Gone Tomorrow

‘No,’ I said.

We all went quiet after that. The tea expert brought the check.

It was in a padded leather wallet. Lila Roth signed it. She said, ‘Sansom should be called to account.’

‘If it was him,’ I said. ‘If it was anybody.’ I took Leonid’s phone out of my pocket and dumped it on the table. I pushed my chair back and got ready to leave.

Lila said, ‘Please keep the phone.’

I said, ‘Why?’

‘Because my mother and I are staying. Just a few more days. And I would really like to be able to call you, if I wanted to.’ She wasn’t coy in the way she said it. Not coquettish. No lowered eyelids, no batted lashes. No hand on my arm, no attempt to seduce, no attempt to change my mind. It was just a plain statement, neutrally delivered.

Then she said, ‘Even if you’re not a friend,’ and I heard the tiniest bat-squeak of a threat in her voice. Just a faint far-off chime of menace, a hint of danger, barely audible behind the words, accompanied by a perceptible chill in her amazing blue eyes. Like a warm summer sea changing to sunlit winter ice. Same colour, different temperature.

Or maybe she was just sad, or anxious, or determined.

I looked at her with a level gaze and put the phone back in my pocket and stood up and walked away. There were plenty of cabs on 57th Street, but none of them was empty. So I walked. The Sheraton was three blocks west and five blocks south. Twenty minutes, max. I figured I could get there before Sansom finished his lunch.

THIRTY-NINE

I didn’t get to the Sheraton before Sansom finished his lunch, partly because the sidewalks were clogged with people moving slowly in the heat, and partly because it had been a short lunch. Which I guessed made sense. Sansom’s Wall Street audience wanted to spend maximum time making money and minimum time giving it away. I didn’t make it on to the same Amtrak as him, either. I missed a D.C. train by five minutes, which meant I trailed him back to the capital a whole hour and a half in arrears.

* * *

The same guard was on duty at the Cannon Building’s door. He didn’t recognize me. But he let me in anyway, mainly because of the Constitution. Because of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights. Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people to petition the Government. My pocket junk inched through an X-ray machine and I stepped through a metal detector and was patted down even though I knew the light had flashed green. There was a gaggle of House pages inside the lobby and one of them called ahead and then walked me to Sansom’s quarters. The corridors were wide and generous and confusing. The individual offices seemed small but handsome. Maybe they had once been large and handsome, but now they were broken up into reception anterooms and multiple inner spaces, partly for senior staff to use, I guessed, and partly to make eventual labyrinthine access to the big guy seem more of a gift than it really was.

Sansom’s place looked the same as all the others. A door off the corridor, lots of flags, lots of eagles, some oil paintings of old guys in wigs, a reception desk with a young woman behind it. Maybe a staffer, maybe an intern. Springfield was leaning on the corner of her desk. He saw me and nodded without a smile and pushed off the desk and came to the door to meet me and jerked his thumb farther along the corridor.

‘Cafeteria,’ he said.

We got there down a flight of stairs. It was a wide low room full of tables and chairs. Sansom was nowhere in it. Springfield grunted like he wasn’t surprised and concluded that Sansom had returned to his office while we were out looking for him, by an alternative route, possibly via a colleague’s billet. He said the place was a warren and that there were always conversations to be had and favours to be sought and deals to be struck and votes to be traded. We walked back the same way we had come and Springfield stuck his head around an inner door and then backed away and motioned me inside.

Sansom’s inner office was a rectangular space larger than a closet and smaller than a thirty-dollar motel room. It had a window and panelled walls covered with framed photographs and framed newspaper headlines and souvenirs on shelves. Sansom himself was in a red leather chair behind a desk, with a fountain pen in his hand and a whole lot of papers spread out in front of him. He had his jacket off. He had the weary, airless look of a man who had been sitting still for a long time. He hadn’t been out. The cafeteria detour had been a charade, presumably designed to allow someone to make an exit without me seeing him. Who, I didn’t know. Why, I didn’t know. But I sat down in the visitor chair and found it still warm from someone else’s body. Behind Sansom’s head was a large framed print of the same picture I had seen in his book. Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein, in Baghdad. Sometimes our friends become our enemies, and sometimes our enemies become our friends. Next to it was a cluster of smaller pictures, some of Sansom standing with groups of people, some of him alone and shaking hands and smiling with other individuals. Some of the group shots were formal, and some were of wide smiles and confetti-strewn stages after election victories. I saw Elspeth in most of them. Her hair had changed a lot over the years. I saw Springfield in some of the others, his small wary shape easily recognizable even though the images were tiny. The two-shots were what news photographers call grip-and-grins. Some of the individuals in them I recognized, and some I didn’t. Some had autographed the pictures with extravagant dedications, and some hadn’t.

Sansom said, ‘So?’

I said, ‘I know about the DSM in March of 1983.’

‘How?’

‘Because of the VAL Silent Sniper. The battleaxe I told you about is the widow of the guy you took it from. Which is why you reacted to the name. Maybe you never heard of Lila Hoth or Svetlana Hoth, but you met with some other guy called Hoth back in the day. That’s for damn sure. It was obvious. You probably took his dog tags and had them translated. You’ve probably still got them, as souvenirs.’

There was no surprise. No denial. Sansom just said, ‘No, actually those tags were locked up with the after- action reports, and everything else.’

I said nothing.

Sansom said, ‘His name was Grigori Hoth. He was about my age at the time. He seemed competent. His spotter, not so much. He should have heard us coming.’

I didn’t reply. There was a long silence. Then the situation seemed to hit home and Sansom’s shoulders fell and he sighed and he said, ‘What a way to get found out, right? Medals are supposed to be rewards, not penalties. They’re not supposed to screw you up. They’re not supposed to follow you around the rest of your life like a damn ball and chain.’

I said nothing.

He asked, ‘What are you going to do?’

I said, ‘Nothing.’

‘Really?’

‘I don’t care what happened in 1983. And they lied to me. First about Berlin, and they’re still lying to me now. They claim to be mother and daughter. But I don’t believe them. The alleged daughter is the cutest thing you ever saw. The alleged mother fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch. I first met them with a cop from the NYPD. She said thirty years from now the daughter will look just like the mother. But she was wrong. The younger one will never look like the older one. Not in a million years.’

‘So who are they?’

‘I’m prepared to accept that the older one is for real. She was a Red Army political commissar who lost her husband and her brother in Afghanistan.’

‘Her brother?’

‘The spotter.’

‘But the younger woman is posing?’

I nodded. ‘As a billionaire expatriate widow from London. She says her husband was an entrepreneur who didn’t make the cut.’