"He's too sharp," I said. "He's a chief, not an Indian. He's not going to get his hands dirty like that for the cash."
Havlicek washed down most of a mouthful of corn chips with a pull of beer and said, "Well, maybe he really wanted this president to be dead for some reason."
"That's what bothers me," I said. "And that's what gets to the point of my anonymous friend, who seems to think that if we find out about the relationship between Black and the president, we'll know why this shooting occurred. That's the crux right there, isn't it? And it seems like stating the obvious to say it must have something to do with Stemple, or Stemple's pardon must be some way involved, no?"
Havlicek nodded.
I said, "I know this is all conjecture, but if you play this out a little further, can you assume that the FBI is covering up the identity of the shooter out of raw embarrassment that one of their witnesses went off and made a mockery of them by trying to kill the president? I mean, if something like that gets public, they're going to have the news media and congressional oversight investigators up one side of the program and down the other, and their secrecy is pretty much blown forever. Maybe the program itself is even lost in the media maelstrom.
"So our immediate mission now," I concluded, "is to find Paul Stemple, and find him fast. There's an election at stake in this, and that gives us two days. We find him, we get some answers."
"And on that point," Havlicek said, in a newly dramatic tone, "we're in some luck."
I shot him a curious look. He pulled out his ancient wallet, shuffled through a collection of cards and old papers, and pulled out a small sheet. He flicked his finger against it and added, "When you first told me about Stemple and the pardon last week, I did a little research on him. I don't like coincidences. I suspected his name might come back into this story."
"So what do you have?" I asked, impressed and embarrassed that I hadn't thought the same way.
"Well, I had to go to hell and back to get this, but I think I have a line on where Stemple is living now, and I think it's right here in D.c. I got ahold of his Social Security number through a contact I have. I used that to nail some of his bank records. I found out that he made some recent withdrawals in Washington. I got some gnome in the Pentagon to tell me he was a Korean War vet, and that he stopped at a local VA hospital last week. I canvassed some short-term real estate brokers on Capitol Hill, where one of the withdrawals was made, and one guy told me he rented an apartment to him. Some skill, some luck." He made a motion to stand up, first placing the nearly empty bag of Fritos from his lap onto the coffee table. "So next stop: his house."
As he stretched his back, Havlicek added, "Jesus Christ. We have a member of the federal witness protection program, Curtis Black, who is in some way involved in an assassination attempt. We have someone taking shots at you. We have a senior FBI official providing us information devastating to his agency. And we have some anonymous source who seems to have all the world's information in the palm of his hand. One quick question: who plays me in the movie?"
I replied, "I don't know. Ernest Borgnine?"
"Screw you. He's about fifty pounds heavier than me. And isn't he dead?"
He ambled off to the kitchen with a few empty cans, calling out, "Give Martin a quick call and let him know you're all right. The guy was a train wreck today."
The hour was late, but Martin picked up on the first ring, as if once again he had been waiting by the phone. I gave him the update on my trip and progress, let him know we were heading out, and told him we'd gather in the morning.
"Boston's all over me to get something good in print," he said, referring to the editors. "Concentrate on a quick-but good-turnover.
Meantime, I'll hold them off as long as I can, until we know we're ready to pop."
On his point about Boston breathing down our necks, there is a tendency in this business for the editors back at the main office to think that all us overpaid layabouts down in the Washington bureau are doing little more than waddling over to the Palm for lunch and Morton's for dinner, and in between tapping into the capital's vast public relations machine to be spoon-fed press releases on the latest triumphs of our elected officials. These same God-fearing editors believe that any time we choose, we can simply call up the White House and get the president on the line, or trundle over to the J. Edgar Hoover Building and have FBI commanders invite us into their offices and open up their active case files for us to peruse, all in the name of the public's right to know. Well, Washington reporting is hard work, and what we needed now was persistence and patience-two qualities that Martin understood, God bless him.
When I hung up, I looked at the clock and saw that it was edging past midnight. My day had begun long before dawn. I wasn't so much tired as physically and mentally demolished. My ribs hurt, and so did my head. Yet it was time to forge on. I was not going to be the guy to hold up this story. Quite the contrary, if Havlicek had a lead, I wanted to follow it.
As we gathered some notebooks and coats, Havlicek asked, "You ever think about what you'd do if you suddenly came into a couple of million dollars? Would you stay in the business? Would you work late at night like this, go through all the deadline stress that we have, all the thankless bullshit? Or would you just kick back and live a life of leisure?"
"What, you just find out you're an heir to the throne of Poland, and they want you to come home and live in the castle?" I asked.
He gave me a look out of the corner of his eye, otherwise ignoring my question. He said, "I get two million bucks, I wouldn't change anything. This whole thing is too much fun." They were the most introspective words I had ever heard him say. Then he added, "Let's go."
"I'll drive," I said.
On the sidewalk, he said, "De Niro."
"What?" I asked.
"De Niro. I bet they get De Niro to play me."
I said, "What, you on heroin? Try Leslie Nielsen."
He smiled and shook his head, this man unlike any other I had ever known.
eighteen
Sunday, November 5
My car was parked at the curb out front. When I started it up, the engine turned bravely in the cold, dry air of an early-winter's night.
Havlicek closed his coat around him in an exaggerated plea for heat.
"Hey, I talked to your FBI friend Stevens today," he said.
"Oh, yeah? You trying to steal my sources?" I asked, jokingly.
He patted the pockets of his coat, looked at me more urgently, and said, "I forgot a tape recorder. You have one?"
"Damn, it's inside." I had started to pull the keys out of the ignition so I could get into my house when politeness once again got the better of me. Knowing I had a spare door key ingeniously stashed under a loose brick in my front garden, I let the engine run so the heat would crank up. "Hold on," I said. "I'll be right back."
I'll never forget his words: "Hurry the hell up. I'm fricking freezing."
Inside, I had hit the third step on my way up to my study, where the microcassette recorder sat on the shelf of an antique bookcase, when I heard the sound. At first, it was like a truck had backfired on the street outside. That was followed by what could have been a plane hitting my house, or an enormous clap of thunder, so strong that the resulting vibrations flung me to the ground, slamming my head against the railing, leaving me in a momentary daze tumbling down the stairs.
In that daze, I recall windows smashing in, the spray of glass, the blast of cold air. For reasons I can't explain, I recall seeing my front door, which I must have left ajar, heave open, and I half expected to see some masked man in a Ninja suit and a machine gun race inside my house. I recall seeing a wave of destruction, as if the whole thing were happening in slow motion-lamps falling off tables, pictures plummeting from walls and cracking on the floor, a chandelier that my wife's family gave us crashing down from above.