“Did you discuss this with God first?” wondered a Mrs. Salatow, of Cape May.
“You red shit,” observed ex-PFC, from North Carolina.
“Why are you tearing down the FBI?” wondered Gordon. “Do you want the terrorists to win?”
“You’re doing a great job, David,” said Bill Fedders. “Call me if you need any more help.”
And on and on it went, the queue lengthening even as he tried to read through it all. Finally it was too much.
Time for lunch.
“Killer, join us?” said a colleague. “Thai, that little place on K.”
“That’ll be fun,” he said, pulling on coat and hat.
“You’re a Yankees fan? Never would have guessed.”
“Yankees, baseball, right? Where they hit that thing with a club?”
Then they saw he was being ironic and laughed, and off they went and had a fine, merry lunch.
He got back late, again okay for a star. He ran the afternoon blogs, saw that he had heated up the boys at Power Line but was a god on Huffington, and the Daily Kos seemed close to declaring him a new religion. Calls from some tag-along foreign pressies-Australian, Japanese, Dutch, the Swedes and their pals the Danes-all wanting to do phoners. Ho-hum. Another call from WRC, a call from NPR, some woman who claimed she’d met him at a party.
It was almost time for the 4 p.m. meeting, and no, nothing had-
“Oh, David, this came for you, meant to drop it off earlier,” said Judi Messing, who administered the office as its receptionist.
He took it. Big envelope, manila. He breathed hard.
Okay, maybe so.
He felt it; yes, there seemed to be a sheet of photo-thickness paper inside.
“David, the meeting. Don’t be late,” someone called, rushing past. “They’ll be singing your praises.”
“I can’t come. Something just came in.”
He saw all the reporters gathered in the conference room and the assistant bureau manager running the show, with the big man himself off to the side, hiding behind those half-lens reading glasses he’d affected for twenty-odd years. David watched through the glass, as if observing a pantomime, while each boy or girl self- promoted his or her own stories, and the great man handed out nods of acceptance or frowns of denial. There was a lot of laughing, as there always was, as the very smart people who constituted the office enjoyed each other’s company, camaraderie, shared values, sense of irony, dedication to professionalism, and, of course, ambition.
He felt above it.
I have transcended, he thought.
Now it was time. He looked around-nobody nearby; someone taking dictation; someone on the phone, too busy to attend the meet; Jack Sims, notorious curmudgeon, boycotting as he had famously for twenty years; researchers sitting at their screens still grinding away; yadda yadda, the same old. God, he loved it. It had taken most of his life to get here, and it had seemed so far away for so long, but now he was actually a member of the bureau in the biggest, fiercest town of all, for the greatest newspaper that ever lived and breathed, and he counted, he was one of them, he was part of it, he moved, he shook, he influenced. Yet for an empire it was a seedy palace: it looked, to continue with the customary metaphor, like a second-tier insurance company branch office, decorated in early-twentieth-century political posters. Some trophy front pages also hung about, but mostly it had the industrial cheeriness of the New Office Interior Design, littered with piles of crap, stacks of crap, pieces of crap, little doohickeys that reporters always got sent, for some odd reason, and a few morale-boosting quotations taped to the walls from men like Breslin, Mencken, Liebling, and Baker, the latter of which was the most helpful:
Q: Mr. Baker, what do you do when you write a column and it’s just not there, you know, you just haven’t done it right, it’s not very good, you know it’s not your best?
A: Publish it.
David always got a smile out of that truth. Anyway, now he opened the flap and slid the paper out, seeing that yes, it was a photograph, though upside down. He turned it around and his eyes drank up the details.
The first thing was the target. He thought it would have a black bull’s-eye, but it was of a configuration he didn’t understand: the predominant feature was a heavy black square about three by three inches in the upper quarter of the face. It lay across and occluded the top of a collection of circles within circles which seemed to form the nominal “target” of the thing. He looked at the printed label up top and made out “I.B.S. Official 300 Yard Bench Rest Target.” Whatever. The sheet was mounted in a frame of some sort. The bullet holes actually weren’t in the center of the circles or in the box either, but just off the box at about ten o’clock in the third ring. The cluster of shots had landed nowhere near the center, but the three men gathered about the target appeared joyous.
The one with the rifle was clearly Nick Memphis, sleeves rolled up, tie loosened. He held a big gun, a rifle, with a tube along the top, an imposing-looking gadget with turrets and markings that sort of resembled a camera, if a camera were a tube instead of a box. The gun looked massive, and it wasn’t the machine gun type of thing, with handles and bolts and cooling ventilation and curved magazines, but more like a hunting rifle, though somehow swollen, as if it had been ingesting steroids. It was black, like the scope, and lay against Nick’s knee as Nick posed kneeling by the cluster of holes, five of them, a little constellation. Next to the cluster, as David bent and squinted to see, someone had written in magic marker, “Nick Memphis, 300 yards, FN Model PSR,.308 Black Hills 168, 1.751!, June 23, 2006, Columbia, S.C.” David didn’t know what the 1.751 referred to and why it bore an exclamation point. He didn’t recognize the two men flanking Nick on each side, their sleeves also up, their ties loosened, each with an earphone pushed up on their heads, as were earphones pushed up on Nick’s. In fact, it was like a glimpse into a strange world, maybe on a distant planet or a million years in the past or future, full of protocols that were mysterious, full of traditions that were meaningless, pride that seemed arbitrary, and most of all that big, immutable gun right in the middle, the center of it all, as if these three guys worshipped it. Very odd.
But the point was, here was visual, dramatic proof that Nicholas Memphis, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation, had journeyed to South Carolina in June of 2006 to examine FN’s entry in the FBI Sniper Rifle Selection, against FBI regulations, especially, as the documents already obtained and proven authentic had revealed, at the expense of the Belgian arms manufacturing concern.
If it was real.
David leaned over as he opened his desk drawer and removed a magnifying glass bought two days earlier for exactly this purpose. Not knowing just what he was looking for, he ran his eye, through the magnified lens, over every square centimeter of the photo. He certainly saw nothing obviously fake, like a shadow going the wrong way or a subtly incorrect relationship of head to neck or a line around this or that figure or object. But who knew what they could do these days?
“Is that it?” Jack Sims asked, leaning over. Jack was of the old-professor type, usually a study in tweeds, jowls, horn-rims, rep-striped bow tie, blue Brooks Brothers button-down even though, regrettably, Brooks now had its shirts made in China, a man with whiskey breath and a memory for arcane political minutiae that was legendary in DC.
“Yeah. Jack, were you in the Army?”
“I was. A thousand years ago. No guns then, we used spears. I was in the 235th Spearchucking Regiment.”
“Seriously, see where he’s written ‘1.751’ here, with an exclamation point and an arrow to the cluster of bullet holes. Any idea what that means? Is it a score or something?”
“No,” said Jack, “it’s not a score. Not with the decimal point.”
“Could it be a caliber? Is the gun a 1.751 caliber?”
“Hmm, when I was in in the sixties, we shot something that had millimeters. I don’t know what the inch measure would be. Wait, I know a photographer who’s a gun guy. For some reason photogs are gun nuts, more often than not. Maybe it’s the love of small, well-machined little gizmos. Anyway, let me Rolodex his cell and see if I can get an answer.”
Jack disappeared, not that David noticed, so absorbed was he in the drama of his examination, and it seemed that Jack came back in a second, when it was really twenty minutes.
“Okay,” he said, “the 1.751 is a group size. In other words, the guy fired five rounds at the target and the five made up a group. They’re trying to figure out the mechanical accuracy of the gun, not the shooter, and they get that from the group. So they use calipers to measure from center to center of the two farthest shots, and it comes out to be one and seven hundred fifty-one thousandths of an inch.”
“Is that good?”
“At three hundred yards, that’s magnificent. My guy says an inch per hundred yards is very good, so at three hundred it ought to be three inches. It’s one and three-quarters of an inch. That’s a wow.”
“Okay,” said David. “Thanks, Jack, big help. Now I get the exclamation point.”
Just at that moment the bureau chief came over.
“I see you guys acting like teenage girls at the mall. Did it come?”
“It sure did,” said Jack. “David’s Pulitzer, gift-wrapped. He’s taking the office to Morton’s for dinner tonight, right, David?”
“It did come,” said David, modestly.
“Okay, bring it in, we’ll see what we’ve got.”
David trekked into the chief’s office, and just about everybody important in the bureau followed. He laid the photo out on the glass table as they crowded around.
“That’s Memphis,” somebody said.
“It sure is. Does anybody know who those other two guys are? David, was there any information with it?”
“No, Mel. It was just the-”
“Sir,” came a voice; it had to be an intern. They were everywhere, ambitious little reptiles, incredibly smart and industrious, desperately wanting to eat the flesh of anyone who stood in their way. Little show-offy monsters.
This one’s name was Fong, but his ethnicity wasn’t Asian, it was ambition. David hated them, even though he realized he’d been one himself.
“I stopped at a gun store in Silver Spring. It’s called Atlantic Guns. Anyhow, they were giving away catalogs of all the gun makers and I thought we needed the FN catalog, so I picked one up.”
“Good, Fong.”
