“Good.” He rose. “You’ll be wanting to talk to Mary.” I wasn’t so sure, but my time was clearly up. We walked together to his door.
“Thanks, Chris.” He shook my hand again. “I hear you’re very good at this. I’ll look forward to seeing you.” The smile that went with the handshake said that he meant it. “And I’ll need your help on other things as I go along.” The warm voice bespoke pleasant hours of purposeful escape from my catacombs, amidst the impressionist serenity. He instructed the receptionist to get Mary Carelli, then backed into his office and closed the door. He left behind a bracing warmth, like a shot of good whiskey. I returned to the subject of the books. My best guess was that Woods read them, then recorded choice quotes on index cards to be fit into future speeches. Substance and surface rubbing together. It was a measure of his skill that I didn’t mind.
I was enjoying the padded chair when I noticed that it was 5:15. Mary Carelli emerged from her office and wordlessly waved me in. The experimental subject had been sealed and delivered. I liked her less than ever. When I got to the door, she was already behind her desk looking at a notepad and waiting for me to sit. So I leaned against the door frame until she looked up. Her eyes were watchful and didn’t change with her smile, which seemed to measure itself to the nearest millimeter. She nodded toward a chair. “Come on in and sit down.”
I looked at my watch with studied deliberation. “Does whatever we’re going to do have to be done today?”
She sat up in her chair and squared her shoulders. Set against the white walls and the hanging plants in her window, she looked mint cool. “Don’t be bureaucratic. I’d just as soon talk to you now.” The voice was cool too-a touch of scorn amidst a lot of indifference.
I didn’t move. “I’m not bureaucratic. Just thirsty. I’ve talked more today than I care to and listened to more than I like to hear. A good deal of it nonsense. So I’m thirsty-and bored.”
She sat holding her pad, still except for her left hand, which idly rubbed the pad between forefingers and thumb. It was as if all but her fingertips was under military occupation. She spoke with measured impatience. “So what do you suggest?”
“I’ve suggested to myself that I have a gin and tonic on the deck of the Hotel Washington, and marvel at our nation’s capitol. I’d be happy to buy you a drink and talk business there.” Once I’d asked, I wasn’t so sure. But it beat sitting at attention in her office by a comfortable margin.
Her body was a stiff parody of resistance. Finally, she willed it away. “All right. But I don’t intend to make a habit of this.”
I knew what she meant, but played dense. “Why?” I asked innocently. “You married?”
She looked at me askance. “No. Divorced.”
I believed it. We left, more or less in tandem.
The deck of the Hotel Washington overlooked the Potomac, the White House, and the Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln memorials, surrounded by grass and trees. From this distance, the squalid brown of the Potomac was blue, and carried a toy armada of trim pleasure craft. Arlington Cemetery sat in soft green hills, an optimist’s glimpse of eternity. The vivid view had an odd unreality, like a mural of the tourists’ imagined Washington. It was possible here to drink oneself into a dazed belief in the dramatic Washington of political fiction: statesmen launching soliloquies at moonlit marble, musing over the fate of Western civilization. The real Washington sat around me: knit-suited bureaucrats, drinking gin with tight mouths, nibbling on salted peanuts and calculations of small chances for petty gains. I looked out again and decided that I had a mild case of overcynicism. On its merits, the view was lovely.
Mary and I sat in awkward silence staring out at the view. She was as remote as the marble. I would have preferred having a drink with the Washington Monument; it wasn’t so embarrassing when it didn’t talk to you. Instead I ordered two gin and tonics and waited for something to happen. Nothing did. Finally, I asked her what it was that she wanted. She told me. So I gave her the rundown she requested-what I had found and what I intended, including the subpoena to Sam Green. The last part caught her interest.
“Have you already sent the subpoena?”
“Yes,” I lied.
She looked angry and unsettled, for reasons I couldn’t fathom. She sat erect and marshalled her shoulders again. I was beginning to read her better. She seemed to expend a lot of energy just keeping herself under control. And the rest of it controlling others. “I thought it was understood that you would clear investigative steps with our office before you took them.”
“It was?”
She looked annoyed, like a teacher with an overaged discipline problem. “You don’t seem to understand the implications of this thing.”
“You know, I didn’t get the impression from your boss that you and I were going to be Siamese twins.”
She wasn’t sure what Woods and I had talked about. She shifted ground slightly. “You’re making this Sam Green come all the way to Washington on pretty weak evidence. It’s like a form of harassment.”
I thought of my pen pal, the jailbird stockbroker. I grinned. “Tell it to the American Civil Liberties Union. They’ve got a file on me. You can find it under ‘N,’ for ‘Nazi.’”
Her eyes seemed to look clear through me, as if I wasn’t there. Which was clearly her wish. She bunched her hands in a determined little gesture. “We’re going to have to get this situation straightened out. I don’t have time to sit here feeding you straight lines and watching you stuff your ego. Which is already overfed.”
I remembered Robinson’s friend at the committee, and his brush with unemployment. I suddenly realized that the day hadn’t been all bad; I didn’t want to lose this case before it began. “Look, please understand some things. I’m not used to this kind of supervision. I like to follow the facts where they take me. Anyhow, hauling in Sammy Green is routine, like bringing in a lifetime deviate after a sex crime. He’s our version of a jailhouse character, and all the facts point to him. Would you prefer that I subpoenaed Lasko?”
The last suggestion startled her for a second. Then she tagged it as an idle threat, and dismissed it. She started to look for my new pigeonhole. “Well, then, what’s your understanding of your role?”
“I’ll keep you posted, as I have. If something major comes up, I’ll let you know before I do anything.” I didn’t like this; I clung to the loophole word “major.” “But I can’t loiter around your office like a truant with his parole officer, seeking advice. I’d never get anything done.”
She wasn’t mollified. “Christopher Kenyon Paget is a pretty name.” Her careful voice lingered on “Kenyon,” as if reading an indictment of false pride. What it told me was that she had read my personnel file. “It doesn’t go with taking direction. But you’re going to have to learn.”
That got me. “The nice thing about being Christopher Kenyon Paget”-I mocked her diction-“is that I can make these decisions for myself.”
She reached her own decision, put down her half-finished drink and snatched at her purse, ready to leave. “This has been fairly disagreeable.”
“Yes,” I said agreeably, “and it’s been so easy.”
We stood and left, single file. Then we grabbed the elevator and walked to her car. She broke the uneasy silence only to ask if I wanted a ride home. We set a new world’s record for non-communication, all the way to my apartment.
I opened the door as soon as we had stopped. “You forgot to thank me for a lovely evening,” I said. I meant it as self-mockery, but it came out wrong, like everything else. She gave me a cold look back to tell me that she wasn’t wasting more time, and leaned over to shut my door.
I was thrilled with myself. Paget the wit. Paget the charming. Paget the amateur psychologist. I had screwed up with Mary, and I had to learn to handle her better were I to keep the case. If it wasn’t too late. And there was an ephemeral personal regret. At least she wasn’t boring. Of course, I told myself, someone had probably once said that about Lucretia Borgia.
My apartment was on the first floor of a seventy-year-old red brick former townhouse, on the six hundred block of East Capitol. My landlord had largely gutted it in the process of preparing to charge $500 a month. The neighborhood had a healthy crime rate, and I didn’t walk around at night. But the place suited me. The fireplace and the fine old wood floors were still there. The living room was large, with a chandelier and shuttered windows which looked out on a garden. And there were two bedrooms and plenty of room for my paintings and books.
I opened the door and knocked over my tennis racket. I had forgotten to play this evening. I plodded to the kitchen nook, poured myself a careless martini, and stuck a frozen pizza into the oven. I bolted the first martini and, in a reckless mood, poured a second. Then I pulled the pizza from the oven. I ate hungrily, my good-taste buds
