O'Farrell's Law

by Brian Freemantle

  By which time he would be fifty, O’Farrell calculated, reversing the Ford back into its garage. Retirement age; another word association from the previous day. Not slippers and pipe and walking-the-dog sort of retirement. He’d have to wait another ten years for that, patiently reviewing and assessing the Plans Directorate finances full-time. But spared that other function, that other function he increasingly felt unable to perform. Dear God, how much he wanted to be spared that again! What were his chances? Impossible to compute. The last time had been more than a year ago—the first occasion he had felt nervous and hesitated and almost made a disastrous mistake—and between that assignment and the one before there had been an interval of almost three years. Always possible, then, that he wouldn’t be called upon again: possible but unlikely, he thought, forcing the objectivity. So why didn’t he simply quit? Go to Petty and Erickson and tell them how he felt and ask to be taken off the active roster? He knew there were others, although naturally he wasn’t aware of their names. Not as good as he was, according to Petty, but O’Farrell put that down to so much obvious bullshit, the sort the controller doubtless said to them all.

  So why didn’t he just quit? Had his great-grandfather ever backed down? O’Farrell wondered, attempting to answer one question with another. Bullshit of his own now. Until these handshaking doubts, O’Farrell had always found it easy to consider himself a law officer like his great-grandfather, merely obeying different rules to match different circumstances. Now he acknowledged that if he made the analogy with objective honesty, what he did and what his ancestor had done in the 1860s were hugely different. So that answer didn’t wash. What did? O’Farrell didn’t know, not completely. There was a combination of reasons, not sufficient by themselves but enough when he assembled them all together, the way the individual parts of an automobile engine came together into something that made functional sense. Different though his job might be from that of his great-grandfather, he was enforcing justice. It was something very few people could do. (Would want to do, echoed a doubting voice in his mind.) And he genuinely did not want to back down, submit to an emotion he could only regard as weakness, although weakness wasn’t really what it was.

  There was also the money to consider, reluctant though he was to bring it into any equation because he found the self-criticism (blood money? bounty hunter?) too easily disturbing. For what he did he was paid $100,000 a year, $50,000 tax-free channeled through CIA-maintained offshore accounts. The system enabled him to live in this historically listed house in Alexandria and help John now that he’d quit the airline to go back to school for his master’s. It enabled him and Jill to fly up to Chicago whenever they felt like it to visit Ellen and the boy.

  He wouldn’t quit, O’Farrell determined. He’d get a grip on himself and stop constantly having such damned silly doubts and see out his remaining four years. If he were called upon to take up an assignment, he’d carry it out as successfully and as undetectably as he’d carried out all the others in the past. Not that many, in fact. Just five. Each justified. Each guilty. Each properly sentenced, albeit by an unofficial tribunal. And each performed—albeit unofficially again—in the name of the country of which he was a patriot.

  Jill’s car was smaller than his, a Toyota, and it did not take O’Farrell as long to clean as the Ford. He did it just as meticulously, seeking rust that he could not find, and regained the house before the tourist invasion.

  O’Farrell was relieved by the decision he’d reached. And his headache had gone, like his inner tension.

  O’Farrell and Jill drank coffee while they waited for eight o’clock Arizona time, knowing that John would be waiting for their call. In the event it was Beth who answered, because John was upstairs with Jeff. O’Farrell, immediately concerned, asked what was wrong with his grandson, and Beth said “nothing,” and then John came on the line to repeat the assurance. He thanked O’Farrell for the last check but said he was embarrassed to take it. O’Farrell told his son not to be so proud and to keep a record so that John could pay him back when he got his degree and after that the sort of job he wanted. It was not arranged that they call their daughter in Chicago until the afternoon and when they did, they got her answering machine, which they didn’t expect because Ellen knew the time they would be calling; it was the same every weekend. Always had been and particularly after the divorce. They left a message that they had called and hoped everything was all right and tried once more before going out that evening and got the machine again, so they left a second recording.

  “That’s not like her,” said Jill as they drove into town. They used her car because, being smaller, it was easier to park.

  “It’s happened before,” said O’Farrell. It had become so ingrained over the years in his professional life not to overrespond (certainly never to panic) that O’Farrell found it impossible to react differently in his private life. Or did he?

  “Why didn’t she call us? She knows we like to speak every week.”

  “There’s all day tomorrow,” O’Farrell pointed out, going against his own need for regularity. He wished Jill had adjusted better to the collapse of Ellen’s marriage; she found it difficult to believe their daughter preferred to make her own life with her son in faraway Chicago rather than come back to Alexandria or somewhere close, where they would be near, caring for her.

  “I wonder if something has happened to Billy,” said Jill, in sudden alarm.

  “If something had happened to Billy, she would have gotten a message through to us.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “You’re getting upset for no reason.” Routine sometimes had its disadvantages, he thought.

  There was some roadwork on Memorial Bridge but the delay wasn’t too bad and they still got into town in good time, because O’Farrell always allowed for traffic problems. He found a parking place at once on 13th Street and as they walked down toward Pennsylvania he said, “We’ve time for a drink, if you like.”

  Jill looked at him curiously. “If you want one.”

  “It’s practically an hour before the curtain,” O’Farrell pointed out. “The alternative is just to sit and wait.”

  “Okay,” she said, without enthusiasm.

  They went to the Round Robin room at the Willard and managed seats against the wall, beneath the likenesses of people like Woodrow Wilson and Walt Whitman and Mark Twain and even a droop-mustached Buffalo Bill Cody, all of whom had used it in the past. O’Farrell got the drinks—martini for himself, white wine for Jill—and stood looking at the drawings. Had his great-grandfather encountered William Cody? he wondered. The martini could have been better.

  There had been a lot of noise from a group on the far side of the small room when they’d entered and it became increasingly louder, breaking out into a full-blown argument. There were five people, two couples and a man by himself; the arguers appeared to be one of the couples and the unattached man was attempting to intervene and placate both of them. O’Farrell heard “fuck” and “bastard” like everyone else in me room and the barman said, “Easy now: let’s take it easy, eh folks?” They ignored him. The would-be mediator put his hand on the arguing man’s arm and was shoved away, hard, so that he staggered back toward the bar and collided with another customer, spilling his drink. The barman called out, “That’s enough, okay!” and the woman said, “Oh, my God!” and began to cry. O’Farrell gauged the distance to the only exit against the nearness of the disturbance and decided that the shouting group was closer. Better to wait where they were than attempt to leave and risk getting involved. The man who’d staggered back apologized and gestured for the spilled drink to be replaced and went back to his group, jabbing with outstretched fingers at the chest of the man who’d pushed him. Waste of effort, thought O’Farrell: at least three inches from the point in the chest that would have brought the man down, and the carotid in the neck was better exposed anyway. The bridge of the nose, too. And the temple and the lower rib and the inner ankle. The killing press
ure points that he’d been trained so well how to use—but only in extreme emergency, because the absolutely essential rule was always to avoid possible recognition by an intended victim—reeled off in his mind until O’Farrell consciously stopped the reflection. It was prohibited for him to become involved in any sort of dispute or altercation, to attract the slightest attention, official or otherwise.

  “Why doesn’t someone do something!” Jill demanded, beside him. “Look at her, poor woman!”

  “Someone will have sent for security,” O’Farrell said, and as he spoke two uniformed guards came into the room and began herding the group away, ignoring their protests.

  Jill shuddered and said, “That was awful!”

  “Embarrassing, that’s all,” O’Farrell said. “They were drunk.”

  “I didn’t like it.” Jill shuddered again.

  It wasn’t being a very successful day, O’Farrell thought. He said, “Do you want another drink?”

  “No,” she said, at once. “Surely you don’t, either?”

  “No,” said O’Farrell. There would easily have been time. “We might as well go, then.”

  They emerged from the hotel through the main Pennsylvania Avenue exit and immediately saw the group continuing their argument. The crying woman was still weeping and her hair was disarrayed. The other woman was trying to pull her male companion away and he was making weak protests, clearly anxious to get out of the situation, but not wanting to be seen to do so. As O’Farrell and his wife looked, the man who appeared to be at the center of the dispute lashed out; the disheveled woman somehow didn’t see the movement and the open-handed blow caught her fully in the side of the face, sending her first against the hotel wall and then sprawling across the sidewalk. When she tried to get up, he hit her again, keeping her down. Neither of the other two men attempted to intrude. One allowed his companion to pull him away, and the other, the one who had made an effort in the bar, visibly shrugged off responsibility.

  “Do something!” Jill insisted. “Somebody do something! He’s going to hit her again.”

  The man did, and this time the woman stayed down. Distantly O’Farrell thought he heard the wail of a police siren. He took Jill’s arm, forcibly leading her back into the hotel toward the long corridor that bisected the building to F Street.

  “We can’t walk away!” Jill said. “She could be hurt.”

  “It’s okay,” O’Farrell said. “It’s all being taken care of.”

  “What are you talking about!”

  “Didn’t you hear the sirens?” She’d expected him to intervene, he knew. And was disappointed that he hadn’t.

  “No!”

  “I did. They’re coming.”

  On the pavement outside, on F Street, Jill stopped, head to one side. “I still don’t hear anything.”

  “They’ll have gotten there by now: police, ambulance, everyone.” O’Farrell wondered why he was shaking, and why his hands were wet, as well. Jill would think him weak, a runaway coward.

  “He could have killed her.”

  “No,” O’Farrell said.

  “How do you know?”

  How do I know! Because I’m an acknowledged and recognized expert, O’Farrell thought: that’s what I do! He said, “It was one of those lovers’ things, matrimonial. An hour from now they’ll be in the sack, making up.”

  “Can you imagine anyone capable of hurting another human being like that!”

  “No,” O’Farrell said again, more easily now because he’d learned to field questions like that. “I can’t imagine it.”

  The show was at the National Theater so they cut down 14th Street, pausing at the Marriott comer to look back along the opposite block. O’Farrell saw, relieved, that the ambulance and police vehicles were there. “See?” he said, snatching the small victory. The fighting couple were side by side now, the woman shaking her head in some denial or refusal, the man with his arm protectively around her shoulder.

  “I can’t imagine that, either,” Jill said.

  “Probably even turns them on.”

  The play was a regional theater company’s far too experimental performance of Oedipus that had been under-rehearsed and mounted too soon. O’Farrell insisted on their going to the bar during intermission—switching to gin and tonic this time, because he wasn’t prepared to risk the martinis—and when they went back into the auditorium a lot of people, practically an entire row at the rear of the orchestra, hadn’t bothered to return. O’Farrell wished he and Jill hadn’t, either. Throughout, Jill sat pulled away from him, against the far arm of her seat.

  Afterward, certainly without sufficient thought, O’Farrell suggested they eat, and at once Jill said, “Ellen might have called.”

  In the car she continued to sit away from him, as she had in the theater. Neither spoke until they’d crossed the river again, back into Virginia.

  “It wasn’t very good, was it?”

  “Dreadful.”

  “So much for the Post review.” An altogether bad day, O’Farrell thought again.

  “I still don’t care,” Jill blurted suddenly.

  “Care about what?”

  “If it were a lovers’ quarrel or what die hell it was: I couldn’t understand no one going to help that woman.”

  It was the nearest she’d come to an outright accusation, he guessed. It wasn’t a good feeling, believing Jill despised him. He said, “It would have been ridiculous for me to have become involved. He might have had a gun, a knife, anything. You really think I should have risked being killed?”

  “I wasn’t drinking of you,” Jill said, unconvincingly.

  Overly defensive, O’Farrell said. “There’s you to worry about, and John and everyone in Phoenix to worry about, and Ellen and Billy to worry about. You think I’m going to endanger so many people I love!” Hadn’t he endangered them too many times? he asked himself.

  “It just upset me, mat’s all.”

  “Forget it.”

  “I’m sorry. I know you’re right. You’re always right.”

  “I said forget it.” What would she have thought if he had gene in, reducing the bullying bastard to blubbering jelly? Another preposterous reflection: he never entered an unarmed combat training session—and he still went through two a month—without die prior injunction that his expertise was strictly limited to what he did professionally and should never be employed in any other circumstance.

  Ellen’s call was waiting on their machine and he let Jill return it, very aware of her need. He sat opposite her in die living room, near the bookshelves, smiling in expectation of his wife’s smile of relief at whatever explanation Ellen gave. But a smile didn’t come.

  Instead, in horror, Jill exclaimed, “What!”

  There was no way O’Farrell could hear Ellen’s reply but his wife apparently cut their daughter off in the middle, telling the girl to wait for O’Farrell to get on an extension.

  O’Farrell actually ran to the den, snatching up the telephone to say, “What the hell is it!”

  “Nothing,” said Ellen, in a too obvious attempt at reassurance. “No, that’s not quite true. It’s important, but Billy isn’t involved, isn’t in any trouble.”

  “What!” repeated O’Farrell.

  “It was a special meeting of the PTA today,” their daughter said. “Very special. All the parents and all the teachers. Like I said, Billy isn’t involved; he says he hasn’t been approached and we’ve talked it through and I believe him. But there have been quite a few seizures, so there’s no doubt that drugs are in circulation in the school.”

  “What sort of drugs?” Jill asked.

  “Everything,” Ellen said. “Even crack. Heroin, too.”

  “Billy’s not nine years old yet!” O’Farrell said.

  “Nancy Reagan sought no-drug pledges from nine-year-olds,” Ellen reminded them. “And no one’s gotten to Billy yet.”

  “Get out of Chicago,” Jill implored. “Come back somewhere around here, near to us.”
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br />   “You telling me it’s any better in Washington?”

  “You’d be safer here.”

  “We’re not in any danger here. You asked me where I’d been, and I told you. If I’d imagined this sort of reaction, I might have lied, to spare you the worry.”

  “We’ll come up next weekend,” Jill announced.

  There was a question in her voice directed toward O’Farrell on the extension and he said, “Yes, we’ll come up.”

  “What for?”

  “Because we want to,” said her mother decisively. “We haven’t been up for a long time; you know that.”

  “A month,” Ellen corrected. “I’m not going to escalate this into a bigger drama than it is, Mother; let Billy imagine it’s some big deal that’ll attract a lot of family attention if he tries it.”

  “We won’t escalate anything,” Jill promised. “We just want to come up. See how you are. That’s all.”

  “I’m fine. Really I’m fine.”

  “Please let us come up, Ellen,” O’Farrell said, requesting rather than insisting.

  “You know you don’t have to ask,” the girl said, softening.

  “You sure Billy’s all right?”

  “Positive.”

  “What’s happening to the people doing it? The dealers?” O’Farrell demanded.

  “There haven’t been any major arrests yet. Just kids, pushing it to make money to buy more stuff for themselves.”

  My beautiful country—the country of which I’m proud to be a patriot—being eroded internally by this cancer, O’Farrell thought. He said, “So what is going to be done?”

  “That was the purpose of the meeting: telling us how to look out for signs. We’ve set up a kind of parents’ watch committee.”