A Dark Perfection

by James, Mark

  “Apart from that, he was one of the best athletes I’ve ever seen. That is, before his knee blew out. He was an All-State running back in high school, then a full-ride scholarship to USC – until the knee during his sophomore year. We were casual friends in high school – back then, I was new to the school – so I missed out on his undergrad years.”

  Osborne looked down at the file. “Then, a law degree from the University of Chicago, the FBI Academy followed by the Diamond Lake killer bust, the FBI interrogation history – the same stuff that’s in the file. That’s when we really got to know each other. Basically, you have someone who’s deceptively intelligent, but also good to have a beer with at the ballpark. And with Clooney-like looks thrown in – you know, the guy that gave the rest of us headaches. That’s about it, really. Not sure how long he’s going to stay with the gang prosecutions. Knowing Jack, he’ll probably be looking for a move at some point.”

  The president, who’d pitched baseball in college, continued down the page. “Hey, we’ve got baseball in common. Decent stats, south paw…”

  He paused. “And the politics?”

  Osborne laughed, “Trust me, Jack is the last person to go there. He has his own opinions, no doubt – the honor and integrity thing that came down from his dad – but he’s not much for arguing. Live and let live.”

  “Alright,” the president said, leaning back, “bring him in – quiet, no footfalls. Any calls?”

  “Don’t think so – Jack runs his own schedule on cases. He’s heading into another trial, not sure exactly when. I’ll check and get back. Probably tomorrow.”

  “That’s fine,” the president said.

  He shifted direction, “So, what’s going on with the girl? You know, around the girl.”

  “Well, the GMA worker bees are buzzing their little brains out trying to get closer to her. I even had a call from Palmer’s office asking on status. You know, a minor update for their records – because, you know, we’re all just one happy family.”

  “Sure,” the president smiled, “like the Manson family…”

  That doubled them both over in laughter.

  “Tell me, Mac, really, when do these guys ever end? I mean, is there always going to be some weasel around the next corner?”

  The president looked over to see Mac staring back over his glasses.

  “Okay, don’t answer that – a self-evident question. Christ, I must be getting old...”

  “When my wife finally gets around to it,” Osborne said, “I just tell her, reptilian.”

  Walker shook his head. “Yeah, a novel way of putting it. Unfortunately, too accurate.” He removed his reading glasses and tossed them on his famous desk, rubbing his eyes. He looked up and smiled, once more thankful that he had Osborne with him on this raft on this endless sea.

  “Alright then, old friend, let’s get it done.”

  It was the saying that Walker was famous for – Alright then, let’s get it done – and Mac smiled each time he heard it, it never getting old. He could even remember the young Bob Walker saying it when they were in college: right before a test that neither of them wanted to take, as they broke from a huddle, as they schemed on how to secure that next illicit keg of beer for the next weekend.

  Osborne gathered his papers.

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  7

  Paris, France

  The puddles reflected the sheen of the woman’s raincoat as she skipped across the Rue de Rivoli. A businessman leaning against a café tipped his head towards the clicking red heels. Ten other newspapers did the same, then returned to their morning espressos.

  Looking down, Inspector Henri Garneau turned away from the red blur and the drizzle and the grayness of the Louvre and let the long silk drapes slide back across the hotel window. Inside, the Hotel St. Regis was bright and sober and elegant, imminently Parisian, but, as with many things, it hid a darker past.

  In 1900, the year of the World’s Fair, three children were found murdered in this same seventh floor suite. They were street urchins and no one ever claimed them. The chef had been suspected because the knife had come from the kitchen. And yet, in truth, no one ever knew. And soon, with the whir of the Fair and the passing of a hundred years, their faces had been forgotten.

  Turning once more towards the bed, Garneau knew that their lost story would surely be revisited today.

  What caught one’s attention first were the eyes.

  Propped up on their pillows, the two victims stared straight ahead, seemingly relaxed, as if watching TV and about to turn to each other and say goodnight. But it was the red eyes that gave them away. Each of the whites had turned to a deep, disturbing color, stark against the crisp cotton sheets and their whitening skin.

  “Inspector?”

  Training Officer Jean Luc Fournier poked his face into the room. He’d run down the hall and was slightly wheezing. He knew not to bother Garneau too much.

  Garneau turned, “Yes.”

  Fornier was the wayward stepson of Pierre-Louis Chastain, the Director-General of the Nouveau Sûreté Nationale (NSN), the reorganized National Police. As a favor to Chastain, the young man had been placed under his tutelage. Garneau remembered laughing with Pierre-Louis over a glass of wine at L’ Ambroisie – as they had each week for the past fifteen years – when Chastain had asked.

  At the time, Garneau had not understood its full portent.

  Fornier hesitated, “I have what you said.”

  Garneau had been trying to teach the young man a degree of assertiveness for months. The real question, however – and one that was just beginning to dawn on Garneau – was whether, as a form of karmic jest, Fornier had been delivered by the gods as a lesson in his own patience.

  “We find the truth, Monsieur Fornier, by first not being afraid to find the truth. Would you agree?”

  Fornier held his mouth slightly open, a breakfast crumb clinging to his tie.

  Garneau took a deep breath, his third that morning. With patience once reserved for his children, he continued, “You see, Jean Luc, the final truth is not what we always expect it to be, nor even what we wish it to be. It is our courage – our will – that brings us to this truth. Always, this remains our challenge.”

  Another silence hung between them.

  “Now, do you wish to keep me in suspense any longer?”

  “No sir, it’s just…”

  When the hotel had initially called the police they’d reported only a homicide, neglecting the names. When Garneau and the other officers arrived, the concierge had been absent, perhaps by design. Garneau had quietly proceeded to the room, as was his practice. He wanted to be the first to experience the crime scene; the first to touch a still warm television, to catch a person’s lingering perfume.

  “Come now, young man, out with it.”

  “The U.S. Ambassador.”

  Garneau held still.

  “And?”

  “And his mistress, we’re assuming.”

  The young man scanned the luxurious room, his eyes lingering at the woman’s black lingerie pulled across a perfect hipbone, the leg falling from the bed.

  “We have no name on the woman yet,” Fornier continued. “The ambassador was here for the G-20 summit. It seems they hadn’t left yet.”

  “Merde,” Garneau swore under his breath. With the American theater bombings so raw in everyone’s minds and the G-20 diplomats still in the city, security was on high alert.

  He turned back to the bed. With the precision of a watchmaker, he reached into his trench coat pocket and removed a circa-1920’s silver cigarette case. He lit the thin cigarette and pulled slowly, deeply, savoring the last quiet moments he would have for some time.

  †

  The president sat in the Oval Office, alone.

  It’d been three weeks since “The Theater Bombings” – as the media had dubbed the event – and the relentless grind was beginning to show under his eyes. And, of course, Paris had been a colossal waste of
energy; the Europeans posturing like peacocks again. He looked down at the stack of orders awaiting his signature.

  Streaming in through the windows, the sunlight lit up the golds in the oval rug as the colors of the flags joined in celebrating the brilliant morning.

  Yet still, even amidst the light, he knew that the world remained what it was, what it had always been – both dark and light.

  Yesterday, he’d ordered a fusion cell strike on a target in Islamabad and two Navy SEALs were killed when their stealth helicopter had gone down in a remote field, the cameras mounted on their helmets revealing their last moments, their last hushed words to their families as the shadows rushed over them. And last night, the vice-president had suggested a psycho-pharmacological attack on Tehran; seeding the clouds with mists of drugs that would dull their minds over time, including their children.

  In the end, even within his dreams, it always came back to the children.

  Had Harry Truman thought about the children of Hiroshima?

  We all know that he did, as we would have.

  Robert Walker, the so-called “Alexander Hamilton from Main Street,” stared into the bright room, the shielding within the walls lending the space a near perfect silence.

  In these decisions, these spaces, it was a truth that every president discovered: a president is always alone.

  Lincoln, McKinley, Kennedy, they’d all been a part of this world, a world apart.

  Was it his destiny, as some had told him?

  In such times, it was his memories from the Iowa farm that held him steady, as if bound to the Earth. He chuckled as he remembered his father’s long ago words. It was a now-famous story, repeated in each of those endless, unauthorized presidential biographies, but it also had the advantage of being true. In the winters, when the ground turned hard and the farmers came in from the fields, they spent their time fixing up equipment, perhaps meeting for an early morning coffee at the grain elevator, all the while waiting for the spring. When the thaw eventually came, they moved back out onto the ground. When he’d been fifteen years old, he and his father had been out in the spring chill putting in fence. But like every fifteen year old, all that the future president could think of was the high school baseball game later that night, and of the girl from the next county who he’d met last weekend, and who might be at the game. His dad looked over at him, “Well, you better get a job with a seat, because you ain’t much good at puttin’ in fence.”

  He’d gone from the seat of an Air Force fighter jet to the seat of a congressman to the seat in this Oval Office.

  Ah, he smiled to himself, the barest of truths…

  The light on his phone shone red. It activated with his voice.

  “Morning, Margaret,” he said to the White House Executive Secretary, Margaret Spencer. “I think I missed you on my way in.”

  “Sorry, Mr. President, my sister called from Florida and, well, she needed to talk. I went down the hall to Mac’s office.”

  “Everything alright?”

  “Oh yes, she just wanted to talk about mom. You know, Rebecca is an artist and can be a little loopy sometimes.”

  Spencer’s ninety-three year old mother was in a rest home, suffering from the last stages of Alzheimer’s disease. The president would sometimes catch Margaret looking out her window. She was a loyal and trusted friend – with Mac, his gatekeepers – and, frankly, he didn’t know what he’d do without her.

  “You know, I have an idea,” the president said. “It’s your birthday next month, right? Why don’t we fly your sister on out and you and the First Lady can all have an afternoon tea, or something, whatever you want. And, well, then I can finally meet this crazy sister of yours. How’s that sound?”

  “She’d be thrilled, Mr. President, really.”

  “Well then, run it by my executive secretary and set up a good date.”

  “Yes, sir,” Margaret laughed, “I’ll talk to myself about it right away!”

  He joined in and they had a good laugh together. Margaret had a knack of lifting his spirits.

  “Mr. President, I forgot, Mac is on line two. He must be wondering where I went off to. He’s in his limo, heading to a meeting at NSA.”

  “Thanks, Margaret. Got it.”

  He switched the line.

  “Hey, Mac, sorry for the wait. What’s up?”

  “I talked to my charming French counterpart about the ambassador situation. They’re being bull-headed – again. I think they’re pissy about being embarrassed at the G-20 summit and using it to now run roadblocks on the ambassador’s murder investigation. Shocking, eh?”

  “He’s a damn diplomat. What’s the problem, hand him over.”

  “Yeah, I know, but their newspapers are making it into some big sovereignty flap. On top of that, the girl the ambassador was found with was a French citizen.”

  “Well, maybe I should remind them whose sandbox they’re playing in?”

  It was a statement in the form of a question and the president wasn’t bluffing; he’d done it before.

  Osborne felt much the same, but also knew the French somehow needed their monthly tiff to feel good about doing what they were being told.

  “I hear you,” Osborne said, “but it’s not worth the effort, not yet. We told them they could have first shot at the autopsies, duly monitored, but that the body comes home after that. Their pride seemed temporarily mollified, such as it is.”

  “That’s fine, let them have some rope. We’ll yank it back later.”

  “Look on the bright side,” Osborne noted, “as long as the body stays in Paris, it’s not over here for our media to make a drama over.”

  “On O’Neill,” he continued, “we’ve got him for a month. District Attorney Peterson says that’s the limit.”

  “Speedy trial issues?”

  “No, worse. If they wait any longer all of their witnesses will be dead.”

  †

  The killer of the U.S. Ambassador scanned across the gardens and fountains of the Jardin des Tuileries that fronted the Louvre. He took another bite from his smoked salmon sandwich and noted that a pigeon had alit upon a crumb he’d dropped on his way to the bench. He stared at the bird and it flew away.

  He looked to his left towards the shallow wading pool, the colorful sailboats operated by the children and the fountain sparkling in the bright sunshine like a Monet painting.

  The killing of the U.S. Ambassador and that French mistress-whore had given him pleasure.

  Years ago, he recalled the ambassador interrupting him at a large corporate luncheon. The old man had done it as if dismissing a gnat. As the killer had depressed the button to the weapon, he’d bathed in the memory.

  He was beginning to feel his full power. History and the world would soon know him, through his works.

  Another daydream – perhaps a portent – came over him.

  It was a vision of the president – with his mind on fire.

  8

  O’Neill stood at the side gate of the White House as two Secret Service Agents verified his credentials. He’d taken the early flight from Chicago-O’Hare airport into Reagan International and dropped off his bags at the hotel before catching a quick coffee at a downstairs diner. With the morning bright and crisp, he’d decided to walk over.

  “Thank you, Mr. O’Neill,” the first agent said, handing back his prosecutor’s badge and passport. “Please, follow me.”

  The agent led him up the path to the stairs as the other trailed behind. The autumn leaves were half-fallen and they crushed under their feet. He heard the agent behind him; instinctively, he noted, ten feet.

  “Hey Jack!”

  He heard the voice before he saw his old friend bounding down from the White House.

  “Jack, oh man, it’s damn good to see you!”

  He and Osborne shook hands. It had been since last Christmas that they’d been able to get together and they both knew it’d been too long.

  “Thanks, Mac. You’re looking good
.”

  Osborne stepped back, patting his stomach. “You’re a bad liar. Too many late nights working, I’m afraid. Having the best take-out in the world, on-call twenty-four hours a day from the White House kitchen, it’s absolutely kicking my ass.”

  “But, hey, look at you,” Osborne said. “What, hitting the weights, having a midlife crisis, or just trying to shame me one more time?”

  O’Neill laughed. “Not a chance, no more heavy lifting for me. The rotator cuffs can’t take it. I did take up swimming though – an hour every morning. It has the added bonus of waking me up. And still have the b-ball league on weekends.”

  “You quit the aikido? That’s a big surprise. You did that forever.”

  “No, still have the aikido. I guess I don’t think of it as exercise anymore.”

  “Just for fun, huh?”

  O’Neill smiled. “The offer stands, Mac. Anytime. Best thing for you.”

  “Oh, sure. I’ll stack it right in between the daily terrorist threats, the looming Supreme Court appointment battles, my anniversary next weekend and the kids’ unending violin lessons. Sure.”

  Osborne turned, placing his hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Come on. Let’s get out of this cold.”

  Osborne looked at his watch. “Besides, the president is wrapping up his meeting with the Indian Ambassador and, trust me, he’d love for us to run some interference. This way, we have a newer entrance.”

  They walked down the corridor between the outer colonnades that fronted the East Wing and entered the remodeled foyer. They walked past room after room, O’Neill noting the famous paintings – Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington, Martin Johnson Heade’s glowing sunsets, the parade flags of Frederick Childe Hassam.

  Osborne saw him. “After hours is always best. Some really good stuff. Like I always said, Jack, you should’ve made it out here before now. Between your trials and our recurrent world crises, the dance cards always seemed full.”