American Quartet

by Warren Adler

  “An Argentinian. Jorge Perfidio. Lovely man. Charming wife. Two small children. It was a hateful act.”

  “Maybe it was an act of passion,” he goaded, watching her empty her glass as her agitation increased.

  “Terrorism,” she scowled. “They are jealous of us.”

  “They?”

  He was smiling, chiding her, deliberately punishing her for her foolishness. She hadn’t the remotest understanding of what had occurred. Was she attempting to trivialize the will of the cosmic force?

  “You will have it in this country,” she continued passionately. “I guarantee it. You are living in a fool’s paradise here.”

  “Perhaps,” he said, but she was not to be daunted. The crab imperial was served and more white wine. He had chosen it carefully, a Chablis grand cru. Later a St. Emilion, 1966, would be poured with the beef Wellington.

  He turned to the wife of the German ambassador, whose hand still clung to his, caressing.

  “We were talking about terrorism,” he said.

  “In Germany we have cured that problem.”

  “Yes,” the other woman said, finishing off her wine. “We know all about German cures.”

  He felt the grip on his hand tighten. The Latin lady’s glass was refilled. She was getting drunk now, her pent-up hostility erupting. He enjoyed the spectacle. It was always a public sport in the capital to see someone in the vortex of power lose control.

  “Public life is a menace,” she lashed out bitterly. “Sop to the unquenchable male ego. Diplomacy is a worthless profession.”

  “She is getting drunk,” the German ambassador’s wife whispered, clutching his hand. He listened to the buzz of conversation. Candles flickered. The white-gloved waiters delicately passed the silver plates. The power of this orchestration comforted him. If only they could understand his need, the cosmic pull. It thrilled him to think about it. He wanted to assure them of the necessity of his acts, the glorious inner voltage that electrified his acts. He moved the German ambassador’s wife’s hand to his erection. She gasped at him, startled. But she did not pull her hand away. Then he turned suddenly to Mrs. Ricardo, bending low, his mouth near her ear.

  “Perhaps he needed killing?” The words were designed for her ears only. She turned glazed eyes toward him, her lips trembling, unable to speak. Behind her rouged cheeks her skin went dead white. As he looked at her, there was a brief second of communication, and in that moment he felt the sweetness of confession. The woman abruptly stood up.

  “I feel ill.” She gagged and cupped her hand over her mouth as she hurried off. The sudden movement at the table forced the German ambassador’s wife to remove her hand.

  “She drinks too much,” she said, apparently disappointed by the interruption.

  He had wanted to say: Czolgosz killed him. But that would have been beyond her comprehension.

  Fools, the lot of them, he thought. Moths around a candle, flickering at the edges of power. Only he knew real power, only he had the ability to will events.

  When Mrs. Ricardo returned, they had nearly finished dessert. She eyed him warily.

  “I hope you are feeling better,” he said. She nodded and quickly turned away. He stood up and tapped his glass. All conversation ceased.

  “There is no greater joy than breaking bread with friends,” he began. “Especially friends so distinguished . . .” The compliments droned on. The Secretary-General was appropriately lauded for his achievements. Remington carefully briefed himself for the toasts, bathing both his honored guest and the others in a warm pool of hyperbole. The response, he knew, would be equally laudatory. Compliments would assail him. But nothing would ever remotely touch what was inside, the secret power.

  Still, he could find contentment now in dealing with ironies. There was simply no other way to translate himself to them. Their ignorance was massive, their reality covered by a veneer of self-delusion. They would never know the inner truth of anything, especially of himself. The best he could do was to throw them a bone.

  “Few of us has any insight into his own destiny,” he told them. He looked beside him at the pale Mrs. Ricardo, barely holding herself together. “We live in perpetual danger. There is a predatory flock of eagles preying upon us, against which we are defenseless lambs. Terrorism, as we have learned tonight, has indeed come to America. Terrorism has torn one of us from the bosom of our loved ones. We cannot, we must not let this occur again.” Inside he was laughing at them. One man could easily terrorize a nation. “Perhaps a moment of silence would be appropriate,” he said, lowering his head. The guests followed suit. In the silence he thought of his mother. She would have sneered at them all.

  13

  ONE night in the middle of October, Teddy materialized at the door of Fiona’s apartment. He had just come off duty. Leaning against the doorjamb, he looked sallow and groggy, and a smell of whiskey clung to his trenchcoat. The circles under his eyes were deeper.

  “What’s with you?”

  She led him into the apartment and poured him a stiff Scotch.

  “She threw me out,” he said, sitting down heavily in a chair and not bothering to unbutton his coat. He took a double swallow of the whiskey.

  “Can’t blame her.” He was wallowing in hurt and self-pity. She remembered the eggplant’s obscene phrase. Pussy-whipped. “It’s not a family game we’re in.”

  “So I’m beginning to understand,” she said. “Maybe it’s time to leave. Not worth giving up Gladys and the kids.”

  “Be a security guard somewhere?” he said. “I don’t know any other life.”

  “I’m acquainted with the problem.”

  “Why?” he asked. “What’s the magnet? It stinks.”

  “So why are we in it?”

  Once Bruce had suggested that she become an investigator for a government agency like Treasury. A T-person, she had remembered joking. I’m a tit man myself, he had responded, but the humor had merely masked the wish. He couldn’t understand what it meant to give up one’s badge and the power of arrest.

  “It’ll pass,” she said.

  “I agree with her. That’s the funny part.”

  “She’s a wife. She should understand.”

  The remark ricocheted in her mind, finding no resting place. She felt no sense of sisterhood. Her mother’s blind loyalty to the “farces” paralleled her feeling for the church. It was simply the glue of her life.

  “How would you know, Fiona?”

  He said it for her, and she felt a tiny shiver of fright for herself. Bruce’s wife, too, would have to understand. It was the nature of the beast.

  “Maybe I should give it up?” Teddy said, holding out his glass. She poured. “No future for a white man anymore. Strictly a black club.” He paused and sipped. “They got different rules.” Something seemed to linger on his tongue and he looked at her as if she was supposed to plead with him to stop. She didn’t, feeling this new thing in the air.

  “That terrorist stuff is bullshit, Fi.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He looked around the room with his cop’s eyes, checking things out. “They know how to keep it among themselves.”

  He gulped down the remains of his drink and held the glass out once more. This time she did not pour.

  “The ammo of the thirty-two. Old. Like the other.”

  She understood instantly. “How old?”

  “About seventy-five years.”

  Her mind raced. What had she said to Dr. Benton? A public place. A single killer. Now another thin thread. Old ammo.

  “Hadley raised it, but the eggplant beat it in. He’s happy letting the Feds and the foreigners chase their asses.”

  “Who told you this?”

  “Hadley. In his cups. It’s not even meant for you, Fi.”

  “So why are you telling me?” She knew why.

  “I wanted you to know is all.”

  His tongue was heavy and he was beginning to slur his words. Finally she poured him ou
t a drink and took one for herself.

  “You know what you’re saying?”

  He shrugged. Drunk as he was, he knew exactly what he was saying.

  “It won’t matter. All the international boys are crawling over town. Soon no one will admit the goof. Everyone will blame the other guy. No one is looking in the right direction anyhow.”

  “Cover-up!” she blurted. It’s wrong, she thought angrily. Standards, too, were another of her burdens. Like compassion. But the latter could be a detriment. The former was essential. It was at the heart of being a cop.

  “He ain’t so stupid, Fi. He’s saving his own ass. A second murder wouldn’t have sat so well upstairs. Screw up the tourist business good, reflect on the black mafia that runs things. Look, it could have been worse. They could have screamed attempted robbery and really scared the tourists off.”

  She began to pace the room, sipping her drink, agitated.

  “You had to tell me. You just couldn’t wait to tell me.” How much shit were these weak men going to deposit on her doorstep, she thought, resenting Bruce as well, an image that only added to her rage. What was she? The great earth mother?

  “So what am I supposed to do about it?”

  “Hey, Fi. Don’t blame the messenger.” Teddy closed his eyes, then laid his head on her table. She debated leaving him there. He reminded her of her father, who had used the same device to escape from pressure. “A man needs his cup when things boil over,” her mother had said, forcing the same sense of acceptance into her mind. Emulating her mother, she dragged Teddy to the couch.

  “We’re supposed to catch the bastards,” she said angrily and covered him with a blanket. It’s not a divine mission. It’s only a job, she argued. Besides, there were no other clues. Would revealing the information actually bring them closer to the killer? She doubted that.

  Later, tossing in sleepless anger, she continued to argue with herself, an endless harangue about morality, aggravated by the darkness. How dare Teddy draw her into their games? It was as though she were being assigned to rock the boat. Her. The invulnerable double minority. But how? Theoretically, there was only one source of the original leak: Hadley, stiff-lipped, scientific, no-nonsense Hadley, a honky to boot. No one seemed ever to use his first name. If the press got it, he would be frozen out, his career destroyed. They knew how to get their revenge. Maybe if it were one of the brothers instead . . . but her mind finally fogged and she fell into a dull leaden sleep.

  Teddy had disappeared by the time she awoke. When her first cup of coffee could not spark alertness, she tried two more. A sour nausea suddenly afflicted her and she debated whether or not to call in sick. She decided that the illness was more emotional than viral, took a long lingering bath, dressed in a pants suit and took the metro to headquarters.

  An odd feeling gripped her as she waited for the train. She was contemplating the squared cement indentations of the station’s arched inner skin, unaware of the army of silent people who waited for the circles of light on the floor to flicker and signal the arrival of the train. The movement of the people into the train shocked her into awareness.

  She was responsible for these people, their protector. Under her jacket hung the weapon of the protector. Her badge, tucked in the jumble of keys, money, lipstick, makeup, aspirin and tissues in her pocketbook, was the holy authority for the enforcement of the rules of society, the symbol of this sacred duty.

  These were her charges, her wards, rushing to the open door of the train, oblivious of her, yet depending on her to keep their lives safe from harm. Somewhere, deep inside of her, this must have been her motivation for joining the “farces.” Motivation! It was the primal clue to the killer, the primal clue to every human. A wave of self-righteousness swept over her, a divine sense of goodness. Wasn’t she the keeper of the flame of order, a soldier in the thin ranks of those who kept the monsters at bay?

  But once inside the train, where the brighter lighting individualized their faces, the collective image of humanity splintered. Who among them were the predators, the thieves and killers? She sensed the swirling emotions that lay behind their bland faces, frustration, envy, greed, thwarted dreams, the hidden ritualized horror of ordinary life. Her mission was also to protect them from each other.

  Don’t you know there is a madman running loose in your city? She wanted to stand up, shout out the words. It wouldn’t matter. Few would understand.

  I have to care for you, she addressed them silently. It was enough to calm her. Whatever her previous resentment, she knew that somehow Teddy had put the message in the right slot.

  That day she and Jefferson finished their paperwork early. As was their pattern now, they were still assigned to routine “naturals,” a boring process at best. An accidental car death occupied them most of the morning at Memorial Hospital. They had apparently reached a silent understanding or, as she characterized it to herself, a plateau of indifference. He had toned down his blatant ghetto mockery and she had resisted being baited into head-on confrontations. Somehow they managed to keep the social intercourse on a purely professional level. The relationship wasn’t designed to gain any insight into themselves, but they both knew that they were temporarily sentenced to each other.

  Yet the very fact that they were outcasts brought them subtly closer. She deliberately drew a curtain around herself, presenting him with the cold visage of a fellow cop, neutered and bloodless. It was never like that with Teddy.

  But somewhere she would have to find a meeting ground. In this business, it was impossible to act alone.

  “I’d like to take a look at the Pan American Union Building,” she said as they drove out of the Memorial Hospital garage onto Washington Circle and into Pennsylvania Avenue. He looked at her archly and reluctantly nudged the accelerator. He appeared in a good mood. By now she knew the obscene implications of what that meant. He had made his point early in their sentence. His life consisted of a nightly round of female conquests, or at least that was the image he encouraged. The big black stud. The Ape. Despite her contempt, she found herself searching for his humanity.

  He pulled the car into an illegal parking spot directly across from the Pan American Union Building and, hunching over the wheel, drew a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, punched one up and lit it with the car lighter.

  From the car, she observed the Spanish-style building, its green atrium dome glinting in the sunlight. Smoke filled the car and she wound down the window. After ten minutes he reacted.

  “Ready to roll? I’m hungry, woman.”

  By then, he was calling her mama only when angered.

  “Why there?”

  She had to be cautious. Drawing him in would be a delicate maneuver.

  “Good a place as any,” he shrugged.

  “Why not outside his home? Or on the street? Why inside the lobby? In front of a guard.”

  “You playing detective games, woman? Who gives a shit? It ain’t our gig.” She felt his curiosity. “What’s in your head?”

  “It’s bullshit, Jefferson.”

  “Ain’t nothin’ but a woid,” he said, stamping out his cigarette.

  “That was no terrorist attack,” she said, turning to face him. The whites of his eyes were scored with red veiny wriggles.

  “What’s one dead spic?”

  “Or white?”

  “Plenty of them, too.”

  “There’s more to it.”

  He seemed suddenly defensive.

  “Yeah. I don’t wanna know.”

  “Because he’s not black?” she said cautiously. “Not the victim or the killer?”

  “That too.”

  “Don’t wanna know what, Jefferson?”

  “It ain’t our gig,” he repeated.

  “Suppose I told you . . .” She hesitated. “That this one . . .” She shrugged a shoulder toward the building across the street, “. . . and the other were connected.”

  His eyelids fluttered. She could tell he was fighting down his curiosi
ty. Swiftly, in quick bold strokes, she told him about the old ammo.

  “Plain and simple. It’s a cover-up. The eggplant’s in it up to his ass.”

  “Just you honkies blowin’ steam. Old ammo,” he sneered. “I didn’t hear nothin’.”

  Suddenly he started the motor and pressed heavily on the accelerator. The car shot forward, coughing.

  “I don’t know nothin’,” he muttered.

  “You do now.”

  “You got fantasies, mama. You should put them to better use.”

  It was a half-hearted feint and Jefferson apparently knew it. He headed the car along Constitution Avenue, making an illegal left on Fourteenth Street.

  “The guy will kill again. It’ll only get worse.”

  “What’s one more dead honky?”

  She sensed his agitation. Finally he pulled the car over.

  “The next one could be black.”

  “Say what?”

  “You heard me.”

  “What’s with you? Leave it alone. They’re just itchin’ to make us look like dummies. Like we can’t run things. They think only white men . . .” He emphasized men “. . . can run things right.”

  “Who the hell is ‘they’?” she countered. It was time to take a swipe from another direction. “What about integrity?”

  “Sheet. You put it in. You take it out. That’s integrity.”

  Beneath his black mask, she could see the alert street intelligence at work.

  “You leave it alone, hear?”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Sheet.”

  The anger must have shot through his foot. The car careened forward, moving into the strip, the highest crime district in Washington, Fourteenth Street between K and R. They passed pushers on street corners doing a healthy business in little knots. A few prostitutes in tight skirts and high heels patrolled the streets.

  “That’s where it’s at,” he said. “Integrity is stopping that bullsheet. That’s real death walkin’ around out there. What’s one lousy killer? What we got? Five homicides, maybe ten, since that guy got blown away. All black. That’s the real war, mama. That’s Nam in the U. S. of A.”