“The sooner, the better.”
“Any preference?”
“What do you mean?”
“There are a lot of ways to get injured in this world. I mean, I’ll take what I can get as far as the opportunity goes, but I try to accommodate my client’s request.”
Senator Day looked around the empty private dining room as if he expected the FBI to come busting through the door. “I’m not sure what you are saying,” the senator answered coyly. “But if I had a choice of how
“I’ll see what I can do. I think I can rule out the use of a firearm. I’m not about to fly to some foreign country with a gun in my bag.”
“It’s not a foreign country. Saipan is a U.S. territory.”
“Well, just the same. Taking a gun on an airplane, even a gun with a proper license, is not in our best interest.” DiMarco didn’t bother telling the senator that he preferred knives. They did the job, left fewer clues if you took the weapon with you, and they were silent. Every musician has their favorite instrument and DiMarco’s were stainless steel, heavily weighted, razor sharp blades made by an old codger in Toledo, Spain.
The senator nodded and said nothing.
Mr. Gelodini entered with a fresh basket of bread and filled the senator’s wine glass. Vincent DiMarco stood and straightened his jacket.
“Michael, my guest can’t stay for dinner. Would you please see him out?”
“Certainly, sir. Will the senator still be dining with us this evening?”
“Yes, I will.”
“Very well.”
Michael Gelodini led Vincent DiMarco through the kitchen and out the side door to an alley beside the restaurant. The metal door shut and darkness surrounded DiMarco like a comfortable jacket. With quarter of a million dollars on his income horizon, DiMarco looked down the alley in both directions. To the left he could see the lights of Hanover Street silhouetting patrons as they shuffled down the sidewalk. DiMarco turned away from the light and vanished into the night.
Chapter 18
Marilyn opened her eyes as the morning sun peaked through a crack in the curtains. For the third night in a row, she had spent more time staring at the dark ceiling than she had at the back of her eyelids. The fax that had poured into the office earlier in the week had forced her to reflect on the last twenty years of her life, something she had managed to avoid through self-therapy and good old-fashioned medication. Admitting that she was the cause of Jake’s parent’s divorce, combined with the plight of a seamstress named Wei Ling, sent her tail-spinning into a level of depression she hadn’t visited in years. She rolled over, got out of bed in her nightgown, and downed two Valium and a Zoloft with her morning espresso.
An hour later, she grabbed a seat on the crowded Metro and cautiously circled job possibilities from the employment page, looking over her shoulder as she rode the subway six stops on the red line. At the office, she made travel plans, took phone calls, and shifted around a never-ending carousel of meetings and appointments, dinners, and lunches. She brewed coffee for her boss as soon as she knew he was on the floor and served it with one spoonful of real sugar, stirred well. But for the first time in her life, she was looking at other job alternatives, scanning the opportunities available to a forty-five-year-old secretary with no educational background.
Reeling from guilt, she asked Jake to lunch—an offer which he politely declined. Marilyn’s third offer to buy him a drink after work was finally, grudgingly, accepted. She didn’t want to leave anything unsaid. She didn’t want Jake to have any questions about the past. He was going to be burdened for life by the truth she had already spilled. She was going to apologize again, try to explain the unexplainable, and act like an adult for once in her life, even if it killed her.
Jake got out of a late evening meeting, a conference call with an Indonesian firm looking to import a new generator for an offshore, wind-power venture. He had prolonged the meeting as long as he could by peppering the international team with an inordinate number of questions. In the back of his mind, he hoped Marilyn wouldn’t be waiting when he finished. Luck wasn’t on his side.
The waiter led Jake and Marilyn to a two-seater booth in a shaded corner of The Dark Room, an appropriately named hole in the basement of an old office building five blocks from Winthrop Enterprises.
The waiter gave the young man and the older woman the usual look. Boy toys for the city’s wealthy and lonely wives were an old sport, and a few establishments in Georgetown survived on such clientele alone.
Marilyn grabbed the red menu with the gold edge and flipped to the cocktails. Jake, uncomfortable, looked around the bar.
“Your friend Al is a little out there.”
“He can help.”
“He said he would, but not without giving me the first degree.”
“He is a very smart man. Don’t let the mental breakdown fool you.”
“Did you know the guy used to work in intelligence?”
“I know he worked for the government.”
“And my father?”
“You need to ask Al about that. I wasn’t involved.”
“What’s his story?
“It’s a long one.”
“I don’t have to be anywhere for a couple of hours,” Jake responded, kinder than he needed to be.
“He lost his wife and son a few years back.”
“How?”
“Remember the Air Egypt flight that crashed off the coast of Nantucket twenty-five minutes after take- off?”
“Sure I remember. They suspect the pilot nose-dived the plane into the sea intentionally.”
“It gives me chills just thinking about it.”
“His family was on the plane?”
“Yes,” Marilyn said fading away momentarily. “His wife was a Japanese lady named Miyuki. From the pictures I have seen, she was quite beautiful. And their son was just adorable. An eight-year-old Indiana Jones. Loved archeology. After the accident, Al moved out of his family’s house in Bethesda. There were just too many faces staring at him as he walked the halls, too many voices calling to him from the corners of the rooms. Too many memories. His brother moved into the house and Al moved into my apartment complex. I recognized him from meetings with your father years before, and we became friends. As it turns out, his move to the apartment was only a first step toward reclusion. One day he decided he had had enough. He left his apartment, fully furnished, and moved out to live on the streets. I used to come by and check on him, bring him clothes and food. So did his brother. But after a while he refused to accept things. Said he was getting by just fine and that there were plenty of others who needed help worse than he did.”
“Pretty drastic.”
“There was more to it than just a plane crash. He was supposed to be on the plane. He was called back to the office on his way to the airport. He put his wife and son on the plane by themselves and was going to catch a flight out the next morning. He was planning to take his son to see the Pyramids.”
“Jesus,” Jake said.
“Yeah, he felt responsible. Guilt does things to people that are hard to explain.” ***
Chow Ying smoked his almond-flavored cigarettes and sipped his Tsingtao beer, close enough to smell Marilyn’s Liz Claiborne perfume. He hummed a traditional Chinese song he had heard the old man who ran the hotel sing the night before. Between verses, he listened to the conversation over his shoulder. The woman cried twice, for reasons God only knew. Chow Ying couldn’t care less. He was there for one purpose, to get closer to Peter Winthrop.
