Collateral Damage (13 page)

Chapter Eighteen

Feeling that he'd had about enough sophistication for the night, Michaelson fixed himself a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich while he listened to a replay of that afternoon's euro conference blaring on C-SPAN from his living room.

“So which is it?” a television voice demanded as Michaelson spread Jif creamy on white Wonder Bread. “Is the success of the euro inevitable or impossible?”

“It is impossible,” the television Michaelson said with unruffled dispassion while the real-life version slathered Welch's grape jam over the peanut butter, “unless ‘euro' turns out to be another word for deutschemark. Then it is inevitable.”

Michaelson finished making the sandwich, sliced it into triangles, and set it on a china plate. The euro conference wound down rapidly.

“Coming up next,” a C-SPAN voice-over interjected then over the mild hubbub of the conference breaking up. “Doctor and Congressman Marcus Humphreys in his National Press Club address earlier this afternoon.”

Michaelson, who had been reaching toward his kitchen radio, stopped as he found his interest unexpectedly piqued by the program note. The idea of watching C-SPAN when he wasn't on it wouldn't ordinarily have occurred to him. He didn't know for sure why the prospect of a canned speech by Marcus Humphreys intrigued him, but he decided impulsively to stick with it instead of turning his radio on to WETA. After all, he told himself with a mental shrug, politics or opera—white noise was white noise.

Carrying his plate and a glass of skim milk into the living room, he nudged a heavy, wooden chessboard aside to make room for the plate on his coffee table. Last month's
Foreign Affairs
struck him as an inspired idea for a coaster. He looked at an empty rostrum on his television screen, waited along with C-SPAN for Marcus Humphreys' appearance, and nibbled at his sandwich while he started thinking.

He thought first about not holding any cards. Why didn't Phillips think Michaelson had any cards? True enough, he'd had to do some bluffing along the way on this one, but up to now Phillips hadn't had the nerve to call him on them. Now, thanks to Connaught, Phillips was no longer the only game in town for Michaelson. Not only that, he'd come up with solid reasons to believe that the item in play here, whatever it might be, was important for partisan and electoral reasons rather than because of national security concerns. So why was Phillips picking now to get all hard-nosed? As long as Phillips hadn't found whatever he was after, how could he ignore anyone who might be able to help him?

Next he thought about dunderheads. About Demarest. About a man coldly exploiting a fragile young woman's suicide-guilt trauma. Or was it coldly? Marjorie had raised an interesting question. Had Demarest acted entirely out of tactical calculation? Or somewhere inside had he enjoyed what he did for its own sake—gotten a perverted thrill out of giving Catherine a psychological flogging from time to time, savoring her desperately panicked reactions to his effortless manipulation?

Humphreys now approached the podium as applause smattered. In an uncommon shot for TV, the camera caught him in full stride during three or four seconds of his approach, showed him nodding and smiling at people standing near the rostrum as he walked past them. He was shorter than Michaelson had expected him to be. But of course, Michaelson reminded himself, like most Americans he had never seen Humphreys except on television. He had unconsciously been expecting a James Earl Jones with Marcus Humphreys' face to approach the podium. On Humphreys' features, as he squared his notes and adjusted the microphone, Michaelson read bedside manner instead of standard-issue eagerness to please.

“Three minutes tops before he quotes Tocqueville,” Michaelson murmured around bites of peanut butter and jelly.

He had been keeping his right hand carefully free of the sandwich so that he could use it to grab other things without getting them sticky. He did that now, rummaging through the briefcase he'd tossed at the end of his couch until he came up with Wilcox's Calvert Manor floor plan and with his copy of the police report. Scattering pawns and bishops, he laid the floor plan on the chessboard and examined it while Humphreys' rolling cadences flowed from the television.

“Almost eighty years ago,” Humphreys was saying 163 seconds into his speech, “the English writer G. K. Chesterton realized something very singular about the United States while he was touring this country.”

“Not Tocqueville,” Michaelson commented in mild surprise as Humphreys continued.

“Chesterton noticed that, unlike any other country that has ever existed, American nationhood isn't based on race, or blood, or soil, or religion. We are the first country in history whose nationhood is based on an idea. That idea is political equality. To be an American is not to have a particular ancestry or to speak a particular language or to worship God in a particular way. It is to embrace that idea. To be engaged with it. To live it actively. To take part, day in and day out, in the continuing dialogue about that idea that is the essence of the American experience. No secular idea in human history is more breathtaking, more radical, more important. Or, potentially, more dangerous.”

Hmm, Michaelson thought, abruptly shaking himself to check cynical reflexes that seemed to be operating with unusual efficiency tonight. No journeyman speechwriter would have penned Humphreys' last sentence. No staff aide who'd been in Washington for more than six weeks would have cleared it. Michaelson began to consider the novel and refreshing possibility that he'd just heard a politician express an original thought.

Cynicism in Washington is like secondhand smoke. With casual and malignant impartiality it infiltrates those who indulge and those who abstain alike. You make it a firm principle never to touch the stuff, and you still come home at night with your eyes red and your throat scratchy and your clothes reeking from it. You could get rid of secondhand smoke, of course, with a shower or a trip to the dry cleaners. Ambient cynicism was harder. You had to think. Once you had enough experience to be any good in Washington, the most baffling locked room you were likely to encounter was your own mind.

Examining the floor plan while he continued to listen to Humphreys' speech, Michaelson began to think that he might just possibly be right about how the murderer had managed Preston Demarest's killing. His first inkling had come when he reviewed the police report inventory of items the crime scene team had found. Now the whole thing—entrance, exit, and murder in between—was coming into interesting focus.

Except, of course, for the nagging detail of who the murderer actually was. He'd had a very satisfactory little theory on that score until an hour or so ago, when he'd realized that C-Sharp couldn't possibly be the killer. No one with the pathological fear of heights that C-Sharp had displayed at the mezzanine railing could have committed this murder. Michaelson was sufficiently eccentric by Washington standards to regard impossibility as a material flaw in a theory about real-world events.

So he had to start over on
who?

He drank some milk. Could he and Phillips both have been flat-out wrong in rejecting CIA complicity in the murder? Politicized at the top, divided in the middle, demoralized at the bottom—all true, but even so. Onshore homicide, huge risk, scant upside.

And yet, he had to admit, during the Clinton administration (if not before) the CIA had unarguably reached the sorry state of having its director take orders from an unelected hack working for a political party. Once any outfit in the national security business was that far gone, maybe all bets were off. Still, he found it hard to believe. It's one thing for bureaucratic behavior to be irrational. It's something else entirely for it to violate the laws of political physics.

Well, this wasn't getting him anywhere on
who
. He decided provisionally to focus on a different initial question:
What?
What was Phillips after? What had he wanted Demarest to retrieve from Calvert Manor? What was it that made
mobiliers antiques
important, and whatever it was, why did Phillips have to buy the entire house to be sure of getting his hands on it?

“During one of the most desperate hours of our Revolution, just before the surprise attack on Trenton,” Humphreys was saying as Michaelson again gave the television his attention, “General Washington issued a famous order: ‘The times are perilous and our enterprise of utmost risk. Put none but Americans on guard tonight.'

“I don't know if Thaddeus Praisegod Humphreys, my great-grandfather's great-grandfather, was one of the Continental soldiers who went on guard that night. But he could have been. He was a free man of color, as the polite phrase of the era had it, at the time of the American Revolution. We know he was a man of some property, because when he went to join Washington's army, he provided his own musket, ball, powder, and kit. We can safely assume that he bellyached about his taxes when he quaffed ale with his neighbors after hauling the tobacco he'd grown with his black hands to market. But nobody crosses an icy river on Christmas Eve under the guns of a large fort for lower taxes. Thaddeus Praisegod Humphreys, just like the men on either side of him, put his life on the line for an idea—for what became the American idea.”

Michaelson sat quite straight on the couch, eyes riveted for the moment to the television, only a slight quiver in his lips betraying the tingle of excitement racing along his nerves. He was hearing the unstated but unmistakable rationale for Marcus Humphreys' presidential candidacy. The skillfully interwoven, richly textured tapestry of history, race, principle, and circumstance that defined Humphreys' unique moral authority. Humphreys could say with authenticity what would sound platitudinous in the mouth of a white aspirant; and he could say with compelling force what would sound like special interest bleating from a black candidate for whom the American Revolution was an irrelevant argument between privileged white men about how to divide the spoils of slave labor.

None of which was why Michaelson suddenly bolted from the apartment, leaving half a sandwich on his coffee table and barely taking time to grab his coat. In his mind he saw again a near-perfect mental image of the print Demarest had made and Halliburton had given him: the hotel receipt photographed against the background of old-fashioned script on a different document. He was hurrying through his door now because he had just figured out how Preston Demarest could have had something valuable without knowing it, how Avery Phillips could have known it was valuable without being able readily to retrieve it, why Phillips had insisted on movable items more than one hundred years old being included in the sale of Calvert Manor. He had just figured out what Preston Demarest had lost his life trying to find at Calvert Manor.

***

Twenty-five minutes later Michaelson was sitting at a table in Cavalier Books' tiny refreshment area, sipping black coffee and neglecting Marjorie Randolph. Having sketched his theory to her, he had now been concentrating for close to a minute on the document Jim Halliburton had entrusted to him years before, which he had picked up at his office on the way over.

“I have a terrible feeling,” he murmured, “that I'm right.”

“A bracing prospect for us all,” Marjorie said.

He glanced up at her, offering a brief smile.

“Would you do me a great favor?” he asked.

“Let you use my telephone?” she guessed. “That's a minor imposition, not a great favor.”

“I'm afraid it's not a call I can make with any credibility,” he said. “I need you to call the trustee, Ms. Wilcox.”

“She certainly won't be in her office at this hour.”

“Quite right. Leave a voice mail message that she'll hear first thing in the morning.”

“To what effect?” Marjorie asked.

“That you wish to buy the Calvert Manor estate books. Ten thousand dollars or something.”

“Based on some fifteen years' experience in the booksellers' trade,” Marjorie said, “the Calvert Manor estate books strike me as inventory that is likely to move very slowly. So ten thousand would be roughly nine thousand six hundred more than I'd feel comfortable paying.”

“Oh, there's no danger of her accepting the offer,” Michaelson said with the insouciant flippancy of someone who wouldn't be writing the check. “She won't make a deal on any estate property without getting everyone involved to sign off on it first.”

“Then what's the point?”

“To make her test the market, thereby bluffing Avery Phillips into thinking that I have more cards than he thinks I do.”

Marjorie rose and, before strolling toward the stockroom with its desk and telephone, offered Michaelson an expression that mingled tolerance and exasperation. She returned in less than three minutes to confirm that she had completed the mission assigned to her.

“And if I find myself shelling out ten thousand dollars for twenty-odd volumes of bills of exchange for tobacco hogsheads,” she warned, “you are going to spend the next five Christmas seasons putting in twelve unpaid hours a day at my cash register.”

“Agreed.”

“Presumably we'll have nothing further from Wilcox and therefore from Phillips until tomorrow morning,” Marjorie said. “Is there anything else on tonight's agenda?”

“Only a trip to the Flogged Cat,” Michaelson said.

“Flogged Cat?” Marjorie asked, looking puzzled for a moment. “Oh. Club Chat Fouetté. Your translation threw me.”

“Isn't it accurate?”

“Literally, yes. But I think the English meaning actually intended is a bit more vulgar.”

Michaelson now looked blank for a moment. “Flogged cat. Whipped—my word, I believe you're right.”

“You've been to that place once today already. What's there now?”

“A man named Janos who smokes cigars and who makes a very striking woman when he climbs into drag. When I put those two things together, some of the gestures he makes when he indulges in his currently fashionable habit remind me of someone.”