Damage Control

by Michael Bowen

  “All right, then, Ms. Quick-Study, what’s the most important word in that snarky little piece of left-wing tripe?”

  “Um, uh, hmm. ‘Money-bundler’? That’s kind of defamatory, I guess.”

  “‘Promising.’” He waited for a searing insight to scald my brain. Didn’t happen, so he spelled it out for me. “‘Promising’ is what you call someone who’s new to the game. A rookie with a high ceiling.”

  “Well, I am kind of a rookie at activist-group fund-raising. The Congressman deciding not to run for reelection in ’fourteen caught me flat-footed, so I grabbed the MVC thing. Figured I could work my Hill contacts and learn on the job.”

  “Exactly my point.”

  “Oh.”

  “’Cause I’m guessin’ you didn’t pull Mr. Jerzy Schroeder from the ass of any Congressional staff acquaintance.”

  “True. I met him at an after-party that the National Association of White Collar Criminal Defense Attorneys threw for a Kennedy Center gala a while back. Just walked up and introduced himself to me. Wasn’t even sure who he was, but I remembered what you always told me—‘Don’t believe everything you say, and don’t say everything you believe.’ Worked out real well. Until the, you know…”

  “Josie, you know as well as I do that you are too new at money-bundling—excuse me, development—to have ripe fruit just fall into your lap like that.”

  Rafe set a steaming mug of freshly nuked dark roast coffee in front of me—just in time to keep me from losing my temper with my condescending relative.

  “Now, Uncle D, don’t be jumping to conclusions here. You’re awful smart, but you haven’t been in D.C. in quite a while. Social media has changed things. Networking and relationships happen a lot faster here now.”

  “‘Haven’t been in D.C.,’ my ass. I was in Washington just three years ago.”

  “That was for your parole hearing, Uncle D.” I sipped coffee.

  “Technically my hearing on modifying my conditions of supervised release. For a good long time now, the United States Parole Commission has had about as much to do with parole as the Justice Department has to do with justice.”

  “Where are you going with this? Are you saying Schroeder was just leading me on—dangling a payday in front of me as bait for an indecent proposal?”

  “Nothing of the sort.” He managed an indignant snort. “No man who showers regularly and owns a clean suit has to go to that much trouble for horizontal recreation with a smart, pretty girl in Washington. Not as smart and pretty as you, maybe, but close enough if all he has in mind is fun.”

  “Well, thank you for that.”

  “I meant it in the kindest possible way.”

  “So what are you driving at, then? What cards was Schroeder hiding?”

  “I don’t have the faintest idea. That’s what troubles me. The purpose of my call is to suggest that after you give that very question some careful thought you let me debrief you so that I can undertake some discreet inquiries.”

  A chill from my neck rippled right down to my hips. In Louisiana politics the expression “when push comes to shove” isn’t a metaphor. Politically active since he was fourteen, Uncle D has done plenty of pushing and plenty of shoving. A Darius Z.T. Barry inquiry is about as discreet as the invasion of Iraq.

  “As usual, you are as right as a Pythagorean triangle, Uncle D, and I will do exactly as you suggest.” Up to a point. “Thank you for sharing your concerns with me.”

  “You are most welcome, Josephine. You’ll always be my favorite niece. I will look forward to hearing from you.”

  Laying the phone on the table, I stood up so that I could pull the robe around myself properly. Then I took a long hit from the mug.

  “Sounded like an interesting conversation,” Rafe said.

  “Uncle D and Bull Durham cigarettes have two things in common: they come on strong, and neither one has a filter.”

  Chapter Eight

  I sagged back into my chair. Rafe sat down kitty corner from me. He took my left hand in both of his.

  “You’re cold.”

  “‘Thanks, I needed that’ is an unpromising way to start the morning.”

  Instead of launching into a four-point response to the Uncle D problem, Rafe met my comment with eight seconds of blessed silence. Empathy radiated from his face. When he spoke, his voice couldn’t have been gentler.

  “How do you feel about that?”

  I swam a couple of laps in his dreamy dark eyes. This guy got up an hour before normal to wrap a robe around me and make me coffee and just BE with me.

  I’d put in about a year on Congressman Temple’s staff when I met Rafe. I’d been treating D.C.’s male twenty-somethings as a buffet, sampling this one and that, sometimes intrigued, occasionally impressed, but never blown away.

  Rafe had blown me away. One good look and POW! His suave urbanity, his easy patter, his sensitivity, his humor, his smarts, his cool sophistication—I’d found out about all that stuff down the road. I’d fallen for him before he’d opened his mouth. It wasn’t just his looks. I sensed something about him, some magnetism, some deep-down authenticity. This guy is real. I’d been playing Triple-A ball, and I’d just met my first major leaguer.

  I’d learned that in his late twenties he’d married a woman he really loved, Leslie Weymouth. They’d planned everything out: start trying for kids in six years or so, when she’d be thirty-two or thirty-three. It didn’t happen right away, but she’d gotten pregnant by thirty-four. A boy. Everything about the pregnancy going just fine. She was about four months along when, at dinner with three other couples, she got this startled look on her face, said “What’s happening?” and then dropped dead. Basically, her heart exploded. A genetic abnormality, the doctor had said. It could have killed her at any time from the day she was born. She could have died with it at eighty-seven, but instead she died from it at thirty-four. The baby never had a chance.

  I think that heart-breaking agony must have deepened Rafe, taken him to a level of humanity that people don’t reach too often in D.C., or in Baton Rouge, for that matter. In the eleven years between Leslie’s death and the day Rafe and I met, he hadn’t gotten serious about any other woman. He got serious about me in a big hurry—and vice versa.

  “I feel like a self-involved drama magnet,” I told him in response to his question. “This is about you, not me. You’re under a criminal investigation, and here I am stewing about some scheme so hypothetical even Uncle Darius couldn’t imagine what it might possibly be.”

  Rafe swung my computer around to scan the Rotunda squib. Flicked his head left and right with an appraising look on his face, the way he did when he was thinking yeah, maybe, I guess, could be.

  “So he thinks you were being played.”

  “Yep. And if he’s right, the game might not be over yet.”

  “Big if. But I knew Darius before he was a full-fledged grumpy old man, back when he was just a curmudgeon-trainee. I was only a baby reporter for the Richmond Times, but even then I could tell that, as politicians go, he was pretty shrewd.”

  “And as cannons go, he was pretty loose,” I said. “Still is.”

  “Yeah. I remember telling him during an interview that I’d heard that in Louisiana, politics is a contact sport. He said, ‘Son, ballroom dancing is a contact sport. In Louisiana, politics is a collision sport.’ He stole that line from a Michigan State football coach, but he proudly claimed it as his own. Colorful guy.”

  “More than colorful. After Uncle D did his patriotic duty in Vietnam, he went to work politically in Plaquemines Parish. He was still a Democrat back then, but in Louisiana there were Democrats and then there were Democrats. As primary time approached in 1970, according to the story, one of the wrong kind of Democrats took it into his head to inspect the Plaquemines Parish voter registration rolls. When he approached the clerk’s office, he fo
und Uncle D and six of his closest friends blocking the door. The fella showed Uncle D a court order. Uncle D showed the fella a forty-five caliber pistol.”

  “Any shots actually fired?” Rafe asked.

  “No, just some fisticuffs. More than eighty percent of the registered voters cast ballots—many of them, remarkably enough, in alphabetical order—and the local dentist took himself a real nice vacation that year.”

  “Yeah, that pretty much fits his profile. Not sure whether there are too many problems worse than having him try to fix them.” Didn’t sugarcoat it. Good.

  We just sat for thirty seconds or so, communing in silence. Didn’t know what I wanted to do. Going back to bed made no sense. Couldn’t generate much enthusiasm for early breakfast. Obvious strategy for the Rotunda squib was to ignore it, so nothing proactive on my near-term agenda.

  All of a sudden Rafe jumped up like an overdose of Viagra had just clicked in. Eyes wide, showing his teeth in an open-mouthed grin, animation lighting his face. Looked like Rafe thought I needed a tumble and a cuddle. I figured I should play along because bruising your guy’s ego is a lousy way to thank him for robe and coffee.

  I’d read him way wrong.

  “How about a run? We haven’t run together in weeks. Not far. Half-hour tops. Get out of here, clear our heads, and pump some endorphins into our flaccid Beltway bloodstreams.”

  Wow! Rafe had just nailed it.

  “You’re on!”

  I was already out of my chair and on the way to the bedroom. Dressed in five minutes flat. Would’ve been four, but I noticed Rafe lacing up a pair of blah New Balance court shoes that looked like they’d come from the back of the closet.

  “Where are those Nike Air cross-trainers you were so happy about when you paid two hundred dollars for them? That was just, what, a few weeks ago, right?”

  “Can’t find ’em. May have left them at Capitol Fitness last time I was there.” He deftly finished tying his left lace. “Let’s go.”

  We went. Astonishing how exhilarated I suddenly felt. Running at six a.m. is the kind of thing you do when you’re nineteen and think having a mid-term coming up is a big deal. Cruising out the front door and heading for the C&O towpath was like scooping all our Beltway hassles into a dog-waste bag and dumping them on a convenient compost heap.

  By three minutes into the run we’d gotten our wind and fallen into a comfortable pace that kept us side by side. It was cool going stride for stride like that with my life-mate. Rafe turned his head toward me and asked a question without panting much.

  “So what were the next steps on the Schroeder project when he caught the bullet? Were you still at the thirty-thousand-foot level with him, or was an actual buy-in dynamic on the horizon?”

  Kinda sad, but I didn’t need a translation for that question. Not sure how it happened, but somewhere along the line MBAs started telling political science majors how to talk. Or maybe Rafe was just too much of a gentleman to ask me flat out if Schroeder and I had gotten past finger-fucking (at the professional level).

  “I’d say we were right on the verge of a clear path forward. He wanted to take me to a key meeting that very morning and, if it worked out, to head to Denver the first part of next week and meet with the whole brain trust.”

  “Key meeting with Dierdorf? Here?”

  “With the major investor, not Dierdorf. Dierdorf was the target.”

  “Right. I thought maybe he was thinking of trying to talk Dierdorf out of the game by flexing MVC’s fearsome muscle at him. Denver trip on his nickel?”

  “Yep.”

  “Sounds like he was getting serious for sure.”

  “Yep.”

  Now I pulled just a little ahead of Rafe. Not by trying to; just happened. I slowed a little to make sure I didn’t put too much distance between us. Kinda liked the side-by-side deal.

  Funniest thing, the next thought that worked its way into my brain was Sandra Jane Burke, one of my classmates at Carondelet. Hadn’t thought about her twice since AP exams. She didn’t stay in my thoughts for long, because before we were much more than half a mile into the run Josie the Scold stomped into my brain and launched into an old-fashioned, down-home talking-to.

  That’s a good man you’ve got there, Josie Kendall. He’s sweet to you and cares about you and fun to be with. You need to be good to him, now. You start takin’ a man like that for granted and next thing you know you and your little Creole butt are on the outside lookin’ in—and when that happens, won’t be no fixin’ it by sayin’ five Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys.

  Not that I took Scoldie’s lecture sitting down. I reminded her that ever since Jerzy Schroeder’s close encounter with eleven grams of lead had focused the cops on Rafe, I had been dedicating myself body and soul to his problem. Didn’t faze her.

  You know EXACTLY what I’m talkin’ about, young lady, and don’t you pretend you don’t. Every single mornin’ two dozen women in D.C. tell the mirror, ‘Why, look, I’m just as sexy as Josie Kendall and twice as smart.’ If you can’t show your man you appreciate him, one of them for sure will.

  Guilt, in other words. Not real familiar with that feeling, and it confused me. In Baton Rouge husbands and wives, generally speaking, don’t get all worked up about a dalliance here and there or an occasional little lagniappe. You don’t go rubbing anyone’s nose in it, of course. You don’t get surprised in your own bed, or have your picture posted online with a handful of the wrong fanny. As Uncle D would put it, though, “It ain’t cheatin’ if you don’t get caught.”

  Now, when it comes to this sort of thing, Washington is Baton Rouge with mediocre cooking. I’d figured that out before the end of my first summer there. In this mini-universe of Schedule C appointees, A-listers, senior staff, wannabes, Beltway bandits, lobbyists, and reporters who cover them all, occasional adultery isn’t a firing offense. It’s just barely a frowning offense.

  No one ever spells this out. It’s understood. I’d never talked about it with Rafe. I figured it was the kind of thing you just knew, like you just know anything you say to a reporter is on the record unless you agree ahead of time that it’s not. But there was Josie the Scold, and she didn’t sound convinced.

  “Turn up ahead there?” Rafe’s voice, from right behind me.

  I nodded. I glimpsed him pulling his left hand away from his right—and I saw the iPhone in the left. Checking our times, I guessed.

  On our return leg the run went from good to perfect. I got that runner’s high they’re always talking about where it feels like there’s no strain, scarcely even any effort. Just gliding along feeling forever twenty-one with my muscles stretching and my lungs filling and my heart pumping. Rafe panted up to our front door no more than a second behind me. Checked his iPhone first thing.

  “How’d we do?”

  “Twenty-eight minutes, for just about three miles.”

  “So…something north of nine minutes a mile.”

  “Yeah. I guess we’ll be skipping the Olympic Trials again this year.”

  Grinning, he opened the door and, with exaggerated gallantry, bowed slightly and gestured for me to go in first.

  I did. Turned around on the line where the stonework in our entryway stops and our oak flooring starts. I waited until he’d come in and closed the door before I jumped him.

  Chapter Nine

  I’d call the next two hours just real nice. Showering together and sponging hot, sudsy water all over each other’s bodies. Drying off with almost new Prussian blue towels that we’d bought together. Popping him a good one on the fanny, just for luck. Fixing a Cajun omelet—green peppers, onions, sausage, cheese, the whole deal—and sharing it. Mellow, lingering glow kind of stuff.

  There was nothing wrong with the sex in between the shower and the omelet, either. I didn’t have to fake a thing. There wasn’t quite the zing that tasting forbidden fruit with Jerz
y had sometimes generated, but Hell’s bells, life isn’t all espresso and double bourbons. For grown-ups—lucky ones, anyway—it’s mostly lattés and smooth merlots and gently subtle Chablis with nuances that a teenager couldn’t appreciate.

  As I approached the end-game on my half of the omelet, I noticed Rafe idly spinning his phone around on the table. Then I picked up a naughty-eight-year-old look in his eyes. He’ll get that sometimes when he’s thinking he might have to take a pol to a “gentlemen’s club” where the patrons stuff twenties into g-strings, and he’s sneaking up on telling me about it (or not).

  “I might have set a better pace for you on our run if I hadn’t been fussing with this thing,” he said.

  “You had to keep track of the time, honey.” Supportive bride, that’s me. “Heaven forbid we wouldn’t have quarter-splits on our impulsive fun-run.”

  “Actually, I wasn’t just checking times.” He couldn’t have sounded more sheepish if he’d been scoping out porn while we were pounding the pavement. “I was following up on a hunch. Turned out to be a good one.”

  I dropped my fork. Forearms on the table. Full eye contact. “You have my complete and undivided attention, Rafe.”

  “The National Solar Power Entrepreneurial Conference is meeting next week. In Denver.”

  “Denver.”

  “Right. Mile-high city.”

  “Next week—when Schroeder was talking about getting me there, supposedly to meet with his wind-power hustlers.”

  “Uh, yeah,” Rafe said

  “But the odds are a hundred to one that the competing solar power mavens who are also going to be there at that very same time will include Sanford Dierdorf—the guy Schroeder and Majority Values Coalition and I were talking about ruining so that Schroeder could glom onto his government subsidy.”

  “Yep.” Rafe sketched a shrug. “Could be a coincidence, of course.”

  “Sure it could.”

  I turned a full-bodied scowl away from Rafe. Looked like Uncle D was right for sure—which meant that the clever, quick-thinking Beltway insider profiled on MVC’s website had probably been getting herself gamed like a hayseed fresh off the bus from Bug Tussle, Texas. Plus, I still had no idea of exactly what the game was.