Collateral Damage

by Michael Bowen

  “Thank you for your hospitality,” Michaelson said as he got up. He found the idea of watching basketball played to Mozart oddly appealing, but he sensed unmistakably that at this point the room was overcrowded by one.

  Chapter Four

  Can I offer you some breakfast?” Catherine Shepherd asked as she plucked a halved bagel from the toaster.

  “Thanks, but I’ve already eaten,” said Marjorie, who like most people who work for a living usually took care of her morning meal well before nine-fifteen.

  It was two days after Marjorie’s first visit to Calvert Manor. Marjorie had gotten Michaelson’s report on his conversation with Phillips and Patrice Helmsing’s reaction to her own description of the home. She had concluded that serious negotiations had to be started immediately and conducted with finesse. The first name that came to mind for the job was hers. So here she was with her legs under the kitchen table at Calvert Manor.

  After dabbing the bagel halves with margarine, Catherine laid them next to a slice of cantaloupe on a blue china plate. She then put the plate over a linen serviette on the butcher-block table in the kitchen’s sunniest corner, where Marjorie was already sitting. Seating herself, Catherine poured grapefruit juice into two tumblers and with a gesture invited Marjorie to take one.

  “Your friend’s a real possibility, then?” she asked.

  “Patrice Helmsing has her own accounts with two stock-brokers,” Marjorie said. “Her most recent husband has an acute desire to delight her. She wants to come back to the Washington area, and she’s interested enough in Calvert Manor that she’d like to fly in from Detroit this week to see the place.”

  “Will Friday afternoon work?” Catherine asked after swallowing a morsel of bagel.

  “Should. I’ll check and get back to you by Thursday to confirm it.”

  “We really could have done this over the phone, couldn’t we?” Catherine mused. “Why did you drive all the way out here just to set up an appointment?”

  Marjorie stalled for a moment with a sip of grapefruit juice. She had no objection in principle to telling the truth, but she felt you had to know when to stop.

  “I think there’s going to be at least one other potential buyer in the picture,” she said. “Of course, that may just mean that it comes down to who bids more, which will make everything rather simple. But I hope it doesn’t, and I came out here so I could tell you why, face-to-face.”

  “Please do,” Catherine said.

  “The other buyer is an agent acting for the European Union. He supposedly wants to buy Calvert Manor so the EU can turn it into its U.S. trade office.”

  “I can’t say that I’m very enthusiastic about that idea,” Catherine said. “Although I suppose it’s naïve of me to admit it.”

  “That’s the instinct I’m counting on,” Marjorie said. “When you were explaining so carefully why it made sense to sell the house, I got the feeling that Calvert Manor wasn’t just a showplace that your father bought to impress customers—that for you it really was a home. If you don’t mind it becoming an office for bureaucrats instead of a home for someone else, that’s up to you. But I felt you ought to have the choice openly presented to you.”

  “I didn’t really appreciate what Calvert Manor meant for Dad when I was a girl,” Catherine said with an understanding nod. “Looking back on it, I think he saw this place as something solid and real. Those big international deals he put together paid the bills, but to him there wasn’t all that much substance to them.”

  “They must have had some substance if they paid the kind of bills a place like this would run up,” Marjorie said.

  Catherine shook her head with a half smile.

  “Dad used to say that in the early seventies the only way an American with an MBA and a Slavic language could avoid making money was to enter a Trappist monastery. That was the heyday of détente. Peace in the world through Pepsi in Moscow. He thought that doing those deals really was changing things. Then, as Dad put it, an old man dies in Portugal, Cubans start fighting in Africa, and it all goes blooey overnight. He kept on making money, but now that was all he was doing. Calvert Manor was something that wouldn’t just go up in smoke like the détente stuff.”

  “This may sound opportunistic,” Marjorie said, “but that’s the same kind of meaning this place would have for Patrice Helmsing. Patrice is black and she’s been a special friend of mine since college. Even when we haven’t seen each other for two or three years, Patrice and I can sit around a fire with cabernet and crudités for hours, talking about Washington in the 1960s and London in the 1790s and our first husbands and last children and everything in between. Her roots are in Washington, and a place like this would have an extraordinary resonance for her.”

  Marjorie thought she’d overdone it, and she expected Catherine to glance away. She didn’t. Instead, Catherine opened her eyes wide and gazed straight at Marjorie with a countenance suggesting the most inexpressible longing Marjorie had ever seen. She looked like a ragged kid from the slums hearing a description of some lushly Arcadian summer camp.

  “That sounds so lovely,” she said in a voice between a whisper and a sob.

  In Catherine Shepherd’s eyes at that moment Marjorie saw exquisite loneliness. For an instant, Marjorie imagined herself suggesting impulsively that she and Catherine just blow off the day, blitz Woodies, have bacon cheeseburgers and chocolate malts someplace where they’d need the National Debt Clock to count the calories, cruise through the Corcoran Gallery, stop for cocktails at Clyde’s, and straggle back to Calvert Manor at twilight with armloads of parcels and a little edge-off-the-day buzz. For a long time afterward, reflecting on their chat in the kitchen nook striped by the cold winter sun, Marjorie wondered if everything might have turned out differently had she acted on that impulse. But she didn’t. The moment passed.

  “I think you’re right about the European Union thing, by the way,” Catherine said suddenly in a more business-like voice, giving her head a little forget-that-last-part flick. “Wilcox called to say that an inquiry had come from someone whose name I can’t remember.”

  “Avery Phillips?” Marjorie suggested.

  “Not sure. Wilcox said the guy was some kind of high-powered dealer-developer, and she suspected he was representing an undisclosed principal. This place hasn’t pulled a nibble in weeks, so I’m betting the call to Wilcox is from the same alternative buyer you’ve been talking about.”

  “Safe bet,” Marjorie said.

  Catherine’s last sip of grapefruit juice left a sixteenth-inch of pulp and liquid in the bottom of the glass. She put her knife and fork together on her plate in the four o’clock position. Then three quick thumps on the back stairway gave Catherine and Marjorie a second or two warning before Cindy burst into the kitchen.

  “Oh,” Cindy said, gaping at Marjorie, “you’re back.”

  “That’s Cindy’s way of saying, ‘Excuse me for interrupting,’” Catherine said.

  “I swear to God, Cathy,” Cindy said, shaking her head at the place setting, “if Martha Stewart ever needs an enema, she’s going to have you hold the tube.”

  Cindy was wearing a bright pink T-shirt with the words pretty girls smoking cigarettes circling a silhouette depicting approximately that. Her denim shorts showed ten inches of thigh below ragged hems and a generous smidgeon of cheek through a hole near the left rear pocket. She was carrying an enormous book covered with what looked like very old, very thick paper hand-folded into a dust jacket. Marjorie wondered if Danielle Steel had produced a bildungsroman that Publisher’s Weekly had somehow missed. Then she realized with astonishment that it was a Bible.

  “Good morning,” Catherine said.

  “Mmff,” Cindy said as she bent into the refrigerator.

  More steps echoing on the stairway answered her. A man in his early twenties lurched into the kitchen. He was wearing white painter’s pant
s and a T-shirt identical to Cindy’s. As he took in the tableau before him, he shook his head with enough enthusiasm to produce a faint tinkle from thirteen small gold rings bunched along the top of his left ear and the outside of his left nostril.

  “Miss Randolph,” Catherine said, “this is C-Sharp. C-Sharp, Marjorie Randolph.”

  “Delighted,” Marjorie said.

  “Looks like snow outside,” C-Sharp mumbled after a barely perceptible nod.

  “I hate Washington when it snows,” Cindy said with reflexive vehemence that seemed disproportionate to the topic. “Washington’s just ridiculous about snow.”

  “‘Pretty Girls Smoking Cigarettes’ is a song, by the way,” Catherine explained to Marjorie as she noticed her examining the T-shirts. “C-Sharp expects it to be his group’s breakthrough hit.”

  “Fuckin’ right,” C-Sharp said.

  Cindy emerged from the refrigerator with a can of Diet Coke and three slices of pizza piled high with congealed mozzarella and clumsily wrapped in aluminum foil. She offered some to C-Sharp, who blinked and looked like he’d need to think about it.

  “Where’d you dig the Bible up?” Catherine asked be-musedly.

  “I’ve been looking for readings for you to use when you and Preston make it legal.”

  “How thoughtful,” Catherine said, the way Miss Manners might have.

  “Okay, be an asshole, but I’ve found one. Listen.”

  Opening the Bible on the counter, Cindy took a deep breath, shook hair out of her eyes, and began reading in a slow cadence with a voice as close to a TV evangelist’s as an alto could manage.

  “A reading from the Book of Numbers, chapter thirty-one. ‘They made war on Midian, as Yahweh had ordered Moses, and put every male to death. The Israelites took the Midianite women and their little ones captive and carried off all their cattle, all their flocks and all their goods as booty. Moses was enraged with the officers of the army who had come back from this expedition. He said, “Why have you spared the life of all the women? Kill all the male children and kill all the women who have ever slept with a man; but spare the lives of the young girls who have never slept with a man, and keep them for yourselves.’”

  Cindy waited long enough after she glanced up from the scriptural account to let the silence—slightly open-mouthed, in Catherine’s case—hang a bit heavy.

  “Don’t you like it?” she asked then, feigning a hurt look. “I think it’s a very moving tribute to the virtues of virginity.”

  ***

  Wet, heavy snow began to fall shortly after Marjorie left Calvert Manor. It fell fast and hard, in soggy, smacking clumps that the wipers fought to clear from her windshield. By the time she came within hoping distance of Connecticut Avenue, she realized this was serious stuff—a long, traffic-mangling storm.

  Which left Marjorie with time to wonder why in the world Cindy would have gone to such an immense amount of trouble, plowing through what must have been the thoroughly unfamiliar pages of the Old Testament, to come up with a lame, one-shot joke. It wasn’t until she finally pulled into a snow-swept parking space two hundred yards from Cavalier Books that an intuitively plausible if not logically supportable answer occurred to her.

  “I wonder if Preston Demarest is Jewish?” she said to herself.

  Chapter Five

  If Cecilia Hamisch had behaved like a normal, self-respecting civil servant, Michaelson reflected at ten o’clock the next morning, he’d be sitting in his office reviewing an earnest research paper instead of standing in the snow committing a felony. Or maybe only a misdemeanor, but even so.

  Yesterday’s snow, falling thick and heavy well into the night, gave federal employees an ironclad excuse to gold-brick. As he walked from his Georgetown apartment down a surreally underpopulated Massachusetts Avenue to his office, Michaelson assumed that none of the former State Department colleagues he planned to call would be in. He would leave messages explaining what he wanted. This would pin him to his desk for the rest of the morning, on the off chance that one of them would wander in by ten and get back to him before lunch. By adopting this tactic he would force himself to pass several character-building hours reviewing a Brookings Junior Fellow’s analysis of the proposed common European currency, which this week was being called the euro.

  Cecilia Hamisch upset this carefully scripted scenario by being diligently at her desk when Michaelson called at nine-ten. Hamisch was a midlevel Foreign Service officer whose lengthy title included the terms “liaison” and “World Trade Organization.” This meant that her actual function was to remind the Office of the United States Trade Representative that trade policy was a component of foreign policy rather than the other way around.

  She had worked under Michaelson for a couple of years before his retirement from the State Department. Given the vagaries of political fortune, it wasn’t impossible that she’d find herself working for him again someday. So he was gratified but not surprised when she promised to call him at four p.m. with a report on whatever she’d found out.

  This meant that Michaelson no longer had anything chaining him to his phone for the next several hours. He dug the latest draft of the euro paper out of his box only long enough to decorate its cover page with an oversized Post-it on which he printed neatly in black, felt-tip pen:

  Your evidence and analysis seem to prove incontrovertibly that the euro is both inevitable and impossible. Is it wise to rely on the dynamic tension between these possibilities, or do you propose to choose one or the other? Let’s discuss. RM

  With that, he consigned the euro paper to his out box and pulled a metropolitan phone directory from the back of his credenza. It took him ten seconds to look up Demarest, Preston R. Demarest’s phone rang fifteen times without either an answer or the intervention of a recorded invitation to leave a message. Such technological self-denial seemed anomalous to Michaelson, who would have given even odds that Demarest took his pager into the shower and had a fax machine in his car.

  Objectively, that merited no more than a shrug and a mental note. Subjectively, however, Michaelson had a sharper taste for concrete problems than for theoretical woolgathering. The concrete problems at the moment were that he didn’t know what Avery Phillips was up to—whatever it was seemed to involve both Michaelson and Jim Halliburton—and for reasons that went well beyond idle curiosity Michaelson therefore wanted to find out what was actually on Phillips’ agenda. The address shown for Demarest was within manageable walking distance of the Alexandria Metro stop. Michaelson grabbed his battered topcoat and tweed walking hat and headed for the door.

  The address turned out to be the lower flat in a two-story house that had been divided into an upstairs and a downstairs apartment. The first thing Michaelson noticed was the mail overflowing the box beside the door. It certainly hadn’t been delivered this morning, which suggested that Demarest hadn’t been home since at least yesterday. Michaelson concluded that he was ringing the doorbell strictly for the exercise, and he was right.

  It was at that point, as he started going through Demarest’s mail, that he began wondering how serious a crime he was committing—and grumbling mentally that there was never a lawyer sitting around on someone’s front porch when you needed one.

  Demarest’s mail started with bills and Newsweek. Then came a letter of some kind from a health club in the district called Bodies by Design; a fund-raising appeal from a group that wished to fight censorship in public schools; and a letter from the District of Columbia Corporations Commission, addressed to Club Chat Fouette, in care of Demarest.

  Michaelson was considering whether the absence of an accent aigu from the last item meant anything when a measured voice cutting sharply through the cold air commanded his attention.

  “What are you doing there?”

  Turning his head unhurriedly to the right in reaction to this challenge, Michaelson saw a woman with rust-tinged gray h
air which at the moment was less than kempt. She wore a blue terry cloth robe over pink pajamas and unbuckled galoshes. She was holding her right hand behind her back. Michaelson suspected that the hand gripped a gun. Handgun ownership is widespread in Virginia, and residents of that state’s Washington suburbs assume that any interloper from the district arrives with felonious intent.

  “I’m looking for Mr. Demarest,” Michaelson said affably behind a harmless-codger smile. “I have something for him.”

  “He’s not home. Whatever it is, you can leave it with me.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of burdening you with it,” Michaelson said as he casually replaced Demarest’s mail. “I was considering leaving it in his mailbox, but on reflection I’m afraid I don’t feel comfortable with that option. He doesn’t seem to collect his mail very regularly, and in any event we must respect the sanctity of the post. You don’t know when he’ll be home, do you?”

  “I’d call that his business. Who would you be, exactly?”

  “My name is Richard Michaelson. I have a card here.”

  “Skip it,” she said as he began to reach for his card case.

  Michaelson complied with a complacent shrug.

  “I would appreciate it very much if you’d tell him I dropped by and am looking forward to his call,” he said.

  “I’ll tell him you trooped over here and rifled his mail.”

  “I hope he realizes how fortunate he is to have such a vigilant landlady,” Michaelson said, laying it on a bit thick as he prepared to offer his back to a woman he was now absolutely convinced was armed and tightly wound.

  “I’m not his landlady,” the woman said. “I’m his tenant.”

  “In that case he’s even luckier than I thought. Good day.”

  Touching the brim of his cap and smiling as if he were auditioning for the kind of role David Niven used to get, Michaelson turned from the woman and began walking away. He didn’t risk self-congratulation until he’d made it to the Metro stop without catching a bullet between his shoulder blades.