The Widening Gyre

Chapter 25

I spent most of the next day calling on people that Gerry Broz had called on in the aftermath of the great blizzard. I'd made note of the addresses and now I went visiting- Georgetown in the morning, Capitol hill in the afternoon. Some people weren't home, many of the people that were home wouldn't talk with me, but I made progress. Enough.

My approach was open and honest. Like my face.

"This is off the record," I told an elegant young woman in a town house on Fourth Street. "I'm doing work for a government agency. I won't mention the name, but it's a three-letter agency."

She stood in her open door in a silk lounging outfit and nodded. Her hair was black with a good-looking sprinkle of premature silver.

"You don't have to even give your name, and you're free to deny anything you say. I'm looking for background only."

She nodded again. Her dark eyes were enlarged by an enormous pair of glasses with jade-green rims.

"There is a young man who sells cocaine to you, and to many of your neighbors, good people, not criminals. He is covertly connected," I said, "to a foreign power with interests antithetical to those of the United States."

"I don't know anything about it," she said.

I shook my head impatiently, but friendly. "No, no. We don't care about the cocaine. I'll snort a little myself on weekends. We've got bigger fish to fry."

"What do you want?" she said.

"The name he's using," I said. "We haven't been able to establish his cover name, and we don't want to risk tipping him to our interest. All I want from you is his name."

She frowned. I was wearing my suit and a clean shirt and trying like hell to look like someone who had gone to Yale and worked now for a three-letter government agency. I smiled sincerely, encouragingly. You can trust your government.

"You needn't admit anything about any proscribed substance," I said. "Merely a name."

"I…" She shook her head.

"I guess all of us are cynical now," I said. "I guess that there's no point talking about duty, about patriotism. I guess it's too late for that kind of talk. But I must say that you have a chance here, at no cost to yourself, to do your country a service."

I looked directly at her, standing straight.

"Gerry Broz," she said. "That's the name he uses here."

"Thank you very much," I said. "We will not bother you again. You have my word." I put out my hand, she took it. We shook, and I went on down Fourth Street to where I'd parked the car.

I replayed that scene maybe twenty times that day. In two other instances I got the name. Everyone else told me to beat it. Whatever happened to duty, honor, country? But I had enough. None of it would stand up in court, but I wasn't going to court. I was building evidence for a different forum.

At the sixteenth house I picked up a tail. It wasn't amateurish, but it wasn't Bulldog Drummond either. Two guys in jackets and ties, driving a dark blue Chevy sedan with District plates on it. One of them wore sunglasses. They stayed behind me for the rest of the afternoon. They followed me back to the Hay Adams. When I gave my car to the doorman they moved on down Sixteenth Street, and when I came out half an hour later showered and reshaved and damned near preppy in my Harris tweed jacket, they were gone.

I guessed that someone I'd talked to had called Gerry Broz and Gerry had called someone and they had sent out two employees to take a look. Unless they were even clumsier than their tail job suggested, they'd be able to get my name by tracing the plate numbers to the car rental company. Then they'd check at the hotel and establish that I stayed there.

Then they'd call in and report to whoever sent them and whoever sent them would probably call Gerry and then they'd decide what to do about it. There wasn't much for me to do but go about my business. At least I had stirred up some activity. I'd worry about their next move when they made it. Readiness is all.

My business at the moment was to pick Susan up at work and drive her out Wisconsin Avenue to the Mazza Mall in Chevy Chase. I picked her up at 5:30. She was standing out front in the early evening. Looking at her made me wonder if some of her patients got better just by staring.

"A deal is a deal," I said. "I shop with you tonight, and Saturday you go with me to the National Gallery."

"Yes," she said, "but no big sighs and stifled yawns while I'm in here. I need to concentrate completely."

"And when it's over we eat and drink," I said.

"Shopping is never over," Susan said. "It is merely suspended."

The Mazza Mall was Rodeo Drive compressed and three stories high. The architecture was L.A., or maybe Dallas, opulent with a big Neiman-Marcus branch anchoring one end of the building. Susan had a charge at Neiman-Marcus and headed directly there. To say that Susan shopped would be like saying that sharks eat. It was disciplined frenzy. While she was at it I kept close watch on the clientele, which was multinational and very stylish and almost entirely female. By actual count, women in the Mazza Mall preferred pants to skirts by a four to one margin and preferred the pants very snug over the backside in nearly every case.

The mall closed finally for the night and we left, Susan still gleaming with a hunter's fierce intensity, me less so.

Outside the mall, slightly east of it and across Wisconsin Avenue, was a familiar restaurant front. My heart leapt up.

"My God, Suze, there's a Hamburger Hamlet."

Susan nodded.

"There's one in Chicago too," I said.

"Would you care to go into this one and eat something? I'll bet I can guess the house specialty."

"It's one of my favorites," I said. "There are many of them in L.A., but I didn't know they were creeping east."

"Isn't this thrilling?" Susan said.

"Ah, Suze," I said, "that world-weary pose ill becomes you. Come on, you'll see."

We went into the Hamburger Hamlet and settled in a red leather booth (well, maybe red vinyl) and I ordered beer and Susan had a glass of white wine. The beer came in an enormous schooner. It made me smile just to look at it.

"Ah," Susan said, "I begin to understand your enthusiasm."

Susan's purchases were stacked on the seat around her and some on my side. She rarely wore the same thing twice in my memory, and back in the house in Smithfield her clothes were in every closet.

"Lucky we found this shopping mall," I said. "You'd probably have had to go to work naked."

She smiled at me. "Even I wonder now and then about myself," she said.

"How the hell do you afford it?" I said. "Being a pre-doctoral intern isn't a get-rich-quick scheme."

"Alimony," she said.

"How the hell can you be liberated and accept alimony?" I said.

Again the smile, innocent, beautiful, glorious, and satanic. "Exploit the oppressor," she said.

The waiter brought us our supper, a large cheeseburger for me, a smaller cheeseburger for Suze, two salads, and another schooner of beer.

"How is your case?"

"It might work out," I said. "I know Joe Broz's kid Gerry made the tapes of Ronni Alexander. I know he deals cocaine to a variety of D.C.'s better citizens. I have some names of some of them and their tacit admission. I know that Gerry trades coke for sex among some teenyboppers, and I know he runs what he calls granny parties for his college chums and a select circle of bored, and/or neurotic housewives."

"What good does all that do you?" Susan said.

"Well, I know how Joe got the tapes. And I'm beginning to think about how to get them back. I can, after all, put a lot of pressure on his kid."

"Isn't that dangerous?" Susan said.

I took a long pull on the beer. "Man's afraid to die's afraid to live," I said.

"That's simple bullshit," Susan said.

"Oh, you noticed that too, huh?"

"It will be dangerous, won't it?"

"Maybe," I said. "I don't know. I'm not exactly clear on how much Joe's involved with this. It just doesn't have his tone. It's too complicated. Too clever. Joe started out breaking people's kneecaps with a baseball bat. He never got much more subtle than that."

"Well, what do you think is going on?"

"I don't know. I just know that all this isn't Joe's style."

"Maybe the boy is acting on his own," Susan said.

"Except that his father's organization is involved. Vinnie Morris came and talked with me."

"Who's he?"

"He's the, ah, executive officer."

"Uh-huh."

"And then the hooligans in Springfield, and Louis Nolan."

She nodded. "Would they do things for the boy without involving the father?"

I shrugged. "Maybe, down the line, if they thought it came from Joe… but Vinnie." I shook my head. "Vinnie would know whether it came from Joe or not."

"So how will you find out?"

"Eventually I'm going to have to talk with Joe," I said. "But not until after Saturday. I'm not going back to Boston until we even up."

"My Mazza Mall for your National Gallery," Susan said. Her face was as it had always been: intricate, beautiful, expressive. In the last year somehow it had also become faintly remote, as if always she were listening to a whisper, barely audible, from someplace else: her name, maybe, tiny and hushed. Susan, Susan, Susan.