Steve Martini: The Rule of Nine

“Yeah, I’d say whoever did this has a problem with anger management,” says Harry. He is looking at the photograph of the charred body.

“The question is, assuming the information from Mexico is accurate, how did Liquida’s thumbprint, if it is his, end up on your business card in the wallet of a drug overdose in D.C.?” says Thorpe.

I look at him with a blank stare. “So what is it exactly that you’re telling us?”

“It’s possible that you show up on this guy’s radar screen,” says Thorpe, “and that’s not a place you want to be. Just a heads-up. If I were you, and this goes for each of you, until we know more, I’d be careful going out anywhere alone, especially after dark. And if you have any security devices at home, you might want to make sure they’re turned on.”

Josh Root was a man who could always make time for an old friend. He and Nicholas Merle had come of age together in the counterculture trenches of the sixties. So when Root called him on his cell phone and asked to meet for a drink, Nick didn’t think anything of it.

“The usual place?” said Nick.

“Why not?”

“Give me twenty minutes.”

Neither man felt comfortable venturing into the other’s office. It was one of those unwritten rules of government etiquette.

The “usual place” was a quiet upscale restaurant in Columbia Heights, not far from the Capitol and the court building. The restaurant possessed a lounge dripping with old-world charm, dark wood, and equally dim lights.

Root arrived first, dropped off by his driver, who parked in a garage across the street and waited. He ordered a drink and took a seat at the booth in the back corner.

When it came to their meetings, Nick was usually late, mumbling something about circumspection and Caesar’s wife. It was part of Nick’s cautious routine. He always had to be certain that no one had picked up on their private meetings, especially the ever curious rumormongers from the press corps. Josh always gave him a hard time about it. If they ran into each other at a cocktail party or an embassy fling, it was fine. But a one-on-one meeting in a bar would cause tongues to wag, not that anybody could do anything about it. Still, why end up in the gossip sheets?

A few minutes later Nick came through the door. He smiled the moment he saw Root. In many ways they were like night and day. Nick was as organized as Josh was chaotic. Nick was tall and slender, had a kind of stately appearance, and was reserved in his manner, whereas Josh was in your face. Josh’s suits, no matter how well tailored or expensive, never seemed to fit his paunchy body. If Nick was the smile of life, Josh was the scowl. Yet with all their differences the two men remained fast friends.

Nick had been losing weight for the past several months. He didn’t look good, at least not to Josh, whose mind was increasingly focused on thoughts of mortality. Nick was working too hard.

He ordered soda water, no twist, just ice. Nick never allowed alcohol to pass his lips during business hours. He took the glass from the bartender, headed for the booth, and took a seat on the other side of the table. “I thought you were out of town, back in Oregon.”

“I was until yesterday,” said Root. “I came back to take care of some business.”

“I should be out of here myself, but I’m interviewing some new clerks for the fall,” said Nick. “What a pain. Kids. Still, a couple of them are pretty bright.”

“Remember when we were that age?” said Root.

“I don’t think I can remember that far back.”

“Sure you can. Berkeley, sixty-eight,” said Josh.

“Jesus, don’t remind me. Seems like another age,” said Nick.

“It was.”

The two men had known each other for almost half a century. Their paths had crossed and careers intertwined so many times that Root could not begin to count them. He often wondered how it happened that two people following such different courses could end up on the same trajectory, as if they were touched by some stellar fate.

Nick had graduated from Berkeley. Josh was a senior at San Francisco State. They met at an antiwar demonstration during Vietnam, and in the months that followed sucked down enough tear gas and tossed enough bricks to form a kind of bond that usually coalesces only in the heat of battle.

After that Nick went on to law school at Yale. Josh graduated and then seemed to drop out of life. He disappeared for more than three years. It was what Josh came to remember as “his dark time.” He talked to no one about it, not even his friends. That he was able to pull himself out of it, resume a normal life, and come so far in the decades that followed was an absolute wonder. It seemed that he had gone off the track and somehow, as if by magic, had wandered back. Still, he often saw himself as a failure. The demons of his youth continued to haunt him. Only now they appeared distorted by the contradictions in his life and the looming horizon of death.

“Do you ever wish we could go back to the time?” said Josh. “You know, the smell of tear gas in the morning.”

“Are you kidding?” said Nick. He laughed.

“You don’t miss the sense of commitment-the crusade?”

Nick thought about it for a second. “It had its place, but the moment has passed.”

“You’re wrong. That moment never passes. The world is what we make of it. And we never lose our ability to change it for the better until we lose our grip on life.”

“You were always more ambitious,” said Nick. “I gave up trying to warp the world a long time ago.”

“I know,” said Josh. It was a major disappointment. Nick believed that radical thought was something you outgrew, like toys in an abandoned sandbox. To Josh it was a core element of his being, as essential as breathing.

“We’ve both been pretty damn lucky,” said Josh. “What is it they say? ‘It’s better to be lucky than good.’”

“We’ve had this conversation before. Don’t sell yourself short,” said Nick. “You are where you are because of talent. Otherwise you wouldn’t have survived as long as you have.”

“I know. Luck is only as good as what you do with it,” said Root. Still, there was no way to get around the fact that his career rested on the pillar of an accident.

In the years after pulling himself together, Josh got a job teaching at a small college near Portland, Oregon. The problem was he was bored. He hated it. He talked endlessly about changing the political system. He often went on a rant at faculty meetings. He had failed to change the system from the outside and now all he did, it seemed, was complain. When one of the other faculty members laughed at him and told him he should run for office, Root filed papers in a bid for a seat in Congress. For months it was the standing joke on campus.

Josh found himself up against a seven-term incumbent from a solid Democratic district in the party primary. His opponent was so invincible that the Republicans didn’t even bother to field a candidate in the general election. As far as they were concerned, the man was anointed.

Then two weeks before the primary, political fortune ran its errant fingers through the golden locks of Joshua Root. The incumbent did a face plant into his chicken Kiev at a fund-raiser in Portland. The man died of his heart attack before the peas had run off his plate.

As the only surviving candidate on the primary ballot, and with no opposition in the general election, Josh found himself with a ticket to Washington and a seat in Congress.

It was where he and Nick crossed paths once more. By then Nick had graduated from law school. After spending a year clerking for a judge on the federal circuit court in D.C., he was working in the office of the solicitor general. The two men renewed their friendship.