Mark Costello - Big If

Vi heard a woman sobbing in the background. “Is someone crying there?”

“Just a client,” Peta said. “ Lauren, honey, hush now — Peta needs to hear. Vi, are you there? I understand the vice president is coming this way, and I know it’s probably impossible, but do you think you could come down to the house at some point? We’d love to see you, Vi. Jens would really love to see you.”

The VP would cross the state that afternoon with a stop along the way, spend the night in Portsmouth, and work Portsmouth in the morning. Vi doubted that she could squeeze an hour free to see Jens and Peta. She’d have to go to Gretchen for permission, and Gretchen wasn’t free and easy on these things.

Vi said, “I’ll try, Peta, I really will, but they keep us pretty scheduled.”

“Of course — I understand,” said Peta. “It was just a thought.”

The call ended as Vi and Tashmo clomped up a set of narrow stairs to the second floor of the bank building.

Boone’s office was done in a certain style — Vi thought of it as Late War on Drugs, except (she knew) the War on Drugs was timeless and endless, and for all anybody knew it was still Early yet. Boone’s desk and chair on wheels and glued-plasterboard credenza had been built by prison laborers at Unicor in Leavenworth and sold at a profit by the government to itself, part of some half-abandoned crackpot scheme to make the Bureau of Prisons self-supporting, like Alabama penal farms of yore.

Boone was on the phone when Vi and Tashmo came up from the parking lot. They waited for him as he flipped his desk blotter calendar, last month, this month, next month, making an appointment with the Concord FBI. The calendar was also jail-made and featured rousing productivity slogans, a different one each month, Think and Suggest for February, Always Foster Quality for March. Vi had seen this very calendar in every federal outpost she had ever visited or worked in, or worked out of, the Crim Division in New York, Psych Services in Beltsville, the ATF in Newark, even once the embassy in Moscow. She found it vaguely sinister: inmates jailed by the hard work of the agents being forced to print slogans rooting these same agents on to even greater feats of busy-beaverism.

“Coffee’s on,” said a trainee agent, padding by the office in his socks. The trainee was named Christopher, a tall soft sofa of a boy, two months out of threat school. Of the eleven trainees, only Christopher was here. Two were out with flu; one was up in Concord, checking with the doctor of a man who blamed the pope on the Jews; two were down in Nashua, battling the flu, checking on a recent theft of fertilizer from a city golf course (a year’s supply, a hundred bags, just shy of four tons); one trainee was busy infiltrating a militia sect in the northern forests; one was on a flight to Montreal where he would liaise with the RCMP, rattling the cages of known Moroccan jihadin; one had gone across the highway for a sandwich; another was in Portsmouth, working on the violent splinter right-to-lifers.

Tashmo was sitting on the edge of Boone’s credenza, his long legs stuck out, jiggling his little zippered boots, like a kid who needed to wee. He was looking at a picture of Boone’s wife, June, a stolid, freckled woman in a pageboy and safari jacket.

Vi took the picture from him.

“Know her?” Tashmo asked. “Helluva nice woman, Mrs. Boone.”

Vi had met June Saxon once at a Beltsville function, chatted with her about her work at the National Zoo, where she was a staff psychiatrist. June had diagnosed the depression of the Chinese panda pair, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, the marquee mammals of that zoo, which had finally explained the pair’s extended failure to mate in captivity. You couldn’t ask a panda how it felt, June told Vi, and so she had relied on long observation of the pandas, noting their listlessness compared to pandas in the wild, and their odd behavior, clawing at one spot in the dirt, tearing at one shoot of bamboo, empty, pointless, repetitious patterns of activity, for hours every day. June had watched them for hours before arriving at her diagnosis. Vi put the picture back on the credenza. Pandas and psychotics — Vi thought Boone and Mrs. Boone were perfect for each other.

Christopher returned to the office with a plastic tray of mugs, sugar packets, milk in a little pitcher, and a pot of coffee, but no one felt like coffee. Christopher seemed bummed.

“Apologies,” said Boone, getting off the phone. “Housekeeping — one must always kiss the butt of the sister agencies.”

Vi thought this saying would look good on a calendar.

Boone said, “Tashmo, how’s it going? How’s Shirl? She good?”

Tashmo said, “She’s fine. How’s Jane?”

“June. She’s doing great. Her panda memoir came out last year. You’d love it. It’s a touching story of friendship and depression.”

“I’ll wait for the movie,” Tashmo said.

Boone said, “I’m afraid you already missed it. It was in the theaters for about a minute. You can still see it on some airlines, Thai Air and maybe Continental. Tash was on the Reagan team, Christopher.”

“Is that where you guys met?” asked Christopher, all wide-eyed. The Reagan team was famous in the Service, like the ’27 Yankees of Protection.

“Boone wasn’t on no Reagan team,” said Tashmo. “Boone, have you been telling this poor kid that you were on the Reagan team?”

“I was on the Reagan team,” said Boone.

Tashmo said, “We let you hang with us because your wife was — nice. But that doesn’t mean that you were on the team.”

“What do you mean, nice?”

“Cheerful. Pleasant. Always a kind word.”

“I guarded Ronald Reagan,” said Boone through a tight jaw.

Tashmo said, “You guarded the ballet-dancing son.”

“His legal name was Ronald Reagan. He was often with his father, and when they were together I guarded both of them. I stood ready with my life.”

“They were not often together,” Tashmo said. “The father didn’t even like the kid. He used to say to me, ‘Ballet.’ Just that word, ballet. It tore him up inside.”

“That’s a lie,” said Boone. “They had the special bond of son and father.”

Vi said, “Let’s not fight about it, Christ. Yo Boone, why are we here?”

Boone was sulking. “You had a screamer at the Marriott last night. Female white, brown hair, medium height, medium build, beige or tan parka. This is the script we got. You and Tash were on the body, closest to the woman. I thought we’d take a gander at the vid feeds, pool and Channel 9, see if we could pick her out.”

Tashmo said, “We get a lot of screamers, Boone.”

Christopher drew the shades. They watched two clips from two angles of the ropeline at the Marriott. The pool press covered every event, no matter how routine (it was called the death watch), but they didn’t always cover all of each event. They often got their requisite ten-or twenty-second clip, a rough cut for the uplink to New York, later trimmed to nothing or two seconds. At the Marriott, the cameras took the VP almost to the end, but Channel 9 cut out at three minutes eighteen seconds and the pool went black just after that, ropeline still in progress.

Vi said, “No, it’s later. She’s closer to the end.”

They watched the video again, Boone working the remote, fast-forwarding through the tight shots, looking for the woman in the pans.

“We could look her up on ThreatNet,” said Boone, “but we’d need a name or KA. If we can get her picture, I can probably trace it to a name.”

He walked between the cubicles to the file room, talking over his shoulder. “She came early and she waited till the end. That’s what I don’t like. Gretchen said no gloves, she wasn’t wearing gloves. I don’t like, she waited in the cold night with no gloves.”