The drive back was harder. There was nearly an inch of snow accumulated and Washington was rapidly sinking into hysteria. No school announcements were being broadcast and storm updates were cutting in on the radio every ten minutes. It took me nearly half an hour to get to a meter on M Street, half a block from Gerry Broz's apartment.
At the corner of Thirty-fifth and M, I loitered near the package store, checking my reflection in the window. Actually the cowboy hat Susan had bought me was one of those high-crowned ten-gallon things with a big feather in band, like Willie Stargell wears. When I had tried it on I hadn't looked like Willie Stargell. I had looked like the Frito Bandito, so we took it back and bought the more modest Gunclub Stetson, with an understated little feather a trout fly in the band. Susan was after me to get cowboy boots too, but I wasn't ready for them yet. When I got further upscale. Then I could get some, and maybe crossed ammunition belts in the same tone.
As I stood and considered my image a Ford van pulled up in front of Broz's building. It said canal glass on the side. Two guys got out and removed a large glass sheet from the back and carried the glass into the building. In a couple of minutes I could see them at work on the broken glass door to Broz's balcony. There were no police cars around. I'd bet Broz didn't report it. A kid of Joe Broz's would not be likely to call the cops. He'd either ignore it or turn it over to his father's organization. On the whole I'd prefer he ignored it.
It took the glass-repair crew maybe an hour to take out the old glass and put in the new. In that time nothing else stirred at the apartment. The snow, occasionally mixed with rain, came down, most of it melting, a little bit collecting. Cars coming off Key Bridge were making a continuous high whine as they spun their wheels. The two workmen came down carrying the broken glass panel, slid it into the back of the truck, got in, and skidded away. Above in Broz's apartment all was secure. As I looked the lights went on in the bedroom, stayed on for maybe three minutes, and went off. About a minute later someone emerged from the apartment building. It was a young man with dark hair. He looked about six feet tall and appeared to weigh a soft 190 pounds. He also looked like the male partner in Ronni Alexander's stag film.
It didn't have to be Gerry Broz. There were two other apartments in there, and probably each one housed more than one person. It could be someone else. But it could be him. Paragraph six applied. He headed up Thirty-fifth Street. I followed him.
Where it slants up from the river Thirty-fifth Street is San Franciscan in its ascent. The snow and rain slick that had covered it didn't help matters any. Broz ahead and me behind expended a lot of energy getting up there. We turned left on Prospect, walked two blocks, and there was Georgetown University. Broz went straight to the library and got a stack of bound periodicals out of the stacks and sat in the reading room thumbing through them and taking notes. I couldn't see from where I was what periodicals they were. I nosed about here and there in the reading room and adjacent places. Except at the checkout area, which looked like the security at an airport, there was no one to pay me any attention. Many coeds went about their activities, heedless of my presence. I was not pleased by that.
One of them did pay attention to my subject however. She came in wearing tight jeans and a green vest over a white cable-knit sweater. She sat down opposite my subject and said, "How'd ya do in the poli-sci final, Gerry?"
"I think I aced it," Gerry said. "How about you?"
"I think I knew the stuff, but that bastard Ekkberg hates me."
Gerry shrugged. "Ekky hates everybody, especially girls."
She nodded. They did some more small talk and then the girl got up and left. Unless the fates were snickering up their sleeve, the kid was Gerry Broz. He even looked like his father, or like his father had. There was a kind of theatricality to him. He sat as if he were being viewed from all sides. But he was softer-looking than his father, not so much overweight as undersinewed, as if he'd walked slowly everywhere he went. He had taken off the tan parka with the dark blue lining he had worn to the library. He was wearing a blue oxford cloth shirt with a buttondown collar and chino pants over Frye boots. His belt was blue with a red stripe running through it and his hair was short and carefully cut. The more I looked at him, the more I was sure it was he in the videotape, and that he was Gerry Broz.
At 6:30 Gerry got up and put on his parka and stowed his notebook in a green book bag and left the library. He allowed them to check the book bag on the way out, and with me discreetly distant he went out into the darkness and walked back to his apartment and went in. I left him there. It was time to get ready for Susan.
Chapter 19
I was dressed to the teeth, dark blue suit and vest with a faint white pinstripe, white silk show hankie, dark red tie with tiny white dots. White broadcloth shirt with a pin collar and French cuffs. My cordovan loafers were shined, I was close shaven, my teeth sparkled. Had the weather been better I'd have worn white flannel trousers and walked upon the beach. Instead I sat beside Susan on a banquette in Rive Gauche and ordered beer.
Susan said "Dewar's and water" to the waiter. Off to our right there was a family group, obviously mother and father with son and daughter-in-law. The old man was explaining to the son and daughter-in-law what a really world class big deal he was. Occasionally the mother chimed in that yes, he really was a big deal. The son and his wife listened in glum silence, the daughter-in-law forcing a bright smile through it all. Obviously the parents were paying.
There were few other people in the room. The howling storm had paralyzed Washington as drifts of nearly an inch and a half had piled up along some major arteries.
The waiter brought our drinks. Dewar's and water," I said.
"Yes. I don't care really, but everyone at work says if you don't order by name they give you bar whiskey."
I drank a little beer. Molson. Rive Gauche didn't have Rolling Rock Extra Pale either. The All World Big Deal at the next table was telling his kid about how tough you had to be to prevail in business and giving a number of examples of how tough he'd recently been.
"Lonely at the top," I said to Susan.
"But not quiet," Susan said.
"How about I threaten to kill him if he doesn't shut up."
"It would probably work, but the rest of the evening might be a bit strained."
"I know. The world is never simple, is it?"
Susan shrugged. "He's excited by his success. He wants to pass along to his son some of what he knows. He's showing off a little. I'm not sure it's a capital offense."
"He's showing off for the daughter-in-law," I said.
Susan shrugged again, and smiled. "He's male."
The waiter appeared to take our order. I ordered pigeon stuffed with cabbage. Susan ordered sole Veronique. I asked for a wine list. The Big Deal listed some people he'd recently fired. I studied the wine list. Control. If I concentrated on Susan and dinner and wine, I could block the guy out. It was simply a matter of control. The wine steward came by. I ordered Gewurtztramminer. He smiled approvingly, as they always do, took the wine list, and departed.
The Big Deal explained to his son some of the ways the son could improve professionally. I could feel the muscles bunch a bit behind my shoulders. Susan noticed my shrug to loosen them.
"Getting to you, is he?" she said.
"Takes his work seriously," I said.
"Don't you?"
"Not as seriously as I take you," I said.
The food arrived, and the wine. We were quiet while it was served.
When the servants had departed, Susan said, "Is there an implied criticism there?"
I didn't answer.
"Do you think I take my work more seriously than I take you?"
"At the risk of oversimplification," I said, "yes."
"Because my work has taken me away?"
"In part."
"Your work takes you away. How is that different?"
"When I leave, I leave because I must," I said. "You could have stayed in Boston." S
usan started to speak. I made a stop sign with my hand. "It's more than that. You went willingly, you aren't..." The more I talked the more churlish it sounded. It wasn't churlish inside. "You aren't sorry. You're having a good time."
"And you'd like it better if I weren't?"
When I had been a small boy someone told me that the blood in your veins was blue, the way it looked through the skin, and that it only turned red when you exposed it to air. What I felt was one thing when I kept it in. It changed color entirely when I exposed it.
"I would like it better if you seemed to be missing me more."
Susan drank some of her wine and put the glass down very carefully, as if the table were shaky. She looked at the glass for a time, as if it were something she'd suddenly discovered. Then she raised her eyes and looked at me.
"Until I was twenty I was my father's princess, his little JAP. And then I was my husband's wife, the ornament of his career, and after the divorce, not very long after, I met you and became your"-she made a wiffling gesture with her hand-"friend. Always me was perceived through you- you my father,you my husband, you my friend."
"By whom?" I said. When I was serious my English was good.
"By all of us. By me and by you, all of you. Down here there's no intermediary lens, no you through which me is seen. Here I am what I am and a great many people are very much taken with me because of what I am and they never even heard of you. Yes, I love that. And yes, I miss you. But missing you is a price I have to pay in order to become completely me. At least for a while. And goddamn it, it's a price I am glad to pay. I sort of expected you'd understand better."
"I kind of hoped I would too," I said. "I'm doing the best I can."
"So," Susan said with emphasis, "am I."
I drank some wine. The truth kept turning to confusion as I tried to speak it. "I think what you're saying I can handle," I said. "But I think you've overcommitted. You are becoming your work. You don't talk the same. You use the jargon of the profession, you drink the drink of the profession, you know who the important people are and get next to them. You've begun to believe in potluck suppers to boost morale. I'm not sure how much you're becoming yourself."
"I'm not becoming myself," Susan said. "I'm trying out selves, I'm working up a self. That's part of the problem. I never had a center, a core full of self-certainty and conviction. I've merely picked up the colorations of the yous: my father, my husband, my..."-she smiled a little- "... friend. Of course I'm becoming more shrink-y than the shrinks. I'm like a kid in her first year at college. And if it helps you any, you might think of me that way, leaving the nest. Even explaining myself limits me, it's intrusive, it compromises me. I want to do what I want to do."
"Unless your supervisor tells you not to," I said.
"That's not fair. It's not... it's not even insightful. You still can't get outside your own view. You can't understand someone without a goddamned code. You don't see that for millions of people, male and female, the workplace is the code."
I shook my head. "You have committed yourself to everything I've worked all my life to stay free of."
"I know," Susan said.
"You endorse a way of life I find not only uninviting, I... I disapprove of it."
Susan nodded.
"I always assumed," I said, and twiddled with my-wineglass as I said it, "I always assumed that someone who found his or her identity the way you're finding yours was..."-I spun the stem of the wineglass slowly between my fingers and watched the round bottom circle slowly on the table linen-"shallow."
Susan's gaze on me was steady. "It's a view you tend to impose on anyone close to you. You believe things very strongly. It burdens people."
I nodded. "A person might need to get away from me," I said. "To develop her own views." I stopped twirling the wineglass and picked it up and drank some wine. Then I took the wine bottle from the bucket and poured some more into Susan's glass and mine.
"The thing is, you're not shallow," I said. "And if you were, it wouldn't matter. Not only would I follow you into hell. I'd follow you into AT&T."
Susan sampled some of her sole.
"So I was wrong about that," I said. "Makes me wonder what else I was wrong about. Makes me doubt myself. Screws up my autonomy."
I took a bite of my squab. It was delicious. I tried the cabbage; it had a magnificent smoky taste.
"How come I'm still hungry when my heart is breaking?" I said.
Susan smiled. "Old habits are hard to shake," she said.
"The other thing that's killing me," I said, "is, I suppose, a problem of excessive self-concern. But I have offered you what I had always thought was the most desirable thing in the world. I have loved you absolutely, and completely, and without reservation. And I still do. I guess I'm feeling that you are not grateful."
"Good heavens," Susan said. "You're human after all."
"But that's not your problem, is it? That's mine."
"Yes," Susan said. "It would be worth your while to think about whether you love me for my sake or yours."
"I don't want to do that," I said.
"Why not?"
"Everybody needs one pipe dream," I said.
"Love?"
"Romantic love," I said. "I won't give it up."
Chapter 20
I followed Gerry Broz around the next day while Washington dug out from what they seemed to think had been Armageddon. In Boston we would have said the storm missed us. Gerry didn't do anything more remarkable than go to class and then go to the library and then go back to his apartment.
I wandered along behind him and looked at the Georgetown campus. It was a big one, spreading down from the Georgetown Medical Center on Reservoir Road to the low bluff above the river. The older buildings were fieldstone Gothic and the new ones were brick.
In the evening Gerry went up to the library and did more research. While I browsed nearby, three coeds stopped to chat with him. Twice he went outside and smoked a cigarette, and at 9:15 he folded up his notebooks and went back to his apartment. I watched the light in his bedroom window until it went off at 11:30, then I dragged back to the Hay Adams and went to bed exhausted. Sometimes the excitement of an archcriminal is more than a man can manage.
Next morning I was back at it, a thrill a minute. This time we didn't go to class. We strolled briskly down M Street to a coffee shop where Gerry talked with two very young girls, high school age at best, sitting in a booth, for maybe a half hour. Then we set out on a walking tour of Georgetown, stopping at five homes along the way. I noted the address each time. No novice I.
Broz wasn't in any of the homes for more than five minutes. Then he returned briskly to his apartment, opened up the garage, got out a red Datsun 280-Z with a T-roof and headed downtown. I followed him in the rental car. He went straight down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, around it on one of the circumference roads, and back onto Pennsylvania on the hill, southeast of the Capitol. He parked about two blocks along, got out, and made another series of visits like the ones he'd made in Georgetown. Then he got back into the car and drove to F Street just east of the White House and went into the Old Ebbitt Grill where he had lunch with three other guys his age, one of whom wore a Georgetown warm-up jacket.
The restaurant was narrow and antique-looking, rising three stories, and divided into several small dining rooms. I had a beer and a hamburger at the bar while Gerry and his associates feasted on the next floor up.
When they left, the guy with the warm-up jacket got into the Z with Gerry, and the other two guys followed along behind in a metallic green Mazda sedan. Behind the Mazda, I made three. Back in Georgetown, Gerry put his Z away and the green Mazda parked outside his driveway. The four men went in and I stayed outside.
In about half an hour the two teenage girls I'd seen Gerry breakfasting with showed up and went in. They seemed highly animated when they went in and when they came out around four in the afternoon it was clear that they were drunk. They giggled as they swayed past m
e up Thirty-fifth Street. I watched them struggle up the incline, and looked back at the apartment and then back at them. They looked like a better bet, paragraph six. I hopped in my car and followed.
Up the hill the two girls separated. One of them kept going and the other turned right down O Street. I turned down O Street behind her.
Half a block down O she stopped to light a cigarette. She was having trouble in the wind when I came up close to her and stopped and got out of the car. She didn't even notice me until I was beside her. She was drunker than she had looked from a distance and kept holding the flame of her lighter two inches to the right of her cigarette. I took it from her and took the cigarette from her mouth and lit it and handed both back to her. I took my wallet from my hip pocket and while I did I let her see the gun on my belt. I opened the wallet, held it toward her, then flipped it closed.
Robert B Parker - Spenser 10 - The Widening Gyre Page 9
