'Who is it?' I yelled back. Okay, stupid question, but sometimes you just ask the first thing that pops into your mind. And they're always asking that question in the movies.
'Stay right there, Mr. Flynn.' For a second, it was as if Jennings was talking to me, but no. The voice, still at the clip of a holler, was younger than I had expected, given that the phone calls sounded like they came from a reasonably old man.
I stayed silent, waiting, but nothing happened.
Jennings: 'Later in the program, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a fresh start for some old steel workers. As part of our Eye on America, we bring you the latest from an innovative job retraining program that is being billed as a model for our fading industrial nation-'
Still nothing. 'Where are you?' I yelled, but got no response. I strained my eyes looking upward, then off into the distant expanse of the museum, but all I could see was the glow of so many television sets. Jennings's voice was so loud, so omnipotent, that it seemed to take its own visual form.
I'd like to think I'm nobody's fool, so it was beginning to dawn on me that if this was just some relatively innocent meeting between a reporter and a confidential source, I wouldn't be entangled in this situational melodrama. Problem is, that thought struck me just as I heard a loud crack- a sound that was becoming all too familiar these past few days.
I'm not sure whether I ducked or just flinched. Nor was I sure where the noise came from, which direction the bullet-assuming it was a bullet-was headed. Because of that, I didn't know which way to run, and feared that if I peeled off in any given direction, I might find myself face-to-face with my stalking gunman. Times like these, I wish I had just become a copy editor.
I looked behind me to see Peter Jennings's face blown out on one of the television screens, just about level with my own, and that image sent something tantamount to a convulsion through my body. It also prompted me to get flat to the floor and begin crawling toward the door, figuring that all things being equal, it was probably the best direction to head.
'The Gulf Coast of Texas braces for the late arrival of Hurricane Sally, which is expected to make land by dawn tomorrow-'
I strained to hear any other sounds, any other slight movements, most notably a gun cocking, but all I could really hear, Jennings aside, was the sound of my own heavy breathing. So I kept crawling to the entrance, about forty feet away, straightaway across the center of the museum floor. Every inch I covered I wondered whether I was an inch closer to safety or death.
About halfway there, I veered toward a heavy door marked with an illuminated sign that read, 'Emergency Exit. Alarm will sound.' Maybe sounding alarms wasn't such a bad idea. I paused on the floor for a few seconds, summoning the emotional and physical energy to bolt upward and blast through the door. My driving fear, gunman excepted, was that the door would be locked, but these are the risks you take in the name of salvation.
I braced myself on all fours and hurled myself against the door. It flew open, and a shrieking alarm filled the air. I found myself on some nondescript street in Rosslyn, empty after dark. I bolted around the corner of the building and could hear the alarm become muted as the door shut behind me. I ran the one block to the Metro station, gulping the fresh air of freedom and safety. A train was sliding toward the platform as I bounded down the escalator. The doors rolled open, and I grabbed my own pole to hold and stared out the rear window as we pulled away, staring, it ends up, at nothing at all.
By all means, I'm Irish. I have the ability to brood for hours at a time. If I ever needed bypass surgery, I'm convinced my doctors would open up my chest and find that my heart is an alarming shade of black.
Not all the time, but often, I love to drink, to tell stories, to laugh hard when my brain feels soaked in Miller, or even worse, gin. But if you really want to see ethnic, take a look at Steve Havlicek.
He stands about five feet six inches, though he doesn't exactly seem short. His face is like a Rand Mcationally map of wrinkles, heading every which way from the downtown location that seems to be the middle of his cheeks. His hair, graying, is often matted against his big scalp or sticking up in various directions in shapeless wisps. He talks loud. He laughs even louder. He loves jokes, and he seems to have a general inability to be embarrassed by anything that life might throw at him. At home his wife, Margaret, his high school sweetheart, his same age, looks a decade younger. She is gorgeous, perfectly put together. They have two children, both grown and successful. From a distance anyway, and I suspect up close as well, they seem to have an ideal relationship, the type of love that tears barriers down rather than builds them up. Ah, but there I go getting deep again.
'Jesus, what a place.' That was Havlicek, walking into the paneled Grille Room at the University Club, an establishment where I have remained a member in good standing for many years. He looked around the lounge and gave one of those soft whistles, like something on the Andy Griffith Show, and said, in a confiding voice, 'High-roller city, huh? I bet lots of big guns come in here.'
I don't think he quite understood the general code of conduct at all private clubs-one of understated appreciation. Members favor words like comfortable and traditional, and neither gawk nor mock each other, at least in a forum as public as the club bar. So I ignored that. I had arrived comfortably ahead of him, giving myself enough time to clean myself up in the marble men's room, knock down a Miller Highlife, and try to calm my nerves. 'What are you drinking, Steve?' I said, rather shortly. Maybe I wasn't exactly calm quite yet.
Havlicek's gaze zeroed in on something across the room, nearly empty because it was a Sunday night. 'Nice cheese tray,' he said. 'That for anyone? Even a nonmember?'
Lyle, the bartender, finally caught Havlicek's eye, God bless him.
'Can I get you something, sir?' he asked, in that way that leaves the impression he might have a mouthful of marbles.
'You bet. What kind of beer do you have?' Havlicek asked.
The list was a long one, and I shot Lyle an interested look, wondering how he would handle this. 'Anything you like.' Okay, so he would handle it well.
'I like that,' Havlicek said, warming to the place even more, growing comfortable, taking on a feeling of belonging. 'I'll have a Heineken.'
Havlicek wrapped his hairy hand around the ice-cold bottle and took a long gulp before Lyle could even hurry down the bar with a frosted pilsner glass. 'That overnight flight and all that time-change bullshit wiped me out, so I didn't get much today,' he said to me, his eyes meeting mine for the first time since he walked in. Then, urgently, 'Jesus Christ. What the frick happened to you? I thought I was a mess, but look at you, you're a fricking wreck.'
'A tough day,' I said. 'Let me regroup first, and I'll tell you about it.'
On a related matter, earlier in the afternoon, I had already decided to tell him about the anonymous calls and note, for a couple of reasons.
First, he would probably be of help on it. He had one of the best investigative minds in the country. He had won his Pulitzer Prize a few years earlier for a series of stories detailing how a group of Boston housing inspectors were actually the biggest slumlords in the city, having arranged a series of property takeovers from prior shady owners, then operating the properties in the same way, free from the threat of inspection. Second reason was, it would be vastly unfair to withhold information from him on this story. If anyone did it to me, I would be furious, and that was the final yardstick. And given what had just happened to me an hour previous, I really had no choice anymore, for my own safety, and perhaps his as well.
'So we've got a dead assassin wannabe who no one knows who the fuck he is,' I said as we leaned on the bar. 'We've got the FBI immediately pointing the finger at the militias, and no one knows why. Basically, we've got nothing.'
'Martin says you might fly out and talk to a militia pal of yours in Idaho? That might be a good idea, just to nail that angle down clean, be able to print that the militias definitively say they don't know who this guy is and that they wouldn't condone the shooting of the president.'
'Thinking about it, but I'm not sure if that moves the ball far enough along. I do have a couple of other interesting developments-'
Lyle, at this point, came over with a couple of bowls of mixed snacks-some pretzels, wheat Chex, corn chips, and peanuts swirled together.
'Jesus Christ, this place is great,' Havlicek said. He reached into his pocket, and I started thinking, Oh, no, please don't. But he did.
