past whatever, any instinct about it—that she didn’t see the importance of this fragment? Didn’t understand what a bombshell it would be, in a country where race was the subtext of all political discourse, to reproduce this document on the front page of The Washington Post?

  She didn’t, and there seemed no point in trying to explain. And so Michaelson without further comment took sole and very gingerly possession of documentary evidence that a black candidate for President of the United States was the descendant of a black slaveowner.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Marjorie had seen some odd things in the more than thirty years she had known Michaelson, but the square baking pan filled a quarter-inch deep with table salt sitting next to his sink struck her as off-the-charts. The box of Baggies resting a few feet away was normal enough. But then Michaelson running tap water over very thin fishing line added another bizarre touch.

  It was just after nine on Friday morning. She wouldn’t be going in to Cavalier Books until around two that afternoon. She would then be there until after midnight, which meant that she should be sleeping now. Instead, she was watching Michaelson prepare what looked like a rather lame junior high school science-fair project.

  “Are you comfortable with what we’re doing?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “It could destroy Catherine emotionally. I mean push her all the way over the edge. Move her from functional neurotic to drooling basket case.”

  “There’s a grave risk of that,” Michaelson agreed. “Now that we have the indenture and can deal with it as we think best, we could wash our hands of the murder, as the police have. If we do that, Catherine’s emotional destruction won’t be a grave risk anymore. It will become an apodictic certainty.”

  “Because of Phillips, or Connaught? Or something else?”

  “Phillips, mostly. If we handle the indenture exactly right and don’t shrink from a little bullying, we can probably neutralize Connaught.”

  “Have you told Phillips yet that you have the indenture?” Marjorie asked.

  “I left a message for him as soon as I had the thing in a safe place.”

  “Good. The trustee responded very early this morning to my offer for the estate books. She said there’s another player in the picture and she wants sealed bids. Your message to Phillips may save him ten thousand dollars or so, as well as reducing his interest in Calvert Manor and those who live there.”

  “Reducing but not eliminating, unfortunately,” Michaelson said. “He now knows that he can’t get the indenture through Catherine, but there’s still the matter of Demarest passing away.”

  “Do you think he suspects Catherine?”

  “I don’t know. But he undoubtedly recognizes Catherine as the weak link. She’ll be the first target of his inquiries unless we convince him to stop making them. That means our choice is starkly simple: Go forward, or write Catherine off.”

  “All of this over a piece of parchment two centuries old,” Marjorie mused. “A historical curiosity. It seems surreal for savvy people to imagine it having a genuine impact on a presidential campaign.”

  Michaelson drew the saturated fishing line through the salt-filled baking pan.

  “Logically, of course, you’re clearly right,” he said. “But we’re not talking about logic. We’re talking about what makes people feel psychologically threatened, what makes them lash out irrationally and close their minds.”

  “People are threatened by what they don’t know,” Marjorie said, nodding.

  “And even more threatened by subversion of what they think they do know. They have a nice, straightforward, Cinerama view of the world. Suddenly they find themselves looking at a gritty documentary without any soft-focus shots. The reaction is anger, denial, and hysteria—not logical dispassion.”

  Michaelson took a round cake pan out of his freezer and broke a tray of ice cubes into it.

  “In a political campaign that indenture could be what the French call a ‘provocation,’” Marjorie said. “A fact that shouldn’t be spoken even if it’s true.”

  “Or especially if it’s true.”

  “What in the world are you doing now?” she asked.

  “Making little ones out of big ones.”

  Michaelson laid the salt-caked fishing line on an ice cube, a few millimeters from its end. He let the salt eat through the cube for a few moments, then pressed and sawed with the string until a thin slice of the cube came free. He popped it into a Baggie and tossed the Baggie into the freezer. Then, patiently, he began to repeat the process.

  “Is that as tedious as it looks?” Marjorie asked.

  “Entirely.”

  Two minutes later he had five more Baggies in the freezer.

  “We don’t really have any choice, do we?” she asked then. “About Catherine, I mean.”

  “I wish we did.”

  “And I’m the one who has to talk to her, aren’t I?”

  Michaelson looked at Marjorie with sympathy and re
spect. She would give anything, he knew, for him to say no, he could handle it. But she knew the truth as well as he did.

  “You’re the only one who can do it,” he said. “You’re the only chance she has.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  A Cohiba Panatela doesn’t taste bad at all when you smoke it, Cindy reflected as she spat her second brushful of toothpaste into the sink around ten o’clock the following Sunday morning. The problem is that then you keep on tasting it for about a week. She’d had her first a few months ago, last November. C-Sharp had fetched her fifth during the Marjorie/Michaelson chat Wednesday night. She now figured she’d have her next one, maybe—never.

  After a throatful of Scope, she returned to her bedroom, where C-Sharp contentedly snored, presumably lost in blissful dreams of cheering crowds. She slipped into slacks of khaki denim and grabbed the first T-shirt in her dresser drawer. It was pale blue, featuring a male and a female head in white caricature with a bit of once-topical dialogue overlaid in black: “That’s hard to swallow, Mr. President.”/”You just said a mouthful, Monica.”

  Cindy’s first misgiving came when she reached the top of the stairs and caught the smell of bacon frying. This didn’t compute. Eyes narrowing in puzzled alarm, she hustled downstairs to find Catherine in a sunshine-yellow dress covered by a hunter-green apron. At least she skipped the pearls and high heels, Cindy thought. Catherine was tending a griddle full of bacon, while more than a dozen cooked strips drained on a paper towel-covered plate.

  “ ’Morning, Cindy,” Catherine said brightly with a glance over her shoulder. “Be a lamb and put that bacon on a clean plate, then take it out to the buffet in the dining room with the other food, would you?”

  Wary eyes fixed on her sister, Cindy dumped the bacon onto a white china plate and sidled into the dining room with it—where she very nearly dropped it, along with her jaw. Describing the spread that covered the buffet with an offhand reference to “other food” struck Cindy as roughly equivalent to calling World War II a “scrap.” Three flavors of bagels, white, light wheat, and whole-wheat toast, all spread deftly with margarine; mounds of fresh fruit; four carafes of fruit juice; pots of coffee and tea; and scrambled eggs bubbling invitingly in a warming pan. In a house that at the moment sheltered a total of three people, Catherine had covered the buffet with enough food for a marine platoon.

  Cindy debated with herself for a moment about how best to react. Pretend that she didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary? Approach it with calm determination, the way the experts say you should when your seven-year-old starts swearing? Or, she thought with a mental shrug, why not just be myself: direct and tactless?

  “What’s the Stepford Wife number all about?” she called from the dining room. “I had this vague idea you were going to church or something. I mean, wouldn’t this be like a five-day supply of bacon even if C-Sharp and I ate bacon, which I don’t and C-Sharp shouldn’t?”

  “We’re having guests for brunch,” Catherine yelled back. “Your call, but you might want to put on something a tiny bit dressier.”

  Cindy strode back into the kitchen but stopped abruptly in the doorway. Her eyes widened and her tongue undertook an urgent search for saliva to swallow. Catherine was holding a long, black-handled, thick-bladed carving knife. And smiling just a bit oddly.

  Offering Cindy a genial nod, Catherine used the tip of the knife to separate three more strips of raw bacon from the second package of the stuff she had opened. Cindy expelled a long breath.

  “What guests?” Cindy managed to ask.

  The doorbell rang.

  “That’s some of them now, unless I miss my bet,” Catherine said. “Would you—”

  “I’ll get it,” Cindy said quickly. “Just please don’t ask me to be a lamb again.”

  As she strode to the front door, Cindy felt the knot of anxiety in her gut swelling into something uncomfortably close to panic. For a wild moment she considered offering a head fake to whoever turned out to be at the door and then running off through the snow to someplace reasonably sane. She fought the impulse back. She opened the door. And she gasped.

  “Good morning, Miss Shepherd,” Avery Phillips said. “I think the other Miss Shepherd is expecting us. May we come in?”

  Cindy stepped back to admit Phillips, quickly followed by Willie and a two-wheel handcart pushed by Project. On the handcart was a trunk that Cindy thought must have been left over from the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera.

  “Michaelson has talked to you, right?” she asked.

  “Yes, and did his best not to seem to be gloating. Outsmarted me, which I don’t mind, and then outfoxed me, which I do. So to get what I want I’ll have to deal with him instead of the Shepherd squirearchy.”

  “What’s in the trunk?”

  “If there’s an outlet somewhere in the house that’ll accept a three-prong plug, it’s an advanced audiovisual telecommunications center. Otherwise, it’s a very expensive doorstop.”

  “What’s it for?” Cindy asked.

  The doorbell rang.

  “That’d be Michaelson,” Phillips said. “Why don’t you ask him about the trunk? I’m just following orders.”

  Cindy opened the front door, where Michaelson and Marjorie waited patiently. Cindy would ordinarily have gaped at the Stanley stainless steel Thermos Michaelson was holding, but her reactive capacities were running on empty at the moment. Catherine glided into the entrance hall, apron doffed.

  “Welcome, everybody,” she called gaily. “You’re just in time for brunch. The buffet is in the dining room. I’m afraid we’re a bit informal. I hope you don’t mind serving yourselves.”

  “Yeah,” Cindy said dryly. “We haven’t been able to get good help since the War. The Boer War.”

  “May I put this in the freezer?” Michaelson asked, tendering the Thermos with two hands as if it were a prize vintage pinot noir.

  “Let me take it for you,” Catherine said.

  “Do you mind if Willie sets our video toys up in the living room?” Phillips asked.

  “After we eat,” Catherine said firmly over her shoulder.

  “Can someone just explain what’s going on?” Cindy asked.

  “While we eat,” Catherine said.

  Cindy still held back, her expression dubious. C-Sharp picked that moment to appear in the dining-room doorway, a strip of bacon in one hand and the remains of another disappearing into his mouth.

  “Bacon’s awesome,” he opined.

  This assessment resolved the issue. In less than five minutes the eight people were seated at the dining-room table before plates filled—and in Project’s case, heaped—with food. A bit forced at first, the conviviality became steadily more real under the stimulus of caffeine, vitamin C, and cholesterol, helped along by Phillips’ diverting explanations of the various ways impressive amounts of money could be legally earned without incurring any obligation to pay federal income tax.

  It was C-Sharp who introduced the topic that, like a well-crafted simile, explained the meeting without calling attention to itself. Glancing around appraisingly after Phillips finished hymning the delights of accelerated depreciation, he swallowed the last of a toast-and-scrambled-egg sandwich and grinned slyly.

  “This is really about P.D., right?” he asked. “I mean, heat’s lost interest because they think it’s accidental, but some of us aren’t buying that, so we’re going to rehash it, am I right?”

  “The police know perfectly well that Preston Demarest was murdered,” Michaelson said. “They’ve lost interest because it has been hinted to them by people whose good opinion their superiors covet that continuing the investigation can do no good and much harm. And because they’ve been given some information about Mr. Demarest’s background that puts his victimization rather low on the list of constabulary priorities. That’s surmise, by the way, but it’s clearly the mos
t plausible explanation for what began as a very aggressive and competent investigation suddenly aborting.”

  “And you’re telling us this because—” C-Sharp prompted.

  “Because the police aren’t the only ones involved, and others with a stake in this matter aren’t so easily turned aside. We are here to satisfy those people about how Demarest’s murder occurred, and convince them to let things lie where they fell.”

  Cindy shot Michaelson a look of angry surprise. He ignored it. He let his eyes deliberately survey the faces around the table. Catherine’s expression suggested polite interest, as if another guest had asked Michaelson to explain the International Monetary Fund and it was her duty to listen with at least a semblance of attention. Marjorie’s eyes were sharp and alert, shifting their gaze rapidly from Phillips to C-Sharp to Cindy. Phillips had his Zen-master mask on, hooded eyes turned steadily in Michaelson’s direction. Willie was looking thoughtfully at Catherine. C-Sharp had picked a windowpane in the background between Michaelson and Catherine and focused a look of bemused tolerance on it. Project, busily shoveling fruit from his plate to his mouth, looked covetously at the eggs and bacon still in the warming trays.

  “I believe you have the floor,” Phillips said to Michaelson.

  “We start with Andrew Shepherd,” Michaelson said. “He was, among other things, a businessman whose work took him behind what used to be the Iron Curtain. Like many people in that position, he allowed himself to be debriefed by the CIA when he returned from those trips.”

  “You mean we’re gonna pin this on the spooks?” C-Sharp demanded, shaking his head with a disbelieving smile.

  “No,” Michaelson said. “The Central Intelligence Agency had no reason to kill Preston Demarest, and if it had killed him, he wouldn’t have died the way he did. The quality of leadership at that outfit has declined somewhat in recent years, but it isn’t yet being run by people who think you can ward off unpleasant publicity by killing an American citizen in the epicenter of American political media. The only people I know of who do think so have jobs as script consultants in Hollywood.”