Richard Stevenson - Strachey's folly

The woman stared hard at us for a brief moment. Then suddenly she turned and moved quickly away, running almost. She jostled one knot of five or six middleaged men in jeans and plaid shirts who were spread across the walkway between the quilt sections twelve or fifteen feet from Maynard, Timmy, and me.

Maynard said, "Hey, what the heck was she doing here!"

"The woman in the trench coat?" Timmy said.

"Yes. Jeez."

"Who was she?"

Maynard said, "I've never actually met the woman, but a friend pointed her out to me in the lobby of the Rayburn building one time. And I'm reasonably certain that that rattled woman who looked like she was scared to death by Jim Suter's quilt panel, or by something on it, was the unindicted former con-gresswoman from Pennsylvania, Betty Krumfutz."

Maynard had bought a small brick town house on the one hundred block of E

Street, Southeast, back in the mid-seventies before the Reagan boom drove Capitol Hill real estate prices beyond the reach of mere adventure-travel writers. The rows of late-nineteenth-century houses on Maynard's side of the street had been built as servants' quarters for the burghers, pols, and lobbyists in the grander houses opposite Maynard's humble row. Maynard's house, like the next-door neighbors', was a simple, two-story box with bay windows, tiny patches of flowering shrubs, and a black wrought-iron front stoop. While the E

Street houses' small rooms might have been considered claustrophobic in, say, St. Louis, on Capitol Hill, with its lingering emanations of life during the Van Buren administration, the little houses, now full of urban professionals instead of black cooks and Irish maids, just felt cozy.

Maynard had stuffed his home with folk art he had toted home from six continents, and in his ten-by-twelve-foot, fenced-in backyard, Maynard had built a rock fish pond surrounded on three sides by a garden he described as

"Japanese-slash-ltalian-slash-Camerooni." The Camerooni part was a big clay pot out of which climbed a restless, meandering yam plant, now defunct for the winter.

We arrived back at the house just after ten. Maynard drove us from Washington's Adams-Morgan section in his little Chevy Sprint. This followed a leisurely Ethiopian dinner-Maynard stuck with the relatively mild vegetable dishes-and several cups of a type of Abyssinian coffee Maynard said would be sure to keep us awake for eight to ten days. We said that didn't sound like much fun, but the coffee, black as lava and nearly as thick, was ripe with cloves and other unidentifiable spices. It was so alluringly strange that we kept drinking it, thinking the next small cup would seem suddenly familiar. None ever did, and now, back at Maynard's house, we were wired.

Timmy was watching the ten-o'clock news on the little TV set on a shelf in Maynard's dining room, I was browsing in that morning's Post, and Maynard was sorting through the mail that had arrived after we left the house that morning.

"Will you look at this!" Maynard said. "It's a letter from- guess who? Jim Suter."

"Is it from Mexico?" Timmy asked.

"Yep, it is. The postmark is blurred, and I can't make out the date, and there's no return address. But I know Jim's handwriting, and this is from Jim, for sure,"

Maynard said, and ripped open the airmail envelope. I could see that the postage stamp pictured an Indian with a flat, sloped forehead in noble profile.

Before we'd left the quilt display earlier, Maynard had sought out a Names Project official. The woman had been disturbed when Maynard insisted that a panel for a living person had found its way into the quilt. The official explained that records on panel submissions were kept back in San Francisco, and she would attempt to track down the source of the Jim Suter panel when she returned to California on Monday. She and Maynard exchanged phone numbers and each agreed to try to sort out this weird development.

"Holy cow, Jim's in some kind of bad trouble," Maynard said to Timmy and me, his wire reading specs perched on his sunburned nose. "He's in trouble and-jeez, that's not all. This is awful." Maynard was holding what looked like a single page of dense script handwritten on one side of some crinkly, thin paper. He finished reading and said, "This is entirely amazing."

Maynard passed the letter to Timmy, who read it aloud. It was dated Monday, September 30, twelve days earlier.

" 'Dear Maynard,'" Timmy read. " 'No, you weren't hallucinating. That was yours truly you saw on Saturday in Merida. I'm guessing you were in the Yucatan for a travel quickie and you'll be back in D.C. by the time this letter makes its way through the Mexican postal system and lands at Dulles. (I once asked a postal clerk in Merida, 'Who do you have to fuck in order to get a letter out of this country in less than a month?' and, I have to admit, his unusually forthright reply caught me off guard.)

" 'Hey, Manes, I do apologize for my rudeness on Saturday. Although, in fact, it was not mere bad manners at all, it was sheer panic. The thing of it is, I did not want anyone in D.C. to know where I was. And when I saw you, I just clutched.

What I should have done was to simply, straightforwardly, ask you not to tell anybody, under any circumstances, that you saw me down here, and of course you would have agreed to that, sans explanations, which unhappily I am unable to provide. But you always trusted me, if I haven't misread our friendship, which has been based on the flesh and the soul, rather than the mind, what with my being a sensible chap of the center and your being to the left of Enver Hoxha, somewhere out around Ted Kennedy, etc., etc.

" 'Hey, Manes, am I being evasive? Cryptic? A tiresomely cir-cumlocuting pain in the butt? Okay, then, friend, here's the actual deal. The actual deal is-hold on to your sombrero- somebody is trying to kill me. Did I write what I think I just wrote? A careful rereading of the text suggests I did. This extremely awkward state of affairs, Maynard, can be explained by the following: someone thinks I know something that could send quite a few rather large enchiladas to prison for muchos anos. Comprende, Senor Sudbury?

" 'And-I guess this is the main reason I am writing you, Manes-if any of these people knew that you had seen me in Merida, they might think that you know what they think I know, and they would want you out of what they perceive to be their hair, too. Sorry about this, but please do take it seriously. You've been around the world thirty-nine times-including bloody Africa, for chrissakes! and you know as well as anybody that murder doesn't just happen in mall movies-and in malls-but that it can and does happen in real life.

" 'So please do not-DO NOT-mention to anyone that you saw me, here or anywhere. It's especially important that you tell no one on the Hill or with the D.C. Police Department that I'm down here or that you have seen me or spoken with me. Okay? Look, I'm sure your curiosity circuits are popping right about now. I know I'd be drooling down my bib with curiosity. All I can really say is, someday I'll explain all this, if I can-and if I can ever again show my still quite presentable face in D.C. Meanwhile, mum is definitely the word.

" 'Hey, Manes, if all this sounds just too, too ominous- well, believe me, it is.'

"Signed, 'Your friend Jim, still unlucky in love.'"

Timmy laid the letter on the dining room table and said, "Wow."

"Lurid, isn't it?" Maynard said, attempting jocularity, though he shifted in his seat like a man unnerved.

"Could Suter be making it all up?" Timmy asked. "You said he was unprincipled in a lot of ways. Maybe he's trying to manipulate you or manipulate events back here somehow."

"Jim's cynical," Maynard said, "about his own life and about the human race in general. But I've never heard of him jerking friends around in a devious way. If anything, he's known for his brutal honesty. That's why I guess I think I have to take what he's saying seriously."