Don DeLillo: Running Dog

"Secret hearings."

"Every day," he said.

"What do the letters stand for?"

"What letters?"

"PAC/ORD," she said.

"Not many people in Washington could answer a question like that."

"Not many people in the whole world, I bet."

"Personnel Advisory Committee, Office of Records and Disbursements."

"Has to be evil, with a name like that."

"Or why else would Percival be involved?"

"He's a righteous type, is he?"

"Never mind that," Burke said. "What I'd like to know is why you're interested in this guy Selvy."

"It's just he's so cute," she said.

Glen Selvy in a three-piece suit walked slowly around the quarter-mile cinder track. There were birds everywhere, wheeling overhead, hopping mechanically in the grass.

Fifty yards away a black limousine turned into the quiet street that skirted the athletic field. Selvy headed over there, watching the back door swing open, his mind suddenly wandering to a nondescript room, a bed with a naked woman straddling a pillow, no one he knew, and then sex, her body and his, relentless crude obliterating sex, bang bang bang bang.

Lomax had a penchant for rented limousines. This was fine with Selvy, whose own car was a cramped Toyota. It was safe to assume the chauffeur didn't come with the car; he'd be someone Lomax knew. Maybe the thinking was that inconspicuousness no longer amounted to much. Or that in a town like Washington a limousine was not readily noticeable. Maybe it was Lomax himself. A personal style. A departure from established forms.

Lomax was pudgy, his hair mod-cut, graying a bit at the temples. He liked to pat and smooth and lightly stroke his hair, although it was never mussed. He was dressed for golf today, Selvy noticed. A set of clubs leaned against the far door.

"I learned something yesterday," Selvy said. "Lightborne knew Christoph Ludecke. Before Ludecke was killed, he and Lightborne had several meetings."

"In what connection?"

"Ludecke claimed to have access to some movie that apparently the whole smut-industry power structure would love to get the rights to. So Lightborne was all set to act as agent for the sale."

"Help from an unexpected quarter," Lomax said.

"Sure, Lightborne. Who figured Lightborne would link up to any of this? It explains the whole thing."

"Does it?"

"The Senator's connection to Christoph Ludecke. Now we know. One way or another he knew Ludecke had this footage. One way or another his phone number, or one of his phone numbers, his least traceable phone number, which we nevertheless traced, ended up in Ludecke's little book. That's the absolute central fact, the core of his involvement. Percival wanted the movie for his collection."

"Does he do movies?"

"This would be the first."

"What's so special about it?" Lomax said.

"It's a genuine Nazi sex revel."

"Wonderful."

"Supposedly shot in the bunker where Hitler spent his last days."

"Grand," Lomax said. "Simply grand."

Off the road a creek meandered east into the distance. In a park a group of young Orientals practiced the stylized movements of _t'ai chi_, a set of exercises that seemed to some degree martial in nature. The tempo was unchanging and fluid, and although there were eight of them involved it was hard to detect an individual dissonance in their routine. Almost in slow motion each man thrust one arm out while moving the other back, this second arm bent at the elbow, both hands extended, fingers together, as though the arms were hinged weapons and the hands not terminal attachments but rather the pointed ends of these weapons. Moves and countermoves. Front leg bending, rear leg stretching. Active, passive. Thrust and drag. A breeze came up, the lighter branches on the trees rising slightly as their leaves tossed in the agitated air. Eight bodies slowly moving in a revolving lotus kick. The creek reappeared at the end of a stretch of elms, swifter here, running in the sun.

"We've got more than enough leverage to use against the Senator."

"I don't make policy," Lomax said.

"We've got the smut collection to use against him. His interest in this movie is just an added twist of the knife."

"I execute policy, I don't make it. I do fact-gathering."

"We know he's got pieces that once belonged to Goering."

"People ask me questions. I frame a reply in terms of giving an answer."

"Among other notables," Selvy said.

"When the time comes, it comes. If he presses these inquiries, we'll tell him what we know and how we'll use it. His constituency will go bananas. Picture the media. Over a million dollars' worth of sexually explicit art."

"No way he can move against us."

"But I don't make policy," Lomax said. "I just gather information."

"Who makes policy? Tell the policy maker. We have whatever we need on Percival. Meanwhile I keep moving paper in his office."

"Double cover," Lomax said.

In the current parlance, Selvy was a reader. He was reading Senator Percival. At the same time he and Percival had a clandestine alliance. No one else in the Senator's office was aware that Selvy had been hired not to help direct the paper flow but to do Percival's art buying.

"But you shouldn't call it smut," Lomax was saying.

"Did I call it smut?"

"You said earlier, his smut collection."

"You've seen the photos, I take it."

"Interesting photos," Lomax said. "You're getting better at it."

"Less rush this time."

"There's nothing shameful about the human body, you know. Some pleasant surprises in that collection. Some very nice things. I'd say the man has taste. Don't call it smut. You called it smut."

Three Irish setters ran in a field near Reservoir Road, scrambling over each other when one of them changed direction abruptly. A group of schoolgirls played field hockey, wearing elaborate uniforms, their laughter and shrieks seeming to reach the limousine across a particularly clear segment of space, an area empty of distorting matter, so that the listener received a truer human voice, the vivid timbre of animated play.

"We found the woman," Lomax said.

"Where is she?"

"Traveling."

"Whereabouts?"

"The old country."

It was cherry blossom time.

Moll found Washington spiritually oppressive. Government buildings did that to her. Great weight of history or something. Guided tours. Schoolbooks. The last Sunday of summer vacation. I don't feel well, mom.

She wore thong sandals, a loose cotton dress and a hip sash-an outfit she used whenever she felt a deceptive appearance was called for. A date with a man she suspected she might dislike, for instance. She believed herself to be attractive, although not quite this way. Clothes, used in this manner, were a method of safeguarding her true self, pending developments.

Her auburn hair, normally curled and friz;ed and shriveled up, had an even more electrified look today. Deep-fried hair. Probably caused by humidity, the condition was extreme enough to be taken as a style.

Along a corridor in the Senate wing she moved in her somewhat wary manner behind a group of reporters who were trying to keep up with Lloyd Percival. The Senator, still wearing orange makeup from an earlier TV appearance, answered only certain questions, and those curtly, talking out of the side of his mouth. He was sixty, a large man, beginning to go fleshy, with something of a burdened look about him, small tired eyes blinking above those folds of loose skin.

He wheeled right, strode past an enormous mahogany clock topped by a bellicose eagle, made another right toward a flight of stairs, and as though by hidden signal the reporters stopped pursuing and dispersed, leaving Moll to follow alone, right into an elevator reserved for senators and staff, out into another corridor, around a corner, keeping about seven feet behind him, just so he'd know she was there.