Collateral Damage

by Michael Bowen

  Aside from his seventy-four inches in height, the slightly maimed finger was Michaelson’s only remarkable physical feature. Dark brown eyes dominated his face, looking almost black because of the contrast with his white hair. His expressions usually covered the narrow range suggested by Talleyrand’s mot about the perfectly trained diplomat: surtout, pas trop de zèle. Detached, professorial interest, polite skepticism, dispassionate curiosity, gentle irony, or qualified approval were all that untrained observers were likely to read in his face or hear in his voice. The most important attribute produced by his training and experience was something that those who didn’t know him well spotted only rarely, and then in such bracing form that they were often shocked. This was the ability to look the truth in the face, no matter how appalling it generally was, and to accept it dispassionately without kidding himself.

  The beginning and end of the Cold War served as nearly perfect bookends for Michaelson’s thirty-five eventful years as a Foreign Service officer. Stalin was still in power when Michaelson took the Foreign Service entrance examination, and the Berlin Wall had only a few years left to stand when he retired. In between he had been shot at twice that he knew of, counting the ricochet that cost him half a pinkie. Three times in a U.S. mission where he was in functional command he had ordered destruction of code books, which is the last thing you do before you turn things over to the marines. He had never turned things over to the marines.

  He had established and for a few years run the State Department’s Interagency Liaison Office, which was Foggy Bottom’s first grudging admission that institutional survival required it to spy systematically on the CIA. (Michaelson had once commented that the Central Intelligence Agency’s only deficiencies were a weakness in local geography and a problem with basic arithmetic: It thought that the Department of State was located in Langley, Virginia, and that the country had only one branch of government.) In the early seventies he had told President Nixon that India would beat Pakistan in a war. President Nixon hadn’t wanted to hear that, which was bad, and the event had proved Michaelson correct, which was worse.

  He had taken early retirement as a calculated gamble. While occupying an office at Brookings with other members of the government-in-waiting (or government-in-exile), he would write thin books and closely reasoned op-ed pieces; he would participate in symposiums; he would talk to reporters who wanted more than sound bites; he would mentor monographs on international affairs. And he would wait for a phone call from a pleasant-voiced woman asking him to hold, please, for the president’s chief of staff: We need a new national security adviser; or CIA director; or even (now) secretary of state—and the president would like to talk to you.

  He was still waiting. There were still people around who could make that call happen. He sometimes did things for those people, and he jealously guarded their good opinion of him. And there were many people around who thought that call might one day come. They sometimes did things for him.

  He and his wife had divorced a few years after the Indo-Pakistani War, when it had become clear he was probably never going to be Ambassador Michaelson. Somewhat testily, however, he had rejected the suspicions of Marjorie and others that his marriage had failed because of his career-limiting bluntness. Instead he blamed himself. He felt he should have sensed his wife’s ebbing confidence, her growing feeling that she was out of place in his world and no longer equal to the demands of a Washington very different from the one she had known in the fifties and sixties. He hadn’t. Surtout, pas assez de zèle. He knew colleagues who thought the disintegration of his marriage and the yawning ache it produced had deepened him, enhanced the human perspective that informed his dispassionate and often chillingly clinical analyses. He would rather have skipped the pain and taken his chances.

  Michaelson had learned about the immediate background to Jim Halliburton’s mental illness eighteen months after getting the envelope from Logan. One of the independent counsel (as special prosecutors had come to be called) swarming around Washington at the time had sent a letter to Halliburton in care of Logan, who was representing him. The substance was straightforward: Halliburton was a subject of the investigation; the statute of limitations was about to expire; unless he waived that defense, he would be immediately indicted—which would mean he would have to start paying Logan’s hefty legal bills himself instead of passing them on to the Treasury.

  “That’s what broke him,” Logan had told Michaelson with the biting lucidity of calibrated intoxication. “The sniveling little weasels didn’t have the guts either to pull the trigger or to lay down the gun. They were just going to leave him hanging. And the people he’d gone out on a limb for stopped returning his calls.”

  During his career Michaelson had seen women in Iran publicly flogged for wearing lipstick. He had seen teenaged boys in Afghanistan strung up by their heels, castrated, and gutted for picking the wrong side in a civil war. But nothing he’d had to look at over three and a half decades of diplomacy had been harder for him than the spectacle of Jim Halliburton during the roughly annual visits Michaelson made to him at the VA Extended Care Facility in Rockville, Maryland. The mind that had mastered Arabic and Hindi was now reduced to incoherent mutterings about briefing Dean Rusk or Cyrus Vance the day before, the once-hard belly left flabby and grotesquely distended by inactivity and pureed food. Eyes that had been coolly analytic were now invaded by feral terror at the mention of standing up. And the thought Michaelson couldn’t altogether repress each time he drove away: I have seen the future, and it stinks.

  Michaelson had kept Logan’s envelope all these years, long after Washington had forgotten Halliburton and whatever affair had enmeshed him, and long after all the independent counsel and congressional investigators had turned in their last expense accounts and folded up shop. He had kept it in adherence to a fundamental Washington principle: Information is currency, and you don’t throw some away just because you don’t know the denomination. He had also kept it as a pointed reminder, for among the first leaks and hints that had stimulated the investigation that ultimately blasted Halliburton’s mind were some disseminated in the line of duty by Richard Michaelson.

  Michaelson didn’t know much more about the significance of the document inside the envelope now than he had five years before. But he could read. The traveler who had checked out of the St. Demetrius Hotel was Andrew Shepherd. And Imex Tradco had the same street address as Calvert Manor. That, rather than a thoughtful concern for Marjorie Randolph and her friend Patrice Helmsing, was why he had asked her to visit the house with him after Phillips’ phone call. And that was why he was going to call on Avery Phillips this afternoon.

  Chapter Three

  Fletcher Park was the name Avery Phillips had given to a northeast Washington, D.C., residential neighborhood after he converted it into a condominium. A discreet private drive led to a secluded parking lot and common area serving eight modest two-story houses. The frame and fieldstone homes were trim and well maintained, with doors of candy-apple red, royal blue, hunter green, and sunshine yellow.

  Michaelson found Phillips in a living room heavy on chrome-and-stretched-leather chairs, eggshell carpeting, track lighting, and shelving of lacquered black wood. Phillips, who Michaelson knew was in his early fifties, could easily have passed for his early thirties. You had to concentrate to see the specks of white in his short brown hair. His olive-complected face was smooth—full but without any suggestion of extra chins or sagging jowls.

  As Phillips listened to Michaelson’s concise analysis of why Calvert Manor couldn’t serve his purposes, he sat with his right ankle planted on his left knee, his right shin almost perpendicular to his left thigh. His attitude suggested a kind of coiled relaxation, as if he were a Zen master ready in the next moment to fight, meditate, or make a joke, and not overly concerned about which it would be.

  “You’re onto something about political fallout,” he said, gesturing minimally with a beaded
glass of Evian. “But the current asking price would be a stunning bargain for my client, even after renovation costs. I think our friends across the pond will cheerfully absorb a bit of short-term flak. Besides, six percent of two-six is, let’s see, carry the three, one hundred fifty-six thousand dollars. Even a slim chance for a commission like that is worth some speculative effort.”

  “I wouldn’t call the chance slim, I’d call it emaciated,” Michaelson said. “And even if the EU should decide to go after Calvert Manor, you should know that it’s probably going to have to outbid somebody else—which may make the final deal look less like a bargain.” Michaelson then explained briefly about Marjorie and Patrice Helmsing.

  “You handle political analysis,” Phillips said with a tolerant, not-quite-condescending smile. “I’ll take care of bidding wars and the formidable Ms. Marjorie Randolph.”

  A bracing blast of late-winter air announced the opening of Phillips’ front door. A bright-eyed young black man wearing a midnight-blue, puffy-sleeved buccaneer shirt and a pair of white leather pants stepped halfway into the room.

  “Heads up, Ageless,” he said to Phillips in a lilting tenor. “Project’s on his way.”

  “Thank you, Willie,” Phillips said, the suggestion of a sigh diluting his voice. He turned an apologetic glance toward Michaelson. “This may become tiresome.”

  “Don’t call him Project, by the way,” Willie interjected. “Only his really close friends get away with that.”

  Michaelson glanced in amused bafflement from Phillips to Willie—Willie Gilchrist, as Michaelson would eventually learn.

  “I haven’t felt this completely lost since the first interdepartmental meeting I attended my third week as an FSO,” he said. “I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “We do have a penchant for idiom,” Phillips said. “Willie regards anyone who can tell a box-and-one from a triangle-two as a basketball fanatic, and he favors us with appropriate nicknames. I’m the Ageless Veteran.”

  “Ageless for short,” explained Willie, who had stepped all the way into the room.

  “Project,” Phillips continued, “whose mother knows him as Tony Selkirk, is a robust young man who until recently was grabbing rebounds for a locally prominent college squad. Not quite NBA material, as he spent several weeks finding out the hard way.”

  “David Stern’s loss is our gain,” Willie chirped.

  “With proper planning,” Phillips said, “he might catch on in Europe or the Continental Basketball Association next season.”

  “Why ‘Project,’ just out of curiosity?” Michaelson asked.

  “In basketball,” Phillips explained, “a project is a player who has immense physical gifts but who won’t be effective without extensive training in court craft and position skills. Willie feels that, at least off the court, Tony belongs in that category.”

  “A little rough around the edges,” Willie confirmed with an emphatic nod. “I must have told him six times that Private Lives makes perfectly good sense once you realize that all four characters are really guys. It just doesn’t penetrate.”

  Nodding politely, Michaelson settled back in his chair. He’d delivered the message that was the pretext for his visit, but he had something else he wanted to chat about before he left.

  Phillips’ postmilitary success in the crowded field of Washington-area real-estate development was a local legend spawning many stories, some not entirely false. Phillips, for example, actually had advertised an Arlington home early in his career as “perfect for rich plumber with a sense of humor.” And according to depositions in two lawsuits, he had indeed characterized developing real-estate projects as far simpler than selling houses. “You just take money from doctors and lawyers and spend it more wisely than they would if they were allowed to keep it. Never lie. Fraud suggests an appalling lack of imagination.”

  With a reputation like that, Michaelson reflected, there must be dozens of people Phillips could have asked to front for him on the Calvert Manor feeler. People far likelier than Michaelson to agree, and who could have performed at least as plausibly. But Phillips had asked Michaelson. And now that Phillips was apparently determined to proceed even though he had to know that the deal he’d described to Michaelson didn’t make sense, the next thing Michaelson wanted to know was why.

  Project burst into the room less than a minute after Willie’s warning. Michaelson thought that he had to be six feet seven inches tall and weigh 230 pounds. A mop of stringy black hair spilled over his forehead. Dark splotches of sweat stained his long-sleeved gray sweatshirt, while muscular legs ruddy with exercise and exposure to cold showed beneath his maroon shorts. He cradled a basketball in his right hand and carried a boom box in his left. Michaelson easily imagined him at a nearby outdoor court, swishing the ball through metal nets to the accompaniment of whatever music people his age listened to these days.

  Confusion and alarm played across his candid features in the few seconds before his eyes glazed over during Phillips’ introductions. Nodding briefly at Michaelson, he dumped the basketball and boom box unceremoniously at the door, levered his feet out of his Nikes without completely untying them, and dropped heavily into the chair nearest Phillips. He edged the chair a couple of inches closer to Phillips while Willie gathered the detritus at the door and took it from the room.

  “Georgetown is ESPN’s first game tonight, so the menu will run to pizza and subs,” Phillips said. “Willie should be calling for them any minute. Not up to embassy standards, I know, but you’re certainly welcome to stay and share if you’d like.”

  “I won’t impose. I do have a parting question, though.”

  “Ask.”

  “Why did you ask me to make the overture for you on Calvert Manor? I’m having a little trouble seeing ‘Michaelson’ as the first convenient name to pop up on your Rolodex.”

  “Not the first, to tell you the truth,” Phillips said. “There were any number who said no before you did. I’m on the verge of having Willie take a shot, and if he turns me down, the next candidate is my mailman.”

  “That explains it,” Michaelson said, smiling smoothly in polite but total disbelief.

  Willie reentered and flipped on a television across the room from the other three.

  “Game time already?” Phillips asked, glancing at his watch.

  “Crossfire,” Willie said. “Marcus Humphreys is on up front.”

  “Ah, good catch,” Phillips said, swiveling toward the television. “Turn it up a bit, would you please?”

  Willie obeyed in time for the others to hear John Sununu end the preamble to a question with the words “credible presidential candidacy.”

  “So how about it, Congressman Humphreys,” Sununu continued. “When will you drop the coyness and heed the jock-wear slogans ‘No Fear/Just Do It’?”

  “I think it’s more important to do it right than to do it fast,” the black congressman whose torso now filled the screen said in measured tones. He still seemed to have all of his salt-and-pepper hair, but his face showed the wear, tear, and character of fifty-seven years. “‘No Fear’ doesn’t do much for me as a slogan. Acting despite fear is brave. Acting without fear is dumb.”

  “Quick with a line, isn’t he?” Phillips commented with detached, professional interest. “Doesn’t look much like James Earl Jones, though.”

  “We can’t really blame him for that, can we?” Michaelson responded.

  Humphreys had been a prosperous physician in Augusta, Georgia, eleven years before when a confrontation with protesters outside an AIDS hospice had propelled him into politics. In Cold Georgia Rain, HBO’s “fact-based” movie loosely about the incident, James Earl Jones had played Humphreys.

  “We can’t blame him for any of it,” Phillips said. “HBO turned eight tub-thumpers chanting passages from Deuteronomy and Leviticus into a howling mob of three
dozen who wanted to burn the hospice down. It converted an anticlimactic demonstration on a cloudy afternoon into a dramatic, late-night siege. And it made Marcus Humphreys into James Earl Jones. The arresting thing is that millions of Americans who saw that HBO movie will swear they were watching live news footage on Nightline. What they see on television is more real than reality itself.”

  “Works for me,” Willie said. “Every Jewish guy I know is funny and every blonde has big tits. Not that I’m paying any attention, of course.”

  “Well, Marcus Humphreys is a four-term congressman because of it,” Phillips said. “And he may well become the first black President of the United States.”

  “Let’s not give HBO all the credit if he does,” Michaelson said. “Maybe the demonstrators were just annoying instead of dangerous, and maybe they went away because they’d run out of hymns and it started raining rather than because Doctor Humphreys stood at the door and said Rachel Humphreys would be a widow before they came in. The facts remain that he did stand in front of the door, they didn’t come in, and they might have if he hadn’t been standing there.”

  “All of which matters less to me than his position on accelerated depreciation of rental property,” Phillips said.

  While Michaelson was trying to remember whether that was Phillips’ fourth lie of the evening or only his third, Crossfire’s camera switched to Sununu and a liberal du jour preparing to talk at each other. Rising from his chair and crossing the room, Phillips dimmed the lights and switched channels on the television.

  As soon as the thudding, familiar basketball action flickered onto the screen, Phillips muted the volume. He put a CD into a player and stroked it on. In moments the strains of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 washed through the room, providing an eerily appropriate counterpoint to the alternately violent and balletic basketball game.