The 500: A Novel
Page 8
It was a perfectly typical case, the kind we did at Davies every week. What I couldn’t figure out was why they were treating the whole thing like it was a state secret. I’d never seen anything so compartmentalized around the offices.
But I was just a soldier, so I’d keep my head down and keep at it with Walker. By now he had the tight look of concentration of a high-functioning drunk on a spree. I didn’t like where this was going and would have beat it out of there if not for work. He was in flagrant violation of the first rule of Washington nightlife: never have fun at a party. He muttered something, looking hard at nothing in particular.
“What?” I asked.
“Are you okay, you know, with Tina?” he said.
I couldn’t remember who Tina was—Walker’s dance card was pretty crowded—but I wanted to keep him mellow. I certainly didn’t have a problem with her, so I just nodded along. “Sure,” I said and steered Walker to an empty living room. He was feeling in his pocket for his keys: bad news.
It wasn’t quite a scene yet, though a few people were taking an interest, watching through the entryway. And I saw Marcus checking in, subtly, while talking to two lantern-jawed guys with goatees. I left Walker for a minute and stepped over to Marcus. I was hoping to get out of tonight’s assignment: I just wanted to dump Walker in a cab and send him home, skip whatever adventure Marcus had planned for me.
“Michael Ford,” Marcus said. “Let me introduce you to two dear friends of the Davies Group”—that was code. Friends alone meant C-list clients, close friends B-list, and dear friends A-list. These guys were priorities.
“This is Miroslav Guzina and Aleksandar Šrebov. They’re with the Serbian trade mission.”
These trade advisers sure turned out to be an interesting bunch. Miroslav tore a piece of rare tenderloin on crostini in half with his teeth, then offered his hand.
“It’s a pleasure,” I said. Aleksandar’s handshake felt like palming a cinder block.
“May I borrow Marcus for a moment?” I asked.
Marcus excused himself and we stepped aside.
“What’s the play here, with Walker?” I asked.
He gave me his dumb and innocent look, which I could only answer with a long sigh.
“Keep him happy,” he said. “And remember: the Davies Group is always looking out for you.”
Damn it. These Balkans must be the guys who were bankrolling the seduction of Representative Walker, which put me in a tight spot. Walker was waving me over, antsy, ready to go. I walked back to him.
“You’ve got that new Cadillac CTS, right?”
“Oh yeah,” he said.
“You mind letting me get my hands on it?” I asked. I knew better than to get between a drunk with a Southern sense of honor and his keys, at least not without having a good cover.
“I don’t know.”
“Come on.”
He shrugged a little bit, held the keys in his palm, and let me take them without a fight. That surprised me at first.
“Come on, man. Fuck this Girl Scout meeting. I know a place that’ll take care of us.”
I didn’t like the sound of that at all. To my ears it sounded a little bit like whorehouse. I realized he gave up his keys not because he thought it was the public-safety-minded thing to do but because he really wanted to get to wherever he was taking us next.
Normally, because Marcus and the Serbs scared the shit out of me and because I was a good little corporate kiss-ass, I would have just followed Marcus’s orders and gone along with Walker.
But I was getting the distinct feeling that the Walker episode was not going to end well, and on top of that, tonight I had a very special problem on my hands. It was the enormous dude who was now watching Walker and me from the hallway, who had been keeping his eye on me all night and looked none too pleased that I was clearly about to paint the town with a reputed poonhound. And why should I care?
Because that particular dude was Lawrence Clark—forgive me, Sir Lawrence Clark, whom you may know as the chairman of PMG, a hedge fund that controls about thirty billion dollars in capital. More important, he was Annie Clark’s father, and a former player for England’s national rugby team. Annie was at my place right now, since that was easier for her than schlepping all the way back up to her house in Glover Park. And remember how the whole Annie thing seemed too easy, seemed like there must be a catch in it somewhere? Lawrence Clark was the first catch I discovered. I sure as hell didn’t want him seeing me heading out to some cathouse with Walker. Clark had me pinned with a furious stare, Walker was begging to go, and Marcus was just standing there watching me squirm as I tried to decide between no good options.
CHAPTER FIVE
BEFORE I MET Sir Larry, I’d pretty much given up my class-resentment chip-on-the-shoulder bit. No matter how hard life has dicked you over, at a certain point (actually, I think it was when I bought a two-bedroom house for myself and maxed out my Roth), that attitude just starts to feel a little ridiculous. I decided to keep a few scraps of my checkered past around, strictly to add character, and let any bitterness go.
He lived in “hunt country.” It’s only about forty minutes from where I grew up in Northern Virginia. Yet I had no idea that a short drive from the pastures of my youth—where I spent so many idyllic summer days in the woods behind the strip mall making out to the flavor of Juicy Fruit, lighting things on fire, and playing with Rich Ianucci’s father’s pistol—was a paradise for Washington’s wealthiest.
It’s all green rolling hills between Middleburg and the foothills of the Blue Ridge. The land is parceled out into huge estates, dotted with quaint hyperexpensive towns where the economy depends on lunching ladies and cute bric-a-brac. The whole place is Anglophile in the extreme: social life revolves around the Saturday fox hunts and taverns with names like the Old Bull & Bush, where George Washington invariably did something or other. It’s where Annie grew up. And after we’d been going out for a few months, she took me to her dad’s estate.
If I may indulge in a little real estate pornography: twenty-five hundred acres overlooking the James River. An eight-bedroom 1790s Colonial mansion. Six-thousand-bottle wine cellar. Twenty-stall stable. Indoor and outdoor pools, and tennis courts, rugby field, pistol range, skeet and driving ranges, softball field with dugouts and a scoreboard and bleachers (because what’s the point of a backyard game of ball unless you have seating for sixty spectators?). I could go on.
Annie’s friend Jen from the office went out there for the weekend once, and she raved about it, so I was pretty excited. She’d gone on and on about Annie’s cool dad, the incredible chef, getting drunk on grands crus and having the run of Sir Larry’s private Xanadu.
The driveway was easily a half a mile long. In front of the house, Annie and I stepped out of my Jeep with the peeling paint and turned to see six black-and-tan Dobermans galloping toward us, covering the distance across the great lawn faster than seemed possible. Their mouths were moving as if they were barking, but there was no sound. It was scary, sure, but it was more eerie than anything else, seeing these sleek muscle torpedoes snapping their jaws but hearing nothing. It made me wonder if maybe I was just a little slow on the uptake, like maybe they’d gotten here already, and maybe I was already dead.
“Leave it,” a commanding voice said.
The dogs stopped immediately, five feet away, and sat. Their eyes remained fixed on me, and I pictured myself as a large, delicious spare rib. Lawrence Clark was a six-foot-four former fly half for England’s national rugby team (he earned his knighthood via rugby wins and charity work) with sandy hair and a perpetual tan. Today he was wearing overalls that appeared to be made of movers’ blankets and carrying what looked like a rolled-up piece of carpet remnant.
“Just doing a spot of training with the bitches,” he said. That’s when I noticed he was also carrying a whip. He kissed Annie on the cheek, looked over at the Jeep, then extended his hand to me. He took my measure for a long, uncomfortable minute.
Message received. Though I might have smugly pointed out it was a little late to lock that barn door, Sir Larry. Through my window I watched him on the lawn. He was wearing the rolled-up thing on his arm and screaming at and whipping the Dobermans as they gnashed and tore at it.
I couldn’t wait to see what he had in mind for me.
I tried to strike up a conversation about wine at dinner, which consisted of the three of us at a table built for twenty. “Wow,” I said, after my first sip. “Seems ’06 was a good year for Bordeaux?” I looked at the bottle of Mouton Rothschild on the table between us. I thought this was pretty passable fancy-people talk.
“I figured we’d go with something”—he looked me up and down—“approachable.” A smile that didn’t touch his eyes followed. Then the cauliflower on his plate suddenly demanded his attention.
I was starting to get an unmistakably frosty feeling from Sir Larry. This was not the guy Jen had described. Though I realized that it was probably a lot easier to have a “corking good time” with the old limey if you weren’t an arriviste who was banging his daughter. Maybe it was nothing; it’s hard to say anything in a Brit accent as tony as Sir Lawrence’s without its sounding condescending.
Annie didn’t help matters when, after I’d gone to bed that night in my room—it featured red and green stripes, antique illustrations of bearbaiting, and seven shelves of creepy antique dolls—she came knocking on my door. We got into some boy-girl high jinks, fell asleep in each other’s arms, and woke the same way.
I’m not complaining, of course, but it certainly made for an awkward situation come morning when we opened our drowsy eyes to find Sir Lawrence standing in the doorway, a Doberman and some other mean-looking beast at his feet.
“I wanted to let you know breakfast is ready,” he said.
“Oh, thanks, Daddy,” Annie said. She sat up and pulled the covers with her, revealing quite a bit of my naked legs. Any pajamas that had started the evening were in a pile on the floor.
Annie seemed oblivious to the fraught nature of the situation. “Is Sundance tacked up?” (I gathered this had something to do with a horse.)
“Yes,” he said, all the while drilling holes in me with his stare.
We had a busy afternoon around the estate, a little shooting and some riding (I aced sporting clays and fell off the horse, so we’ll call it a draw). Sir Lawrence and I had a moment alone just before Annie and I were about to leave for DC. She’d run back into the house to say good-bye to the maid.
Lawrence put his hand on my shoulder and, I guess just in case I was slow and hadn’t picked up what he’d been laying down all weekend, said, “I don’t know what your game is, but I don’t think you’re good for her. She seems to enjoy you for the moment, however. So—” He grimaced, as if swallowing something extremely unappetizing.
“Now, if you hurt her,” he went on, “even the slightest mistake, rest assured that I’ll track you down and I will crucify you.”
“All set!” Annie yelled. Clark’s tone changed in an instant when she appeared on the front steps.
“Does that sound reasonable?” he asked me, putting on a cheery mug for Annie.
“A little overkill, actually, but I think I get the gist.”
We left him, and as my trusty Jeep trundled down the endless driveway, Annie turned to me and asked, “What were you two talking about?”
I noticed one of the pooches off in a field lying on its belly and chewing contentedly on a scarecrow’s head.
“Hunting,” I said.
“Oh, good,” she said, and put a reassuring hand on my thigh. “He can be a little protective sometimes, but I think he’s warming up to you.”
CHAPTER SIX
HOWEVER MUCH I wanted to play nice with high society, there was still a little punk in me, and a little pride. So you know what I ultimately decided at the party at Chip’s? To hell with Sir Lawrence Clark. He was a lost cause anyway. The guy had me pegged from the get-go, and I had a few ideas percolating on how to get him off my back. I gave him a big wink across the room and headed out of the party with Walker.
The only man I really owed anything to was Davies, and I owed him everything: the fresh start, the job, the house, the chance to meet Annie. I’d do whatever Davies Group asked of me. If I stepped carefully and watched myself, I could stick with Walker on his midnight monkey business without betraying Annie. It was work, after all, official duty. At least that’s what I was telling myself as Walker murmured something ominous about Tina.
Should I wait up? Annie texted me.
Late night, hon. Work stuff. So sorry. Miss ya! I texted back. It was all technically true. Walker punched something into the Cadillac’s navigation system, and I pulled out. We drove in silence, except for the occasional snap of Walker chewing his fingernails and the cheery female voice telling us to “Continue. On. Wisconsin Avenue. For Two. Point. One Miles.”
I think we were in Maryland. We pulled off the highway near a strip of box stores and into a development called Foxwood Chase. It was one of those bulldozed patches of woodlands where the contractors built so quickly there was not a tree or a bush left standing, only houses circling a retaining pond that looked like a gravel pit. I could see empty houses, and empty lots beyond them, not uncommon out in the exurbs of DC. A lot of developers had gone under, a lot of houses had been foreclosed. It gave the whole place the feel of a ghost town.
Our chirping navigator directed me into a gated driveway. Walker leaned over from the passenger seat and waved at the little video camera beside the fence. Open sesame. We pulled up to a mock villa McMansion: columns, three-story entryway, spiral shrubs, the whole nine.
A bodybuilder type—young, maybe about 280 pounds—opened the door. He had a baby face and dimples and wore a wife-beater and a white Cleveland Indians baseball cap set at a rakish angle. He gave Walker one of those bro-style handshakes where you clasp fists and pound each other’s back. He gave me the hairy eyeball, at least until Walker said, “It’s cool, Squeak, I vouch.” Then the dimples were back in full effect as Squeak walked us inside.
I guess I, like many people, carry around a lot of preconceived notions about whorehouses. I’d pictured a Victorian mansion in New Orleans, an elegant, still-beautiful older madam, a lot of lace.
But the more I thought about it, the more this made sense: a four-thousand-square-foot white box of a house, unfurnished except for black leather couches and a sixty-inch plasma TV. I’d assumed there’d be a bar to hang out at, or maybe some kind of strip club setup where I could keep my eye on Walker without doing anything that would make me hate myself too much. This was VIP style, however, and there was nowhere to hide. Reluctantly, I took a spot on the couch.
A seatmate joined me, promptly entering my personal space and introducing herself: “My name is Natasha. I am from Russia.”
“Very original.”
“I thank you.”
Where to begin with Natasha? She had a fake-diamond Monroe—a piercing in her upper lip meant to approximate Marilyn’s beauty mark. She wore mostly glitter makeup and what I will generously call a dress. She started to get a little handsy, but I wasn’t too worried about myself. I might have to make a scene or storm out, but there wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to play moose-and-squirrel with this one. I didn’t care what Marcus said. I had to draw the line somewhere.
Curled up next to Walker was a pigtailed Korean girl whose name I didn’t catch. I began referring to her in my troubled internal monologue as Hello Kitty. Both girls were fresh off the boat; you could almost still smell the packaging. Kitty couldn’t hold a candle to Natasha’s trashiness; she was actually quite pretty and naive-looking. By luck I had gotten the girl who completely skeeved me out. No tem
ptations.
I was playing good defense on Natasha as she walked two fingers of her left hand up my thigh, and I actually thought I might make it out of this with skin and soul intact. I could almost calm down.
Except for the kid in the kitchen. He was slight and young, maybe just college age, and paid no attention to what was happening in the living room (the house had one of those echoing open floor plans). Sitting on a stool at the kitchen island with a dead man’s stare, utterly absorbed by his cell phone, he tapped the keys nonstop with his thumb, and with the other hand picked at acne scars on his cheeks. Every time I managed to ignore him, something diverting would come through the ether to his cell and he would explode with a girlish titter that filled the house and set my short hairs on end. The kid couldn’t have weighed more than 110 pounds but somehow he scared me more than Squeak did.
Natasha seemed to have grown an octopus’s worth of arms. The kid giggled again. Just when I thought things couldn’t possibly get any creepier, Squeak walked over to the stereo and put in a CD. The strings swelled through giant speakers. It took me a moment to place the music: it was from Dusty in Memphis, “Just a Little Lovin’.”
Somehow that gave the whole scene the quality of a nightmare. That was it. I was out. It wasn’t worth losing my license to practice (I’d passed the Virginia bar in February) or betraying Annie. The question was whether I could escape without completely scotching all my work with Walker so far.
As I was rising to leave, some conversation-without-words eye contact took place between Walker and Squeak. Squeak nodded and reached for a lacquered box on the side table. I had a bad feeling about what lay inside.
And I guess it speaks to my unhappiness with the whole situation that I was relieved when he pulled out drug paraphernalia: a glass bowl.