Nature of the Game

by James Grady

  “Taxi?” he said, coming close enough to kiss the man.

  The cabbie felt something hard poke his groin. Looked down and saw the barrel of the woman’s gun shoved against his zipper. Art’s other hand slapped a wad of bills on the cab’s roof. The driver swallowed hard. Dropped the keys on the roof, scooped up the money, and vanished into the crowd.

  Art drove.

  The DESERT LAKE team was bivouacked at an Iranian Army base on the outskirts of town. Half a mile from the lights of the base, Art pulled the cab to the side of the road.

  “They finish in twelve days,” said Art. “Until then, you don’t leave the base, you don’t get noticed. You’re instructing in the field medicine rotation. Anybody asks, you’ve been inoculating kids in the countryside. As a favor to the Shah.”

  He turned off the cab’s engine.

  “Now’s the time to ask to say good-bye,” said Art.

  The night stayed as it was, silent, still.

  “Is there anywhere better to go?” Jud finally asked.

  “Not in this life.”

  “Gone this far,” said Jud, “might as well see what’s next.”

  Art opened the briefcase between them. Fresh dark stains marred its surface. He turned on the cab’s dome light.

  “There’s paperwork that has to get fed into the system,” said Art. “It’s all filled out, but we need your signatures.

  “Hell,” joked Art, “it’s your life.”

  Jud laughed as he signed dozens of forms: Army discharge papers, secrecy agreements, letters, official and private documents that built a bland legend around his history. He signed a thick application form to the United States Secret Service, Department of the Treasury. A letter dated weeks in the future accepted him for training in the February 1971 class of agents. His training diploma was the second-to-the-last document in the case.

  The last document was a set of Treasury Department orders dated five months in the future, May 1971. The orders assigned uniformed Secret Service officer Jud Stuart to the technical security and protective services division and detailed him to the White House.

  WINTER RAIN

  The day Beth and Wes first made love, Nick Kelley tracked down the hearings of the 1974 Senate investigation into a military spy ring in the White House.

  The spy ring came to light in December 1971, when a Pentagon probe of news leaks to a newspaper columnist accidentally revealed that a Navy yeoman assigned to the National Security Council had stolen over five thousand secret documents from such White House officials as Henry Kissinger—and delivered his intelligence haul not to a foreign power but to high-ranking American military officers assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  Nick leaned back in his chair. He was in the law division of the Library of Congress. Fluorescent lights glowed above thick green carpet. He sat alone at a long wooden table. A frazzled woman in her twenties sat two tables away, surrounded by legal pads and thick volumes. Every so often, she’d groan. Whispers floated to Nick from tables occupied by the law students or junior associates on research errands from the city’s one thousand law firms. Librarians worked inside the horseshoe reference station. The scent of ink and book bindings filled the air.

  From behind him came the sound of a page being turned.

  A white-haired man in a frumpy suit sat at the table behind Nick, reading a book.

  Looks like he’s reading a novel, thought Nick. A pensioner with nothing better to do. Nick turned back to the three slim white paper reports of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

  The Senate investigation that took place almost three years after the discovery of the spy ring was the last of three government probes into what became known as the Moore-Radford affair, named after then—JCS chairman Adm. Thomas J. Moore and the spy, Yeo. Charles Radford. The results of the Pentagon investigation in 1971 are sealed. Another secret investigation was undertaken by the White House “Plumbers” unit formed in the Nixon administration to stop leaks to the press—a unit whose plans included burglaries, buggings, briberies, election tampering, obstruction of justice, political street violence, and the murder of American citizens, activities whose disclosure forced President Nixon to resign from office in the scandal called Watergate.

  By 1974, when the Senate Armed Services Committee was pressured into holding hearings on the spy ring, a swirl of unraveling conspiracies had the country agog at its own reflection. The Moore-Radford affair was a confusing sideshow to the dramas of corruption in the Nixon White House and revelations about illegal bombings in the endless Southeast Asian war. The Committee held four days of hearings. Its chairman told a reporter that if he allowed the investigation to grow, it “would destroy the Pentagon.”

  Nick blinked to clear his eyes for the fine print, reread a page where a senator was telling the Counsel to the President that an admiral had testified that “in ‘normal times’ what Yeoman Radford did would be considered treason.”

  No one was indicted or tried because of the military spy ring. The Senate investigation produced no visible results.

  Nick couldn’t concentrate on the black-ink words.

  What did you think you’d find? he asked himself. A line saying, “This is where it ties into your life?”

  The reports mentioned no other spies in the White House.

  Maybe if I’d paid more attention then. Maybe if I’d tried harder over the years to draw the lines, connect the dots. Maybe if I’d pressed Jud harder, faster.

  “What difference would that have made?” he mumbled.

  The woman looked up from her legal pads, glared at Nick’s disturbance. He shrugged his apology.

  Looked around that vast room, with its miles of shelves weighed down by volumes of America’s laws. The verdicts of state and federal courts were bound and cataloged and properly shelved.

  Where would I look up the verdict on Jud Stuart? he wondered. Or on Nick Kelley?

  He’d long believed there’d be a place and a time when he’d know such an answer. Growing up in boggy, piney flatlands, he’d decided the answer had to be somewhere else beside his hometown.

  “I grew up in the hand state,” he once told his wife. He held up his left hand, palm out, fingers together, breathing room between them and his thumb. He touched a spot an inch below the knuckle of the forefinger. “Here.”

  Butwin, Michigan. Population 5,300—when all the farmers came to town. As Nick grew up in the 1950s, the small farmers were beginning to disappear, their wheat and corn patches not economically viable in the modern world.

  It was the modern world. Television came to town when Nick was five. Two or three times a week, the sky would crack as a jet from the Air Force base seventy miles away broke the sound barrier and scarred the sky with a white vapor trail. Some of the jets were B-52s pregnant with the hydrogen bombs that would end the world, the bombs that kept the communists in RussiaChina-Korea-Cuba-behind-the-Berlin-Wall from marching into Butwin, raping the women, and forcing everyone to worship Lenin. They were coming with a big bang. They were coming one step at a time. Nick planned to take to the pine bogs, hide with his .22 rifle, fight the bad guys.

  Summers were muggy and hot; winters long, snowy, and brutally cold, especially when the wind was off Lake Huron. In winter, smoke from hundreds of wood stoves drifted through the town. The railroads quit running passenger trains when Nick was seven, and the terrible/wonderful interstate kept tourists from stopping in town as much as in the old days.

  Nick’s father managed a freight-hauling company for the Greenough family. He’d come home for lunch when the noon whistle blew on the Borden dairy plant, be back at work by the one-o’clock bell in Nick’s school. Nights, he’d work again after two hours off for a six-o’clock dinner. Sometimes Nick visited him in the musty office next to the garage where the trucks were serviced. Nick feared that when he grew up, he’d have to work in a musty office surrounded by ledger books about materials and money that had nothing to do with him and the magic of the world.
/>   And Nick loved the world’s magic, mysteries, and powerful forces that swayed life and that seemed to be rooted far from the pine bogs of Butwin, Michigan. His parents wanted him to be a lawyer because he would argue anyone about anything: that’s what a lawyer did. Nick wished that being a lawyer meant saving innocent people from execution and catching murderers, like Perry Mason did each week on television. Nick would have liked doing that, but he had a hunch that his parents’ view of what lawyers did was closer to the truth than his dreams of Perry Mason.

  Nick had no brothers or sisters. He relished the freedom of his solitude. He read mysteries and science fiction. Since his parents thought movies were a fine education for a boy, Nick went to Butwin’s one theater two or three times a week. His parents raised him strictly but fairly, with the certainty passed down from the Depression and World War II that Nick was lucky to be alive—luckier still to be living in Butwin, Michigan, USA. He thought so, too.

  Because they loved him dearly, his parents insisted Nick work from the time he was ten. Work. Do his best. Do the right thing. Simple rules that kept him in a constant state of self-examination and self-discipline. Rules that cut him off from trivial thrills, rules that made him strong.

  His parents never discussed God. The family nominally belonged to the Methodist church. Nick believed in good and evil, that there was something more powerful than man. But he had trouble believing the Bible. What did Jonah eat in the belly of the whale all those days and nights? If Jesus believed in turning the other cheek, why did he attack the money changers in the temple? If God was in charge, why did people go to hell? Such questions widened the canyon between Nick and everyone he knew. Nick’s friends were divided up between the other great churches of the world—Lutheran and Roman Catholic. The town had no Jews, and only one childless black couple. There were Chippewa Indians. Nick’s mother had their blood in her veins, which made Nick immensely proud.

  When he was a teenager, Nick risked negative marks on his permanent record by drag racing in his parents muscle-engined Chevy, the radio tuned to WJR rock ’n’ roll from Detroit. He hunted rabbits and foxes, but he never jacked deers—blinding them with a spotlight as they fed at night, then blasting them with shotgun slugs. On magic nights, he would drive past the city limits, pull in Chicago or even New York on the car radio. The real world. He loved driving, commanding a car to go, pushing it to terrifying limits, shaking and sweating and being alive to remember death speeds. Many nights, Nick cruised main street alone, drove through the empty pine flats, looking, waiting, wanting.

  And dreaming. In dreams where he knew the magic of the world, dreams where he could ride the forces, control them. In dreams that became stories where choices were found and made. Heroes. Villains. Right and wrong. Excitement instead of musty offices or ten-minute end-to-end towns. In the stories that he dreamt, that he wrote on an old typewriter, the magic worked, the world made sense; it gave verdicts with clarity.

  In 1964, when Nick was fifteen, Joe Barger came back from the war in Vietnam. In a flag-covered coffin. Nick hadn’t liked the older boy, who’d joined the Marines to avoid the town’s wrath for hooliganism. But Joe Barger had gone where verdicts were clear, where all the magic was ultimate. Two more boys from Butwin would die in Vietnam. Larry Benson lost a foot. Mike Cox returned silent. Nick tried to join ROTC at the University of Michigan in 1967, but knee surgery after a meaningless play in his lackluster high school football career kept him from winning the green beret of a Special Forces soldier. And touching the magic that way.

  Nick’s starry eyes bedeviled him. He was invisibly reckless: secretly committed to a life in which he believed serving the magic demons that commanded him to write would doom him to a stark life of bare necessities. He was unfashionably cautious: when he and Sharon Jones got drunk on Goebel’s 22 beer, he rolled off her naked body, refused to have sex with her. What if he was tricking her because she was drunk? He wanted it to be real. He also didn’t want to be trapped by another small-town mandatory marriage that would keep him from getting out.

  Into the world. Where things mattered. Where he could make a difference. Where he could write. Where he could touch the forces that made things happen. Where he would learn the verdicts.

  What I ended up with is Jud Stuart, he told himself. Hell, he realized, I don’t even have that.

  He’d reached Dean at the old phone number, a nervous conversation in which he told that monster from yesterday that if Dean could, he should tell Jud to call his old friend.

  “At work,” added Nick. “He’s got the number. Tell him not to call me at home, but at work.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Dean.

  Dean acknowledged nothing about Jud. Nick asked him no direct questions. Knowledge brought responsibility, exposure. Nick felt exposed enough. He wanted to ascertain how much that window was open, not to open it farther.

  “You still a writer?” asked Dean.

  “Yes.”

  “Been to a morgue yet?” When Nick didn’t answer, Dean laughed. Hung up.

  That’s it, thought Nick. Dead end. Over.

  He closed the Senate report. Enough chasing phantoms. He’d called national-security sources with lame questions about intelligence issues, fishing for leads, anything that might clarify Jud’s last phone call. Nick hooked nothing. He had enough clichéd quotes and sophisticated speculation to write a decent think-piece for Peter Murphy, fulfilling the journalistic obligation he’d incurred to gain legitimacy for his personal quest.

  And I can stop not telling Sylvia things.

  His wife knew about the article assignment and thought he was being unwise. She didn’t know he’d called Dean. Years before, he’d tried to tell her about Dean, but she hadn’t wanted to listen, didn’t want to know that the man she loved knew monsters. Nick was guilt ridden by his sins of omission.

  The woman two tables away sighed, laid her forehead on the open book in front of her.

  This place is all yours. Nick put on his coat. As he gathered up the Senate reports, he noticed the white-haired man behind him check a beeper. Nick hadn’t heard the device go off.

  When Nick dropped the reports on the shelf at the horseshoe reference center, the white-haired man materialized behind him. He smiled at Nick and took a book-request slip from the counter. A blue topcoat was draped over his arm. Nick heard the click of a ballpoint pen as he headed toward the wooden door.

  The law division was on the second floor of the Library of Congress’s Madison building. Nick pushed the down button for the elevator. The doors slid open and he realized where the villain in the novel he was writing had been born; what his grandfather had done. He was the only passenger in the elevator. For a moment, he considered staying in this metal womb while his vision percolated. The bell dinged on the main floor. The vision would still be there after lunch. He buttoned his coat against the end-of-winter cold, walked through the marbled hall.

  Sylvia’s office was across the street, two blocks down the hill in the Rayburn House Office Building. They could have lunch together. No, wait: her subcommittee had a hearing tomorrow, she’d be swamped today.

  As he went through the revolving doors, he realized he couldn’t remember the last time they’d made love.

  Today was Wednesday. This morning they’d both hurried to work as soon as Juanita arrived.

  Tuesday night Sylvia’d worked late, reading draft bills and memos in bed until her guilt at not letting her husband fall asleep made her turn off the lights.

  Monday morning Saul woke them at four-thirty. Mom and Dad took turns cooing him back to sleep, succeeding fifteen minutes before their alarm clock went off. Monday night, they were so exhausted that as soon after dinner as Sylvia had finished the monthly bills and Nick had done the dishes, bathed Saul, read him a story, and gotten him to sleep, they collapsed into bed, stared numbly at situation comedies on TV. The most erotic moment came when Nick silently wondered what his wife would look like in a wispy black negligee.

  S
unday had been close: in the morning, they’d each tiptoed to the bathroom, then crawled back in bed. Had time to hug each other before Saul’s crying became too distressed to ignore. Saul refused to nap all that day. Sunday night Nick had to watch a television movie because his agent wanted him to pitch an idea to the producer; Sylvia fell asleep halfway through the movie, but he’d seen her pull her dress over her head, seen her naked as she went to take a bath.

  Friday and Saturday, Nick had been recovering from the cold that Sylvia had been recovering from on Thursday and Friday.

  Nick couldn’t remember last Wednesday.

  That Tuesday he’d been brooding over his novel, Jud’s games, and guilt over using disposable diapers. Coming to bed from the nursery, she’d read his vexed mood and checked her advances.

  Monday.

  Nine days ago. The night after Jud had called.

  Saul had fallen asleep early. They’d been undressing for bed, laughing about what Sylvia’s mother had said on the phone. He’d been in his shorts, she in her old ivory bra and torn panties. She brushed something off her shoulder. He touched hers, touched her cheek. She smiled. Slid into his arms. He ran his hands up her bare skin. Unhooked her bra. She stepped back, shrugged the bra to the floor. Her breasts were pendulous from nursing. He loved how they filled his hands. They lay on top of the bedspread. Kissing. Touching. Laughing. Shushing each other so they wouldn’t wake the baby. He knew where to touch her, kiss her, and she held him. He moved on top of her, like almost always; inside her, warm and wet and sweet, pressed close together, kissing, sighing gently, moving.

  “Nick!” yelled a man’s voice.

  And Nick blinked; shook his head.

  He was outside the Madison building. Cold, his hands had no gloves. Cars whizzed by on Independence Avenue. The Capitol dome glistened ivory against a gray sky.

  “Hey, Nick!” yelled the man’s voice again.

  A squat man in a leather trench coat was waving at him from the corner of Independence and First Street. He hurried to Nick.