Richard Stevenson - Strachey's folly

"Yeah, Rain's a peach." Dolan picked up on Timmy's antsi-ness and leaned closer and lowered her voice. "Rain's got two kids now with her partner-two little boys. Did you know that?"

"No, I didn't," Timmy said.

"That's not for me," Dolan said in a matter-of-fact way. "I got nine brothers and sisters, seven of them younger than me. Somebody else wants to overpopulate the world, fine. Me? Uh-uh."

"I'm the father of a child in Edensburg, New York, north of Albany," Timmy said, and with an accustomed gesture whipped out his wallet. "Two lesbian friends asked me to be the father of their child-via artificial insemination, of course and it turns out I love it. This is Erica Osborne-Kotlowitz."

Dolan glanced briefly at the photo of a tiny person in a white dress and said,

"Looks human to me, Timothy. Good for you, honey."

"She'll be seventeen months old this Thursday," he said.

"Uh-huh."

I said, "Chondelle-may I call you Chondelle?"

"Yes, you may."

"Chondelle, to get to the point, a close friend of Timmy's was shot and seriously wounded in front of his house on E Street, Southeast, last night."

"Maynard Sudbury is his name," Timmy put in, leaning close to Dolan. "We were in the Peace Corps together in India in the midsixties. A poultry development project. Few of us had any real experience with farming of any kind. We were what the Peace Corps calls BAGs-B.A. generalists. The Peace Corps phi-losophy at that time was-"

"Timmy, Chondelle has a date in a couple of hours, so maybe we need to just explain to her what happened yesterday and last night and postpone the theories of rural development until a later date."

"Yeah," she said, "I'd love to hear about you and your friends raising chickens.

But let's save that."

I looked around, and nobody was seated at the tables adjacent to ours, and none of the Sunday-morning coffee drinkers and Post readers in the shop showed any sign of being aware of us at all. I said, "Timmy is afraid that the shooting and a number of other disturbing events yesterday are interconnected-part of an extensive Robert Ludlum-style conspiracy. I don't agree, but his suspicions are not entirely off-the-wall. It was a pretty wild twelve hours yesterday." Then I laid it all out: the first un-expurgated version of Saturday's events spoken out loud by Timmy or me to anyone.

While Timmy shifted uneasily in his seat, I described to Dolan Maynard's shock at discovering an AIDS quilt panel for Jim Suter; the mysterious appearance at the panel by a woman Maynard recognized as former congresswoman Betty Krumfutz; the letter from Suter warning Maynard that Suter's life was in danger and the admonition not to reveal Suter's whereabouts to anyone, especially not to the D.C. cops or to any people on "the Hill"; the reported vandalism of the Suter panel on the quilt; the brutal shooting; the ransacking of Maynard's house while Timmy and I were at the hospital; the unnerving multiple appearances by D.C. police detective Ray Craig.

Dolan listened to this recitation carefully and with a look of concern and growing distaste. When I mentioned Suter's warning not to reveal any of this story to the D.C. cops, Dolan raised a carefully drawn eyebrow but did not react otherwise.

When I had finished, she said, "I'm sorry about your friend. I hope he makes it.

Firearms do terrible damage to human bodies, but at GW they deal with these injuries all the time. So he's in good hands."

"And Maynard's resilient," Timmy said. "He's survived things almost as bad as getting shot-parasites, plagues, guerrilla wars, mobs, you name it. So there's reason to hope he can withstand this attack, too."

"Maynard sounds like a real tough bird."

"So, what do you think?" Timmy said. "Am I crazy, or is there really something big going on here? Something… something interrelated with… with a lot of people involved in it?" He took a quick look over his shoulder, as if he might catch another patron of the coffee shop in the act of pointing a directional microphone our way, or aiming a bamboo pipe with a poisoned blow dart.

Dolan said, "No, it's not crazy to consider the possibility that there's a connection between everything that went on yesterday. That's not crazy at all. It does sound to me like it's more than a run of bad luck."

"But," I said, "Timmy may be letting his imagination roam a bit too freely, don't you think? Such as imagining, to cite just one example, that some of the GW hospital staff may be out to do Maynard in, and the same for large segments of the D.C.

Metropolitan Police Department. I think he needs to be reassured on these points, among a number of others."

Dolan sighed heavily and said, "Look, I gotta make a phone call. I told my date I'd check in with her around now. Come on with me while I make a quick call, okay? There's a phone down at the corner, by Second."

Before we could question Dolan, she stood up and we quickly got up, too, and followed her out onto Pennsylvania Avenue. None of us had finished our coffee, but Dolan paid no attention to that.

As we walked up Pennsylvania toward the Library of Congress, Dolan looked straight ahead and said, "I just wanted to get us out of there. Don't turn around, don't look back, but another plainclothes officer was in the coffee shop. He came in right after I did and sat three tables behind you all. He was too far away to hear much of anything you said, but after you told me what you told me, Donald, I thought, why is this man sitting here? The officer's name is Ewell Flower, and he works under Ray Craig."

Timmy said, "Oh, God," and he appeared to be putting a lot of effort into not looking over his shoulder, as was I.

"Why not let's walk on over to the Capitol," Dolan said. She led us across Pennsylvania, past the library, across the Capitol grounds with their beautifully kept greenery and their antiter-rorist reinforced-concrete barricades-would missiles with tactical nuclear warheads explode out of the bushes in the event of attack? — and around the south wing of the great building. The Capitol looked soft and creamy in the autumn morning sunlight, as if it could somehow render benign even the hard-hearted harangues of Jesse or Newt that regularly bounced off the walls inside.

From the high terrace of the west facade, we looked out over the city and the Mall and the AIDS quilt stretching away toward the Washington Monument, and beyond that, Abe Lincoln. Tens of thousands of people milled quietly among the panels. Timmy had remarked the day before that he had never seen so many people in one place remain so subdued. The quiet was partly a sign of respect, we concluded, and of so many of the quilt visitors being lost in memory, but it was also that no words felt adequate to express the quilt's huge and complex meaning.

Timmy said, "It's funny. Five minutes ago I was really frightened, but here I actually feel safe. In fact, this is the first time in twelve hours that I've actually felt safe. Not that I necessarily am safe," he added, and took a quick look back toward Pennsylvania Avenue. I looked around, too, but saw no one who stood out among the quilt visitors and other tourists and passersby. Dolan had not described Ewell Flower to us, so I didn't know whom to look for.

Timmy went on, "It's interesting how most gay people aren't usually aware of feeling wnsafe. But at these big, mainly gay events, you're always aware of feeling safe in a way you never do any other time. Do you know what I mean?"

I said I knew, but Dolan just said, "I'll take your word for it."

I asked, "Is this Ewell Flower following us? Have you spotted him since we left the coffee shop?"

"No, and he probably knows I made him. He's a short, skinny African-American man, gray-haired, wearing shades, in a black windbreaker. If they've got a tail on you, he probably switched off with somebody. I don't recognize anybody else from the division just now. I guess they could be using people from outside the division. So, yeah, we could still be under surveillance."