House of Secrets - v4 (19 page)

The older man passed a sympathetic look across the desk, accompanied by a large sigh. He picked up the phone receiver and dialed a three-digit number. “All ready.”

He hung up the phone.

“Can’t talk anymore, Andy. I’ve got to go kiss the queen of Denmark.”

“It’s a bitter job,” Andy said.

“Could be my last queen.”

Andy sagged. “For Christ’s sake, Chris. What do I say to that?”

Both men stood. Chris Wyeth ran a hand down his ugly tie. Behind Andy, the door to the outer office opened an inch. “Do you think you’re ready to start kissing the queens, Andy?” Wyeth immediately held up a hand to silence the senator. “You know what? Don’t answer that. But you and I do have to talk, my friend.”

“What was this?”

“This?” Wyeth glanced about the office. “This never happened. I’m at Blair House as we speak, getting my kisser warmed up. I haven’t seen you in over a week, buddy boy.”

“Longer, Chris.”

Wyeth came around from behind the desk. “Right. Longer. Long time no see. Give Christine my love, will you?”

“That would mean you and I have talked.”

“Well, Andy. If we can’t trust our wives to keep a secret, who can we trust?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. The office door opened a few more inches as he approached, and then a few more as the vice president of the United States passed silently through it.

T
he last thing Christine needed was her mother’s opinion.

Christine had the cordless phone clipped to the pocket of her jeans and was wearing the headset so that she could remain mobile. She was kneeling on the floor of the sunporch amid an angular semicircle of newspaper pages. Her absurdly hearty spider plant, removed from its large pot, lay on its side on the newspapers. The dense cluster of packed soil and entwining crisscross roots looked menacing, the turgid roots having grown bound up and restrained in the pot and been forced to perform under such unnatural imposition.

Christine performed this surgery on the plant only every several years, and each time she did, she was convinced that her intervention was finally going to prove fatal to the plant. Discovering her mother at the other end of the line in the midst of the operation did not qualify as a reprieve from the task at hand. If anything, it felt more like a harbinger.

“You need to put your foot down, darling,” Lillian was saying. “Men are not the mind readers we’d like them to be. You have to spell it out for them, otherwise they’ll just assume that what they want is what you want. Think of your father, sweetie. Ambitious men are bullies. That just comes with the territory. Now, I know Andrew has his very sweet side; I’m not saying he doesn’t. Though of course you know my real opinion of that. Maybe the less said the better.”

Yes
, Christine thought, squeezing the shears open and closed against nothing.
Maybe the less said
.

Lillian’s pause for breath was brief.

“You don’t have to live in that awful fishbowl. I know full well you don’t want to. I certainly don’t want my granddaughter playing hopscotch with her little Secret Service friends. Good Christ, what a horror. This is not a
life
we’re talking about here, Chrissie, it’s a freak show. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t have the temperament. You know I’m not attacking you when I say this. As far as I’m concerned, being unfit to be a politician’s wife is a sign of superb mental health.”

“Thank you for the diagnosis.”

Lillian continued. “You’re just not cut out for this. And frankly, your husband is blithely overlooking this fact. I’d say,
conveniently
overlooking it. This is what they do, Chrissie. Trust me.”

“You seem to be awfully good at mind reading.”

If Lillian was hearing the edginess in her daughter’s voice, she was ignoring it. “Well, yes I am, thank you. I do have an intuitive sense about these matters, Chrissie. That’s nothing to poke fun at. Even your father had to admit I was good at reading people.”

Eventually, Christine got Lillian off the phone. She pulled off the headset and tossed the phone onto the coffee table. She went at the huge fist of soil with her shears for several minutes, hacking off some half dozen or so roots, shaking loose dirt like black dandruff onto the newspapers. Finally she let the shears drop to the floor. She stared grimly over at the phone.

The most depressing aspect of their chat was that this time around Christine felt her mother had been pretty much on target. Being in agreement with her mother was always troubling to Christine, if only on principle. On this particular topic, it was all the more disconcerting. Integrating her own life and career with that of her husband’s had been a formidable challenge from the very outset. Michelle’s well-being and “normal childhood” had served these past seven and a half years as their shared focal point, the place to go whenever they felt the need to check up on themselves. Even so, Andy’s career carried a profound gravitational force, one that neither Christine’s parenting nor her photography counterbalanced. For the most part, Christine had come to terms with this. The bottom line was that Michelle was not a neurotic, spoiled, confused gorgon of a child. Not yet, anyway.

Senator Harrison’s drinking issue had reached the point of public dialogue over the weekend, so his potential as a replacement vice president was essentially kaput. According to all Christine was hearing, this left Michigan senator Jeff LaMott, former secretary of state John Bainbridge, and seven-year-old Michelle Foster’s daddy. Lillian was right on the money. Entering into this arena of politics would be a point of no return for Christine and Michelle. Secret Service shadows at every turn, the heightened press scrutiny, a husband infinitely more absorbed in matters he either could not or would not discuss with his wife. Less sharing. Less family time. All of the cautions, in fact, that had presented themselves to Christine back when Andy had proposed marriage to her. She wondered gloomily if perhaps she was doomed to continue approaching her life with her eyes wide shut. Not at all a heartening thought.

Christine picked up the shears and positioned them at the base of one of the prime roots of the spider plant. Taking a two-handed grip on the gummy red handles, she bore down with all her strength, compressing her back teeth. The root did not want to give. It was thick and stubborn. The effort called out the thin squiggly vein that ran vertically up Christine’s forehead, and she groaned ever so slightly as she bore down on the shears.

Snap!

It sounded like a gunshot.

A
fter Christine finished the repotting project, she picked up the newspapers and loose soil and deposited them all in the trash chute in the hallway. She washed up, then phoned Shelley Tanner to confirm the afternoon shoot. Shelley was Christine’s business manager slash agent slash favorite outrageous acquaintance, the latter category being the one Christine prized the most. A fire-haired woman from Tasmania, of all places. When Christine needed a break from so-called real life, Shelley was her ticket.

Christine was scheduled to shoot toothpick-thin Judy Starling, the quivering-voiced alt-rock chanteuse who was currently riding atop her largest career wave yet, along with her enfant terrible boyfriend from the group Cody. Or perhaps the boyfriend’s name was Cody. Christine wasn’t really tuned in. Shelley had organized the whole thing, Judy Starling was ready for photo documentation of her fabulous twenty-three-year-old life, and according to Shelley, Starling was “super eager” to add her waif like form to Christine’s modest portfolio of celebrity images.

Shelley confirmed the shoot for two o’clock at Judy Starling’s Tribeca apartment.

“I hope you’re not allergic to parrots,” Shelley said, her fantastic Tasmanian accent attacking every word. “I’ve heard rumors of twenty or more.”

“I can’t wait.”

“Just so you know, the boyfriend is going to be wanting to highlight his tattoos. I have to admit, they’re an impressive collection.”

“Oh yippee.”

Christine hung up the phone. An hour and a half later she had her equipment packed and was waiting for the buzz from the lobby to tell her that her car was there. She paused in front of the Mexican mirror in the hallway and poked at her new hair. She was wearing tight jeans and a simple V-necked sweater. On a whim, she ducked into the hallway bathroom and emerged with a green scarf knotted into her hair and trailing down her neck.

The intercom buzzed.

“Car’s here, Mrs. Foster.”

“Thank you, Jimmy.”

As she hoisted her bag onto her shoulder, the phone began to ring. It was already nearly a quarter to two. Christine leaned into the kitchen to check the caller ID.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

They want money
, she thought.
You’d think five thousand dollars a year might buy me some peace
. She let the phone ring and headed out the door.

As the door closed behind her, the answering machine in the kitchen picked up. The recorded voice of Michelle Foster was tinny, accompanied by bits of static.

“Hello. You have reached the home of Michelle and her parents. We are unable to come to the phone. Please leave a message after the beep.”

The long tone sounded. It was followed by a second or two of silence, then a man’s voice.

“Hello, Michelle. I was just calling to let you and your mother know that your father is an evil man. Right up to his stinking white perfect teeth. Okay? You should know this, Michelle. You sound like a nice little girl, but even nice little girls can sink like a stone in this world. So you be careful, okay? That’s what I want to tell you. You be very careful. I’ll talk to you later. Bye-bye.”

The answering machine clicked and went silent. A second later, its small yellow light began to blink.

T
he first thing Dimitri Bulakov did Monday morning was fire up the laptop and review the three images he had chosen the night before. Each image brought a larger smile to his face than the previous image. He was happy with his choices, and he copied the three files onto his flash drive, which he then unplugged from the computer and slipped into his pocket.

“You do not move,” Dimitri said to his wife, who was watching him from the bed. “Today it is me who will get some fresh air. I will bring home food.”

Before leaving, he pulled the Yankees cap down low on his head and grabbed his sunglasses. At a local FedEx, Dimitri spent ten minutes at a computer and printer and came away with a paper copy of each of his three images. The quality was not great, but the important thing was that it was clear what was happening in each of the pictures. It was amazing to consider that the different activities captured had taken place mere minutes from one another. How quickly everything can change. If the only activity Dimitri had captured had been the first one, Dimitri would have collected his two thousand dollars from Aleksey Titov a week ago, put some of it against his and Leonard’s debts, blown the rest, and that would have been that.

Dimitri put the three printed pages into an overnight envelope, addressed it, kissed it, and handed it to the clerk.

“Tomorrow?” Dimitri said. “You promise?”

The clerk checked the address. “D.C. Yes, sir. By noon tomorrow. Guaranteed.”

Four blocks away he found a bar that was open. Two of the three patrons looked as if they had been glued to their stools for years. The third was a
thirty something woman who looked closer to sixty. She was holding down the far end of the bar, using a glass of whiskey as her anchor.

Dimitri ordered a beer. The woman muttered something Dimitri couldn’t make out except that it was clearly not complimentary. He drank the first beer fast and ordered another. When the front door opened, bringing an unwelcome flash of sunlight into the dark den, Dimitri’s heart skipped a beat. Of course it was illogical to fear that Aleksey Titov himself was the short silhouetted form coming into the bar.
Don’t be stupid
, Dimitri told himself.
Don’t be paranoid
.