Killing Plato

“Do you know the Old Ebbit Grill?”

“I do.”

“Could you meet Mr. Redwine there tonight at eight?”

I told her I could.

“If you will give Mr. Redwine’s name to the hostess, they will seat you at his usual table.”

The Old Ebbit Grill is right across Fifteenth Street from the Treasury Building, barely a five-minute walk from the White House. I left the Mustang with the valet, then lingered out front for a few minutes examining the place’s Greek Revival facade. At exactly eight o’clock, I took a deep breath and pushed through the revolving glass door.

Naturally Billy hadn’t turned up yet. I declined the hostess’ invitation to go to Billy’s table and instead went into the bar to wait.

Down one wall of the bar was a line of booths with tufted, rust-colored velvet benches and forest-green tops. Each booth had a little table lamp with a yellow-cream shade that threw a dim but appealing glow. A huge, gilt- framed oil portrait of a woman with impossibly ivory-colored skin and an outsized rump hung just above the long mahogany bar and there were some stuffed deer heads scattered around together with one wild boar and something else I took to be a walrus. Heavy brass chandeliers, vaguely art deco in appearance, hung from a very high tin ceiling, undoubtedly fake. The tiny bulbs flickering inside frosted glass cylinders made them look almost like gaslights.

I slid into an empty booth, laid down the large manila envelope I had brought with me, and ordered a Bushmills and water. Somewhere far in the background I heard Frank Sinatra sing the first notes of “Nancy with the Laughing Face”.

When my drink came I slipped at it slowly and watched a television set tuned to CNBC that was hanging over the bar. It was discreet and silent, captions flickering over the bottom of the picture, and nobody but me seemed to be paying the slightest attention to it. The music changed to “Can’t We Be Friends”, then “That Old Feeling”, and finally, “I Can’t Get Started with You”.

Billy was an actor at heart, and when I saw him walking across the bar toward me about fifteen minutes later he looked every inch of one. He moved at a stately pace, rhythmically slapping a rolled-up copy of The Wall Street Journal against his thigh, nodding perfunctorily at the occupants of some tables and pointedly ignoring others. There were a couple of what I assumed to be Secret Service types trailing him and they sized me up professionally as he approached the booth. Since they didn’t shoot me, I guess I passed whatever test they were using.

“This fucking town,” Billy sighed as he sat down. “This goddamned motherfucking town.”

Then suddenly he straightened up and looked around as if he had just realized where he was.

“What the fuck are you doing in the bar?” Billy asked. “Didn amp;rs? arquo;t they offer to take you to my table?”

“I like bars. All kinds of interesting things happen in bars.”

Billy shook his head and slid back out of the booth. He nodded toward the main dining room and shortly afterward we settled in at a table in a far back corner of the restaurant. There was no one else within earshot and Billy’s escorts took another table strategically placed near the main entrance.

Almost immediately an elderly waiter in a long apron materialized and placed a drink at Billy’s elbow, a martini containing two olives impaled on a red plastic sword.

“Evening, Mr. Redwine.”

“Evening, Paul.”

I had brought my Bushmills from the bar so I lifted it and tilted the glass toward Billy in a half-assed toast. He lifted the martini glass in turn, tilted it at me, then took a long, slow pull.

“Man,” he said when he put it down, “that is so good.”

After that, Billy folded his arms and leaned back a little. He tilted his head slightly to one side and studied me with a half-smile on his face.

“So what kind of outrageous horseshit have you gotten yourself into this time, Jack, my boy?”

I reached across the table and put the brown envelope I had brought with me in front of Billy. Inside was the copy of the email intercepts Darcy had printed off Kate’s disk. I kept the cassettes in my pocket.

Billy eyed the envelope as warily as if I had just laid a rattlesnake down in front of him, which in a manner of speaking I guess I had.

“What?” he asked, looking back and forth from me to the envelope.

“It’s some stuff you ought to see.”

“Stuff?”

“You going to look at it?” I asked. “Or are we going to dance around a little first?”

Billy laughed at that, then he extracted a pair of half-glasses from his breast pocket and slipped them on. I watched his face as he flipped quickly through the pages, although he remained mostly expressionless. Taking a sip of his martini, he went back to the beginning and read carefully through everything, then slid the pages back into the envelope and returned his reading glasses to his jacket pocket.

“So,” I asked, “what do you think?”

“I think you’ve got some pretty good contacts in Thailand.”

“Is what I read there true?” I pointed to the envelope. “Were the marshals in Phuket with instructions to kill Karsarkis?”

“Ah, Jack…” Billy shifted his weight slightly and ran his fingers up and down the stem of the martini glass. “Everything around here is a little true and nothing is completely true. You ought to know that.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Billy. Why were the marshals really in Phuket? To bring Karsarkis back, or to kill him?”

“It’s not that simple, Jack.”

“Yes, it is that simple.”

“Look, Jack, there were different people there. They had…different responsibilities.”

Billy flicked a glance at his minders, then he cleared his throat and tapped at the table with his forefinger.

“We?ustif were hoping Karsarkis would see the wisdom of coming back on his own. On the other hand, if we could have found a way to snatch him, we would have done it. I don’t mind telling you that. But nobody really wanted to kill him.”

“Which means you might have. If you thought you had to.”

“Yeah, we might have if we thought somebody else was going to snatch him first.”

“God damn, Billy-” I started in, but he interrupted me before I could get started.

“What else could we have done, Jack? Just sat there with our thumbs up our butts while Karsarkis became Exhibit A in the great hit parade of American fuck-ups? Hell, Karsarkis would probably rather we’d shot him than let the crazies get him.”

“Look, Billy, there’s something important here that you don’t know anything about.”

Billy nodded slowly. “That wouldn’t surprise me.”

“Karsarkis was going to spill it all,” I said. “He thought if he just told the world everything he knew, that would protect him. Then no one would want to kill him anymore to shut him up.”

“How do you know that?”

“Before Karsarkis got on that plane, he came to see me. He told me he was going to go public.”

“Huh,” Billy said. “How about that?”

“There’s more.”

Billy said nothing.

“He told me exactly what it was he was going to spill.”

Billy blinked then, twice in rapid succession, but otherwise his eyes gave nothing away.