Robert Parker - The Widening Gyre

"Something like that. People will do a great deal to support the image they have of themselves."

"Hard to be romantic seeing life that way," I said.

Susan shrugged.

"Doesn't allow you to believe in heroes or villains or good or bad, does it?" I said. "If all actions are selfish."

"Heroes and villains, good and bad, are not applicable in my work."

"Grant that," I said. "But mightn't they be applicable in your life? How do you know how to act?"

We turned down along the east side of the White House.

"Of course I have vestiges of my upbringing, and religious training, and school inculcation that nag me under the heading of conscience. But consciously and rationally I try to do what serves me most at least cost to others."

"And when there's a conflict?"

"I try to resolve it."

The White House was brightly lit from all sides inside the iron fence that surrounds it. There must have been security apparatus, but I didn't see much. We turned left on Pennsylvania again.

"You don't understand, do you?" Susan said.

"Seems pretty Hobbesian to me," I said.

"Despite the fact that I have much more formal education than you do, and despite your somewhat physical approach to problem solving, you are an intellectual and I am not. You speculate on questions just like this one- how does one determine his behavior. You read Hobbes and God knows who else. I don't even know Hobbes's first name."

"Thomas," I said.

"Or what he said, or when. The kinds of questions about how to act that you are asking rarely come up for me, or the people in my work. We are results-oriented."

"They come up quite often," I said, "in my work."

"Of course they do. Partly because it's you that is doing the work, and partly because you've chosen a kind of work where those questions will come up."

The august march of government architecture reared on either side of us, the Federal Energy Administration, the Post Office Building, the Justice Department, and across the street the FBI Building. My knee started to bend in genuflection before I caught myself. The municipal neo-classicism of the architecture was a little silly, but on the other hand it looked the way it ought to. What would have been less silly?

"Can you analyze our relationship in the light of Silvermanian pragmatism?" I said.

"I love you because I find it compelling to be loved so entirely. You love me because as long as you do you can believe in romantic love."

Ahead on the right was the National Gallery with its new wing. Beyond rose the Capitol, on its hill.

We turned back up Pennsylvania Avenue.

"Too bad it's so late," I said. "If it were still daytime, we could take the FBI tour and maybe they'd show me a tommy gun."

"That's your closing comment?" Susan said.

"I have no closing comment," I said.

"What do you think of what I have been saying?"

"I think it is bullshit," I said.

"Would you care to support that view?"

"No," I said.

Linda was there at ten of eleven. Without any booze in her she looked tight and pinched and scared and embarrassed and shy and as restless as a willow in a windstorm.

I smiled when she got into the car.

"I hope I'm dressed okay," I said. "I've never been to a granny party before."

Linda didn't speak. She looked straight ahead. As I slid away from the curb I said, "We need a plan."

She nodded.

"Who'll be there?" I said.

"Me and Margy," she said. "And Jerry and Butch and Claude and Jimmy and the two grannies."

"And moi," I said.

She nodded.

"Who'll be watching through the one-way mirror?"

"Just me and Margy."

"Okay," I said. "I'll wait outside. You and Margy go ahead and get comfortable in the bathroom. Then when the four men and the two ladies get to it, you go out through the other bedroom and around through the living room and open the apartment door.

"What if they catch me?"

"I'll protect you."

"Against four guys?"

I made a muscle in my upper arm. "My strength, little lady, is as the strength of ten."

"And you have a gun," she said.

I shrugged. "That's part of it," I said.

"How come there's no other cops with you? Don't you have any back-up?"

Everybody watches television.

"If I had back-up, honey, I couldn't cover up for you."

She nodded and looked at me for the first time.

"You really are going to let me off, aren't you?"

"Yes," I said. "I am."

We stopped on M Street in sight of Gerry's building. I looked up at the apartment windows. "The window in the bathroom is blacked out, for the one-way mirror. The last windows on top there must be the spare bedroom."

Linda said, "Yes."

"After you open the door for me, open the bedroom window. I'll see it and come up."

"Okay."

We sat quietly. Linda was pale. Her swallowing was audible. Two well-dressed women in maybe their early forties walked past up on M Street and turned into the building. The grannies? In another minute Linda said in a strained voice, "There's Margy."

"Okay," I said. "Go to it."

Linda looked condemned as she got out of the car. But she went, passively. She fell in beside Margy, and as they talked Margy glanced back once, toward the car, and then nodded, and together she and Linda went into the apartment.

At 11:15 three college boys came down the hill on Thirty-fifth Street and went into Gerry's building. I took a Polaroid camera out of the Speedo gym bag I used to carry gear in. Casey, Crime Photographer. It was almost noon when I saw the bedroom window go up. I got out of the car and walked across the street into the apartment building. I had no more trouble with the outside door than I had the last time.

At the third floor the front door to Gerry Broz's apartment was open a crack. I pushed it open. There were faint sounds of rock music in the apartment. I walked the length of the living room, past the dining nook, and into the spare bedroom. The bathroom door was closed. I opened it. The two girls stood half-watching through the one-way mirror, half-looking for me. The sound of rock music was a little louder, but still very muffled. He must have soundproofed the bedroom. Margy had red hair done in a long braid. I smiled politely and gestured both girls away from the window. They edged back against the rear wall of the bathroom, afraid, but excited too. They looked at everything I did.

I looked through the mirror. The two well-dressed women I'd seen earlier were there, only they weren't well dressed anymore. They were both naked. So were the four college boys.

The women looked naked, in a way that women never do in skin magazines. These women were real, with the fine roughening of skin here and there, the tiny sag at the breast, the small folds across the stomach that real women, and men, have. It made them more, rather than less, seductive, I thought, because it emphasized their nakedness, and in a sense their vulnerability. It also made me feel a little sadder for them. That kind of vulnerability shouldn't be handed around. It was for someone who loved you and was vulnerable too.

I began to take pictures through the mirror as the four boys and two women engaged rather raucously in group sex. I made sure that I got at least one full-face shot of all the participants, and enough of the larger scene so that it was clear what was going on.

It took me no more than ten minutes and when I was through there was a great deal more still going on behind the mirror. I had what I'd come for. I smiled at the two girls and took the learner's permit and the coke from my pocket and gave both to Linda. Her eyes widened as she took them.

I said softly, "I can still cause you a lot of grief, my love, if you or Margy were to rat on me."