“Well, yes, normally, Walter. But there has to be some even-handedness.” Malatesta continued to deliberate. He fish-mouthed and tapped on one cheek. “I don’t see the parties citing a case like that.”
“Just came down, I thought. Brand-new opinion. Not even published. What’s the name?” Walter walked around, pounding his fingertips on his forehead. “Why don’t I remember this?” he asked himself. “But they reversed whoever it was. Almost exactly like this case.”
“A reversal?” Malatesta asked again.
Walter nodded soberly. In a gingerly way, Malatesta threw up his hands so as not to loosen his sleeves.
“You’ve got good sense on these things, Walter. I acknowledge that. Well, all right. File the order, Walter. First instinct’s always best in this business. I granted the motion last night; that was probably the right thing to do.”
“Right.” Walter almost bowed as he turned heel.
Stan stopped the tape. He lifted his chin as he faced us. He asked what we thought.
“You’re kidding, right?” Robbie answered. He’d been unable to hide his amusement for some time. “For Godsake, Stan, Walter’s leading the poor little son of a bitch around by the nose. He’s getting him to sign orders blind. Isn’t that what it looks like? He goes and splits the money I give him with Rollo Kosic and has a laugh about how Silvio is thinking so hard he can’t tie his shoes. And then Brendan, just to keep it all moving, Brendan comes along and pats Silvio on the keester for his great record of never getting reversed.”
Behind Stan, McManis flashed me a look. I took it Robbie’s dialogue with Sennett was a replay of what had already gone on between Stan and Jim.
“So you mean you’ve been cheated all along?” Sennett asked.
“Cheated? Christ, Stan, who am I to complain? I get what I want. Walter takes the money and keeps it? So what? For me it’s the same thing.”
Sennett bristled. “It’s hardly the same thing. A devious minute clerk isn’t a corrupt judge.” He cast a hard look at Robbie. “Not for either of us,” he added with a menacing flash of candor. He was right. Walter was a flunky, both in the court of public opinion and in that of a sentencing judge.
“What I’m thinking,” Sennett said, “is that you got made.”
Feaver stared, insulted. The cover for the Project, maintained by huge mutual effort, was a shared treasure. The person who was detected as a government operative would have let everyone down.
“Think about it,” said Sennett. “There must be a way they found out the camera is there. Walter knows he’s rare roast beef, so he’s helping Malatesta wriggle away. If—” He stopped, brought up short by our reactions. McManis and Robbie and I seemed joined in a moment of awe and wonder such as the Scripture describes, not of celebration or joy, but of amazement and dread. The power and speed of Stan’s thinking and the way it could divert him from even the most glaring realities was stunning.
“What?” he asked, in response to the staring. He folded his hands and sat forward stiffly. “It’s possible. It’s completely possible,” he said. “Completely.”
24
THE NEXT THURSDAY, APRIL 30, EVON FOUND herself sitting alone in the Mercedes on the top floor of the Temple parking garage. The car was within sight of the glass vestibule housing the ruined elevator, and she’d watched as the doors wobbled open and Robbie had joined Walter Wunsch. After a few words of hearty greeting, they passed completely out of range of the infrared while the elevator groaned and rattled as it made its descent. She sat there, unknowing, isolated, hoping like hell it didn’t go to fudge, and feeling an unexpected irritation in her bladder.
Following a few days of confused debate, the best tactical option seemed to be to proceed with another payment to Walter in gratitude for the favorable ruling in Drydech. It would put to the test Sennett’s theory that Wunsch was somehow on alert. No matter how loyal he was to Malatesta, Walter was not going to buy more time in the pen by accepting a second envelope.
Even before the elevator had arrived back on five, Evon knew something was wrong. The sea rush of static in her earpiece began to yield to voices. Instead of having hightailed it on the first floor, Walter was still with Robbie. They were talking about a woman, with the usual unpleasant undercurrent. Feaver was laughing, in his humoring fashion, and Wunsch was growling in a low way that made his words difficult to discern.
The elevator doors, engraved with rusty gang signs and markered graffiti, slowly parted. Unharmed, Feaver stepped forth smiling, still in the company of Wunsch. In spite of a heavy topcoat in the mild spring weather, Walter’s narrow shoulders were hunched, almost up to his ears.
“Not possible,” she heard Robbie say. He tossed a wave at Wunsch and pushed off from the vestibule. Walter stood his ground. He stared through the smeared plate glass toward Evon in the car, his complexion like a bowl of oatmeal, his look ugly as it loitered on her. Unexpectedly, she heard Feaver speaking to her over the infrared as he advanced on the Mercedes.
“Okay, now when I get into the car I’m going to say something to you, blah, blah, blah, and I want you to laugh out loud. Hysterical laugh. Okay? I just told you something that’s a living, fucking riot.”
Feaver bounced into the driver’s seat and, as he’d said, mouthed several sentences, making no sound whatsoever, a pantomime intended for Walter. “Laugh!” he then exclaimed through his teeth. She did it, while he continued offering stage direction. His hand was lifted to obscure the movement of his lips, as he told her to shake her head, laugh so hard she was coughing. Eventually, Robbie turned to the windshield and mushed up his face. He shrugged at Walter, and Walter shrugged in response. The elevator car had opened behind Wunsch, and he turned for it.
She waited for a hand sign, something, but Feaver gave no explanation. Instead he rammed the car into gear and peeled from the garage. Several blocks down, he veered into an alley, bucketing along until he’d pulled into the graveled parking lot behind a small store. Its back doors were protected by a rusted security grate. Robbie pointed emphatically to his belt line and mouthed, “Off.”
She did not have the remote today. They were only a few blocks from the LeSueur and she had figured to deactivate the FoxBIte at McManis’s.
“Shit,” said Feaver out loud. “Frisk,” he told her.
She asked what was going on.
“Goddamn it, frisk,” he answered. He sat through it stiffly, looking off through the window. He told her to state her findings and the time, and then, without another word, plucked the microphone bud out of his shirt and tore it from the lead. “Show time’s over,” Robbie said.
“He didn’t take the money?”
“Ate every bite. Same as always.” At Klecker’s advice, Feaver had bought custom-made boots as a safer and more comfortable spot to hide the FoxBIte, and he jacked up his calf now to wrestle one off. He had considerable difficulty in the cramped confines of the car. She asked repeatedly what was wrong, but he refused to answer. Finally, he tore the FoxBIte from the ankle harness and slapped it down on her purse.
“For God’s sake, what’s the problem?”
“The problem is,” he said, “as Walter and I are about to go our separate ways, he tells me a story. It’s half a joke to him, half maybe not. Apparently, when we were in Malatesta’s courtroom last week, you plowed into some guy? Well, he’s a copper. Old chum of Walter’s from when they were both around felony court. This guy’s got a lawsuit going, administrative appeal from a ruling of the Fire and Police Board. He caught thirty days for something. Name is Martin Carmody.” Feaver stared, waiting for a response. “Wanna buy a vowel?”
“I’ve seen him around. I thought I had.”
“Yeah, well.” She followed Robbie’s eyes as he looked out the window again toward the unfaced brick at the rear of the low building. A little tendril of something green twisted around the rusted rainpipe. “He says about five, six years ago—this is what he tells Walter—he was sent to Quantico for a couple weeks of advanced fir
earms instruction. Out there he gets to know his instructor, female FBI agent, DeDe Something. Real well he got to know her one night. Biblical ‘know.’ And he could swear, so he tells Walter, that this chick he plowed into, meaning you—that’s her. DeDe. Dyed her hair. Lost the glasses. A little less country-looking, but, Christ, that’s hard to forget. The only reason he’s asking Walter is because Missus Carmody is attending the hearing every day and he’d rather not have any howdy-dos.”
Evon had her eyes closed by now.
“So I did the big ho-ho,” Robbie said. “FBI? Ridiculous. Let’s go ask her. Walter, thank God, is too much of a prude to actually stick his nose in the car and inquire of a lady about who she might have been bopping, and of course, his act is what-me-worry-about-the-FBI, but he was still curious enough to come up and watch.”
“Fuck,” she said, when she could talk. She had never used that word in front of him, she realized. Her Mormon routine.
“So, DeDe, baby, you better tell me what we’re going to do now.”
“Goddamn.” Her mind was like a ship stuck in ice. The engine revved but the prow couldn’t break through. If Walter had taken the money, she hadn’t been made. But there was no way to be sure. Her whole torso was rattling. And as always, she felt her heart being carved on by shame. It was worse, somehow, that it had been broadcast to the surveillance van. Everybody knew. By now, Sennett was spinning like a weather vane in a tornado. They were all going to be nuts.
“So do I understand?” she asked. “He was just being cautious? Carmody? He wasn’t really sure? I mean, we were drunk, Robbie. Knee-walking drunk.” She drummed her fingers. “He’s not sure. That’s why he asked Walter.”
“Probably. But Wally’s still a little spooked. It looked like he was cooled out by the time he left. But the question is out there.”
She talked mostly to herself. “I couldn’t place him. I really couldn’t place him. I walked right past him.” It had to have been around 1986, because they were still building Hogan’s Alley, a little town where crimes were staged for training purposes. It was the first time she’d been invited back to Quantico to teach firearms. Ancient history. Another life. A tiny inappropriate burp of laughter jumped up to her throat. Naturally, she remembered him as so much better-looking.
“Yeah,” he said. “A one-nighter. Just a stray dick at closing time. I’ve been there.” When she caught Robbie’s look, she understood the rest. The emotions tumbled through his dark face. He was gripping the walnut wheel with both hands and the deep eyes flicked up at her the same way they had the first day when she told him they’d already caught a bad guy.
“Robbie,” she said, then stopped.
He gunned the car, backing into the alley.
“Great cover,” he told her.
MAY
25
“DO YOU REMEMBER?” SHE ASKED. “WE talked. That night. After Kosic. Do you remember that? And you described lying in the dark. And feeling so uncertain. Do you remember?”
She heard the hollow glottal echo as he drank. “So are you saying—?”
“I’ll tell you what I’m saying,” she said. “But answer me first. Do you remember that?”
“Sure.”
“Well, here’s what I need to know. Was that a play?”
He made a low sound, perhaps a groan. “Nope,” he said at last. “That was straight shit.”
“So then, can you imagine reaching inside yourself and being uncertain about what’s there? Not being sure you can really feel what you crave. Can you imagine that?”
In the dark, he took his time to ponder. After he’d removed the FoxBIte and told her what Walter had said about Carmody, they had driven around before heading back to the LeSueur. Contempt bristled off him—him of all people, enraged because he thought he’d been deceived. But his anger proved strangely hard to bear. She felt lost and mangled as it was, still trying to calculate the costs of this breach of cover to the Project and to herself, shocked that out of nowhere her former life had come, like some unwelcome relation, to reclaim her. If Feaver had dropped her on a corner, she could never have wandered home.
He’d finally asked her what was true. Was she or wasn’t she? She refused at first to answer.
‘We’re not going there, Robbie. It’s not appropriate. I have a job to do.’
‘And you’ve fucked that up, too.’ As the dust from that wrecking ball rose, she received a darting sideward look, softer than anything she’d seen since they left Walter. ‘Not fair,’ he said after a moment and reverted to silence.
Somehow they reached a consensus not to remain at the LeSueur. Feaver circled the block, while she tossed the FoxBIte to McManis from the door to his office. Jim didn’t say much. He wanted to know if Walter had looked sold when he’d turned back to the elevator. She thought so. So did Feaver. But, she’d realized, even if Walter had doubts, there were no odds for him in confronting her.
She asked if Sennett had gone crazy.
‘Yes,’ Jim answered. ‘He thinks the Movers should have picked this up on background.’ Grave as the situation was, he smiled at the notion of that questionnaire: List every wild and crazy evening for the last ten years. He nodded kindly when she told him she just wanted to beat it. ‘This isn’t on you,’ he told her.
She knew that was true. It was nothing more than wicked coincidence. UCAs got made most often by cops or prosecutors who recognized them. But that was logic. If the Project cratered now, it would always follow her. Back to Iowa and whatever might come next. Don’t embarrass the Bureau. The Quantico watchword was burned like a brand onto the mind of every recruit. McManis and Sennett were talking anyway. Balancing risks. That was why he was just as happy to let her go. They didn’t know yet what they were going to do with her.
Back in the Mercedes, Feaver had asked if she needed a drink, which God knows she did, and he volunteered to go into a package store to get her a bottle. Until they abandoned ship, the Mormon girl shouldn’t be seen buying liquor. She was not really ready to be alone, and it seemed at least a form of recompense to finally let him into her apartment. She mixed the vodka with some frozen lemonade she had in her freezer and, after they had drunk much of it in silence, impulse had welled up in her, almost like the piston push of sickness. She wanted to explain. Why? she asked herself, hoping to find a clear rationale for restraint. Why?
Because. Because silence would be fatal to something fragile in her.
Because it seemed unbearable to have the precious truth, so hard to speak, taken for a lie.
The light had disappeared. She’d never closed the drapes. Refractions of the streetlights and a neon sign across the avenue limned the room. Her eyes were closed for the most part. Robbie sat on the floor against the flowered sofa the Movers had rented. In the cushions, when she lay on it at night watching TV, she could detect the trace remainders of stale cigar smoke and the gassy chemicals that had failed to remove it. Feaver had taken off his suit jacket and his boots. His toes wiggled in his fancy patterned hose as he drank, but he’d gone still now while he deliberated on his answer. Could he imagine?
Yes, he said, in time. He could imagine that, yes.
“Is that how it is for you?” he asked her.
“How it was,” she said, “for years. Years. I thought I was just not interested or didn’t care. I wasn’t sure. Maybe I was putting all of it into sports.” Athletes were their bodies. After a game, there was a supersensory awareness: the bruises, pulls, the aches within. Her skin felt as if something keen had been drilled through every follicle into the deeper layers of the derma. For most of her teammates, that electricity must have flowed into sexual expression. But for her, the game was the excitement. Her inchoate sensations of herself seemed almost superstitiously forbidden. Not merely because of the church-taught sense of plague or peril. But because it would deplete her somehow, put at risk the radioactive core of passion that sent her storming down the field.
In high school, she was the great jock, too much for ma
ny boys to want to take on. And it was a Mormon town anyway; more than half the kids weren’t allowed to date until they were sixteen. She wanted to go out, naturally, once all that swung into motion. She wanted to belong. She was seventeen years old. She went to the senior prom and had sex that night, as if it were part of the same ceremony, which for many in Kaskia it was. She lay out in the grass on the lee side of the local ski mountain and let Russell Hugel wrestle off her undergarments and plunge into her. It didn’t last a minute. He helped her up. He carefully plucked every leaf and grass strand from her dress, then walked her back down the hill in silence. The poor boy was probably embarrassed, probably thought he’d made a hash of it. A rooster in the barnyard, flapping his useless wings, went at it longer than Russell had. Such was sex. She reviewed it in her mind periodically. The interlude passed like the dance itself. Long-anticipated and brief and disappointing. She put away the dress. And concluded, as she went off to college, it was all too much of a mess.
Gay—the thought that there was anyone on earth like that—was still kind of a legend, as far as she was concerned, one of those terrible things that people tell you about the world that you suspect is exaggerated or not even true. She sounded like a hick, she knew. But she’d grown up on a ranch. Rams with ewes. Bulls with cows. She’d heard about Sodom in church. But God had destroyed them.
“I made it through hockey camp the first summer with no clue. And some of those girls were so dykey, so out, one of them, Anne-Marie—the girls joked about not being alone with her. I still didn’t get it.”
She had a teammate at the time, she told him, a woman named Hilary Beacom, a good midfielder but not quite a star. Two years ahead of Evon, Hilary was from the Main Line near Philadelphia. Field hockey, weirdly, had a high-class heritage. There were all these women out there, running, whaling at balls, smashing each other in the legs and even, now and then, the head. Blood flowed often. It wasn’t what Evon thought of as a finishing-school game. But that’s where many of the girls came from. Private schools. Rich schools. Hilary Beacom had emerged from that world. Blond hair thick as velvet, pulled back in a tartan headband. Clothing by Laura Ashley. And the contented charm of someone who truly owned the world.