The Pariot GAme (18 page)

Riordan picked up his white phone. He punched out numbers and held the receiver to his left ear. He waited for several rings.

“Did I get you out of the tub?” he said. “Sorry. It’s not the clumsiest thing I’ve done today, but at least the rest of them were things that screwed up other people.… No, people I didn’t really care about in the first place, before I screwed them up.… Yeah, Freudian. Actually, you know, you’re probably right. I didn’t want anything to do with the bastards in the first place, but they would’ve fucked me up first chance they got if I didn’t let them play pretend with me and bore the ass off me. I knew they’d be fundamentally useless to me, but I had to talk to them so I got even by screwing
them
up.… You’re awful smart, you know that? I wished I had a college education.… Oh, yeah, you’re right. I
did
have a college education. I must not’ve been paying full attention. Well, look, get back in the tub, and if you use my razor, for the luvva Christ put a new blade in it. At least take the old one out. And at very least, if you don’t do either one of those things, remind me in the morning so I don’t get up and remove half my face with the first slice.… No, I don’t know why broads’ legs ruin men’s razors.… Yeah, I’m bushed. I’m heading for the barn. Pick anything up?… Good. See you.”

Riordan lifted his sports coat from the back of his chair, reached across the desk and shut off the white cylindrical
Braun fan that had been blowing on his legs, went to the door, opened it, took one last look around at the cluttered desk, the banker’s boxes stacked waist high on the brown vinyl tile floor, the gray metal filing cabinets with the supplementary steel-barred locks down the front, said “Shit,” and turned off the lights. In the corridor outside, he shut the door and tested it against the snap lock in the knob. He put on his jacket and buttoned it over the gun. Then he got his key ring out of his jacket pocket and locked the cylindrical lock just below the knob, and the cylindrical lock just over the knob. He used a third key to slam the bolt lock at the top of the door frame, and he selected a fourth key as he crouched to drop the bolt at the bottom of the door into the hole drilled in the vinyl tile and the concrete under it. “There,” he muttered, straightening up slowly against the sound of the shrapnel, “safe and secure at beddy-bye, everybody. Take a man who knew his business a good fifty, fifty-five seconds to get through all that protection. Shit.”

Swinging his right leg awkwardly, Riordan made his way down the corridors to the back door of the building. There was one short overweight man in his middle fifties in the corridor. He wore a green uniform and he was pushing a green trash canister ahead of him on wheels. It had a broom sticking out of it. Every so often he stopped and took the broom out. He made a few brief sweeps, pushing dirt against the baseboards, then put the broom back into the barrel and pushed it along another five or six feet. Riordan came up behind him, his boot heels clicking, the left cleanly, the right after the sliding sound as he swung it on the pivot in his knee and then put it down again. The man with the broom did not look up.

When Riordan reached him, he said, “I thought you guys only worked days now. Save on energy.” The man looked up at him. Riordan noticed the hearing aid in his left ear. The
man did not answer him or have any expression on his face. “Oh,” Riordan said, feeling silly, “sorry. I didn’t know you were …” The man stared at him. “Say,” Riordan said, pointing with his left index finger to his left ear, “wouldn’t that thing work better if you turned it on?” The man stared at him. “Batteries’re dead,” Riordan said to himself. “Tomorrow,” he said very loudly, “go up to Secret Service. They got loads of batteries. Get a special rate on them.” He smiled. The man stared at him. “You know,” Riordan said, “Secret Service? Guys always with the President, keep him from getting shot? Looks like they’re wearing hearing aids? Huh?” The man stared at him. Then he dropped his eyes and swept a few more times before turning his back and pushing the canister another six feet with the broom in it.

“Right,” Riordan said. He slipped past the man and reached the back door. He opened it, went outside into the warm evening, shut the gray metal door behind him, tested the lock, and went down three concrete steps. The green Ford sedan was parked under a sign that said
U.S. GOVT VEHICLES ONLY
. There was an eagle on the sign. There was a blaze orange ticket on the windshield. Riordan took the ticket off the windshield, unlocked the door, threw the ticket onto the floor in the back to join several dozen others, unbuttoned the coat, and got in. He started the engine as he was shutting the door and drove up toward State Street. He took a right on State, ignoring the red light against him and the sign which advised
NO TURN ON RED
. State was deserted, except for a derelict asleep in his Morgan Memorial overcoat, against the grated subway entrance under the old State House. The unicorn and the lion, newly gilded and painted, were rampant in the floodlights. The plaza in front of the New England Merchants Bank buildings at One Washington Mall had a population of two, a man and a woman who were skipping, hand in hand, out of the revolving doors. “Bay Tower Room,”
Riordan muttered. “Nice clothes, lovely view of the harbor and the airport, dinner for two with lots of wine and cocktails and after-dinner liqueurs: ‘We’re a little lighter, a buck and a quarter, My Dearest. But who cares when you’re having fun and stiffer’n a goat with rigor mortis on the best hooch money can buy?’ ”

Riordan turned right into the driveway of the condo apartments at 226 Beacon Street, easing the Ford between two cars encroaching on the entrance. He passed through the wrought-iron gate, went down the ramp, rolled down the window, removed the plastic key card from his inside pocket, slipped it into the machine, opened the corrugated steel door into the underground garage, and drove in as the door closed behind him.

Riordan on the third floor of the building closed the apartment door behind him. He threw the dead bolt, took off his jacket and tossed it on the beige couch, and unsnapped the magnum holster from his belt. He unsnapped the keeper strap on the holster and moved the revolver in the leather two or three times. He put the gun on top of the white bookcase along the interior wall. He hitched up his pants and for a moment stared out the picture windows onto the Charles River, broad and black in the night between the lights of Storrow Drive on the Boston side and the lights of MIT and Memorial Drive on the Cambridge side. The only light in the room was from a low white cylindrical floodlight on the floor in the corner beyond the couch. It shone upward toward the ceiling through the foliage of a large ficus in a straw basket, throwing shadows on the white walls and the beige drapes. Riordan stared at the lights. He could hear Freddie singing “Lovin’ Arms” in the bathroom. When he looked down the hall, he could see a wedge of light on the floor and the wall,
from the partially opened door. There were wisps of steam drifting around the edge of the door.

“Freddie,” he said, “I told you before and I tell you again. You can’t sing at all.”

“Hi, honey,” she said. “You home already?”

“No,” he said, “this is a singing telegram from your ever-solicitous government, which wishes none of its loyal citizens ever to be lonely ever again.”

“You must’ve driven like a bat out of hell,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “If they pulled me over, I was going to identify myself as one of those crack federal agents, the elite of law enforcement in all the world. In hot pursuit of somebody. Frederika Thomas. Suspicion of singing with felonious intent. Our motto: ‘We make the Mounties look sick—they only get their man; we get his fucking brother-in-law and a couple of the guys from his bowling team as well, even if they didn’t do anything. We also get our women, by God. Especially if they didn’t do anything. Adds spice to their otherwise dull gray lives.’ ”

“I’ll be right out,” she said. “Just toweling my hair dry. You had any dinner?”

“No,” he said, “and I don’t want any, either. I haven’t had any loving, either. That I do want. I want a good old drink and some good old loving.”

She came out of the bathroom with a towel turbaned around her hair. She wore a pale gold short bathrobe. She was short, about five three. She had well-proportioned legs and she had a good figure, but she was sturdy. “So help me,” she said, “you’d better not say it.”

“But you do,” he said. “I can’t help it. Every time I see you, I think of a palomino Shetland pony. From the time I was six until I was close to twenty and finally realized I was far too big to ride her—”

“—And you were certainly right about that, big boy,” she
said. “My back’s damned near broken. Female superior on all occasions from now on. Don’t care how excited you get.”

“—I pestered my parents for a palomino Shetland like the Monahans’ ‘Christmas.’ God she was pretty. Small, but beautiful. Willing. Sweet-tempered, lively. Just like you.”

“I realize it’s supposed to be a compliment,” Freddie said, going into the kitchen and switching on the light, “but I really don’t feature being compared to a horse. Bourbon and water?”

“No,” he said. “Too hot. Thank God for central air conditioning you can regulate yourselves. And damn Jimmy Carter for his goddamned eighty-degree bullshit about Federal Buildings. That asshole have anything to say today? Anything new, I mean.”

“No,” she said. “Oh hell, I don’t know. I got home too late for the six o’clock news and I haven’t read the paper yet either. How the hell do I know? What do you want?”

“We got any rum?” he said. “Rum and tonic. Some lime.”

“Yassuh, yassuh, massa,” she said. “Comin’ right up, massa.”

“Oops,” he said. He walked down the hallway to the kitchen and embraced her from behind. The top of her head barely came over the top of his belt. “Hi, honey,” he said, “I’m home. You somewhere around here, honey? Say something, so I can find you.”

“You clown,” she said, laughing. “At least you could take those damned shitkickers off, so I’d come to your breastbone.” He turned her loose. She turned around and stretched up her hands toward his neck. He took her waist in both hands and lifted her to his eye level. She put her arms around his neck and hugged him. He hugged her around the waist. She initiated the kiss, her feet dangling a foot from the floor. After a long minute, he slowly released her, and she slid to the floor.

“We must look like a pair of fools when we go out,” she said, laughing. “People must think I’m your mascot or something. ‘Huh, big guy like that, think he’d at least get himself a great Dane or something. The hell’s he want with that Chihuahua?’ ‘Very simple, sir,’ ” she said, deepening her voice, “ ‘when my little lady here gits tard, an’ her little ole dawgies starts to gitting sore there, y’all know? Wal, I jes’ picks her raht up by the scruff the neck and I puts her in mah pocket there, and she jes’ rides along as comf’t’ble as you please, head stickin’ out and them bright little eyes a-lookin’ the whole world raht over. Thet’s why.’ ”

“You don’t sound like you had a bad day,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said, turning to the counter to prepare the drink. “Shows you how deceitful I can be, because I sure damned right well did.”

“Care to tell me what happened?” he said.

“Make a deal with you,” she said. “I’ll go first, but only on the condition that you come clean when I finish and tell me everything that went haywire on your farm today too.”

“I was going to enforce that agreement even if it wasn’t made,” he said.

“I’m not going in tomorrow,” she said. “When I got home from the office, I had a phone call. As a result, I’m going to stay here in the morning and lie on the roof in the sun.”

“A phone call,” he said, as she handed him a drink.

“Yup,” Freddie said. “Funny, but disruptive in a way.”

Riordan sat down on the couch. For a while he did not say anything. He swallowed some of the rum and tonic. He cleared his throat. “Look,” he said, “I would like to make a request, okay? I can’t say my day was much of a success. I am grateful for that, because the day I succeed in this case, that clown Bolling down there at the Seat of Government will probably send me out to destroy the KGB. All I had to do today was put up with a bunch of amateur detectives who’re
so eager to ingratiate themselves with the Feds that they’re falling all over each other telling me things that I read in the paper yesterday. I’ve got a guy up at the State House who apparently’s spent his entire adult life worrying about going to the penitentiary himself, and now he’s cozying up to me like I was his long-lost brother. Maybe he helps me, maybe he doesn’t, but boy can he talk. And then Bolling called, also chatty.

“Anyway,” Riordan said, “I didn’t get anything done today, but I’m still kind of tired and I can’t stand any sudden shocks. So let’s sort of treat this telephone call like we were going into a cold swimming pool, okay? Very gradually, so I don’t get cramps in my legs.”

“Okay,” she said.

“This was, no doubt,” he said, “a long-distance telephone call.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Was it prepaid?” he said.

“No,” she said, “it was collect.”

“It originated in Manhattan, area two-one-two,” he said.

“No,” she said, “it originated from Camden, Maine. I don’t know what the area code is for Camden. Two-oh-seven?”

“Camden,” Riordan said. “It wasn’t from Jennifer Thomas, who is vacationing with her father, Attorney Arthur Thomas, of Gatskill, Campbell, Foye and Several Other Guys, Two-fifty-two Park Avenue?”

“It was from Jenny,” Freddie said. “She spent one night in the wonders of summer evenings in Manhattan, with her doting father who had scheduled his vacation for the month in order to spend it with his daughter.”

“But not in Manhattan,” Riordan said.

“That was the original plan, the way I understood it,” Freddie said. “But then, what does a foul-mouthed broad like me know about planning, huh? Somebody tells me what the
schedule is, I’m gullible and I believe it. Arthur did take his vacation. Jenny did fly down on the shuttle. He did have the limo meet her at LaGuardia. He wasn’t able to be there himself, of course, wrapping up some last-minute details and so forth. You know how it is when you’re leaving the office for a month. So much to do, and everything. Busy, busy,
busy
.