by Gene Riehl
“You need special tires?”
“They’re not special at all. That’s the part I’ve never been able to understand. The only difference I can see is that they have a white code stenciled on them, to make sure they’re not resold to any other tire dealer in this country.”
I grinned. “So much for hiding your secret identity.”
“So much for empty suits in Paris.”
“Bureau did the same thing to us a few years ago, only it was gasoline, and the post office. We had to gas up at post office fuel depots or write a memo explaining why we didn’t. Moronic. Lasted six months. Saved about a hundred dollars.”
“You hungry?”
“La Maison’s on Wisconsin, right?”
He nodded and we were off.
At the restaurant, the maître d’ seated us in a dark-green leather booth toward the rear. I looked around the room and recognized more than one politician. It wasn’t surprising. La Maison was a favorite for all types of congressional members and the civil-service chiefs who served them.
We traded small talk until the waiter brought our food and left again. Gerard took a bite of his poached salmon, followed it with a spear of asparagus.
“The Brenda Thompson thing,” he said. “Her confirmation hearings start a week from Monday, I see in the papers. Your investigation went well, I presume.”
He was back at work already, I realized. The casual question, the almost bored disinterest in the answer. Washington political chat, nothing more.
“Without a hitch,” I lied. “Smooth as silk.”
“But didn’t you tell me you had a problem with her early on? The day you asked me to call Paris about her?”
I’d told him no such thing and he knew it. “Not really. Just touching all the bases. You know the bureau.” I gave it a full beat before I asked a real question, careful to keep my voice just as bored as his. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason. Just keeping the conversation going.”
He ate more salmon, I continued with my poulet en croûte. Despite his nosiness I was determined to enjoy my lunch.
“And the phone records,” he said after a while. “Was the Telserve information useful?”
“Very useful. Thanks again for doing it so quickly.”
“So what’s next for her? Thompson, I mean.”
“Just the Senate confirmation hearings. Then on to glory.”
He glanced at me, and I couldn’t help thinking he knew better already, that he was just trying to get me to confirm what he’d already been told. He lifted his wineglass. I held up my glass of water.
“To glory for Brenda Thompson,” he said. “Nothing would please me more.”
As usual Lisa had outdone herself, I saw when I got back to my office and examined the Thompson report she’d assembled and put on my desk for my signature. Once again, I saw that I’d been justified in assigning the case to her despite her lack of seniority, and in going to Finnerty to get authorization for doing so.
A report of the size required for a Supreme Court nominee is a massive undertaking. No one agent could write the whole thing in the few weeks we get to finish the investigation. Hundreds of already written pages come in from agents all over the country, sometimes all over the world as well. The case agent in the field office where the nominee lives—Lisa Sands in the Thompson case—must assemble the pages and prepare the administrative cover pages, the index, and a synopsis of the important findings of the investigation.
What Lisa had provided me was a 392-page document in praise of Judge Brenda Thompson, along with the four skinny administrative pages Finnerty had ordered to summarize what had happened in Abahd’s house in Cheverly and what we’d discovered in Brookston. Four pages designed to go no further than the director’s office at the Hoover Building, where it would be detached before the report went on to the Oval Office, its contents relayed by mouth and in person to the president himself.
It was standard operating procedure—the administrative section—a way for the field agents to explain to the Hoover Building why this or that had or hadn’t been done, why questions had been brought up in the report’s body then left unanswered. But that wasn’t the only reason for its existence. It also kept certain information deep inside the bureau’s files, where it couldn’t be seen by outsiders without a Freedom of Information request—a request the bureau could stall until the seeker gave up and went away.
After the president heard about Brookston, he would call Brenda Thompson into the West Wing, demand an explanation for embarrassing him, then throw her out the back door and into the real savagery that would follow. Washington being Washington, the details would get leaked to the media and that’s when things would turn really ugly. The press would rip her to shreds. After they finished she wouldn’t even be able to go back to the job she had before, would disappear into the vast pantheon of American losers, would resurface only as the answer to an obscure question on future college tests.
I thought about that for a moment, about justice and the often peculiar ways it could be found. Thompson had lied, at the very least, and the murder of Jabalah Abahd still had to be accounted for. It was distinctly possible that the judge’s public humiliation would be the least of her problems.
I grabbed a pen and initialed the cover page of the report, authorizing it to go upstairs to the ADIC. Then I called Lisa’s desk in the bullpen.
“I owe you a dinner,” I told her. “A real one, I mean. Somewhere without pictures on the menu. We can leave from here after work, go someplace close.”
“God, Puller, I don’t think I can stand another meal in a restaurant this week.” I felt a distinct sag of disappointment, but before I could argue, she continued. “Tell you what. You buy the groceries, I’ll do the cooking. How’s that sound?”
“Are you sure?” I crossed my fingers. “Are you sure you’d rather do that?”
“I’d love to stay in and cook. And after the week we’ve had, I don’t care about healthy. Bring me red wine and some kind of dead animal, something that had parents until very recently. Maybe a couple of potatoes I can bake.”
“Dessert?”
“On top of steak and potatoes?” She hesitated. “Oh, hell, can we have cherry pie?” She paused again. “What are you trying to do to me?”
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her, but thank God she interrupted before I could.
“I need some time, though,” she said. “A couple of hours to turn into something you won’t mind dining with.”
“How about seven?”
“Great. My address in Alexandria is on the office roster. You’re a pretty good agent. You shouldn’t have any trouble finding me.”
SIXTEEN
“I haven’t really had a chance to settle in yet,” Lisa told me, after she’d poured us a couple of vodka martinis and started the tour of her condominium in the heart of Alexandria.
“I still need to ship some things from El Paso,” she went on. “Artwork, mostly, but a couple of pieces of furniture, too. Stuff I wanted to pack myself that I didn’t want to trust to the movers.”
“Looks pretty good to me the way it is.”
I stopped at a grouping of three eye-catching prints, hanging in the living room where no one could miss them. Goya, I thought, as I examined the first of them—a windswept scene featuring a circle of seventeenth-century aristocrats dancing under a mostly leafless tree on the banks of a river—but the other two were mysteries.
I told Lisa what I’d been thinking.
“You’re right,” she said, “the first one is Goya. ‘Dancing on the Banks of the Mazanare.’”
She moved to the next one, a very dark room this time, a young boy seated next to an open window, staring at his bruised and bloody feet.
“Bartolome Murillo,” she said. “Earlier than Goya. ‘Young Beggar,’ he called it. The original has been in the Louvre for over three hundred years.” Her voice dropped a bit. “Lots of beggars around at the time, plenty of children
like this to choose from. I’ve always wondered where Murillo got the courage to actually show one of them to the people who paid him to paint.” She nodded toward the Goya. “People like that, I mean. The people dancing while the child tries not to starve.”
I stepped to the last picture in the trio. Larger than the other two, almost three feet across, and abstract as hell. Large black letter A, along with a short algebraic equation and some formless scribbles, surrounded by a rough brown border against a plain background of pale violet. Definitely not seventeenth century, or the next one either. I looked at Lisa.
“This one finishes the story,” she said. “Twentieth century. Antoni Tapies. It’s called ‘Lettre à 1976.’”
“Dare I ask what it means?” I waved my hand toward all three of the prints. “You say there’s a story here.”
“For my father there was. For me, too, although I didn’t live it like he did.” She shook her head, said something in Spanish.
I looked at her. “Sorry, I’m afraid I don’t—”
“Always the rich, always the poor. Siempre los ricos, siempre los pobres.”
“What about this one? What’s the big A mean?”
“A fresh start, a new beginning.”
She reached for my arm. “Come on. Let’s freshen our drinks.”
To get to the kitchen we went through the dining room. The table had to be eight feet long, dark and massive, the chairs as well. On the wall behind the table hung a framed tapestry, a hunting scene in the Middle Ages. The room reminded me of a refectory in a Castilian monastery. I could almost see the monks gathered to dine, almost hear their mumbled prayers before the meal.
The only thing that didn’t jibe was the setting Lisa had laid for us. Crystal wine goblets, heavy silver utensils, oversize plates rimmed in gold leaf. Silver candleholders, green tapers already lit. No Spanish monk, I’d have been willing to bet, had ever seen such luxury. The abbot, maybe, but none of the working stiffs.
“Wow” was the only thing I could think to say.
She laughed, her eyes somehow even more magical in the candlelight. She’d dressed to match the decor, I realized. A white blouse buttoned to the neck, frilly, relieved by a topaz brooch hanging close to her throat. Dark-blue skirt, tight around her hips, then flaring away in pleats to fall an inch above her black boots. Formal and casual, all at the same time. Her thick dark hair brushed her shoulders, and the effect stunned me into silence. We stood that way for an awkward moment before she spoke.
“Let’s go back to the living room, Puller. I’ll bring some munchies. We can sit for a while, enjoy our drinks before cooking.”
In the living room—after she’d fetched a silver platter covered with tapas—we sat across from each other in matching upholstered chairs, dark chairs with swirls of red, green, and yellow in a sort of Oriental pattern.
“Close,” she told me when I said as much, “but it’s Moorish. Almost the same thing, when you think about it.”
“I’m confused,” I said after dispatching two of the tapas, baked dough wrapped around some kind of spicy meat. “You speak Spanish with what sounds like native fluency, but your English doesn’t have a trace of accent, and your last name is nowhere near Hispanic.”
She laughed, took a sip of her martini, and set the glass on the coffee table between us. “You haven’t read my personnel file, have you?”
“Not closely enough, obviously, but I was seriously thinking about looking at it again before coming over here tonight.”
“Looking for …”
“An advantage, of course, although I wouldn’t say that to anyone but another FBI agent. An edge. Something to know about you that you wouldn’t know I knew.”
“Am I as threatening as all that?”
“I don’t know yet. I guess what I really want to ask is who are you? I know the basics, but the way you handle yourself, the way you respond to me as your supervisor … Nothing about you makes sense for an FBI agent less than a year out of Quantico.”
“Wonder Woman, that what you’re saying? By day a mild-mannered new agent, by night …” She laughed. “You can fill in the blank tomorrow morning.”
I stared at her, not sure I’d heard her correctly. She leaned forward, stretched her arm across the table to touch mine.
“Okay, Puller, I’ll behave.” She stood suddenly. “Give me your glass. If we’re going to start telling the truth, we’d better have another drink.”
I handed her my glass, she took both of them away. I could hear her in the kitchen. Refrigerator opening and closing, clink of ice, her voice humming a ballad that sounded familiar. I thought about what she’d said, about telling the truth. I shook my head. Not a bad idea, one day, but probably not tonight.
Then she was back, sitting in her chair, one leg crossed over the other.
“I’ll go first,” she said. “My father’s name before he came from Spain—before the Spanish Civil War made being an outspoken intellectual a very dangerous thing to be—was Luis Saenz, but when he got to El Paso he found himself treated as just another Mexican, even though he had light skin and blue eyes. His first impulse was to leave, to leave Texas altogether, but his cousin lived in El Paso and his cousin was the only person in the United States he knew. So he worked his tail off to learn English without an accent, and became Lewis Sands. He’d been a certified public accountant in Barcelona, a respected professional, but until he became fluent enough in English he had to work as a bookkeeper.” She smiled. “He married an Anglo, I wasn’t born until he was sixty. After he’d become successful enough to fill our home with the things he’d given up by changing his name. The things that were all around him the day he died.”
“And your mother?”
“Mom’s much younger. Dad might have given up some Spanish things, but he never gave up their ways. He married a woman twenty-five years younger, and I never heard her complain about it.”
“UTEP first. I do remember that from your file. Then law school, and the D.A.’s office back in El Paso.”
“I moved up to Austin for law school, but I really loved El Paso, and my father was getting pretty old by the time I got out into the real world. The district attorney in El Paso was hiring, so I went back and became a prosecutor.”
“Must have been a tough job to leave. Prosecutors and judges run the world you and I live in. Why switch to our level?”
“The boredom. As the new kid, all I got were misdemeanors, by the truckload. A pipeline filled with petty criminals from both sides of the border. I felt more like a garbage collector than a prosecuting attorney. A monkey could have done my job. One day I had a real case for a change, got involved with a couple of FBI agents, realized I wanted to be them instead of me.”
“Happened that way for me, too, except I was a C.P.A. sick to death of sitting behind a desk and waiting for the clock to get to five.” I shook my head. “Now look at me. Sitting behind a desk all day. I’m not watching the same clock, but other than that, it’s pretty much the same.”
“You call the last few days sitting behind a desk?”
“Of course not, but I don’t get enough weeks like this one, out on the street where I belong. Makes it all the harder to go back to the tedium.”
“So why were you out among the rabble this time? You could have assigned somebody else to go to Brookston with me. You didn’t have to work with me yourself.”
I glanced into those eyes. Was she having fun with me? The vodka was running higher in my brain now, and I almost slipped up and told her the truth.
“I did have to work with you,” I told her instead. “Supreme Court nominee, really bad downside potential for the supervisor. No way I sit back and let somebody else determine my fate.”
“A control freak. Do you keep such tight rein on everything, or is it just SPIN cases?”
“Part of the job, I guess. Hard to survive if you let go of the wheel for long.” Boy, was it ever, but this wasn’t the night to get into that. I glanced toward the kitche
n. “I’m starving. Why don’t we take a crack at those groceries?”
It had started to rain again as Lisa mixed a couple of salads and warmed the French bread I’d brought with the groceries. I laid the filets on the preheated broiling grill, and the kitchen began to fill with good smells. I opened a bottle of Pepper Lane cabernet. Ten minutes later we were ready to sit down.
Back in the dining room, the candles were an inch lower, but the light was just as mellow. Lisa disappeared for a moment, and when she came back there was music playing. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. We sat across the big Spanish table, nothing between us to block our view of each other. We sipped cabernet, listened to Ella and Louis. I lifted my glass.
“Amor y pesetas,” I said, repeating a Spanish toast I’d memorized in the days when it was important to be California cool.
“Y tiempo para gustarlos,” she responded. The language sounded so much better coming out of that beautiful mouth.
We ate in a comfortable mixture of small talk and silence, the wine gone far too quickly. I thought about the second bottle I’d brought, mentioned it to Lisa, but she shook her head, and it was a good thing. A couple of martinis, two and a half glasses of cabernet, and I was brimming with good fellowship and so—I was certain—was she. We continued to chat as we finished the steaks, and by the time we’d worked through the cherry pie we were pretty good friends. Afterward I rose and picked up my plate, came around the table and reached for hers, but she took the one I was holding and set it aside.
“Forget about the dishes,” she said. “Where I come from, the night’s for dancing.”
She came around the table, grabbed my hand, and led me into the living room.
“Take off your shoes, for God’s sake,” she ordered. “You’re too damned tall as it is.”
I did so as Ella and Louis came to the end of their set. We waited for the next CD to start. Linda Ronstadt, I heard a moment later, with the Nelson Riddle orchestra, Linda’s voice so pure it gave me shivers.
