Foxcatcher

by William H Hallahan

He never returned to Philadelphia.

  At the height of his career with the State Department, Bobby McCall still looked back on his uncle’s advice with regret. He should never have deferred law school.

  The lack of a law degree had hampered his advancement in Washington repeatedly. Every day seemed to give him at least one reminder of his mistake. Every day except one—and that was the result of a child’s deck of tarot cards.

  As he drove to work that morning, he was shocked to look into the rearview mirror of his car and see the silly tarot predictions coming true. A blue Buick was following him. In it were three men, just as predicted: the Hanged Man, the Merchant with the Figs from Tyre, and the Masked Tumbler.

  McCall’s thirteen-year-old daughter had bought the tarot deck in the village drugstore in Alexandria along with a bottle of shampoo. She and her friends had spread the cards out on the card table under the bridge lamp and read the directions hastily, with muffled shrieks. The first night they’d huddled on the huge screened-in porch of the McCall home, doing forecasts on themselves and the boys they would someday marry.

  There were endless wiggles and giggles and squeals of delight and dashings to the telephone. But on the second evening they were quiet. They had reread the instructions that came with the deck and were doing serious “castings.” They murmured of Foxcatcherey Man, the Woman in the Case, the Merchant with the Figs, the Masked Tumbler, and the Hanged Man. The solemn silence was gratifying.

  “Dad?”

  McCall looked up from his book. His daughter stood just outside the circle of his reading lamp. “Yes, my love.”

  “Dad. You’re in grave danger.”

  “I am?”

  “It’s in the cards. You have to beware of the Hanged Man, the Merchant with the Figs from Tyre, and the Masked Tumbler.”

  “Good heavens. I must be very careful.”

  She stood at his elbow without speaking, then strolled away.

  A few minutes later his wife was at his side. “Could there be anything to those cards, do you think?”

  “Are you serious? Can you really be serious?”

  “Well, that reading they did on you is pretty serious. Debbie says three men are going to kill you and you laughed at her.”

  McCall took his wife’s hand. “How old is Debbie?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Uh huh. My advice is to take the deck of cards from them and send them back to the Parcheesi. Also fill them up with ice cream.”

  But the next morning his wife suggested that she consult a soothsayer who was all the rage among the cocktail set in Washington. Madama Sforza.

  “This has gone far enough,” McCall answered. “Burn those cards and drop the whole thing.”

  Dinner that night was solemn. Neither his son nor his daughter spoke. They poked at their food. McCall’s wife tried to brighten the conversation but she ended up doing a monologue that no one listened to.

  After dinner, he and his wife had coffee on the porch. It was McCall’s favorite time of day. They lived in a huge old Victorian house in Alexandria with five bedrooms and a wraparound screened porch that was the gathering place for neighborhood children in the evenings. He enjoyed hearing the sound of their voices in the deepening dusk while inhaling the odor of his lawn being soaked by the sprinklers.

  That night there were no children.

  “I read the instructions for those tarot cards, Bobby,” said his wife. “And I did a casting of my own.”

  “Oh boy.” He put down his coffee cup and turned to her.

  “It came up the same way, with a random shuffling. Twice, Bobby. Frankly I’m frightened.”

  “Enough.”

  “The Merchant with the Figs from Tyre has a sight draft with your name on it.”

  “Is that right?”

  She glanced at him. “Oh, I know it sounds silly—” She burst into laughter. “Oh dear. But it’s serious!”

  “You sound like the little Scottish lady who lived in her wee cot in the Highlands,” McCall said. “When they asked her if she believed in ghosts she said, ‘No. And I hope they leave me alone.’ ”

  They looked at each other and laughed again. Later, she bought a new game called Foreign Intrigue and took the tarot cards away from Debbie and her friends. Wiggles, giggles, and strident cries returned.

  The next day, McCall drove to an early-morning rendezvous.

  The night before, on his way home from Washington, McCall had placed a call to Italy from a public phone booth across from his office. He suspected that his own phone was being tapped. From Italy, his clandestine informant whispered into the phone: “I’m flying to Washington tonight. Urgent news. The usual place. The usual time.” The man hung up.

  The usual place was the rear parking lot of a run-down motel off New York Avenue in Washington. And the usual time was 9:00 A.M.

  The city was in the grip of its unbearable summer heat, and McCall drove with the car’s air-conditioner squeezing out the licking humidity from the air.

  On the way to the rendezvous, he was well along on U.S. 295 when he first began to check his rearview mirror. With that sense born of experience and instinct he felt he was being followed, and soon enough he saw the blue Buick, dodging in and out of lanes, staying well back.

  By the time he drove onto New York Avenue toward the motel, McCall was sure: Inside the new blue Buick were three men. They didn’t crowd him; they seemed to know where he was going.

  He decided to take a circuitous route to elude them. He abruptly turned left onto Queenschapel Road, sped two blocks and turned a corner, turned another and another. He was in an area of high-rise apartments and condominiums. He drove aimlessly through the winding streets, watching for the Buick. He’d lost it.

  After a while he drove back onto New York Avenue. The motel was less than a mile ahead of him, an old two-story structure with flaking blue paint on the trim and cracks in the white stucco walls. The parking lot at the back was bordered by sumac trees and weeds and litter. Behind it ran a disused railroad siding.

  The Buick was parked at the curb a block before the motel. The three men inside bowed their heads and half averted their faces as they watched him pass. The Hanged Man, the Merchant with the Figs from Tyre, and the Masked Tumbler who could fly through the air: three Nemeses, come in the last act to drag the hero to the underworld, as ordained by the gods. There was no question that they knew exactly where he was going.

  He broke off the rendezvous and went instead to his office.

  The Washington heat embraced him like a hot wet towel, and he damned L’Enfant for having placed the nation’s capital in a swamp with one of the most humid blistering summers in all of North America. Madness.

  With some fifteen years’ experience in monitoring international arms traffic, McCall had been appointed chief of Arms Traffic Control Bureau, Department of State, three years before. He had been followed many times in his career. That was an old story to him.

  McCall stood at his office window and looked down at the busy street. Off at an angle he could see into Constitution Mall. The crowds of summer were thronging up the stone steps of the Smithsonian. As usual the Air & Space Museum was getting all the play.

  His eyes searched the street below. There was no sign of the blue Buick or the three men. What he was concerned about was the safety of his Rome informant. And concealing the man’s identity.

  It was twenty after ten. Time to go. He took a deep breath and set out. When he left the building he crossed the street to the same pay phone he’d used the night before. At exactly ten-thirty he pushed in some coins and punched out a number.

  “Let’s do it again,” he said.

  “Trouble?”

  “Nothing I can’t handle,” said McCall. “How about the second location?”

  “In half an hour. I have to catch the afternoon flight back to Rome.”

  McCall scanned the streets, then set off on foot. They were nowhere to be seen: the Hanged Man, the Merchant with the Figs
from Tyre, and the Masked Tumbler who could fly through the air.

  Seven Seas News Service was a CIA front, set up in the Simmold Center, an old office building in downtown Washington populated by news services, small specialty magazines, stringers, freelancers, publicity agents, and various breeds of influence peddler.

  Barred by law from domestic spying, the CIA used ex-CIA agents in fictitious companies like Seven Seas News Service to do its domestic spooking for it. They spent a great percentage of their time spying on other intelligence arms of the government, indeed on the CIA itself. And often, after the assignments were completed, the ex-CIA agents would then return to the CIA with their perquisites and emoluments fully restored, no longer ex.

  McCall, as the chief of the Arms Traffic Control Bureau, Department of State, used Seven Seas on occasion. But today he was using its roof.

  Sweltering, he walked north on 7th Street, past the National Portrait Gallery with its swarm of pushcart peddlers. Before long, he was perspiring. Some blocks later he went into a coffee shop and ordered a glass of iced tea at the counter. He sat there for a few minutes, holding a newspaper while watching the street. Satisfied, he left the paper with a tip and strolled into the men’s room. From there he walked through the kitchen and out the back door into the alley. He came out at 8th Street.

  Two blocks later he entered the basement of an old apartment building, followed a labyrinth of corridors to the rear, stepped into an alley, and entered the basement of the building next door. He took the service elevator.

  At the top floor he got off and entered the stairwell that led to the roof. It was exactly 10:57. The heat inside the stairwell was almost unbearable.

  He paused at the stair railing and looked down six floors to the lobby. Two double rows of lights illuminated the well clearly: No one was on the stairs. The well was like a broad square tunnel straight to the bottom—the converging lines seemed eager to pull him downward. He stepped back and went upstairs to the door that led to the roof. So far so good.

  When he swung the roof door open, a great wall of summer heat struck him. The light was blinding. The smell of soft hot tar filled his nostrils. Roasting under the direct sun, the roof was an inferno.

  He stepped out on the wooden platform and eased the door to behind him. He was already dripping wet when he moved into the shade of the stairwell cupola and waited. The boardwalk ran the entire length of the block across the roofs of three different office buildings. Everything shimmered in the wilting heat waves.

  In the streets below him, horns sounded as the cars of bureaucrats, stealing away for a long summer weekend, struggled to get out of town through the tourist traffic. Everywhere, the streets were clotted with traffic jams. Off to the east and south, the multi-lane U.S. 295, arcing around the city, was heavy with highspeed summertime traffic.

  McCall looked at the crowds of tourists along Constitution Mall. He could see Capitol Hill and the White House, the Washington Monument and, beyond, Jefferson on the Potomac and the Pentagon—all wearing noble sentiments cut in stone. Like Rome in its latter days: filled with monuments that babbled naïve epitaphs nobody read or believed.

  He had been an observer of the city too long. Fifteen years in the bureaucratic wars. He knew as he stood there that everywhere about him the very freedoms that the monuments celebrated were being chopped up and stolen away. Sold. Bartered.

  Illegal telephone bugs abounded, many of them authorized by the highest men in the nation, men sworn to prevent such things. McCall himself had placed his share. But it was more than bugs: Every day, white envelopes stuffed with money were passed over desks for lucrative contracts, for rigged bids, for removal of obstacles, for a congressman’s vote, for influence, for silence.

  Secretive bureaucrats buried the record of thousands of incompetencies, mistakes, and crimes, of malfeasance and nonfeasance—buried them in multitudinous official files by the simple expedient of stamping TOP SECRET on them. McCall was sick of his knowledge. He felt like Tiresias.

  Down in the streets, History was unimpressed by the monuments. Bloodstained and gore-scarred, History followed after mankind like a public scold who knows all the family secrets. Men ignore History for good reason. It’s humanity’s rap sheet.

  History teaches despair.

  McCall pulled the roof door open a crack and listened for sounds inside the stairwell. Still so far so good: No one had followed him; at least, no one had come up on the roof.

  McCall looked at his watch: 11:00. Late in the afternoon he would be sailing with his son out of Annapolis on a beam reach under a rising evening breeze—if he lived through the next half hour.

  He told himself to think of cool bay breezes. He shut his eyes and sweltered, patiently waiting for Daniels.

  Daniels finally appeared at the far end of the roof. It was 11:02 and McCall set out along the length of the wooden walkway. Cupolas and elevator pillboxes, television antennas and skylights—everything shimmered in the waves of terrible heat swirling around him.

  Daniels was standing in the shade of a stairwell housing, wiping his face. He wore overalls and stood spraddle-legged over a toolbox.

  McCall smiled at him. “Love your cover,” he said. “Heavy overalls on top of a business suit on a roof in a hundred and twenty degrees. Verisimilitude at its acme.”

  “Let’s make this quick, Bobby,” Daniels said. “I can’t believe this heat up here. Kay? Now. With this piece of info, we’re clean. Even. Quits. Kay?”

  “Bad attitude, Danny. Sister agencies should cooperate with each other. It says so right on the front page of the government manual.”

  “Yeah, well, you know what you can do with the government manual. Anyone from the Cookie Factory who gets caught talking to anyone from State gets coal in his stocking.”

  “Alas,” said McCall.

  “Alas, my ass. You people are a pack of screw-ups. The whole goddam State Department. Anyway. Here’s the straight skinny you wanted.”

  He handed McCall a spiral-bound dossier. Title: Operation Zealot. Daniels said, “Ready? This has to be fast. There’s real trouble brewing in the Mideast. Those crazy Iranians are trying to crank up all that surveillance equipment that the Shah left behind.”

  McCall grunted.

  “It’s all in here.” Daniels shoved the dossier at him. “There’s only one ray of light in the whole thing. They don’t have enough spare parts to operate the equipment. They’ve tried to buy the stuff but the U.S. embargo on critical equipment is killing them. So they’re trying a new ploy.”

  “Smuggling.”

  “You called it. The Iranians are sending one of their best boys out with a satchelful of money to buy those spare parts. Price is no object.”

  “I can imagine,” said McCall.

  Daniels touched the dossier. “This is a military analysis of what the Iranians can do with that surveillance equipment and what it means to the whole goddam Middle East. Kay?”

  “Thrilling reading, I’m sure,” said McCall.

  “What they can do will make you wet your pants.”

  “Did you get the name of the Iranian agent they sent out?”

  “Attashah. Rooley Attashah. Know him?”

  McCall grunted. “Couldn’t be worse.”

  Daniels picked up the toolbox. “Okay. We’re quits. No more favors, Bobby. This tidbit pays off what I owe you. Christ—get me out of this heat. It’s worse than Rome.”

  “I got a piece of news for you, Danny. Right out of Cookie Factory ovens. You interested?”

  “What’s it about?”

  “I can tell you who’s going to be the next Chief of Station in Cairo.”

  Daniels put down the toolbox gingerly. “Who?”

  “I hear you’re an applicant for the job.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I am. So give. Who’s got it?”

  “Someday you’ll return the favor maybe, eh?”

  “Who is it, for Christ’s sake!”

  “You.”

  Daniels s
oftly socked a fist into his left palm. “I’ll be damned. Made it. I made it. Are you sure?”

  “You’ll be told on Thursday.”

  Daniels picked up the toolbox. “Jesus.” Then he put it down again. “How about that?” He was oblivious to the perspiration rilling down his face. “How about that.” He picked up the toolbox once again.

  McCall said, “You’d better learn to like the heat. It’s the principal product of Cairo.”

  “I love it. I love it.” A rush of hot air was released when Daniels pulled open the roof door. He paused to point at the dossier in McCall’s right hand.

  “Be careful with that goddam monograph, Bobby. It’s my ass. Christ. I’d rather tell the Russians than you guys in State.”

  McCall walked back along the boardwalk in the breathtaking heat. Daniels, as Chief of Station, would have access to much more information.

  He glanced out over the city again. All over Washington, all over the world in fact, he’d done favors for key people useful to him. Favors that could be called in.

  By the time he reached his door the heat had made him almost light-headed. He stepped through the doorway to the stairwell. Then he paused to blot his soaked face with his handkerchief. Cool breezes on his sailboat called to him. Soon. Soon.

  When he drew the handkerchief away from his face and opened his eyes he was standing at the stair top in total darkness. The lights had gone out—two complete rows of lamps from the top of the staircase six floors to the bottom.

  He stood listening in the dark.

  From far away sounded the horns of the traffic. Even fainter was the singsong of a police siren.

  He had an awful premonition that he was about to be grabbed and pitched six floors down the stairwell. His skin prickled and he stepped back out onto the roof.

  He scanned the rooftops. Daniels was long gone. Quickly he walked back along the boards. Daniels had locked the door behind him. He tried the two other stairwell doors. They were both locked. There was no other way down from the roof. He was trapped with only one exit: the dark stairwell.

  He walked back to his door. Sweat was dribbling off him. He wanted urgently to get away from the heat.