“How nice for you,” he sighed. “So what are you bitchin’ about today?”
“You guys screwed the pooch pretty badly this time.” I chuckled. “I’m laughing to keep from crying.”
“You could be prosecuted for that bit with Simmons,” the D.C.I. groaned wearily. “Our counsel is looking into it.”
“Hmm…but we both know that’s not gonna happen, eh?” I smiled, “This whole big thing was about the recent and troubling inability of you putzes to keep even your best secrets, wasn’t it? Kinda hard to keep secrets in Federal District Court.”
“You’re at least as responsible for Joe’s suicide as Simmons or the girl. You do realize that, right?”
“I don’t think you want to go there, Sparky,” I said quietly. “Not even a little, seeing as the same could be said of you.”
“Yeah,” he sighed. “Yeah, sorry. I am responsible. I tried to keep a lid on it, but…”
“It was you who slapped that gag order on their project, wasn’t it?” I nodded. “Buying a little time for yourself?”
“Well, Sweet Jesus,” he growled. “How the fuck was I supposed to know Clay Wright was going to think compromising a guy like Joe would be a good idea? He decides to build a fucking resort around…around our best-kept secret!”
“Around the most successful and effective assassin in C.I.A. history is what you mean,” I replied mildly.
“Well,” he sighed, “can’t confirm or deny that, of course.”
“No need to,” I said easily. “I’ve done some networking.”
There was a prickly silence for a few moments.
“Y’know,” he said through gritted teeth, “you could have been a tremendous asset to this agency, not to mention your country. You…”
“Ah,” I interjected, “an oldie but goodie. I never get tired of hearing how much I could have done for my country. Never mind that I volunteered for Viet Nam, served 12 years with distinction, killed people, saved hundreds of lives—all in the name of my country. Let alone all the bad guys—like Allen Simmons—I remove from the streets, and will in the future. We all have different ways of serving. I use fists and guns. You…use a desk.”
Another prickly silence; this with a wounded edge to it.
“I’ve done what was asked of me,” he snapped.
“For the most part,” I replied, “so have I. No one asked me to join C.I.A. Everyone just assumed I would.”
I leaned over the desk, suddenly weary down to my bones.
“So you—or ‘you’ surrogates in London, I’m guessing—put the lid on Pembroke. They could do the work, but not talk about it. No marketing, no presales. I’m guessing you hog-tied folks in Olympia, too.”
“And the Sierra Club,” he sighed, “whose own pet senator let it be known that they ought not screw with us on this one. No one was legally compelled to shut up. We, as you pointed out so rudely, have no domestic authority. But believe it or not, I felt like we owed it to Joe to find a way to keep him concealed. He’s done a lot of nasty stuff on our dime. I was lobbying the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee to just buy up all the adjoining land. It wouldn’t have cost that much. Joe would have had a buffer zone. About 40 minutes after you told us he was dead, it was approved. He didn’t have to die.”
“Neither did six guys from a paper company,” I said quietly.
“Yeah,” he sighed. “If I hadn’t let Clay Wright handle it…”
“Don’t hang this shit on Clay Wright,” I snapped, “He tried to get Joe to chill out and keep his head down. The person who should pay for Pembroke is locked up in the Reading Gaol, right now…or wherever the Brits keep their psychotic assholes these days.”
I took a deep breath and tried to lower my blood pressure.
“He’d have had to pay for the murders…I mean the ones you birds and congress didn’t authorize, of course,” I said quietly. “I told him to run. MI-6 couldn’t let it go at that.”
“No,” he said heavily, “they wouldn’t.”
“So,” I murmured, “what could have happened…did.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s what I’m going to tell myself, anyway,” the Director of Central Intelligence said.
“How the hell did that project escape you guys in its planning stages?” I sputtered. “They filed permits, imported staffers, incorporated…”
“Because, regardless of what you imagine, we really don’t do domestic surveillance. Not our charter. There were surveyors on-site before I even knew of it. And, even then, it was just good ol’ fashioned free enterprise. Nobody had legal standing to challenge it, except enviro-Nazis, and we couldn’t risk them looking at Joe.”
“You don’t do domestic surveillance that you know of,” I replied.
“Oh, overzealous spooks run amok? Is that your big theory?” he snorted. “Y’know, smart guy, big guns and good field craft still don’t trump shrinking budgets and congressional oversight. See, my field agents—even the zealous ones—all have this petty mania for getting paid. I can’t afford domestic surveillance.”
“Those two bed-wetters who braced me in Spokane were roving pretty far afield, then,” I smiled.
“I sent those two mostly to watch Joe but also to keep you company,” he sighed.
“So,” I yawned, “you obviously knew Joe was behind the shootings and I know damned well you knew why…so why didn’t you stop him?”
“We tried,” he shrugged verbally. “He was very, very good, y’know. He knew where he was going and we didn’t. We were about 15 minutes behind him by the time he got to Belgium. All I could do was lean on Clay Wright.”
“You completely missed Joanna Kasten,” I pointed out.
“Yeah,” he murmured, “we did. We couldn’t backtrack her past Spain. So we never made the connection. Calvert tipped to that. My hot-shot team of analysts are sporting some well-chewed glutes this morning. As am I, for that matter.”
“So,” I sighed, “what happens now? C.I.A. just dummies up and disavows Joe?”
“Publicly, yeah,” he said wearily. “Privately, I headed off a few preliminary attempts from the Senate Intelligence crowd to revoke his pension and benefits. I pointed out to that one smug son of a bitch that everybody can think anything they please, but nobody will ever prove he shot anyone. His death benefit, Joe’s savings, your totally out-of-character gift…Alicia will never want for anything.”
“Except a father and mother,” I pointed out.
“Except that,” he sighed, a sound pulled from deep below the gut, where the soul hides.
“There’s one thing here I still don’t get,” I murmured, rubbing my face, suddenly more tired than I should have been, “Since the funeral, I’ve heard several people describe Joe as ‘slow’ or ‘challenged’. Clay Wright said something like that. But you don’t do what Joe did for all that time if you’re slow or challenged. Savant, I might buy. Somebody who just shoots the beaks off hummingbirds at 1000 yards, okay. But getting yourself to the place, getting back out, leaving no real trace in such a total way that he wasn’t even photographed for thirty years? Hell, nobody even knew his name, for certain. I talked to him. He showed zero signs of deficiencies. And he hung Joanna Kasten out to dry posthumously. I’m not about to believe that was all coincidence.”
There was a long silence at the other end of the line. I was about to believe he’d hung up when I heard a deep and heart-felt sigh.
“Jesus,” he said softly, “I hate this job, sometimes.”
He paused again for a few seconds and then cleared his throat.
“Joe was 55 years old,” he continued slowly, “Or would have been. Tomorrow, in fact. He was born in rural Oregon in an era in which children who were different were almost always considered somehow impaired. Joe had dyslexia. In 1950s Oregon, teachers and counselors treated dyslexia as a mental problem. He couldn’t read, like the other kids, so they called him stupid, teased him about being slow. When he reached his teens, he developed coping me
chanisms and, we believe, learned that his problem was something he could compensate for. When we found him, in the hospital, we went slowly with him because we’d already found out that he was among the two or three best marksmen who ever served in the Army. Then, after the hospital, with Clay Wright looking after him, he used shooting as therapy. He got better. Better physically and shockingly better as a shooter. He had incredible eyesight. And we finally thought to give him an IQ test - a verbal test that didn’t require him to read. He had an IQ of 110 - high normal intelligence. But his coping mechanism was to pretend that he was a little lost. He evoked sympathy, empathy, concern. He worked at being underestimated. We put him in therapy for the dyslexia. In a few years, it corrected itself. Reading became his passion, his main joy. That and shooting.”
Another short pause and then, very quietly.
“I liked him, Truman,” he sighed, “I liked him a lot. He just wasn’t…wasn’t a linear thinker. He wasn’t a planner. That’s what Clay Wright was for. He was…different. And…nobody ever really got to know him but Joanna Kasten. And, solitary as he was, he welcomed even her company. But I know damned well he saw through her. And I know he did plan the whole thing with the will. Wright swears he didn’t help but…”
We were both quiet for a moment, thinking, I guess, of things as they are and things as they should be.
“You haven’t called Mom, lately,” I prodded.
“Jesus, I know,” the Director of Central Intelligence groaned. “I tried about 45 minutes ago but…”
“She’s at Garden Club today,” I replied.
“Shit, that’s right,” Dewey North sputtered. “It’s Thursday.”
“No biggie,” I smiled. “I told her you’re busy.”
“I’m always busy,” he murmured. “That’s no fucking excuse.”
“She’s busy and happy.” I chuckled, “She doesn’t sit by the phone waiting for our calls.”
“I know…still,” he said uncomfortably.
“I do, however, sit by mine,” I needled him.
“Hey, butt face, I called you, remember?”
“To flip me shit and threaten to have me prosecuted!” I laughed.
“Well, hell, if you can’t threaten your own brother, who can you threaten?” Dew laughed.
“Glad I could be there for you, Bevis,” I smiled. “Seriously, though, do I have to lean on a couple of your field agents to get a phone call? What do I have to do to get you to bring my niece and nephew out here? Shoot somebody?”
“Shoot me,” he chuckled. “At this point you’d be doing me a favor.”
“Buck up there, Sparky,” I said easily. “After all those ass-kickins’ I gave you, Washington oughta be a cakewalk.”
“That’s an interesting and colorful memory ya got there, ace,” Dew observed. “You probably remember the Cubs winning the world series, too.”
We talked for a few minutes about this and that; two middle-aged guys bitching about jobs and kids and how to shop for Christmas. Two kids who wanted nothing more out of life than to become the left side of the Cubs’ infield someday, wind up as a prosperous but solitary private eye, way the hell out in Seattle, and head spook of the world’s main spook-shop. Underneath all the latent menace, the elbow-rubbing on Capitol Hill, the lost loves, and altered dreams, we’re finally two little boys from Virginia, still chasing after their mom’s approval.
And may it ever be thus.
My brother told me he loves me and I said the same to him. And in that moment when I cradled the phone, I tried to imagine what my life would be without hearing or saying that; without that tuning fork that resonates deep in your belly at the thought of your parents, a brother, a sister, a good friend, a spouse…a child. In that moment, it became clear to me that Joe’s punishment had been exacted far in advance of his crimes; exacted by one of the colder faces of God, who makes some of his children hollow as a schoolboy’s promise and hopeless as sunken ships.
A cool wind swept in my window, fresh and salty from Elliott Bay. I shivered slightly, there in the late summer’s morning, but I knew it would soon pass and that the chill was actually in me, in the knowledge that, but for an accident of birth, I could have been Joe, Joe could have been me, and the world would have gone on laughing up its sleeve, tumbling in its path, as oblivious and inevitable as it is right now.
I got up and closed the window anyway. In Seattle, you just never know.
I went out with Paula Farrier about half a dozen times. It was a lot of fun, good conversation, intellectual stimulation, and a woman who loves the M’s almost as much as I do. That don’t grow on trees either.
Ultimately, though, there was something either missing or maybe too much present. I began to realize that my nine years’ withdrawal was, yes, about figuring out my own shortcomings but it was also, I learned to my dismay, about some of the things that people like me and Paula Farrier know that other people, thankfully, do not. Inside me, I discovered, there is a pervasive darkness that I never fully confronted until I saw the reflection in Paula. We may, as Joe suggested, really be infested with the spirits of those we’ve battled, defeated, jailed…killed. It shows up in cops and prosecutors and soldiers and the like as depression, emotional deadness, or black humor.
I realized that I had seen too many things like what happened with Joe and those memories limited my ability to take things like the many small crises and rituals of romance seriously enough. That, as much as anything else, was at the heart of my failures at love and Paula, whether or not she had come to the same realization, was in that place, too.
Eventually, we stopped calling, stopped making plans, and my life became its comfortable rut again.
My third day back, my office bell rang and I opened the door to find a delivery driver with a hand dolly loaded with three cases each of Fobiano and Screaming Eagle. I stared at him as though he were a unicorn until he handed me the note from Jack, with just one word inside: “Bonus!”
I opened one of the Screaming Eagles that evening, sitting on my deck, watching the sunset with new eyes and thinking far-away thoughts. In some irrational, impulsive gesture, I stood as the sun winked out behind the Olympics and poured about $300 worth of the glorious stuff off my deck, onto the earth below.
“Ashes to ashes,” I whispered.
I thought of Joe frequently, especially as I watched, more and more often, those luminous sunsets over the Olympic Mountains, burning to black the Phoenix sky that would rise at dawn to do it all over again, a glory without end.
I hoped that, wherever Joe was, that light was shining on his face, lighting the dark corners of his soul. I like to imagine that, anyway, since much of Joe lives in me and my own end, but for a few breaks along the way, could have figured to be very much the same.
Call Me Joe Page 29