Adams Morgan June 24
Addis dropped his car keys and knelt down to find them. The accordion file slipped and fell to the wet cobblestones. Several pages slid out. Damnit, he cursed silently. He needed a light in the alley behind his house, where he parked the sensible Honda he had been driving for six years. He scooped up the papers and grabbed the keys.
He considered dropping by Havana Village, a bar around the corner. Rolando, the owner, always was a good host. A plate of rice and beans. A beer or two. But Addis was tired—the day after the funeral had been full of meetings on transition plans, on convention plans—and he had brought work home.
“Mr. Addis—”
Had he heard something? He didn’t see anyone. He peered into the shadows, between the parked cars, beneath the fire escapes. No one. The glasses he wore for driving at night were askew. He straightened them. Across the alley—he thought he saw a figure. Using a finger, he tried to wipe the mist from the lenses. Nothing there. But be sure, he told himself.
“Hello, hello?” he half-whispered. No reply. After a long wait, he opened the gate to the garden behind his brownstone. The clicks of footsteps? He could not tell. He recalled the security briefing held for the White House staff two days ago. Or was it three? The previous days held no fine distinctions. One of Dunne’s assistants had warned all White House personnel to be cautious. Make sure to inform the duty officer where you will be at all times. Report anything unusual at home or work immediately. Use common sense. Don’t take risks. Addis was sure that looking for a stranger in a wet, dark alley fell into the don’t-do category.
A clear footstep. Addis looked in its direction. A woman stepped out from behind a parked van. A ray of light fell across her face. Addis squinted
to see through his glasses. She had long hair—dark red?—and a pointy chin. She was wearing sunglasses.
“Mr. Addis?” she said.
“Yes,” he said and started to walk toward her.
She stopped abruptly, and, as a reflex, he did too. They were still fifteen feet apart. Her face was now in the dark.
“I think, that is, I … I have some information that might be useful.”
She was nervous. He stood still.
“About what?” he asked.
“The, the …”
He thought she was crying.
“Why don’t you come in and we can talk,” he said, realizing he was further violating White House security guidelines.
She stepped in his direction—hesitantly.
A beeping sound went off. And Addis heard the rush of a car racing through the alley. He fumbled for the cellular phone in his jacket pocket and again dropped the file. The beams from the car’s headlights flooded the alley. Addis looked for the woman. All he saw was glare. The car—a dark-color sedan—drove by, missing him by inches. He fell and landed on his side. The car moved through the alley. Addis hurried to his feet, while pulling the phone out of his pocket. It was still ringing.
She was gone.
“Hold on a minute,” he said into the phone.
He ran through the alley and to the street. He did not see her. He did not see the car. Was there a connection between her disappearance and the sedan? Too many people desperate for parking in his neighborhood sped through the alley in the evenings. Might have been merely another diplo-trash club crawler.
“Sorry, sorry,” he said into the phone, catching his breath. “You still there?”
It was Dunne. He asked Addis if he could stop by.
“Sure, Clarence,” he said, “whenever you like.”
Addis entered his house through the kitchen and ignored the tower of dishes in the sink. As he reached for the light switch in the dining room, he felt something against his leg. He spun around and knocked a lamp to the ground.
Shit, I’m too jumpy.
He turned on the overhead fixture. Eric, his cat, was on the floor in front of him. The cat cried in Addis’s direction and then trotted out of the room. Addis put down the soaked file and followed the cat to the kitchen.
The food dish was empty. He checked a cupboard. He was out of cat food.
He poked around until he found a small jar of caviar. The prime minister of Russia had given Addis the caviar in Moscow while guiding Hanover and Addis on a late-evening tour of the Kremlin during the first summit. We read much of you here, he had said to Addis, when they were in the kitchen facilities. “Do you have a brother?” And he placed a jar of caviar—“the best,” he remarked—in Addis’s pocket.
Addis opened the caviar and fed it to the cat.
He knew her voice would be there—Holly Rudd’s, on the answering machine—so he disregarded the blinking light. He sat down at the desk in the corner of the living room, opened the file, and laid out the damp documents. When he ran out of desk space, he used the floor.
Earlier that day, Margaret Hanover had stopped by the office. “Remember,” she had said, “the loose ends. Give them a good tying.” Addis had tried to make a start by going over the documents. But concentrating in the office had been impossible, especially after M. T. O’Connor had burst in, waving a sheet of paper.
“From Kelly’s office,” she had declared. He could see the page had once been crumpled.
“From the garbage?”
“Does it matter?” she shouted. It was a first draft of the initial policy initiatives of the Mumfries administration: tax cuts; deregulation; enhanced business subsidies, particularly for energy companies. “He took two bullets so Mumfries could reward the home-state shits who have greased him ever since he was a numskull bootlicker in the state legislature?”
She wanted to leak the document to the Post. Addis talked her out of it. Any leaks, and Kelly would clean house and clear out the Hanover holdovers. Piss inside the tent for a while, he counseled.
At his home desk, he again looked at the financial records, as they dried. Pages were missing, some were torn. He hated doing cleanup work and cursed Evan Hynes-Pierce, a British reporter who wrote for a Pittsburgh newspaper owned by an arch-conservative millionaire. It had been Hynes-Pierce who had put the inquiry to the press office: Had the Hanovers many years back invested in a land deal in Rapides Parish and received preferential treatment due to the intervention of Margaret’s father, even though Chasie Mason and his daughter were notoriously estranged? The press office had ignored his request for information. Friends in Louisiana subsequently informed the White House that a seedy Brit was skulking about, asking about the old days, about Chasie Mason and the Hanovers. But, so far, no story had materialized.
“Give it a good tying-up,” Margaret Hanover had asked Addis.
Before the convention? Was that the point? Clear the way?
The front door buzzer sounded. Addis let in Dunne. He cleared the living room couch of two weeks’ worth of newspapers, and Dunne sat down.
“Ever see this?” Dunne asked and handed Addis a fax.
It was a memo from Hamilton Kelly to Bruce Harpold, who had been the White House director of administration, until a heart attack killed him while he was eating lunch in the White House mess. The memo carried a date from the transition period:
Vice President-elect Mumfries, whose work on the intelligence committee has convinced him that security safeguards are not sufficient throughout federal facilities in Washington, has asked me to convey to you his concern on this front and his suggestion that, following the inauguration, the White House implement a full review of all security, especially all rules and regulations governing the entrance of non-White House personnel into the White House/OEOB complex.
It was cc’ed to Dunne.
“Never saw it,” said Dunne. “But a bunch of reporters have now. One sent me this copy. Wouldn’t say how she got it. And Kelly’s not commenting. At least, that’s what I’m told.”
“Shit,” Addis said.
“Did you ever see it? You were staff director for the transition, right? Working with Bruce?”
“Yeah, but you know how much paper flew across my desk then. I don’t remember this. Can we check Bruce’s papers?”
“Yeah, go digging through the archives. Like there’s time for that. I wouldn’t put it past that Kelly to have—”
“But why?”
“Make himself look better. You know the type. He can only smell good, if someone else stinks like shit. And Grayton wants me far out to pasture. This makes me even more radioactive.”
Addis offered Dunne a drink and then realized he was out of everything but tap water. Not even Coke. Dunne declined.
“You think they want one lone nut?” Dunne asked.
“Who?”
“Grayton, I don’t know, whoever. Like last time. One head case. The Bureau and everyone else are working their butts off, trying to figure out Mr. Max Bridge. But … .”
“Why are you asking, Clarence?”
“Makes it easier, I suppose … . Don’t know. I have lots of time to wonder about lots of things. And then this.” He held up the fax.
“Got one thing,” Dunne said, “and I don’t feel like sharing it with
them. They don’t seem to like my input so far … . Maybe I’ll take a drink. Have any Scotch?”
Addis explained the house was dry and went to get a glass of water for Dunne. There wasn’t even ice in the freezer. As Addis cleaned two glasses, Dunne kept talking.
“Got a friend on the local force, a sergeant. Last night, two of his guys answer a call. Someone in an apartment building on New Hampshire hears a guy beating the crap out of a woman in the apartment next door. Cops show up. Bang on the door. The guy opens it. Inside there’s a woman. Messed-up, a little bloody. But not too bad. Crying. Guy’s drunk. Starts blabbering about being a diplomat. And then this other fellow shows up. Turns out the guy’s right. They’re both low-level schmucks at the Moroccan embassy. Cops ask the woman what happened. She keeps saying, she’s all right. Says she just got mugged outside the building, roughed up by some black guys. Happened too fast to identify them. Cops ask her for I.D. She’s got none. The black guys—always black, right?—took her purse. Gives them a name and address. Turns out it’s false. The second Moroccan tries to smooth everything over. The officers aren’t buying this. But she won’t press charges. Then the drunken Moroccan says something like, ‘Hey, I can help you out. That girl in the paper, the one in the hotel room, I saw her.’ But then he starts blabbing about how he’s related to the prime minister. Next he vomits over one of the cops.”
Dunne took the glass of water from Addis.
“Cops got their names. Didn’t bother bringing him in. Diplomatic immunity’s always a pain. And the woman won’t say what really happened. The cops make her as a professional. They insist on seeing her leave, and she gets into a cab. When they go back to the station, they tell my friend what the drunk said. He rips them a new backdoor and sends them back to get more information. Dumb-ass cops. You know it, the Moroccans are gone. And today, when my friend went down to the embassy, they tell him the drunken asshole has so embarrassed his wonderful nation that he was sent home.”
“So,” Addis asked, “should the Bureau chase this guy back to Morocco?”
“What I might do. But I’m neck-deep—or going to be—in Kelly’s shit.”
“You going to tell them?”
“Maybe. My suggestions don’t make the top of the list these days.”
Dunne gulped down the water.
“Wife will be worried. We’ll keep in touch, okay?”
“Sure,” Addis said. “If I can be—”
“I don’t think anyone can be.”
After Addis locked the door, the phone rang. Go away, he said to himself. Everyone. Please.
After the fourth ring, the answering machine took the call.
“Nick, hi, it’s me. Just calling to say hello. Just wanted to see how you are … Nick, I’m so sorry. I won’t bother you again. I just want to …” She hung up.
Eric jumped on the desk. Addis pushed the cat off the papers. Why bother with all this now? he asked himself. But he knew why Margaret wanted to, and he wished he didn’t. He took out his pocket calendar and looked at the days ahead.