Eggsecutive Orders

by Julie Hyzy

  “Well, it was nice to meet you,” I said, even though we hadn’t officially been introduced. I just wanted to get the heck out of there.

  But Kap seemed unwilling to let us go. He raised an eyebrow. “You look familiar.”

  My face went hot. “I’m the executive chef at the White House.”

  “Ah,” he said. I felt the weight of his comprehension. In the space of two seconds, his expression shifted from anxious to genial. “Today has been very difficult for Ruth, as you can imagine. We spent most of the morning at the funeral home, making arrangements. Carl, having been a decorated veteran, always wanted to be buried at Arlington, so we made those arrangements as well.”

  My mom had moved closer. I couldn’t understand why. The last thing I wanted was to prolong this unexpected meeting. I desperately searched for a polite way to extricate ourselves, but Mom interjected.

  “My husband is buried here, too.”

  Kap’s awareness shifted. Where he’d been paying attention to me as though I were the only other living human being in the cemetery, he now turned his gaze toward my mother. “I’m very sorry to hear that,” he said. “Has it been a long time?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Very long.” And then she surprised me by adding, “Too long.”

  My jaw nearly dropped. What the heck was this? My mom was flirting with a complete stranger in the middle of Arlington National Cemetery. While it had been more than twenty years since my dad died, and my mother had had a gentleman friend or two since then, it seemed odd to see her so flushed and eager. Like a teenager.

  “I’m here from Chicago visiting my daughter.” Mom cocked her head at me like I was a little kid.

  I felt like one-left out of the adult conversation. Who was this guy, anyway? A brother? Brother-in-law? This Kap didn’t look like either Carl or Ruth Minkus. He was older than both of them and looked to be Middle Eastern, or Greek, whereas the Minkuses likely came from Western European roots.

  Kap smiled broadly. This was one handsome senior citizen and I understood my mother’s instant attraction to him. Still…

  Holding out his hand, he said, “Zenobios Kapostoulos. But everyone calls me Kap.”

  My mother placed her hand in his and smiled back. “Corinne Paras.”

  “I am delighted,” he said. “And were we in different circumstances, I would very much enjoy continuing our conversation. But, as it is, I must tend to Ruth and Joel.”

  My curiosity got the better of me. “You’re part of the family?”

  His smile still in place, he shook his head. “Carl and I worked together. He and I are-were-good friends. Business required my presence out of the country for many years and I’ve only recently moved back to the area. Of course, I had hopes of rekindling our friendship.” His eyes tightened. “But, unfortunately, it was not to be. Carl and I had only a short time to catch up. And now this.” He shook his head again. “It is very sad.”

  “Kap?” Joel called from the doorway. “We’re ready to go.”

  Kap gave a little bow to us all, and held my mother’s gaze for an extra few heartbeats. “It has been my pleasure, ladies.”

  Nana sniffed when he turned away. “How come nobody introduced me?” She fanned herself as she watched Kap leave. “My, my,” she said approvingly.

  Had my family gone nuts in the head?

  “What was that all about?” I asked them. “I thought we were here to visit Dad’s grave.”

  Mom still wore the remnants of a smile as she pinned me with a meaningful stare. “Don’t chastise, honey. Opportunities to interact with charming men don’t come around very often these days.” She chanced a look out the window, but the Minkuses were gone. She shrugged. “Just a little distraction.”

  I would have said more, but it seemed pointless. “We’ll probably never see him again anyway.”

  “Probably not,” Mom said. She sounded wistful.

  We got off the Tourmobile at the stop for the Tomb of the Unknowns, but diverted from the rest of the group to follow the road that led toward my dad’s grave site. I had been here plenty of times before. But not with my mom-at least, not when I was old enough to remember. I took Nana’s arm as we stepped off the pavement onto the grass. “You okay?” I asked them.

  Nana said, “Sure, sure,” but she glanced nervously at my mom.

  “Mom?”

  She took in the expanse of green, all the identical white headstones. “I haven’t been back here since…” Her voice caught. “I can’t even remember exactly…”

  I reached out and grabbed her hand, squeezing lightly. “I know where he is,” I said.

  We walked silently past rows and rows of headstones, our feet making soft shushing sounds in the almost-green grass. I came to visit my dad’s grave from time to time because it gave me peace to do so. I thought about how I sometimes talked to my dad, but after noticing how tight my mom’s face had grown, I decided not to mention that. This was going to be tough for her.

  “Here,” I said.

  Nana stepped away from me to stand next to Mom. The three of us gazed at the white headstone, which read AN-THONY M. PARAS. SILVER STAR.

  Mom looked around us. “The trees are a lot bigger now.”

  I nodded.

  Nana patted Mom on her shoulder. “He was a good man, Corinne. And he loved you very much.”

  Mom covered her eyes and cleared her throat. She spoke, but I couldn’t make out what she said. Not that it mattered. I got the feeling whatever she’d said wasn’t meant for me or for Nana.

  The three of us spent a long quiet moment there together. Finally, Mom looked up. “Thank you,” she said throatily. “This was important to me.”

  I put my arm around her and hugged. “For me, too,” I said.

  From there we made our way back to the Tomb of the Unknowns.

  “Oh,” Nana whispered when we positioned ourselves behind the brass railing at the top of the rise. “Look at that.”

  I’d been here many times but I understood my grandmother’s awe. Stretching out eastward beyond the tomb was a green vista that overlooked hundreds of other graves. But it was here, at the tomb itself, under the sharp blue spring sky, that her attention was captured.

  The sentinel walked twenty-one measured steps. He then turned and faced the simple, white monument for twenty-one seconds. Whenever he switched positions, he first kicked out one leg in a taut, well-practiced move, then smacked the active foot against the stationary one with an audible clack. Turning, he faced back down the mat upon which he’d walked, shifting his weapon to his outside shoulder, with another tight, structured move. He then took twenty-one more steps back the way he’d come. A brisk breeze made the three of us shiver, but the sentinel never flinched. When he turned to face the tomb again, Nana asked, “He does this all day?”

  “They operate in shifts,” I whispered. I gestured for us to leave and we made our way up the marble steps into the adjacent museum. There were no words to describe the solemnity I always felt in the presence of deceased veterans. Keeping my voice down seemed the only respectful way to talk. And I knew from prior visits that any loud conversation would result in the sentinel’s chastisement of the crowd. “They change every hour.”

  “Handsome man,” Nana said, glancing behind us. “Tall.”

  “They all have to be between five-foot-eleven and six-foot-four.”

  “Really? There’s a height requirement?”

  We were inside the small museum now, and although we spoke freely, we still kept our voices low. “There are a lot of requirements,” I said. “You should look it up. They’re a very dedicated group. And only about one-fifth of those who apply are accepted into their ranks.”

  “Look it up on the Internet, you mean?” Mom asked.

  “You mastered e-mail. There’s nothing scary about surfing the ’Net. Unless you’re downloading from a questionable source, you really can’t hurt your computer.”

  “Oh, she isn’t afraid of that,” Nana said. “She’s af
raid of becoming addicted to the thing.”

  I turned to my mom. “Seriously?”

  “One of my girlfriends joined something called ‘chatrooms’ and now she never wants to come over for coffee or go out to movies.”

  “Who?”

  I laughed when she told me. “You don’t even like her.”

  “That’s beside the point.”

  After strolling along the outer rim of the breathtaking Memorial Amphitheater and finishing our Tourmobile trek, we took the Metro back to my apartment, where Nana decided to nap for a little while. When she was out of the room and the place was quiet, I realized that I would usually have a phone call or an e-mail to look forward to from Tom. Not so today. My cell phone had been extraordinarily silent and when I checked my inbox, I had only two new non-spam messages. One from Bucky and the other from Cyan. Both were looking for updates. I wrote back, but confessed I had no news.

  Speaking of news, I called Mom over to the computer in the spare bedroom-the room where I was staying while she and Nana used my queen-sized accommodations. “Here,” I said. “Let’s give you a quick tutorial.”

  She shook her head, but at least she took a seat on the daybed behind me. “I don’t see why it’s so important for me to learn this,” she said, pointing at the headline that described a double-assassination in China. “I can get this from watching the news.”

  “True,” I said. “But the news simply projects the day’s biggest stories-or what they deem most important. If you’re interested in something that doesn’t have to do with China ”-I motioned toward the monitor-“you can search for whatever it is you need.”

  “What happened there, anyway?” she asked.

  I scrolled down the article to find out that two upper-level Chinese government officials had been shot, execution style, in a restaurant in Beijing. According to “unconfirmed reports,” the two Chinese officials had been buying United States secrets from an “unnamed insider.” It appeared that the Chinese government, believing their conduit had been compromised, had sanctioned the double-assassination.

  Their killer had been immediately apprehended and offered no resistance when taken into custody. He had, however, been killed himself shortly thereafter. Details were sketchy, but the Chinese police were claiming that he had grabbed for one of their officers’ weapons in a futile attempt to escape. Political pundits were speculating that the police were covering up the fact that the gunman had been shot in cold blood after carrying out his allegedly government-sanctioned hit.

  “Just like Lee Harvey Oswald,” Mom said.

  “If you believe the conspiracy theories.”

  Her gaze was glued to the screen. “I don’t believe our government killed President Kennedy. But Jack Ruby’s oh-so-convenient shooting makes me wonder who did.” She made a clucking sound. “And I’ll bet there are people all over China tonight wondering who was behind this one.”

  Still at the helm, I clicked the browser bar and said, “I love the Internet. It’s like having the most comprehensive library available to me twenty-four hours a day.” I typed in the name of an author I knew my mother liked. “Look. Lots of information. Biography, book descriptions, reviews. This is great stuff.” I gave her a meaningful look. “But don’t believe everything you read.”

  She moved closer and I let her have my seat. I showed her how to search. It took a few tries before she was willing to take control of the mouse and keyboard, but eventually I stepped away. “Have at it,” I said. “Look up whatever you like. Just keep it clean, okay?”

  She looked up long enough to catch my wink.

  “You’re going to be sorry if I spend my whole vacation sitting in front of this computer,” she said.

  “Don’t worry. I won’t let that happen.”

  She was already typing. “You’d better not.”

  CHAPTER 10

  MY BREATH CAUGHT THE NEXT MORNING WHEN I opened the paper. With all the excitement yesterday running into Ruth Minkus at Arlington, I had almost forgotten about Howard Liss’s accusations. Almost. But not completely.

  The newspaper’s headlines dealt with the Chinese assassinations, but I didn’t stop to read the coverage. All my focus was on getting to page two to see what new mischief Howard Liss was up to.

  Whatever Happened to Mean Minkus?

  The media (and dare I say it-the government) is persisting with society’s tendency to confer sainthood on an individual just because that person is dead. Have we so quickly forgotten the “Mean Minkus” appellation bestowed on our recently departed compatriot? I’m sure others aren’t so forgiving. In fact, I would be willing to bet that several high-profile celebrities are sleeping a little easier tonight now that the bulldog has bitten the dust. Whether they deserve the respite, or whether they’ve just dodged a bullet remains to be seen. It will be up to Minkus’s capable second-in-command, Phil Cooper, to determine what terrorist cells our favorite film stars belong to. If any.

  My focus today is not on these superstars, but on the dead man. Let us stop singing his praises. Let us stop eulogizing him as though he were infallible and a loveable teddy bear just because he no longer walks in our midst. Let us admit he was a canker to many, and a hero to some. But if, indeed, he met his maker before his time, then I want to know who did it. You should want to know, too. You should demand to know. Perhaps then we will have ourselves a genuine terrorist to persecute. Who did it? I don’t know. Joel Minkus, the golden boy congressman-and soon to be senator if Ruth has anything to do with it-has not yet seen fit to make time for my questions. I hope he will reconsider soon. Time is our enemy. If anyone knows who Mean Minkus was targeting, we may have our best clue to our killer.

  “You’re not actually reading that garbage, are you?” Mom asked from behind me.

  Nana peered over my shoulder. “What does that crazy man have to say today?”

  I let out the breath I’d been holding. “At least Liss isn’t attacking me again.”

  “Good,” Mom said. “How anyone can subscribe to that man’s rantings, I can’t understand.”

  “Rantings,” I said. “Good choice of word. This Liss Is More column might sell a lot of papers, but he sure seemed to be all over the place in terms of accusations. Today he’s on a whole new rampage. ‘Who was Minkus’s next target?’ ” I frowned as I turned the page. “Maybe that’s who the police should be investigating instead of me.”

  “He’s a lunatic,” Nana said as Mom poured her a cup of coffee.

  “What does that say about me?” I asked rhetorically. “I read him every day now.”

  Mom patted me on the shoulder. “Well, of course you do,” she said in that soothing voice she used to use when I woke up during a nightmare. “He pulled you into this situation.”

  I didn’t want to argue that I was already part of this situation before Liss ever got a hold of it, but the phone rang. I’d turned it back on this morning, hoping the onslaught from the press had subsided.

  Nana looked up. “Do you think that’s your handsome hunk, Tommy?”

  Mom and I exchanged a look. “No,” I said, with more than a little disappointment. “Ollie Paras,” I said into the receiver, forgetting this was my home phone. “I mean… Hello.”

  “Oh my God, Ollie, there are people out on our front lawn. With cameras!”

  In my effort to process the woman’s panicked words, I couldn’t place her voice.

  “Why does anyone think we had anything to do with Minkus? You know we didn’t. Can’t you tell them? Steve is ready to go out there with a baseball bat.”

  “Suzie,” I said, relieved to know who I was talking to. “Please, don’t let him do that, okay? It will just make it worse.”

  “I know,” she said. “He knows it, too. But we can’t even leave the house to get the newspaper on the driveway without a hundred people shoving microphones at us and asking a million questions.”

  “A hundred?”

  “Well, at least a dozen. Hang on.” I heard her counting. “W
ell, there are five on the lawn and two by the street.”

  “Have they been there since Monday?”

  “No, just today. This morning. Why are they targeting us?”

  I thought about that. Except for the camera crew and the White House staff, no one knew that Suzie and Steve had been part of Sunday night’s dinner preparations until I’d mentioned it to Jack Brewster, and then to the two detectives when Craig interrogated me. I couldn’t imagine who might have leaked that information to the press, but it was obvious someone had.

  “I don’t have an answer for you,” I said, but my brain was trying to piece it together. “Did anyone come over to question you about Sunday’s filming?”

  “Yeah,” Suzie said uncertainly. “Last night a detective stopped by and asked us a few questions, but he said it was just routine. Now this.” I could practically picture her gesturing out her front window.

  “Try to keep a low profile,” I suggested.

  “Do you have any idea what our schedule is like today?” Suzie asked, her hysteria returning. “We have two segments to film at the studio this afternoon. How can we get there if there are news vans blocking our driveway? What do they want from us?”

  “Let’s take it easy,” I said, trying to work the same soothing magic on Suzie that my mom had been able to work on me. “First of all, they can’t be on your private property.”

  “Hang on, let me peek out the window.” I heard the soft shift of metallic blinds. “No, they seem to be mostly on the street. Some are under the tree at the parkway.”

  “Where do you live?”

  She told me. I recognized the name as a posh Virginia suburb. “Okay,” I said. “As long as they-”

  Suzie screamed.

  “What?” I asked into the receiver. “What? What happened?”

  When she answered, her breath came in short gasps. “One of them jumped up at my front window and took my picture.”

  In the background I heard Steve swearing and threatening to grab a gun.

  “Stop him,” I said.