Blow the House Down (7 page)

CHAPTER 7

B
ACK IN THE APARTMENT,
it took me a few minutes to find my Majestic lock-picking kit—for some idiotic reason, I'd hidden it inside the toaster—and a few minutes more to get through the lock on the utilities' door. The chirpy gay ménage à trois in 4C had gone out of their way the previous morning to tell me that they would be sunning themselves in user-friendly Laguna Beach while I sweated through D.C.'s summer. The least they could do, I thought, was loan me their phone line. I used a pair of alligator clips to tie into the interface terminal, then rang up Willie.

“Hey, what are you up to?” I asked, pretending to be surprised he was asleep.

“Shootin' hoops. What else a nigga be doin' at two in the morning in the pourin' rain?”

“It's only nine-thirty. Willie, I got a little problem.”

“Everyone's got problems, Maxwell. You heard of original sin? ‘In Adam's fall sinned we all.'”

“I'm serious.”

“So am I. Can't it wait until morning? I'm up at five.”

“Remember where you drop me?”

“I'm not senile yet, my friend. You mean—”

I cut him off. Stolen line or not, the phone is your worst enemy. “Yeah. I'll be there. Pick me up in fifteen.”

I'd known Willie for twenty years. We'd first met through Stash, an old Air America pilot who'd lost a leg and a foot in Laos. Two appendages shy of a driver's license, Stash hired Willie and his taxi to get back and forth to his make-work job in Seven Corners. I rotated back to the field shortly before budget cuts forced Langley to retire Stash and send him home to die, but I made it a point to call Willie whenever I was in Washington and needed a ride your average cabbie couldn't give you. Willie looked like a mortician's assistant, but he had the heart of a NASCAR driver and the soul of a wolverine.

Stash and I had never told Willie where we worked, but he'd figured it out listening in on our war stories about shit holes like Laos and the Congo. Willie didn't say anything, just shook his head, probably thinking what fools white people are, but when his son had spent half his senior year in high school trying to decide between going to Georgetown to study international relations—a straight shot at the State Department—or heading north to Cornell to become an engineer, Willie talked him into Cornell. He knew a dead-end road when he saw one, and he'd had his own turn with international relations, serving Uncle Sam on the Batangan Peninsula with the 11th Infantry Brigade just about the time William Calley Jr. and his platoon were slaughtering peasants wholesale.

I went back upstairs to my apartment, put on a Levi's jacket, and stuffed a black watch cap in the pocket—the only thing I could find in a hurry to keep the rain off me. Then I grabbed a sterile cell phone I'd stowed under the socks in my top dresser drawer and jotted down its number on a scrap of paper. I used the land line to call Geico and report the accident, hoping I would be put on hold the way I always was when I had something important to discuss. I wasn't disappointed. A digital voice said it would be a twelve-minute wait. As I lay the phone on the floor, I crossed my fingers and hoped she was right. Twelve minutes was just about what it would take for Willie to throw a slicker over his pj's, fire up the Crown Vic, and make it the half dozen blocks to Ontario Liquors.

I took the stairs to the basement and slid past the resident barrio. Uni-vision was cranked up to high volume: a soccer game, Nicaragua against somebody, a tie, injury time. I could have kicked down the back door instead of using the knob and no one would have heard. In the alley, I all but knocked over the El Salvadoran kid. He was peeing against the Dumpster, eyes wide as a raccoon, stoned out of his mind.

I wandered down the alley, lingered by a Dumpster or two myself, and startled enough rats to stock a leper colony. The only way to see me was through a pair of night-vision binoculars, a league I wasn't prepared to play in. Normally, the stoops would have been packed all the way along Euclid and back up Ontario, but the rain had driven the street life inside. Willie was just pulling up as I turned back onto Columbia. He had the car in gear before I closed the door.

“Straight to St. E's or should we give them a run?” he said. St. E's is St. Elizabeths, the local loony bin, home to Ezra Pound and John Hinckley Jr., among other famous nuts.

“Rock Creek,” I told him, staring out the back window. “Take Memorial Bridge to the GW Parkway.” I was checking to see if anyone had pulled out behind us when Willie tossed a box of Kleenex into the back and flipped down the mirror on the passenger's side. A cobweb covered the entire left side of my face. My ear had disappeared. I never wanted to meet the spider that made it.

I guided Willie along a countersurveillance route in northern Virginia I'd run at least fifty times: a loop-de-loop at the I-395 exchange, a quick on-and-off at the Key Bridge / Rosslyn exit, a U-turn just after Spout Run, enough traps so that a tail either had to show itself or lose you. It was as subtle as a quadruple bypass, but subtlety wasn't the point. The Norton was proof enough that all wasn't well in my little world. No reason to pretend I was out for an evening drive. The only thing I cared about right now was a couple hours of privacy with a person who didn't even know I would be meeting him.

Basically, I was flying blind in the backseat. I needed the rearview and side mirrors to check everything out, but Willie had those. Just to complicate things, there was way too much traffic. Didn't anyone sleep anymore? Worse, the rain was starting to sound like a Bombay monsoon, a steady drumbeat on Willie's vinyl roof.

It crossed my mind to tell Willie what was going on, why I'd gotten him out of bed to give me a ride. If there was anyone I could trust outside the Agency, it was Willie. But how could I ever explain the whole insane run in New York, the alligator clips and the stolen phone line, the call to Geico to convince anyone listening to my phone I was still in my apartment, now this? Spending a life doing anything and everything you can to protect your agents puts you inside a rare subset of existence. It all made sense to me. But Willie wasn't there. Wise as he was, he'd never get it. Espionage is like the world at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. When a creature from it suddenly gets dragged to the surface, no one knows what to make of the thing.

“Phone me in two but not on my land line. On this one.” I dropped the number of the ghost cell phone on the front seat.

Willie didn't ask why. I doubt he even wanted to know why, but I knew he would play by my rules.

We had crossed Key Bridge and were headed back through Georgetown on M Street when I warned Willie we'd be making a hard left after the old Eagle Liquor and a quick jog up to Prospect. He inched along, waiting for a gap in the oncoming traffic, until we both saw a space just large enough for the ex-Norton.

“Hit it!” I yelled.
“Now!”
But Willie already had.

The Crown Vic hydroplaned across only inches behind a Navigator packed with high-schoolers and dead in front of a couple in a Lexus. Underwear would be changed early tonight. By the time we hit the alley's cobblestones, the Crown Vic was in a full skid. We just missed slamming into the side of Kinko's.

Low key it wasn't, but there was no way in hell anyone could see Willie slam the brakes just as we turned left on Prospect or me bail out in the fraction of a second he needed to power up again.

CHAPTER 8

I
 
WAITED IN THE SHADOWS
under a dripping oak tree until Willie was long gone around the corner. By the time a tail caught up to him, they'd see only the Crown Vic's rear lights going up 35th Street. I waited some more just to see if anything living moved, wishing to hell I'd brought an umbrella. Then, when I knew for sure it was impossible to get any wetter, I jammed the watch cap on my head and set off on foot almost back to where I had come from. Frank Beckman lived on Tuttle Place, in Kalorama, five minutes by foot and a thousand miles in every other way from where my twisted Norton lay rusting in the rain.

I worked my way up through Georgetown, scrambled over the high iron fence on R Street that fronts Oak Hill Cemetery, and followed the slope down through the tombstones and monuments until I hit the bicycle trail that runs through Rock Creek Park. Three minutes later, I was under the Massachusetts Avenue bridge. Another fifty yards along, I forded the creek as best I could—my Nikes were already soaking—waited for a gap in the traffic, then sprinted across the parkway and clawed my way up the steep eastern slope of the valley. I came out pretty much where I expected to: on Belmont Road, a block north of Tuttle Place and two blocks from Frank Beckman's tastefully imposing Georgian mansion.

 

I first met Frank Beckman in Brazzaville, in the Congo, in 1979, on the evening after the French embassy's chef had been eaten by a crocodile. It was all anyone could talk about. The chef had slipped out of the kitchen between the soup and fish course and walked down to the river. For what? A tryst? A fistful of something to dress the salad with? No one knew. One of the waiters heard him scream. A passerby saw thrashing just below the riverbank, but it was pitch black out on the water and crocodiles were everywhere. There was nothing to be done. The chef's toque was found the next day, snagged on a branch a half mile downstream. That was the other question on everyone's tongue: Had the croc bothered with a red wine sauce or devoured the chef au naturel? Even then, Brazzaville was not the world's most sympathetic place.

I was assigned back then to Dubai, covering the Iranian revolution. (This was 1979, in the pre-Webber days, when the base actually knew its ass from third base.) But mostly I was on the road, going wherever a Farsi speaker might prove useful: Manila, Khartoum, even (of all places) Brazzaville. Headquarters wanted me to pitch the first secretary at the Iranian embassy, a fat, fish-mouthed Khomeini devotee whose father had owned the Cadillac franchise in Tehran back in the days when the Shah was among his best customers.

Frank had been scheduled to take over the station in Brazzaville six months earlier, but a nasty divorce kept him tied up in Washington. When he finally did make it to the Republic of the Congo, just a week before I did, he had wife number two in tow: a tender, Irish-Chinese mix of a thing named Jill, fresh out of Skidmore College with a B.A. in French lit. But if Jill was expecting a honeymoon or even intelligent conversation—in any language—she got little of the sort.

Frank was Kentucky white trash through and through: high school into the army, army into the 82nd Airborne. At eighteen, he was jumping out of airplanes. He enrolled at the University of Kentucky on the GI Bill, graduated in his mid-twenties, joined the Agency a week later, and spent his thirtieth birthday hiding in an attic in Hue during Tet. Somewhere along the way he'd picked up a mid-Atlantic accent, a
sine qua non
for advancement in the Agency. I learned all this in the first half hour I'd ever known him, sitting in what passed for a living room, in what passed for a chief of station residence, in what passed for a capital city in yet another people's paradise of the ever-Darkening Continent. Frank was shit-faced when I arrived: warm gin. He kept drinking it, kept talking—he and Jill had met in Paris the March before when she was tracking Françoise Sagan's youth through the Place Pigalle—but he seemed to have leveled off at whatever level of drunkenness he had aimed for, or arrived at.

As for Jill, the story of their chance encounter and whirlwind romance seemed to hit a sour spot, or maybe it was the climate, or being stuck inside. The French chef had proved a more-than-cautionary tale for her. She had no intention of leaving the house except under armed guard, Frank informed me, and maybe not then.

“C'est pas vrai?”
I asked. She nodded tartly.

The house was—and here I'm being charitable—a fucking dump. The Agency had given them a furniture allowance, almost a generous one, but by the looks of things, Frank must have used it to offset the ruinous expense of exiting his last marriage. The dining room table was a few planks nailed together and balanced on a pair of sawhorses. Jill's books—Gide, Moliere, de Maupassant, Sagan—formed a precarious tower on top of the only piece that looked as if it might have been up to the standards of her former life. Otherwise, the whole house, or what I could see of it, was done up with local crap, including the painting over the sofa: a Negress on lurid felt, washing laundry in the Congo River. I didn't know Frank nearly well enough then to ask him if it was a joke.

All that, though, was more than two decades ago, in a Cold War no longer being fought, in a part of the world now so ravaged by AIDS and civil unrest that it seemed to be sliding backward off the face of existence. When I ran across Frank a little more than six years later—coming out of the Beau Rivage in Geneva—he told me that the Negress was gone, along with Jill.

“She split,” he said. “Homesick, Jill told me. We had a daughter: India. Beautiful, like her name. I almost never get to see her.”

If I had been smarter, I would have seen it as a premonition of my own marriage. Like Jill and Frank, Marissa was a half generation younger than me—nineteen to my early thirties, a talented poet, a bright light at the American University in Beirut. We'd met when we were both rock climbing in the Dolomites. She was like a black-haired, olive-skinned spider. I couldn't keep my eyes off her. Nothing daunted Marissa. Not even me, as it turned out. If she hadn't been three months pregnant, I doubt we would have married, but out of it all came Rikki, good from not-so. That, too, Frank and I had in common.

I nodded my condolences over his lost wife and missing child, and asked Frank to talk on. Our colleagues in Southern Air Transport had just been “tasked,” as they say in Washington circles, to deliver a thousand TOW missiles from U.S. Army stocks to Tel Aviv for trans-shipment to Iran. Against such madness, Frank's domestic life seemed the picture of normality.

Soon after they were reassigned to New Delhi, Frank said, Jill had talked him into signing a power of attorney so she could buy a small cottage for them back near Saratoga Springs, scene of her undergraduate triumphs. They had been in Brazzaville more than three years by then. With the differential and hardship pay, they'd managed to save a little money, and Jill had never adapted well to a place where the highest form of entertainment was watching geckos crawl across the ceiling. New Delhi wasn't going to be much better. Why not throw her a little bone? There was the daughter, India, too. Better she should be schooled back in the States.

It all made unassailable sense, Frank said, but Jill had other plans. Instead of the cottage, she took the money and bought a condo, and instead of Frank, she filled it with an associate professor of Slavic languages and sent hubby his walking papers.
Et voilà,
Frank was broke again. But America is the land of second acts, and Frank Beckman was its living proof.

 

First, Frank got his daughter back. India had just turned eleven when he was brought home for good and elevated to the seventh floor, number two in the Directorate of Operations, which made him, with about ten degrees of separation, my boss. Ten months later, long after midnight, India, a runaway, showed up on Frank's doorstep in Herndon, Virginia, after a week of frantic searching. Her stepfather, by now a full professor and department chair, couldn't keep his hands off her, she told Frank. Instead of immediately killing him—his first and deepest instinct—Frank got Jill to sign away her rights to India and set about learning to be a father.

I could still remember almost every detail of Frank's retirement party five years earlier, a barbecue in the fenced-in backyard of his soulless split-level. India was all of seventeen by then. She'd raced through high school as if it were a track event and had just finished her freshman year at Berkeley, animated in the way that only wildly precocious teenagers can be. Over plates of charred chicken earlier in the evening, India told me that she'd already taken courses from two of the people who taught me best.

“Joy of my life,” Frank said, with only a slight slur.

We were sitting on his postage-stamp-size deck, watching her bag up the plastic cups and paper plates that littered the yard. India was dragging a recycle bin behind her for the beer and wine bottles. I'd edged out the last of the guests a half hour earlier—a husband-and-wife analyst team that never knew when to leave. Frank and I were cradling snifters, pretending to admire the bouquet and color in the blue bug-light by the sliding glass doors. A bottle of Remy Martin sat on the table between us.

“Joy O' My Life!” he yelled out, louder this time.

“I know, Dad. I know,” she called back with a laugh, “and you're the joy o' mine.”

I was starting to feel as if I had intruded on some private ritual—a fly on a priest's neck as he blessed the holy elements.

“And Maxie, too,” she shouted a split second later to a roar of laughter.

Beside me, I could see Frank flip open the top of an old Sealtest Dairy milk box, the kind my aunt used to keep on the back porch. He rummaged around and pulled out a dirty towel. I could already smell the gun oil.

“I bought it last year,” he told me as he folded the corners down. “Didn't buy it, really. Traded a silver Berber dagger for it. Some brother down in Southeast with a taste for antiques.”

It was a nice piece, a Beretta six-millimeter with a professionally made silencer, the preferred weapon of Middle East assassins.

“Why?”

“Why—” Not a question. He tilted the Remy Martin bottle in both our directions, wrapped the gun up again, and laid it back in the Sealtest box.

“Why. Because I still wanted to murder the son of a bitch for what he did to India. I figured, What the hell: I retire, I even the score, I die. Case closed.”

“And?”

India was waving to us from the far end of the yard, a pair of garbage bags over her shoulder. She was kicking the recycle bin ahead of herself as she worked.

“I decided to get rich instead.”

It took a few years, but damn if he didn't.

 

A miniature guy airing out his miniature schnauzer on the other side of Belmont took one look at me trudging out of the woods, flipped open a cell phone, hit something on speed dial, and took off running, dragging the little rat dog on its side behind him. He'd called security, I bet. The neighborhood pretty much had its own police force and plenty of other help, too.

Motion-detector lights flicked on one by one as I walked by the sprawling coral-stucco Mediterranean at the corner. Across the street, where Tuttle dead-ends at Belmont, two pairs of eyes followed me from behind the tinted glass of a black Cadillac Escalade—private guards for the Embassy of the Sultanate of Oman. Just beyond the embassy, at the intersection with Massachusetts Avenue, sat the Mosque and Islamic Center, wired to the teeth against infidel invaders. For a guy who set out to make his fortune by providing “consulting services” for the oil-rich, Frank couldn't have calibrated his address much more carefully. He had everything but a Bedouin tent parked in the backyard and camel-shit mulch for his boxwoods.

2501 Tuttle Place took up the half of the block that the stucco Mediterranean didn't. Flagstone steps rose on either side to a double front door capped by a limestone half-moon and, above that, a window surrounded by stone scrollwork. More garlands—in stone and wood—were draped over and below the windows that flanked the central ones on either side. On top, three dormers rose tastefully punctuated by a pair of ornamental white orbs. Chimneys bound the house at either end. Improbably enough, an ancient, rusting TV antenna was clasped to the easternmost of the chimneys. My guess is that it was a private satellite communications link disguised to look like some piece of fifties claptrap. In Frank's new world, millions of dollars were measurable in nanoseconds.

English ivy crawled up the redbrick facade at both ends and on either side of the door. At the back, behind seven-foot-high brick walls draped with climbing roses, the garden curved its way past a granite pool to the next street over, to an old carriage house that had once served a great turreted pile of a mansion built in the 1880s by a Nevada silver king and U.S. Senator. The carriage house was all that remained of the estate. Frank had tarted it up into guest quarters for when his clientele weren't traveling in full retinue.

The only thing that spoiled the perfect symmetry of the place was a wing tacked onto the west side: a bedroom, library, and garage stacked one above the other. The garage dated from an era before automobiles took on the general proportion of boats. Frank's beautifully restored Mercedes 600 had no chance of fitting in there. The fact that it wasn't waiting on the street out front meant either that he'd sent his driver home for the night or that he still wasn't in himself.

I checked my watch: 11:07. A little red light was winking at me from inside the old coal chute that once would have served Frank's basement furnace. I was on camera already, and I hadn't even made it to the front door. A block and a half up the street, a car crept slowly down my way, spotlights shining on either side as it searched even the underside of parked cars for the likes of me, perhaps for me in particular. I stepped up to Frank's door, pulled off my black watch cap, straightened my hair as best I could, and pushed the bell.