George Pelecanos: DC Noir

Port did not so much as blink.

“Think you’d be happy working your way back up to the copy desk in Davenport, Jordie?” Weil asked. “No, I would think not.”

The next day, Port joined Ana Mendes for lunch downstairs at Red Sage, a smart restaurant with a Southwestern theme. He ordered the salmon paillard, and his former mentor the pecan-crusted chicken dusted with red chili. In her briefcase was his latest manuscript, Betraying Ourselves

“Ana, if he could’ve gotten away with it, he would’ve shot me right there,” Port said, sipping the Sancerre he’d ordered.

“Wrung your neck is more like it,” Mendes replied. “Jordie, what were you thinking?”

She recommended him out of college for his first full-time job at the Quad Cities Times. Something about Jordie brought out a tenderness in her, and so they kept in touch and she felt a sense of pride when he became the paper’s film critic. She followed his career when he moved to Fox’s KLJB-TV, and in 1991 she wrote a reference letter to the ACCC. He was telegenic, personable, reasonably bright, and she knew Ronald Reagan was his hero. A true believer, he’d be a perfect public face for Douglas Weil’s political action committee.

Some years later, she asked one of Weil’s lawyers why they’d decided on Jordan Port.

He fit the profile, she was told. His father, a son of a Roosevelt Democrat, was described as aloof and unsympathetic, and he died when Port was nine years old. In turn, Port spent his school days and early career in an unwitting search for praise and validation, particularly from older, plainspoken men. They knew he’d adore Douglas Weil, whose warm, folksy manner belied his cunning and drive.

The clincher was his behavior as a film critic. Port gulped down every perk offered by every studio, from a sixty-nine-cent pen to a flight to Nice for Cannes. He’d convinced himself he had to do so for the job, not once questioning whether he really needed a foot-high figurine of Schwarzenegger as T2 for his desk, Molly Ringwald’s voice on his answering machine…

This kid was waiting to be bought, the lawyer said.

Mendes now sat across from Port and saw fear and determination mingling in his eyes.

“Jordie, there are faster ways if you want to kill yourself—”

She stopped short, remembering Port’s mother had committed suicide.

“It’s all true, Ana. I challenge you to tell me it’s not.”

Mendes sighed. “Jordie, this town is fucked. You’re not going to get anything done here. This book… I can’t make it happen.”

“I can take it to New York,” he said.

“Jordie, ask yourself if you want to blow up the bridge. Ask yourself if you have any friends on the Left.”

“Ana, I want to do what’s right,” he said earnestly. “Reagan’s legacy—”

“Jordie, will you… Jordie, stop,” she said sternly. They were a block from the Treasury Department, a short walk from K Street, and she was no longer certain she could match a face with a title. Looking around, she whispered, “Jordie, there’s no right or wrong. There’s no dissent and no discussion. There is what is.”

“They mock Reagan,” Port said, ignoring his salmon. “They call his philosophies ‘paleo-conservatism.’ They say his lessons don’t apply.”

“Jordie, I know,” she said tiredly. “I read your manuscript. So did Randy.”

Randy Dawson, her boss and stepson of a nationally syndicated columnist. The house, Patriot Publishing, was a subsidiary of a marketing firm funded by the pharmaceutical industry and an ad-hoc coalition of brokerage firms.

Port said, “I’m sick of going to these luncheons where they praise Reagan in public and then mock him when the paying guests leave.”

“Jordie, will you listen to yourself? I know you almost twenty-five years and you’re lecturing me,” she said.

She reached across the table and held his hand. “Please. You have to stop. You have no chance of success. They will bury you. Do yourself a favor and burn the manuscript.”

“I can’t,” he said, drawing up. “Someone will publish it. It’s good and it’s right.”

“Jordie, I’m trying to help you. You have to under—”

Port’s cell phone rang.

It was Douglas Weil Jr., and he asked Port if he was alone.

Without knowing it, Port had stood and was now next to the table. Last night, whenever he closed his eyes to sleep, Weil was there, teeth bared.

Mendes saw him quiver.

“Find a corner,” Weil told him.

Port walked to one of the private dining rooms, and he shut the door behind him.

“You’ve booked yourself on MSNBC tomorrow night,” Weil said.

“Yes. Yes, I did.”

“Cancel,” Weil said forcefully.

“Doug, I can’t. I’m—”

“Cancel,” he repeated and cut the line.

When Port returned to the table, he saw it had been cleared.

Mendes was gone.

Jordan Port was in the lead-off slot on MSNBC’s Hardball The producers knew him well — the appearance was Port’s seventy-third in the past fifteen years. There hadn’t been a more charming Clinton basher.

The guest host, with whom Port had scuba dived in the Caymans, called him Jordie. On air, he referred to him as “still one of Washington’s young wise men.”

He threw Port the softball he asked for.

“You’ve written a book Washington doesn’t want to see in print. Am I right?”

Eleven minutes later, Port ended his comments with a quote from Ronald Reagan:

“When we begin thinking of government as instead of they , we’ve been here too long.”

As he stepped into darkness outside the MSNBC offices on Nebraska Avenue, Port’s cell phone rang.

A senior producer from Larry King Live , who excoriated him for going elsewhere. She then cheerfully invited him to appear tomorrow night, asking if he’d messenger the manuscript to her.

Friday was a dead night for news, Port knew. But he figured he could parlay a King appearance into fodder for Sunday’s TV roundtables and shout fests. He’d send the show a chapter, but he’d hold the work close until he went to New York on Monday to find a high-powered agent. The media buzz would give him wings.

No sooner had he cut the line than the phone rang again.

The caller, whose voice he couldn’t recognize, gave him the address of a website and a password. In the e-address, the jordanport came after the second backslash.

Heart pounding, Port raced his ACCC-owned Lexus back to Dupont Circle. He parked at a fire hydrant, the car’s flashers flickering on his nineteenth-century red-brick row house.

Running into his dark apartment, he ignored the blinking light of his answering machine and scurried to his desk, still wearing his camel’s hair topcoat and the blue blazer, blue shirt, and blue-and-pink club tie he’d chosen for his Hardball appearance

His hands shaking, it took him several tries before he typed the correct address. He’d kept trying to put an ampersand between the letters.

Finally, the screen went blank, and then it flashed a site for S&M aficionados.

Port used the password he’d been given, drove down two pages, and found photos of a burly man in leather, cat-o’nine-tails dangling from his broad fist. On a table, face burrowed into a short stack of towels, was a naked man whose butt had been whipped raw.

The next photo showed the man’s face, and it was Port’s.

Port’s face, as clear as if in a Sears portrait, though he had never — not once — participated in such activity.

Much of Washington assumed Port was gay, but he n’t. He had little interest in sex, and hadn’t been with anyone in almost five years.

But there he was, in every photo.