Adams Morgan June 29
Rolando brought over two plates of grilled shrimp and two glasses of wine. Addis and Lancette were seated at the back of the first-floor dining room. This was where he had sat with Rudd three nights earlier.
“Okay,” Addis said after the owner left, “let’s have it.”
“Have what?”
“Your story.”
“My story? Like this is a date?”
“Sure, why not?”
“It’s not that interesting.”
“Then give me your cover story.”
“That’s even duller.”
“Okay, then how about those Wizards? Can you believe what a messed-up season they had. Nothing in the paint. No leadership—”
“Okay, you win,” she said. “My story.”
She went through it like she had done with Grayton, but with more details. She told him how she had found her way to the CIA. It started with her thesis at the Woodrow Wilson school: an examination of Tito’s campaign to undermine and absorb political dissent in Yugoslovia. Impressed by the paper, a professor had recommended her to a friend in Washington, a fellow at an institute dedicated to foreign policy. She had visited the friend, and they had chatted about prospects for democracy in the Balkans. He asked if she might be interested in working further in that area. She said yes. He picked up the phone and called an acquaintance in the CIA. I get five hundred dollars a head, he had told her. She was not sure whether he was joking.
“The rest is you-know-what,” she said.
“Current events,” he said. “But that whole flap?”
“Not now.”
“Something like, you wouldn’t go along with some report on …”
“Assessing the political strengths and weaknesses of various Serbian players.”
“They wanted you to fix it, give a boost to somebody?”
She stared at a couple at another table. They were laughing. The man was making faces as he told a story.
“Okay,” she said. “The thing was, they were shooting for the right policy. It was all about who should get a nod of support from us. But the folks who deserved it were the worst organized. And it doesn’t help to send a paper to the NSC saying the people we ought to be helping are a bunch of fuck-ups. So they wanted that shaved.”
“And you didn’t want to be a shaver?”
“It’s not what I was paid to do,” she said.
“Not even when it could have helped.”
“Not even. I was naive. I didn’t think it was up to me to rig the record.”
She looked at her hands.
“That’s about it,” she added.
“Commendable.”
“Or foolish and arrogant.”
Enough pushing on this front, Addis thought.
“Okay, is it my turn?” he asked.
“You don’t have to bother,” she said. “I’ve read the profiles. Seen the interviews. And I have a confession.”
Jesus, I love the way your mouth moves.
“Yes?” he asked.
“A close friend of mine is intensely preoccupied with you. She’d be disappointed—actually, she’d feel betrayed—if I didn’t try to introduce her to you. She’s really nice. A lawyer at the DOE. So maybe when all this is …”
She trailed off.
Bad sign, he told himself.
“Sure,” he said. “Sure.”
He sipped the wine.
“Care to tell me how you got into this thing?” she asked.
“A product of celebrity. See what happens when—”
“They put your face on the cover of magazines.”
“Yeah,” he said.
He thought of Gillian Silva. He poked a shrimp across his plate.
“A woman who wanted to meet me. Had what she believed was important information. She got it to me and …”
“And what?”
“She was hit by a car and killed. I can’t say it’s connected. But …”
Lancette moved her hand on the table toward his, but it stopped inches short.
“Mr. Dunne asked me not to tell the director about any of this.”
“Clarence is obsessed these days. That’s understandable. He wants to be in control. I’m not fighting him on that.”
“It’s hard to sit on this. I’m supposed to bring Wenner everything. That’s the whole point. No surprises—”
“No skeletons, no bumps in the middle of night,” Addis said.
“Something like that,” she said. “He called twice today. He saved my ass, saved my career. He’s going to be royally p.o.’ed.”
“Well, go ahead. I’m not going to fight you, either.”
Addis lifted his wine in mock toast to her and drank.
“You’re not exactly what I expected,” she said.
“Or your friend, I bet.”
“Probably.”
“Well, Julia”—it was the first time he used her name—“it’s been an unusual time for me—”
“I can imagine,” she interrupted. “It must be very—”
“It’s not just that. Even before this … I was getting tired of gaming out one situation after another. I’m not so certain life is so malleable. Sure, major events—momentous events—can turn on small decisions. You know, the pebble in the pond and all the ripples. But you can spend so much time trying to figure out what pebble to throw where to get precisely the right ripple. And then, anyway, a flash flood comes racing in and washes over the ripples you’ve so carefully orchestrated.”
“How many hours a day do you put in at the White House?”
“Usually—and it hasn’t been ‘usual’ lately—fourteen or so.”
“And you’ve been doing this for almost four years?”
Almost five, if you count the campaign, he thought. He nodded.
“Then let me suggest a radical diagnosis: burnout.”
“That’s part of it. But there’s more. When I’m honest with myself, I know that.”
“You’re not always honest with yourself?” she asked.
“That’s a hard one, don’t you think? How can you tell if you’re honest with yourself? Say you’re really good at spinning the truth, then how can you?”
“You just can. In the CIA they say they want us to be objective analysts. Just the facts, ma’am. But the whole weight of the culture, of the bureaucracy, is to produce material that pleases whoever is above you. The President or just the guy who can give you a promotion. Still, you know damn well when you’re pushing a piece of evidence too far or ignoring information that contradicts what you believe—or want to believe.
I’ve seen a lot of smart and good people who act as if they really do believe their own tilted reports. But I have to think that at one level they know what they’re doing, that …”
She thought for a second.
“That they’re aware they’re juggling the truth. It’s not that they’re liars. But from their perspective they’re—let’s be kind—animating the truth with other concerns. For noble reasons, of course. Nobody likes to think of themselves as—”
“A shit,” he said.
Lancette laughed and lifted her glass.
“Exactly. The human capacity for self-justification is endless.”
He clinked his glass against hers, and Addis waved to Rolando and ordered another round.
On the way out, they passed a group of twenty-somethings heading toward the dance room on the second floor.
“Do you like to dance?” Lancette asked.
“‘He dances like an epileptic string bean.’ That’s what a writer for Vanity Fair wrote about me during the campaign. I made the mistake of letting him come out with us one of the few nights we took time off. Since he proceeded to get drunk at world-record speed, I always thought his observation was—”
“Enhanced?”
“Precisely. Not exactly the truth, but …”
“Not exactly not not the truth?”
“Right,” he said. “Right, not not the truth. I like that.”
They walked out into the night. The air held a cool moistness. In the breeze he could smell the trees of nearby Rock Creek Park. He was enjoying the buzz—from the wine and from her. Let’s just ignore the remark about her girlfriend, he told himself.
They crossed Columbia Road and passed a crowd of African diplomats heading toward a world beat club.
“Actually,” he said, “I do have a story you haven’t already read about.”
“Really? I hope it’s not classified. I don’t think I want to know any more state secrets.”
“Don’t think this one belongs to the state.”
“Then, feel free,” she said and smiled.
Shit, why the fuck not?
“Remember Donny Lee Mondreau?” he asked.
Her eyebrows moved together.
“It’s a familiar …”
Addis gave her a moment. Her face eased. She did not make the connection.
“A retarded man. Convicted of killing a convenience store owner in Louisiana and got the death sentence—”
“And President Hanover flew back,” she interrupted.
“Yes. But he wasn’t President then. It was during the campaign.”
“I remember.”
They reached Addis’s house. He stepped inside first and felt something beneath his foot. Cat shit, he knew. He hit the light switch.
“Watch out where you walk,” he said.
On a table was a note. He read it and gave it to Lancette.
“It’s from Samantha,” he said. “She’s twelve, lives next door. She takes care of the cat when I’m gone.”
“I fed Eric,” the note said. “But he’s in a bad mood. Maybe you shouldn’t go away so much. Or maybe you should get another cat. Samantha.”
Addis guided Lancette to the living room couch. He then headed to the kitchen to retrieve paper towels and stain remover. The cat was not in sight.
“Do you think,” Lancette shouted at him, “she meant that you should replace your cat or that you should get an additional one so he’d have company?”
“Good question,” he said on the way to the front hallway.
“She’s a pistol,” Addis said, as he cleaned the mess. “The other day she asked me if I believed in God. I said, ‘Mostly.’ She didn’t like that. I could tell. She then asked if I wanted to marry a woman who believed in God. I said I’d like to marry a woman who had some faith. Then she said, ‘Would you marry a woman who didn’t believe in God but who went to church anyway?’”
“What did you say?”
“I said there are a lot of reasons for going to church. Some people go because they know what they’re going to find. Some people go to look. And she said, ‘But wouldn’t she be a phony?’ I said, not if she knew the difference between the two.”
“So when you’re not running the world, you assist young girls in their spiritual development,” Lancette said.
Addis passed through the living room on his way back to the kitchen.
“Everyone needs a hobby.”
Damn, he thought, she’s good. I’ve missed this.
She inspected the stack of memorabilia piled on a rocking chair. There was a hat from the U.S.S. Constitution. A photograph of Addis at a ceremony at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, his arms around two famous musicians. A folder of letters from schoolchildren. A framed citation, signed by Hanover,
thanking Addis for his participation in the passage of an education bill. A postcard with a photograph of the Empire State Building. Lancette flipped it over. “From one sin city to another,” the handwritten message read, “Love, J.” She recalled the news reports of Addis’s affair with a famous model who went by a single name that began with the letter J.
Addis returned to the room. She dropped the card on the pile.
“Do you want coffee, tea, or anything?” he asked. “Hot chocolate?”
She picked up from the floor a cardboard container for a six-pack. But instead of beer, there were miniature bottles of champagne in the slots. Each had the presidential seal on it.
“Product endorsements?” she asked.
“If you go to the Kennedy Center and sit in the President’s box, they have a refrigerator there. With a combination lock on it—”
“And you have the combination.”
“Yes. Six-six-six, believe it or not. Don’t tell the Christian right.”
“Do you think they change it with each administration?”
“If they do, I’ll probably never know. Should I open one?”
“No, no,” she said. “You’ll want to keep these.”
She wiped the dust off the bottles and put them back on the floor.
“And would it be real or fake?” she asked.
He looked puzzled.
“The hot chocolate. Are you going to actually heat up milk and add true chocolate syrup? Or is it, rip open a package of powder and pour in boiling District water?”
“Let me try to find some clean sheets,” he said.
“What about the story you promised? Mondreau?”
“Oh, yeah.”
He looked around the room. Every chair was covered with books and papers but the one at the desk. He pulled it over and sat in front of her.
He told her about the phone call from Flip Whalen, the suspect’s confession, the reported suicide. He told her about his role in advising Hanover on Mondreau’s execution. He did not mention the breach that his advice had caused between him and Rudd. As he spoke, he stared out the bay windows and watched people heading toward the nightlife of Adams Morgan. When he finished, he looked at her. Her elbows were on her knees, her chin resting against her palms.
“Is that why you were in New Orleans?” she asked.
“Not really. I thought about asking around a little, but …”
“You didn’t want to know?”
“I don’t think that’s it,” he said. “I just don’t know how you show up at a sheriff’s office and say ‘Hey, did you boys kill a nigger as a favor to the President?’”
“You tell anyone about the call?”
“No, no one.”
You can do the math. That means you’re the first. This is much more intimate than sex.
“I’m honored,” she said.
She smiled to show she was not kidding.
“And you still don’t know what to do about it?” she asked. “If anything?”
He nodded.
She gently shook her head: “That’s a tough one. Are you going to let it drop?”
“So far I have.”
“I don’t know what I’d do.”
They were silent for a moment. This is a woman who stood up to the CIA—and from the inside, he thought. She’d really let the episode fade? Let official history go undisturbed?
“Thanks for not judging,” he said.
Lancette touched her bottom lip with her index finger. She leaned back into the couch and gazed out the window at a crowd of club-hoppers. Two men were loudly singing an old disco song. A black van drove past the house. Addis thought he had seen it a few minutes earlier. A poor soul circling for parking? Or …
“I’ll get around to it,” she said. “Some judgments take longer than others.”
He wondered if they ever would kiss. The singing outside turned into a howl.
“You know,” she said, “I was reading an interview with this Dutch architect. He was saying, ‘the street is dead,’ but—”
“Not here,” Addis interrupted.
“That’s what I was thinking.”
The phone rang. Addis picked up the cordless phone on the desk. The battery was dead.
“I’ll let it ring,” he said.
The answering machine picked up.
“Nick, it’s M. T., are you there? Are you screening? Jesus Christ, pick up the phone. It’s important.”
He ran into the kitchen.
“Fuckit, Nick, pick up,” O’Connor said.
He grabbed the phone and said hello.
“Damnit, Nick,” Lancette heard O’Connor complaining. “I got to—”
The phone machine shut off.
Lancette stood and looked at the message machine. The number 15 was illuminated. From one of the piles, she picked up a baseball. She could
not read the autograph. Stop snooping, she told herself. She thought about the phone call from Flip Whalen.
Addis came out of the kitchen. He had gone pale. She dropped the ball. It landed on the rug and rolled several feet.
“They shot Clarence,” he said.
She froze in place.
“Who?”
“No one knows.”
“Where?”
“Near Bennington Gardens. A housing project in the Southeast. They call it, ‘Simple City.’”
“Shit. And?”
“They don’t know. He’s at G.W. Unconscious, but still alive.”
Addis pushed aside the papers on his desk and found the remote for the television. He clicked it on.
“Another Washington tragedy,” a news anchor was saying.
A live shot showed the outside of George Washington University Hospital. There was nothing to see. The anchor cut to a reporter at the hospital. He had no facts other than what O’Connor had relayed to Addis.
“The police,” the reporter said, “have no idea about the motive.”
Shit, Gillian Silva, Raymond DeNoefri, now Dunne … .
The show returned to the local anchor: “Sadly, these days motives are not always needed. And on a personal note, let me say … .”
He went on to report that he knew Dunne socially, that Dunne had been of help to him when the anchor developed a substance abuse problem, that he was certain some people will question what Dunne had been doing in such a notorious and dangerous neighborhood on his own, late in the evening, and that …
Addis turned off the set before the anchor finished his point. He saw a black van drive past his house again.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
“Where?”
“Ever been inside the White House?” he asked.