Mark Costello - Big If

Vi and Herc dropped their bags at O’Teen’s feet. O’Teen was a ratty Philadelphian, a lovelorn ex-computer-dater and ruinous sports gambler. He lived alone in Arlington, where he had full cable and his mother and his bookie on speed dial. He liked to bet the NFL and always had a few dimes down by Sunday brunch. He also bet on baseball, college and the pros, though never on the Phillies because he loved the Phillies and he said you never bet on what you love. Late winter was his fallow time, post-football and pre-baseball, and he bet on what he could, hockey, hoops, and prizefights, ice dancing and the more important dog shows. The Personnel Division was always on O’Teen for his gambling. They probably would have dumped him from the detail if they could have found anyone in Crim willing to work ropelines twenty-eight days a month.

Vi said, “What’s happening, O’T?”

O’Teen chewed a fingernail as he read the sports page, checking the disabled lists. He said, “I’m fucked up, that’s what. They’re saying here Prince Rupprecht has the ague.”

“Who’s he?” asked Herc.

“Top-rated giant schnauzer. He kills ’em in deportment, a big hound with the moves of a poodle. Sidney gave me three to five at the Westminster. This throws the field wide open.”

Tashmo came in grumpy from the parking lot. He said, “What’s going on?”

“Prince Ague has the clap,” reported Herc. “Otherwise not much.”

O’Teen handed Herc the sports page, keeping Arts & Leisure for himself. He was looking at some bets on the Palmolive-Rachmaninoff piano competition in St. Petersburg. Sidney the bookie would give him three to one on a hot Korean pianist, a rookie out of Juilliard, just turning pro.

O’Teen said, “He kills ’em with impromptus and nocturnes. He’s got speed, power, soft hands — the whole package. He plays these long, warm, flowing melodic lines, with brilliant stacatti, like the young Horowitz. I saw him trash a Polish girl at the Cliburns last year.”

An SUV pulled up in the parking lot. Sean Elias skipped around, opening the sliding side door. Five Elias children spilled onto the curb, lining up by height, it seemed, tallest first, the baby, number six, on the end in Mommy’s arms. Sean’s family always drove him to the jumping-offs. Early, late, during school, in every kind of weather — they never missed a jumping-off. Sean went down the line, bending to kiss each kid, whispering a sentence to his son, his son, his son, his daughter, and his son, a kiss and then a whisper, then the baby and the wife. There was nothing special about the Eliases, but Vi liked watching them just the same. What did Sean Elias tell his children? Be good. Help your mother. Help your brother help your mother. Don’t take any wooden nickels. Good luck on the test. And to his wife — what fit into a whisper? I love your body and you in it. Look at what we made. Don’t forget the insulation.

Elias crossed the lobby, suit bag on his shoulder. The SUV pulled through an arc and disappeared.

“‘Evening,” said Elias, as if nothing had just happened.

O’Teen was on the cell phone. “Sidney? Yeah, it’s you know who. Two dimes on Korea at the Rach.”

The waxer waxed, the agents waited, several minutes passed. Vi was worried about Bobbie Taylor-Niles, who was always late, but even later tonight than she usually was. Vi paged Bobbie to her cell phone. As she waited for a callback, Vi walked between the pillars and looked out at the jet on the tarmac, blue under the belly, white across the top, black letters on the white, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Base police stood guard around the landing gear. A pygmy truck maneuvered the jetway stairs against the forward door, carefully, by nudges.

O’Teen was reading Arts & Leisure, looking for something else to bet on. He said, “Who here knows anything about the Venice Biennale?”

Herc turned to the scoreboard page. “What league are they in?”

“It’s not a team, you mutt. It’s an invitational art tournament, kind of like the NCAAs of art. I went long last time on quirky intimate gesso washes and these doom-laden neo-Cornell boxes, betting with my heart. Sidney gave me juicy odds.”

“What happened?”

“I got killed.”

The motorcade arrived, two limos, identical, and a line of Chevy Suburbans with blacked-out windows. Agents from a transit team fanned out from the vans, the usual close-order drill. They walked the VP through the lobby, out the doors, across the runway, up the jetway stairs, and past the airmen, who hopped into shoe-click salutes.

Gretchen joined her crew, folding her cell phone. “Anybody heard from Bobbie?”

Vi said, “She’ll be here.”

Gretchen nodded, shouldering her bags. The agents followed her across the tarmac to the plane, zigzag single-file, listing to their duffel sides. The cold air woke them up.

“She looks beautiful tonight,” said O’Teen in the wind. He meant the jet.

The airmen knew their faces, but checked their IDs anyway.

Bobbie made the jumping-off, but only barely, boarding after the press, the food, and the political riffraff. They climbed to cruising altitude, the seat belt sign went off, and Gretchen called Bobbie to the last row of the cabin. Bobbie got a sotto voce chewing-out as the plane banked over P.G. County, the pulsing grid beneath them.

Up front, the boys were playing poker.

“Everybody ante up,” Sean Elias said. Chips were tossed. Elias started dealing.

The parade of aides began, a steward bearing dinner, a colonel bearing cables, Fundeberg bearing the latest gloomy polling from New Hampshire.

Tashmo and Elias folded after the first raise. Herc bid O’Teen up to thirty bucks, then took his money with three eights.

They were over Delaware when Boone Saxon stood up to deliver the threat roundup, a kind of global briefing to let the agents know what they might encounter in the crowds. Boone went down a list of known, suspected, or potential threats, summarizing each, the Arab specter from Quebec, the violent splinter right-to-lifers, the neo-Nazis, the militias in the north.

Vi listened from the fifth row of the cabin. Boone, a senior hand, supervised the grading of incoming threats, chaired or shared the chair of three sensitive committees, and helped run ThreatNet, a vast database of people who think the government is watching them. Most of these threats came not from organized enemies of the United States, terror groups or protest groups or hostile foreign powers, but rather from the Eric Englebrechts and Leticia (Gomez) Joneses of the world, the lost souls and lone wolves, the drifters on the road, the un-or undermedicated schizophrenics who might or might not suffer what are known as ideations, as Boone called them, or forced thought, or paranoid thought syndrome, who might or might not also own a rifle or a pistol, or have access to explosives. The might-or-might-not aspect of the thing (the if of it, the X factor) was the bureaucratic urge behind ThreatNet, and its full-time staff of sixty agents and ninety-two civilian employees, and its budget (classified, but sizable, Vi knew). The letters came in (the postcards and the e-mails and the voice mails and the rest), creating by their mere existence, by their coming in, a need for institutional response, if only so that later, when something happened (if it did), the nation couldn’t say that Beltsville knew ahead of time and took no action. Most of what Boone described in his briefings to the team was mania, psychosis, sad mental disarrangement, people living with their parents, people sleeping under bridges, people riding Greyhounds fleeing voices in their heads, and it was easy to write these people off as merely maniacal (psychotic and pathetic, unable to organize a hot meal, much less a public murder), but then again, were any of them plainly crazier than Hinckley, who shot four men and nearly killed a president?