Blow the House Down (8 page)

CHAPTER 9

C
HIMES TINKLED SOMEWHERE
at the back of the house. Steps approached but then stopped just short of the door. A closed-circuit camera whirred above my head—swiveled left, swiveled right, panned the street behind me, the sidewalks, then zeroed in for a good eye-to-eye.

“It's me, Simon,” I said, waving my hand back and forth in front of the lens. “Waller. In the flesh.” I must have looked as if I'd climbed out of a peat bog.

Simon, Beckman's butler, opened the door a crack but kept it chained and his shoulder hard against it, just in case.

“Mr. Beckman is out,” Simon finally said, after he had ignored me in every meaningful way he could. “I will happily inform him that you passed by, Mr. Waller. Have a good evening.”

I stuck my foot in the door before he could close it, but at best, we'd reached a standoff. Simon was too civilized, for the moment, to crush my foot, and I was never going to be able to bust through. Apart from Simon himself, no small challenge, the door chain looked as if it had been forged on Mt. Olympus by Vulcan himself.

“Mr. Beckman is at the Kennedy Center.”

“Opera's over unless it's Wagner, and Frank hates Nazis.” Simon sighed theatrically on the other side of the door, clapped his hands together in despair, then disappeared somewhere back inside, leaving me alone with my foot in place. That's how I was standing three minutes later when a light from the security-patrol car plastered my shadow against the door. There was no point turning—I would have been blinded—and no time, either. I heard the
flap, flap, flap
of crepe-soled shoes on the steps and felt an eighteen-inch Mag light digging into my lower back, just at the base of the spine. I knew if I moved too fast for his liking, the last thing I would feel was the same light coming down on the top of my head.

Simon's face was back in the door.

“Mr. Waller”—he searched for the right words—“is
known
to Mr. Beckman.”

The rent-a-cop behind me gave a slight twist to his Mag before he pulled it out of the small of my back, just to say how disappointed he was not to be doing worse, then turned and started back down the steps. When he was safely in his car, Simon slipped the chain from its mooring and cracked the door barely wide enough for me to enter. He'd already spread two bath towels on the floor and had two more draped over his arm.

“Dry with this,” he told me as he handed me one of the towels, “and sit on that,” he added, dropping the other on the floor. He reached into his back pocket and drew out a pair of padded-sole athletic socks.

“And put these on. Your shoes”—he was eyeing them as if they were roadkill—“do not leave the towels on the floor. Nor does that jacket. Or the thing on your head. Mr. Beckman will be back presently. You may wait for him in the library. I believe—” But he didn't bother to finish. We both knew that I knew the way.

“And by the way, Max,” Simon added as he turned back down the hall. “You look like shit.”

Now that I was, in fact, roadkill, everyone seemed to have a “by the way” for me.

One drunken night at the Intercon in Amman back in early 1992, Frank and I had voted Simon the ugliest man on earth. He took it well—he was even more gone than we were, and he'd definitely been standing behind the door when God handed out looks and stature. Simon couldn't have been any more than five feet four, with a lantern jaw that almost grazed his chest. What's more, he was in no position to argue. A would-be soldier of fortune, Simon had fallen on hard times. His nerves had failed him a few months earlier, in the middle of the night, as he headed over the Kuwait border into one of the occupied oil fields.

For three years, Frank and I kept Simon afloat with odd jobs. Then, when Frank decided to remake himself as a multimillionaire consultant and oil trader, he offered Simon the oddest job of all: butler. He had, after all, a perfect British servant-class accent thanks to his father, a men's room attendant at a second-tier London club; and he had stored away his own cache of secrets about the clientele Frank hoped to attract.

There was no question of salary at first. Frank had hocked everything—his house, his retirement, his clothes, china, the silver-plated flatware, his reputation—to even be able to afford the down payment on Tuttle Place. I have no doubt that he called in favors from Jeddah to Doha and points north and south to create the paper facade that would create the illusion that his was a thriving business. But like Jay Gatsby, the new Frank had sprung from his own Platonic conception of himself, and he had made it work. The leased furniture became real furniture; the Benz and driver, a Citation 10 jet, permanent fixtures. The mansion he had bought in a D.C. real-estate trough back in '95 for $6 million had to be worth twice that now, maybe three times as much, and it was only the beginning of Frank's good fortune.

I spread one of Simon's towels carefully on the leather couch in the library, pulled on the socks—an inspired touch on Simon's part—and leaned back to gaze at the Greek marble frieze above the fireplace in front of me: The two phalanxes of hoplites embraced in mortal, hand-to-hand combat were perfectly balanced against each other and perfectly lit, too, by recessed lamps above. When I'd first seen the frieze, I thought it had to be an expensive reproduction. There wasn't a chip on it. The original had to be in a museum, but the brass plaque said otherwise:
ATHENS
4
TH CENTURY B.C.
When I asked Frank, he just shrugged his shoulders.

“Oh, yeah, it's real. Ask my insurance company.”

Simon must have approved of my couch hygiene because he placed a double espresso on the table in front of me and padded off again with barely a sound. I downed it in two quick swallows, then got up and grabbed a stack of newspapers off the console table: the
Financial Times,
the
Wall Street Journal,
a new Christie's rare-wine auction catalog. At the far end of the house, across the dining room and central hall, over a living-room fireplace that looked from here identical to my own, I could just make out a Modigliani nude—Frank's newest acquisition. An article about the purchase in a recent
Art + Auction
had set Langley all abuzz.

“Good for you, Frank,” I said, raising my empty cup to the distant nude. “You've come a long way from the Congo.” I meant it, too. I could still see that Negress on felt, perched over Jill's stringy blond hair as if she might just leap down and have her for a between-meal snack.

I heard a car door close outside, then another. The Benz was pulling away as I got to the window, done for the night. Frank's silver mane was impossible to miss. He must have lost twenty pounds since retiring; he'd even picked back up the spring in his step. Walking next to him was a young woman in a sequined ballgown with a black shawl over her head against what had now eased back to a drizzle. What little castle in the sky did she haunt? She was a stunner by anyone's measure, and no more than half Frank's age from what I could see. His life coach? A girlfriend? Wife number three? Whatever role she was playing, she had her arm in Frank's.

Simon was mumbling something in the hall as a woman's footsteps climbed the stairs. A minute later, Frank stuck his head in the library. “Give me five,” he said, but he was already on his cell phone as he turned and started up the stairs himself, two steps at a time.

“Yes, your highness, of course,” I could hear him saying. “We'll make sure you have it before noon. No excuses.” I picked up the
Financial Times
and pretended I wasn't listening as his voice faded away.

I was still standing there, paper in hand, five minutes later when India suddenly appeared at the door, wearing a Redskins sweatshirt and Levi's. My God, I thought, that's who Frank came in with—his daughter—and I hadn't recognized her, or as they warned us at the Farm, I wasn't looking for what she had so quickly become.

I had seen India maybe half a dozen times since that evening at Frank's tacky split-level—a lunch or dinner when I happened to be near Berkeley, a visit or two to the new mansion when she was home on vacation, only five months ago for a drink at a café near the Gare du Nord when I was in transit from Marseilles to Amsterdam. I seemed to have fallen into the role of a slightly screw-loose uncle—happily, I should add. My mother considered me mistake enough for one womb: I would never have a blood niece of my own. Nor did India have any family other than her father now that her mother had disappeared from the picture.

“Going to relive the glory days with Dad? The time you two camped on the Beirut-Damascus highway?”

It was anything but glory. Frank and I had lived in his car for a solid week on the Syrian border, waiting for the Iranians to deliver David Dodge, the first hostage taken in Lebanon. Instead, they dumped him in Damascus. That was 1983, most of India's lifetime ago. We must have told the story so often that it became embedded in her brain.

“Or are you just stopping by on your way home from a wet T-shirt contest?” India's tone had a definite edge, but her smile was as friendly as ever.

“You think I'm too old to compete?”

“Oh, Max, no. Never.”

I took her hands and gave her a quick peck on the cheek.

“I thought you were still in Paris.”

She looked at me, held my hands a beat longer, then pulled me in for a hug. India's through with being a girl, I thought. Maybe she never really was one. Some people never get the luxury of a youth. I knew something about that.

“Vacation's over,” she finally said. “Time to make a living. Just like the old man.”

“Looks like he's struggling.”

The frieze was just over her shoulder.

Before she could say anything else, Frank was back, wearing corduroys and a cashmere sweater. The air-conditioning was set at Arctic levels. Simon was two steps behind with a pair of straight-up Scotches, no ice. I could see India wondering where her glass was, but her father gave her his own peck on the check and gently pushed her out the door.

“Good night, dear. I'm sure Max is just stopping by for a minute. You've got work tomorrow.”

The library was set off from the rest of the house by a set of paneled pocket doors. I waited until Frank had pulled them shut before I spoke.

“Work?”

“She started last week at the Agency. Can you believe it? Doing traces on the Saudi desk, a whole lifetime ahead of her to ascend to the seventh floor. It wasn't my idea, I assure you. I tried to dissuade her.”

He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. It seemed a million years since he had unwrapped the Beretta on his Home Depot deck.

“You might have told me. I could have—”

Frank raised his hand to stop me.

“The stink was on you, Max my boy, the royal whiff. Everyone knew it. My daughter didn't need that.”

“You might have told me that, too.”

Frank laughed. “You need to hang around the water cooler more. That's where everything happens in an inert bureaucracy.”

I was sitting back on my towel; Frank, in a matching end chair beside me. He reached in a drawer of the low table in front of us, pulled out a remote, and punched a button. A sheet of the chestnut paneling slid noiselessly back to reveal a huge flat-screen TV.

“There's supposed to be a program on Al Jazeera tonight about Yemen. The place is circling the drain again, or so thinks Hunt Oil.”

Frank surfed up and down the channels looking for it; gave up and flipped through Fox, MSNBC, CNN; then turned the TV off. He sipped his Scotch, frowned, and pushed a button on a side table. Simon must have been waiting on the other side of the library doors.

“It's too late for this. Bring us two Armagnacs.”

“I thought you might show up here sooner rather than later,” he said when Simon was gone. “Just not so soon.”

Actually, I wasn't surprised Frank had heard about the investigation. Washington is a company town; news of government scandals travels fast. It travels even faster in Agency circles where it's such a welcome diversion from the humdrum truth of collective incompetence.

Frank was right: The Armagnac was a much better choice, and Simon left the decanter. I gave Frank the
Reader's Digest
version of Webber's show trial and the FBI investigation. When I got to the part about the spiral notebooks being gone, he stopped me.

“What did you keep those for?”

“Wandering fires.”

“Knock off the riddles.”

“We never found out who kidnapped and killed Bill Buckley. It's been sort of my grail. You know that. You're not curious?”

“No. If I'd stopped to solve every mystery there was, I'd still be in Kentucky.”

“It must have had something to do with the first day I walked in the place and saw those words chiseled in the marble: ‘Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.'”

Frank scowled as I said it: Stirring mottoes weren't his thing, either. I was on to the Norton, the RV, and the guy in the poncho when he stopped me again. “Are you telling me someone's out to get you? A conspiracy?”

“Frank, c'mon, no one blow-torches a Kryptonite lock just to push the bike into traffic.”

“Maybe you didn't close the lock tight this time. Maybe that kid you pay to watch the bike watched the combination instead. That's what you get when you live among the savages.”

I didn't forget to close the lock, and I didn't live with savages. If Frank would ever walk the ten blocks to Adams Morgan and have a look around, he would know that. But he wouldn't, and I wasn't going to get into any of that with him.

“How about the RV?” I said instead. “Or the poncho guy calling me paranoid? It doesn't—”

“Your famous score-keeping.”

“Someone's got to.”

“I hate to tell you this, old pal, but Smirch and the Black Hand went the way of the Soviet Union, and I don't really think the Trilateral Commission or the Masons care enough about you to steal your moped.”