“So, anyway, Peter is the flavor of the month in Washington circles because his let’s-nuke-the-Russians number is just the tune Reagan and his chums want to hear. It’s got a good beat and they can dance to it. They give it an eighty. And suddenly he’s Mr. Bomb, he has this terrible committee job, and it’s eating up his time and he’s loving it. I admit it I couldn’t handle it. And who should show up then but Ari Gottlieb. I guess if I had to design the PJM, I’d design Ari. That’s Perfect Jewish Male. I mean, he was like Alan Bates in An Unmarried Woman, just too good to be true. He was incredibly good-looking but not in a pretty or an offputting way. In a kind way, somehow. He never raised his voice. When he laughed—oh, listen to me, I sound like I’m in a musical—when he laughed, he really made you feel like it was you and he alone in the most brilliant private joke ever told. I liked the way his skin crinkled right by his eyes, into two little deltas, like flint arrowheads. It had a nice texture to it. He was very gentle, very confident. He wasn’t afraid. Peter was rigid with fear and guilt, but Ari was without fear. When he saw you, Jesus, how he lit up! His gift was for focus. He made you feel like you were the only person in the world, there was nobody else. I met him at an opening two years back.”
“Date please.”
“Who remembers dates?”
“Could it have been January?”
“No. The weather was warm. It was very warm, I remember, because Ari and I had a Coke from one of those hot dog wagons on the street outside the Corcoran and—no, no, yes, it was January. It was a surprisingly warm January day. Peter was locked up. It had really gotten crazy with the group, Congress had just done something about putting the MXs in old silos or something and—”
“January eleven?”
“Maybe.”
She hated them. She just looked at them.
“Anyway, it was my idea. It wasn’t Ari’s idea. It was my idea. He was an Israeli citizen. He’d been in their Airborne troops or something, which I heard was a big thing over there. He knew people in the embassy. I just wanted to—to hurt Peter.”
“Was he interested?”
“No. Not at first. He thought it was foolish. Israel doesn’t have big missiles, Israel doesn’t care about big missiles, that’s what he said. But I said the information was valuable. Israel could use it somehow, they were clever. Jews are always clever.”
“And so he relented?”
“Finally. You see, for me it gave me a chance to do something. And it wasn’t like giving it to the Communists. It was to people on our side. To other Jews.”
“Yes.”
“And he went to them, and they said yes, they’d look at it, and finally he said this man wanted to meet me and talk to me, but it wouldn’t do to be seen at the embassy, could I go up to New York and meet him at the consulate. The Israeli consulate.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, and so I did. I met an Israeli intelligence officer at the Israeli consulate and it was very nice. He was a brilliant, commanding man, very considerate, very charming. He said he didn’t want me to get into trouble, did I know what I was doing, was I sure, blah blah blah. He pointed out that Jonathan Pollard had been arrested and that our government was making ugly noise about prosecuting him to the max, and that if I got caught, maybe there wasn’t much they’d be able to do about it.”
“And—”
“And I didn’t care. I was sure. And so I started doing it. It was easy.” She felt so smug when she said it. She’d had a great deal of curiosity about this moment. Would she turn her confession into what Peter used to call one of her “productions”? Well, yes, she had.
She felt the eyes of the Three Dumb Men upon her.
“After all,” she said, “it was only the Israelis. I mean, they are our friends, the last time I looked at the Washington Post.”
“Mrs. Thiokol—do you mind if I call you that?”
“No, that’s fine.”
“Mrs. Thiokol, could you tell me a little about Ari Gottlieb? I mean, I don’t suppose you have any pictures.”
“Yes, I have three of his pictures. Abstract impressionism. He was not very good, that’s the fun—oh, you mean, his photograph. No, I’m sorry. I don’t.”
“Could you tell us about him?”
“He was just everything I wanted. Except he had one flaw.”
“What was that.”
“It wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t help it.”
“What was it?”
“He wasn’t Peter Thiokol.”
She continued. “If anything, he was too perfect. Ari was beautiful and loving and never moody and very sexy. And dull.”
“He left you?”
“After an odd weekend in an inn in Virginia a while ago. Very strange.”
“How strange?”
“I can’t say. I slept through it all. I passed out after too much champagne. He was very offended. He left the next day. He had to go back to Israel. To his wife.”
“When was this?”
“Two weeks or so. I don’t really remember. Who remembers dates?”
“And so you’re alone.”
“I was alone even when I was married.”
“Tell me about this Israeli intelligence officer.”
“Oh, you know. Very clever man, very warm. Charming. Mysterious. I could tell he was a legend, even there in the consulate. They all looked at him. He was a special man. I remember after it was over, we went out on Seventy-third Street and he helped me get a taxi. You felt safe with him. And he—”
“Excuse me, Mrs. Thiokol?” It was, she saw, the youngest of the Three Dumb Men. He was slightly more tentative than the others and he could see his interruption irritated her.
“Yes?”
“You said Seventy-third Street.”
“Yes.”
“I used to be in our New York bureau. You mean Eighty-fourth Street.”
She was confused to sense no softness in his position.
“All right, I got the address mixed up. Who remembers addresses? And what dif—No, I’m sorry, it was Seventy-third Street! I’m not going to let you bully me. It was between Madison and Park. A lovely old brownstone. The Star of David on the flag, all the pictures of Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir and Menachem Begin and Shimon Peres, all the bustle, all the workers, all the—”
But she could feel him staring at her.
“I’m sorry,” he finally said. “I know the building very well. It’s a brownstone all right, but it’s at Eighty-fourth, between Madison and Fifth, near the museum. I worked there, I used to go into that building regularly. We had a cooperating deal with Mossad for security.”
“I—I mean—”
And then she could think of nothing to say.
“Are you sure it was Seventy-third Street?”
She nodded dumbly.
“You see,” he said, “it would be pretty easy to do. Rent the house. For one morning you hang out the flag. You hang some pictures. Some people rush around, looking busy. An hour after you’ve gone, they’ve cleared out. That’s all.”
She felt a hole open: it was dark and huge. She was falling. No one was there to catch her.
Peter! she thought. God, Peter!
And then she said, “They fooled me. They just fooled me”.
“Yes, ma’am. I’m afraid they did,” said one of the Three Dumb Men.
She began, very softly, to weep.
“Oh, Peter,” she wept, “oh, Jesus, what have I done?”
1700
Uckley sat in the front of the state police car by himself. He felt cold. Somebody had gotten him a blanket, which he pulled around himself. He sat in a festival of pulsing light. It seemed to be the world convention of police cars, and in the dusk, their red and blue lights bounced off the houses and the trees back at him. He had a headache and his guts hurt from the bullet impacts on the vest, but at least he was done vomiting.
Everybody was staying away from him, at least for now, and he was grateful for that small mercy. He stared ahe
ad, seeing nothing. He was exhausted, flattened out. He preferred the numbness, however, because he knew that if he thought about it too much, he’d want to die, just to make it all go away.
The kids were with a state policewoman, but no one really was sure what to do with them, what with the father missing. He thought he’d heard something about them going to their grandmother’s in Hagerstown. He couldn’t look at them, the two little girls, little perfect angels, untouched by corruption or evil. He’d caught just a glimpse: they looked like little petals, perfect and rosy.
Why had she come up the stairs?
Why did I fire?
She came up because she was a mother.
I fired because I’m a policeman.
There: hubris, fete, kismet, karma, whatever. It was somehow written; it was inevitable; it had been decreed.
When he’d gotten back to her, there was nothing to do. Her daughter sat next to her, holding her hand. Soon the other little girl came out and sat on the other side and started to cry. Uckley just looked at them, and at the dead woman, and then went out and got into the car, while various medical people and cops and firemen and citizens rushed about. He yielded to anybody who seemed to know what they were doing.
“A tough break,” said Delta Three suddenly.
Uckley looked up, dazed.
“You okay, Sergeant?” he asked blankly.
The man was on crutches, his thigh heavily wrapped.
“I think I’ll live. Look, if there’s any trouble, I’ll tell ’em how it happened. Shit, Mr. Uckley, you went up there alone against a real bad customer who had two kids hostage, and you cleaned his clock. That’s a good day’s work.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t even do that right.”
“We went into a house where there were three hostages. We got two of them out. That’s a pretty damned good operation anyway you slice it. And that mother, she was a good mom, she’d have rather her kids made it out than herself. So, there you go.”
“The point was to take prisoners,” Uckley said.
“Begging your pardon, sir, but fuck taking prisoners. We put three assholes in the ground, and that’s what we get paid for.”
It was no help.
“Sir, you better report in. You know, at the mountain they’re waiting, and I bet it’s pretty tense there.”
“Yeah,” said Uckley.
With a grim sense of futility he took the radio mike off its arms, feeling his ribs knit up in pain with the effort, and pushed the send button.
“Base, this is Special Agent Uckley, can you give me a call sign and patch me into Delta command?”
“We read you, Bureau One. You’re all set for transmission, over.”
“Delta Six, do you copy? This is Bureau One, over.”
There was static and scrambled noise in the furriness of the transmission, but eventually a voice came out of it at him.
“Bureau One, Delta Six affirmative, we copy. Go ahead.”
“Assault complete. Two hostages freed. We lost one man killed, and two wounded but stable. Uh, we are in command of the situation now. We found three aggressors, heavily armed.”
“Prisoners?” came Dick Puller’s voice through the fog.
“Uh, negative, Delta Six. That’s a negative. Too much firepower. We, uh, we couldn’t get you any prisoners, Delta Six.”
There was silence from the radio.
Uckley rushed to fill it.
“Delta Six, I accidentally shot a civilian. I’d like to request a release. You ought to get yourself another—”
“Negative, Bureau One.”
“For Christ’s sake, I shot a woman to death. I’m no goddamned good to—”
“Bureau One, this is Delta Six. Civilian casualties are a necessary hazard of combat operations. Get a hold on yourself.”
“Colonel Puller, I shot a mother in the heart in—”
“Bureau One, stop feeling sorry for yourself and listen up.”
“Sir, I—”
“Listen up, Bureau One. This is combat operation, and you follow orders, or I’ll have you arrested, goddammit. Son, I don’t have time to screw around here with your delicate feelings. Do you copy?”
“Copy,” said Uckley through a knotted throat and blurry eyes.
“Collect their firearms, feed the serial numbers to the Bureau, and see if you can get a make on them. Then I want you to conduct an examination of the bodies. There should be a medical examiner or something there. Check out those bodies. And the clothes too. Check out the clothes. Do you copy, Bureau One?”
Uckley just looked at the microphone, a dead thing in his hand. He felt impossibly old and impossibly fatigued. It was almost night now and the streetlights had come on.
“I copy,” said Uckley, and got up to do what he had to do.
* * *
“End of story,” said Nathan Walls. “As in, end of muthafuckin’ story.”
And so it was: their lights came up onto sheer wall, where the livid pick marks of the mining tools of fifty years or so back still gleamed in the light of the beam.
The tunnel called Elizabeth had simply ceased to exist. She yielded to mountain.
“Son of a bitch,” said Witherspoon. “You mean that’s it?”
“‘Less you wants to start to dig, man. Figure you got to dig about a half a mile straight up. Then you be at where you want to be at.”
“Goddamn,” said Witherspoon, really pissed. All this way, all this low walking and crawling through this damn tomb, and here they were; they had come to nothing.
Walls sat down.
“Goddamn this bitch. Can’t never trust no white woman. You looks at ’em and they crosses they legs. Oh, except your old lady, of course.” He reached into his pocket, took out a cigarette, flicked a light from a Bic lighter, and inhaled.
“You smoke here?” asked Witherspoon.
“Hey, why not? Not nobody here but us spooks.” He laughed. “Man, I thought I was gonna be a muthafuckin’ hero. Man, now we just walk back, and that’s that. You know, Spoon, here’s what I was gonna do. I figure we run into some shit, man, smoke and lights and fireworks everywhere, man, old Walls just pull a fade. He go for a nice walk in the country. Not too bad, huh? I tell you, boy, only way old Walls going to get his ass a little quiet time to hisself.” He laughed again.
“Yeah, that’s real great,” said Witherspoon. “You’re really talking like a hero now. Your momma would be proud.”
“My momma be dead,” said Walls, laughing again.
Witherspoon slipped off his MP-5, his flak jacket, slid the night vision goggles off his head, and tried to arrange the angle-head flashlight upon them so that its beam fell on the end of the tunnel. Then he went to the wall and began to feel around. The light caught him and he cast a giant shadow.
But he could feel nothing. It was solid rock. His fingers, long and ebony, flew across it.
“Man, you wastin your time. Relax. Have a smoke. Then we go back to the world.”
In time Witherspoon gave up. There seemed no point. They were licked.
He fumbled with the Prick-88 strapped into the webbing of his vest, and picked up the earphones and put the hands-free mike in front of his lips.
“Rat Six, this is Rat Team Baker, do you copy?”
He listened intently. There was no answer.
“Shit,” he said, “we must be inside too far. They aren’t reading us.”
“Maybe they asleep,” said Walls. “You get an easy job like sitting on your butt while two niggers do all the shit work, man, you get a white man’s job, you fall asleep. Call their asses again.”
“Rat Six, Rat Six, this is Team Baker, do you copy? Do you copy?”
Silence.
“Is anybody there? Is anybody, I repeat anybody, there?”
“Maybe that damned bomb finally went off, all the white people dead,” said Walls.
“Then all the black people are dead too,” said Witherspoon.
“Man, some nigger scientist ought t
o figure out a bomb kill only white people. Man, I’d pay for something like that.” He laughed, flicked out his cigarette.
“Rat Six, this is Team Baker, do you copy?”
By now Jake’s had filled with workingclass men. Gregor hated them. They were truck drivers, fork-lift operators, warehousemen, painters, postal clerks, all large, most dirty, all tired, most loud. They smoked. The air of the place was blue with smoke. His headache had not gone away even though he’d been splashing vodka on it for some time now.
He was watching the clock crawl through the day until it would be time to call Molly again, and then he heard someone talking about soldiers and a training exercise in central Maryland and looked up to the television set. It was the news hour and the reporter was at a state police roadblock somewhere, where the cars were lined up like it was the end of the world or something.
Gregor leaned forward intently.
“Hey, Mister, who you pickin’ in Eastern Division?”
“Redskins,” Gregor said. “Shhhh, the TV.”
“Redskins won’t even make the playoffs!”
The reporter was talking about a military exercise being conducted in the mountains, rumors of plane crashes and helicopters, how traffic was backed up and how civil authorities weren’t able to say when it would all return to normalcy, but that this was one of the prices you had to pay for your democracy.
The reporter, a childish boy, nodded enthusiastically as he spoke, narrowing his eyes for emphasis. Behind him, far in the distance, Gregor could see the fat hulk of a snow-covered mountain. It was white and glistening and looked lovely.
The boy now was rattling on about new troops headed out to the exercise. He’d thrust his microphone up to some soldiers sitting in trucks that were momentarily stopped. The men in the trucks were saying they didn’t know anything about it, they’d just been put on alert that morning in D.C., and about eleven they’d been ordered to load up on the vehicles and here they were.
“But,” the young soldier now told the young reporter, even as the truck was pulling away, “tell you this, we gonna kick ass!”
“Man, that must be some exercise they got going out there,” said a man at the bar. “They say traffic’s backed up all the way to goddamned Baltimore. Never heard of nothing like it.”
The Day Before Midnight Page 23