Blow the House Down Read online

  I was assigned back then to Dubai, covering the Iranian revolution. (This was 1979, in the pre-Webber days, when the base actually knew its ass from third base.) But mostly I was on the road, going wherever a Farsi speaker might prove useful: Manila, Khartoum, even (of all places) Brazzaville. Headquarters wanted me to pitch the first secretary at the Iranian embassy, a fat, fish-mouthed Khomeini devotee whose father had owned the Cadillac franchise in Tehran back in the days when the Shah was among his best customers.

  Frank had been scheduled to take over the station in Brazzaville six months earlier, but a nasty divorce kept him tied up in Washington. When he finally did make it to the Republic of the Congo, just a week before I did, he had wife number two in tow: a tender, Irish-Chinese mix of a thing named Jill, fresh out of Skidmore College with a B.A. in French lit. But if Jill was expecting a honeymoon or even intelligent conversation—in any language—she got little of the sort.

  Frank was Kentucky white trash through and through: high school into the army, army into the 82nd Airborne. At eighteen, he was jumping out of airplanes. He enrolled at the University of Kentucky on the GI Bill, graduated in his mid-twenties, joined the Agency a week later, and spent his thirtieth birthday hiding in an attic in Hue during Tet. Somewhere along the way he’d picked up a mid-Atlantic accent, a sine qua non for advancement in the Agency. I learned all this in the first half hour I’d ever known him, sitting in what passed for a living room, in what passed for a chief of station residence, in what passed for a capital city in yet another people’s paradise of the ever-Darkening Continent. Frank was shit-faced when I arrived: warm gin. He kept drinking it, kept talking—he and Jill had met in Paris the March before when she was tracking Françoise Sagan’s youth through the Place Pigalle—but he seemed to have leveled off at whatever level of drunkenness he had aimed for, or arrived at.

  As for Jill, the story of their chance encounter and whirlwind romance seemed to hit a sour spot, or maybe it was the climate, or being stuck inside. The French chef had proved a more-than-cautionary tale for her. She had no intention of leaving the house except under armed guard, Frank informed me, and maybe not then.

  “C’est pas vrai?” I asked. She nodded tartly.

  The house was—and here I’m being charitable—a fucking dump. The Agency had given them a furniture allowance, almost a generous one, but by the looks of things, Frank must have used it to offset the ruinous expense of exiting his last marriage. The dining room table was a few planks nailed together and balanced on a pair of sawhorses. Jill’s books—Gide, Moliere, de Maupassant, Sagan—formed a precarious tower on top of the only piece that looked as if it might have been up to the standards of her former life. Otherwise, the whole house, or what I could see of it, was done up with local crap, including the painting over the sofa: a Negress on lurid felt, washing laundry in the Congo River. I didn’t know Frank nearly well enough then to ask him if it was a joke.

  All that, though, was more than two decades ago, in a Cold War no longer being fought, in a part of the world now so ravaged by AIDS and civil unrest that it seemed to be sliding backward off the face of existence. When I ran across Frank a little more than six years later—coming out of the Beau Rivage in Geneva—he told me that the Negress was gone, along with Jill.

  “She split,” he said. “Homesick, Jill told me. We had a daughter: India. Beautiful, like her name. I almost never get to see her.”

  If I had been smarter, I would have seen it as a premonition of my own marriage. Like Jill and Frank, Marissa was a half generation younger than me—nineteen to my early thirties, a talented poet, a bright light at the American University in Beirut. We’d met when we were both rock climbing in the Dolomites. She was like a black-haired, olive-skinned spider. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. Nothing daunted Marissa. Not even me, as it turned out. If she hadn’t been three months pregnant, I doubt we would have married, but out of it all came Rikki, good from not-so. That, too, Frank and I had in common.

  I nodded my condolences over his lost wife and missing child, and asked Frank to talk on. Our colleagues in Southern Air Transport had just been “tasked,” as they say in Washington circles, to deliver a thousand TOW missiles from U.S. Army stocks to Tel Aviv for trans-shipment to Iran. Against such madness, Frank’s domestic life seemed the picture of normality.

  Soon after they were reassigned to New Delhi, Frank said, Jill had talked him into signing a power of attorney so she could buy a small cottage for them back near Saratoga Springs, scene of her undergraduate triumphs. They had been in Brazzaville more than three years by then. With the differential and hardship pay, they’d managed to save a little money, and Jill had never adapted well to a place where the highest form of entertainment was watching geckos crawl across the ceiling. New Delhi wasn’t going to be much better. Why not throw her a little bone? There was the daughter, India, too. Better she should be schooled back in the States.

  It all made unassailable sense, Frank said, but Jill had other plans. Instead of the cottage, she took the money and bought a condo, and instead of Frank, she filled it with an associate professor of Slavic languages and sent hubby his walking papers. Et voilà, Frank was broke again. But America is the land of second acts, and Frank Beckman was its living proof.

  First, Frank got his daughter back. India had just turned eleven when he was brought home for good and elevated to the seventh floor, number two in the Directorate of Operations, which made him, with about ten degrees of separation, my boss. Ten months later, long after midnight, India, a runaway, showed up on Frank’s doorstep in Herndon, Virginia, after a week of frantic searching. Her stepfather, by now a full professor and department chair, couldn’t keep his hands off her, she told Frank. Instead of immediately killing him—his first and deepest instinct—Frank got Jill to sign away her rights to India and set about learning to be a father.

  I could still remember almost every detail of Frank’s retirement party five years earlier, a barbecue in the fenced-in backyard of his soulless split-level. India was all of seventeen by then. She’d raced through high school as if it were a track event and had just finished her freshman year at Berkeley, animated in the way that only wildly precocious teenagers can be. Over plates of charred chicken earlier in the evening, India told me that she’d already taken courses from two of the people who taught me best.

  “Joy of my life,” Frank said, with only a slight slur.

  We were sitting on his postage-stamp-size deck, watching her bag up the plastic cups and paper plates that littered the yard. India was dragging a recycle bin behind her for the beer and wine bottles. I’d edged out the last of the guests a half hour earlier—a husband-and-wife analyst team that never knew when to leave. Frank and I were cradling snifters, pretending to admire the bouquet and color in the blue bug-light by the sliding glass doors. A bottle of Remy Martin sat on the table between us.

  “Joy O’ My Life!” he yelled out, louder this time.

  “I know, Dad. I know,” she called back with a laugh, “and you’re the joy o’ mine.”

  I was starting to feel as if I had intruded on some private ritual—a fly on a priest’s neck as he blessed the holy elements.

  “And Maxie, too,” she shouted a split second later to a roar of laughter.

  Beside me, I could see Frank flip open the top of an old Sealtest Dairy milk box, the kind my aunt used to keep on the back porch. He rummaged around and pulled out a dirty towel. I could already smell the gun oil.

  “I bought it last year,” he told me as he folded the corners down. “Didn’t buy it, really. Traded a silver Berber dagger for it. Some brother down in Southeast with a taste for antiques.”

  It was a nice piece, a Beretta six-millimeter with a professionally made silencer, the preferred weapon of Middle East assassins.

  “Why?”

  “Why—” Not a question. He tilted the Remy Martin bottle in both our directions, wrapped the gun up again, and laid it back in the Sealtest box.

  �
�Why. Because I still wanted to murder the son of a bitch for what he did to India. I figured, What the hell: I retire, I even the score, I die. Case closed.”

  “And?”

  India was waving to us from the far end of the yard, a pair of garbage bags over her shoulder. She was kicking the recycle bin ahead of herself as she worked.

  “I decided to get rich instead.”

  It took a few years, but damn if he didn’t.

  A miniature guy airing out his miniature schnauzer on the other side of Belmont took one look at me trudging out of the woods, flipped open a cell phone, hit something on speed dial, and took off running, dragging the little rat dog on its side behind him. He’d called security, I bet. The neighborhood pretty much had its own police force and plenty of other help, too.

  Motion-detector lights flicked on one by one as I walked by the sprawling coral-stucco Mediterranean at the corner. Across the street, where Tuttle dead-ends at Belmont, two pairs of eyes followed me from behind the tinted glass of a black Cadillac Escalade—private guards for the Embassy of the Sultanate of Oman. Just beyond the embassy, at the intersection with Massachusetts Avenue, sat the Mosque and Islamic Center, wired to the teeth against infidel invaders. For a guy who set out to make his fortune by providing “consulting services” for the oil-rich, Frank couldn’t have calibrated his address much more carefully. He had everything but a Bedouin tent parked in the backyard and camel-shit mulch for his boxwoods.

  2501 Tuttle Place took up the half of the block that the stucco Mediterranean didn’t. Flagstone steps rose on either side to a double front door capped by a limestone half-moon and, above that, a window surrounded by stone scrollwork. More garlands—in stone and wood—were draped over and below the windows that flanked the central ones on either side. On top, three dormers rose tastefully punctuated by a pair of ornamental white orbs. Chimneys bound the house at either end. Improbably enough, an ancient, rusting TV antenna was clasped to the easternmost of the chimneys. My guess is that it was a private satellite communications link disguised to look like some piece of fifties claptrap. In Frank’s new world, millions of dollars were measurable in nanoseconds.

  English ivy crawled up the redbrick facade at both ends and on either side of the door. At the back, behind seven-foot-high brick walls draped with climbing roses, the garden curved its way past a granite pool to the next street over, to an old carriage house that had once served a great turreted pile of a mansion built in the 1880s by a Nevada silver king and U.S. Senator. The carriage house was all that remained of the estate. Frank had tarted it up into guest quarters for when his clientele weren’t traveling in full retinue.

  The only thing that spoiled the perfect symmetry of the place was a wing tacked onto the west side: a bedroom, library, and garage stacked one above the other. The garage dated from an era before automobiles took on the general proportion of boats. Frank’s beautifully restored Mercedes 600 had no chance of fitting in there. The fact that it wasn’t waiting on the street out front meant either that he’d sent his driver home for the night or that he still wasn’t in himself.

  I checked my watch: 11:07. A little red light was winking at me from inside the old coal chute that once would have served Frank’s basement furnace. I was on camera already, and I hadn’t even made it to the front door. A block and a half up the street, a car crept slowly down my way, spotlights shining on either side as it searched even the underside of parked cars for the likes of me, perhaps for me in particular. I stepped up to Frank’s door, pulled off my black watch cap, straightened my hair as best I could, and pushed the bell.

  CHAPTER 9

  CHIMES TINKLED SOMEWHERE at the back of the house. Steps approached but then stopped just short of the door. A closed-circuit camera whirred above my head—swiveled left, swiveled right, panned the street behind me, the sidewalks, then zeroed in for a good eye-to-eye.

  “It’s me, Simon,” I said, waving my hand back and forth in front of the lens. “Waller. In the flesh.” I must have looked as if I’d climbed out of a peat bog.

  Simon, Beckman’s butler, opened the door a crack but kept it chained and his shoulder hard against it, just in case.

  “Mr. Beckman is out,” Simon finally said, after he had ignored me in every meaningful way he could. “I will happily inform him that you passed by, Mr. Waller. Have a good evening.”

  I stuck my foot in the door before he could close it, but at best, we’d reached a standoff. Simon was too civilized, for the moment, to crush my foot, and I was never going to be able to bust through. Apart from Simon himself, no small challenge, the door chain looked as if it had been forged on Mt. Olympus by Vulcan himself.

  “Mr. Beckman is at the Kennedy Center.”

  “Opera’s over unless it’s Wagner, and Frank hates Nazis.” Simon sighed theatrically on the other side of the door, clapped his hands together in despair, then disappeared somewhere back inside, leaving me alone with my foot in place. That’s how I was standing three minutes later when a light from the security-patrol car plastered my shadow against the door. There was no point turning—I would have been blinded—and no time, either. I heard the flap, flap, flap of crepe-soled shoes on the steps and felt an eighteen-inch Mag light digging into my lower back, just at the base of the spine. I knew if I moved too fast for his liking, the last thing I would feel was the same light coming down on the top of my head.

  Simon’s face was back in the door.

  “Mr. Waller”—he searched for the right words—“is known to Mr. Beckman.”

  The rent-a-cop behind me gave a slight twist to his Mag before he pulled it out of the small of my back, just to say how disappointed he was not to be doing worse, then turned and started back down the steps. When he was safely in his car, Simon slipped the chain from its mooring and cracked the door barely wide enough for me to enter. He’d already spread two bath towels on the floor and had two more draped over his arm.

  “Dry with this,” he told me as he handed me one of the towels, “and sit on that,” he added, dropping the other on the floor. He reached into his back pocket and drew out a pair of padded-sole athletic socks.

  “And put these on. Your shoes”—he was eyeing them as if they were roadkill—“do not leave the towels on the floor. Nor does that jacket. Or the thing on your head. Mr. Beckman will be back presently. You may wait for him in the library. I believe—” But he didn’t bother to finish. We both knew that I knew the way.

  “And by the way, Max,” Simon added as he turned back down the hall. “You look like shit.”

  Now that I was, in fact, roadkill, everyone seemed to have a “by the way” for me.

  One drunken night at the Intercon in Amman back in early 1992, Frank and I had voted Simon the ugliest man on earth. He took it well—he was even more gone than we were, and he’d definitely been standing behind the door when God handed out looks and stature. Simon couldn’t have been any more than five feet four, with a lantern jaw that almost grazed his chest. What’s more, he was in no position to argue. A would-be soldier of fortune, Simon had fallen on hard times. His nerves had failed him a few months earlier, in the middle of the night, as he headed over the Kuwait border into one of the occupied oil fields.

  For three years, Frank and I kept Simon afloat with odd jobs. Then, when Frank decided to remake himself as a multimillionaire consultant and oil trader, he offered Simon the oddest job of all: butler. He had, after all, a perfect British servant-class accent thanks to his father, a men’s room attendant at a second-tier London club; and he had stored away his own cache of secrets about the clientele Frank hoped to attract.

  There was no question of salary at first. Frank had hocked everything—his house, his retirement, his clothes, china, the silver-plated flatware, his reputation—to even be able to afford the down payment on Tuttle Place. I have no doubt that he called in favors from Jeddah to Doha and points north and south to create the paper facade that would create the illusion that his was a thriving business. But li
ke Jay Gatsby, the new Frank had sprung from his own Platonic conception of himself, and he had made it work. The leased furniture became real furniture; the Benz and driver, a Citation 10 jet, permanent fixtures. The mansion he had bought in a D.C. real-estate trough back in ’95 for $6 million had to be worth twice that now, maybe three times as much, and it was only the beginning of Frank’s good fortune.

  I spread one of Simon’s towels carefully on the leather couch in the library, pulled on the socks—an inspired touch on Simon’s part—and leaned back to gaze at the Greek marble frieze above the fireplace in front of me: The two phalanxes of hoplites embraced in mortal, hand-to-hand combat were perfectly balanced against each other and perfectly lit, too, by recessed lamps above. When I’d first seen the frieze, I thought it had to be an expensive reproduction. There wasn’t a chip on it. The original had to be in a museum, but the brass plaque said otherwise: ATHENS 4TH CENTURY B.C. When I asked Frank, he just shrugged his shoulders.

  “Oh, yeah, it’s real. Ask my insurance company.”

  Simon must have approved of my couch hygiene because he placed a double espresso on the table in front of me and padded off again with barely a sound. I downed it in two quick swallows, then got up and grabbed a stack of newspapers off the console table: the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, a new Christie’s rare-wine auction catalog. At the far end of the house, across the dining room and central hall, over a living-room fireplace that looked from here identical to my own, I could just make out a Modigliani nude—Frank’s newest acquisition. An article about the purchase in a recent Art + Auction had set Langley all abuzz.

  “Good for you, Frank,” I said, raising my empty cup to the distant nude. “You’ve come a long way from the Congo.” I meant it, too. I could still see that Negress on felt, perched over Jill’s stringy blond hair as if she might just leap down and have her for a between-meal snack.