All the Houses (46 page)

“Is Sam around?” I said.

“You his professors or something?”

I said no just as Dad said yes.

“Yes and no, okay. Why're you looking for him?”

“We're actually looking for someone else, someone he knows.”

“He's not here.”

“Do you know when he'll be back?”

His shoulders bounced, a snort or maybe a hiccup, and he said he didn't.

“Could I leave a message?”

“You could,” he said.

In my line of sight was a shelf with books and a small carved pipe and a plastic miniature of some ancient Egyptian deity. I was ready to walk away, but my father stepped into the space between chair and television and then introduced himself.

“Tim Atherton.”

“I'm Nando,” he said.

“You're what?”

“My name is Nando.”

“We're looking for a girl, a young girl named Nina.”

“Sam's little friend? She was here.”

“They were here together?” I asked.

“Naw, she was looking for him too. But he—”

“What?”

“I don't think he'd like me telling people.”

“We really need to find her.”

“I guess it's public record, though.”

“What is?”

Nando shifted in his chair, and he seemed to listen to something we couldn't hear. He took a breath, fidgeted more, and then began.

“He got arrested like a week ago. It was bullshit. This bitch came over here and said she was supposed to buy from me. I wasn't here, so he told her to come back later. But she was all, I need it now. He knows where my stash is. And he's not a very sophisticated person, he doesn't realize, he never thinks for a second about maybe it's a setup. The narc, she looked maybe twenty years old, that's what he told me. He was just trying to be nice, he brings it out to her. So then he gets arrested.”

“And they're still holding him?”

“He's not a citizen or anything. Student visa, man. They're going to send his ass back to Turkey, is what they told him.”

“Did you tell all this to Nina?” I asked.

“Not all of it. She was already upset so I didn't say about how they want to deport him.”

“Do you know where she went from here?”

“I don't.” He stood up and looked through a pile of papers on a side table, then left the room. We could hear him opening drawers. He returned and handed my dad a used envelope with something written on it. “This is the place where he is. It's out toward Frederick. I don't know who you people are, but if you have any way to help him—”

He paused, and I saw that he was worked up. “He's such an innocent guy, you know? I mean, he's from a village. His dad is, like, a fisherman. He didn't have any idea.”

*   *   *

Then we were in the car again, headed back to D.C. We wanted to keep looking for Nina but had nowhere to look. It was too late at night to try to go to the jail that Nando had named. I wondered if Nina had tried to go there, wherever it was. I pictured her in some painted-cinder-block lobby, backpack still over her shoulder, pleading with a night guard.

My dad was pissed. “What is wrong with these people?” he was saying, and at first I didn't know who he meant. “They just pick these guys up, I don't know if they have quotas to meet or what, but why they're bothering with some college kid…” I wouldn't have expected him to take up so strongly for someone he'd never met, based on a tale told by a dude with a soul patch, but he'd had his own experience with threatened prosecution, I remembered. “If they deport that kid, and he doesn't get his degree and he's on some list of people who can never come back here…”

“It's fucked up,” I said, though normally I wouldn't have used those words around my dad.

“It is,” he said. “Can you think of anywhere else she might've gone?” He didn't want to end the search, and neither did I.

“Not really.”

“Her poor father. Remember that night you and Courtney came home so late?”

“Which night was that?” I pretended I didn't know which night he meant.

And then he told me the whole story. Or no, not the whole story, but this much:

*   *   *

“Your mother was on a business trip,” he began, “and I was downtown until late, at the lawyer's office. There were weeks when I had to go every night. I would stay for hours in one of the conference rooms, this little conference room with no windows and shelves of law books on all sides. Every night I would go through documents. There were tons of them, boxes and boxes. I hadn't been charged, but I was being investigated, and so I had to try to get ready for anything and everything, whatever they might bring against me. The kitchen sink. There were thousands of pages to be read, and the minicassettes I'd used in my Dictaphone, I listened to all of those, I went over it all. It was—it was tiresome. Awful, really.

“The irony was, about a year, maybe a year and a half earlier, I'd done something very similar at work, at the White House, in terms of looking through documents, looking for something incriminating. A report in the media had made some hay about Oliver North and the Contras, and some members of Congress got mad about it and were wanting to look at all our files. I was asked to review the files ahead of time. I went through stacks of memos, looking for ones that might have reflected badly on what North was up to, and I'd pulled about six of them and handed them over to my boss. I never asked what he planned to do about them, but still, if anything, that was the most—the most iffy thing I'd done, I thought I could get nailed on that. In other words, not for whatever was in the record, but for my part in removing something from the record. Even though I had not personally done anything more than locate and hand over the memos.

“Still, I went on reading through all that material. Night after night. I felt I had to do whatever I could. I was no big shot, but I could've gone to jail. There was that chance. It was a dark time. I would come home and I would peek into each of your bedrooms, yours and Maggie's and Courtney's. I would look at you guys sleeping and—

“Well. In other words it would be late, ten or eleven, by the time I left the law firm. More than once, a few times I think, I drove by Dick's house before I went home. It wasn't on the way, not at all, but sometimes I would just drive for a while, drive and think. I couldn't talk to Dick about what was happening, we weren't supposed to communicate with other people who were potential subjects of investigation. He was living in Bethesda with his wife and his stepson, who I guess you know. It was a big house they bought after he got married to her. A fine house.

“So that one night I turned onto his street and slowed down, and I go by the place, and I'm just speeding up again when I see Dick walking down the street. There's no sidewalk, he's just walking a little ways ahead of me on the left side of the road. I can see his light-colored hair. I pull up beside him and roll down the window, and that spooks him, like it would anybody at that time of night. At first he starts to walk faster. Then I say, can I give you a lift? He turns and blinks and says, As if I didn't have enough people on my tail.

“He was still walking, and I was inching the car forward. He told me that this was the only time he could be out in public without feeling like everyone was watching him. They all think they know, he said. Yes they do, I said.

“Then he stopped and said, let me ask you something. Do you believe that ethics are universal? He asked me that, which was strange. It's not a question that people, the people I know, typically ask each other, much less in the middle of the night, through a car window. And I'd never took Dick to be someone with a strong interest in ethics, but now all of a sudden he's wanting to know did we do anything
unethical.
Congress can go screw themselves, he was saying, but in that case who do we answer to?

“Finally he walks around to the passenger side and gets in the car. I guess that would've been the Pontiac? No, I take that back. It was the VW. I drove us around the block and Dick took a flask out of his coat and offered it to me. I said something like, but don't you think it was worth it? He gives me this look like I'm speaking gibberish and asks me, what are your antecedents? What was worth what?

“The experience, I said. The chance to serve.

“He wasn't having any of that. You don't really believe that, he said, do you? I realized he'd probably been sipping out of that flask for a while. We lost, he said.

“I wasn't inclined to start an argument, and so I asked him how his wife was doing, and he laughed and said she was as good as could be expected. And then he asked about you girls, wanted to know how my three girls were holding up.

“So here we are driving around at about ten miles per hour and flouting the open container law of the state of Maryland, and for a little while we say nothing, and then Dick out and asks me what did I want. I said I wanted it all to be over as soon as possible. No, he says, what
did
I want, what had I wanted, before? In my career, what had I wanted? As long as we'd been friends, that subject had always been off-limits, we never said it directly. I don't know why. I knew Dick was very ambitious, but we'd never said to each other, I ultimately want to be this or I want to be that. That night, though, I realized he'd had it all mapped out for himself. He told me that before the scandal he'd figured that if Bush senior won in '88 then he would've had a good shot at OMB director. And that was one difference between us. I had goals and ambitions, but at that moment, with everything falling apart around us, that was the last thing I thought about—you know, now I'll never get to be director of the Office of Management and Budget? The last thing.

“Then he said he was thinking about moving back to Connecticut. He also said he'd been in touch with a couple of publishers. That was how it was, everyone scrambled to get a lawyer and then right after that everyone ran out and tried to get a book deal. To help pay for the lawyers, if nothing else.

“We said good night and I drove home, and when I got back to our house I looked in on Maggie, and she was asleep, but then I looked for you and your sister, and when I realized you weren't home, I was—I was— You girls were usually pretty responsible about telling us where you were going and about getting back at a reasonable hour, so this was—

“I called your mother, and she got very upset. She screamed at me over the phone. Why hadn't I been home, what was I thinking? It wasn't just because of you and Courtney not being home. It was everything. Up until then she'd kept herself pretty buttoned up, but that night she let me have it.

“Then I called the police, who were not very helpful. They told me that to go looking for every teenager who isn't home at one a.m. would tie up the entire department, and to call again if you guys were still missing the next morning.

“So I sat in the living room and I waited. It felt like hours that I sat there. And finally, finally I heard a car stop outside, I heard a door open, I went to the window and saw two cars. I was so angry. I was ready to rake the both of you over the coals, and then I saw that your sister was with Dick, who I'd just seen earlier in the night. There he was, and she looked—it looked like she'd been crying. She walked up the stairs with him. Before I could say a thing she made a face at me, like I was, I don't know. She was angrier at me than I was at her. You remember how she was then. I didn't know how to—how to get to her, and I should've—I know I wasn't—Well, I didn't know how.

“She went inside, and Dick said to me that she'd called his house because she'd been stranded somewhere and hadn't been able to reach me or your mother. I couldn't quite get my mind around it. Sure, if a friend of one of you girls had called in the middle of the night and I thought she was in trouble, I would've gone to pick her up, and later Courtney explained it, she said she'd been trying to call his stepson, her friend or boyfriend or whatever he was. But when Dick first told me, he just said that she'd called
him
. That was the last time I spoke to Dick, as a matter of fact. The very last conversation we had. I didn't…”

*   *   *

He stopped midsentence. He looked out at the road, and for a second I couldn't recall where we were going or what we'd been doing. Who had we been hunting for, really? I told him to take me back to my apartment, since I didn't know where else to go. He didn't want to take me back—he wanted to continue our search—but we had no more leads.

We sat in the car outside my building. Nearby, a long blue Dumpster occupied two parking spaces in front of a town house that had just been sold. The car heater was turned up high, chapping our lips, making me feel feverish. I wasn't ready to go in, because it seemed there might be something else we should do or at least say before giving up. I waited. There was so much he'd never talked about, the old scandal just a small province in that country of the unsaid.

And then did I will it? Dream it? Over the rumble of the engine, the heater, the space between our seats, he went on with what he'd been saying earlier, picked up with it as though he'd never paused.

“Didn't talk to him again. Even later on, after the hearings, we never spoke.

“That spring, as you know, Courtney had her trouble with the police, and I … here she's always been a straight-A student, very responsible, and then all of a sudden she's arrested? In jail? My god. And not only that, she'd also just turned eighteen, and I didn't want for this to be public, for her to have to have this thing follow her around the rest of her life. I didn't want it to wind up on the news, and I was scared that it would because of me, you know, daughter of former White House official gets arrested.

“So I called Jodi and asked her, I said here's the situation, Courtney was arrested. How do I keep this out of the news? I wasn't supposed to be talking to her either, to anyone in the press. She told me there wasn't a whole lot she could do. But if she did hear that someone was on the story she would warn me.