Official Privilege

by P. T. Deutermann

  “I have a man who comes in periodically and gives it a haircut. Yes, put that there; that’s fine. But I forgot the glasses. I’ll be right back.”

  She went back to the house while Dan looked around. The garden and yard were not as long as his, but the trees were more stately, the lawn trimmed, and the flowers identifiable as such. Two whitewashed brick walls on either side led down to a third wall and gate, probably into an alley behind. A building visible over the top of the back wall had scaffolding all the way up to its roof.

  Georgetown even felt different from Old Town. Probably the absence of tourists, he decided. He had read that although it was now the province of the rich and famous in Washington, much of Georgetown had originally been a slum, something Old Town had never been.

  What tourists there were in Georgetown stayed down around the bars and restaurants along M Street, while in Old Town, they were everywhere, often peering right into peoples’ living room windows because the house fronts were often right on the street. He watched Grace come back down the steps with two wineglasses and an ice bucket. She was appropriately named, he thought, and her outfit reinforced the notion that she was indeed a woman—a long-legged one at that. She put an ice bucket and glasses on the glass-topped wrought-iron table, swept a few acorns off her chair, and sat down.

  “There. You can tell I entertain a lot. But I did get the wine bottle open. If you would do the honors, kind sir.”

  Dan poured the wine, gave her a glass, and then tipped a salut. She responded and their eyes met for a fraction of a second longer than necessary. She looked down first.

  “So, Commander,” she said, a hint of a smile on her face.

  “So, indeed, Miss. Grace Ellen Snow. This is a nice wine.”

  She laughed at the allusion to their previous discussion about wine critics.

  “So it is; I wasn’t expecting your call until tomorrow night.”

  Dan nodded. “I was out on the river,” he said. “I thought of you and decided to call.”

  “Just like that?” Her voice was softer now.

  He looked away, recalling the serenity of the river, even when it was up and running. “No, not just like that,” he said. “I usually have a ghost to wrestle with whenever I consider speaking to a woman who … who—”

  “Who is not your wife.”

  “Yes. Well, see, my wife is … gone. That was the funny thing out there on the river this afternoon, and the reason I decided to go through with it. Calling you, I mean. My mind kept making comparisons, kept saying —well, all sorts of things. But there was this refrain that kept invading: Claire is gone.” His throat had become annoyingly dry. “Claire is gone,” he whispered, softer.

  “Oh hell.”

  His eyes suddenly misted over and he put down his glass. He was aware of his surroundings at the periphery of his vision, but straight ahead he could see nothing.

  He was afraid to look at Grace, afraid even to breathe. He felt like he had just made ‘a cosmic discovery: Claire was gone, gone for good, gone away, gone so damn far away that even now, as he tried to capture her face, her figure, to recall anything at all about her, he discovered that all the loving images had escaped from his mind’s eye in one great rush while he wasn’t looking.

  He stared, blinking, unseeing, at the green lawn and the blurred pattern of the brick wall, trying hard to reconstruct her outline in the soft evening light, but failing. For two or three minutes, he sat there, lost in this sudden onslaught of emotions, emotions he couldn’t define, except that they were tinged with a little shame. Finally, he took a deep breath and came back to the garden.

  “Sorry about that,” he whispered, and then cleared his throat and took a gulp of wine, nearly choking on it.

  “I didn’t mean to—I’m not sure what just happened there. Maybe I’d better go.”

  But Grace was shaking her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Listen, I’m glad you called. You should have seen me, Dan, running around the house like a chicken with its head cut off. Look at me, I even put on makeup. Look at me.”

  He finally looked at her, and he saw something soft in her face he hadn’t seen before—luminescent softness in her eyes. Green eyes, he realized. She has green eyes.

  I knew that. He suddenly realized that she understood what had just happened.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “sometimes I think life has to turn our heads before we see clearly. You’ve been at the back of my mind since last Friday night.” He nodded a silent “me, too,” but said nothing, not quite willing to trust his voice.

  “I’m not really sure how to act, Dan. I had all the flirt burned out of me after the fifth or sixth time Rennie beat me up. And yet, I’m a middle-aged female who knows damned well that time is short. Oh, shit, this is hard. What should we do?”

  “Well,” he said finally, finding his voice, “we could drink some of this wine, this nice wine.”

  She laughed again, a clear exhalation of relief and humor and shared enjoyment. He laughed with her, shaking his head as if to chase back the treacherous emotional shadows. They spent the next two hours talking about themselves, working on the wine, and beginning to explore the edges of a relationship, both of them being very careful to probe neither too deeply nor too soon. After dark, they walked down Wisconsin Avenue to one of the few small bistros that was open on a Monday night for dinner, where they continued the exploration, checking the fit of their interests, touching tentatively on politics and religion, doing better on his love of history and her fascination with unraveling complex crimes, his expectations of what his command tour would be like, and his recent realization that his time in the Navy after his long-sought command tour would look a lot like the time leading up to it.

  She tried to explain some of her reasons for going to work for the government, based in part on her having been handed all the advantages of money along with a first-class education. He tried to put a better face on the reasons he had stayed in the Navy. They paced themselves, becoming surer that the feeling was worth pursuing, but being very careful to make small moves.

  After dinner, they walked back through the quiet streets of the neighborhood to her house, admiring the rich variety of architecture and means on display in the genteel rows of mostly brick houses. They walked the last block to her house in silence, content that they had talked enough for a while. When they reached her front steps, he felt a tinge of uncertainty while she unlocked the door, but he then took her hand in both of his.

  “Hey, hand,” he said, not looking at her face, “this is the moment when the boy usually tries to kiss the girl, but the boy’s still not sure of what he’s doing, and he desperately doesn’t want to make any mistakes, so he’s gonna just say good night and run home to figure out when he can see you again, okay? Will you pass all that on to your owner for me?”

  She smiled in the soft glow of the porch lights and then took hold of his hand.

  “Hey, hand,” she said, “make it very soon, all right?”

  He grinned at her and walked to his car, waved once as she went inside, and then addressed himself to the difficult business of getting the Suburban out of the driveway without hitting any of the densely parked cars.

  As he drove out of Georgetown, he realized that they had spent an entire evening together without once mentioning the Hardin thing. Maybe the EAs were right: Maybe that mess was better off in the moldering bureaucratic backwaters of the Washington Navy Yard.

  And—he had her parking permit.

  malachi awoke tuesday morning with another world class hangover. Driving back over to Virginia the night before had turned into a traffic nightmare when two carloads of Arlington Vietnamese had sideswiped each other on the Virginia side of the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge and then proceeded to stage a gunfight. The ensuing Olympic-size traffic jam had taken ninety minutes to clear out. By the time he returned to Capitol Hill on the Metro, he was in a decidedly foul humor. Coming out of the Eastern Market Metro station, he had seen three youn
g men sizing him up as a possible mark in the early-evening darkness. He had crossed the street and walked right at them, hands open at his sides, daring them with a belligerent, flat-eyed stare to start something.

  Then he bowled right through them on the sidewalk, eliciting a chorus of “Hey, man” from the startled men.

  He had gone right to the bourbon when he got in and proceeded to drink himself insensible right there in the kitchen. He woke up on the floor of the second-story hallway, his head on fire and his stomach tied up in a bilious knot. He spent the first five minutes wondering how he had managed those stairs without breaking his neck, and the second five minutes trying to organize a sufficient number of muscles and nerves to make it to the bathroom. It was nearly two more hours before he could do much more than sit up straight, and even then he needed some whiskey in his coffee to get color vision back. He sat at the kitchen table, his eyes mostly closed, nursing the coffee, a cigarette smoking in a saucer, his head resenting the noise the refrigerator made, waiting for the whiskey to do something. He could feel each heartbeat in his temples.

  Curiously, he remembered a lecture on alcoholism he had been forced to attend by the battalion commander during his last year in the Army. This surprisingly tough-looking chaplain had given a talk on the stages of alcoholism, and Malachi, along with the other dozen or so troops in the audience, had been able to fix himself with quick accuracy on the slippery slope the chaplain was describing. He also remembered that the sergeants had all retired to the club for a drink while they talked about the lecture. Malachi had gone with them. He was an officer, but he was far closer to the sergeants than he was to the other officers, especially after Vietnam, where the sergeants had made him very nearly a rich man. But what he really remembered was what the chaplain had said about the root causes of alcoholism: The booze is addictive, and it will eventually overwhelm your life, but there is usually something profoundly wrong in your life that the addiction for booze itself feeds on. Well hell, he thought as he sat with his head on his arms on the kitchen table, we all know what that problem is, don’t we? I got castrated by a German whore, who also threw in a wonderful new voice and some scars that scare children and make dogs bark at me.

  But instinctively he knew it was deeper than that, that his entire life after falling in with Monroney and An gelo and the other guys in Saigon had been an increasingly empty experience, despite all the money. By the time he’d spent his first year in Germany, he had become aware that the CID had been onto him and some of the scams going down there, and maybe even before, in Nam. But the sergeants’ mafia was slick and wise in the ways of the Army, and there were just too many insiders at work for the CID ever to put a case together, especially against a captain in the Military Police Corps.

  His assignment to Mcnair after the incident in Germany had been a deliberate warehousing job, under the guise of a humane convalescent assignment. He had been in titular charge of the gate guard details that protected generals’ row and all those bright-faced up-and- corners who drove through the gates every morning on their way to the National War College. Yeah, he got some disability retirement, and yeah, he never got caught. But they knew. During those last months, he had begun to hear the whispering behind his back:

  There’s more to that guy than just the horrible incident in the bar.

  Where most Vietnam vets got respect when, leather-faced and bedecked with ribbons, they walked into the club, Malachi got furtive, curious looks. He had been vastly relieved to get his disability discharge papers, and he had even opted out of having any sort of traditional retirement ceremony. The battalion commander had seemed vastly relieved.

  Since then, his life in Washington, first working with Monroney and then for himself, had been profitable and occasionally even interesting.

  Living entirely alone, he had absorbed himself in the mechanics of being a shadow-land contractor, adapting readily to the mechanics of his trade even as he struggled to fashion a life after hours, increasingly with the help of I.W.

  Harper. But where was the future? He knew in his heart what kind of future that empty Harper bottle promised: His own father had dissolved in a bottle, leaving the boy Malachi to finish high school as a teenaged foster child. Now he had a small retirement pension and enough money stashed here and there never to have to work again, but what was he going to do with it? Having shoveled shit for some of the great men of Washington for almost twenty years, he was still little better than an enlisted man, the eternal snuffy, paid to take out the garbage, thrown a couple of bills by the fat cats in their thousand-dollar suits. She was a great piece of ass, Malachi, but go back up there and see if I left a rubber on the floor, okay? It’s a no-fingerprint sort of thing, Malachi; you know how it is.

  Before the Hardin problem, the quality of his life had been measured in degrees of emptiness and loneliness; he did what he did because there was a demand for his services and because that’s what he did for a living. He could appreciate the circular nature of his rut, but it was a rut that seemed made for him, especially after Germany.

  But now, for the first time, he was feeling a sense of threat, a tingling of unease along the ratlike nerve bundle he had developed since throwing in with the sergeants in Saigon, that over-the-shoulder sixth sense

  Monroney was always talking about. Up to this point, everything he had done since leaving the Army had been on instructions. Anyone wanted to come after him, there was always a principal or a high-priced assistant to offer up. But this time, with this Hardin thing, he had the sense that the principal and his horse-holder might be working on offering him up, maybe before somebody started closing in. It didn’t help that this was murder. Okay, yeah, they said they had the investigation bottled up.

  And yeah, there was no direct connection to be made between Malachi and the Hardin killing in Philadelphia—except for the accident on 23rd Street. Well, mostly an accident—he hadn’t really meant to kill her, not until she had shown him that glittering, man-hating stare, that stare Inge had as she drove the broken bottle-into his groin. Always cutting, these women. He looked down at the puckered, still-red scars across the back of his right hand.

  Try as he might, even the Harper couldn’t get An gelo’s warning out of his mind, and he realized that there were going to be some more of these binges until he took care of it. That little voice was still whispering in his ear, telling him to get out of it: Get out of town, use your fake IDs and your contacts in the shadow world to chuck it, get clear of it, before these god damned officers get their shit together and think of something. But he knew he wouldn’t do it; he’d been doing these bastards’ bidding for his entire life, even when he was supposedly one of them, but this time he wasn’t going to just salute and hop right to it, backing deferentially out the door, saying, Yes, sir, no, sir, three bags full, sir. Just once, he wanted to kick their asses, and he wanted them to know he had kicked their asses.

  Then maybe he would beat feet, fold his tents, and steal away into the desert night.

  He got up and went to the refrigerator, got out some ice cubes and cracked them into bits using a heavy steel mess-hall soup spoon and the palm of his hand. He filled a glass with cracked ice and then turned it amber with bourbon from a fresh bottle of Harper. He lit a cigarette and sat back down again and sipped the icy

  liquor. Maybe he ought to preempt the bastards. Maybe put an anonymous call into the D.C. cops, tell ‘em that they needed to go talk to the great man, because, here’s the thing: He had been doing Lieutenant Hardin’s sister.

  So what? All right, try this: Lieutenant Hardin was iced because he was going to blow the whistle, going to embarrass the great man for porking his sister. What could the captain do about that? He couldn’t point to Malachi without admitting they had hired him. And even if they did that, there was no evidence. Malachi could simply do the armadillo, deny everything. And Angelo sure as hell wouldn’t talk, even supposing the cops could walk it back all the way to the Guides in South Philly. But they
couldn’t even do that, because nothing had been done directly.

  Everything had been done through intermediaries, contractors, untraceable cash, untraceable phone calls, and discussions over dinner in a place where retirement-minded cops did not venture—the Washington way. The cops might eventually put together the whole story, but without evidence or a confession, they could not indict or convict.

  Or maybe do the Washington thing—expose the whole sorry story to the cold light of day. Give it the Washington Post test. Leak a little.

  Malachi had been around Washington long enough to know that if even the outlines of the story got out in town, the great man wouldn’t remain a great man for very long, because the Navy, embarrassed by the charges and the inevitable calls for an investigation, would deep-six his ass, and maybe the captain along with him. And if Malachi could separate them from their official privilege and federal power, then they would no longer be in a position to make some calls and maybe line up another contractor to come take care of their Malachi problem.

  They’d he distracted, tainted with a whiff of scandal, retired, but not so honorably, and definitely not invited to serve on all those fancy Beltway bandit boards or to become consultants. Then they’d be down on the rug with him and the other fleas, just another pair of retired military stiffs in Washington, grasping for whatever crumbs might come their way from the government’s table. Hell, once they were down on his level, he might even have some fun with them.

  Malachi mulled over that engaging prospect but then rejected it. He could hear Monroney: Even that’s too direct, Malachi; that’s not how you do shit in this town.

  The better way was to drop a dime all right, only play the real Washington game, just call the cops and simply ask a rhetorical question: What was the connection between a certain Washington admiral’s illicit affair with It . Elizabeth Hardin and her brother’s getting snuffed right after the sister died? Don’t name any names; let the cops dig for it. Because once the cops came asking questions, the word would get out on the EA network pretty quick, and then the great man and his captain would have other things to think about than sending someone after Malachi. Yeah, that’s how to do it—not once removed, but twice removed. And now is when to do it. He got up to refresh his glass of ice. He needed to get his brain in high gear so he could figure out precisely whom to call. Hell, he was already feeling better.