They lay in bed, Tashmo drifting off to sleep. Shirl was bundled under covers, as she always was when naked in this room. She was talking about the problem with the car, the truck, the starter and the brakes, the trip to Generoso’s, Nigel, Mandy, and the car seats, sounding very far away.
Tashmo had a crazy thought, lying there. What if Lydia Felker had called Shirl? What if Lydia had told Shirl the whole story, the old affair, all of it? Was this why his wife was so on edge?
Shirl was up and busy. She copied Nigel’s number from her Palm Pilot, reaching to the night table, holding the covers to cover her breasts, like if she wasn’t careful he might see one. She brought the phone to Tashmo and he dialed.
Nigel taught a seminar on plagiarism at UMaryland. Tashmo didn’t like professors as a group and wasn’t wild about Britons either, except for Winston Churchill, who seemed like an okay guy. Tashmo had told the guests at Mandy’s wedding that Nigel taught a course in plagiarism, rather than on. Nigel, who was drunk, got pissed, saying that in meant he was teaching how, whereas on meant that he was deconstructing. The number rang somewhere in the District.
Nigel here. Kindly leave a message at the tone and I’ll return your call.
Tashmo waited for the tone. “Hi, Nigel, it’s your father-in-law, Sunday around six. I’m calling because we really need the car seats first thing tomorrow and I figure you don’t need them, since you dumped your family like the scumbag punk you are, and three weeks is probably too soon for you to have new kids with someone else, I’m assuming, so kindly drop the car seats at the Goulds’. You remember Bo and Leah from the wedding. They live down the street, the brick house on the corner, number forty-one. Don’t let us down, okay?”
The pickup started in the driveway.
Shirl said, “Hallelujah,” and threw it in reverse.
They took Laurel Road to the Balt-Wash. Tashmo made Shirl drive so that she could feel the leftward drag for herself and better describe it to Generoso.
He said, “Brake.”
She braked.
“Feel it?”
“No.”
“It’s like an aaagh. Tell him that. Try again.”
She tried it. She didn’t feel it.
He said, “I swear it was doing it before.”
It was dark. They were southbound on the Beltway.
“Try it now.”
She tried it.
“Feel anything?”
“A pain in the ass.”
“Oh that’s funny, Shirl. That’s really really funny.”
Shirl pulled in front of Building 00 at Andrews Air Force Base. They sat in the no standing zone and still there was this bullshit with the car.
“You mean the truck,” he said. “It’s a truck, a pickup truck. Say truck.”
“I can’t walk home.”
“Nigel will bring the seats, you’ll see. Mandy can follow you to Generoso’s.”
“Nigel will let us down.”
The jet beyond the fence was fueled and floodlit, waiting. Tashmo knew that Nigel would let them down.
He said, “Get one of your girlfriends to follow you to Generoso’s. Jeanette can take the bus to Custis.”
“That’s just great,” said Shirl. “A girl alone on a Greyhound bus with a fat black eye. Knowing our luck, she’ll be captured by a documentary photographer and become a famous haunting icon of American disaffection. How embarrassing for her — it could devastate her self-esteem.”
Shirl.
“You and your book club,” Tashmo said. “Besides, there ain’t nothing wrong with our luck.”
7
As the youngest agent on the VP’s team, Vi drew the duty of driving Gretchen Williams. Vi would leave Tower South in a four-door Taurus from the government’s leased fleet of four-door Tauruses, pick up Gretchen at her house in Maryland, take her to meetings at Old Treasury downtown, at the Pentagon, or out in Beltsville with the planners. Vi didn’t hate the duty. It was long days of no thinking, of focus on the road, as Gretchen shot the rapids of official Washington, pestering the higher-ups for better gear, or more down time, or replacement agents. Gretchen rarely got the things she lobbied for, but she tried, which Vi thought was impressive.
Vi pulled into Gretchen’s driveway around four that Sunday afternoon. She saw Gretchen in the doorway of her house, fighting with her son. This went on for ten or fifteen minutes, then Gretchen came down the steps with her suit and duffel bag.
From Gretchen’s house to Beltsville was twenty minutes without traffic, and there wasn’t too much traffic going northbound. In the twenty minutes, Gretchen said two things: “Hey” (as in hello, when she first came down her driveway and got in) and “Hey” (as in Pass this asshole already, when Vi was caught behind a rattle-trap Toyota in the slow lane on the Beltway). Gretchen spent the ride looking at the VP’s schedule for the New Hampshire trip, a fat printout in a plain manila folder. This was another good thing about driving Gretchen Williams: not a lot of claustrophobic small talk in the car.
They pulled up to the gate of the Protection Campus, passed their creds out the window to the guard, who ran them through a reader and waited for approval on his screen. The buried sensor net around the grounds was undergoing routine maintenance. Vi saw the techies and the backhoe and the trench, the SWATs in ball caps drinking coffee, standing by the trench, everybody looking like they were making overtime. The guard handed the IDs through the window and stepped back to let them pass.
A short road up the hill, lawns on either side. Three cars at the crest, parked end to end along the shoulder, flashers flashing, two Tauruses and a big black Lincoln Town Car with a whiplash aerial. An agent saw them coming and stepped into the road. The agent was a black guy, Levi Harris, one of the Director’s bodyguards. The Director, being king of all the details, had the Town Car and a driver and a detail of his own, and Levi was the weekend guy apparently.
Gretchen passed the VP’s schedule to Vi. “Run this by the planners. I’ll meet you on the quad when the Director’s done with me.”
Gretchen got out, walked around the hood, saying not a thing to Levi Harris. The doors of the Town Car were opening. Legs were coming out, followed by the bodies of three people: Boone Saxon, the threat investigator, wearing a stiff raincoat and one of his plaid vests which always made Vi think of TV Christmas specials; Debbie Escobedo-Waas, the Director’s new gal Friday, so perky and gung-ho; and finally, slowly, like a bureaucratic Elvis, the Director himself, emerging from the car, pulling on his suit to straighten it.
They started down the road on foot. The Director walked in front, letting Debbie make his points, Gretchen on the other side of Debbie, Boone Saxon a step or two behind them. The driver in the Town Car swung out and followed them, pausing to let Levi Harris hop in the shotgun seat. The bosses walked slowly, talking more than walking, Levi and the driver following discreetly in the big car. Vi, uncertain of the etiquette in such situations, followed the Lincoln down the road and around the quad, Debbie talking, the Director interjecting here and there, Gretchen nodding as she walked, Boone Saxon listening in case his name was called.
The quad was a grass oval, big enough for soccer, browned over for the winter. The buildings on the quad — Threats, Plans, Movements, Psych Services, the Weapo School, and Technical Support — were of a set, if not a mind-set, red brick and cream steel, sculptural, abstract, like if you pushed them all together, they would fit and make a giant checkered cube.