Upper Georgetown June 26
Gillian Silva led Dunne and Addis into the kitchen of her group house. Against one wall was a bookcase full of lunch boxes depicting television shows of the 1960s. A housemate, she explained, was a collector. None of the other residents were home. She asked the two men if they wanted coffee. Both declined.
“Oh, yeah, Coke,” she said to Addis. “I should’ve asked. Want one?”
Every profile of him included the obligatory reference to his fondness for—or near-addiction to—Coke. A documentary on the election showed a wall of his campaign office entirely covered with empty Coke cans, each affixed by electrical tape. During the transition, an advertising firm had offered him a large sum for doing a commercial for Coke. He turned it down.
“No thank you,” he said now.
Silva started the coffee-maker and then excused herself and went to the bathroom. Dunne in a low voice explained to Addis how he had located her.
“That was a lucky guess about First Ladies,” Addis said.
“I think I deserved it,” Dunne replied. “I can’t depend on enticing key witnesses with my boyish looks … . She tell you anything yet?”
“She’s friends with Allison Meade. Worked with her in this funny escort business, maybe more of a scam—she claims there’s no sex—but doesn’t know what her friend was up to at the Mayflower.”
Dunne recalled to himself what Al-Fusah had said: “It was clean.” What an odd world, Dunne thought.
Silva joined them at the kitchen table. She had taken her hair out of the ponytail.
“May I ask you a few questions, Miss Silva?” Dunne inquired. He placed his hands on the table, palms down.
She looked toward Addis.
“It’s okay,” Addis said.
“I’ve seen your face before,” she said to Dunne. “I got this great visual memory. Can tell you exactly what everyone I saw yesterday was wearing. Even the day before. And I’ve seen you—on TV, or something like that.”
“I’m the … I was head of the Secret Service detail at the White House until—”
“Until the assassination?” she asked and then feared she had made an impolitic remark. “Oh, sorry.”
“No, that’s alright,” Dunne said.
“But I was telling Nick—okay, if I call you that?”
“Please,” Addis said.
“I was telling him, I don’t want my name in all this. I think it would kill my grandmother. And she just had this operation. And my’rents would go ballistic. They’d be so …” She took a sip of the coffee.
“Miss Silva, I don’t make promises I can’t keep. At least for now I can try to keep you out of this. But I may not be able to guarantee that forever. But—and I don’t want to pressure you—if you don’t help now, then you may become the subject of some official action, perhaps a subpoena, and then your name will be linked to the assassination investigation.”
“That’s not very nice,” Silva said. She turned to Addis for support. He shrugged.
Slamming diplomats, intimidating a young woman—we desperate men are not polite, Dunne thought.
“Okay,” she said. “But please, okay?”
“I will try, Miss Silva.”
Dunne asked about Allison Meade. Silva said that Allison had introduced her to First Ladies, that she and Allison had kept their work a secret from their friends and families, that Allison worked more than she did.
“She’s prettier than me. Or, I guess, was. Her eyes—they were different colors, blue and gray. You wanted to keep looking at her, to figure that out. She was good when people got pissed off. You know, when they thought they were getting something they weren’t. She’d talk to them, sexy-like. Let them smell her. And they would … you know. As long as they didn’t get her messy. Sometimes she’d play S&M games with them. But the rule was: You can’t touch. You can’t be busted for prostitution, then, Raymond told us. He was the guy who ran this thing. He said he’d can us if we did tricks. But Allison was real cute. So some guys called back for her, even if they couldn’t do everything. And that was fine with me. There were few guys I ever wanted to see again. Most were greasy—guess I shouldn’t say that, but they were—foreigners, junior diplomat types, the World Bank and all that. It wasn’t an ego thing for me if they didn’t ask for me again. Really, it wasn’t.”
Addis tried to imagine Allison Meade. He had seen a wire photo; it did not compare with Silva’s description of her friend. He wondered what he and Dunne would do with this information. Could they not immediately relay it to the proper authorities? He had never practiced law. But shit, he thought, there had to be some statute about interfering with a federal investigation.
“When was the last time you saw her?” Dunne asked
“In psych class, the day before …”
“And she said nothing about any upcoming jobs?”
“No. Sometimes she’d tell me. Sometimes she just smiled at me like she had this story to tell but she wouldn’t tell it.”
“And she never mentioned to you anyone who sounded like the suspect in the assassination? You’ve seen the pictures?”
“Yeah, sure. And, no, she never said anything about anyone like that. How come you guys with all your computers and everything can’t find out who this guy is?”
“We will,” Dunne said.
“He does all the talking?” she asked Addis, nodding at Dunne. She was pulling at the ends of her hair.
“Right now, he’s doing most,” Addis said. She was angling for a certain kind of notice from Addis. He leaned across the table, brushed her hand with his, and asked if he could use the phone. She smiled and said yes.
Good touch, Dunne thought.
Addis went into the living room. A stack of fashion magazines was on a coffee table. A lava lamp and a bong were on the mantle above the fireplace. A framed poster commemorating a Monet exhibit was on the wall. On the couch was a pile of Jane Austen novels. Studying Sartre and de Beauvoir by day, servicing international bureaucrats at night—Addis wondered how much of a secret world truly existed. Spouses lying to each other. Employees padding books. Children deceiving parents and vice versa. Community leaders doing the unspeakable. Who was renting all those behind-the-counter videos in those nice shopping malls? Calling those 900 numbers?
After years of working in government, Addis had changed his view on how the world works. He had grown up a devotee of Watergate. He could cite whole passages of the tapes. As an adolescent, he had pored over the Warren Commission report and could list the dozens of suspicious holes and contradictions in the official account. He had believed then that the official reality open to public inspection merely veiled a hidden world, where the true power resided and the truly significant decisions were reached. But government service had prompted him to reconsider. Bureaucracies were too incompetent to create, manage, and maintain extensive conspiracies. Interagency competition would doom any plot that
relied on cooperation among various portions of the government. Spend a week in government, and anyone would see that it was impossible for the Pentagon, the FBI, the Secret Service, the CIA to agree on anything, let alone how to cover up a presidential assassination for decades. Most government malfeasance was actually nonfeasance—bumbling conducted by cover-your-ass bureaucrats, not intricate schemes authored by masterminds.
There were secrets. Secret meetings, secret plans, secret wars, secret deals. Addis had seen a few, yet nothing monumental, and few that would profoundly affect history’s overall shape. A favor for a contributor. A private understanding between the President and a foreign head of state that was not shared with Congress. But these secrets did not comprise an entire other world. Addis had concluded that, in general, life is pretty much what it appears to be. Oswald probably had done it. But recent events—events that had transpired before the Hanover assassination—had caused him to reevaluate, to wonder if the world revolved upon small secrets. Nothing grand, no global plots, but a long line of modest, economy-size secrets—like Silva’s secrets—that, taken together, formed a covert patchwork that blended seamlessly into the pattern of everyday life as we see it.
Addis called the White House and checked his messages. There were no calls he wanted to return. From the living room, he could hear Dunne gently interrogating Silva.
“So tell me about Raymond,” Dunne asked. “What’s his last name?”
Silva did not know. The name of the receptionist in the office? She only had been told the first name: Maria.
“Listen,” she said. “This was not like Citibank. We didn’t have staff meetings. I saw him once in a while, but usually it was all over the phone. And I’d pick up the money. Mostly from Maria.”
She described Raymond: short, thin, muddy-brown hair, pronounced nose, thin moustache, angular face, maybe forty-five. Looked like a squirrel.
“What else?” Dunne queried.
“Once he told me he was in the Marines. I couldn’t see it. Don’t they have a height requirement or something?”
“And …” Dunne said. He could tell she was keeping something back.
“I hate getting into this stuff,” she said.
“What stuff, Miss Silva?”
“It’s so stereotypical.”
“What is?”
She was silent.
“What is?” Dunne repeated.
“You’re missing the good stuff,” she called to Addis in the living room.
Addis returned to the kitchen and leaned against the counter.
“Ms. Silva?” Dunne said.
She tossed her head.
“Okay, he’s gay,” she said. “Runs an escort service—well, not exactly an escort service, but close enough—and he’s gay and hangs out in the bars. I don’t know. It’s like too much a type. You know what I mean?”
“I appreciate your sentiments,” Dunne replied, “but I’m just asking for details that might be useful in case we want to find him.”
“Yeah, it’s not like I’m so PC, but …”
“How do you know about Raymond’s social life?”
“He mentioned it to me when he first interviewed me. I think to convince me that he doesn’t hit on his girls. It wasn’t a big deal. He paid well and never tried any funny stuff. That’s all I cared about.”
Silva was talking to Dunne, but her eyes were on Addis.
“Do you know which bars?” Dunne asked.
“No.”
“Would you know where to find him if you had to?”
“I guess not,” she said. “Just at the office. When I heard about Allison, I called him, and there was no answer. I didn’t know what to do …”
A tear moved down her face and met her lip.
“And never any word from Raymond.”
She shook her head.
“After that you immediately changed your phone number?”
“Yes.”
Dunne thanked Silva for her cooperation. He gave her his home phone number and asked her to call if she thought of anything else.
“And do you have a number?” she said to Addis.
“You can call the White House switchboard and ask for me.”
She looked disappointed.
“But you’re going to keep my name out of this, right?” She was still talking to Addis.
He did not see how that could be done in the long run. He waited for Dunne to speak.
“As long as possible, Miss Silva,” Dunne said.
On the way out, Silva pointed to a framed photograph of herself hanging on the wall. She was wearing a black leather bustier and a bikini bottom. Much of her body was exposed. She looked good, Addis thought.
“My cousin’s a fashion photographer in New York,” she explained. “Shoots lingerie catalogs.”
“It’s nice,” Addis said.
Silva smiled at him. “Good luck,” she whispered.
Dunne and Addis stood in front of the group house.
“So now what, Clarence?” Addis asked. “You’re not about to tell the task force about this interview, are you?”
“I may … eventually. Is that okay?”
“I don’t know. Been a while since I checked the criminal code about screwing with a federal investigation.”
The two walked toward campus. A car passed by. A man was driving; another was in the passenger seat. Through the tinted windows, Dunne could not make them out.
Surveillance? If so, Dunne knew how he would do it. Three teams mobile, one stationary and tracking, rotations every fifteen minutes—
“So you want to keep this to yourself for now?” Addis asked.
“Yep.”
“Why?”
“Don’t have a good answer for you.”
“Trying to save the day all on your own?”
“Probably.”
“And what else?”
“Can’t really tell you. Something’s off with the way they’re handling this investigation. Don’t know what. But it is.”
“Fuck it, Clarence, you want me to withhold information from the task force and a presidential commission because something feels wrong?”
Addis put on his sunglasses. Shit, he thought, is this how a cover-up starts? Will conspiracy buffs—or, worse, congressional aides and federal investigators—one day be examining accounts of this conversation now occurring on a lovely Georgetown street on a sunny afternoon? Earlier in the day Addis had heard on the radio that the most popular Internet sites this week were those devoted to conspiracy theories on the Hanover assassination. One theory referred to a budget memo—leaked last month—that raised the possibility of cutting spending for the Pentagon and the intelligence community. Addis knew that idea was DOA and that the memo, written by a low-level analyst in the budget office, posed no threat to the generals and the spies. Yet that did not stop hundreds—or thousands?—of his fellow citizens from drawing a certain conclusion.
“It’s all I have right now,” Dunne said.
“Okay—for a while.”
“How long is ‘a while,’ Nick?”
“I can’t say. But I’ll let you know when it starts to run out, if you let me know what you’re doing.”
“Sure.”
“You’re lucky I’m in a don’t-give-a-good-god-damn mood these days.”
Dunne looked at him for more of an explanation.
“My secret,” Addis said.