Last Days of the Condor

No ghosts. No clongs. Only the whoosh of time outside in the evening street.

  Vin grabbed his blue hooded raincoat off the wall hook in the living room, noticed dark splatters of not rain on it as he bounded upstairs, ignored whether the dental floss strand had been snapped. The killers are gone and on their way.

  Three cardboard boxes stacked in his bedroom closet held Vin’s junk. Most of it came from who knew where, who knew why, but the middle box …

  Weighed about forty pounds. Inside were books he could conceivably care about. And a black leather zip-up bomber jacket wrapped around something heavy the size of a loaf of bread. He unwrapped the jacket to reveal a black plaster statue of the Maltese Falcon. But who cared about that bird: he freed his scruffy black leather jacket, the secret he’d been hiding by making it look like mere padding around a fragile treasure.

  Or so he hoped any squirrels who black-bagged & tossed his home had thought.

  No iPad photos of this jacket, of Vin in it. No data for a BOLO alert.

  Condor stuffed the black leather bomber jacket in his shopping bag. Restacked the boxes. Grabbed thermal underwear top and bottoms from a drawer. Clean socks.

  Look at your reflection in the bathroom mirror.

  Running scared.

  Again.

  “Yeah,” Condor told his image, told the ghosts. “But I was young then.”

  Grab the pill bottle of pee medicine, pain tablets, beta blockers and baby aspirin for your hyper heart, multivitamins. Drop them and the low-dose Valium into your shopping bag: you’ll need to sleep if you live long enough. Take your toothbrush.

  Rows of antipsychotic sedations stared at Condor.

  Make them kill the real you.

  Vin slammed the medicine cabinet door shut.

  Grabbed yellow rubber gloves from under the bathroom sink.

  Remembered to pocket his Maglite, a black metal flashlight the size of a fat tube of lipstick, perfectly acceptable and prudent for any PINSS-resettled home.

  Condor pushed a stepstool against the blank white wall at the top of the stairs where he’d often been tempted to violate Operational Readiness and hang a picture or a movie poster of, say, Magnum-toting Lee Marvin and noir blonde Angie Dickinson in Point Blank, or maybe an art print like the ones tourists buy in the Smithsonian gift shop, Sargent’s Girl in the Street of Venice, a black-shawled, white-dressed brunette walking past two men, one of them raises his head to—

  Focus!

  Vin snatched the cloth belt off the black & red checked bathrobe hanging in the bathroom, the seemingly innocent robe he bought for this cloth belt, and it will work.

  He threaded his leather belt through the canvas handles of the shopping bag so it now both carried the shopping bag and held up his pants.

  Vin took off, then tied his laces together to dangle his shoes around his neck.

  Tied one end of the bathrobe belt through a slat on the stool, left as much slack as possible when he tied the other end of the robe belt around his left ankle.

  Almost forgot!

  Condor tossed his cell phone clattering down the hall to the floor of his bedroom.

  Pulled on the yellow rubber gloves.

  “Yip! Yip yip yip!”

  Outside—the neighbor’s yippy white dog: Barking at who?

  Condor climbed on the stool next to the bare oh so clean white wall, reached up—

  Yellow-rubber-gloved hands left no smudge marks on the white ceiling panel they pushed open to the crawl space between Condor’s hallway and his roof.

  “Yip! Yip yip!”

  Vin grabbed the lip of that portal, stood on his left foot, bathrobe-belt-lashed and with the bag behind him, put his stockinged right foot on the bare white wall, took a deep breath—

  Propelled himself up into the crawl space, his elbows held his weight on the frame of the passageway, his left leg stretched below him lashed to the stool launchpad.

  In the trapdoor’s maw, Condor dangled above the house floor tied to a stool.

  “Yip yip!”

  Outside the turquoise front door, something or someone was driving the yippy white dog mad. Condor shoved open the trapdoor to the roof.

  Cool air tumbled over his sweaty face.

  He scrambled out to the city sky. Pulled the stool lashed to his ankle up behind him. Slid the square white ceiling panel back in place, unsmudged.

  Wood-splintering crash—someone kicked in his downstairs front door.

  Condor quietly closed the trapdoor.

  “Yipyipyipyip yip!”

  Peel off the yellow gloves. Shove them in the shopping bag unlashed from your pants. Untie the bathrobe belt from your left ankle. Put on your shoes.

  Cop car red lights spun in the alley below and off to his right: Go left.

  Washington is a horizontal city defined more by what’s inside its Beltway’s circling eight lanes of whizzing cars, trucks, and bus traffic than by the borders of various legal jurisdictions like the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. Any of the city’s twenty-first-century vertical growth higher than the white marble Washington Monument by law begins in outlying neighborhoods that are no longer distinct suburbs.

  Condor ran across the top of the city.

  Off to the right of that stumbling runner rose a horizon of the Capitol dome. Like most of the central city, wall-to-wall town houses filled his neighborhood. He stumbled over firewalls, past chimneys, toward the edge at end-of-the-block.

  The last house on the block. The owner had chopped this three-story-plus-basement property into apartments, rigged a steel fire escape down the back of the top two units. The fire escape zigzagged down toward a minuscule backyard patio inside a tall wooden fence. Other buildings sticking farther into the alley blocked Condor’s view back toward his home and where the alley pulsated with cops’ red lights.

  You can’t see them, they can’t see you.

  The fire escape trembled, but he made it down the top two flights.

  A silver-haired man wearing a gray sports jacket with a shopping bag looped on his shoulder dangled by his hands from the fire escape’s bottom steel rung.

  Let go.

  Fall through cool spring air.

  Crash to a heap on a postage stamp of lawn.

  Everything hurt. Shoulders from climbing and dangling. Sore arms. Legs—right knee, oh man! The jarring drop rattled his bones, his teeth. His heart pounded no no no against his ribs. He wanted to lie there. Vin stumbled to his feet.

  A distant siren wailed.

  Steel bars protected the door into the apartment from this backyard. The other exit was the gate through the man-high wood fence. He could run out to the alley …

  Into whose gun sights from back where the red lights spun?

  Condor shoved a lawn chair to the street side of the fence.

  One more climb. One more fall.

  Sirens screamed closer as he thumped onto the sidewalk screened from the view of his front stoop and back alley by the block of town houses he’d run over. Crossed the street, didn’t look to his right down the alley.

  Don’t pull them with your eyes.

  Nobody shot him. Nobody yelled stop. No sounds of running footsteps.

  Get out of the cordon zone.

  Don’t go there.

  Condor ducked into the garden-level alcove of a town house, unpacked his black leather jacket, revealed its satiny tan inner lining repaired with an L of gray duct tape. Ripped the tape free, stuck his hand between the inner lining and the outer black leather.

  Found the money: four flat packs of bills sorted by denomination from $1s to $20s. Almost a year’s worth of hoarding. Never so much his bank accounts plus expenses might alarm his minders’ probable audit projections. Dollars short-changed out of waiters’ tips. Five-dollar portraits of Abe Lincoln skimmed out of un-receipted sacks of homegrown tomatoes and fresh peaches and white corn and rainbow trout from the fish counter at the Eastern Market four blocks from Vin’s house. Twenty-dollar bills palmed from what cov
er teams could have seen him stuffing in the pots of Christmas bell-ringing Salvation Army warriors. Vin had drawn the line at stealing for his cache: You are the line you stand on. Wouldn’t dip his hand into an unknown Library of Congress staffer’s open purse to snatch a loose twenty he saw in there as she rode beside him in the elevator. Standing in the alcove that night, he knew that if squirrels searching his place hadn’t stolen any of his secret funds, he was stuffing $327 into his black jeans.

  Enough operational cash to last, what: twenty-four hours in a major American city?

  Condor shook his head. How long did I last that first time?

  Inside the lining, he found the SmarTrip credit card to ride D.C.’s public buses and subways. The SmarTrip was a tradecraft coup: he’d bought it at a drugstore when the clerk was overwhelmed by a distraught mom holding a crying baby. They were the only people in that bright-lights store, no cover team to see what thirty dollars cash got him.

  Drugstore, thought Condor as he put the SmarTrip in a cash-stuffed pants pocket.

  Marra Drugs Superstore sprawls over the north-side block on Ninth and Pennsylvania, SE, welcomed Condor that Tuesday evening with a SPRING MADNESS SALE! banner over its double glass doors. He kept his face down for security cameras as he slid into a smog of deodorizers. Soulless instrumental music poured from the ceiling.

  Don’t notice me. His grip on the red plastic shopping cart let him control trembling while he rolled down the aisles. His shopping bag gaped open for any security inspection as he dropped items into his cart. Don’t stop me as a shoplifter.

  From the Close Out & Seasonal Goods aisle:

  • A WASHINGTON REDSKINS logoed maroon & gold baseball cap.

  • An XXL unlined maroon nylon REDSKINS jacket.

  • A knapsack-like Kangaroo Love baby carrier designed to let the wee one ride strapped below Mommy or Daddy’s beating heart.

  From the Medical Devices aisle:

  • Three pairs of Athlete’s Foot & Odor Eater cushioned shoe inserts.

  • The last pair of giant black plastic, square-framed, no-UV-protection sunglasses that at best evoked the late, great rock warbler Roy Orbison.

  • A turquoise plastic travel-pack box of “lemon-fresh hypoallergenic” baby wipes.

  From the Groceries & Sundries aisle:

  • The lightest, cheapest, plastic bottle of water.

  • Four “protein” bars.

  • The thinnest roll of “stretch & cling tight” plastic wrap.

  • The smallest spool of “magic” invisible tape.

  From the Beauty Products aisle:

  • A twelve-pack of silver-dollar-sized coated cotton makeup swabs.

  • A dainty cuticle scissors, the only blades he’d seen in the store.

  • Three—no, two $3.98 palm-sized bottles of HipGirlz liquid cover-up makeup in Our Darkest Tone Yet!

  Condor rolled his shopping cart toward the cashier line. A white-haired woman shuffled toward the same register. She used a black cane with one hand and clutched a box of microwave popcorn in the other. Wore hearing aids.

  The hitch & hide.

  “Here,” he said to the woman with a cane as he pushed his cart ahead of her in the checkout line and plucked the popcorn from her hand, “let me get that for you.”

  “What?” said that white-haired woman.

  But Condor had already dropped her popcorn on the checkout conveyer belt, stacked his own purchases behind it, whispered to the cashier: “My wife loves popcorn.”

  “Un-huh,” said the cashier, her eyes on her work.

  And not seeing us, thought Condor. Because we’re over fifty and thus invisible.

  Now “solo fugitive you” were never here, are the silver-haired husband of a white-haired woman with a black cane and bad hearing who joneses for popcorn.

  Condor gave the clerk cash, got change. Grabbed the store’s giant white plastic bag stuffed with purchases, pushed his cart toward the front door.

  Called out to the white-haired cane lady behind him: “Come on, dear.”

  Please, please, please …

  He heard the tap tap tap of her cane following behind him through sliding glass doors to sundown. Heard her not bust him.

  “Whoever you are,” said the white-haired woman standing on the sidewalk with him. “Even back in the day, took more’n popcorn to get me to go.”

  Condor gave her the popcorn.

  “I could use a Scotch,” she said. “How about you?”

  She was maybe ten years older than him. Came of age before rock ’n’ roll. Left fear in some footprints far behind her. Lived alone calmly waiting for when.

  “I’ve got to run,” he told her. “But you’re spectacular.”

  He hurried up Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol dome. Turned right on Eighth Street before Capitol Hill’s commercial blocks where bank ATMs used constantly recording security cameras. With a shopping bag in each hand, walked past a mother with a baby in the car seat of the SUV she was parking. Don’t snatch them for her ride.

  The sky reddened. He spotted a passageway between two brick town houses, slid into that gap. Peed, a call-the-cops offense for any witness, but he stood with his back to the brick passageway’s opening, a stream of his life gurgling into a circular storm drain.

  When you gotta go.

  Don’t go there.

  He ripped store tags off the REDSKINS cap, pulled it on. Wore the huge maroon nylon Windbreaker over his gray sports jacket. Calculated that the oversized Roy Orbison sunglasses would attract too much attention in this evening hour.

  Everything ached. His head throbbed. His feet hurt. He felt his pulse slow to only 50 percent too fast. Popped a pain pill with a swallow from the drugstore water bottle. The passageway he stood in stank of his own urine, of wet cement, bricks.

  Can’t stay here.

  Don’t. Go. There.

  Vin closed his ears to the ghosts, and with a shopping bag weighing down each hand, left the passage, a sports fan shuffling north on Eighth Street. Crossed Independence Avenue and the route he’d taken home from work less than two hours earlier.

  These are the streets of your life. Not your hometown but the town you made into someplace you could call home. When they let you. When you weren’t on the run.

  Washington, D.C., under a bloodred sky.

  He marched toward the Adams Building five blocks away at Third and A, SE.

  The white car had been parked at that corner way back when.

  Vin hadn’t been able to step on A Street back then when he’d been officially safe.

  Now he walked there.

  A white stucco three-story town house filled the corner of A and Fourth Street, SE. The building had long since blended into this neighborhood of town houses, unmemorable except for its size and the brass plaque mounted on the white wall beside the black iron stairs leading to the black wooden main door on the second floor. Blinds covered all the windows. Clearly not a personal home, the building looked like no one ever went in or came out. A low black iron fence surrounded this building the color of Moby Dick.

  Vin stood on the corner across the street from the white town house.

  Felt time fall away. Heard wind inside his head. Smelled …

  Gunpowder. Sweat. Blood. Perfume from a pretty woman named …

  What was her name? What were all their names, the names of the dead?

  That was when you became Condor.

  So long ago. Yesterday. This morning.

  He stared at the brass plaque mounted on the town house white wall. What it said there now didn’t matter, wasn’t real, was a lie.

  What it read once and forever was AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORICAL SOCIETY.

  And that, too, was a lie.

  Gone behind him in time like his shadow he could never shake.

  Bags in hand, he marched up Fourth Street, crossed East Capitol. Glanced left at the looming Capitol building, bathed in crimson—then in the wink of his street crossing, darkness fell, fre
ed electric illumination so the Capitol glowed like an ivory skull.

  Walk through this chilling Tuesday night.

  Walk far away from Union Station with its trains out of town, its subways underground, its buses to New York City, its restaurants and food court and chairs to rest in and its swiveling-high-on-the-marble-walls security cameras to capture your picture.

  Darkness covered streets where he slouched past town houses with lit windows that showed him young lovers struggling to figure out what they felt behind their smiles. First-time parents coaxing spoons of food into a pint-sized person who mortgaged them to the future. Office warriors pacing in their living rooms pressed to the cell phones chaining them to careers of political conscience, power, status, and payouts. Group houses with five onetime strangers assuring each other that these days when they could only get paid to serve high-priced coffee weren’t their tomorrows.

  Real life, thought Condor. Should have tried it.

  But he was years past blaming anyone for the sum of his choices.

  There’s something wrong with the car headlights at the end of this block.

  Condor stopped by two reeking gray rubber Dumpsters. Headlights filled the town house city canyon ahead of him as a car crept not sped closer, closer.

  One whirl stacked his bags next to the two gray rubber Dumpsters, let him dive and curl up behind them.

  Yellow eyes eased down the street toward where two rubber Dumpsters sat in front of an ordinary town house. The purr of a car engine grew to a grumble.

  They’re nobody, Condor told himself. Looking for a parking place or a lost dog.

  The view from the creeping-past car showed no one shuffling in the street. No one running away or looking back. Not even a rat on top of the stuffed gray Dumpsters.

  Dark sedan. Two shadowed shapes hulking in the front seat.

  Don’t move. Don’t breathe. Don’t let your eyes weigh on them so they’ll pass by.

  Red taillights going … going … turning the corner … Gone.

  You’ll never know if that was the right move.

  Walking on, he heard no sirens for a dozen blocks. Saw no spinning red lights. No roadblocks on New York Avenue he crossed before the neon glows of a McDonald’s, a Burger King and kitty-corner gas stations franchised from the surviving multinational oil companies. And as he neared North Capitol Street, the pulsing north-south four-lane artery connecting the skull Capitol dome with the rest of the world, Vin needed fuel.