"So the odds of us learning who Black became and where he went are not exceedingly good," I said.
More crunching. He said, "Except for the obvious. Suppose Black is actually dead now. Suppose he's the one sitting in that morgue, the unsuccessful assassin. Suppose it looks like the feds gave a free pass to some armored car robber more than twenty years ago, supplied him with money and a whole new life, and he turns into some sort of presidential assassin."
"The damned question is, why does some robber flunky from Chelsea, Massachusetts, end up shooting at the president, especially after he's taken a ride on the federal gravy train. How does point A lead to point B? And what's the role of Paul Stemple?"
Havlicek replied, "Maybe it was a hired hit. Maybe the guy's in the program. He's settled into his new life. He's working in some menial job, not making the money he was used to making when he was hitting banks and Brink's trucks back in the early eighties. And along comes this offer. Or maybe he seeks it out. You know, calls his old contacts. Maybe it's so good it makes him rich for life."
From the limited knowledge I had of Black, it didn't sound like him.
Here was a guy who was always the ringleader, always gliding above the fray, letting others do the dirty work, telling them how to do it but never doing it himself. He was smart, savvy, even worldly. No, he wouldn't be the type to pick up an automatic rifle and take that kind of risk at Congressional just for the cash. He was smart enough to find another way.
"He's too sharp," I said. "He's a chief, not an Indian. He's not going to get his hands dirty like that for the cash."
Havlicek washed down most of a mouthful of corn chips with a pull of beer and said, "Well, maybe he really wanted this president to be dead for some reason."
"That's what bothers me," I said. "And that's what gets to the point of my anonymous friend, who seems to think that if we find out about the relationship between Black and the president, we'll know why this shooting occurred. That's the crux right there, isn't it? And it seems like stating the obvious to say it must have something to do with Stemple, or Stemple's pardon must be some way involved, no?"
Havlicek nodded.
I said, "I know this is all conjecture, but if you play this out a little further, can you assume that the FBI is covering up the identity of the shooter out of raw embarrassment that one of their witnesses went off and made a mockery of them by trying to kill the president? I mean, if something like that gets public, they're going to have the news media and congressional oversight investigators up one side of the program and down the other, and their secrecy is pretty much blown forever. Maybe the program itself is even lost in the media maelstrom.
"So our immediate mission now," I concluded, "is to find Paul Stemple, and find him fast. There's an election at stake in this, and that gives us two days. We find him, we get some answers."
"And on that point," Havlicek said, in a newly dramatic tone, "we're in some luck."
I shot him a curious look. He pulled out his ancient wallet, shuffled through a collection of cards and old papers, and pulled out a small sheet. He flicked his finger against it and added, "When you first told me about Stemple and the pardon last week, I did a little research on him. I don't like coincidences. I suspected his name might come back into this story."
"So what do you have?" I asked, impressed and embarrassed that I hadn't thought the same way.
"Well, I had to go to hell and back to get this, but I think I have a line on where Stemple is living now, and I think it's right here in D.c. I got ahold of his Social Security number through a contact I have. I used that to nail some of his bank records. I found out that he made some recent withdrawals in Washington. I got some gnome in the Pentagon to tell me he was a Korean War vet, and that he stopped at a local VA hospital last week. I canvassed some short-term real estate brokers on Capitol Hill, where one of the withdrawals was made, and one guy told me he rented an apartment to him. Some skill, some luck." He made a motion to stand up, first placing the nearly empty bag of Fritos from his lap onto the coffee table. "So next stop: his house."
As he stretched his back, Havlicek added, "Jesus Christ. We have a member of the federal witness protection program, Curtis Black, who is in some way involved in an assassination attempt. We have someone taking shots at you. We have a senior FBI official providing us information devastating to his agency. And we have some anonymous source who seems to have all the world's information in the palm of his hand. One quick question: who plays me in the movie?"
I replied, "I don't know. Ernest Borgnine?"
"Screw you. He's about fifty pounds heavier than me. And isn't he dead?"
He ambled off to the kitchen with a few empty cans, calling out, "Give Martin a quick call and let him know you're all right. The guy was a train wreck today."
The hour was late, but Martin picked up on the first ring, as if once again he had been waiting by the phone. I gave him the update on my trip and progress, let him know we were heading out, and told him we'd gather in the morning.
"Boston's all over me to get something good in print," he said, referring to the editors. "Concentrate on a quick-but good-turnover.
Meantime, I'll hold them off as long as I can, until we know we're ready to pop."
On his point about Boston breathing down our necks, there is a tendency in this business for the editors back at the main office to think that all us overpaid layabouts down in the Washington bureau are doing little more than waddling over to the Palm for lunch and Morton's for dinner, and in between tapping into the capital's vast public relations machine to be spoon-fed press releases on the latest triumphs of our elected officials. These same God-fearing editors believe that any time we choose, we can simply call up the White House and get the president on the line, or trundle over to the J. Edgar Hoover Building and have FBI commanders invite us into their offices and open up their active case files for us to peruse, all in the name of the public's right to know. Well, Washington reporting is hard work, and what we needed now was persistence and patience-two qualities that Martin understood, God bless him.
When I hung up, I looked at the clock and saw that it was edging past midnight. My day had begun long before dawn. I wasn't so much tired as physically and mentally demolished. My ribs hurt, and so did my head. Yet it was time to forge on. I was not going to be the guy to hold up this story. Quite the contrary, if Havlicek had a lead, I wanted to follow it.
As we gathered some notebooks and coats, Havlicek asked, "You ever think about what you'd do if you suddenly came into a couple of million dollars? Would you stay in the business? Would you work late at night like this, go through all the deadline stress that we have, all the thankless bullshit? Or would you just kick back and live a life of leisure?"
"What, you just find out you're an heir to the throne of Poland, and they want you to come home and live in the castle?" I asked.
He gave me a look out of the corner of his eye, otherwise ignoring my question. He said, "I get two million bucks, I wouldn't change anything. This whole thing is too much fun." They were the most introspective words I had ever heard him say. Then he added, "Let's go."
"I'll drive," I said.
On the sidewalk, he said, "De Niro."
"What?" I asked.
"De Niro. I bet they get De Niro to play me."
I said, "What, you on heroin? Try Leslie Nielsen."
He smiled and shook his head, this man unlike any other I had ever known.
eighteen
Sunday, November 5
My car was parked at the curb out front. When I started it up, the engine turned bravely in the cold, dry air of an early-winter's night.
Havlicek closed his coat around him in an exaggerated plea for heat.
"Hey, I talked to your FBI friend Stevens today," he said.
"Oh, yeah? You trying to steal my sources?" I asked, jokingly.
He patted the pockets of his coat, looked at me more urgently, and said, "I forgot a tape recorder. You
have one?"
"Damn, it's inside." I had started to pull the keys out of the ignition so I could get into my house when politeness once again got the better of me. Knowing I had a spare door key ingeniously stashed under a loose brick in my front garden, I let the engine run so the heat would crank up. "Hold on," I said. "I'll be right back."
I'll never forget his words: "Hurry the hell up. I'm fricking freezing."
Inside, I had hit the third step on my way up to my study, where the microcassette recorder sat on the shelf of an antique bookcase, when I heard the sound. At first, it was like a truck had backfired on the street outside. That was followed by what could have been a plane hitting my house, or an enormous clap of thunder, so strong that the resulting vibrations flung me to the ground, slamming my head against the railing, leaving me in a momentary daze tumbling down the stairs.
In that daze, I recall windows smashing in, the spray of glass, the blast of cold air. For reasons I can't explain, I recall seeing my front door, which I must have left ajar, heave open, and I half expected to see some masked man in a Ninja suit and a machine gun race inside my house. I recall seeing a wave of destruction, as if the whole thing were happening in slow motion-lamps falling off tables, pictures plummeting from walls and cracking on the floor, a chandelier that my wife's family gave us crashing down from above.
Within what must have been seconds, as the noise gave way to a grotesque silence, I understood that something had exploded, probably right out front. I picked myself up without realizing that blood was flowing from a gash in my head and raced out the front door. On the sidewalk and street, in the cold night, the various parts of my car were strewn asunder. A small fire burned in the engine, exposed by the open hood.
I scanned the area furiously, looking for Havlicek. I spotted the door of my car on the sidewalk. The hood was sitting in the middle of the street. There was singed, broken glass everywhere I looked, sparkling softly in the streetlights. Finally, my eyes were drawn to the still form of Havlicek, or at least his tattered body, slumped against my house, his legs splayed open, his head concealed by one of his arms.
I did what anyone would do: I raced over to him, rolled him over so he was facing me, and saw that his skull was cracked open. Blood and God only knows what else poured out of the hole. Half his left ear had been ripped off. He was no longer wearing any shoes, and soot or burn marks covered most of his clothing.
His eyes were closed. My first impulse was to shake him, to yell in his face, to tell him he'd be all right. I knew, though, that if he was alive, shaking him would only cause more blood to flow out of his head. I felt his throat, knowing nothing about where a pulse might be, but in hopes I would suddenly learn. I moved my hand around a couple of different ways, trying to maintain some calm. To my absolute amazement, I found a slow pulse.
"Steve, you're going to be all right," I said, softly. I yanked my coat off and laid it over his form, remembering some first aid guide I must have read somewhere that said you always keep a trauma victim warm. "Stay with me, Steve," I said, speaking gently into his whole ear. "Stay with me. Just stay with me. Hang on. Help is on the way.
Everything's going to be all right."
I glanced around the neighborhood and saw several people emerge onto their front stoops, a collective look of panic on their faces. I shattered the odd silence by yelling, "Is there a doctor around?" I got no response. You would think in the heart of Georgetown there would be at least one doctor on my block, but this being Washington, you made your money in television and in the lobbies of Congress, pushing various legislation, not helping those who needed to be nursed back to health. Someone finally opened a door and hollered back, "I've called for help." Nice of you to get involved, I thought.
I turned back to Havlicek. His neck was resting in one of my hands.
His garnet-colored blood was dripping onto my wrist and coagulating on the cold ground.
"Everything's all right," I said over and over again, talking, probably, as much to myself as to him. "We're not going to let those bastards beat us," I said. "They're not going to beat us. You're going to be all right."
All of time seemed to screech to a halt out here on the sidewalk of Twenty-eighth Street, amid the morbid ruins that were once my house and car. The silence was still deafening. At this hour, late on a Saturday night, or rather early on Sunday morning, there wasn't even any traffic. I felt myself start to panic, felt myself want to scream at someone, to assess blame, to seek revenge. Eventually, in the distance, I heard the vague sound of a siren, and over my shoulder, a voice said to me, "Here, I have a blanket and some towels."
A neighbor who I hazily recognized spread the blanket across Havlicek's form. I took the towel and pressed it gently to Havlicek's head, trying to stem the flow of blood. "He's alive," I said. "He's alive, and he's going to be all right."
And just like that, Havlicek opened one eye and looked at me. My heart was pumping so hard it almost exploded through my chest. I hadn't actually believed anything I had said about him being all right.
I looked at him in unabashed amazement and said excitedly, "You're fine, Steve. You're going to be fine. Hear that ambulance. It's about a minute away. Everything's going to be all right. Hang in there with me."
Havlicek tried to mumble something in return, but it was incoherent, the talk of someone weak and in shock. I said, "Don't speak. Save yourself. Stay with me. Stay with me. Help is on the way."
Havlicek being Havlicek, he didn't bother to listen. He continued to mumble. His one eye was open, looking at me. His second eye popped open as well. I told him again to stay quiet. When he still didn't listen, I said, "Steve, do yourself a favor and shut up."
Then, summoning what appeared to be an inordinate amount of energy, Havlicek blurted out, "My pocket."
"Your pocket?" I asked him, still speaking softly, not raising my voice, not acting panicked, although all around us were the parts of what a few minutes ago was my Honda Accord, and before me, my friend was on the doorstep of death, about to ring the bell.
He nodded his head. I fished through his pants pocket, and he looked at me with some exasperation, saying, "Coat."
In the background, the siren kept getting closer, weaving through Georgetown. In the foreground, people weren't so much staring at us as gawking, as if they never had a car bomb explode on their block before in the early hours of a Sunday morning. I reached into the inside pocket of his navy blazer and found a sheet of white paper. I put it in my pocket without looking at it. He seemed content, and closed his eyes.
"Don't go anywhere, Steve," I said. "Hang tough for me. Just hang tough, and you're going to be fine."
I didn't even realize that my hand was on his and that he had been gripping one of my fingers. I didn't realize it until I felt his grip loosen, his hand become completely slack. He gave one hard exhale, and his facial expression changed completely. When I put a finger under his nose, his breathing seemed to have stopped.
I said, louder, "No, Steve. No. You're staying with me here. I need you on this. Your wife, she needs you. Don't go anywhere." The sirens seemed to multiply and got increasingly louder. It sounded like they were only a block or so away. I had my other hand cupped on the back of his head, and despite myself, shook him a bit.
"Come on, Steve. We've come too far. We don't have that much further to go. Stay with me."
With that, I started to breathe into his mouth, to push air into his system. But the sad fact of the situation was that I didn't have a clue what I was doing. It all seemed so futile. When the ambulance pulled up and the EMT'S leaped out, I told them I thought he had just stopped breathing a few minutes ago. One of the men put an oxygen cup over his mouth. Another thumped at his chest. Two more raced over with a stretcher. I backed away, fading into the background, almost tripping over what must have been the passenger-side door to my car.
A woman in an official-looking jumpsuit approached me and asked if I was all right. I replied that I was fine, and she sa
id, "You know you have a cut on your head?" She wiped a cloth over it and told me to come with her. I shook my head, never really diverting my eyes from Havlicek and all the men around him. She disappeared and came back in a moment, told me to stay still, and carefully placed a bandage on my temple. "You'll be all right for now," she said. Physically, yeah.
The rest, I wasn't so sure.
At that precise point, it hit me-the dog. I turned back and raced toward the house and into the front door, which was open. The inside looked, well, like a bomb had hit it. On the floor in the middle of the living room, Baker was sprawled out on the rug, the shattered chandelier pinning him to the floor. When I knelt down in the broken shards of glass, he didn't so much cry as whimper, his eyes looking at me in a pleading pursuit of relief.
They say you never approach a wounded dog, that it might even attack its master to protect itself. Screw that. I kissed his muzzle and rubbed his ear and told him he was going to be fine. I very gently pulled part of the chandelier off his back end. I gingerly pulled some shards of glass off his fur. He seemed unable to move, stuck on his side. Whenever my hand or leg went near his mouth, he licked me furiously, almost apologetically. A wounded wolf in the wild he was not.
I made a move to run outside and get help, but when I did, Baker tried to get up, found himself overcome by pain and started to give a plaintive wail. Rather than leave, I covered him with a throw from my couch, scooped him up in my arms, and took him outside into the street.
I hoped against hope that the first cop I saw would be a dog lover. A nondog person, they'd just as soon let Baker die in a pool of his own blood. A dog person would carry him on their back to the vet if they had to.
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