Mistress(46)

Woodrow Wilson’s wife championed improved urban housing while she was First Lady. Rosalynn Carter made mental health her cause. Nancy Reagan told us to “just say no.” Libby Rose Francis’s thing is “stay in school.” Hard to be against that, but seeing this bejeweled, silver-spoon elitist among inner-city dropouts is like watching Donald Trump milk a cow.

Now Bono, he’s a cool one. He’s reinvented himself musically twenty times over, fronted probably the best rock band of my generation, and now tries to feed the hungry and heal the sick. I wonder if I could have accomplished what he did. I think so. All I’d need is a mountain of musical talent, ambition, and balls. And a pair of those tinted glasses.

Maybe in the next life. I wonder how quickly my next life will come. Judging by the odds, my time in this life is waning.

My cell phone rings. I’m not used to it. I just bought it today at a convenience store. It has one hundred minutes on it.

“Sorry I missed your call earlier,” says Ashley Brook Clark. “Caller ID didn’t show up.”

“I’m not using my personal cell phone anymore. That thing’s dead to me now.”

“I can barely hear you. Your phone’s dead?”

“They’ve tapped it,” I say a bit more loudly, but trying not to draw attention. “I can’t use it. I’m using a prepaid phone.”

“They’ve tapped your phone? Are you sure, Ben?”

A waitress passes me who is prettier than any girl I ever dated in my life. A moment of longing courses through me, then back to the point.

“I’m not sure of anything anymore,” I say.

On the TV, Bono and the president raise their clenched fists in triumph. I would love to be so happy about something that I threw my fists into the air in triumph. In fact, screw happy—I’d settle for mildly content right now.

“So how are you doing?” she asks me.

“It’s a beautiful day,” I say.

“Yeah? Where are you? It sounds like you’re in a club. I hear jazz music.”

“I’m at a place called Vertigo.”

“Don’t know it. Where’s that? Over on U Street?”

“Where the streets have no name.”

“Where the—okay, whatever, you don’t want to tell me. How are you doing on your search for Operation Delano?”

“I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”

The door to the club opens. An Asian couple enters, young and handsome, looking over the whole place with blank expressions. They could be assassins. Why not? I shrink in my seat.

“I think you’re nervous,” Ashley Brook says. “You’re scared.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you’re quoting U2 song titles to me, Ben. You do things like that when you’re nervous. Next thing, you’re probably going to tell me which presidents liked jazz.”

“Clinton, probably the most,” I say. “The leader of the Czech Republic gave him a tenor saxophone as a gift. Otherwise, I’d have to say—”

Then I remember what Detective Liz Larkin said to me about memorizing presidential trivia as a way of bonding with Father, and I shut my mouth. No more of that. I wasn’t bonding with Father. Screw him—

The club door opens again, and two men walk in who look like they could play professional basketball, tall and wide and menacing. My stomach does a quick flip, a flurry of how-did-they-find-me’s rush through my head, and the ever-imminent sweat breaks out across my forehead before I realize that these two guys are, in fact, professional basketball players for the Wizards.

I take a moment while my heartbeat de-escalates to a human pace. I can’t keep this up much longer. I’m flinching at shadows.

“Tell me something good, Ashley Brook,” I say.

“Okay, I will,” she says. “That busted laptop you dropped off for our techies? They think they can recover the data on there. It’s going to take them a few days, but they think they can do it.”

She’s right. That is good news, the first in a long time.

“Tell them to hurry,” I say. “Because I’m running out of days.”





Chapter 52



Garfield Park is brimming this morning with exuberant children—bouncing around the playground equipment, kicking a soccer ball, or just running around aimlessly. I mix in with the mothers pushing their strollers down the park’s central sidewalk, but, as always when I come to check on my town house, I try to stay to the south, by the Southeast Freeway, as much as possible. Anyone watching my house, and hoping to ambush me there, would hang out on the park’s north end, by F Street.