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TESTIMONY
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Background: 36; BA (Econ) UMd (1980); no armed forces exp.; Wk. Hist.: 1980–1983, Baltimore Graphics (sales); 1983–1989, Wilson Sporting Goods (sales); 1989–Present, Annapolis Brokers (sales); left each position of own volition, seeking “greater challenge” and “better opportunity.”
Marjorie stopped reading. She asked Word Search to find “Highways to Indians.” It came up with nothing.
She sighed again. This was shaping up as a long afternoon.
***
A gentle rain was falling by the time Michaelson reached the modest house of ocher-colored brick in McLean, Virginia, where Artemus lived. He found the retired general kneeling at the near border of a flower bed that seemed to occupy a third of the backyard. Squishing through the drizzle-beaded grass, Michaelson introduced himself, shook hands, then pointed at an empty steel bucket a couple of yards away.
“May I?” he asked.
“Be my guest.”
Sissy Artemus, who had let Michaelson into the house and directed him to the backyard, had warned him that her husband might grant an audience but certainly would not allow his gardening to be interrupted. Michaelson turned the bucket upside down and sat on its bottom, grimacing only slightly as accumulated damp seeped through the seat of his pants.
What would most people think a warrior looked like? Michaelson wondered, reflecting on several he had known. Not, surely, like Artemus, with his avuncular face, his thinning red hair plastered across his brown-blotched scalp, his slightly thickened middle bulging a bit over the black leather belt at his waist. Had Artemus lost that special cold fire sometime in the late seventies or early eighties, felt it flicker out late some sleepless night while he thought about brave men and frightened boys under his command who’d been sacrificed a few years before to electoral calculations?
Michaelson thought he could tell if he could see the man’s eyes. But he couldn’t do that right now.
“Do you know why I’ve come?” he asked.
“Define ‘know,’” Artemus said as he worked his fingers lovingly through rich loam. “Sorry. Inside joke. You’ve come because you want to learn something.”
“Actually, I’m here because I want to understand something I’ve already learned,” Michaelson said. “I know Jeffrey Quentin offered you a return to active duty, a shot at a plum assignment, and de facto rehabilitation of your career. I know you turned him down. But I want to understand why.”
“Now, how do you figure you know all that?” Artemus asked the question in a gently joshing tone, without taking his eyes off the viscous soil he was kneading.
“The first part is simply the standard Quentin bribe adapted to your situation. I know he offered that to you because he offered the functional equivalent to me, and you have a lot more to give him in exchange than I do. I know you turned him down because he hasn’t delivered and he’s the type who knows better than to breach illegitimate contracts.”
“Are you sure you’re as smart as you think you are?” Artemus asked in the same voice as before.
“Not entirely. But the important thing in Washington is to be smarter than other people think you are. I’ve managed that much for over forty years now.”
“Then why do you need anything Quentin could give you?”
“I don’t. I want something he could give me, but that’s not the same thing.”
Artemus sat back on his heels and laboriously scooted his knees sideways until he was giving Michaelson about a three-quarter profile. He gazed with deeply hooded eyes at the older man.
“Don’t bullshit me,” he said jovially. “I know about you. I remembered your name the minute Sissy told me you’d called. You got yourself talked about plenty when I was working at the White House.”
“I’m flattered,” Michaelson said. “When you were at the White House I was either rather old for an area director or rather young for a retired foreign service officer.”
“You retired early from the State Department, but you weren’t pushed out. You decided on your own to leave because you wanted to set yourself up for national security adviser or CIA director. Everyone including the tour guides knew that.”
“I’m an ambitious man,” Michaelson conceded mildly. “But a large part of the jobs I want amounts to drawing lines. A national security adviser who’s willing to do anything the president wants him to is worse than dangerous—he’s useless. There are things I won’t do to get those jobs, because there are things I’d have to refuse to do if I got them.”
“That’s easy to say from the sidelines.”
“I’ve had plenty of practice. I’ve been on the sidelines a long time now.”
“If I were you, I’d take up gardening,” Artemus said.
He grinned bitterly as he said this. With the grin his eyes opened wide, and Michaelson saw the fire: banked, perhaps, but not gone. He realized that it must be killing Artemus to kneel here tending roses instead of planning troop movements or plotting procurement strategy.
“I’m not going to waste your time,” Michaelson said. “You had a choice when Quentin approached you. You made it and in my judgment you made it correctly. You refused to cross the line. What matters right now, though, is why you made the choice you did. You’re the only one who can answer that question for me. If you’re willing to answer it, I’m eager to hear what you have to say. If you’re not willing to answer it, I’ll go nurse my frustration someplace a little bit drier.”
“Why does it matter?” Artemus asked.
“A woman named Sharon Bedford died young about ten days ago. She shouldn’t have. The answer to my question has something to do with her death and therefore with her life. That’s why it matters.”
Michaelson felt that he’d passed some kind of a test. Sighing briefly, Artemus gathered up a trowel and a mini-rake.
“I guess I did it because I wanted to face a choice like that and get it right while there was still time,” he said. “Let’s go inside.”
***
Whatever paralegals get paid, Marjorie thought fiercely, it’s not enough. No amount would be adequate compensation for wading through these dreary, tedious, repetitious exercises in finger-pointing, blame-shifting, evasion, and self-justification—much less for finding the few nuggets of substantive information buried in there and bringing them out. She had stolen more than two precious hours from the limitless demands of Cavalier Books, devoted them to slogging doggedly through deposition summaries prepared by Sharon Bedford, and come up with nothing.
She now knew that the phrase “Highways to Indians” wasn’t nestled conveniently within any of the summaries, at least in any obvious way. She knew that the six summaries she had read from beginning to end overflowed with mind-numbing detail about dozens of things that shouldn’t have led to the murder of Sharon Bedford or anyone else, except perhaps a couple of lawyers. And she knew that she had to find a better way to do this.
The disk listed the deposition summaries in alphabetical order, by case name. Hoping with a combination of desperation and giddiness that putting them in chronological order might suggest something more promising than she’d come up with so far, she rummaged through piles on her desk until she found the neatly typed invoices Bedford had sent to Hayes & Barthelt for her work. The invoices themselves were dated and each summary charged for on an invoice also bore a date, so it was easy for Marjorie to list the summaries from earliest to latest on a legal pad.
Having done so, she contemplated her handiwork. Nothing.
Calling the disk directory back to her computer screen, she compared her handwritten, chronological list with the electronic, alphabetical list. Nothing.
She thumbed back through the invoices. Cucurri v. Gardner a/k/a wasn’t there. Bedford apparently hadn’t charged Hayes & Barthelt for summarizing a deposition in that case.
Marjorie retrieved the Cucurri summary and clicked down to the end. END OF DEPOSITION. All caps. So Bedford had finished the summary. But she apparently hadn’t billed for it. Why? Whatever the reason might be, the only place Marjorie could think of to look for it was in the summary itself. So that’s what she began doing.
***
“Did you know it’s possible to have a totally secret court-martial in this country?” Artemus was asking Michaelson about the time Marjorie began reading the Cucurri summary. “I mean absolute star chamber. Locked and guarded courtroom. Sealed evidence. No public notice of charges or outcome. And if anyone goes looking for it later on—brother, it just didn’t happen.”
“No,” Michaelson said. “I didn’t know that, as a matter of fact.”
They were sitting across a simple wooden table in the Artemus kitchen, mugs of steaming coffee before them.
“It’s a fact. That’s what they threatened me with. They were serious, too.”
“Well, it’s nice to have an intuition confirmed now and then,” Michaelson said. “They didn’t threaten you with something like that over shoving your way to the head of the line outside an operating room.”
“You said your question mattered because a woman died who didn’t have to die,” Artemus said after a long sip of scalding coffee. “That’s the way I felt about my daughter. I had a lever. If I didn’t use it, she was going to die and she didn’t have to die. It was just as simple as that.”
“It’s the lever I’m really interested in.”
“Right.”
“But you’re not going to tell me what it was.”
“Can’t.”
“After all,” Michaelson said, “being court-martialed isn’t the kind of thing any prudent soldier would risk twice.”
Artemus smiled without showing his teeth, amused rather than provoked by the artless gibe.
“You probably aren’t going to believe it, not that I care particularly, but that’s not it. Fact is, it wasn’t the court-martial threat that made me cave in and retire.”
“What was it, then?” Michaelson asked.
“I just looked at what I’d done, and looked back at the way it had all happened, and I knew I’d flat gotten it wrong. I don’t mean when I helped my daughter, I mean from the beginning. I step into the White House, get one look at the inside of the Oval Office, and overnight every instinct I had turned to crap. First time it had ever happened. Once I realized that, I had less confidence in myself than I’d had when I was a plebe at the Point.”
“You astound me,” Michaelson confessed. “If someone had asked me to dream up twenty possible explanations for what happened to you, that one wouldn’t have been on the list.”
“It was just so different to be in the middle of it while it was happening. I mean, there on the scene, at the time, everything seemed to make perfectly good sense.”
“‘While it was happening,’” Michaelson repeated pensively.
“You know what I mean. People today tend to feel warm and fuzzy when they think back on President Reagan’s foreign policy, ’cause by the time he left office, the Berlin Wall was about to come down, the Soviet Union was about to bust apart, we’d just about won the Cold War, and you figure somewhere along in there someone must’ve done something right. But I’ll tell you what, when it was going on and no one knew for sure how any of that was going to come out, the whole thing looked just a tad dicier.”
Michaelson waited, raising his eyebrows encouragingly, giving Artemus a chance to say the obvious, to cite the two irrefutable concrete examples of the nerveracking diciness he’d just asserted: the Iran/Contra mess; and the nearly disastrous summit in Reykjavik, where President Reagan had come within a stunning, naive inch of giving away the nuclear advantage of the United States without getting anything in return.
Artemus didn’t cite them. Returning to the enigmatic half-smile he’d used earlier, he simply stopped talking.
Michaelson sagged a bit in his chair. The flicker of hopeful expectation that had flared briefly inside him when Artemus began to open up guttered.
“There is one potentially useful thing you can tell me,” Michaelson said then. “One thing that won’t further compound the error you feel you made, and could conceivably mitigate it.”
“What’s that?” Artemus asked skeptically.
“Whom did you co-opt to get the special treatment you wanted for your daughter?”
Artemus considered the question for a moment before he showed his teeth in a malicious grin.
“Dr. Marc,” he said. “Jerry Marciniak, p-h-fucking-d. You get a chance, you just mitigate the hell out of him, far as I’m concerned.”
***
“…a totally fresh biography of Gladstone,” the eager sales rep from HarperCollins who’d come in when Marjorie was two-thirds of the way through the deposition summary in Cucurri v. Gardner a/k/a said. “Emphasizes his human side, if you get my drift.”
“I don’t think most of my customers are terribly interested in S&M,” Marjorie said. “You might try Brentano’s on that one.”
“No, really,” the rep said. “Kirkus said this biography was ‘two steps above God Is an Englishman.’”
“I remember reading that,” Marjorie said. “I believe that comment was intended to be disparaging.”
“My whole point,” the rep said delightedly, spreading his arms over the attaché case perched on his knees. “A heaping tablespoon of sugar to help the history go down. Not history for people who already know history, history for people who love to read. Connecticut Avenue demographics on the nose.”
Grinning, Marjorie relaxed, her sales resistance overcome by the irrefutable argument.
“Send me two copies,” she said. “I’ll sell the first one to a retiring lobbyist and rely on word of mouth to sell the second.”
“You won’t be sorry,” the rep promised as he opened his attaché case and made quick notations in his order book. “Hey, I have a great bookstore joke for you.”
“I hope it’s a quick one,” Marjorie said. “I’ve spent all afternoon on a problem that has nothing to do with keeping this store profitable, and I haven’t gotten anywhere with it.”
The rep snapped his case shut and stood up.
“Very quick. Salesman’s racing through an airport. Realizes he forgot to bring anything to read on the flight. Passes a bookstore and notices a book on its remainders table, right inside the front door: Secrets to Sex. Sign underneath says ‘For Sale to Adults Only.’ Sounds like it might not be too bad. Hears his flight being called. Grabs the book, throws his money at the clerk, hustles to the gate, and gets on board. Settles back for some salacious delight, opens the book, and discovers that he’s bought volume nineteen of Graham’s Encyclopedic Manual of Grammar, Diction and Usage.”
The square-faced man’s wire-rimmed glasses twinkled as he waited through two seconds of anxious silence. All at once Marjorie’s face was blank, her eyes seemingly fixed on a horizon somewhere well beyond the storeroom at Cavalier Books.
“Come on,” he pleaded. “It wasn’t that bad.”
To his considerable alarm Marjorie suddenly leaped from her chair.
“It is a perfectly marvelous joke, the best joke I’ve heard in Washington since the last time Congress tried to define middle class,” she assured him in a delighted voice. Seizing his shoulders, she spun him effortlessly toward the door. “Now scoot. I have to think.”
As soon as she’d hustled the slightly bewildered man out the door,
Marjorie hurried, laughing, back to her desk.
I’ve been had, she thought to herself between fits of giggles. We’ve all been had. There wasn’t any road map in the Cucurri deposition summary. The entire thing was window dressing. Classic red herring. Bedford had simply put this imaginary name on a duplicate summary of another deposition. Her own little private joke. Like the Illegitimi Non Carborundum plate she’d given Davidson.
Marjorie’s giggles turned into a full-throated laugh. She could see Bedford, the NSC staff veteran, chortling to herself as she thought of someone stealing her computer files, laboring feverishly over them, and then racing furiously down the false trail Bedford had deliberately created.
Because that’s what the case name was. A confection that an NSC computer would have identified in thirty minutes as a tantalizing lead, and which would then have sent hordes of researchers hustling up a blind alley. As Illegitimi Non Carborundum and the rest of the scene in Davidson’s tiny office flashed through her mind once again, Marjorie was certain of it.
“Carrie?” she called, scurrying onto the sales floor.
“Yes?” Carrie answered patiently as she simultaneously propped a telephone receiver between her ear and shoulder and rang up a sale.
“Where’s our last copy of Lewis and Short?”
“Reference section, foreign language gondola, bottom shelf, toward the far end.”
Marjorie found A Latin Dictionary by Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short exactly where Carrie said it was. She had the bulky tome open in her hands and was eagerly reading from it even before she’d made it back to the stockroom.
Five minutes later she was back on the sales floor, hurrying toward the front door.
“I’ll try to be back by five-thirty,” she told Carrie breathlessly on her way out.
Carrie took advantage of the first respite from the late-afternoon trickle of customers to find the legal pad on Marjorie’s desk and satisfy her curiosity about the sudden exit. The respite lasted about ninety seconds. This proved ample.
Worst Case Scenario Page 11