Liars & Thieves

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

The ambulance crew was still in the suite loading Carmellini on a stretcher when Mikhail Goncharov whispered to Callie, “May I leave now?”

“Certainly.” Callie didn’t know what the CIA or FBI honchos would think of Goncharov’s departure, but she didn’t intended to ask them. They were huddled in the corner with Jake Grafton.

After catching her husband’s eye, Callie followed Goncharov out into the corridor and through the crowd in the hallway to the elevator. Secret Service, police, FBI agents, paramedics, and hotel executives — the crowd was beginning to thin now that the first lady and Royston had been taken away in handcuffs. Callie and Goncharov boarded the elevator, watched the door close. No one made any move to stop them.

They made their way through the lobby. People were whispering, watching the paramedics and police hustling about, speculating on what had happened.

Outside the main entrance on the Avenue of the Americas, under the awning, Goncharov told Callie, “I don’t want to go back to the CIA or British intelligence.”

“I don’t think they really need you,” she said. “The British copied your files.”

Goncharov snorted. “I suppose I knew they would.” He laughed without humor. “I was very naive.”

Callie ignored that comment. “Where do you want to go?” she asked.

Goncharov took a deep breath as he considered it. He looked right, then left, looked up at the buildings, then back at Callie. “I don’t know. Somewhere. I don’t speak a word of the language, I have no money, but this is what I want. This—.” He gestured grandly with his hand.

Callie opened her purse, took out all her cash, and held it out to him. “Here.”

“No.”

“Yes.” She said the word in English. “Yes.” Then in Russian, “This isn’t much, but it will feed you for a while. Tens of millions of people have come to America and started over — thousands do it every day — and you can, too. A little money will help.”

“Yes,” he said, trying the English word.

“Yes.” She echoed him, still holding the money in her hand, offering it.

“Yes.” He reached for the cash, inspected the bills, then put them in his pocket.

Callie Grafton smiled and held out her hand.

He shook it. “Good-bye,” she said in English.

“Gude-by.” The archivist, Mikhail Goncharov, turned and walked away into the night, into the great city of New York, into the heart of America.

The second day after my operation, the hospital moved me from intensive care to a private room. I thumbed the television on and flipped channels until I found a baseball game. I was just drifting off to sleep when Jake Grafton came into the room and shut the door.

“Hey,” he said. “We almost waited too long to get you to a hospital. The doctors had some real nasty things to say to me.”

“It was worth it,” I said. “After all the shit I went through, I really wanted to see Reactor and Zooey take the fall.”

“Reactor?”

“Royston was a fast breeder.”

Jake Grafton nodded and lowered himself into a chair.

“That scene in Dorsey’s suite — I was really surprised when you trotted out the DNA results. I thought those tests were going to take a week.”

“That’s right. We still don’t have the results. Should have them tomorrow.”

It took a long ten seconds for me to get it, what with my delicate condition, generally honest nature, and low mental ability. “You mean you lied to them?”

“Yeah.”

“And that red folder. Was that really it?”

“Oh, no. That was just one we had at home. What the hell — none of those people could read Russian.”

“‘Rollo’?”

He shrugged. “Goncharov couldn’t remember O’Shea’s code name, and I doubted if O’Shea ever knew it. I made that one up.”

I had to smile. Jake Grafton gave me a grin in return.

“How come I haven’t had every reporter in the free world in here today offering me millions for my story?”

“The story the FBI gave the press was that Zooey and Royston were lovers. I don’t think the press understands who was in the suite or what was said. Perhaps that could have been explained better, but the FBI didn’t bother. Zooey has held three jailhouse press conferences, and the media is having a field day. The country is eating it up. Royston’s lawyer refuses to let his client say a word and refuses to say a word for him. The bail hearing isn’t until next week, and the prosecutors will oppose it, they say. Some opposition senators and representatives are promising an investigation. The president refuses to discuss the matter.”

“He’s a cold-hearted bastard,” I remarked, remembering his short conversation with Zooey. But perhaps that wasn’t fair — he knew her a lot better than I did.

“This election is going to become a circus,” Grafton predicted. “It’s going to make the California governor’s recall look like a tea party. Politics has become an afternoon soap opera. In an era when the country is deeply divided over complex issues without easy answers, perhaps that is inevitable.”

I took a deep breath and moved on to the most important question. “Am I going to be arrested?”

Grafton chuckled. “Apparently not. I am informed that you are still a valuable employee of the CIA.”

“Long as I’m getting paid.”

We talked for a while about this and that, about Mikhail Goncharov and Kelly Erlanger and Dorsey O’Shea and my former boss, Sal Pulzelli.

“Was Joe Billy really Stu Vine?” I asked.

“I think so,” Jake said. “The CIA holds little tidbits like that very tightly indeed.”

“How come he was assigned to my shop?”

“I think the decision was made somewhere to bring him inhouse. They just needed a place to stash him for a while. What the agency didn’t know was that he had agreed to do a job for Royston. Do you remember? Pulzelli was told to send Dunn to be a guard at the safehouse. Since Dunn was scheduled to go to a training session, Pulzelli changed the assignment without telling anyone.”

“That was Sal… the born administrator. He lived his life by the schedule and thought we should, too.”

We were still chatting when a nurse came in and told the admiral he would have to leave. “See you, Tommy,” he said.

“Thanks, Admiral, for everything.”

“Any time.”

“You and Callie going flying?”

“All over the country. We’ll call you when we get back.”

Then he was gone. Just like that.

Maybe it was really over. God, I hoped so. If some wild man with murder in his eye came charging in here, I didn’t even have a pocketknife to defend myself with… if I could stay awake, which I couldn’t.

I drifted off while the nurse was working on my IVs.

The next day two guys from the agency and one from the FBI showed up with a cassette recorder. After reading me all the warnings, they wanted the whole story in my own words. I ran them out after half an hour. The next day they were back and we did two hours. Three hours the day after that, then for the next two days they asked questions, hundreds of them. I did the best I could, but when I got tired I told them to return tomorrow. They didn’t come the last day I was in the hospital. In midafternoon, after giving me a cursory exam and a new set of bandages, the hospital released me.

I was ready to go. I had channel surfed when the law wasn’t there and had had more than my fill of the made-for-TV political circus. I took a cab to Pennsylvania Station and then a train to Washington.

My apartment was a wreck. Someone had ransacked the place during my big adventure, maybe one of Royston’s thugs or perhaps Joe Billy Dunn.

It took courage to open the refrigerator. There was something green in there, and I didn’t think it was lettuce. I threw everything in a garbage bag and spent twenty minutes wrestling it down to the cans in the basement. I was weak as a cat. I wasn’t ready to tackle that mess the goons had made. I even thought about moving in with Willie… for ten whole seconds.

The agency guys had said my old Mercedes was parked in the lot, so I went looking for it. Found it finally, decorated with bird droppings, parked under a tree. It even started on the third attempt.

I called Jake Grafton on his cell.

“Hey, I’m out of the hospital. Where are you guys?”

“Wisconsin. Getting gas. We’ll be in Minnesota tonight. How are you doing, Tommy?”

“The agency gave me a couple weeks off, but I may never go back. I’m still thinking about taking a banana boat south.”

“It’s like that, huh? Why don’t you go over to my beach house, loaf there until you feel better?”

Now that was an idea! The beach.

“You wouldn’t mind?”

“Oh, heck no. Just make sure you buy your own beer.”

“Where did you hide the key?”

Grafton made a rude noise and hung up on me.

Well, why not? I put the Mercedes in gear and let ’er rip. Stopped at a Wal-Mart on the Eastern Shore for the bare essentials — underwear, beer, swimsuit, and toothbrush.

At Grafton’s place I quickly settled into a routine. Every morning I walked all the way to the corner to buy a paper from the vending machine, read it as I poached a couple eggs and made toast, finished it over coffee, then walked to the beach and lay around on the towel frying in the sun.

Willie Varner had all his stitches out, he said, was getting laid again by his semiregular girlfriend, and was working in the lock shop. He gave me some grief over the phone, but not too much. Like me, he was very happy life was getting back to normal.

The papers were full of the political news. I thought Zooey was in danger of overplaying her hand, but she was fulfilling her promise to her husband. She accused him of a dozen infidelities, cheating on his income tax for eight years, and screwing a couple million out of two former business partners. I thought the president would have a huge political problem with all this, but no. Apparently in the post-Clinton age the public was becoming inured to personal scandal. The party’s honchos picked a new vice-presidential candidate, a woman the president recommended, and the president refused to discuss any of his wife’s jailhouse revelations, declaring that the issues were more important than the personal life of any candidate.

The president played it like a harp and actually gained in the polls. It turned out he had the ability to work a little quaver into his voice when the reporters hounded him about his wife and Royston. People actually felt sorry for the S.O.B.

The world is full of wackos — what can I say? I figured that in a few weeks the president would probably file for a divorce and in a year people would be asking, Zooey who? One of the pundits suggested that he get a dog to help him through this difficult time.

The guy who owned the house three doors closer to the beach on Grafton’s side of the street stopped me on the second day I was there. He wanted to chat.

“I see you’re staying in that retired admiral’s house.”

“Yeah.”

“You know him?”

“Enough to get permission to use the place. Why’d you ask?”

“Oh, man! About ten days ago we had the goddamnest shootout you ever heard of right here on this street. That admiral killed two guys”—he pointed—“right there and there. A busload of military guys surrounded his house and dragged two more men out of it.”

“Wow! Sounds like a movie or something. But it was real, huh?”

“I was having a party. Had a house full of guests. Normally this house is rented out to whoever, but that was the first night of my summer vacation — take a month every year. Had lots of people here from the office. Goddamnest thing you’ve ever seen. Submachine guns blasting, bodies all over, blood, soldiers with weapons, enough cops to arrest the Capone mob, all right here on this street about midnight.”

I shook my head. “Sorry I missed it.”

“You know anything about it?”

I shrugged. “This is the first I’ve heard.”

He scrutinized my face. “Who is that admiral, anyway?”

“Some retired ship driver. Name’s Grafton.”

“Well, here is the amazing part. I’ve got a couple dozen people here partying, and we all see and hear this shootout and watch the police and ambulance people clean up, and they wouldn’t tell us a goddamn thing.”

“They wouldn’t?”

“Nothing. The next morning we check the television and newspapers to see what in hell the shootout was all about, and you know what? There wasn’t a word in the paper or on television. I even called the local paper and talked to the editor.”

“’Zat right?”

“He listened to what I had to say, said his reporters would look into it… and he printed zilch. Nada! Not a single word on the air or in print. Like it never happened. All the television and papers are full of the political mess — there isn’t room for anything else. But I’ll tell you, if I read or hear another word about Zooey Sonnenberg I think I’m going to puke.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Thought you might know something about the shootout.”

“Naw. Not a thing. By the way, you gonna have any more parties?”

“Next Saturday. Wanta come?”

So Jake had some explaining to do with his neighbors. I made a mental note to tell him so when I talked to him again.

Try as I might to think of something else, the events of the last few weeks occupied most of my thoughts. Joe Billy Dunn, Royston, Zooey Sonnenberg… the guy who had tried to kill me from the abandoned house with the little Ruger rifle — I carefully inspected that house every time I passed it.

Of course I wondered about the president and Zooey. I thought about that conversation I had overheard. Did he know that Zooey was cheating on him with Dell? Did he care? Did he ever care for her, or was theirs a political union, a marriage in name only?

Someday some idiot publisher would pay the president millions for his memoir, and the public would read what he chose to say — just that and nothing more. I decided there are some rocks no one will ever see under.

One morning I climbed in the car and headed for the Bethesda Naval Hospital to get checked for infections and have the last of the stitches removed. Dorsey O’Shea was on my mind. The way I figured it, she wanted to marry me and take me away in order to save my life. She knew or suspected Royston was going to have me hit. She may have thought that if I were her husband, he’d lay off.

Perhaps Dorsey had fallen in love with me… a little teeny tiny bit. Loved someone besides her mother, Zooey Sonnenberg. Maybe she cared.

That’s what love is, isn’t it? Caring.

I cared for a woman who was somewhere out there in the big wide world and might never return.

Was I capable of loving another person, one who was physically here?

The thing about Dorsey…

What if she called? She had my cell phone number. What would I say to her?

I thought about that, about the murders and Zooey and all that stuff. As I drove over the Bay Bridge, I threw the phone out the window into the Chesapeake.

On Saturday morning I was basting in the sun, reading a novel and enjoying a stiff breeze, when a shadow fell across my book. I looked up.

Sarah Houston. In a huge, floppy sun hat and a skimpy two-piece suit that didn’t hide anything. I don’t know why they even bother to wear those things. She spread a huge beach towel beside mine and handed me a tube of suntan lotion while the wind whipped at the brim of her hat. “Do me, will you?”

“Did you just happen by?”

“I hike the beach from Maine to Florida every summer. Saw you lying there and decided I could use a break.”

“Going to be here long?”

“As a matter of fact, Admiral Grafton called me. He said you were staying at his beach house and asked if I would like to use it, too. Said he had a couple of bedrooms and plenty of toilet paper.”

I turned on my side and looked her over while she settled herself on her towel and told me this tale. I wondered if Grafton really called her or she called him. I sat up and went to work with the lotion.

“So,” she continued as I slathered her, “I thought, I’m due for some vacation, and why not?”

“Indeed! Why not?”

“Give me a chance to get the real inside scoop on Zooey and Royston. Grafton said you were in the suite when they were arrested.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t discuss it. I’m saving it for my autobiography.”

“Darn. I’ll just have to wheedle it out of you. A project like that will help fill the long evenings.”

“Heck, yeah. As a matter of fact, I have a party invite for tonight. Want to go?”

“If we can leave the party early. There’s a certain man I’m looking forward to making love to.”

You could have knocked me over with a feather. Sarah Houston! Who would have ever suspected?