Nature of the Game (29 page)

Sunday had been close: in the morning, they'd each tiptoed to the bathroom, then crawled back in bed. Had time to hug each other before Saul's crying became too distressed to ignore. Saul refused to nap all that day. Sunday night Nick had to watch a television movie because his agent wanted him to pitch an idea to the producer; Sylvia fell asleep halfway through the movie, but he'd seen her pull her dress over her head, seen her naked as she went to take a bath.

Friday and Saturday, Nick had been recovering from the cold that Sylvia had been recovering from on Thursday and Friday.

Nick couldn't remember last Wednesday.

That Tuesday he'd been brooding over his novel, Jud's games, and guilt over using disposable diapers. Coming to bed from the nursery, she'd read his vexed mood and checked her advances.

Monday.

Nine days ago. The night after Jud had called.

Saul had fallen asleep early. They'd been undressing for bed, laughing about what Sylvia's mother had said on the phone. He'd been in his shorts, she in her old ivory bra and torn panties. She brushed something off her shoulder. He touched hers, touched her cheek. She smiled. Slid into his arms. He ran his hands up her bare skin. Unhooked her bra. She stepped back, shrugged the bra to the floor. Her breasts were pendulous from nursing. He loved how they filled his hands. They lay on top of the bedspread. Kissing. Touching. Laughing. Shushing each other so they wouldn't wake the baby. He knew where to touch her, kiss her, and she held him. He moved on top of her, like almost always; inside her, warm and wet and sweet, pressed close together, kissing, sighing gently, moving.

“
Nick!
” yelled a man's voice.

And Nick blinked; shook his head.

He was outside the Madison building. Cold, his hands had no gloves. Cars whizzed by on Independence Avenue. The Capitol dome glistened ivory against a gray sky.

“Hey, Nick!” yelled the man's voice again.

A squat man in a leather trench coat was waving at him from the corner of Independence and First Street. He hurried to Nick.

“How you doin'?” The man took Nick's bare hand in a strong, gloved grip. “It's Jack Berns.”

“Long time, Jack,” said Nick. “What are you doing here?”

“A case. Hanging out in Cannon.” Berns nodded toward the white-marbled congressional office building across the street. “What about you? I'll buy you some lunch, we'll catch up. I'm on expense account.”

Nick's memories of Sylvia froze, cracked; pieces fell from the portrait like jagged planes of a mirror. Berns loved to brag about forty years of women: his conquests, their failings. Nick wanted the warmth of his memories back, not the jagged edges of Jack Berns's life.

“I can't,” said Nick, regretting the loss of a chance to pump this notorious Washington warrior. “I gotta go.”

He waved vaguely down toward the row of bars and cafés.

“Going that way myself,” said Berns. “Walk with you.”

“Okay,” said Nick, not sure how to walk away from this friendly figure.

Shoulder to shoulder, they turned their back on the Capitol dome. As they walked into the wind, Nick looked down the block, saw a blue-coated, white-haired man stride around the corner, disappear.

“I was talkin' 'bout you the other day with Peter Murphy,” said Berns. “He said you're back working for his column. He said you was doing something on spies.”

“Just a think piece. Nothing really.”

“I ought to kick Peter's ass,” said Berns.

Nick frowned at the shorter, older man.

“Thirty years in this town,” said Berns. “I nailed more spooks 'n he knows, and I bet he didn't even tell you to call me.”

“No,” said Nick. They crossed the street from the Library of Congress block to the café strip. “He didn't.”

“Son of a bitch,” said Berns. “Can't blame the old guy. Likes to keep the good sources sewed up tight in his own pocket.”

“Yeah,” said Nick.

“So the boys at Langley ripping somebody off? 'Member how I helped Peter nail that phony business the spooks were running in Miami?”

“That was before my time,” said Nick.

“These days, they're jumpy out there. You should be careful crossing the river. Don't go it alone.”

“Peter's backing me,” said Nick. They reached The Tune Inn, a honky-tonk where stuffed animals mounted on the wall watched congressional aides eat burgers and home fries.

Berns laid a gloved finger on Nick's arm. “You got something, don't you?”

“I don't know.” Nick nodded across the street. “I need to get back to my office.”

“That's right, you're up here. I should fall by and see your place one of these days.”

“Call first,” said Nick. “Sometimes I'm out.”

“Sure.” The bald man smiled at Nick. “We only worked that one story together, but you did a hell of a job.”

“It was a puff piece,” said Nick. “Nothing to it.”

“But you didn't blow it. I appreciate that.”

There was nothing to blow
, thought Nick. Berns sounded like a man on the far side of his own mountain, looking back.

The private detective tucked a business card in the pocket of Nick's pea coat.

“If you're doing what you're doing, you need a guy who knows the ropes,” said Berns. “Can't let Peter keep all the good sources to himself. Give me a call. I hear anything, I'll do the same.”

“Sure,” said Nick; thought,
What the hell?

Nick shook the man's hand, waved good-bye, and hurried across the street. Didn't look back.

Half a block up from Pennsylvania Avenue, Nick remembered he was hungry; remembered he had no cash. A blast of icy wind pushed against his coat. Icy bullets of rain tapped his face, random rounds fired in advance of a bigger storm. He cut through an alley, turned the corner on Third Street, hugged the building as he scurried back toward Pennsylvania Avenue and the recess in the wall for his bank's automated teller machine.

The smoke-plastic windbreaks of the teller machine sheltered him from the weather. He inserted his card. The green computer screen told him to punch in his personal code. He did so, glanced to the intersection.

A maroon Cadillac stopped for the red light. The white-haired man with the blue topcoat sat behind the window of the front passenger door. Raindrops dotted the glass.

Nick smiled, his imagination stirring with a story about a pensioner killing time in a library.

The light changed, the Cadillac turned left, toward the freeway to Virginia. A grass boulevard divides Pennsylvania Avenue on Capitol Hill; the Cadillac had to stop as it drove through the boulevard to cross the opposite lanes. The windshield wipers swept winter rain from the driver's view.

The driver was Jack Berns.

Traffic parted, and the Cadillac drove off, bearing the old man who'd sat behind Nick in the Library of Congress, an old man who carried an electronic signaling device; bearing the Washington gunslinger who'd stepped out of nowhere to walk awhile and talk awhile with Nick. To ask Nick questions.

The automated teller beeped at Nick, but he stood motionless in the wind, staring down the street, cold and alone.

MIRROR

B
eth woke up screaming.

Wes shot out of bed, consciousness roaring into him, eyes blinking, hands reaching for
whatever
. The bedroom was dark, cold.

“
Nightmare
,” she said, grabbing him. “I had a nightmare.”

She trembled as he put his arms around her, lowered them down to his bed, pulled the covers over their naked bodies. Beth's thin body warmed, stopped shaking.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I didn't mean to scare you.”

“It's okay. You're okay.”

Her head nodded on his chest. “Been working too hard. That ever happen to you?”

“Sure.”

“Tell me your nightmares,” she said.

“Tell me yours. It's what we've got tonight.”

“I had this image of a mirror,” she whispered. “I was popping back and forth through it, playing with it. I was it, then I wasn't. In and out. Back and forth. Then I went the wrong way, and the glass shattered and shredded all across my body, little tiny pieces of me, bright slivers. Cracking off.”

With his hand on her back, he felt her heart racing.

“In my wilder days, I did acid,” she said. “Maybe I'm working out that legacy.”

“But it's just a legacy,” he prompted.

“I might still be wild, but I'm not still stupid.”

Lawyer Wes wanted to thank somebody for that truth.

“Wait until I tell you my weird dreams,” she said.

“Whenever you want.”

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Somewhere between very late and real early,” he said. He felt her smile. “Go back to sleep. You're safe here.”

“I know.”

She kissed the skin above his heart.

A quarter hour later, she was asleep, curled with him like a spoon, her back against his chest. He wanted to stay between her and the nightmares. But his body began to cramp. She shifted in her slumber. And he had promises to keep.

Tired as he was, he knew he wouldn't rest. The luminous hands on his watch showed 4:39. Wes slid out of bed. Beth stirred, but slept on. He covered her bare shoulder. He found his sweat suit and sneakers, eased from the room, and gently shut the door.

Their clothes were scattered on the living room floor. He piled them on the chair. Snapped on the lamp. While the coffee was brewing, he laid Jack Berns's picture of Jud Stuart in the middle of the coffee table. The two photographs he'd stolen from the L.A. flophouse went on either side of that portrait—the picture of Jud Stuart and the black-haired man to the left, and on the right, the snapshot of the beautiful woman.

“Where are all you people now?” he whispered aloud.

He drank coffee and stared at the pictures.

“I'm on the edge,” he told them.

Wes knew his law professors and by-the-book fellow military officers would be appalled by the arrogance with which he'd bent a myriad of society's rules. His law school classmates who were now wheeling and dealing in the legal factories along K Street probably wouldn't blink. Marines who'd had to supersede Standard Operating Procedure in combat would probably smile. And his father …

“
You're on the horse
,” said the memory of that leather-faced, fire-eyed man. “
Ride it
.”

To ride Denton's horse, Wes was certain he'd have to stop bending the rules and start breaking them.

Phone records are protected and private property. While Wes hadn't directly appropriated such property, he had benefited from Jack Berns's acquisition thereof. He had foreknowledge that such acquisition was not legal, paid money to enjoy the fruits of that activity. Classic elements of a criminal conspiracy.

You're supposed to be a kind-of cop
, he told himself.
You're becoming a kind-of crook
.

What that's gotten me are two more pictures of people I don't know
, he thought. Plus one more name:

Nick Kelley
.

Spying on the private records of a public pay phone, playing loose with an L.A. cop, scamming a gin mill bartender and a flophouse desk clerk, stealing abandoned photographs, cadging favors from friends at NIS—no prosecutor would waste time pursuing such activities. His superiors in the Corps or DCI Denton could discipline him, but they'd put him in the field, given him the mission. Their authority required them to understand what a man in Wes's shoes could, should, and shouldn't do. But for them—for most of them, anyway, Wes knew that what mattered most was keeping their suits clean. He neither feared their censure nor craved their approval. They were his commanders, not his judges.

Wes knew little more about Jud Stuart than he did the night of Denton's party. But his instincts told him that Denton was right: the fragments of the life scattered on Wes's coffee table added up to something important—something more important than the hairsplitting legal files on his old desk at NIS.

The best number Wes had in the equation to tally that score was Nick Kelley. Kelley was a reporter, and therefore a land mine. There were a hundred ways he could blow up in Wes's face. Plus Kelley was a private citizen, ostensibly upstanding and within the law. A human being endowed with certain inalienable rights, among them a due level of respect and protection from public employees. Like Maj. Wes Chandler.

“Ride the horse,” Wes told his quiet home.

The floor creaked in the bedroom.

Wes stashed the pictures. The toilet flushed. He had time to refill his cup, get back to the couch, and sit down, time to catch his breath before the bedroom door opened and Beth came out, barefooted and wearing one of his long-sleeved, tan khaki shirts.

“I smell coffee,” she said.

“In the kitchen.”