Blow the House Down Read online

  “And by the way, Max, we’re sorry to see you go.”

  I could no longer remember her name, but a few months earlier I’d wandered into an office party celebrating the birth of her second grandchild. The kid’s photograph had been stuck on the end of a toothpick and pinned on top of the cake. Grandma cut me a slice herself. Maybe she really was sorry to see me go. But who knew in this insane asylum.

  Out in the parking lot, the Armanis kept to the safety and comfort of their air-conditioned Cherokee as I climbed onto the worn seat of my vintage Norton Commando and prayed to all gods known and unknown that it would start. I had a vision that I would have to push the damn bike halfway across the parking lot to jump it—a spark plug needed replacing, or maybe it was the points. What I knew about fixing motorcycles I had picked up in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance three decades back. Thank God for small favors, the Norton turned over on the first kick: the last bit of dignity I had left to me.

  I could hear the Cherokee thrumming behind me as I passed under the sally port and pulled up to the stoplight at Route 123. Waiting there behind a Dodge Grand Caravan with a bumper sticker that read MY SON IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT YORKTOWN HIGH, I felt certain I was doing this for the last time. The crap about putting me on unpaid leave was just that: crap. You don’t read people out of compartmented clearances if you ever expect them back. Eventually, security would finish poking through my things and send them back to me, along with the money I’d put into retirement, and that would be it, a quarter-century, framed and out.

  The Cherokee flashed its lights once to let me know the light had turned green. I slipped the Norton into first and pulled slowly away. In the mirror, I could see my wingmen already turning around, their job over. They were probably wondering, like me, just what the hell I’d done.

  I downshifted hard at the bottom of Route 123, leaned into Chain Bridge Road, and followed it across the Potomac into D.C. Twenty yards ahead of me, a dump truck was bouncing its way along the ripped-up roadbed. With each new rut, the truck threw off more junk. An empty five-gallon tin of Bertoli extra virgin olive oil bounced high in the air, arced maybe within a foot of my visor, fell left, and careened into the windshield of a Camry in the oncoming lane. There was no safe place under the sun. I slowed to a crawl, stuck my feet out to either side of the Norton, and threaded my way through the debris. Inches behind me, some fuckwit in a jet-black Humvee leaned on his horn.

  Washington’s weather had entered its sultry season. The morning had been sunny, even dry, almost a spring day. But now you could cut the humidity with a knife. A downpour was coming. I’d take a sandstorm any day.

  From Canal Road, I headed up Arizona. Across MacArthur Boulevard, I let the bike loose for three long blocks: a roar as beautiful as any jungle cat. I was fishtailing to a halt at the stop sign for Nebraska when a pair of fossils out for an early-evening constitutional gave me a cold stare as scary as anything I had seen that day. Off to my left was a mock Norman château—it had to hold at least eight bedrooms—bathed entirely in green lights: lights woven along the wrought-iron fence that fronted the property, lights strung along a half dozen trees that filled the long lawn up to the house, lights looping from the eaves and curling around the whimsical chimneys. Christmas in June. Too weird.

  American University was just taking shape in front of me when I veered off to the right and began working my way back over to Cathedral Avenue. I’d fallen in love for all of five days with a woman who lived in an apartment just off here—a magazine writer, an author of distinguished books. On the morning of the sixth day, she was still working on the same paragraph she’d been slaving over when we met. I was ready to move on to a new story line. Besides, I had to leave for Tashkent before the end of the month. Better to end it early. Chris Corsini was right: I do slink in and out of people’s lives.

  At the top of the hill, across Wisconsin Avenue, the cathedral shone in all its Gothic-Episcopal rectitude through what was fast becoming an evening mist. I’ve never been inside, I thought: something to do in retirement. If that’s what this is.

  The Norton Commando was the spoils of another dream gone sour. When our marriage finally fell apart, Marissa traded in our Istanbul apartment for a little stucco villa with its feet in the Adriatic, next to a lighthouse on a tiny Croatian island called Dugi Otok, a ninety-minute ferry ride out of Zadar. Rikki went off to Canterbury, in England, to middle school, just as her mother had done two decades before. And I got the bike, the only thing I kept. I’d always meant to ride it across Turkey into the Caucasus. Instead, this.

  I turned right at Massachusetts, right again on Wisconsin, and left on Garfield. At the bottom of Cleveland Avenue, I threaded my way through two cabs on to Calvert, then shot across Connecticut just as the light was turning red. On Columbia Road, I slipped the bike under a tin outcropping on the building across the street from my first-floor apartment and secured the front wheel to the frame with a Kryptonite lock, implacable enemy of the inexhaustible bike thieves of Adams Morgan. The fat El Salvadoran kid who sat watching the space waited for me to dig a buck out of my jeans.

  “Buenas tardes. Comó está?”

  “Not so bad,” the kid said with a yawn. He had a twelve-inch Quiznos sub in one hand, a Negro Modello in the other. Just another night’s work.

  The kid’s mother and father and eight siblings lived in the basement apartment just below me. Next door to me was two-thirds of a wanna-be Krautrock band. In the floors above, where the apartments got bigger, were a gay ménage à trois, two straight couples with little kids, three full floors of daddy’s girls and mama’s boys. I didn’t exactly fit into Adams Morgan, but I didn’t want to live anywhere else. The dim entries, the smell of rancid grease, the ambient din all reminded me of Lima.

  I flipped on the television and flipped it off again. Brain poison. Took out a bottle of Johnny Walker and put it back again. Liver poison. Thought about the clubs all along the street and gave up on that as well. Too early. Too late. Too depressing. From the bottom drawer of the dresser I pulled out five years’ worth of Riggs bank statements and settled down at the circular table stuck into the little bay at the front of the apartment. Outside, under the sodium streetlight the canary-yellow Norton gleamed through a halo of a steady drizzle.

  When I looked up again, the drizzle had turned to rain. An RV blocked the view. 1-800-RV-4-RENT read the sign on the side. Below it, a fiery sunset lit a landscape of mesas and prong-horn antelope. Funny, you never see RVs in Adams Morgan. I went back to the statements: nothing, no surprises, not a thing out of the ordinary I could spot. My check was automatically deposited every two weeks. My savings account never seemed to go up or down. If there was a bubble anywhere, I couldn’t see it.

  I got the whiskey out again, got a glass—this time I meant it—and was just beginning to pour when I heard a punishing sound from outside: metal ground up and dragged along the macadam. The RV was just pulling away as I hit the street. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the El Salvadoran kid was gone. Just down the way, a Metrobus driver was cursing, trying to yank the wreck of a canary-yellow Norton Commando out from his undercarriage.

  “Fuckin’ just came out of nowhere!” he was yelling. “Right into the fuckin’ middle of the fuckin’ road. Nobody fuckin’ gives a fuck about fuckin’ nothin’ no fuckin’ more!”

  I helped him drag the tangle of steel off to the side of the street, then waited while the gawkers drifted away. It didn’t take long: These remains were artificial, not human.

  I was standing by myself, toeing the crushed gas tank, wishing I had at least thrown on foul-weather gear, and thinking that even Superman didn’t mess with Kryptonite, when I felt more than saw someone coming down the sidewalk, walking fast, straight at me. White, black, Hispanic? I couldn’t tell. It was too dark to see anything other than that he was wearing a forest-green poncho, hood up, and a pair of basketball shoes the size of canoes. His arms were under the poncho—with or without a weapon, I had no way
to know, but I hadn’t stayed alive by assuming the best about human nature. I was just about to take a step sideways and kick in his right knee when whoever it was took a sharp right turn and set off across the street.

  “Silly, paranoid fool,” he said as he passed me, in a voice as void of accent as any human voice could be.

  Was he talking to himself? Nuts? Talking to me? I watched him turn left on the other side of the street and head west practically at a run, before he suddenly darted into an alley and disappeared. It was at that last moment, just over his shoulder, that I saw the RV idling three blocks down Columbia, double parked, blocking a lane. The brake lights were on but nothing else. The curtain in the rear window was parted. It was too dark to see if anyone was looking out.

  CHAPTER 7

  BACK IN THE APARTMENT, it took me a few minutes to find my Majestic lock-picking kit—for some idiotic reason, I’d hidden it inside the toaster—and a few minutes more to get through the lock on the utilities’ door. The chirpy gay ménage à trois in 4C had gone out of their way the previous morning to tell me that they would be sunning themselves in user-friendly Laguna Beach while I sweated through D.C.’s summer. The least they could do, I thought, was loan me their phone line. I used a pair of alligator clips to tie into the interface terminal, then rang up Willie.

  “Hey, what are you up to?” I asked, pretending to be surprised he was asleep.

  “Shootin’ hoops. What else a nigga be doin’ at two in the morning in the pourin’ rain?”

  “It’s only nine-thirty. Willie, I got a little problem.”

  “Everyone’s got problems, Maxwell. You heard of original sin? ‘In Adam’s fall sinned we all.’”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I. Can’t it wait until morning? I’m up at five.”

  “Remember where you drop me?”

  “I’m not senile yet, my friend. You mean—”

  I cut him off. Stolen line or not, the phone is your worst enemy. “Yeah. I’ll be there. Pick me up in fifteen.”

  I’d known Willie for twenty years. We’d first met through Stash, an old Air America pilot who’d lost a leg and a foot in Laos. Two appendages shy of a driver’s license, Stash hired Willie and his taxi to get back and forth to his make-work job in Seven Corners. I rotated back to the field shortly before budget cuts forced Langley to retire Stash and send him home to die, but I made it a point to call Willie whenever I was in Washington and needed a ride your average cabbie couldn’t give you. Willie looked like a mortician’s assistant, but he had the heart of a NASCAR driver and the soul of a wolverine.

  Stash and I had never told Willie where we worked, but he’d figured it out listening in on our war stories about shit holes like Laos and the Congo. Willie didn’t say anything, just shook his head, probably thinking what fools white people are, but when his son had spent half his senior year in high school trying to decide between going to Georgetown to study international relations—a straight shot at the State Department—or heading north to Cornell to become an engineer, Willie talked him into Cornell. He knew a dead-end road when he saw one, and he’d had his own turn with international relations, serving Uncle Sam on the Batangan Peninsula with the 11th Infantry Brigade just about the time William Calley Jr. and his platoon were slaughtering peasants wholesale.

  I went back upstairs to my apartment, put on a Levi’s jacket, and stuffed a black watch cap in the pocket—the only thing I could find in a hurry to keep the rain off me. Then I grabbed a sterile cell phone I’d stowed under the socks in my top dresser drawer and jotted down its number on a scrap of paper. I used the land line to call Geico and report the accident, hoping I would be put on hold the way I always was when I had something important to discuss. I wasn’t disappointed. A digital voice said it would be a twelve-minute wait. As I lay the phone on the floor, I crossed my fingers and hoped she was right. Twelve minutes was just about what it would take for Willie to throw a slicker over his pj’s, fire up the Crown Vic, and make it the half dozen blocks to Ontario Liquors.

  I took the stairs to the basement and slid past the resident barrio. Uni-vision was cranked up to high volume: a soccer game, Nicaragua against somebody, a tie, injury time. I could have kicked down the back door instead of using the knob and no one would have heard. In the alley, I all but knocked over the El Salvadoran kid. He was peeing against the Dumpster, eyes wide as a raccoon, stoned out of his mind.

  I wandered down the alley, lingered by a Dumpster or two myself, and startled enough rats to stock a leper colony. The only way to see me was through a pair of night-vision binoculars, a league I wasn’t prepared to play in. Normally, the stoops would have been packed all the way along Euclid and back up Ontario, but the rain had driven the street life inside. Willie was just pulling up as I turned back onto Columbia. He had the car in gear before I closed the door.

  “Straight to St. E’s or should we give them a run?” he said. St. E’s is St. Elizabeths, the local loony bin, home to Ezra Pound and John Hinckley Jr., among other famous nuts.

  “Rock Creek,” I told him, staring out the back window. “Take Memorial Bridge to the GW Parkway.” I was checking to see if anyone had pulled out behind us when Willie tossed a box of Kleenex into the back and flipped down the mirror on the passenger’s side. A cobweb covered the entire left side of my face. My ear had disappeared. I never wanted to meet the spider that made it.

  I guided Willie along a countersurveillance route in northern Virginia I’d run at least fifty times: a loop-de-loop at the I-395 exchange, a quick on-and-off at the Key Bridge / Rosslyn exit, a U-turn just after Spout Run, enough traps so that a tail either had to show itself or lose you. It was as subtle as a quadruple bypass, but subtlety wasn’t the point. The Norton was proof enough that all wasn’t well in my little world. No reason to pretend I was out for an evening drive. The only thing I cared about right now was a couple hours of privacy with a person who didn’t even know I would be meeting him.

  Basically, I was flying blind in the backseat. I needed the rearview and side mirrors to check everything out, but Willie had those. Just to complicate things, there was way too much traffic. Didn’t anyone sleep anymore? Worse, the rain was starting to sound like a Bombay monsoon, a steady drumbeat on Willie’s vinyl roof.

  It crossed my mind to tell Willie what was going on, why I’d gotten him out of bed to give me a ride. If there was anyone I could trust outside the Agency, it was Willie. But how could I ever explain the whole insane run in New York, the alligator clips and the stolen phone line, the call to Geico to convince anyone listening to my phone I was still in my apartment, now this? Spending a life doing anything and everything you can to protect your agents puts you inside a rare subset of existence. It all made sense to me. But Willie wasn’t there. Wise as he was, he’d never get it. Espionage is like the world at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. When a creature from it suddenly gets dragged to the surface, no one knows what to make of the thing.

  “Phone me in two but not on my land line. On this one.” I dropped the number of the ghost cell phone on the front seat.

  Willie didn’t ask why. I doubt he even wanted to know why, but I knew he would play by my rules.

  We had crossed Key Bridge and were headed back through Georgetown on M Street when I warned Willie we’d be making a hard left after the old Eagle Liquor and a quick jog up to Prospect. He inched along, waiting for a gap in the oncoming traffic, until we both saw a space just large enough for the ex-Norton.

  “Hit it!” I yelled. “Now!” But Willie already had.

  The Crown Vic hydroplaned across only inches behind a Navigator packed with high-schoolers and dead in front of a couple in a Lexus. Underwear would be changed early tonight. By the time we hit the alley’s cobblestones, the Crown Vic was in a full skid. We just missed slamming into the side of Kinko’s.

  Low key it wasn’t, but there was no way in hell anyone could see Willie slam the brakes just as we turned left on Prospect or me bail out in the fr
action of a second he needed to power up again.

  CHAPTER 8

  I WAITED IN THE SHADOWS under a dripping oak tree until Willie was long gone around the corner. By the time a tail caught up to him, they’d see only the Crown Vic’s rear lights going up 35th Street. I waited some more just to see if anything living moved, wishing to hell I’d brought an umbrella. Then, when I knew for sure it was impossible to get any wetter, I jammed the watch cap on my head and set off on foot almost back to where I had come from. Frank Beckman lived on Tuttle Place, in Kalorama, five minutes by foot and a thousand miles in every other way from where my twisted Norton lay rusting in the rain.

  I worked my way up through Georgetown, scrambled over the high iron fence on R Street that fronts Oak Hill Cemetery, and followed the slope down through the tombstones and monuments until I hit the bicycle trail that runs through Rock Creek Park. Three minutes later, I was under the Massachusetts Avenue bridge. Another fifty yards along, I forded the creek as best I could—my Nikes were already soaking—waited for a gap in the traffic, then sprinted across the parkway and clawed my way up the steep eastern slope of the valley. I came out pretty much where I expected to: on Belmont Road, a block north of Tuttle Place and two blocks from Frank Beckman’s tastefully imposing Georgian mansion.

  I first met Frank Beckman in Brazzaville, in the Congo, in 1979, on the evening after the French embassy’s chef had been eaten by a crocodile. It was all anyone could talk about. The chef had slipped out of the kitchen between the soup and fish course and walked down to the river. For what? A tryst? A fistful of something to dress the salad with? No one knew. One of the waiters heard him scream. A passerby saw thrashing just below the riverbank, but it was pitch black out on the water and crocodiles were everywhere. There was nothing to be done. The chef’s toque was found the next day, snagged on a branch a half mile downstream. That was the other question on everyone’s tongue: Had the croc bothered with a red wine sauce or devoured the chef au naturel? Even then, Brazzaville was not the world’s most sympathetic place.