“What is it?” Millikan began.
“It’s probably nothing, sir.”
“Now, there is very little you can tell me that is going to disturb me. Aziz has confirmed that we have nothing to fear in Kuwait. He has confirmed that they are rearming to attack Iran again. My God, what would they have to gain in going into Kuwait? More oil? So what is it?”
“Well, sir, the Agency was giving a briefing on Iraq to our agriculture attaché to Baghdad, who was back in Washington for a couple of days. Nothing out of the ordinary—just a few analysts sitting around with the attaché sharing some of their recent findings with him.”
“So?”
“Well, sir, it seems that one of the analysts at the Agency told the attaché that the Iraqis are misusing the three-hundred-million-dollar Food for Peace funds to—in her opinion—buy or develop weapons.”
“What!” Millikan could hardly believe his ears; it had to be a mistake. “What was a military analyst doing in a briefing with an ag attaché?”
Dellinger looked stricken. “It wasn’t a military analyst,” he said. “It was an ag analyst.”
Millikan was still too thunderstruck to become enraged. “You’re telling me that some aggie took it upon himself, first of all, to stray into military affairs, and then to offer his own personal opinions about Saddam’s military policies to one of our diplomats?”
“Her opinions. The analyst in question is female.”
Millikan took a few deep breaths. “Pray continue,” he said.
“Well, when this attaché got back to Baghdad, he told the deputy chief of mission, who told the ambassador, who told Baker, who told the President.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Millikan said, and slapped the table so hard it sounded like a gunshot.
“While you were in the bathroom with Aziz, I was called to the phone and given a heads up. I don’t think it’s important. But I thought I would pass it on to you.”
That this had happened at the end of a nearly perfect day made Millikan want to scream. But he didn’t scream. In his dreams, before six o’clock in the morning, he was allowed to scream. After six o’clock in the morning, he didn’t scream.
But he was allowed to get pissed off. “You don’t think it’s important. The President has heard about it, Aziz probably rushed back to Baghdad because of it, but you don’t think it’s important. Goddamn it! Don’t those assholes know that we’re making foreign policy here? Can’t I have a single meeting with my colleague without having it ruined by the inexcusable behavior of some silly bitch of an analyst?”
Richard Dellinger was not about to point out how the U.S. government worked at a time like this. He merely said, “I don’t know, sir.”
“We are not going to lose our Middle-Eastern policy because some bottom-fish bean counter can’t keep her mouth shut. Tell the pilot to get the plane ready. We’re going back ahead of schedule.”
three
A STRIP mall south of Wapsipinicon was home to the real-estate offices of Buck and Grace Chandler, who had acted as Clyde’s brokers on his recent purchase of an apartment building in Nishnabotna. On his visits to that office he had frequently passed the door of an even smaller and less expensive office that had been leased by Dr. Jerry Tompkins, late of the Eastern Iowa University Political Science Department (he had been denied tenure), and currently the principal of Tompkins and Associates Pollsters and Consultants.
The “Associates” were his wife and his mother. The latter, a plump woman in a Sunday dress, perched like a flagpole sitter on a small armless swivel chair in the front room, gazing fixedly at the silent telephone with its intimidating row of buttons. The former, an angular creature in a lavender jogging suit, was folded into a corner of the room with her sharp nose bent so close to the screen of a Macintosh that her waxy flesh was suffused with its cadaverous glow. The screen was covered with a grid of boxes with numbers in them. Mrs. Tompkins was pawing fretfully at the tabletop with her right hand, which, as Clyde realized, concealed one of those computer mouses. She was talking to herself quietly.
Dr. Tompkins came out from the back as if he had been quite busy and had forgotten all about Clyde’s free appointment. He was a rangy fellow with a sparse beard, dressed in a limp three-piece suit and rimless glasses with large, panoramic lenses. The one free no-strings-attached consultation lasted fifteen minutes and mostly consisted of Dr. Tompkins telling Clyde that he didn’t have a persona, and that, if he was going to be a public figure, he needed to get started on building one as soon as possible—a daunting task that would be infinitely easier if Dr. Jerry Tompkins was on hand to manage it. There was no small talk, fetching of coffee, or other preparatory formalities. It struck Clyde as a chilly way of doing business, at least by Nishnabotna standards; but perhaps here in Wapsipinicon people did not have so much time to burn on such unproductive activities as shooting the breeze—especially people with Ph.D.’s and computers. Clyde came away from his free consultation with nothing but a feeling of personal inadequacy and a perverse desire to return to Tompkins and Associates as a paying customer.
He had gone in there only because Terry Stonefield, chairman of the Forks County Republican party, had intimated to him that there would be a campaign budget. But a few days later Terry Stonefield convened, on short notice, the County GOP Strategy Session ’90, wherein Clyde, the other Republican candidates, Terry Stonefield, and a few other important Forks Republicans sat around a conference table at one of Terry’s offices for a few hours drinking coffee and mostly agreeing with whatever Terry said. Clyde, who was not accustomed to meetings, was slow to get the gist of the proceedings, but eventually he divined that, in the view of Terry and the other Republicans, the County Commissioner’s race was where the smart money was. They built the roads and bridges, assessed tax rates, and were, in general, where the governmental rubber hit the road.
Once this decision was made, an awkward silence ensued in which Clyde Banks and Barnabas Klopf, M.D., the incumbent candidate for county coroner, were the focus of much awkward, furtive scrutiny.
“You see, Clyde and Barney,” Terry finally said, “politics looks different when you’re on the inside. Politics is like a car. When you’re on the outside, all you see is this big metal boxy thing with windows and tires and lights, windshield wipers and door handles and such—anyway, the point is that it goes and you don’t understand why. But if you’re a mechanic, if you’re on the inside, you see the little . . . thingies and crank rods . . .”
“Lifters,” Clyde mumbled.
Terry lunged at the offering like a drowning man going after a rope. “Yes. The lifters. You see my point, Clyde. When you see it on the inside, you know how to soup it up. How to hot-rod the car. And let me tell you that the way to make the car that is the Forks County GOP really get out there and lay a patch is to concentrate on that County Commissioner’s race. Because I think we’d all agree”—Terry paused and looked meaningfully around the table, gathering consensus before he had even made his point—“that those darn Commissioners have coattails a hundred miles long.”
“So it’s coattails, then,” Clyde said after a long silence.
“Clyde, you’re going to make a fine mechanic,” Terry said.
The upshot was that Clyde’s budget was mostly transferred to the County Commissioner’s race, leaving Clyde without the wisdom of Dr. Jerry Tompkins except for the vaguely remembered, complimentary admonition that he must develop a persona and become a public figure. As a sort of consolation prize, Terry Stonefield gave Clyde the phone number of a company down in Arkansas called Razorback Media, which gave Clyde an astonishingly low price on bumper stickers, as long as he had them printed in white on University of Arkansas red.
Beyond the bumper stickers, all his politicking and persona building were going to have to be done on his own time. Which was how he hit upon his campaign strategy, which brought him to the office of the county surveyor.
“Very large.”
Clyde could never rem
ember the difference between large-scale maps and small-scale maps until he read The Hound of the Baskervilles. There is a scene early in Hound where Sherlock bursts in carrying a bunch of maps of Baskerville-land and Watson asks whether they are large-scale maps. Sherlock’s mnemonic reply was tattooed on Clyde’s brain like a subdural hematoma.
The sheriff’s department had many maps of its assigned bailiwick tacked to the walls. When Clyde had asked his boss, County Sheriff Kevin Mullowney, where those maps had come from, Mullowney had tilted his head back to look at Clyde under the lenses of his tinted bifocals. This small adjustment enabled Mullowney to make believe that he was looking downward at Clyde from a greater altitude. In fact Clyde was taller than Mullowney; Clyde had wrestled at 192, and Mullowney was always around 167 or thereabouts. Among his many other personality disorders, Mullowney had the chip-on-his-shoulder attitude typical of a wrestler who believed that he could have attained greater glory if he had weighed a little more than he really did. Since graduating from high school three years ahead of Clyde, Mullowney had compensated for this by ballooning well past the 192 mark.
“Why would anyone want a map like that?” Mullowney had said. As far as Mullowney was concerned, these very large-scale maps were secret cop intelligence that should not be allowed to fall into the hands of ordinary citizens, or even mere deputies such as Clyde.
“Looking at some real estate,” Clyde had said immediately and, he thought, convincingly.
So far his decision was a private thing, a thing that Clyde had done inside his own head, and he didn’t want to reveal it to anyone just yet, least of all his opponent, who was also his boss. So he said he was looking at some real estate.
“How many of them things you own now?” Mullowney said, tilting his head down to a more normal position, relieving Clyde of his intense sheriff scrutiny.
“The house we live in. A lot down the street. And then two buildings with three units each.” Clyde went out of his way to use the jargon adopted by Buck Chandler, his realtor, and refer to them as units rather than apartments. It would be certain to cow Mullowney.
“They making money for you?” Mullowney asked a little less loudly. He had decided that his deputy might just be a sophisticated investment savant. Everyone knew that Clyde had been pretty good in school and had been a little surprised when he had refrained from going to college; maybe, Mullowney was seeming to think, maybe Clyde was even smarter than people had thought.
“They ain’t generating any cash flow, if that’s what you mean,” Clyde said. Use of the money term “cash flow” in these circumstances was guaranteed to keep Mullowney’s brain reeling.
“Then what’s the point of owning them?” Mullowney said.
“I’m buying them on fifteen-year mortgages,” Clyde said, “so the payments are pretty high.”
“Jeez. We got a thirty on our house.”
“Anything more than fifteen, you end up spending too much on interest,” Clyde said.
Mullowney was flummoxed. This was the first time it had ever occurred to him, or for that matter anyone in his vast extended family and circle of social contacts, that if you stuck with it long enough, it was actually possible to pay off a mortgage. For Mullowney making mortgage payments was kind of like putting money in the collection plate at church every Sunday: throwing money away for a payoff that would not materialize during your actual life span.
“That’s real smart,” Mullowney said. “Then what? You gonna retire?”
“Well,” Clyde said, “I was talking to Desiree about it and decided that I didn’t want to be still breaking up fights at the Barge On Inn when I was forty-five years old.”
“Oh,” Mullowney said. He sounded just a little bit surprised and almost hurt to think that a person might not be happy doing exactly that.
“Do you want large-scale maps or small-scale maps?” the secretary at the county surveyor’s said. Her name was on a plaque: Marie O’Connor. Marie O’Connor was apparently secure in the belief that she was the only person in Nishnabotna County who knew which was which. But when Marie O’Connor asked him that question, Clyde just quoted his Sherlock.
“Very large,” he said.
“Very large,” she murmured, crestfallen.
Clyde was a very large fellow. Every two weeks he stood naked in the garage, bent over the unfolded want-ads section of the newspaper, and ran a Sears electric hair clipper with a quarter-inch comb over his head, then ran the howling orifice of his shop vac over his scalp and pranced into the bathroom for a shower. His astigmatism forced him to wear glasses with very thick lenses that made his eyes look very large. Right now he was off duty, and so he was wearing jeans and very large work boots and a flannel shirt with holes burned through it from a battery-acid mishap some years back; through the holes flashes of a T-shirt could be seen on which the logo of the Texas Longhorns had been printed upside down on top of the logo of a cheerleading camp in South Carolina—Clyde bought all of his T-shirts at the monthly seconds sale down at the T-shirt plant. Clyde was also wearing an old Gooch’s Best seed-corn hat, which was on his head backward because the driver’s-side window of his pickup had been punched out by a drunken nephew of Sheriff Mullowney, whom Clyde had then arrested; the resulting air blast coming into the cab when he drove fast would catch the bill of his cap and whip it off his head unless Clyde turned it around backward.
“I need something where I can see individual houses and lots,” Clyde said.
“I’ll need the section numbers,” Marie O’Connor said.
“All of them,” Clyde said. “I need the whole county.”
Marie O’Connor was taken aback.
Clyde had not been planning to explain his plan, but as he now realized, this was counterproductive.
“See, I’m running for county sheriff,” he said. “Between now and Election Day, I intend to knock on every door in Forks County.”
“I thought Kevin Mullowney was running unopposed again,” Marie O’Connor said.
“Well, I just announced it,” Clyde said.
Actually he had just announced it that instant. This made him feel conspicuous and awkward—nothing new in and of itself. But he had just now recognized that if he could find out Marie O’Connor’s address, he could go ahead and check her house off the map. One less door to knock on.
“What are your qualifications?” Marie O’Connor asked.
“First in my class at the Iowa Law Enforcement Academy. Graduate of Wapsipinicon High School, former wrestler and football player.”
“What weight class?” Marie O’Connor said, ignoring all of the other qualifications.
“One ninety-two.”
“Didn’t you go to State?” she asked, squinting and cocking her head at him.
“Yes, ma’am. Three years in a row.”
“How’d you do?”
“Sophomore year I took third in my weight class, junior and senior year I took second.”
“That’s right. You’re the one who kept losing to Dick Dhont.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Clyde said, trying to gloss this over as fast as possible. “I’m a graduate of Iowa State Law Enforcement Academy in Des Moines, and I have five years’ experience as a deputy county sheriff.”
“Well,” Marie O’Connor said, “you’re talking to the wrong person. Kevin Mullowney’s second cousin is married to my daughter.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t you have any campaign literature?”
“Not on my person.”
“Any bumper stickers or shirts or hats or something?”
“Not yet. Actually, my campaign hasn’t been officially launched yet.”
“Well, you got your work cut out for you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Let’s see if we can’t get you all set up with some maps,” Marie O’Connor said in singsong tones. Clyde wondered, hardly for the last time, whether the strategy of knocking on doors was going to be a mistake.
four
A YOUNG
woman was walking by herself along Clarendon Boulevard in Rosslyn, Virginia. She was about as tall as the average adult male, and, seen from a distance, might have been mistaken for one if she hadn’t been wearing a skirt—her mother had always described her as “big-boned” or “sturdy” or some other euphemism, even during her teen years when her summer labors on the family potato farm had brought her body-fat percentage down to a level she’d never see again.
For five years she had been doing a job here that involved no physical exertion whatsoever and left no time for extracurricular workouts. So now an extra layer of chunkiness had been laid over that solid frame. She moved down the sidewalk in a peculiar wide-based, stomping gait, tottering from side to side with each stride, head high, back straight. Her chin-length hair swung back and forth, and her eyes, which had not taken well to contacts, met the world from behind thick lenses.
A cold and a warm front were fighting like Democrats and Republicans for control of the Potomac Valley, and the conflict generated enormous billowing clouds, electric royal-blue skies, thundershowers, and alternating gusts of warm spring and chill winter winds that came in off the river. But the winds flowed around Betsy as if she were cast in solid bronze, peeling the vent of her Wal-Mart trench coat open to expose the not very distinctive plaid of its lining, but not diverting Betsy by even one arc second from her straight course down the sidewalk.
As always, however, the higher centers of Betsy’s brain were concentrated on her job. The only thing about the weather that Betsy bothered to take note of was the pollen. They hadn’t had much pollen in Nampa. Being a farm girl, she knew what it was. But when she’d first come to D.C. and seen the yellow film covering everything in the month of April, she’d mistaken it for dust—until her immune system had reacted to it, in much the same way that a city girl would react to a live rat on her bathroom floor.
It was April now, and the motley collection of professionals’ gleaming Acuras and illegal immigrants’ shambling Gremlins parked along Clarendon Boulevard were covered with that yellow film again. It was stuck down with static electricity or something, and no wind could take it off. A few minutes ago a spattering of rain had swept in off the river, swirling the film into abstract patterns.
The Cobweb Page 3