Robert Baer - Blow the house down

foot, and I was never going to be able to bust through. Apart from Simon himself, no small challenge, the door chain looked as if it had been forged on Mt. Olympus by Vulcan himself.

"Mr. Beckman is at the Kennedy Center."

"Opera's over unless it's Wagner, and Frank hates Nazis." Simon sighed theatrically on the other side of the door, clapped his hands together in despair, then disappeared somewhere back inside, leaving me alone with my foot in place. That's how I was standing three minutes later when a light from the security-patrol car plastered my shadow against the door. There was no point turning-I would have been blinded-and no time, either. I heard the flap, flap, flap of crepe-soled shoes on the steps and felt an eighteen-inch Mag light digging into my lower back, just at the base of the spine. I knew if I moved too fast for his liking, the last thing I would feel was the same light coming down on the top of my head.

Simon's face was back in the door.

"Mr. Waller"-he searched for the right words-"is known to Mr. Beckman."

The rent-a-cop behind me gave a slight twist to his Mag before he pulled it out of the small of my back, just to say how disappointed he was not to be doing worse, then turned and started back down the steps. When he was safely in his car, Simon slipped the chain from its mooring and cracked the door barely wide enough for me to enter. He'd already spread two bath towels on the floor and had two more draped over his arm.

"Dry with this," he told me as he handed me one of the towels, "and sit on that," he added, dropping the other on the floor. He reached into his back pocket and drew out a pair of padded-sole athletic socks.

"And put these on. Your shoes"-he was eyeing them as if they were roadkill-"do not leave the towels on the floor. Nor does that jacket. Or the thing on your head. Mr. Beckman will be back presently. You may wait f°r him in the library. I believe-" But he didn't bother to finish. We both knew that I knew the way.

"And by the way, Max," Simon added as he turned back down the hall. "You look like shit."

Now that I was, in fact, roadkill, everyone seemed to have a "by the way" for me.

One drunken night at the Intercon in Amman back in early 1992, Frank and I had voted Simon the ugliest man on earth. He took it well-he was even more gone than we were, and he'd definitely been standing behind the door when God handed out looks and stature. Simon couldn't have been any more than five feet four, with a lantern jaw that almost grazed his chest. What's more, he was in no position to argue. A would-be soldier of fortune, Simon had fallen on hard times. His nerves had failed him a few months earlier, in the middle of the night, as he headed over the Kuwait border into one of the occupied oil fields.

For three years, Frank and I kept Simon afloat with odd jobs. Then, when Frank decided to remake himself as a multimillionaire consultant and oil trader, he offered Simon the oddest job of all: butler. He had, after all, a perfect British servant-class accent thanks to his father, a men's room attendant at a second-tier London club; and he had stored away his own cache of secrets about the clientele Frank hoped to attract.

There was no question of salary at first. Frank had hocked everything- his house, his retirement, his clothes, china, the silver-plated flatware, his reputation-to even be able to afford the down payment on Tuttle Place. I have no doubt that he called in favors from Jeddah to Doha and points north and south to create the paper facade that would create the illusion that his was a thriving business. But like Jay Gatsby, the new Frank had sprung from his own Platonic conception of himself, and he had made it work. The leased furniture became real furniture; the Benz and driver, a Citation 10 jet, permanent fixtures. The mansion he had bought in a D.C. real-estate trough back in '95 for $6 million had to be worth twice that now, maybe three times as much, and it was only the beginning of Frank's good fortune.

I spread one of Simon's towels carefully on the leather couch in the library, pulled on the socks-an inspired touch on Simon's part-and leaned back to gaze at the Greek marble frieze above the fireplace in front of me: The two phalanxes of hoplites embraced in mortal, hand-to-hand combat were perfectly balanced against each other and perfectly lit, too, by

recessed lamps above. When I'd first seen the frieze, I thought it had to be an expensive reproduction. There wasn't a chip on it. The original had to be in a museum, but the brass plaque said otherwise: Athens 4th century b.c. When I asked Frank, he just shrugged his shoulders.

"Oh, yeah, it's real. Ask my insurance company."

Simon must have approved of my couch hygiene because he placed a double espresso on the table in front of me and padded off again with barely a sound. I downed it in two quick swallows, then got up and grabbed a stack of newspapers off the console table: the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, a new Christie's rare-wine auction catalog. At the far end of the house, across the dining room and central hall, over a living-room fireplace that looked from here identical to my own, I could just make out a Modigliani nude-Frank's newest acquisition. An article about the purchase in a recent Art + Auction had set Langley all abuzz.

"Good for you, Frank," I said, raising my empty cup to the distant nude. "You've come a long way from the Congo." I meant it, too. I could still see that Negress on felt, perched over Jill's stringy blond hair as if she might just leap down and have her for a between-meal snack.

I heard a car door close outside, then another. The Benz was pulling away as I got to the window, done for the night. Frank's silver mane was impossible to miss. He must have lost twenty pounds since retiring; he'd even picked back up the spring in his step. Walking next to him was a young woman in a sequined ballgown with a black shawl over her head against what had now eased back to a drizzle. What little castle in the sky did she haunt? She was a stunner by anyone's measure, and no more than half Frank's age from what I could see. His life coach? A girlfriend? Wife number three? Whatever role she was playing, she had her arm in Frank's.

Simon was mumbling something in the hall as a woman's footsteps climbed the stairs. A minute later, Frank stuck his head in the library. "Give me five," he said, but he was already on his cell phone as he turned and started up the stairs himself, two steps at a time.

"Yes, your highness, of course," I could hear him saying. "We'll make sure you have it before noon. No excuses." I picked up the Financial Times and pretended I wasn't listening as his voice faded away.

I was still standing there, paper in hand, five minutes later when India suddenly appeared at the door, wearing a Redskins sweatshirt and Levi's. My God, I thought, that's who Frank came in with-his daughter-and I hadn't recognized her, or as they warned us at the Farm, I wasn't looking for what she had so quickly become.

I had seen India maybe half a dozen times since that evening at Frank's tacky split-level-a lunch or dinner when I happened to be near Berkeley, a visit or two to the new mansion when she was home on vacation, only five months ago for a drink at a cafe near the Gare du Nord when I was in transit from Marseilles to Amsterdam. I seemed to have fallen into the role of a slightly screw-loose uncle-happily, I should add. My mother considered me mistake enough for one womb: I would never have a blood niece of my own. Nor did India have any family other than her father now that her mother had disappeared from the picture.

"Going to relive the glory days with Dad? The time you two camped on the Beirut-Damascus highway?"

It was anything but glory. Frank and I had lived in his car for a solid week on the Syrian border, waiting for the Iranians to deliver David Dodge, the first hostage taken in Lebanon. Instead, they dumped him in Damascus. That was 1983, most of India's lifetime ago. We must have told the story so often that it became embedded in her brain.