Fear itself

3

They got him. They got him good.

First they tortured him a little. No congratulatory messages at work Monday, no retirement luncheon, no gold watch.

But Pender had been determined not to let it get to him. On his way home he stopped at the strip mall in Potomac and picked up videos of Guadalcanal Diary, The Sands of Iwo Jima, and The Best of Mimi Miyagi, enough Chinese takeout to feed the Red Army, and to wash it down, a fifth of Jim Beam. He’d left the pint behind in Abruzzi’s desk drawer. She’d insisted she didn’t drink, but Pender suspected it would only be a matter of time.

Since his divorce ten years earlier, Pender had been living in a ramshackle house on a hillside above Tinsman’s Lock, Lock 22 of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, on federal land originally ground-deeded to former slaves after the Civil War and held now by Pender on a grandfathered National Park Service lease.

Among the advantages of living at Tinsman’s Lock: a heavily wooded lot, no neighbors, and gorgeous views of the C amp;O, the Potomac, and the Virginia countryside beyond; it was also cheap. But chief among the disadvantages was the reason it was cheap: according to the terms of the lease, all visible improvements beyond the existing underground power and phone lines had to be period-any time between 1850 and 1890 would do-and not many people, it seemed, were willing to pay Montgomery County prices for a Tobacco Road home.

As for the interior, in the ten years Pender had lived there, more than one woman had tried her hand at decorating, but none of them had lasted long enough to make much of a dent, domesticity-wise. As his old friend Sid Dolitz once observed, the house was a lot like Pender himself: big, homely, and getting more dilapidated with every passing year.

So after convincing himself that he hadn’t wanted a damn party anyway, Pender had spent the first evening of his retirement watching videos, pigging down Chinese, and practicing his putting out on the spacious, if rickety, back porch, in preparation for his retirement present from Sid: a trip to California, two days of golf at Pebble Beach, two nights at the Lodge.

By Tuesday morning, a surprise party was the last thing on Pender’s mind. He slept until ten, drowned his hangover with the hair of the dog (and why not? — he wasn’t working), had leftover Chinese for brunch, and drove off in his jet black pride and joy, a ’64 Barracuda he’d rescued from an abusive living situation and restored to health while drying out after his divorce, to meet Sid Dolitz at Sid’s country club for their veddy civilized one o’clock tee time.

In many ways, Dolitz was the anti-Pender. Short, slight, a connoisseur of good food and fine wines, a faithful and uxorious husband to his beloved and extremely wealthy Esther until death did them part, and something of a dandy, at least by Bureau standards (even back in the FBI’s mandatory conservative-suit-white-shirt-and-tie days, his suits were natural shoulder, his shirts were Egyptian sharkskin, and his Countess Mara neckties were always accessorized with a complementary pocket handkerchief), Sid had been playing a somewhat bemused Felix to Pender’s Oscar for over twenty years.

Today he was wearing a pale green poplin windbreaker and perfectly creased khakis with a one-inch cuff; his iron gray toupee was unruffled by the fresh autumn breeze.

“Five bucks a hole,” he called as Pender stepped up to the first tee.

“Ten,” replied Pender, who then duck-hooked his first drive into the dogwoods to the left of the fairway.

Although Sid was ten years older than Pender, he preferred walking the course-possibly because he understood that the more tired Pender’s legs became, the worse he hooked his drives. Once again, Pender barely shot his temperature. He paid up at the nineteenth hole; Sid left the money on the bar, and several rounds later, he insisted on leaving his own car at the club and driving Pender home in the ’Cuda.

Not a particularly subtle ruse: afterward, it occurred to Pender that if he hadn’t suspected anything by the time he dragged his golf bag through the front door-at which point the thirty or forty people crowded into the vestibule or overflowing into the living room jumped out at him (those still young enough to jump) and shouted “Surprise!” at the top of their lungs-he probably had been too drunk to drive.

He had to fight back the tears as they crowded around him. “You got me,” he kept saying. “You got me good.”