Big If

by Mark Costello

  Gretchen said, “It’s curfew time, you’re finished here. We’ve got an early prebrief in the morning. Everyone to bed.”

  “But we just ordered dinner,” Bobbie said.

  Gretchen said, “Bobbie, shut your trap. Herc, locate the waitress, cancel that last order. Elias, don’t pay with plastic, makes us look like fucking flight attendants—Jesus, Eli, have some pride. The rest of you to bed except for Tashmo. Tashmo, follow me.”

  Every night on the road, Gretchen’s last official act before she went to bed was a tour of the hotel from the lobby to the roof. She took this tour alone most nights, double-checking normal, making sure that nothing was undone or overlooked. She crossed the lobby of the inn that evening, Tashmo at her elbow.

  She said, “Where were you when you were called for this deployment, Tashmo? I was at the batting cage with my son, seems like a million years ago. Then I get beeped by Debbie Escobedo-Waas. She says the Director needs to see me. Fine—Vi comes by and we go up to Beltsville. When we get there, the Director takes me for a big walk on the quad. ‘Gretch,’ he says, ‘everything pertaining to the life and works of Lloyd L. Felker is secret now, and triple need-to-know, and you don’t need to know so I shouldn’t tell you, but I will. Because I know it bothers you, what happened in the flood. Felker was your people, Gretch, and you left him on the ground. You left the Asplund girl too, but we were able to recover her substantially intact, so it’s no big whoops. But Felker—that was a big whoops. Not your fault, of course. You lost a man, Gretch. Cost of doing business. And in the end, it’s not your fault that the man you lost happened to possess, in his legendary memory, all-clearance knowledge of every plan and tactic in the cupboard, every plug in every hole, every hole in every plug, every Certainty and Sensitive. I’m not here to dwell on your fuckup in the flood, because I admire you. You keep them dawgies moving, Gretch, and I see you as directress of this Service in a few years. I’ll be out to pasture then, an eager, hungry, slightly desperate, business-lunching corporate security consultant, probably working for that goddamn Loudon Rhodes, assuming he’s not in prison for shooting Hinckley, ironically enough, not that I object to shooting Hinckley, sauce for the gander in my humble book, but I don’t condone hiring ex-Mossaders to plan such a hit, and I have in my office, Gretch, at this very moment firm evidence of contractual discussions between Loudon Rhodes in Hollywood and a shadowy global headhunter with offices in Crete and Lake Success, New York—firm evidence, I tell you: wiretaps, wiretaps—well, not wiretaps because everything in Hollywood is cell phones nowadays, so these are mostly wireless taps, but shockingly explicit nonetheless, and when the time is right, evil Loudon Rhodes will be facing a grand jury if he doesn’t give me a really good job when I retire. You don’t need to know what I’m about to tell you, Gretch, and I shouldn’t fill you in, but I will. Because when I’m retired to the cold, unfeeling private sector, and you sit in my twirly chair of power, and are in a position to give out certain lucrative consultancies, I want you to remember me as one who knew you felt responsible for Hinman and had the decency to fill you in.’”

  Tashmo said, “Did he ever actually get around to filling you in?”

  “They found Felker,” Gretchen said.

  There were troopers on the couches by the lobby doors. They got up as Gretchen approached and sat down again as Gretchen went away.

  “After Felker disappeared in Hinman,” Gretchen said, “Boone Saxon’s guys put a watch on his Diners Club card. Two days after Hinman, the card came alive in a burst of charges, St. Louis, K.C., Denver, and Las Vegas. The rate and spacing of the charges indicated a man driving west, steady progress, but not headlong flight. Most of the charges were for gas, barbecue, or Asian-only escort services, and the tips, I’m told, were staggering. Boone traced the card to a casino-motel-massage complex in Laughlin, Nevada, a southward jog from Vegas, which made the Director think of Mexico, of Felker running for the border, not quite the Director’s worst nightmare, but up there anyway. Because what if Lloyd went into Mexico and sold his knowledge of our weakness to the drug cartels, to Castro at his embassy, to the Shining Path? What if he made the jump from Mexico to the Middle East and sold his mind to the Iraqis? We’d have presidents in bunkers for the next twenty years. It was therefore deemed imperative to catch Felker before he made the border. The Director sent a troop of SWATs to Laughlin. They covered the casino and found the Diners Club card in the hands of a car thief from Chicago. We’ll call this person Earl.”

  There were two banquet halls off the lobby at the inn. The first, the West Wind Room, had been rented to the campaign and transformed into a cavernous press center. Gretchen walked between the rows of folding tables, watching people type at laptops, talk on cell phones, type and talk and chew their pencils, looking at the ceiling.

  “Before the flood, this person we call Earl was a guest of the State of Illinois, doing the back nine of a seven-to-fourteen, working in the barber shop, studying for his GE Ph.D. in boxing history, hoarding marijuana, snitching on his friends, abusing his free access to the law library, pestering the overburdened courts with nuisance suits complaining of various ills, slights, and due process violations—in other words, living the life of your typical mellow prison inmate.

  “Then it rained and rained, and the river rose, and the person we call Earl was sent to Hinman with a work gang, throwing dikes against the flood. He was separated from the others when the levee broke. He wandered through the town, in no special hurry to find the nearest guard. Earl claims that as the water swallowed the lower-lying trailer parks he was bravely engaged in a volunteer salvage operation, rescuing televisions, sporting goods, and women’s underwear from the sinking trailers. As he was salvaging everything that wasn’t bolted down, he looked up and saw an apparition, nothing less—a crazy white man in tacky flight attendant clothes, wading through the water, telling Earl and his co-salvagers to disperse to the designated refugee processing center. The man was with a spindly-ass little white girl, who seemed to work for the same airline. When Earl and the other salvagers did not disperse as directed, the white man came up with an Uzi. Earl flees into a trailer, the flight attendants follow. Shots are exchanged inside the trailer as it slips into the river.

  “Everything is dark and they are under water. Earl pushes through a window and pops to the surface, spinning in a nasty sucking current. He can’t see the banks. He thinks that he will die and opens negotiations with the Creator of the Universe, making certain promises: If You let me live, dear God, I promise I will never, never, never joyride or set poor examples for the youth of my community. He fights to keep his mouth up. He kicks and promises. He weakens and begins to fade. At that moment he is bashed in the face. He looks up and sees the old white flight attendant clinging to the roof of the floating trailer home. Felker—and of course it’s Felker—is trying to push a ladder to Earl, striking Earl in the face and head. Earl grabs the bottom rung and climbs to the roof, where he promptly vomits.

  “They rode the house downriver. The trailer was small and vinyl-sided, winterized, airtight against the kind of drafts which can balloon your heating bill, and therefore semi-watertight. This is Earl’s version. I’m not saying I believe it. Boone has consulted home-buoyancy experts and even staged a secret reenactment with scale models in Nevada. The conclusion reached by Threats is that a fully winterized, vinyl-sided domicile could, if weighted properly, float and not capsize, but only in no current, not the monster wet stampede Earl has described, and even in no current, the house could float for, at best, some hours, not the day and night and dawn Earl has described, and so there is good cause to doubt the heart of Earl’s account. I don’t care about the floating house, myself. My question is, what did they talk about, Felker and the car thief, clinging to the roof? I assume there was some conversation. Be awkward without conversation, wouldn’t it?”

  Gretchen left the press center in the West Wind Room. There was a complementary coffee bar by the front desk in the lobby, two steel u
rns, a sleeve of cups, little baskets holding sugar packets and half-and-half containers. Gretchen stopped to pour a cup. She took it black. Tashmo passed on coffee.

  “The house was always breaking up,” she said. “What happens is, the stripping glue becomes unstuck. Water seeps into the drywall, the drywall swells, the plastic staples blow, panels float away, and the house begins to sink. First Felker and Earl had the house and roof, then part of the house and all of the roof, then a corner of the roof. They floated, clinging to it, and Earl again made final preparations. ‘Dear God,’ he said, ‘it’s me again—we spoke earlier today, and you’ll notice that I’ve thus far kept the promises I made, and haven’t joyridden or set a poor example for the youth, and so I’d like to propose that we continue with our mutual understanding about me not dying or joyriding.’”

  Gretchen sipped her coffee, blew on it, and sipped again. “Prayer, it seems to me, is like a voice mail—you can get quite detailed, anticipating all replies, though it’s still basically a one-way conversation, until you hear the beep. My mother prays a lot. I never really saw the point of it.”

  They moved on to the second banquet hall, called the Nor’easter, rented out that night to a wedding reception. Tuxedoed groomsmen spilled into the lobby, ties unclipped, cummerbunds askew, and formed, improbably, a human pyramid, a frat stunt and a tribute to their brother getting married. The pyramid collapsed in a welter of low-fives and booty checks. From the ballroom, Tashmo heard the rising tink-tink-tink of forks hitting goblets, guests calling for another kiss. Tashmo thought of several things: marriage, getting married, his wedding day in North Dakota, which was practically the last time he was ever in a church on his own time, and how Shirl’s father, a shrewd Jew-hating wheat farmer named Arne Skurdahl, was too choked up to give a wedding toast, standing there babbling, My daughter, my Shirley, my daughter, my girl, just full and overcome with love on his daughter’s wedding day, and Tashmo, who didn’t like the old blowhard all that much, liked or understood him for a moment at the wedding. Tashmo thought about fraternities, sororities, all that useless brutal energy, and how the girls at Rho Rho Rho beat his daughter up and called it a ceremony, how they beat his daughter, his Jeanette, his number two, his future and his past, the kid he raised from spit and sperm, how they blacked her eyes and made her pee blood instead of pee, and who were they to lay a hand on his Jeanette? And shouldn’t he be mad instead of somehow proud?

  Gretchen moved along. “Earl says he woke up in some reeds on the Missouri side. He pulled Felker from the water, felt him cold, believed him to be dead, and went through his pockets, finding Felker’s empty holster, a billfold, and the creds. Earl took this—plausibly, I think—as a sign from God. He rented a big car and started west, charging every pleasure, posing as Lloyd Felker, Deputy Lead Agent. Earl had the best three days of Felker’s life. He tipped impressively, didn’t joyride, and tried to set a good example for the youth. When the SWATs tackled him in the casino, he was giving a staunch antidrug lecture to a cigarette girl.

  “The searchers got this story out of Earl. They believed it or they didn’t—either way, they hit Missouri that night, towns around New Snively and Duprete. The river was itself again by then, but the wreckage spread for miles, a great curving rat’s tail of debris. The SWATs went from hospital to hospital, tent city to tent city, searching through the refugees for any sign of Felker. The refugees were battered and looking for their children and their families. People, searching, moved around, which made them hard to search through systematically. In one camp, the SWATs would hear of a man like Felker in another camp, but when they got to the second camp, the man who was like Felker had moved on. They chased a dozen phantom Felkers who were always moving, conducting their own searches.

  “They finally found him, nine days after Hinman, doing volunteer crowd control at a first-aid station in German Gap, Missouri. Felker admitted being Felker, but he didn’t want to leave until everyone was bandaged, and, in the end, the goons had to get a little physical. They forced him on a plane, flew him back to Beltsville, the special-access area of Threats, and tried to figure out what the fuck to do with him. They couldn’t send him back to the ropelines. High-stress duty—one never knows. On the other hand, they couldn’t forcibly retire him because of what he knew, the bible in his head. Best to keep him in the family, right? So they had a problem: where do we store Lloyd?

  “So they put their little heads together, the Director and Debbie Escobedo-Waas, and they came up with a plan. Felker was reassigned from Protection to the Technical Assistance Unit of the Data Administration Group of the Personnel Division, Boston station. His title was Leave Specialist. Felker meekly went to Massachusetts with his family. They leased a house in Concord, outside Boston, high suburbia.”

  Gretchen and Tashmo rode the elevator to the bar. By the time they got there, the bar was past last call. Kelli, the waitress, wiped tables with a rag. The barman hung his tricorner hat on the tap pulls and washed his tankards with a spray gun. Herc Mercado was sitting at the bar, explaining the true meaning of “La Vida Loca” to Kelli as she wiped.

  Kelli said, “Isn’t that a street in Italy?”

  “No,” said Herc, “it’s about a woman and a man and the music they can make.”

  Gretchen came up behind Herc. “I told you to go to bed.”

  Herc said, “I went to bed. Now I’m up again.”

  Gretchen stared at a spot in the air three inches to the right of Herc’s left ear. Herc slid off the stool, blew a kiss to Kelli, and slunk out.

  Gretchen left the paper cup of coffee on the bar. Tashmo followed her to the gray steel fire door. They marched up the stairwell to the roof, the echoes of Gretchen’s footsteps merging with the sound of Tashmo’s feet.

  “Now we’re into Lydia’s version,” Gretchen said. “Because, you see, I called her, Tashmo. Had to, once I heard Earl’s story. I’m the one who led her husband to the flood. She’s a real piece of work, Miss Lydia. She told me the part of the story nobody else knows—you and Lloyd, you and her. I gather you were all quite close way back in them Carter days.”

  Tashmo said, “I should explain.”

  “Yes,” said Gretchen, “but not to me. So there they are in Massachusetts, Lydia, Lloyd, and their son. It was a happy life, if you believe Miss Lydia. Lloyd got up every morning, ran three miles in the nude, stepped off the treadmill, showered, dressed in clothes he had laid out the night before, went off to work. He left the house like any good commuter but never made it to the office.”

  Tashmo said, “Where did he go?”

  “Everywhere but work. He’d scout for coffee shops offering free refills. He’d stand on commuter rail platforms, waiting for discontinued trains. He’d tour the homes of Concord’s famous authors. He took these tours repeatedly, staring at the furnishings. He fell asleep in Emerson’s boudoir and was asked to leave the Hawthornes’ on several occasions. He went to the Battle Road Visitors Center, the shrine to the Minutemen, sat through the twenty-minute slideshow more than twenty times. The rangers remember him. He seemed to be a busy and important man stealing time from a pressing schedule to learn about his heritage. He was always calling someone on his cell phone, always being paged—he waited for the pages, called back, and was paged again, an epic game of phone tag as he walked the storied mile where liberty was born.”

  “Who was he calling?”

  “This was the Director’s question. ‘Did this goddamn Felker sell our secrets to A-rabs?’ Boone pulled the billing file on the cell phone. Turns out Felker was feverishly paging himself from the cell, entering the pager as the callback. This went on for weeks.”

  “What did Lydia think?”

  “She thought they were happy in Massachusetts. She said he seemed more excited, more engaged, and they were having sex again. Don’t make a face. They were having sex like never before and he was finally talking about work. For years, she said, everything he did was secret and Most Sensitive, plans and counterplans—he was totally
absorbed, she was totally left out—but now he talked about his job in minute detail, all the tittle-tattle from the water cooler, who was up, who was out, who was kissing butt, who was fighting for a better parking space, what Ned said to Fred about Ted, all the dull, intricate arcana that makes working in a large, collegial office like being wait-listed for Purgatory. And Lydia, hearing it, felt a selfish joy. He was talking, they were talking after sex. He was asking her opinion, like they were a team, like he valued her input and advice. Should I put my name in for the parking space? Should I tell Ted what Ned said to Fred? She listened and she tried to give the best advice she could. It made her happy, and he saw this, so he told her more.”

  Gretchen pushed the roof door open. A sniper with a nightscope turned, startled. He saw the chief-of-detail, touched his helmet with his glove, and looked off to the east.

  Gretchen walked to the edge of the roof, a little close for Tashmo’s comfort.

  She said, “Imagine the energy, the sheer creative will, required to invent, day after day, a new day’s worth of tedium. Can you imagine loving somebody so much that you would do this every day for months just because it gave them a certain amount of pleasure?” Gretchen shook her head, looking down six stories at the parking lot. “Ever loved someone that much?”

  “No,” said Tashmo.

  “Ever been loved that much?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Have you?”

  “Not so far,” Gretchen said.

  She turned back from the drop. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  She said, “To my room.”

  “Felker had a favorite ranger at the Battle Road—a woman, as it happens. Her name was Ranger Nguyen. She isn’t Vietnamese, despite the name. Her parents are, of course, both of them, but Ranger Nguyen was born in Baton Rouge, and she knows everything there is to know about her heritage, falling bombs at Fort McHenry, American guerrillas in the Massachusetts woods, a people mobilized, an arrogant empire hurled back across the sea. The pride she takes in Bunker Hill, the way she reveres Paul Revere—she’s thrilling, somehow, this young and deeply clueless girl. I can see why Felker fell for her.”