Suddenly Betsy’s stomping gait faltered and slowed, and she came to a gradual stop, like a ship easing into a berth. She spread her broad shoulders and hunched over. She heaved two or three times, as if sobbing, and suddenly sneezed—not a polite “atchoo” but a thermonuclear explosion so powerful that she staggered in place, nearly losing her balance, and some loitering Hispanic men on the other side of the boulevard looked up alertly, ready for action. She reached into the pocket of her trench coat and found a Kleenex, which she used to clean up the aftermath. She stomped several paces down the street to an overflowing public wastebasket. She pushed its spring-loaded door open with the back of her hand, but as she was dropping in the soaked and ruined Kleenex, a McDonald’s extra-large french-fries container tumbled out, pocked against the pavement, and began to roll along the sidewalk, driven by the wind like a tumbleweed.
“Sorry,” Betsy said, and began to stomp after it, like a defensive lineman pursuing a puppy. She aimed several tremendous stomps at it as she made her way down the sidewalk, drawing amused and admiring stares from the young men across the street. Finally she flattened it, bent down, yanked it out from under her shoe, and carried it half a block to the next waste container.
A few miles down the road from there was the Pentagon, and among those military people you could find quite a few who were principled enough to chase other people’s litter down the street during a windstorm. But this kind of thinking was not common in other parts of the capital, and certainly not where Betsy worked. Betsy hewed to it anyway, because she had the feeling that it was the only anchor she had, and that if she gave it up, she would be torn loose like a used Kleenex in a howling tunnel of wind and end up God only knew where.
She worked in the Rutherford T. Castleman Building, near the Courthouse Metro Station in downtown Rosslyn, and lived at the Bellevue Apartments a few blocks down the hill. It took her ten minutes to walk up in the morning and eight to walk down in the evening, though she did it in seven today, because from her office window she had noticed that the citybound vehicles on I-66 had their headlights on, implying rain to the west. As she approached the front door of the Bellevue, she looked back over her shoulder and did one careful scan of the area, looking for predators. Finding none, she swept her key card out with one deft move and pressed it against the electronic pad, then shouldered the door open the moment the lock clicked. As badly as she wanted to get home, she stood there patiently watching the door until its hydraulic closer drew it shut and the lock snapped to.
She walked through the lobby that looked impossibly luxurious to her eyes, took the elevator to ten, walked down the hall, and entered her apartment. She heaved a big sigh of relief as she snapped the last lock home—she was exhausted, and it was good to be home.
Strange noises were coming from the living room: feet thumping and sliding against the floor, and fast, rhythmic, deep breathing. Betsy sidled down the short hall toward the apartment’s one common room, which served as living, dining, and kitchen.
Her roommate of one week, Cassie, was dressed in tights and some kind of athlete’s brassiere. Her painstakingly cornrowed hair was pulled back into a tight bun, Walkman headphones clamped over the top, and she was sweating hard as she worked her way through an aerobics routine. Betsy had been taught not to stare, but she forgot herself for a few moments. She had heard of low-impact aerobics and high-impact aerobics, and she was pretty sure that she was watching the latter, and that Cassie wasn’t doing it for the first time. Her jog bra left her midriff bare, so if she had had an ounce of fat on her body, it would have shown.
Betsy was partly fascinated and partly intimidated to be sharing an apartment with this exotic person. Young, single government employees in Washington had to get used to playing the roommate game; this was Betsy’s third apartment, and Cassie was her seventh roommate, in five years. The previous one had been TDY’d to Munich on short notice, so Betsy had placed an ad on a computer bulletin board, and they had sent her Cassie. Betsy’s employer was picky about whom she lived with. It was best to live alone, and if that didn’t work, they didn’t want her trolling for roommates in public venues.
What it came down to was that Betsy had to live with people who, like her, had been pretty carefully checked out by Uncle Sam. The wallet sitting on Cassie’s bedside table, containing an FBI badge and ID card, proved she was clean enough to share an apartment with Betsy.
She backed stealthily out of the living room, as if she’d intruded on some private act, and retreated to the bathroom. She took off her clothes, hanging them on the back of the door, and turned on the shower. Then she faced the mirror, raised her left elbow over her head, and gently hefted her left breast in her right hand. She leaned toward the mirror.
The door flew open; Betsy’s clothes fell off the hook into a heap on the floor. Cassie was a long stride into the room before she stopped herself. “Oh! Pardon me,” she said. She said it sincerely. But she wasn’t really embarrassed, which fascinated and somewhat irritated Betsy—who, if she had made the same mistake, would have spent the rest of the month apologizing for it.
Cassie had planted herself on the bathroom floor now and was staring fixedly at Betsy’s breast, her brow furrowed, her big brown eyes burning like coals. She reached up and stripped the headphones off, then took another step toward Betsy. “What the hell is that?” she said, as if she were busting some criminal who’d been caught flat-footed with a bale of sinsemilla in his arms.
Betsy was so stunned by this frank intrusion that she didn’t have a chance to get embarrassed. She stared at her breast in the mirror as if it were a piece of frozen evidence in a crime lab. She wasn’t sure how to answer Cassie’s question: she knew the answer perfectly well, but she was afraid that if she told the story, she might start blubbering. She pointed to a long, narrow bruise on the side of her breast. “Thumb,” she said. Then she pointed to another one, at an angle to the first. “Index finger.” A third, parallel to the second. “Third finger. Ring finger, just a shadow—no trace of the pinkie.”
“Well!” Cassie said. “I could run and get a fingerprint kit. But I suppose you already know who did it.”
Howard King. But Betsy didn’t say anything, just heaved a big sigh, trying to head off the crying urge.
“How about the one on your back? It’s straight and angular.”
“Filing cabinet,” Betsy said.
“Those bruises are a few hours old,” Cassie said with professional certainty, “so it happened at work, not on the way home. Musta been your su-per-vi-sor.” She was watching Betsy’s face in the mirror as she said this, and Betsy’s face answered the question for her.
“I bruise easy.” Betsy dropped her elbow to her side, the examination complete.
Suddenly Cassie was excited again. “And what the fuck is this? What are these people doing to you, anyway?”
Cassie was pointing to a wide bruise that encircled Betsy’s upper arm. Then she recognized it and calmed down. “Oh. Polygraph.” Unself-consciously, she pulled her tights down and sat on the toilet. Betsy marveled at this woman, who could do things like peeing in front of a near stranger while seeming as poised as if she were sitting at a sidewalk café sipping cappuccino.
Cassie’s brow wrinkled up again. “The polygraph guy didn’t grope you, did he?”
“Nah.” Betsy said. She could have said a lot more, but she was pretty sure her voice would quaver. Cassie, having finished with a clinical examination of Betsy’s breast and arm, now zeroed in on her face. “I’m getting you a beer, Idaho,” she said. “Gotta get you to open up a little.”
“No, thanks,” Betsy said. “I don’t care for beer, thank you.”
“Then you take your shower and I’ll fix you something and you’ll never know it has booze in it. That’s what you need.” Cassie finished, pulled her tights back up, and paused in the doorway. “You a Mormon, ain’t you? I just figured that out. I always heard that the Agency was full of Mormons.”
“Yep,” Bet
sy said. “Born and raised.”
“Then let’s just say I’m going to fix you a drink, Ida, and it’ll be your job to drink it and my job to know what it’s made of. Fair?”
Betsy was not very good at turning people down, especially articulate people with strong personalities. “Yes,” she said.
Cassie smiled, pivoted on the ball of one foot, reached out with a pointed toe, and triggered the flush lever. “One more immortal soul,” she said, “down the toilet. See you in a few, Ida.”
five
IT ALL looked real easy once Clyde got all the maps spread out on the basement floor.
The floor of his actual house would not have been a good place for them because the Big Boss had gone into a kind of nesting overdrive where even leaving a little piece of food on the floor set her off. Spreading out a couple hundred square feet of maps would have been spouse abuse—always the furthest thing from Clyde’s mind.
So instead he went to the apartment building that Buck Chandler had just sold him. It was located on North Seventh Street in Nishnabotna, several blocks west of Central Avenue, not far from the freight yard and about half an inch above the mean water table. He had thrown his big push broom into the back of his truck on the way down there, and so he started by pushing all the old dust, bent nails, and hunks of shattered drywall back into the corners of the basement. There were also a lot of cigarette ash and broken beer bottles left over from teenagers breaking in and partying in the basement.
Clyde took his very large-scale maps of Forks County and placed them edge to edge on the basement floor until the entire county was laid out in front of him, minus two square places where Marie O’Connor had been temporarily out of maps. The scale of the maps was so large that a mile on the ground worked out to almost a foot on paper. Consequently, Clyde’s new strategic map of Forks County, fully assembled, was about twenty feet square.
He untied the thick braided laces of his high-top steel-toed boots, unhooked the laces from the many brass hooks that marched up his ankles and shins, wrestled the boots off his feet, and left them sitting on the floor. Then he stepped onto the map of Forks County. His socks had got damp from perspiration, and wherever he went, he left moist, wrinkled, footprint-sized patches on the map. All the tiny little black squares that represented houses were spread out around him like pepper spilled across a table.
In order to see much, Clyde had to get down on his hands and knees. The lightbulb sockets screwed onto the joists above his head were all empty. The basement had half a dozen small windows near the ceiling, which were barely above ground level.
The job that was ahead of Clyde did not look like such a big deal from there. Most of Forks County was empty, save for farm buildings spread miles apart. He could see now that he would have to resist the tendency to fritter away all his time out in the middle of nowhere, covering lots of territory but not drumming up that many actual votes. All the population, hence all the votes, were centered in the twin cities of Wapsipinicon and Nishnabotna.
Which was kind of ironic, because the cities had their own police forces. They didn’t pay much attention to sheriff-related matters. It was the farmers out around the edges of the county who really needed to get rid of Kevin Mullowney and replace him with a person like Clyde.
But that was neither here nor there. For Clyde, here was Nishnabotna (population thirty-two thousand) and there was Wapsipinicon (population twenty-one thousand, plus about twenty-five thousand students at Eastern Iowa University).
The two cities each straddled a river of the same name. The Wapsipinicon came in from the northwest, flowed through the sandstone bluffs of Palisades State Park, then passed into the town of Wapsipinicon, through the verdant campus of EIU, and into Riverside Park.
The Nishnabotna came in from the north. Just north of town it was dammed up to make Lake Pla-mor. Then it ran along the railyards and industrial flatlands of Nishnabotna and joined up with the Wapsipinicon to form the Iowa River, which then flowed thirty or so miles down to the southeast and joined up with the Father of Waters, which, technically speaking, ran all the way to New Orleans, Louisiana.
“I’ll just—I’ll just be going,” a voice said.
The voice was deep and rough and sounded like truck tires driving on a gravel road. It was coming from a dark corner of the basement, a nook that had been set into the wall as a kind of root cellar/tornado shelter. Clyde heard something moving back there.
A large, hunched, dark form emerged from the little three-sided room. Poised on his hands and knees in the middle of Forks County and looking up squinty-eyed into the dim light, Clyde could see only his silhouette. It was hard to tell whether he was looking at a water heater, an abandoned refrigerator, or a human being. When it moved a little, he decided the latter, but in terms of size and shape it was about halfway between a water heater and a refrigerator.
The shape moved fast considering it was clearly drunk and had just got up. Clyde tried to stand, but he was still on one knee when the man dived into him, wrapping his arms around Clyde’s waist, and slammed him backward into the concrete. There were ways to foil this type of takedown, but Clyde could not really use them because he had to concentrate all his efforts on not getting the back of his head smashed on the floor.
He did a half twist as he was falling backward and flung one arm above his head, so that his armpit, instead of the back of his skull, absorbed the successive impacts of his own weight and Tab Templeton’s 450-some pounds.
Clyde Banks and Tab Templeton had been separated by two years of age and several weight classes when they’d been in school, and consequently had never gone mano a mano until both had graduated to the less scrupulously fair adult world. Since then they had gone at it a total of nine times—mostly in the back room of the Barge On Inn, but most memorably during the climactic third year of the Nishnabotna Meat strike when the strikers had got Tab liquored up, placed an ax handle in his mitts, and sent him forth to wreak some mayhem. The Heavyweight had been too disoriented to know which were scabs and which were strikers, but when Clyde had shown up to arrest him, acting on the orders of Sheriff Mullowney, Tab had suddenly realized who his opponent was and had begun to swing the ax handle terrifyingly. Clyde, for his part, was armed with his nightstick, Excalibur, which had very recently been turned from a block of yellow Osage-orange wood, dense as uranium, by his grandfather Ebenezer. The two had done battle in the center of a vast ring of cheering strikers and scabs. Clyde had—at some length, and after suffering many injuries—brought his man in.
Clyde kept shaking his head back and forth, trying to dislodge Tab’s hand from his jaw and Tab kept putting it back there. Clyde did not recognize this move at all until he finally figured out that it was not really a wrestling move per se; it was an attempt to snap Clyde’s neck.
Some dim light was coming in through a window above them and glancing off the multiple layers of clothing that The Heavyweight was wearing; around his vast conical neck Clyde counted four separate collars nested inside one another and a T-shirt underneath that.
Underneath the T-shirt was something else, some kind of shiny, colorful fabric that had got dull and dirty with the years. Realizing what it was, Clyde worked his one free hand down the back of The Heavyweight’s neck, grabbed it, and yanked it off.
It was a loop of ribbon with something thick and heavy dangling off it. Clyde held it up so that it rotated and glowed in the light—a yellow metal disk with a design stamped into one side and some words. Clyde didn’t have the leisure to read it, but he already knew what it said:
GAMES OF THE XIX OLYMPIAD
MONTREAL 1976
WRESTLING
The Heavyweight took his hand off Clyde’s chin and grabbed for his gold medal, but Clyde was ready for that; he tossed it away and heard it go plink in the corner of the room.
Just like that, he was gone. The terrible pressure was gone from Clyde’s ribs and legs. He scrambled to his feet, snatched up his boots, and made for the stairway, kee
ping one eye on Tab Templeton, who was on his hands and knees in the corner of the basement, pawing through debris looking for his medal.
He found it a lot faster than Clyde was really expecting him to and followed Clyde up the steps; Clyde could feel the structure of the stairway and of the building to which it was attached sagging downward, as if The Heavyweight could pull Clyde down toward him simply by walking up the steps and tearing the house and all its contents into the central pit.
But Clyde made it out the front door and got to his truck, which was parked sideways in the front yard. He vaulted over the edge into the truck’s box, picked up the spare tire, stepped onto the truck’s roof to give himself more altitude, and heaved it at The Heavyweight as he was emerging from the front door with a section map of Nishnabotna County wrapped around one of his lower legs.
It looked as if the spare tire bounced right off Tab Templeton’s thick, bearded, mashed-in face, but in fact it probably just bounced off his chest. Normal body-part terminology did not always apply in the clearest sense to The Heavyweight, with his spherical physiognomy and short, fat, stunted extremities.
He brushed the spare tire off as if it were an acorn falling out of a tree, but he stopped on the edge of the front porch to take his gold medal and put it carefully around his neck. Then he dropped the medal down inside his shirt.
This gave Clyde the time he needed to sort through all the stuff in the back of his truck and find a tire chain, roughly twenty or thirty pounds of rusty iron. He held it in the middle so that about three feet of it dangled down on either side of his hand, and he stood in the middle of the truck’s box so that The Heavyweight would not be able to get him by the legs.
The Cobweb Page 4