"General Magruder," said Willard desperately, "I am here as a civilian consultant, and if there are any charges to be brought against me I have the right to have a lawyer present. I demand—"
"No you don't," Magruder corrected him. "What you do, Willard, is you volunteer to accompany these two, who are now ordered to Boiling Field."
"Boiling Field?" cried Willard. "That's Washington, D.C., isn't it? But—"
Magruder didn't tell him to shut up. He didn't have to; he looked at him, and the objections froze on Willard's tongue.
Outside I had heard the flutter of a chopper's rotors. As Magruder opened the door I saw it sitting there, the vanes turning slowly, the pilot peering out toward us.
"That's yours," said Magruder. "It'll take you to the airport where a MATS C-ill is waiting for you. Phase Two is about to begin."
When the old man, peering out of his apartment door, could hear no noises on the stairs he scuttled down to the mailbox. The precious brown envelope from the Welfare was there. He retrieved it, hurried back up the uncarpeted steps, let himself in, and snapped all three locks behind him. Now if he could just make it to the Seven-Eleven, he would have food and money for the next weeks. He did not even feel the faint puff of—something—that touched him; but as he turned he saw that his apartment had been ransacked! In just that minute, the old TV was gone, the shelves over the stove in the kitchen alcove had spilled out their sparse contents, the worn couch cushions were thrown on the floor. Moaning, he opened the door to his bedroom to see if his precious hoard of papers had been touched . . . There was someone in his bed. A man. With his throat cut and his eyes glassy; the face was contorted in fear and pain . . . and the face was his own.
24 August 1983
4:20 P.M. Mrs. Nyla Christophe Bowquist
I should have been on my way to Rochester for preconcert publicity spots. I couldn't leave Washington. The whole crazy day zipped past flick-blur, and my flight time came and passed, and Amy rebooked me on an evening flight, and I told her to cancel that one too. I did what I always did when hopelessly confused and shaken up and worried. I practiced. I propped up the piano reduction of the Tchaikovsky orchestra part in front of the television set, and I played the concert. Over and over; and all the while my eyes kept getting pulled to the screen, where every twenty minutes or so they repeated that insane broadcast from the night before and Dom— dear Dom, my love, my bedmate, my coadulterer Dom—was sitting up there with that greasy smile on his face, introducing that imitation President of the United States, saying those incredible things. Normal programming was abandoned, but there was no real news, either. The alien troops in New Mexico held inside their occupied areas, ours did not attack them, no one in Washington would say anything tangible.
I was not the only person wholly confused and disoriented in Washington that day. Even the weather was miserable; there was some kind of a hurricane working its way up the coast, and what we were getting out of it was muggy heat with spats of soapy rain.
The phone kept ringing. Jackie called twice. Both of the Rostropoviches called; so did Slavi's concertmaster, so did old Mrs. Javits—so did everybody who had any suspicion that I had a personal interest in Senator Dom DeSota, and none of them said anything embarrassing, and they were all very kind. Ten minutes after I hung up on each conversation I couldn't remember anything that had been said. The good thing was that the newspapers didn't call. That much of our secret was safe, Dom's and mine.
I spared a moment to be sorry for poor Marilyn DeSota, sitting in her penthouse with her phones going every minute, and wondering what the hell was going on with the man she was married to.
Yes, I spared a moment to be sorry for my lover's wife. It wasn't the first time. It was only the first time that I'd let myself dwell on it for more than maybe half a second—for as long as it took me to tell myself that Dom's infidelity was, after all, his responsibility and not mine.
I made myself believe that, usually.
And Amy kept coming in . . . with tea; with made-up questions about what dress I wanted to wear in Rochester, and did I remember I had a Newsweek interview scheduled for tomorrow morning in Rochester, and what the concert manager from Rochester had said when he called and I wouldn't talk to him.
I hadn't forgotten the concert, of course.
In a way, I was working at it harder than I would have been if I'd been on the scene. They were bringing in Riccardo Muti to conduct, and we had a difference of opinion. I wanted to do the Tchaikovsky, and he had agreed to that, but I wanted to play it without the usual cuts. Muti was resisting. That's a conductor for you. Get the damn concerto out of the way so you can get back to having the whole orchestra under your personal thumb, instead of sharing it with some damn instrumentalist. I'd had the same squabble every time I played the Tchaikovsky for a long time, and usually I gave in. This time I didn't want to.
So I played it all the way through, twice, and drank a couple of cups of cooling tea, and then I played it some more.
The trouble with that was that my fingers thought about the music, but my mind was flying in all directions. What was Dom doing? Couldn't he at least telephone me? Was it possible that this crazy Cathouse project he'd joked with me about was somehow real? And what was I doing with my own life? Every now and then it would occur to me that if I wanted to start having a baby, it was none too soon to get on with it. . .
But whose baby did I want?
I tried to make myself think about the music, while those sweet, lush, gut-stirring Romantic themes came floating out of the Guarnerius. Tchaikovsky had had his own troubles. With the concerto, for instance. "For the first time one must believe in the possibility of music that stinks in the ear," one critic had said at the premiere. How could you live after a review like that? (But now it was one of the best-loved concerti in the repertoire.) And his own life had been screwed up worse than mine, in the nonmusical ways—politics aside—maybe politics aside, because certainly there was a Byzantine flavor to the jockeying around the czar's court. He'd done worse with marriage than I had: tried it once, and had a nervous breakdown as a result. He'd had his twenty-year love-letter torrid romance with Nadejda von Meck without even once meeting the poor woman, running out of the back door of a house when she unexpectedly showed up at the front. Crazy Peter Ilyich! They said that he first intended to become a conductor. But it didn't work out, because he began leading the orchestra with the baton in his right hand and his chin held tightly in his left, because somehow he'd developed the conviction that if he let go of his chin, his head would fall off.
Crazy Peter Ilyich . . .
Sping went my E-string, the second one I'd broken that morning. I grinned in spite of myself, thinking of something Ruggiero Ricci had said to me once: "A Strad you have to seduce, but you can rape a Guarnerius." Only I'd raped it a little too roughly.