Malachi wasn’t entirely sure why he was keeping a watch on Collins and the woman, but if the woman was the mysterious Miss. Snow, and if she went home tonight, he might be able to find out where they both lived—if that was Snow in there.
After a half hour, a pimply-faced waiter inside the very busy cafe finally saw him out at the table and came hustling out, trying manfully to disguise his irritation at finally having to service the sidewalk tables, and yet obviously prepared to catch hell for taking so long.
“Relax,” Malachi said to him. “Bring me a double I.
W. Harper hundred proof on the rocks, water back, and your dinner menu.
And take your time, hey? I’m mostly out here tonight to people-watch.”
The waiter nodded and hurried away to get his drink, and Malachi settled back into the chair. Upon reflection, he doubted very much that the woman with Col lins was Miss. Snow from the NIS. Probably just one of those female officers that had sprung up all over the military in the past few years, although she looked a little expensive for the Pentagon.
He would wait for two, maybe three hours. If it looked like Collins was going to score, he would give it up for Lent and just go home. If not, and he took her home, he would follow the Suburban to see if it led him to where the woman lived. Just in case. In any event, one thing was perfectly clear: If the captain had hired some new talent to come after Malachi, this pretty boy with the big car and the little boat was probably not it.
dan refilled grace’s wineglass and his own, then read aloud some of the wine babble off the back label.
” ‘A hint of violets, a soft edge on the palate’—who thinks this drivel up, do you suppose?” He snorted.
“Short, little, round men who wear bow ties and odd glasses.” She laughed. “I wish they’d just say it’s a nice wine. It is a nice wine.”
“Yes, I thought so. They have this evil establishment over here in Old Town called the Sutton Place Gourmet.
Hungry-Yuppie heaven. I go in there once in awhile and do serous damage to my entire physiology: Everything they have there is first-class, but a health food store it is not. Got the vino and this pate there.”
She nodded and looked around the garden, giving Dan a nudge of momentary regret about not keeping it up better. He supposed the neighbors would have had him up on charges if this were Georgetown.
“I like the … natural look,” she said at last, managing an almost straight face.
Dan laughed out loud. “Yeah, it’s natural all right. I call it a Darwin garden: The fittest species are going to make it. I amputate anything that encroaches on the patio or the walkway back to the alley; otherwise, they’re all on their own.”
She laughed, but then her expression grew more serious.
“Tell me,” she said, “do you think the racial aspect has something to do with what’s happened with this case?” she asked.
Dan was almost annoyed that she had come back to the Hardin case. He had been enjoying her company, and the chance to have a drink with an attractive woman without having to maneuver through all the quivering thornbushes of the mating game. But the Hardin case is really why she’s here, right? She didn’t come down to the boathouse to watch you row, did she?
He did not give her a direct answer.
“Did Englehardt say anything to indicate that race was a factor in how they’d handle the case?” he asked.
She put her glass down. “He didn’t mean to, but yes, he did. He said it was just another unsolved black homicide, one among too many. And then he tried to cover his tracks by citing the backlog of Hispanic, Filipino, and even unsolved white homicides. But I think he revealed how he felt with his first words. The gist was, This is probably some black thing. Another young black male ending up getting killed over a pair of tennis shoes. That’s hardly front-page news. His sister was also killed, although that appears to be an accident. Well, that’s Washington. We get three of those a night in this town. Next. Like that.”
Dan nodded and stared down at the table. Grace sounded bitter about what had happened. He didn’t know what to say to her. Having seen the body, the murder of Lieutenant Hardin was a lot more personal than daily newspaper stories of life and death in the inner city. He could not trivialize the hideous fact that the lieutenant had been literally entombed alive in that ship. Grace had seen it, too, which maybe was why she wouldn’t let it go.
“What do you plan to do?” he asked.
“About … ?”
“Well, first, about getting the shaft from your erstwhile rabbi, Engle-whatever, and the NIS. And about the Hardin case.”
“Ah. You think something should be done about the Hardin case?”
He had surprised himself, and maybe her, as well.
But it was true: Something should be done. “Regrettably, yes, I do.”
“Why regrettably?”
He had to think about it for a moment, figure out how to explain his situation. “Because,” he replied, “it’s politically risky, careerwise. I have this instinctive feeling that if I continue to poke around in this, I’m going to step on a land mine with those EAs.”
Grace was surprised. “How could the Hardin case make you professionally vulnerable?”
“Easy. I’m in a Washington headquarters staff job, and in the bank for command. I stick my nose where it doesn’t belong, piss somebody off, especially one of these EAs, they can derail all of that if they want to.
Delay giving me a ship; extend me in the staff job. Or give me a ship that’s being decommissioned: You spend a year and half putting her to sleep in some armpit like the Philadelphia shipyard. Dismantling the armed forces seems to be a priority of this administration, you know.”
He leaned back in his chair and stared out into the darkness of the garden. “Or, if somebody like that guy Randall wanted to do some damage, they can descreen me: He exercises poor judgment; perhaps not in the Navy’s best interests that he go to command. Remember, there are a lot more commanders than commands available—that’s why we have a bank. They could always tell me to ride my desk to my twenty and get out.
Unless, of course, I got SERBed, and then I could get out right now.”
“Serbed?”
“Selective Early Retirement Board. All the services are doing it now, in celebration of the fact that the Cold War is over and American is finally safe. They convene a special board to screen the inventory of oh-fives and oh-sixes each year, the commanders and the captains, the lieutenant colonels and the colonels, and send about twenty percent of them a Dear John letter.
Thank you for your x-teen years of loyal service, but we have decided that we don’t need you anymore. Report to the personnel office in ninety days and they’ll make you a civilian.”
“I’ve never heard of this. What exactly happens?”
“Just what I said. It’s the civilian equivalent of downsizing, only the Navy calls it ‘right-sizing’ … do you love it? Orwell would have approved. They convene a formal selection board around Thanksgiving and then several hundred lucky souls get a very sincere Christmas card from the Chief of Naval Personnel telling them that the Navy wasn’t serious about that twenty year career stuff, and, regrettably, they will be civilians in ninety days. Good frigging luck.”
She shrugged. “You guys get ninety days. Most civilians get two weeks. I got one day.”
He sighed and refreshed their wineglasses. “I know.
But when I signed up, we were promised at least a twenty-year career.
They promised the twenty years because we were signing up to put our lives on the line for Uncle Sam. Civilians always lived with the two-week notice clause in their contract, because civilians were mostly signing up for just a job—nine to five, home every night, every weekend. No six-month deployments to the Indian Ocean, no firefights in the back alleys of Mogadishu, no station-keeping blockades off Haiti.”
“But the military is all volunteers, isn’t it?”
“Yup. I’m not knocking the cru
ises, going to sea, or standing up on the firing line. But part of that deal is a twenty-year run and then a secure pension for everyone who survives the twenty years. Cops and firemen are in an analogous situation, which is why most of them get retirement on twenty if they want it, and if they survive that long.
That’s the promise that’s being broken.”
“Well, it’s not all nine to five out there in the civilian world,” Grace observed. “Civil servants, yes, but many civilians in the business world put in overtime hours without pay just to keep a job.”
“I know,” he said, beginning to feel a little bit annoyed.
“But I still can’t equate what I do to what a civilian who’s in the business of selling soap does.”
“The soap salesman would point out that he pays your salary. I think maybe you’ve been a bit insulated in the armed services. Even as a civil servant, I still got only one day’s notice.”
“Yeah. Unfortunately, you told them you would resign.”
“At your suggestion.”
I That made him suddenly angry. He put his wineglass down on the glass-topped table with an audible crack. I knew it. Trust your instincts, he thought. You were right the other night. Suddenly, he wanted her to go home and to take her little crusade about the Hardin murder with her. He wanted to recoup the solitude of his garden, to scuttle back to his pleasantly encapsulated life.
She read his expression.
“I guess I’d better go,” she said softly. “And I apologize for saying that. Your idea should have worked; with anybody but that Rennselaer snake, it would have. The truth is, I didn’t belong there. I never belonged there. I should have just bowed out when the administrations changed. Can you call me a cab?”
Now he felt a tinge of embarrassment. How the hell had they run the evening right off the tracks like this, and so fast? And why do you care? I don’t. I guess.
“I can run you back,” he offered. “I did promise—”
“It’s no bother. Besides, you don’t want to try driving into Georgetown on a Friday night; it’s a real madhouse.
A cab’s fine, really.”
Once again, he didn’t know what to say. Part of him wanted to try to retrieve the evening, but another part was whispering in his mind, What are you waiting for?
Go call the goddamn cab.
“I’ll go call a cab,” he said.
He left her in the garden and went up into the kitchen to use the phone.
“Twenty minutes, buddy,” the dispatcher said. “It’s Friday night and everything.” He hung up and stood there in the kitchen, looking out the window into the garden. He could see the pale oval of her face, but not her features. He didn’t really want her to go just yet. He had projected a nice Friday night with her: a drink in the garden, maybe wander down to King Street for dinner, walk around after dinner through all the stores in their eighteenth-century buildings. She was beautiful, smart, even sexy, and he couldn’t pretend that he hadn’t noticed. He sensed that he had somehow screwed the thing up. Or she had, or maybe they both had. Neither one of us knows how to act anymore. Too late now. He sighed. He went back out to the garden.
“Twenty minutes,” he announced.
“Thank you,” was all she said.
They sat there in the darkness for a while. He wanted to say something, do something, and he wondered if she did, too. Not necessarily to keep her there, but to end it better.
“What will you do about the way they terminated you?” he asked finally.
She looked away into the garden. “I don’t know. The lawyer in me wants to sue them, to go to war. Another part of me isn’t ready for the ugliness and the hassle of all that. I may make some noises as if I’m going to sue them, maybe extort some professionally appealing paper out of them for my resume. But I think, on balance,” she said, smiling at her own use of such a bureaucratic term, “I’m mostly relieved it’s over.”
“I guess I’d say that’s a sane approach. As you can tell, I’m not as secure in my own profession as I expected to be at this stage. Being in the bank for command should protect me from the SERB. But not if somebody decides to single me out.”
“So if I do follow up on the Hardin case, you’re not in a position to help, are you?”
He avoided answering her question. “How would you do that, if you’re not in the NIS anymore? How could you find out what was going on?”
“I think Robby Booker would help me. My guess is that he’ll be pretty upset if the NIS just buries the case.
He’ll see the bias angle pretty quickly.”
“I see. Well, in today’s Navy, the bureau is looking for ways to invite people at my pay grade to leave the party. You attract the wrong kind of attention and then some EA hisses to another one, and suddenly you’re out in the cold with all the other middle-aged white males, pounding the pavement, looking for a job. When I joined the Navy, a commander was something special —a guy who had made it to scrambled eggs on his cap and had a shot at being the captain of a ship. Nowadays, a commander in the Navy is middle management, the new national endangered species in America.”
“Won’t you have to face that prospect, anyway? I mean, after your command tour?” she asked.
He resented the implication, but she had a point.
Look at Summerfield. “Guys who get through their command tour without running their ship aground go on to make captain,” he said. “Your career gets a new lease on life. Twenty years can become thirty.”
“So the career is the objective.”
“In a way, I guess it is, yes.”
“I guess that’s the part I never digested. And probably why I no longer have one in government.”
“That’s because you have money, which means security.
Most people who work for the government really do it for the security.
That’s why something like, the SERB seems like such a betrayal. And it’s not like the policymakers don’t know that.”
“But the policymakers aren’t career, are they?” she mused. “They’re appointees.”
“You got it.”
They sat there for a while until a horn honked out front. Dan reluctantly led her along the garden walk to the front gate. He unlocked and opened the gate, stepped through, and held it open for her. A Yellow Cab was double-parked in front of the house; it was facing downhill, it’s interior light on. The driver was a hugely fat man who made no move to open the door.
Dan opened the left-rear door for her.
“Well,” she said, “thanks for the wine. And good luck with your career.
I had no idea life in the Navy had become so precarious.”
“I suspect it’s life everywhere,” he said. “It was a pleasure to see you. Sorry I wasn’t better company.”
She smiled—a little sadly, he thought—said good night, and got into the cab. The cabbie turned off the interior light and drove down the hill. Dan watched the cab for a few seconds as it rattled down the cobblestones to Union Street, exhaled aloud, and then went back into the garden. As he closed and locked the gate, he thought he heard a large vehicle take a turn much too fast down the block. He walked back to the table, sat down, and poured himself some more wine. Well, Casanova, here’s to you. You sure impressed that lady all to hell. She’d been effectively fired with one hour’s notice after running a gambit that was indeed your suggestion, and you spend the evening complaining about how exposed you are to the current round of reductions in force. Yeah, but she’s got tons of money and doesn’t have to work; you do. She’s working for the psychic satisfaction of working; you’re working for the chance of getting your own command at sea one day and, let’s face it, for your twenty and the security of a Navy pension.
Neither of which would be worth sacrificing for the sake of finding out who iced the lieutenant two years ago in beautiful downtown Philadelphia. Especially not after the VCNO’s EA had taken some pains to warn him off the case. He could just see Captain Randall’s smiling face if he fou
nd out that young Commander Collins had not quite let go of the Hardin investigation.
Lovely thought, that. Americans had supposedly always been afraid of the dreaded Man on Horseback; they ought to be taking a real hard look at the Man’s horse holders.
He sighed and corked the wine bottle. If Grace Ellen Snow wants to pursue the Hardin case, more power to her. She is literally a free agent now. But he could predict what would happen: The NIS would discover that she was still playing detective and warn her off in a hell of a hurry.
For the sake of his career, he did not want to be around when that happened. He decided to go around the corner to Mcdonald’s, grab some grease, and then go home for some cognac. Maybe the cognac would help him forget about the Hardins and Grace Ellen Snow.
But as he walked down the block toward King Street, he realized that forgetting about Grace Snow and the Hardin case was not really possible.
Captain Randall had made it clear that the Hardin affair was clearly a no-go area, but his own sense of right and wrong was sulking in a corner of his mind and giving him dirty looks. The murder of the young lieutenant was bad enough, but if the Navy tubed the investigation just because it might expose some sensitive nerves at high levels, that was doubling the wrong. Sure, he could let Grace do it, but the fact of the matter was that she would be on the outside of whatever was going on in the Navy. He stopped as he reached the crowds and the bright lights on King Street. He knew that he wasn’t going to be able just to turn his back on the Hardin case. And there was also no way he could just turn his back on her. Damn it.
malachi nearly lost the cab in the stop-and-go maze of the back streets of Old Town. The cabbie had elected wisely not to go out onto Washington Street on a Friday night, and he was shooting through the back streets between Washington Street and the river until he could merge back into the GW Parkway up near the power station. Malachi had to run one stop sign near the public housing projects, then douse his lights to cover the next two blocks without attracting the cabbie’s attention.
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