"I do too," I replied.
We were quiet again for a moment. She said, in a tone of voice that was different, "I saw you two once." She stopped, then started again.
"I saw you two once when you didn't know I saw you. It was at night.
You were on M Street, probably going to eat or something. I don't know. Katherine was really pregnant, and she stopped you while you were walking. She kissed you on the street, then stared at you and you stared back at her and it was as if there wasn't anyone else in the world. I walked by and didn't say anything and you didn't see me. I didn't want to ruin the moment. But I thought, my God, how in love are they? I've thought about that moment a lot. I think about it when I see you alone, kind of struggling but not really saying anything about it. I don't know, Jack. I'm sorry for all this. And I'm sorry for bringing it up."
I stared at her for a moment, then away from her, off into the distance. Baker had lain back down. The night was quiet, the air feeling cooler by the minute. "Thanks," I said, softly, and I reached out and gave her wrist a squeeze as I said goodbye.
I live near the corner of Twenty-eighth and Dumbarton Streets, in what the silver-haired grand dames of the realty circuit would call the heart of the East Village of Georgetown. Coming around Twenty-eighth, with a block and a half toward home, I noticed a large black woman sitting in a beat-up old Toyota at the curb. The car engine was turned off. The first glimpse I got of her played in my mind like a snapshot.
She seemed so out of place, just sitting there in her car as it neared eleven o'clock on a cool and lonely Tuesday night. When I spotted her, she seemed to be staring in my direction, as if looking for something, then she turned away as soon as we met eyes. It was odd.
Given what had happened at the Newseum, I knew this was stupid, returning to my house, walking the streets at night alone, pretending I was immune to danger when it was so painfully apparent in my recent history that I was not. But I had this stubborn Irish desire not to give in to the forces who were trying to intimidate me, or even kill me. That said, I was starting to feel afraid.
Halfway up the block, a man and a woman stood on the street, her leaning against a utility pole, necking.
I whispered to Baker, before we arrived within earshot of them, "I forgot that's what men and women do." The dog just kind of looked up at me, blankly. He was heeling tight, drawing his mood from mine. I think he assumed that men just mostly threw tennis balls, then took taxicabs to the airport.
As we passed by the couple, I saw the man look at me out of the corner of his eye. I looked away quickly and thought that that, too, was odd.
Now it felt just plain creepy on these streets that I had walked hundreds of times at every conceivable hour. Most houses seemed to be darkened for the night, the windows shut tight against the chill of autumn, their owners sound asleep. I watched shadows flicker on the ground, looked warily at movement in shrubbery, and scanned both sides of the street for any other people in parked cars. Nothing. As I neared my doorstep, the street seemed so dark, so empty, and so quiet that it was like a Hollywood stage set, void of actors and light crews.
I pulled my keys out of my pocket, and a car rounded the corner, slowly. It was a man, alone, in a Ford Taurus or another car like it.
He was looking in my direction as I was looking at him, and his car was barely moving at all. I fidgeted with the key in the lock and urgently pushed open the door. As I stepped inside, unnerved, I saw the car speed up and drive away. I shut the door fast, turning a deadbolt I don't think I had ever used before.
I quickly picked up the telephone and dialed Kristen's number. Baker stood by my side, looking around anxiously and up at me.
On the phone, one ring, then two, then three. Come on, Kristen. Be there.
"Hello," she said.
"Hey, it's Jack. I just wanted to make sure you got back in all right.
It seemed kind of quiet out there."
She gave a short laugh that seemed a mix of curiosity and gratitude.
"Jack," she said, pausing. "I'm fine." She laughed again. "You worry too much."
"Maybe I do." I said goodbye and hung up.
I pulled my sand wedge out of my golf bag on the way upstairs, then laid it down beside my bed, the closest thing I had to a weapon. I wondered what the NRA and PGA might think about this. Then I drifted off to sleep, and not very quickly.
eleven
Wednesday, November 1
Wednesday morning brought a fresh batch of polls to an election that was just six days away-polls that showed Hutchins holding on to a three-point lead over his Democratic rival, Senator Stanny Nichols. To be sure, this was not Lincoln versus Douglas or Truman versus Dewey.
Hell, it wasn't even Ford versus Carter. A week and a half before, when I packed my clubs into my car and drove out to Congressional Country Club, the presidential race was a statistical dead heat, pardon the pun. But the president had received a critical shot in the arm from that, well, shot in the arm. His approval ratings had risen nearly ten points, into the mid-60-percent range. Hutchins had suffered only a flesh wound in that blaze of gunfire; but Stanny Nichols saw his political career seriously injured.
Still, three points remained within that so-called margin of error that the boys over at Gallup always make sure we are well aware of. Despite Hutchins's good fortune, there was a sense of unease with him in the country, a lack of familiarity-and voters like to feel as if they know their president. Much of politics is about simple images, and some of that unease was erased out at Congressional Country Club when that nice paramedic was kind enough to poke Hutchins's words around and make him seem a nonchalant, combat-tested hero, cut right out of the American flag. Enough, anyway, to give him this three-point polling lead.
Truth is, the closest Hutchins ever got to military action was probably playing with his GI Joe as a young boy and watching McHale's Navy and F
Troop on TV. And the further truth is, voters were still nagged by a sense that they didn't really know the man.
The anxiety was evident throughout the White House. Lincoln Powers's mood was getting worse, not better. The president's campaign days were getting increasingly longer and more urgent. Aides seemed grim-faced, even in television interviews, as if the totality of events that was supposed to happen after that shooting didn't.
Give Nichols credit for hanging tough. He had been plagued by allegations of corruption-specifically, using his standing as a United States senator to receive a highly favorable purchase price on a Breckenridge chalet from the owner of a major ski resort, one of his top contributors, and then failing to pay the appropriate tax on it.
Add to that his lack of national experience. When all of the major Democrats took a pass on the race because they assumed they'd be running against Hutchins's popular predecessor, Wordsworth Cole, Nichols was the only one who stepped in to fill the void. In another time, in another place, he would have been known as the sacrificial lamb. Here, he was the Democratic nominee.
After Cole died, Nichols had suddenly become a contender, legal problems and all. Smartly, he made the press a major issue in his campaign, saying it was time that the news media stopped hindering the rich dialogue of a great nation with two-bit tattletale stories about old and misreported events. It was a message that seemed to resonate with the voting public.
Meanwhile, Hutchins did his very best at playing the delicate role of national consoler, and his very best was pretty good. He had performed flawlessly in his brief tenure as president. He paid public respect to Cole almost every day, every chance he got. At the same time, in policy decisions, he made clear what he would always call his