Robert Parker - The Widening Gyre

I looked at her. She had shrunk back in the corner of the seat looking nowhere near sixteen and a half. There were tears on her cheeks. She had close-cut black hair and a slightly uptilted nose. She had obviously begun the day with makeup, but there wasn't much left. I turned left on Wisconsin Avenue without saying anything. I put the cocaine and her learner's permit into my shirt pocket.

"That's not mine," she said.

I didn't say anything.

"It isn't," she said. Her voice was snuffly and the tears continued to trickle down her cheeks.

"Honest to God," she said. "I don't know how it got there."

I kept driving.

"Where we going?" she said.

I shook my head. We drove some more. She had started to cry softly beside me. I felt like a child molester. Sometimes the end justified the means, sometimes it didn't. It seemed to me that lately I was having more trouble sorting out when it did and when it didn't. At the top of the hill on the right was Washington Cathedral. I pulled over in front of it and stopped.

Linda looked at me and tried not to cry.

I turned sideways and leaned my right arm on the back of the seat and said, "Linda, it's going to be all right."

She stared at me blankly.

"What d'ya mean?"

"I mean there's a way out of this for you."

She stared at me and didn't say anything.

"I don't want to put a sixteen-year-old kid in the house of blue lights. I'm after more important stuff. If you'll help me, I'll help you."

"What d'ya want me to do?"

"First I want you to tell me where you got the coke and then I want you to tell me what you were doing in there with Gerry Broz and then we'll go from there."

"I don't want to get no one in trouble," she said.

I nodded. "Least of all you," I said. "Listen, honey, I gotta have something out of this. I don't want it to be you, so give me somebody else. Somebody that deserves it more.

In twenty minutes I had it all.

Gerry Broz dealt coke. If you didn't have money for coke, he'd trade for sex.

"If he thought you were sexy," Linda said with pride.

"For himself?"

"For himself and his friends," Linda said.

"If they thought you were sexy."

Linda nodded. Broz also dealt among many of the Washington fashionables, Linda said. She didn't know who, but Gerry bragged of the people he sold to.

"Or traded with," I said.

"Not just kids," Linda said. "Grownups, middle-aged women."

"How do you know?"

"They have parties, granny parties they call them. Gerry calls the older women grannies. They let us come and watch."

"Watch?"

Linda nodded. She thought it was neat. "They have a way to peek. In the bathroom there's a one-way mirror. You can watch."

It was obviously the most interesting thing Linda did and she liked to talk about it once she got going. It was as if she'd forgotten why I was asking. She was an excited teenage girl telling about her adventures, except her speech was slurring while she talked. "Sonofagun," I said. "I'd like to see that." Linda nodded. "It's really bogus," she said. "Some of those women, really high-class women." She shook her head at the bogusness of it all. "Could you sneak me in?" I said. Her eyes widened.

"I'll bet you could," I said. "You sneak me in and you're home free. It'll be like I never saw you. I give you back the coke and the learner's permit as soon as we're out."

Linda said, "I don't know."

I said, "I'll bet you could. You can go right in the front door and through the living room and into the bathroom. If everything's happening in the bedroom, there's no way they'd see you."

Linda was silent. "Yeah, that's… How do you know what the place looks like?"

"There's not much I don't know," I said. "Keep it in mind." Delphic.

"I don't know."

"When's the next, ah, performance?" I said.

"Tomorrow morning," she said. "Eleven o'clock."

"The early bird catches the worm," I said. "I'll pick you up right here at ten of eleven. We'll slip right on in."

"Okay. I guess. I mean, what if I say no?" I smiled at her without warmth. Every year it got easier to smile without warmth. I was starting to feel like Jimmy Carter.

"Well, how will we do it?"

"You'll go in," I said. "Then when the action gets under way, you'll come and get me."

"I usually watch with my friend. What if she says something?"

"Tell her not to. Tell her I'm your dad and I believe in togetherness. That's your problem."

"You're older than my dad," she said.

"Maybe not, maybe I've just had a harder life."

She giggled a little and hiccuped. "Not unless you've been married to my mother," she said.

I let that pass. I didn't ask how old her father was. I was afraid to.

"Margy's okay," Linda said. "She'll keep quiet."

I took the cocaine and her learner's permit from my shirt pocket.

"Remember," I said. "I have you locked, if I want to press it."

She nodded.

"Don't get smart when the booze wears off," I said. "Don't think I'm too swell a person to bust you."

She shook her head vigorously. More vigorously than I liked. I drove her to the corner of her street and let her out.

"Here, tomorrow," I said. "Ten of eleven."

"Yes," she said, and got out and walked away from me fast without looking back.

Susan and I were having a drink in The Class Reunion on H Street. The place was full of journalists and booze was at flood tide.

"An orgy?"

I nodded.

"You have a date with a sixteen-year-old girl to go watch an orgy?"

I nodded again.

"And you got the date how?"

"By impersonating a police officer," I said.

Susan nodded. She drank a small swallow of Dewar's and water.

"Do you plan to participate?" she said.

"Not unless you turn up there."

Susan nodded and kept nodding. "At a-what did the little dear call it?"

"A granny party."

"Yes, a granny party."

"Well, they're not really grannies," I said. "The kids are so young, that's all. They just say that."

Susan nodded again. I poured some Budweiser from the bottle.

"I didn't order by name," I said. "Wonder if this is the house beer."

Susan ignored me.

"What do you expect to find?" she said.

"Same old thing," I said. "I won't know till I look. I just keep pushing and looking. Better than sitting and waiting."

"It requires a rather considerable negative capability," Susan said.

"Lots of things do," I said.

"Want to walk?" she said. "I don't get enough exercise down here."

"Sure."

I paid for the drinks and we left. It was a fine night. Temperature in the fifties, clear. At the corner of H Street we turned east, toward the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue.

"Do you think Alexander would really drop out of the race rather than expose his wife?"

"Absolutely," I said.

"It would be hard to choose otherwise," Susan said. "Be hard to avoid feeling guilty."

"Yes, it would," I said. "But I think he is better than that. I think he doesn't want her hurt."

"If he dropped out," Susan said, "he could feel virtuous and make her feel guilty."

"He says he doesn't want her ever to know that he even knows about the films."

"It would allow him to feel superior to her," Susan said.

We walked by the enormous granite pile of the Executive Office Building next to the White House, across from Blair House. It was everything an executive office building should be.

"You shrinks are so cynical," I said. "Is there any behavior that is not self-serving?"

Susan was silent for a bit as we walked along in front of the White House.

"Probably not," Susan said.

"So that the woman who dies trying to save her child does so because if she didn't she couldn't live with herself?"