“Yes. But I’m not there anymore. I’m now in the Career Services division.”
Dan took time to stir the ice cubes in his drink. Curioser and curioser.
“I see,” he said finally.
“Do you?” She was looking right at him.
“Well, yes, and no. But probably yes. You pissed somebody off, and they executed what the civil serpents call the ‘lateral arabesque.’ When it happens in the Navy, the detailers call you up and tell you that you’re going to get a professionally challenging reassignment.”
She smiled. “I think I frustrated them more than made them angry. I wouldn’t let the internal organizational politics interfere with a case.
What I didn’t understand, initially at least, was how both internal and external political considerations colored everything we did, either at Justice or in the NIS. Let’s go find dinner somewhere,” she said. “I’ll tell you about it.” They asked the bartender for a recommendation for dinner in the South Philadelphia area. He solemnly advised ordering a pizza delivered to the club bar instead.
But one of the warrants named a restaurant that was two miles down from the main gate on Snyder as being truly outstanding. He also advised taking a taxi, as the locals were sensitive to out-of-town license plates, especially if they displayed a Washington, D. C., military decal.
The bartender shook his head but did call them a taxi. Thirty minutes later, they were ensconced at a corner table at the Trattoria Firenzi and trying out a bottle of Antinori red Chianti, at Grace’s suggestion.
At Dan’s suggestion, they ordered a series of dishes from the abundant appetizer listings instead of a main course.
“The warrant officer knew what he was talking about,” observed Grace after the first of the dishes was presented.
“Warrants usually do; he also knew we were from Washington.”
Grace laughed. “That’s not a very big base, and one of those guys was from base security.”
“How do you know that?”
“NIS trade secret: He was carrying a police-type beeper.”
He smiled. “Well, see, you do know something about police work. Now, if you’re willing, tell me why you think you were eased out of Investigations Policy and into Career Services at NIS.”
She studied him for a moment, as if making up her mind. He looked back at her over his wineglass. Intelligent eyes, dusky green now. An almost severe face, faintly classical in bone structure and the fine planes of her cheeks and brows. Still no visible makeup. Something of a hard case perhaps. Except from what he had seen of her in coveralls, not that hard. And yet there had been zero coquettishness: strictly business.
Maybe an undercurrent of insecurity. Why should she tell him anything?
After all, they were working for opposing camps. But then he saw her decide.
She poured some more wine and then began to tell him about herself—her home and family in New England, mother and father both doctors, a comfortable upbringing for an only daughter, an economics degree from Brown University, a JD from Georgetown Law, and then the job at SEC, first in Washington, later in New York. She had graduated from law school in 1984.
The following year, her parents had both died, which had crystallized her decision to stay put in Washington.
“My father had a heart attack, in the hospital, if you can believe it.
One of the nurses said she looked up and he was suddenly standing there, right in front of her desk. She had said, ‘Yes, Doctor?’ And he had told her that his heart had just stopped, then keeled over. They had him in the CCU in one minute, but they couldn’t … restart him. That was the word they used. Like he was a stalled old engine. He just … got away from them.”
She sipped some wine for a moment, staring at the candle in the wax-covered fiasco on the table.
“That was in the spring of 1985. My mother willed herself to carry on, for a while, anyway. But at Christmas time that same year, I think she turned her head to the wall and just … died. She actually gave me some warning. There was one letter, although I didn’t pick up on it. I was their only child, so I assumed the universe
centered on me. I had no idea how close they were—no idea at all. I think now they felt that they had done a conscientious and loving job with me, then gone back to being totally involved with each other once I left the nest.”
She paused to drink some wine, put down the glass, and drew her left palm slowly across her left cheek, reflecting.
“Mother was a psychiatrist in private practice with two other doctors. I don’t think I’ve ever told anybody this, but I’ve often thought that she just took something —you know, being a doctor, they know how to check out if they want to. But I’m not sure. She was a very strong woman, and I also believe that she was capable of simply switching off. I think she just went to find Dad.”
Dan saw her eyes mist over briefly, and he wished he had a handkerchief, but she dabbed her eyes with the corner of her napkin, took a deep breath, another sip of wine. The waiter came by with the next round of appetizers.
“Anyhow,” she continued, “there was a startling amount of money that came out of that dreadful year— life insurance, his investments, their share of their practices, that sort of thing. It all came to me, and suddenly I didn’t have to work. Not financially, anyway. But personally, I worked harder than ever. I just put my own head down and let the office take over my life. It was actually comforting for a while. And then I met Ren, my husband-to-be. He was testifying before the Senate Banking Committee on bond trading, and I was assigned to go monitor. I transferred to New York the following spring and we got married in early
1987.”
He sipped his own wine and kept quiet. She seemed to want to talk, and there were some uncomfortable parallels in the story of their lives.
“The job and the marriage were wonderful, for a while. But then the go-go years on Wall Street began to unravel, and life got tough out there in the financial trenches. Rennie didn’t handle it well, and then he got himself involved with cocaine and a couple of girl friends, and a nasty habit of using me as a punching bag. I broke it off, but by then I was not a very comfortable person to be around. Which is why that appointment came along, I think.”
“That was at the end of 1990?”
“It was 1991, actually. As I said, politically I wasn’t very astute about it, or I might have waited to see who or what won the election.”
“The ‘whats’ did.”
“I think it was more of a case of the ‘whos’ losing it, but anyhow, by December, 1992,1 was among the great Washington wave of the suddenly redundant. As I said, I didn’t have to work, but I did, if you follow.
What my mother did scared the hell out of me, and after my divorce, I was desperately afraid of being cut off from my life, which by then meant my work.”
“And you’ve found nobody significant in Washington?” he asked, then blushed. “Excuse me; forget I asked that.”
She smiled. “Why did you ask?”
It was his turn to scramble. “Well, your parents’ passing, a divorce. I just figured that by now, maybe …”
She gave him an introspective look but appeared to ignore his embarrassment. “No. After Rennie, I’ve taken myself off the market, as it were. You have to remember, in SEC, I dealt professionally with government litigators and their antagonists—type A’s, most of them, both the good guys and the bad guys. But kind of hard to warm up to, and, once you’d been through a twelve-hour day in that business, there wasn’t much time or energy left for sex appeal, no matter what they tell you in the movies. Especially once the home front began to dissolve.”
“I hear that.”
“So now I live in Georgetown, in my own town house. It even has a driveway and a garden with nice high brick walls. High-rent solitude, the perfect refuge for the harried government executive, as the Realtor explained it. Do you know Georgetown?”
He laughed. “Out of my price range, I’m afraid. I’ve been a wi
dower since … well, since 1988. I think I
told you—my dad bought a listed eighteenth-century house in Old Town Alexandria twenty years ago as a rental investment and passed it on to me during my last shore tour here—in Washington, I mean. In theory, it’s worth about ten times what he paid for it, but the remaining mortgage and the taxes are still pretty hefty.”
“Old Town’s pretty nice; I think it’s what Georgetown used to be like,”
she observed.
“Georgetown looks like Armani country to me these days. Old Town’s convenient to Fort Fumble, but the house itself isn’t much. It’s an old factor’s building, two stories and an attic, a loading crane still hanging out one of the attic windows, but it’s long and narrow rather than large, and not much of it is level or square anymore. I have a view of my neighbor’s garden and the back walls of other town houses, and the river, if I want to step out my front door and stand on tiptoes and if it’s wintertime. But there’s no garage. All those damned cobblestones, and a wooden fence that’s defying gravity better than it’s defying the termites. Dad put in central air and heat a few years before I got it, which makes it bearable. Some of those old places are unlivable. But Georgetown always seemed to me to be reserved for either assistant secretaries of state or the serious disco crowd.”
“There’s a wider range of people than that, although I don’t do much of the Georgetown social scene. I’ve been an extra at some dinner parties—neighbors, mostly, who need a fourth to fill out a table. After New York, though, I’ve been something of a recluse.”
The waiter came back with the final round of appetizers, and Dan was approaching his limit. His daily workouts on the river or on his home rowing machine had left him very fit but without much capacity for restaurant food, especially after his noontime Reuben extravaganza.
Grace seemed to be having the same problem.
“If I’m not intruding, what happened to your wife?” she asked.
Dan put down his wineglass and looked at the table, his eyes suddenly unfocused. After all these years, it was still surprisingly hard to talk about it; her question had ambushed him.
“Claire died in childbirth, or almost in childbirth.
Something they called toxemia, came out of nowhere.
We were at the PG school in Monterey—that’s the Navy’s graduate school.
She’d had some problems with blood pressure on and off in her third trimester, but labor had been going normally, if you can call anything about labor normal. I left to go home to put the damn dog out, if you can believe it. Was back in thirty minutes, and when I got back, she wasn’t there—in the labor room, I mean. A nurse intercepted me and took me into a doctor’s office, and I waited there in a panic until a doctor came in with the chaplain and told me that Claire had had convulsions and what appeared to be a massive stroke. Lost her and the baby.”
He ran out of breath for a moment, then said, “It happened so god damned fast.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said, reaching across the table for his hand. In his sudden emotional state, her hand felt cool on his and almost strange.
Grace appeared to sense his discomfort and withdrew her hand.
“Yeah, well. I’m kind of like you. Crawled into my cave and pulled the blankets up. I buried myself in my graduate work, finished a master’s in mechanical engineering, and then asked for sea duty, something haze gray and under way and going way the hell out of the country. The Navy’s exceptionally good about that, a guy loses his spouse. I was back at sea in a deployed cruiser in two weeks, and it was a godsend. Overseas, twenty-hour days, faraway places, as wet a shore liberty as your head could stand. Came to Washington for the first time in mid-1990. Shore duty’s like civilian life—it goes a little slower.”
“I know all about that slower,” she said. Dan was getting uncomfortable with the conversation, and yet he sensed a kindred spirit. She was saying something about how weekends dragged.
“Oh, yes, weekends,” he said. “Well, I’ve found the cure for them: I’ve become a Civil War-history buff. I drive out to the battlefields—there’s a bunch within three hours of D. C.—and I read a lot of books. Some of those places are amazing, and the countryside is usually worth the trip.” The waiter asked if they wanted doggy bags; they declined and Dan asked for the check.
“I’ve begun a predoctoral program in political science at Georgetown,”
she said. “I don’t really know what I’m going to do with it, but it fills those weekends with academic work.”
She looked wistful as she said it, and Dan realized that they were kindred spirits. She was probably harboring some pretty serious emotional scar tissue, and, like him, she was careful to seek stable and predictable circumstances within which to make it through the days, and nights. As if she sensed his thoughts, she excused herself while Dan waited for the check.
His conversation with Grace made him wonder once again about his own prospects for a relationship with another woman. For the first few years, his widower status had protected him, but after his executive officer tour on John King, he had wondered if he should or even could start up again with someone new. None of the women he had met over the past few years had been able to breach that pungent aura of sadness that circled his vision whenever he thought about Claire and the family he had lost. He knew he would be better off with someone, but all the prospective someones had been either mildly desperate divorcees or other conjugal casualties. No longer knowing what he wanted, he had just let that part of life slide, focusing inward on his workdays in the Pentagon, his rowing, his weekend sojourns into the history-drenched Virginia countryside, the prospects for getting back to sea again, all the while politely rebuffing the occasional attempts of his professional contemporaries to set him up with a family friend. He watched Grace thread her way back through the crowded dining room—attractive, poised, aloof, not seeming to be aware of herself—and searched his feelings for some spark of real interest. Physically, she was definitely interesting, but his heart remained silent. He
sighed. The waiter arrived at that moment with the check, and he returned to the business of the day, splitting the bill for their individual travel-expense reports.
at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday morning, Master Chief Gonzalez called back from the Bupers with word that he had some information on the missing It. (jg) W.
Hardin. Dan called the extension number over to Grace so she could pick up and listen.
“I can fax up the printout,” Gonzalez said, “but it’s not as much info as you might be expecting, ‘cause the records all went off to that federal depository in St. Louis about a year and a half ago, after he was declared a deserter.”
“So he was actually declared,” asked Dan.
“Yes, sir. His ship, that’s USS Luce, the DDG, she’s been decommissioned since’then. The ship initially filed an incident report when he went UA, like the manual requires, but then they declared him thirty days later.
That part’s all in here. And he was the assistant supply officer, not the chop. He was the Disbo.”
“Uh-oh. Okay, Master Chief. Let me get you the fax number here. Oh, and can you get me his fitrep file?”
“I doubt it, Commander. Once the records go to St. Louis, we don’t keep anything.”
“How about those little old ladies up on the fourth deck—that place where officers can come in and review their records?”
“The microfiche should have gone out with the records, but, yeah, they might still have his package. I’ll check it out. But I’m going to need some paper to get that released.”
Dan thought about that for a moment. Getting access to another officer’s fitness reports took a flag officer’s signature.
“Lemme make a call back to my bosses in Opnav, Master Chief. Meanwhile, I’ll fax you down my ap r’-ix.
pointing letter so you can release the other admin. And I’m going to ask formally that the records be retrieved from St. Louis on a priority basis. This isn’t a UA case;
this is more than likely a homicide.”
“No shit? You told his next of kin?”
Dan felt a wave of embarrassment. A next-of-kin notification should have been put in motion the moment they had the ID.
“No, I haven’t,” he replied. “Our ID is based only on laundry markings on his uniform. We presume that’s accurate, but I need the records, especially the health and dental records, so the forensics guys can confirm.
But the body is that of a black male, lieutenant junior grade, in uniform, Supply Corps insignia, and the uniform has his name on it.”
“Well, that sure sounds like Hardin, just looking at the printout.
Commander, lemme give you some advice.
A body in a battleship—for journalists, that’s going to be some sexy shit. It’s gonna bring the press in pretty quick, somebody in the yard runs his mouth. Get a message sent down here to the bureau—to the Casualty Assistance Calls office—from Comnavbase Philly, probably, reporting what you’ve found, asking for the records, and asking for a CACO. That way, the CACO can go see the family—it says here they’re right here in D. C.—and let them know something before they see it on the TV, okay?”
“Good advice, Master Chief. Message coming at you.
Stand by for the fax number.”
Dan switched off the speaker phone and looked at Grace Snow. “Nothing like a master chief to keep a commander off the rocks,” he muttered. “I should have thought of that yesterday, soon as we had a name.”
Grace was shaking her head as she looked at her notes. “I kind of got lost in the alphabet soup. CACO?
FITREP? DISBO?”
“Right. Hang on a moment.” He got up from his borrowed desk and went to find Santini, whom he asked to get the Commander Naval Base Philadelphia public affairs officer over to the MS office right away.
“Can I tell her what it’s about? The Navbase staffers don’t just come because I call ‘em,” Santini said.
“Just tell him—her, did you say? Tell her there’s a commander from Opnav in your office asking for the base PAO, and it’s really urgent. If we’re lucky, we’re going to be just ahead of the curve here. And I need your fax number here for the guy in Bupers, and a copy of my appointing order faxed to him.”
Official Privilege Page 15