Robert Baer - Blow the house down

Willie didn't ask why. I doubt he even wanted to know why, but I knew he would play by my rules.

We had crossed Key Bridge and were headed back through Georgetown on M Street when I warned Willie we'd be making a hard left after the old Eagle Liquor and a quick jog up to Prospect. He inched along, waiting for a gap in the oncoming traffic, until we both saw a space just large enough for the ex-Norton.

"Hit it!" I yelled. "Now!" But Willie already had.

The Crown Vic hydroplaned across only inches behind a Navigator packed with high-schoolers and dead in front of a couple in a Lexus. Underwear would be changed early tonight. By the time we hit the alley's cobblestones, the Crown Vic was in a full skid. We just missed slamming into the side of Kinko's.

Low key it wasn't, but there was no way in hell anyone could see Willie slam the brakes just as we turned left on Prospect or me bail out in the fraction of a second he needed to power up again.

I waited in the shadows under a dripping oak tree until Willie was long gone around the corner. By the time a tail caught up to him, they'd see only the Crown Vic's rear lights going up 35th Street. I waited some more just to see if anything living moved, wishing to hell I'd brought an umbrella. Then, when I knew for sure it was impossible to get any wetter, I jammed the watch cap on my head and set off on foot almost back to where I had come from. Frank Beckman lived on Tuttle Place, in Kalorama, five minutes by foot and a thousand miles in every other way from where my twisted Norton lay rusting in the rain.

I worked my way up through Georgetown, scrambled over the high iron fence on R Street that fronts Oak Hill Cemetery, and followed the slope down through the tombstones and monuments until I hit the bicycle trail that runs through Rock Creek Park. Three minutes later, I was under the Massachusetts Avenue bridge. Another fifty yards along, I forded the creek as best I could-my Nikes were already soaking-waited for a gap

in the traffic, then sprinted across the parkway and clawed my way up the steep eastern slope of the valley. I came out pretty much where I expected to: on Belmont Road, a block north of Tuttle Place and two blocks from Frank Beckman's tastefully imposing Georgian mansion.

I first met Frank Beckman in Brazzaville, in the Congo, in 1979, on the evening after the French embassy's chef had been eaten by a crocodile. It was all anyone could talk about. The chef had slipped out of the kitchen between the soup and fish course and walked down to the river. For what? A tryst? A fistful of something to dress the salad with? No one knew. One of the waiters heard him scream. A passerby saw thrashing just below the riverbank, but it was pitch black out on the water and crocodiles were everywhere. There was nothing to be done. The chef's toque was found the next day, snagged on a branch a half mile downstream. That was the other question on everyone's tongue: Had the croc bothered with a red wine sauce or devoured the chef au naturel? Even then, Brazzaville was not the world's most sympathetic place.

I was assigned back then to Dubai, covering the Iranian revolution. (This was 1979, in the pre-Webber days, when the base actually knew its ass from third base.) But mostly I was on the road, going wherever a Farsi speaker might prove useful: Manila, Khartoum, even (of all places) Brazzaville. Headquarters wanted me to pitch the first secretary at the Iranian embassy, a fat, fish-mouthed Khomeini devotee whose father had owned the Cadillac franchise in Tehran back in the days when the Shah was among his best customers.

Frank had been scheduled to take over the station in Brazzaville six months earlier, but a nasty divorce kept him tied up in Washington. When he finally did make it to the Republic of the Congo, just a week before I did, he had wife number two in tow: a tender, Irish-Chinese mix of a thing named Jill, fresh out of Skidmore College with a B.A. in French lit. But if Jill was expecting a honeymoon or even intelligent conversation-in any language-she got little of the sort.

Frank was Kentucky white trash through and through: high school into the army, army into the 82nd Airborne. At eighteen, he was jumping

out of airplanes. He enrolled at the University of Kentucky on the GI Bill, graduated in his mid-twenties, joined the Agency a week later, and spent his thirtieth birthday hiding in an attic in Hue during Tet. Somewhere along the way he'd picked up a mid-Atlantic accent, a sine qua nort for advancement in the Agency. I learned all this in the first half hour I'd ever known him, sitting in what passed for a living room, in what passed for a chief of station residence, in what passed for a capital city in yet another people's paradise of the ever-Darkening Continent. Frank was shit-faced when I arrived: warm gin. He kept drinking it, kept talking-he and Jill had met in Paris the March before when she was tracking Franchise Sagan's youth through the Place Pigalle-but he seemed to have leveled off at whatever level of drunkenness he had aimed for, or arrived at.

As for Jill, the story of their chance encounter and whirlwind romance seemed to hit a sour spot, or maybe it was the climate, or being stuck inside. The French chef had proved a more-than-cautionary tale for her. She had no intention of leaving the house except under armed guard, Frank informed me, and maybe not then.

"C'est pas vrai?" I asked. She nodded tartly.

The house was-and here I'm being charitable-a fucking dump. The Agency had given them a furniture allowance, almost a generous one, but by the looks of things, Frank must have used it to offset the ruinous expense of exiting his last marriage. The dining room table was a few planks nailed together and balanced on a pair of sawhorses. Jill's books-Gide, Moliere, de Maupassant, Sagan-formed a precarious tower on top of the only piece that looked as if it might have been up to the standards of her former life. Otherwise, the whole house, or what I could see of it, was done up with local crap, including the painting over the sofa: a Negress on lurid felt, washing laundry in the Congo River. I didn't know Frank nearly well enough then to ask him if it was a joke.

All that, though, was more than two decades ago, in a Cold War no longer being fought, in a part of the world now so ravaged by AIDS and civil unrest that it seemed to be sliding backward off the face of existence. When I ran across Frank a little more than six years later-coming out of the Beau Rivage in Geneva-he told me that the Negress was gone, along with Jill.

"She split," he said. "Homesick, Jill told me. We had a daughter: India. Beautiful, like her name. I almost never get to see her."

If I had been smarter, I would have seen it as a premonition of my own marriage. Like Jill and Frank, Marissa was a half generation younger than me-nineteen to my early thirties, a talented poet, a bright light at the American University in Beirut. We'd met when we were both rock climbing in the Dolomites. She was like a black-haired, olive-skinned spider. I couldn't keep my eyes off her. Nothing daunted Marissa. Not even me, as it turned out. If she hadn't been three months pregnant, I doubt we would have married, but out of it all came Rikki, good from not-so. That, too, Frank and I had in common.

I nodded my condolences over his lost wife and missing child, and asked Frank to talk on. Our colleagues in Southern Air Transport had just been "tasked," as they say in Washington circles, to deliver a thousand TOW missiles from U.S. Army stocks to Tel Aviv for trans-shipment to Iran. Against such madness, Frank's domestic life seemed the picture of normality.

Soon after they were reassigned to New Delhi, Frank said, Jill had talked him into signing a power of attorney so she could buy a small cottage for them back near Saratoga Springs, scene of her undergraduate triumphs. They had been in Brazzaville more than three years by then. With the differential and hardship pay, they'd managed to save a little money, and Jill had never adapted well to a place where the highest form of entertainment was watching geckos crawl across the ceiling. New Delhi wasn't going to be much better. Why not throw her a little bone? There was the daughter, India, too. Better she should be schooled back in the States.