Robert Parker - The Widening Gyre

The mall closed finally for the night and we left, Susan still gleaming with a hunter's fierce intensity, me less so.

Outside the mall, slightly east of it and across Wisconsin Avenue, was a familiar restaurant front. My heart leapt up.

"My God, Suze, there's a Hamburger Hamlet."

Susan nodded.

"There's one in Chicago too," I said.

"Would you care to go into this one and eat something? I'll bet I can guess the house specialty."

"It's one of my favorites," I said. "There are many of them in L.A., but I didn't know they were creeping east."

"Isn't this thrilling?" Susan said.

"Ah, Suze," I said, "that world-weary pose ill becomes you. Come on, you'll see."

We went into the Hamburger Hamlet and settled in a red leather booth (well, maybe red vinyl) and I ordered beer and Susan had a glass of white wine. The beer came in an enormous schooner. It made me smile just to look at it.

"Ah," Susan said, "I begin to understand your enthusiasm."

Susan's purchases were stacked on the seat around her and some on my side. She rarely wore the same thing twice in my memory, and back in the house in Smithfield her clothes were in every closet.

"Lucky we found this shopping mall," I said. "You'd probably have had to go to work naked."

She smiled at me. "Even I wonder now and then about myself," she said.

"How the hell do you afford it?" I said. "Being a pre-doctoral intern isn't a get-rich-quick scheme."

"Alimony," she said.

"How the hell can you be liberated and accept alimony?" I said.

Again the smile, innocent, beautiful, glorious, and satanic. "Exploit the oppressor," she said.

The waiter brought us our supper, a large cheeseburger for me, a smaller cheeseburger for Suze, two salads, and another schooner of beer.

"How is your case?"

"It might work out," I said. "I know Joe Broz's kid Gerry made the tapes of Ronni Alexander. I know he deals cocaine to a variety of D.C.'s better citizens. I have some names of some of them and their tacit admission. I know that Gerry trades coke for sex among some teenyboppers, and I know he runs what he calls granny parties for his college chums and a select circle of bored, and/or neurotic housewives."

"What good does all that do you?" Susan said.

"Well, I know how Joe got the tapes. And I'm beginning to think about how to get them back. I can, after all, put a lot of pressure on his kid."

"Isn't that dangerous?" Susan said.

I took a long pull on the beer. "Man's afraid to die's afraid to live," I said.

"That's simple bullshit," Susan said.

"Oh, you noticed that too, huh?"

"It will be dangerous, won't it?"

"Maybe," I said. "I don't know. I'm not exactly clear on how much Joe's involved with this. It just doesn't have his tone. It's too complicated. Too clever. Joe started out breaking people's kneecaps with a baseball bat. He never got much more subtle than that."

"Well, what do you think is going on?"

"I don't know. I just know that all this isn't Joe's style."

"Maybe the boy is acting on his own," Susan said.

"Except that his father's organization is involved. Vinnie Morris came and talked with me."

"Who's he?"

"He's the, ah, executive officer."

"Uh-huh."

"And then the hooligans in Springfield, and Louis Nolan."

She nodded. "Would they do things for the boy without involving the father?"

I shrugged. "Maybe, down the line, if they thought it came from Joe… but Vinnie." I shook my head. "Vinnie would know whether it came from Joe or not."

"So how will you find out?"

"Eventually I'm going to have to talk with Joe," I said. "But not until after Saturday. I'm not going back to Boston until we even up."

"My Mazza Mall for your National Gallery," Susan said. Her face was as it had always been: intricate, beautiful, expressive. In the last year somehow it had also become faintly remote, as if always she were listening to a whisper, barely audible, from someplace else: her name, maybe, tiny and hushed. Susan, Susan, Susan.

The blue Chevy was behind me the next morning when Susan and I left the hotel, and it was still behind us when I dropped her off at work. They tailed more aggressively this time, like they didn't care if I spotted them. That meant, probably, that when they got a chance they were going to accost me. I decided to give them the chance.

I went down North Capitol Street and around the Capitol and parked on Madison Drive in the mall down by the new National Gallery annex. It was early and the tourists hadn't taken all the spots yet. Behind me at the curb along the reflecting pool in front of the Capitol the souvenir wagons were already in place selling snack food and pennants and ashtrays and paperweights and T-shirts and booklets and maps and hats and Sno-Kones and postcards and key fobs and oversized ballpoint pens, and everything except maybe the food had the name Washington, D.C. on it. The early bird catches the worm.

I got out of the car and leaned against the hood while the tail got itself parked and the two neat guys in their ties and jackets got out and walked over to me. They looked like the kind of guys you see playing doubles at your tennis club. Tallish, huskyish, blandish. One of them had a neat blond mustache. Their hair was short in back and long on the sides, fringing over their ears. The guy without the mustache wore sunglasses with gold wire rims. He had a long oval face and seemed to have cut his chin shaving that morning. The guy with the mustache showed no sign of cutting himself. He was probably the agile one.

I smiled at them as they walked over to me.

The one with the sunglasses said, "Is your name Spenser?"

I said, "Yes, it is, and let me tell you, it's damned nice to be recognized."

"Congressman Browne would like you to stop around to his office this morning, if it's convenient."

"A congressman? Little old me?"

The guy with the sunglasses nodded wearily. His pal, the well-coordinated one without the razor nick, stood a little to my left as we talked and clasped his hands behind his back. He was being impassive.

I said, "Is the congressman an early riser?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Will he be in yet?" I said.

"Oh. Yes. Shall we go now?"

"Sure."

"It will be easier if you ride with us. They won't let you park up on the hill without a sticker."

"Okay. Can you fix it if I get tagged down here for parking?"

The impassive one said, "Ignore it. The fucking district government will lose the ticket eight times out of ten."

Still waters run deep. I got into the car and we whisked up the hill. The impassive one drove and when we got to the Cannon Office Building on Independence he stayed with the car and the guy with the sunglasses took me in.

We began, of course, with the inevitable rotunda. There was a cop with a gun sitting at a desk, but he didn't pay us any attention and we went right on past and down a corridor.

The Cannon House Office Building was not entirely harmonious. The halls were quite elegantly tiled in white and gray marble. The walls were done in welfare-office green wallboard. From the ceiling of the corridor hung light fixtures, the ugly utilitarian bulbs concealed by large, textured globes that looked sort of like misshapen white pineapples. My host moved briskly along the first floor corridor. The representative from North Carolina had both a state and an American flag posted outside his office. We passed Meade Alexander's office, no flags. How patriotic was that? The corridor was full of young preppy-looking women, congressional staff, bustling about, tending to the nation's needs. A pork barrel to be shared, a log to be rolled, in quest of more perfect union.

Browne's office was between Shannon of Massachusetts and Roukema of New Jersey. Or more precisely it was between Roukema Annex, and Roukema, but I was counting congresspersons, not offices, and they were the ones on each side of Bobby Browne. Outside it said representative ROBERT P. BROWNE, COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS. There was a state seal on the door below his name. We went in.