There's that Dean Martin thing again, but it wasn't a bad idea. We sipped our beverages, we traded small talk about the newspaper business and the FBI and growing up in rural Indiana, as she did, as compared to South Boston, as I did. She told me she liked my house. I ordered a $19 shrimp cocktail and a $22 cheese and fruit plate, and could just about hear Peter Martin asking sarcastically, "What's this, two dollars a grape?"
Outside, she offered to drop me in Georgetown on the way to her Arlington condominium. Outside my house, she asked, "Could I use your bathroom?"
In the foyer, she knelt down on the floor, skirt and all, to give Baker an enormous hug and a kiss on his fluffy ears, telling him he was a wonderful boy all the while. In his excitement, the poor dog seemed ready to have a heart attack at the prospect of any company at this hour of the evening, let alone female.
"Don't you need to use the bathroom?" I asked finally as she stroked Baker's head with no apparent inclination to move.
She laughed and said, "No. I was just looking for an excuse to say hello to your dog. I absolutely adore him. Sorry."
We both smiled over that, and the telephone rang. It was about ten-thirty, and as I looked at the phone with a mix of longing and fear, she looked at me, amused.
"I'll just let that kick over to my answering service," I said.
"Deja vu," she said with a mischievous grin. "Are you a character in an Anne Tyler novel or something? Why don't you pick up the telephone?
A hot woman? An anonymous source? Maybe the president of the United States leaking to you again?"
She walked toward the telephone as I tried not to panic. Eternity seemed to descend on this living room, at least insofar as this ringing phone was concerned. It seemed as if it would ring forever. At last, she reached over and picked it up herself, saying in a playful voice,
"Flynn residence, may I help you?"
Then she looked at me blankly and slowly put the phone back on the hook. "Hung up," she said. "I must have scared her off."
twelve
Thursday, November 2
The dream was one of those hazy ones where the whole seems clearer than the sum of its parts. I remember realizing I was supposed to meet Katherine, but couldn't recall where or when or why. She wasn't at home and wasn't at work, and she didn't have her cell phone with her, so I sat at my desk in the bureau trying to figure out what time we said we would be getting together and where we were supposed to meet.
Then it struck me that maybe I couldn't reach her because she had gone to the hospital and had the baby. She hadn't called me because she wanted to surprise me with our new child. So maybe that's where we were supposed to gather, at Georgetown Hospital, in the maternity ward, to celebrate the most momentous day of our lives. So the real question was whether I should be angry at her for excluding me from our baby's birth or pleased that she was trying to make it a surprise.
Best I can remember, it was about here that the jagged sound smashed into my subconscious and stirred me into a state of semi-reality. At first I thought it was my alarm clock, but when I groped around my nightstand with a blind hand and shut it off, the sound kept firing away at my brain. Then I realized it was the telephone, and it occurred to me that Katherine might be calling to say she was dining with her sister and wanted to know if I would like to meet them for dessert. To say the least, I was confused. The bedroom was completely black and cool outside my comforter, and I glanced at the illuminated clock and saw it was four-thirty in the morning, which only added to the fog.
When finally I found the phone on my night table, the familiar, haunting voice on the other end knocked the last remnants of fantasy from my brain and brought me back to a reality I wasn't sure I liked.
"You're a hard man to reach, Mr. Flynn," the anonymous source said in that even, dignified voice that had echoed in my mind so many times over the last week.
My wife is dead, I thought, suddenly burdened anew with a sadness that I had shed for my dream. Before I could say anything to this voice, even extend a greeting, he kept talking.
"You must be careful not to be misled. You must realize, you are being fed lies, lies that mask important truths that will someday astound you. You must keep working, keep digging, and get at these truths."
The world, or at least this conversation, was becoming clearer to me as the cobwebs gave way to the importance of the moment. I had prepared for this call in excruciating detail, actually thought of little but, and I knew I couldn't lose the opportunity because I was tired and grieving for my wife.
"That wasn't you who wanted to meet me at the Newseum, right?" I asked.
There was a moment of silence on the other end, and when he spoke, he sounded uncharacteristically flustered, his voice taking on a tone I had not heard from him before. "The Newseum? No, I don't understand."
This verified what Havlicek and I believed all along: that someone was trying to help me, even while someone else was trying to kill me.
I asked, "So you're saying you didn't have a note delivered to me at a restaurant Saturday night asking to meet you at the Newseum?"
"No."
I asked, "Then who would try to kill me?"
"Mr. Flynn, given the sensitivity of the information involved, there are people who will go to extremes to make sure it does not find its way into the public realm. There are people who would kill rather than see you get to the bottom of this story. I must warn you that if you continue to accept my help and pursue these leads, you are in danger.
Imminent danger."
I said, somewhat less than politely, "You haven't given me any leads yet, only general guidance. I need specifics. If I'm going to be in danger, you might as well give me more help. It's not enough to encourage me. You know more than I do. You know more than you're saying. I need you to tell me what you know, or at least to guide me along so I can get there."
"That's fair," he said. He paused, and beside me, the dog, his head on the edge of a pillow and his body spread out on the bed like a person, rolled partially over to look at me, then closed his eyes again. I sat up in the dark on one elbow. The light from the telephone handset cast a small glow on my bed.
"I'm prepared to help you," he said. "I'm prepared to bring you to the core of this situation. But it's crucial for you to understand, as we get further along, as you begin to realize what has happened with this assassination attempt, your own life will be threatened anew.
Knowledge is power. That axiom is true. But in this case, knowledge is also danger."
Obviously my Deep Throat had a flair for the dramatic, and I wondered, given the tone of his voice and the perfect sentences he formed, whether he had resumed reading from some sort of script. If he thought he was scaring me, he thought wrong, but I sensed he understood this.
The two most intriguing things you can say to any reporter worth the ink in his pen is that he may have to go to jail if he doesn't give up his source, and that his life is in danger. Best as I could understand at this early hour, he was offering me some version of a twofer.
"I've already accepted the danger," I said, finding myself speaking as theatrically as the source. "What I want is to get to the bottom of this story."
There was another long pause, and I thought I detected the shuffle of paper. I could hear him breathing softly into the telephone.
Finally, he said, "You've been to Chelsea, Massachusetts."
It seemed more of a declaration than a question, though I wasn't really sure, so I said, "Yes, I've been to Chelsea." And indeed I had. It's a tiny city of less than two square miles just over the Mystic River from Boston, jammed with decrepit slums and abandoned storefronts. It was the birthplace of Horatio Alger, a fact that had provided hope to waves of immigrants from Italy, Poland, and Ireland. Now that hope had turned into little more than despair for the Jamaicans and Mexicans who found themselves not in a job but in a cycle of poverty, their only refuge taken in an occasional puff of crack cocaine.