Nature of the Game

by James Grady

  “How you doin’?” The man took Nick’s bare hand in a strong, gloved grip. “It’s Jack Berns.”

  “Long time, Jack,” said Nick. “What are you doing here?”

  “A case. Hanging out in Cannon.” Berns nodded toward the white-marbled congressional office building across the street. “What about you? I’ll buy you some lunch, we’ll catch up. I’m on expense account.”

  Nick’s memories of Sylvia froze, cracked; pieces fell from the portrait like jagged planes of a mirror. Berns loved to brag about forty years of women: his conquests, their failings. Nick wanted the warmth of his memories back, not the jagged edges of Jack Berns’s life.

  “I can’t,” said Nick, regretting the loss of a chance to pump this notorious Washington warrior. “I gotta go.”

  He waved vaguely down toward the row of bars and cafés.

  “Going that way myself,” said Berns. “Walk with you.”

  “Okay,” said Nick, not sure how to walk away from this friendly figure.

  Shoulder to shoulder, they turned their back on the Capitol dome. As they walked into the wind, Nick looked down the block, saw a blue-coated, white-haired man stride around the corner, disappear.

  “I was talkin’ ’bout you the other day with Peter Murphy,” said Berns. “He said you’re back working for his column. He said you was doing something on spies.”

  “Just a think piece. Nothing really.”

  “I ought to kick Peter’s ass,” said Berns.

  Nick frowned at the shorter, older man.

  “Thirty years in this town,” said Berns. “I nailed more spooks ’n he knows, and I bet he didn’t even tell you to call me.”

  “No,” said Nick. They crossed the street from the Library of Congress block to the café strip. “He didn’t.”

  “Son of a bitch,” said Berns. “Can’t blame the old guy. Likes to keep the good sources sewed up tight in his own pocket.”

  “Yeah,” said Nick.

  “So the boys at Langley ripping somebody off? ’Member how I helped Peter nail that phony business the spooks were running in Miami?”

  “That was before my time,” said Nick.

  “These days, they’re jumpy out there. You should be careful crossing the river. Don’t go it alone.”

  “Peter’s backing me,” said Nick. They reached The Tune Inn, a honky-tonk where stuffed animals mounted on the wall watched congressional aides eat burgers and home fries.

  Berns laid a gloved finger on Nick’s arm. “You got something, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know.” Nick nodded across the street. “I need to get back to my office.”

  “That’s right, you’re up here. I should fall by and see your place one of these days.”

  “Call first,” said Nick. “Sometimes I’m out.”

  “Sure.” The bald man smiled at Nick. “We only worked that one story together, but you did a hell of a job.”

  “It was a puff piece,” said Nick. “Nothing to it.”

  “But you didn’t blow it. I appreciate that.”

  There was nothing to blow, thought Nick. Berns sounded like a man on the far side of his own mountain, looking back.

  The private detective tucked a business card in the pocket of Nick’s pea coat.

  “If you’re doing what you’re doing, you need a guy who knows the ropes,” said Berns. “Can’t let Peter keep all the good sources to himself. Give me a call. I hear anything, I’ll do the same.”

  “Sure,” said Nick; thought, What the hell?

  Nick shook the man’s hand, waved good-bye, and hurried across the street. Didn’t look back.

  Half a block up from Pennsylvania Avenue, Nick remembered he was hungry; remembered he had no cash. A blast of icy wind pushed against his coat. Icy bullets of rain tapped his face, random rounds fired in advance of a bigger storm. He cut through an alley, turned the corner on Third Street, hugged the building as he scurried back toward Pennsylvania Avenue and the recess in the wall for his bank’s automated teller machine.

  The smoke-plastic windbreaks of the teller machine sheltered him from the weather. He inserted his card. The green computer screen told him to punch in his personal code. He did so, glanced to the intersection.

  A maroon Cadillac stopped for the red light. The white-haired man with the blue topcoat sat behind the window of the front passenger door. Raindrops dotted the glass.

  Nick smiled, his imagination stirring with a story about a pensioner killing time in a library.

  The light changed, the Cadillac turned left, toward the freeway to Virginia. A grass boulevard divides Pennsylvania Avenue on Capitol Hill; the Cadillac had to stop as it drove through the boulevard to cross the opposite lanes. The windshield wipers swept winter rain from the driver’s view.

  The driver was Jack Berns.

  Traffic parted, and the Cadillac drove off, bearing the old man who’d sat behind Nick in the Library of Congress, an old man who carried an electronic signaling device; bearing the Washington gunslinger who’d stepped out of nowhere to walk awhile and talk awhile with Nick. To ask Nick questions.

  The automated teller beeped at Nick, but he stood motionless in the wind, staring down the street, cold and alone.

  MIRROR

  Beth woke up screaming.

  Wes shot out of bed, consciousness roaring into him, eyes blinking, hands reaching for whatever. The bedroom was dark, cold.

  “Nightmare,” she said, grabbing him. “I had a nightmare.”

  She trembled as he put his arms around her, lowered them down to his bed, pulled the covers over their naked bodies. Beth’s thin body warmed, stopped shaking.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “It’s okay. You’re okay.”

  Her head nodded on his chest. “Been working too hard. That ever happen to you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Tell me your nightmares,” she said.

  “Tell me yours. It’s what we’ve got tonight.”

  “I had this image of a mirror,” she whispered. “I was popping back and forth through it, playing with it. I was it, then I wasn’t. In and out. Back and forth. Then I went the wrong way, and the glass shattered and shredded all across my body, little tiny pieces of me, bright slivers. Cracking off.”

  With his hand on her back, he felt her heart racing.

  “In my wilder days, I did acid,” she said. “Maybe I’m working out that legacy.”

  “But it’s just a legacy,” he prompted.

  “I might still be wild, but I’m not still stupid.”

  Lawyer Wes wanted to thank somebody for that truth.

  “Wait until I tell you my weird dreams,” she said.

  “Whenever you want.”

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Somewhere between very late and real early,” he said. He felt her smile. “Go back to sleep. You’re safe here.”

  “I know.”

  She kissed the skin above his heart.

  A quarter hour later, she was asleep, curled with him like a spoon, her back against his chest. He wanted to stay between her and the nightmares. But his body began to cramp. She shifted in her slumber. And he had promises to keep.

  Tired as he was, he knew he wouldn’t rest. The luminous hands on his watch showed 4:39. Wes slid out of bed. Beth stirred, but slept on. He covered her bare shoulder. He found his sweat suit and sneakers, eased from the room, and gently shut the door.

  Their clothes were scattered on the living room floor. He piled them on the chair. Snapped on the lamp. While the coffee was brewing, he laid Jack Berns’s picture of Jud Stuart in the middle of the coffee table. The two photographs he’d stolen from the L.A. flophouse went on either side of that portrait—the picture of Jud Stuart and the black-haired man to the left, and on the right, the snapshot of the beautiful woman.

  “Where are all you people now?” he whispered aloud.

  He drank coffee and stared at the pictures.

>   “I’m on the edge,” he told them.

  Wes knew his law professors and by-the-book fellow military officers would be appalled by the arrogance with which he’d bent a myriad of society’s rules. His law school classmates who were now wheeling and dealing in the legal factories along K Street probably wouldn’t blink. Marines who’d had to supersede Standard Operating Procedure in combat would probably smile. And his father …

  “You’re on the horse,” said the memory of that leather-faced, fire-eyed man. “Ride it.”

  To ride Denton’s horse, Wes was certain he’d have to stop bending the rules and start breaking them.

  Phone records are protected and private property. While Wes hadn’t directly appropriated such property, he had benefited from Jack Berns’s acquisition thereof. He had foreknowledge that such acquisition was not legal, paid money to enjoy the fruits of that activity. Classic elements of a criminal conspiracy.

  You’re supposed to be a kind-of cop, he told himself. You’re becoming a kind-of crook.

  What that’s gotten me are two more pictures of people I don’t know, he thought. Plus one more name:

  Nick Kelley.

  Spying on the private records of a public pay phone, playing loose with an L.A. cop, scamming a gin mill bartender and a flophouse desk clerk, stealing abandoned photographs, cadging favors from friends at NIS—no prosecutor would waste time pursuing such activities. His superiors in the Corps or DCI Denton could discipline him, but they’d put him in the field, given him the mission. Their authority required them to understand what a man in Wes’s shoes could, should, and shouldn’t do. But for them—for most of them, anyway, Wes knew that what mattered most was keeping their suits clean. He neither feared their censure nor craved their approval. They were his commanders, not his judges.

  Wes knew little more about Jud Stuart than he did the night of Denton’s party. But his instincts told him that Denton was right: the fragments of the life scattered on Wes’s coffee table added up to something important—something more important than the hairsplitting legal files on his old desk at NIS.

  The best number Wes had in the equation to tally that score was Nick Kelley. Kelley was a reporter, and therefore a land mine. There were a hundred ways he could blow up in Wes’s face. Plus Kelley was a private citizen, ostensibly upstanding and within the law. A human being endowed with certain inalienable rights, among them a due level of respect and protection from public employees. Like Maj. Wes Chandler.

  “Ride the horse,” Wes told his quiet home.

  The floor creaked in the bedroom.

  Wes stashed the pictures. The toilet flushed. He had time to refill his cup, get back to the couch, and sit down, time to catch his breath before the bedroom door opened and Beth came out, barefooted and wearing one of his long-sleeved, tan khaki shirts.

  “I smell coffee,” she said.

  “In the kitchen.”

  He liked how she had no trouble finding a cup and saucer, pouring her coffee; the natural way she came into the living room, moved their clothes out of the chair and curled into it like a cat.

  “Good morning.” She smiled at him over the steaming cup. “Sorry I kept you up all night.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  She put her cup on the end table, took her cigarettes from his shirt, lit one. The burnt match dropped on her saucer.

  “I’m going to have to get some ashtrays,” he said.

  Her eyes twinkled.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  Gray light filled his windows.

  “About twenty to seven. Looks like it might rain.”

  “You can wear that funny hat on your closet shelf.” She shrugged. “I was looking for a robe. I get cold.”

  “I don’t use that floppy hat these days,” he said. “We wore them in Recon, on patrol. Better protection against sun and rain than a helmet. Lighter. Doesn’t stop bullets, but it breaks up the outline of your head in the bush.”

  “Vietnam.”

  He nodded, braced for whichever of the dozen clichés she’d hit him with.

  “Why are you a Marine?” she said. “Why did you fight over there?”

  “For you,” he told her.

  She looked at him—not stared, looked, and he felt like she saw, understood.

  “What was the hardest part?” she asked.

  “The worst?”

  “No,” she said. “The hardest.”

  “The letters.”

  Beth frowned.

  “I’m an officer. When I lost a man, I had to chop a letter to his parents or his wife or his girlfriend. Tell them something. I’d make it back from patrol, sit in a hooch, stinking from the jungle, burned-out and beat-up. Copters flying overhead. Rock music blaring from some radio. Guys laughing. And I had to sit in a sandbagged womb, come up with words to put on paper, give comfort and meaning and worth to something as sad and brave as one nineteen-year-old boy taking a bullet while other men and I made it. We don’t have the words to do that. We can take the bullets. We can return fire. But we can’t write the words to do it justice.”

  They drank their coffee for a moment.

  “What are these?” she asked, fingering the metal maple leaves on his shirt.

  “They’re my rank insignia. They mean I’m a major.”

  “Yes, you could be,” she said. Then laughed her husky, unforgettable, staccato laugh.

  Wes couldn’t stop the grin, the blush.

  “What time do you have to be to work?” she asked.

  “These days, I’m very flexible.”

  “Sounds like it,” she said. “L.A. junket, no clock to punch. Not quite the picture I had of a Marine.”

  “When do you need to be at work?”

  “I usually get to the museum around ten. I’ve got some studying for my classes I should do first, but it’s routine.”

  She put her coffee cup on the table, stretched her slim bare legs out in front of her. Her thighs were lightly freckled.

  Angel kisses, Wes’s mother would have said.

  “You look like a runner,” Beth said, eyeing his sneakers, the sweatpants hugging his strong, long thighs.

  “As long as my knees hold out,” he told her. “Physical conditioning goes with the job.”

  “The Marines are looking for a few good men.”

  “We want to keep them that way.”

  “That’s understandable. A good man is hard to find.” She stubbed out her cigarette on the saucer, combed her fingers through her long hair, pulled it back from her face and her widow’s peak. “So, are you going to go for a run before you do whatever it is a Marine major does?”

  “I should stay in shape.” Wes’s throat was dry.

  She leaned forward, and her hair fell alongside her face. Her bruised lips smiled as she whispered, “I agree.”

  Two hours later, they stood leaning against his closed front door. He was naked. She’d put his shirt back on, held her clothes bundled against her chest. She fingered his shirt.

  “I’d say I’d wash and iron it, but I’m a lousy liar.”

  He kissed her forehead, ran his hand through her hair.

  “No pressure,” she said, “but when will I see you again?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  “That might not be soon enough.”

  She kissed his chest, opened the door, and walked across the hall to where she lived. He watched her close her door, watched her not look back.

  The phone rang inside his apartment.

  “Do you know who this is?” the man’s voice on the phone asked Wes.

  “Sure,” he answered: Frank Greco, the NIS counterspy who’d agreed to get the service records of the dead man in the bar.

  “You’re gonna make our squash game today, aren’t you?”

  “When?” asked Wes. Neither he nor Greco played squash.

  “I got us a court at that club on the Hill. Third and D, Southeast. Forty minutes.”

  Wes barely had time to s
have and shower, dress. He found a parking spot a block from the three-story red-brick Squash and Health Club he’d never been inside and walked toward its door.

  “Hey, Marine!” called a voice behind him. “What a ride?”

  Greco, piloting a two-year-old Honda sedan.

  They drove to a less crowded residential street and parked. The Navy Yard and NIS headquarters were a mile to their right, the Capitol dome slightly closer to their rear. No one was walking along the rows of town houses. Few cars drove past them.

  “Mathew Hopkins,” said Greco, dropping a thick manila envelope on the console between them.

  Greco’s silver hair was thin on top and long on the sides. He was squat and wore suits from Sears Roebuck. Greco had a black belt in judo and could lift as much iron in the NIS gym as most agents younger than his fifty-one years.

  “Check the paperwork later,” he told Wes. “Hopkins was a radioman, volunteered for Nam, pulled Special Ops. In 1970, he posted to the Naval Field Operational Support Group. Two years, then he’s sea-dutied around until he retires out in ’79 with a hundred-percent disability. Navy shrinks claimed psychiatric trauma so bad Uncle’s gotta pay him off, but not so bad he needs mandatory care. Guy had superior ratings, some commendations, but no hero. Almost nobody anybody would notice.”

  “Except,” said Wes.

  “Naval Field Operational Support Group. Sounds like paper-pushers, right? That’s the real name for Task Force 157.”

  “I don’t know them.”

  “They got shut down in 1977. Since the 1960s, they were the Navy’s best secret. Civilian contract types, ex-service guys who were bored selling cars, career Navy officers and enlisted men. No diplomat cover, no sitting safe on a ship and intercepting Russian sub signals. HUMINT. Spy dogs. CIA barely knew about ’em. Same for the Navy chain of command. They were the first military group allowed to create real businesses for cover. They had guys everywhere: salesmen, dockworkers. Got people into China. Your pals at the CIA don’t want to leave the embassies. The 157 guys ignored the embassies.”

  “And Hopkins was with them. If they were so good, why were they shut down?”

  “Politics.” Greco shrugged. “One of their ops was Ed Wilson. He went renegade to get rich. Cut deals with Qaddafi in Libya, making money off Colonel Crazy by selling him assassination gear. Wilson even conned Green Berets into working for his private program. They figured it was all just another deep-cover dodge. Now Wilson’s doing thirty years hard time.”