Jake Needham - Killing Plato

Billy Redwine and I hadn’t actually spoken since the time a year or so ago when he had flown all the way to Phuket to hear my tale about the Asian Bank of Commerce and the string of dead bodies somebody in Washington had been leaving across Asia to hush up the real story behind its collapse.

I was at National Airport waiting for my bag and trying to decide what to do now that I was in Washington when I noticed a big Hertz sign at baggage claim. That sounded like as good a start as any, so I went out to the curb, caught the yellow and black Hertz bus, and about half an hour later was tooling up the George Washington Parkway in a shiny red Mustang that smelled of new vinyl and old tobacco.

I pushed the radio buttons and found an oldies station and all at once I remembered how much I missed cruising the streets of a city listening to music on a car radio. In Bangkok or Hong Kong or Singapore, they didn’t get the idea at all. Driving just for the sheer hell of it was such an American thing to do. It wasn’t a concept that translated very well.

The disk jockey started playing the original Rolling Stones version of Honky Tonk Woman and I slapped out the rhythm on the steering wheel with my palms.

Damn, that feels good.

When I got to Key Bridge, I turned off the Parkway and crossed over the Potomac into Georgetown. A brisk wind slashed at the city from the east, bringing with it a damp chill off the water and leaving piles of yellow leaves splotched with crimson banked like snowdrifts against the hubcaps of parked cars. The wind spun the dry leaves into miniature tornadoes and lifted scraps of paper and sailed them over the car like tiny squadrons of paper airplanes. The Four Seasons was full, but the Georgetown Inn had a room, so I left the car with the doorman, got my bag out of the trunk, and checked in.

Then I picked up the telephone and called the White House switchboard.

I left a message with a woman who identified herself as Billy Redwine’s administrative assistant. I?he Wthink that meant she was his secretary. She was cool and correct, and her voice contained no suggestion she expected my call ever to be returned by anyone at all, let alone by Billy Redwine.

It was less than twenty minutes before the telephone in my room rang.

“Mr. Shepherd?” It was the voice of a different woman, her tone professional but with subtle hints of deference and warmth. “Mr. Redwine wonders if you are free for dinner.”

“That would be fine.”

“Do you know the Old Ebbit Grill?”

“I do.”

“Could you meet Mr. Redwine there tonight at eight?”

I told her I could.

“If you will give Mr. Redwine’s name to the hostess, they will seat you at his usual table.”

The Old Ebbit Grill is right across Fifteenth Street from the Treasury Building, barely a five-minute walk from the White House. I left the Mustang with the valet, then lingered out front for a few minutes examining the place’s Greek Revival facade. At exactly eight o’clock, I took a deep breath and pushed through the revolving glass door.

Naturally Billy hadn’t turned up yet. I declined the hostess’ invitation to go to Billy’s table and instead went into the bar to wait.

Down one wall of the bar was a line of booths with tufted, rust-colored velvet benches and forest-green tops. Each booth had a little table lamp with a yellow-cream shade that threw a dim but appealing glow. A huge, gilt-framed oil portrait of a woman with impossibly ivory-colored skin and an outsized rump hung just above the long mahogany bar and there were some stuffed deer heads scattered around together with one wild boar and something else I took to be a walrus. Heavy brass chandeliers, vaguely art deco in appearance, hung from a very high tin ceiling, undoubtedly fake. The tiny bulbs flickering inside frosted glass cylinders made them look almost like gaslights.

I slid into an empty booth, laid down the large manila envelope I had brought with me, and ordered a Bushmills and water. Somewhere far in the background I heard Frank Sinatra sing the first notes of “Nancy with the Laughing Face”.

When my drink came I slipped at it slowly and watched a television set tuned to CNBC that was hanging over the bar. It was discreet and silent, captions flickering over the bottom of the picture, and nobody but me seemed to be paying the slightest attention to it. The music changed to “Can’t We Be Friends”, then “That Old Feeling”, and finally, “I Can’t Get Started with You”.

Billy was an actor at heart, and when I saw him walking across the bar toward me about fifteen minutes later he looked every inch of one. He moved at a stately pace, rhythmically slapping a rolled-up copy of The Wall Street Journal against his thigh, nodding perfunctorily at the occupants of some tables and pointedly ignoring others. There were a couple of what I assumed to be Secret Service types trailing him and they sized me up professionally as he approached the booth. Since they didn’t shoot me, I guess I passed whatever test they were using.

“This fucking town,” Billy sighed as he sat down. “This goddamned motherfucking town.”

Then suddenly he straightened up and looked around as if he had just realized where he was.

“What the fuck are you doing in the bar?” Billy asked. “Didn amp;rs? arquo;t they offer to take you to my table?”

“I like bars. All kinds of interesting things happen in bars.”

Billy shook his head and slid back out of the booth. He nodded toward the main dining room and shortly afterward we settled in at a table in a far back corner of the restaurant. There was no one else within earshot and Billy’s escorts took another table strategically placed near the main entrance.

Almost immediately an elderly waiter in a long apron materialized and placed a drink at Billy’s elbow, a martini containing two olives impaled on a red plastic sword.

“Evening, Mr. Redwine.”

“Evening, Paul.”

I had brought my Bushmills from the bar so I lifted it and tilted the glass toward Billy in a half-assed toast. He lifted the martini glass in turn, tilted it at me, then took a long, slow pull.

“Man,” he said when he put it down, “that is so good.”

After that, Billy folded his arms and leaned back a little. He tilted his head slightly to one side and studied me with a half-smile on his face.

“So what kind of outrageous horseshit have you gotten yourself into this time, Jack, my boy?”

I reached across the table and put the brown envelope I had brought with me in front of Billy. Inside was the copy of the email intercepts Darcy had printed off Kate’s disk. I kept the cassettes in my pocket.

Billy eyed the envelope as warily as if I had just laid a rattlesnake down in front of him, which in a manner of speaking I guess I had.

“What?” he asked, looking back and forth from me to the envelope.

“It’s some stuff you ought to see.”

“Stuff?”

“You going to look at it?” I asked. “Or are we going to dance around a little first?”

Billy laughed at that, then he extracted a pair of half-glasses from his breast pocket and slipped them on. I watched his face as he flipped quickly through the pages, although he remained mostly expressionless. Taking a sip of his martini, he went back to the beginning and read carefully through everything, then slid the pages back into the envelope and returned his reading glasses to his jacket pocket.

“So,” I asked, “what do you think?”

“I think you’ve got some pretty good contacts in Thailand.”

“Is what I read there true?” I pointed to the envelope. “Were the marshals in Phuket with instructions to kill Karsarkis?”